Is there anything we can do?

A Contemplation on Love, Society and Ourselves

Credit: Jonathan Foster

1.

Sitting in a crowded cafe by the harbour stirring away that obligatory frothy barista heart, I’m in the eye of my own storm as I experience my body coming to terms with a new splash of stress.

I’ve just lost my job. Been made redundant. Given the elbow. Sacked.

While my mind jigs and jags, and reshuffles and establishes defensive positions, my body stays submerged in the tangible world, free of the imaginary of words, slowly shifting and rearranging my emotional tectonic plates at a glacial pace after this sudden quake. There’s nothing I can do but wait for things to find their place and settle.

My survival instinct, honed over years of clinging to the cliff face of life, may equip me to weather this latest misfortune, to get back on my feet, but the vast territory of inequality is expanding fast and my capacity to ever break into a passing privilege bubble feels more unlikely than ever.

Especially now that the Shopkeepers are no longer pretending to have anyone’s interests at heart and are blatantly stealing from humans to equip their robots.

The cafe is packed with people who seem so familiar, people with whom I share nothing and yet everything, people who seem merrily oblivious of the truth that we’re travelling on this journey, side by side, in the same boat.

I watch some of them chatting, most of them looking at screens, evidently busy, or merely addicted, and I feel that sense of solitude in a crowd. How familiar we’ve become with being isolated, how at ease with insecurity, how performative we seem, pretending not to all be suffering our own storms of one sort or another.

Perhaps I’m just ill-suited to the frivolous bourgeois life. I’ve so rarely found solace in trite social ceremony. I’ve always enjoyed the flare of intimacy or a flash of honesty in all the dull falsity.

Even though I’m well familiar with the precarity of existence, I’ve learnt over the years to loosen my grip, to make peace with vulnerability, and accept that this life is a fleeting adventure, almost entirely a charade, almost with no real substance.

Except for one thing, except for that ever flowing fountain of profundity, except for Love. The true goddess of us all.

I begin to smile to myself as my world seems to be stumbling though an inevitable collapse, as if it too were slowly shifting and rearranging its own emotional tectonic plates, waiting for things to settle. I feel myself chuckling at the farce of it all, me, some foolhardy writer who can’t stop peering into the collective soul and trying so hard sound the alarm, my tiny klaxon bleating that we’ve lost our way and exchanged our human spirit for The Machine, that we’re being subjugated into the darkness and we’re not even paying attention.

And then I too get thrown aside in the rush to obsolescence.

Oh man, I begin laughing to myself as the thought rises, they’ll be queuing up to read this morbid piteous raging. No wonder they sacked me. ChatGPT may steal the entire world’s literary output but at least it doesn’t bore the fuck out of everybody with unending melancholia.

I look around the cafe at this “everybody”, the most privileged people in history, three generations into our demented consumerism project where the anchors that fixed us to the Earth, to our ancestors, to our collective soul, have long since snapped and now we’re floating free in a nightmare of our own making, a planet sized shimmering soap bubble straining under the pressure of our rampage, ready to burst under the dead-eyed stewardship of the Shopkeepers and their broken-hearted death cult who slavishly fight amongst themselves to be the last man standing.

And here am I, my stress levels masquerading as laughter, paying for unaffordable coffee, looking to all the world like the ludicrous, outsider I have always been as I sit alone and wait for my body to catch up with my bewildered mind.

2.

The tomato plants growing out of the large ceramic pots below the window spread their fragrant pungency throughout the kitchen. The cuttings too, fragrant lily of the valley, vibrant lilac and a handful of elder flower coronets all radiating their sweet sharp spring scent. A warm June breeze swirling this heavenly floral fragrance as the dog and I languish on the sofa embracing the stillness. Just being.

My phone started ringing but I let it ring. An old friend, very chatty, mostly about himself. Last time we spoke it took an hour to wade through whether fiction is even a real thing considering the multilayered creation of reality and identity that we humans engage in. I mean, he’d said, isn’t everything fiction (?), where do you draw the line (?), can you really take the credit for what you write (?), can you (?), are you actually making it up or borrowing or what (?) Then, he apologised and hung up, I’m sorry, I’m already late, it’s all over anyway.

I enjoy his radio show telephone calls, but I just didn’t have the energy to face a tsunami of self-absorption. Besides, I didn’t want to hear myself inventing explanations or making excuses. I wanted to be left to stumble around acquainting myself with this latest misfortune in my own sweet time.

As the phone rang away the dog watched me closely, aren’t you going to get that? He always assumes it’s for him, some arrangement being made for his benefit, he doesn’t like an unanswered phone.

I got up and checked the tomatoes and the house plants. They didn’t need watering. She had already been there, padding around in her bare feet as reliable as the morning sun, casually attending to what needs attending, nurturing what needs nurturing, so that we, all of us, the girls and the dog and I, bask in her benevolent rays. I glanced at my watch to check if the dog needed feeding because those rays of hers are spreading goodwill through my being like infectious laughter through a crowd.

It’s so strange, inhabiting a world of such intimacy, of such kindness, where our spurious boundaries tangle and overlap so that where one ends and the other begins is trivial as we lean into each other’s mutual sanctuary.

And yet, at exactly the same time, to inhabit a world at the End Times, where collapse seems inevitable, almost obligatory, even though human love, this relentless and ever flowing fountain of profundity, could, if we just loosened our grip and made peace with our vulnerability and accepted the fleeting nature of life, we could so easily extinguish the darkness and hand us all back to ourselves. If we could just dare to share our ever thrashing private storms and become drenched in each other.

3.

“What did they actually say?” she asked as she looked about for something.

“They said that it was so very difficult for them as employers to be in this position, having to let people go, and they didn’t like it at all,” I said, “What are you looking for?”

“Oh, poor them,” she said, “By the way, the woman upstairs is turning 90, she’s having drinks, her son is arranging it,” she said.

“Yeah, poor them, never mind it was their own greed and lust and reckless decisions that brought about this financial disaster, never mind it was entirely their own doing,” I said, “Are we expected to go to these drinks then?”

“They’re bastards, they’ve always been bastards, you know that. The way they’ve treated you. Why, do you actually want to go?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Well, you don’t have to worry, her birthday is the day after we leave.”

“Oh, that is a shame.”

“You’re so happy about it,” smiling away.

“No I'm not. So then they said…”

“Yes you are,” she say laughing away and then, “so what did they say?”

“So, apparently the union negotiator suggested that if management lessened their massive salaries the company wouldn’t have to make any redundancies.”

“Oh I bet that went down well, what did they say to that?” she asks glancing about absently.

“They actually said, without the slightest irony, that their salaries are decided by the Board so it was out of their hands, and then they actually said that if companies want quality candidates they need to pay competitively. Are you looking for the dog’s lead?”

“What, those pals of theirs on the Board who appointed these same quality candidates who’ve just fucked everything up?” she said now looking at me.

“Yep, those pals of theirs on the Board who throw money at them to fail upwards. I thought her son lived in Mexico or something,” I said

“He does. He coming back for his mother’s 90th.”

“Huh. By the way, if you’re looking for the lead it’s hanging by the door, on the hook where it always is.”

“Where are the girls?” she asked as she took the lead from the hook.

“No idea, probably staying away to avoid coming to my 90th.”

“They needn’t worry my darling, you’ll be well dead by then,” she said, laughing away, “So what are you going to do now, have you got any plans?”

And I say nothing and bite my lip as she leashes the dog and opens the door. I did have plans but I didn’t want to say them out loud. Fate has paid way too much attention to me already. No point in waving tempting flags in its face.

4.

This time I answer the phone. After a whirlwind of his latest musings we unfortunately landed on me.

Surely your plans aren’t to write those little ditties on Substack? You’re never going to make anything out of those. What are you even doing with that?

It’s not about the making anything of of them, I’m trying to develop my craft, I’m writing and people are reading, there’s readership and community, what else is there?

Oh man, really? You know you’re just feeding AI systems for free, slogging away just to be robbed by the Tech Barons and then made obsolete.

Yeah, well fuck them, I’m already obsolete so I beat them to it, anyway, what do you suggest? I just give up writing?

I’m just saying there’s plenty of better writers than you, and their better at networking and self-promotion and all the stuff that gets them noticed and grows their readership or community or whatever you want to call it. Besides, you’re all over the place, I mean dude, what even is this nonsense right here?

I dunno, playing around in the Substack playground, fourth wall stuff, messing with the genre, a fever dream, honestly I don’t know. I’m just trying to entertain, you know, write something interesting or thoughtful or something.

Well, that’s the most pretentious thing I’ve heard in a long while. If I was you I’d get back to the you being made unemployed story, at least that made some sense.

Yeah, well thanks but I don’t need your helpful advice, I’ve got my very own inner voice doing a perfectly good hatchet job without you.

I’ll leave you to it then.

Fine, thanks.

I hung up.

5.

Is there anything we can do to engineer a way of surviving in this faltering machinery and still find the space to be ourselves, express ourselves and love one another with everything we’ve got?

Is there anything we can do to escape being marooned in this cruel madness and pull power back from the hands of the Shopkeepers?

Is there anything we can do to resist being made obsolete as beings with dignified social value in our own lives?

Is there anything we can do to platform gentleness, compassion and love in a world sorely in need of these values?

I think there is. Do you?

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