Underlying Angst

What's next?

I have an internal sense that I am waiting for an explosion. I don’t have any idea when or where it will occur. This makes it worse.

In the past, whenever I felt a surface disruption, I still had a feeling that there was a solid footing beneath me somewhere. It might have felt quite deep below me, but my sense was that it was there. It was like bedrock - my gut told me that there was a place beyond which we could not sink.

That deep sense of security is gone.

Now the very ground is shifting beneath my feet. Things I have taken for granted my entire life have been shown to be false. I watch the news and wonder about AI, or whether the statistics have been fabricated. There are times when I begin to question my own logic, and my perceptions about what is real. I’ve lost my bearings.

In my therapy practice, I will often ask a client how they have handled similar situations in the past. If they are concerned about something new, I might ask if they can imagine that there were others in the past who have handled something similar. I know that there have been terrible times in history — massacres, lynchings, concentration camps, invasions, slaughter of the innocent, pestilence and disease. Discrimination, separation, and victimization. All of these could be fought by right-minded people. Courage showed up. Evil could be conquered.

This feels different because it is the oozing spread of a cancerous idea — that truth is relative, that good depends on which side one is on, that what is enduring depends only on how much wealth can back it up. This new perspective eats away at many of the ideals that I held dear.

Some think of it as might makes right, but it is darker than that, more insidious. It turns empathy into a sin, and compassion into a joke. Our light appears to be fading.

I see others flailing about for an answer. They despair at their lack of control or lash out at a perceived lack of leadership. Some seek out desperate measures — finding a new home country, or barricading themselves in a bunker. Others say there is an economic solution. But you can’t run away from an idea. It must be confronted by a truth that is more powerful.

We have had that truth for a long while, and many have discarded it. It appeared to be too esoteric, too impractical, too implausible. But the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Come and see.