This idea was contributed by one of my most loyal readers who has asked to stay anonymous. But he’s got a full list of great ideas that I’ll be using over the next few weeks. If you have an idea, then please let me know it!
A way you’ve become more cynical, that makes you sad
I no longer think that the world is inherently good, and that the exception is evil.
I now believe the world is inherently apathetic, and the exception is empathy.
This makes me incredibly sad. Let me dig in a bit more…
When I was going through D.A.R.E (I must have been one of the last classes as far as I can tell), I thought to myself, “Why do they teach us this? Adults are smart enough to know to stop doing drugs. And how much trouble can you get in as a kid anyway.” Well, I was wrong about that, and I was wrong in general that naivety and bad decision making are the purview of the young and innocent (maybe the innocent, but give me that one).
I also never understood that there were a million things wrong with the world. I thought it was genuinely the things on the evening news, and that everything else was exactly like the life I lead.
I think it’s fair to say that by 15 I knew better, but I still believed that the world was inherently good, and that people, to create a good world, inherently helped each other.
Having now lived beside the homelessness situation in San Francisco, read how brothers turn against each in civil wars all over the world, and watched myself not let someone into the lane even though they had their signal on, I know it’s much, much worse than I thought.
I didn’t think though that it was this bad.
I don’t know what the event was nor did I really realize how extremely I’d flipped to the other side until I read that question. As soon as I read it though, I knew what the answer was. Happiness removes entropy from the system. So does anger. In fact, reacting in anyway does so. Only apathy seems to bring the world to its natural place. And that’s awful. But the world keeps proving this true over and over again.
I never thought this way as a 5 year old, and Amelia and Luka don’t see the world that way. I wish I never had. I hope they never have to.