Toxic individualism

Commune (no, not communism) is the solution to our problems

Me being a toxic individualist

I tire in leisure.

Sunday has come to be my least favorite day of the week. We slow down, but for what? For screens?

I’d certainly feel different if something happened on Sundays. Block party? Count me in. Neighborhood group volunteer at a local charity (I don’t know . . . I’m just spitballing here)? I’m down. Sit in front of the TV and watch football? No thank you.

I must admit, to be fair, things are different for me. I’ve been lucky, throughout the past several months, to wake up every day and do what I want with just about every single second of my time. I have few bills to pay, no job by whose requisites I must abide, no external pressures—save for those I choose—to which I am bound.

If I were forced to awaken at a certain hour and be at some location for a particularly long duration five days per week, I’d surely have more incentive to watch NFL on Sundays. But I am not, and so the things I do with my time are more of a pleasure than a chore, and the only time I need to “relax” is when I lay in bed and sleep.

This may sound like a slight, but I do not mean it as such; I say it merely as a matter of fact—or an observation.

While I know it may be right to slow down and celebrate the fruits of my labor one day a week, it seems I just don’t, for some reason, enjoy the types of fruit most others prefer these days.

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I’m not all that versed in history, but I know enough (and I’ve been around just long enough) to be pretty certain that the world and our culture have changed.

It has not always been the case, for example, that both parents needed to work, nor that people opted in their free time to watch TV in lieu of socializing, nor that everyone carried around in their pocket a highly addictive device, nor that swathes of the population were entirely out of tune with the rhythms of nature, nor that in coming of age children moved hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from their parents, nor that hundreds of millions—indeed, billions—of people were supported by resources from the other side of the world, nor that chunks of local tradition were replaced by corporate industry . . .

No, sir, it has not always been the case. The world, the human world, is, indeed, a very different place. A weirder place, if I do say so myself.

In fact, the more supposedly human it gets, the weirder it becomes. I find, in all things associated with the word “urban,” something so putrid, so offensive to the intuition. For in all things urban—though people are more physically close than anywhere else (today, in numbers greater than at any other period in history)—hearts come to grow ever more distant. How, why could a group of people so nearby be so strange, so foreign?

It is, to many, now undeniable: we’ve become individualists of the highest caliber, each operating like some self-sufficient unit, as if to open ourselves would be no different than inviting mutiny on the open seas.

Regular strangers, in many ways, seem not merely to be fellow countrymen whose names we don’t know but utter outsiders who must have come from faraway lands, speak some mysterious language, and could, at any moment, engage in the most unpredictable sort of behavior.

We walk around with masks upon our faces, taking them off only in times of privacy, or severe intoxication, or removal from what is now so stiff a way of life. Our homes have become these sorts of castles in their own right, rendering each of us our own kingdoms, as if any need for neighborly help might signal vulnerability, inciting, in turn, a destructive onslaught of, well, who knows what!?

Many think the world has become overly expensive—and indeed it has, for how much money has been printed and for the simultaneously incredible proportion of taxes we pay¹—and yet, instead of turning to others, choosing to become more communal, we dig our heels into the ground and give ourselves even more to what are often empty pursuits in the name of “starting our own lives.”

What a statement! As if we may truly divorce ourselves from those we love!

Speaking of which, finding time for loved ones now seems to require near as much effort as it takes to plan a trip around the world. Every second of our day is filled with this and that; we now hold above our own intuition the mighty schedule. And in those fleeting moments we are free, which tend to be after the once-worshiped-now-harnessed life-giving sun has set, we give ourselves not to anything fulfilling—for that, in addition to all that bears down upon us during the day, would be far too tiring—but to the most pleasurable of impulsive indulgences.

While we needn’t one solitary religion to maintain some sort of cultural cohesion, we lack altogether a uniting vision . . . There is, for many individuals, not nearly as much to look forward to as there was decades ago—furthering the tempting and destructive reach of these indulgences.

Our very immediate environments have been overtaken by the interests of high bidders—then destroyed via lack of care by their subsequent and inevitable disinterest, not unlike a moralless, hedonistic bar-goer does an innocent, naive 20-something.

For the trajectory the world as we know it seems to have taken, most maintain a very small perceived locus of control, consequently becoming ever more self-serving.

The very fabric of society—that invisible yet undeniably influential interconnective force—has been parasitically attacked and degenerated in the name of “progress.”

Is it any wonder the new American Dream is to escape, to break free?