Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday (thus my standard “hello and good morning” salutation) and it is the 2nd day of July in 2026 AD/CE.
I don’t really expect that those reading this on the day are going to be unaware of the day and the date. If they are unaware and yet are reading this online, then their unawareness must surely be willful or at least willing, for the day and date tend to be plastered all over most of our devices. But in case someone reads this in the future‒even rather far into the future‒I figured I might give a bit of temporal context.
Admittedly, I don’t deal much with current affairs and politics and scandal and the like here, because I consider almost all such matters to be flashes in the pan, or stutters and sputters in the pan‒or even just flash powder that got drenched and then washed away in a dreary rain.
It’s almost all trivial, and almost all of it is so eye-rollingly repetitious, and much of the importance people attach to it is laughable. The political concerns of a given modern human are no more important than the particular political concerns of a villager somewhere in the far-flung reaches of the Roman Empire…or the Phoenician empire, or the kingdom of Sumer or what have you.
All this local political turmoil, while not unimportant on a local level, is still vanishingly small and unnoticeably brief on any kind of even human historical scale, let alone something less anthropocentric.
Now, I want to be clear: there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking part in local politics (local in space, local in time, etc.). It makes sense to deal with one’s immediate concerns, as it does to try to secure one’s next meal. That’s how you continue on to the following meal, after all. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “My favorite breath is whichever one gets me to the next one.”
But one should keep one’s next breath in perspective. Your personal shortness of breath does not per se endanger the respiration of your office, your town, your region, your country, or the world. It’s just you.
That’s okay. It’s fair and reasonable for you to be concerned about things that affect your life directly. But you should not expect others to be just as concerned about just the same things as those that concern you, nor should you consider it a moral failing if they are not. If you think they ought to be concerned, then it’s incumbent upon you to use your reason‒not your emotions, they just won’t work‒to convince them.
Don’t behave like an adolescent who imagines that the world will end if they cannot see some particular show or play some particular game or attend some particular event. Your emotions are salient and motivational only to you, at least directly, and they in and of themselves will influence only those who already care about your emotional state.
If you want to convince other, disinterested** people that something you find important should be important to them as well, merely weeping or wailing or shrieking at them is unlikely to persuade them (and will often do the opposite). Your passion is persuasive mainly (or solely) to you. You’re going to have to calm the eff down and explain things.
And you might fail to convince someone. If so, the failure is on you. Admittedly, it may not be solely on you; other people can be trapped in their own emotional cages just as you can be in yours. You can only try. And, if you want to be logically consistent, you should also listen to reasons other people might give for their own points of view. You could be wrong, after all, hard though that may be to accept (especially about something about which you feel so strongly).
But there is no law of nature saying that people will definitely be persuaded even by the most rational and clear and complete arguments. Sometimes you’re just banging your head against a brick wall. It’s not a good state of things, but it’s just something that happens.
Of course, in the long run, nature itself will take care of those who are unreasonable and irrational‒and by “take care of”, I mean eliminating them. Don’t get too smug about that. To the degree that you are less than perfectly rational, you are at increased risk for nature “taking care of” you.
This is not to say that perfect rationality would protect you from every danger that might tend to “take care of you”. Supernovas and meteors and earthquakes and the like do not respond even to your cleverest arguments.
That is to say, they don’t respond to them in the moment. In the moment of a gigantic catastrophe, it’s too late to reason one’s way around it. But being rational ahead of time can indeed affect how even the most calamitous disaster acts on you. As I intimated yesterday, it’s conceivable that even the heat death of the universe (or the big crunch, etc., as the case may be) might be avoidable or at least endurable.
Maybe not. But maybe so. And the only way to know if it is amenable to intervention is to try to understand such things better and better all the time, to use the laws of nature to your advantage, for you cannot break or even bend those laws. There is no lovely, tempting political corruption that can allow you to persuade the universe to waive the law of gravity just so that you don’t fall to your death after losing your grip on the edge of a cliff. I’m sorry.
Except, I’m not really sorry. You were under “constructive notice” of such things already‒a legal term meaning that you knew or should have known about the facts involved and so are responsible for what that knowledge entails. Any genes that tend to make a human-sized organism less aware or less convinced about, say, the dangers associated with gravity are, ceteris paribus, less likely to persist throughout the generations than ones that give them real awareness of those dangers.
So, don’t casually walk along unstable cliff edges if you want to maximize your chances to continue living. You may think you have “main character energy”, which sounds cool and all, but you’re only the main character of your own mind (if that).
To the universe, you are not even a paid extra. You’re not even an offstage voice or a stage hand. You’re at best a speck of dust somewhere on the rear-facing surface of some negligible bit of the backdrop, probably blocked by a curtain. As Poe pointed out, the hero of the tragedy, Man, is the conqueror worm.
Which raises thoughts about that stupid social media based trend of asking, “Would you still love me if I were a worm?”
Well…maybe if you were a conqueror worm.
TTFN
*This is not a modified Shakespeare quote. See if you can discern the source of the quote.
**Let alone uninterested.
