Juvenoia
Do you remember the Vsauce video "Juvenoia"? Like many things I consumed when I was a presapient elementary schooler, the details of this particular entry in 2010s YouTube elude me, yet one thing from that video I still remember. The host, Michael, pointed out that a single year in young person's life feels like an eternity because in some sense, it really is—when you're five, experiencing one additional year represents a sixth of your entire life! But as you age (and this might also have to do with the differences in how juvenile and adult brains experience reality at large), time compresses; birthdays are desacralized; hours desiccate like grass clippings left in the afternoon sun. And suddenly, when you find yourself in the third year of your undergraduate degree, staring down the salivating maw of post-graduation employment, health insurance, and savings accounts, Michael's words leap beyond the realm of pop science into the realm of the tactile and oh-so-urgent.
Whereas I never needed to ponder the idea of a life well-lived when I was young—every day is well-lived when your only responsibilities are hanging out with friends and going to ping-pong practice—now that I'm a bit older, I feel the need to be deliberate with the way I spend my time. Is this activity enriching? Does it make me more satisfied with my life? Does it set me up for success in the future? It doesn't help that the university I go to sometimes feels like a Kafkaesque pressure cooker for people who were born in test tubes designed to mass-produce Wells Fargo employees.
The problem, I think, is that everything about the way American society is structured is meant to wrest deliberativeness away from us. Deliberation has been replaced with cessation—that is, of all higher mental functions. The addictive social media / iPad baby horse has been beaten into the nth circle of hell at this point (juvenoia, anyone?), and I don't think the internet per se is the problematic of the day. Rather, we seem to have lost something distinctly recherché and inimitably human that the internet, and social interaction at large, once contained. In its place, we were given (as I refuse to believe this was an intentional choice on the part of most humans), a massified, enshittified revenue machine. And scholars and thinkers have been talking about this alienating bullshit since modernity immemorial, but I think we are all bowling alone to an extent nobody in the history of humanity ever has been.
We're not meant to think—we're not meant to create—we're not meant to socialize—without our bodies, thoughts, and personhoods being fed into the great infernal mills of the technological-industrial complex and ground up into identity puree. I say this flavored with only the zest of the fruit of irony: from the intellectual atavism of Joe Rogan, to the neverending encroachment of the sterile suburb upon nature, to the sheer self-conceit and stupidity of our political system—they are all sides of the same excrement-encrusted polygon.
A decaying man once observed: The bourgeois are not human.
I propose: Not one of us is human.
Not one of us is human because there is no room for us to be human. Those who appear to have achieved it have abandoned, or surpassed, their humanity: they are no longer Homo sapiens sapiens. No human, sensu stricto, can endure this. We are clinging desperately onto life as mass extinction of all mankind, the whimpering end to the Holocene, precipitates everywhere around us.
What is the way forward for those of us left, the human? I don't know. We have to change. And me? I would like to retreat into the greenery that lies beyond the road, which darkens into an imperceptible, primeval fog. The musk of the untrodden leaf-litter and the silvery blades of moonlight will keep me company, and my own body will melt into the unfurling ferns quivering in the nocturnal breeze. I, too, will relinquish my humanity, and return to something less than—and more than—human.
A place I went this year that made me happy.
Until next time,
Bella