The Healing Pub
Before the Devil knows your dead
Our doting overlairds at the WEF have expressed their concerns that today’s youth are having their “mental health” negatively impacted by urban living. They are distressed (forcing down reflux) that poverty and violence induced by their own policies and manipulations will cause 70% of the world’s adolescents to be reduced to quivering, hand-wringing lumps of protoplasm by 2050 (there’s that magic year again).
Of course, it has nothing to do with being force-fed fear porn throughout the developmental years, while simultaneously being divorced from anything real whatsoever.
It’s really no mystery why our civilization has become a morass of anxiety-ridden rudderless souls cast upon the high seas without a compass. Our entire lives have been severed from the tangible and human, and filled with existential fears about things over which we have no control, and which for the most part don’t even exist.
Simple human relationships have been exported to nameless, faceless digibits, rather than the family, neighbors and school chums. We have quantifiably more interactions with complete strangers, than with the folks standing directly in front of us. People are increasingly living vaporware lives, while sitting in dark dingy hovels, faces illuminated and hypnotized by the All-Glowing Eye.
How many physical humans are we in regular contact with, that we’ve know for more than 5 years? My guess, if you are under 30 years old is the number can be rendered on one hand.
The word “economy,” from the Greek root oilos meaning “house,” once meant the financial management of the household. It was something tangible, and a family’s fortunes could be measured in physical stacks of coins, or later paper. There were bread-and-butter issues to discuss around the dining table.
The concept of “economy” has been perverted into some amorphous set of formulae and mystical incantations, dictated by incorporeal institutions and measured by meaningless statistics. Our transactions are no longer the exchange of real things face to face with another human, but the transfer of digibits across gossamer networks, with no relationship between buyer and seller.
How many purchases have you made recently at a physical shop that you can walk to, where you exchanged pleasantries with an owner or employee that you’ve directly spoken to in at least the past month? My guess is that almost no one reading this has had such an experience recently.
Most damaging of all to the psyche is the extended “community”. The word “community” is rooted in the Greek koinos, meaning “common” or “shared,” but the original sense was of a physical world full of real people, with whom we regularly interacted. We had common, shared experiences and relationships with our neighbors (from Old English neahgebur, or “nearby dweller”).
Now, our “communities” are dispersed collections of faceless digibits who share some meaningless superficial characteristic, rather than a physical proximity sharing life experiences. Once upon a time, we could come to the aid of real people in our immediate area and see the results of our aid. No more.
We are induced by an artifical society into anxiety over vast, intangible issues with no specific cause or solution. We are pounded with alarms over the plights of people in countries we can’t even find on a map, much less pronounce, and we have no idea if our aid ever reaches them, much less seeing any real benefits for our efforts.
We are told to give ourselves ulcers over the imminent extinction of snail darters and cave newts, while we cross the street and turn our heads from the very real needs and suffering of humans just a few steps away. I can’t say I’m overly concerned wsith cow farts, when my neighbor two doors down has taken ill and can’t affort medication.
And of course, the solution is always throw money/digibits at whatever the problem is.
I don’t bemoan the technology we have that has conquered time and space. It is truly amazing to be visually and audibly in contact with distant friends and relations, but it doesn’t take the place of a hand on the should and a shared loaf of bread. It is not a substitute for real human contact, only a palliative for physical separation. It is certainly not a replacement for living within a real community, with real people and real experiences.
It is no wonder millions of people have turned to pharmaceuticals to relieve themselves of the sense of disconnection. We live in a metaphysical state of dislocation, where no-thing feels more real than a handshake and shared experience. We can fill a pothole in the street and see real results, yet we are told that a colorless, odorless gas is the cause of all our problems and ceasing to breathe is the only solution.
Though the WEF article cited at the top seems to be sounding the alarm, I suspect (based on the ever-present date of 2050) that they are instead gloating over the wild success of their evil machinations. They are clapping each other on the back for a job well done, while publicly feigning dismay. At the same time, they are feeding yet another formless worry into the reigning narradigm, to feed our free-floating anxiety over distant problems for which only piles of our money (and pharmaceuticals) are the solution.
My guess is that throwing a block party and waving at the neahgebur and exchanging pleasantries with folks in the local shops will do more to solve the worlds problems, than any amount of donations to vaporous causes. Perhaps it is long past time to revive the local pub and hang out at the local shop, chatting with folks who actually live in our communities.
There’s an old proverb that seems apropos: put two Irishmen on bar stools and they’ll solve the world’s problems in a night.
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable course of action to me.
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Is that a Norman Rockwell painting? That is apt. Norman Rockwell's paintings were all about human connections in the analog world.
I rarely go to stores. We get 90% of our needs delivered. Being an old cripple does get in the way of getting about with people. I did talk to Trombone Barry, my next door neighbor, for 30 seconds yesterday.
I have no idea what the youths of today are thinking. I never interact with them. Hikikimori is a lonely existence sometimes, but look at the alternative.
I do miss going to the bars to tell stories. The Covid Con killed all that.
As my generation was taught in childhood, Charity begins at home.