Melbourne's Stage 4 Lockdown // Contradictory Ideas // Generation Tense and Tired // Complacency

This piece will be an amalgamation of unrelated thoughts, as are most of the posts on this platform.

STAGE 4 LOCKDOWN.

Walking around my area tonight was eerie. Where there were people scattered through the park yesterday afternoon there is now a desolate silence. Walking through the neighbourhood, it felt as if you could hear a conversation several streets away. This is the sound of the strictest lockdown yet.

Dogs have seemingly become an escape route, a valid excuse to get some air. Running, even if only faster than a brisk walk, has become the only solace for those wanting a mask-free outdoor adventure. What a strange time we live in.

There are so many different ways to take these challenges. We can focus on ourselves and our own predicaments. On just how annoying wearing a mask is. On how we want to go outside. On how we want to see our friends and family. If we focus on these things, we will inevitably become frustrated.

If instead we see this as an opportunity and we focus on the things we take out of this time, we will inevitably gain far more from it and make it go faster. We can walk around in awe of how eerie it is and listen to the sounds of the neighbourhood that we wouldn’t otherwise hear in more regular circumstances. We can use this time to connect with an interest that we had always been interested in but never had the time to pursue. There are countless ways to gain from this time.

But I don’t want to spend this whole piece focused on this corny shit.

CONTRADICTORY IDEAS.

We all want to find some cohesive theory of how the world works. My whole life is dedicated to finding such theories. But the reality is that there is no unified theory of everything. Instead, there are many different ideas that might contradict each other but need to be held in the mind simultaneously.

The idea we need to have goals in order to have any hope of doing anything substantial. The idea that we should abandon goals, since they are simply efforts to avoid suffering and become suffering in themselves. We should live in the moment and yet paint a picture of a better world. Which is it? Both simultaneously. Just like we have many parts of our mind pulling us in all different directions, we can have many ideas in our minds pulling us in different directions. In the end, it’s all about finding a balance. Finding when one idea might be useful in constructing a better world and finding when another might be more useful.

The idea of a flow state and being absorbed in your fast thinking. The idea of slow thinking and being thoughtful, planning out each move. The idea that we have no free will and that life is the product of cause and effect patterns. The idea that free will is all that we have, for without it what would we be? All have their place. We seek a centralised point at which we can control these patterns, but it seems that no such place exists. We are simply creatures of contradiction.

GENERATION TENSE AND TIRED.

I wish people in our generation were less tense. It seems that people are rarely willing to offend and take risks, myself included. Aren’t our 20s supposed to be reserved for such belligerency? Instead of watching our language and being careful not to offend, shouldn’t we be giving far less of a fuck than the generation of our parents? Why are we so tense?

There are all of these tones of tiredness. Post Malone – always tired. This has become a meme of our generation. What are we tired of? Our lives are only just beginning. It is tiring growing up in a world wary of what you say – a land of freedom without such freedoms.

We’ve grown up in a world where the paths are outlined from the beginning, and none of them are very appetizing. There must be something more, and yet no one is presenting the alternative. As humans, we are meant to strive for something greater than ourselves – it seems in our nature. Without this vision, our society becomes complacent. We focus on ourselves rather than on others, on the community, on the vision. With this complacency comes self-centredness and narcissism. With this self-centredness comes ego, the ‘narrating self’ focusing on our past digressions (depression) or our future fears (anxiety). This ‘narrating self’ is what tires us.

Getting back to the idea of a new media company (about which I haven’t written here) – it needs to embody the reactions that I have outlined here. It shouldn’t be explicitly aimed at Generation Z, but the message will attract that generation most. The belligerency that Gen Z was never inspired to manifest.

It’s almost as if Gen Z never had anything to rebel against. What were we supposed to rebel against? Generation X are so jaded and so meek. Generation Y are so misguidedly smug. Growing up with screens in our skulls we never felt a need to rebel. Instead, we are just tired. We see millennials rebelling in the weirdest sense, but never felt connected to that.

We’re sick of this self-obsessed culture. We will abscond the identity politics with substance. We will paint an image of a better world and strive towards it, even if it kills us.

COMPLACENCY.

Narcissism and self-centredness are not a result of wealth but rather complacency. For this reason, there shouldn’t just be a solution of the economic problems, but a vision implemented for the people to strive towards – the analogy of the cathedral and the generational bricklayer is brought to mind. Ideas like healthy nationalism among other shared fictions are ideal for this cohesion.