"Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men."
TS Eliot, The Hollow Men
I'm writing this having just come off the back of an absolutely awful fortnight. Thanks to several invoices being processed much later than expected, I had to miss a friend's wedding. I'm currently in the midst of an interpersonal conflict with one of my clients that I'm trying to resolve as best as I can (thankfully my other contract is going swimmingly, but that one will take a while to pay out), and given that my consulting business is still very new and fragile, I'm terrified of losing the contract and the associated income. A lot of my other spoons are consistently being dedicated to preparing for the death of my partner's mother and spending as much time as possible with her before she passes. In short, I have extremely limited intellectual and emotional resources, I'm burnt out and irritable, and I'm trying my damnedest to make all this work. I feel like dogshit.
What I find interesting about what I'm experiencing is that I think I'd be much less stressed and exhausted than I am if these circumstances were a result of natural causes. Earthquakes, volcanoes and asteroid impacts happen and they screw things up something fierce, but it's difficult to take them personally. So many of my recent struggles, however, seem to have been caused by people being careless or wilfully withdrawing from their responsibilities to other people. With comparatively few exceptions, I'm finding that people in the society we've built are largely careless, blithely doing what's best for them and the few people they care about, heedless of the human wreckage they leave in their wakes. It's hard to stress sufficiently just how much damage this has done to our society and our lives.
I'm not quite sure how we got here: some of it must certainly be a result of the social fragmentation COVID created, and some of it must have to do with the fact that we live in a world of totalising institutions that aim to isolate and exploit us. Still, that doesn't exculpate us, and ironically enough, trying to explain it might give people an excuse to continue being careless towards each other, which is absolutely not what we want. As much as our media and the totalising institutions that we're embedded in want us to believe otherwise, the things we do and the attitudes we take still have an impact on other people and failing to take responsibility for that is still has awful consequences, often on the people who can least afford to deal with them.
The obvious impacts are bad enough: when people don't care about each other or their responsibilities, the things that these people are responsible for drift steadily towards becoming more and more shit. Things break, people lose out on things that they were depending on the careless people for, people die or have their lives ruined.
More than this, however, being a responsible, adult human being in a world of mass carelessness is outright dangerous. Take the "personal responsibility" line so beloved of right-wing political parties everywhere, for example. I actually like the concept of taking responsibility for and charge of your own life: after all, if you're unhappy with your lot in life but you don't do anything to try and change it, you will stay in the situation that you're in. In work, in life and in a lot of the communities I'm a part of, it's a message that people need to hear. Unfortunately, taking responsibility for your own life when so many people refuse any responsibility for the effects their actions have other people or the world is a bit of a fool's errand. It is, after all, remarkably hard to be financially responsible when the people you work with feel at liberty to just ignore invoices and payroll for more than a week, or to work effectively when your manager has given very limited indications of what they actually want you to deliver and your company is insisting that you work with clumsy, inadequate tooling. And given that careless people tend not to accept that their actions can materially affect others, your capacity for hard work, care and unwillingness to hurt others will be exploited ruthlessly.
For a person who's wired to care and who can't avoid taking responsibility for how their actions affect others, this is a deeply painful and dangerous place to be. There are a few failure modes that I've observed: the first is that you keep trying, keep caring and eventually burn out and break down. When that happens, it's very easy for the same careless people who tend to have just been exploiting you to blame you for fucking up in every which way, and often in multiple mutually contradictory ways. And then you end up ostracised, out of work and generally having a bad time. The other failure mode is that you simply stop caring entirely and can't bring yourself to try at all. This might be a bit better for your mental health, but it's every bit as destructive. The cost of all of this to the soul is awful: having been dealing with this for a while, my soul and my sense of self feel like they've been worn thin to the point where I exist in most spaces as a hollow, worn-out, vicious woman.
Navigating through life as someone who genuinely cares in a world where that is actively punished is disconcerting. It's not even that people treat you and your care with hostility: it's that they find you and your way of experiencing the world as being utterly, hopelessly incomprehensible. They see you shamble through a bone-filled desert, seeking desperately for something invisible to them, and ask "what's her problem?". They blame you for being defective when your seeking leaves them feeling uncomfortable, and they have myths that they repeat about how you steal and corrupt people like them, turning them into a creature like you. You end up pushed to the margins of their world, the subject of hushed whispers and fearful glances.
The obvious solution to this pain is to care less, and to some extent, this might be the sensible option. Unfortunately, it's very hard for me and people like me to do that: caring is a weirdly all-or-nothing thing for us, and if we can't find a reason to care enough to do a good job, it's hard to find the energy to do the thing at all.
The other option is to arrange your life so that you can spend time and interact with other people who care and nobody else. This is, on the face of it, kinda hard. While there are a lot of us out there, we're very, very scattered, and getting enough of us into a room together is a real challenge. Still, there are a lot of us: more than enough, if we were to co-ordinate, to build a good life for all of us. And with the internet being what it is, we're able to co-ordinate. This blog, I think, is a small part of my attempt to build my life in this way.
And yet, for all that we form connections and build places where we can live and thrive, we still live in cactus land and depend on it for our daily bread. Our care remains a defect in the eyes of the world. And our suffering remains a source of weakness and a danger, as though, in the eyes of the world, our thirst for water and meaning was a thirst for blood.