Oops…I did it again.

A few years ago, after a night of heavy drinking with a buddy at an East Village bar, I had an apocalyptic dream. In this dream I was with my wife and kids in a parking lot heading to church. The sky was strikingly blue, the same color it was on September 11th, 2001. Not a cloud to be seen.

Suddenly a massive lightening bolt ripped from one end of the sky to the other…and everything went black.

At this point I woke up, of course. The dream was short, but very vivid. In it I knew that I was witnessing the end of the world. I even knew why it was happening: the magnetic reversal of the poles. This was a concept with which I was completely unfamiliar at the time. I’m totally convinced that I had never even heard of that possibility. But after the dream I did a little research and learned that scientists believe that magnetic reversal of the poles has happened before, will happen again, and is thought to be accompanied by catastrophic consequence.

In the dream I remember being thankful that I was with the people I loved most when the end came, and that it came quickly and painlessly. But it was the feeling I was left with after the dream that resonated most deeply.

This dream awakened me to the very real possibility that life as we know it could end in a heartbeat, with no warning whatsoever, for reasons that we cannot even begin to fathom. This is something I’ve always known, I suppose. But now I was suddenly and keenly aware of how little we really know about where we live, how we got here, and how long it would all last. And all of this brought to light the absurdity of life all around me.

It didn’t help that I had a dead-end job at a dying magazine that published bullshit stories about information technology. But the absurdity was all around me, and my thoughts would daisy chain from something small and absurd to the grander, all-encompassing absurdities. For example: I’m sitting at my desk, editing some crap copy from a lazy freelancer, and I think: “Who gives a rat if this story makes its way into the world or not? Will it make the world a better place? Or just fill it up with more crap?”

The answer of course was obvious. But it led to other more debilitating thoughts. Like, “Who even cares if this magazine ever gets published again? Or any magazine for that matter? Or whether a stockbroker makes his quota and gets a bonus? Or another computer ever gets sold? Do we need ANY of this crap? It’s all just businesses supplying other businesses so that more business can get done. It’s a ponzi scheme. There’s nothing being made or added or improved. It’s just money changing hands. It’s all so absurd.”

Now, it’s easy to see how this kind of thinking can spiral out of control. And it did. It robbed me of my motivation to do anything but be with my family. What the dream did was pierce the veil. It made apparent all of the human constructs and endless distractions we use to tolerate everyday life. To make ourselves busy. To keep us from thinking about anything that is real.

There’s a literary term for when the protagonist of a story learns that everything he or she believed to be true is a lie (and no, it’s not epiphany, but I can’t remember what it is.) It’s like realizing that you’ve been plugged into the matrix. And it is not a comfortable feeling.

I spent two days knowing that almost everything I did – my job, my commute, fixing my car, paying insurance bills, feeding the cat, mowing the lawn, etc. – was unnecessarily complicated, distracting, and absurd. It was heartbreaking, soul-sucking, and utterly debilitating. It was threatening to break me.

And then I did something that I’m still not sure how I feel about: I plugged myself back into the matrix. I made a purposeful decision to repair the veil. I started poring over baseball box scores. Watching action movies. Reading magazines, books, and following stocks. I forced myself to care about things I knew meant absolutely nothing. And in a matter of days, I was happy again.

This is why people get religion.

For years, everything was fine in my world until this whole economic collapse. There are two thinkers that are dragging me back out of the matrix, re-piercing the veil I’d worked so hard to reconstruct. The first is Peter Schiff, the economist and talking head that continues to point out the absurdities of America’s economy.

But even Schiff doesn’t see far enough. He simply wants to replace one delusion with a slightly more meaningful one, but still based on the same guiding principle of money and economic growth.

David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist really nails it in this lengthy but worthwhile speech. In it, he points out the self-destructive, self-deluding nature of modern society. And points out the false choices between economic growth and ecological responsibility. It will blow your mind, so you must be ready to be unplugged.

And so I’ve come unhinged again. The constructs have been exposed. And I’m seeing the world with dizzying clarity. But will this time be different? Will I choose to stay unplugged, no matter how unpleasant reality is? Or will I admit to hopelessness, drink the Kool-Aid again, and settle back into comfortable absurdity?

Stay tuned. 

Comments

[michael fitzgerald]

So, what have you decided? Or, since you last posted seven months, perhaps I might intuit your decision.

[Jarvis McGruder]

In the last section of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy articulates a similar experience. The excerpt is posted at blogspot.tolstoygold.com. check it out!