The Importance Of Choosing Nourishing Substitutes

If Chris Whitty isn't chatting shitty, and social distancing is indeed extended to the end of the year, by then each of our new normals will include all the new habits we will have developed in the meantime.

Habits that will consist of the substitutes we've had to use as replacements for the actual things that we want to do now but can't at the moment.

If we end up having to say goodbye, for the foreseeable future, to something we miss really badly, and the gradual detachment process involves a sort of withdrawal stage to pass through; then it'll be important to choose a substitute which isn't a low-nutrition quick fix, and is actually a substitute good for us in its own right.

While we wait for things that are being missed to return, choose substitutes that contain within them opportunities for growth in life-affirming directions, instead of substitutes that act like cheap drugs to get you through, which only lead to diminishing returns on each successive hit.

Imagine Our Own Future Before Power Imagines One For Us

I feel like precisely because imagining the future which comes after this seems impossible, is the reason why we have to start imagining it. 

Otherwise the future we end up getting to live in we will have had no part in creating, and there are enough politicians and leaders of all kinds out there only too happy to design a future for everyone else to live in if it means they get to write the rules.

As difficult as it may seem, I feel like now is the perfect time for people to try and imagine what they want to happen after this, and seek out others who also share the same hopeful sentiment. Living in a future in which everyone has had a hand in making, no matter how small it may seem, is a really important thing in terms of having a sense of joint ownership about something everyone helped to build.

And that desire to seek out others who think and feel similarly to the way you are right now will be essential in order to galvanise people together into a cohesive whole, able to work as one. Because the only other option or road that springs easily to mind right now is one which leads to despair and total submission to the external forces that usher, steer and coerce us into doing what it thinks is best, if we choose not to do anything at all and remain stagnant.

That does sound proper dystopian, and even a bit hysterical when read in one go, but if you would have told me 2 months ago that very soon I would find myself staying in my house for 5 weeks straight in a bid to help save people's lives, then I would have mentioned that you didn't have to watch the entirety of Black Mirror in one sitting. 

But here we are! 

The truth of what's happening sounds just as wild as fiction right now, which is exactly why the way the story continues is so up for grabs. Everyone has writers block because the true extent of the reality we're in still remains unknown. Which is precisely why imagining a future that personally gives you hope is so necessary.

What I realised about the way I respond during a extended period of depression

Nearly all of the negative things that you say are assumptions. They are NOT facts, because they have not happened yet. 

People should never make assumptions about their future simply because it feels like things will never change. The simple fact is that it is literally impossible for anything to stay the same. Things can only get worse or get better. It's your choice. Things remaining as they are forever isn't actually something that can happen, so forget about it.

Listen to your thoughts or go through your writings or trains of thought and highlight the facts and separate them from the assumptions. The things that can be said because they are true, and the things which will become true if you keep telling yourself they are already true when they aren't.

Dont ruin your life investing the power of your belief in assumptions which the end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Never EVER declare that whatever negative experience is happening for you, will carry on like that forever, because you have no right to claim such a thing before it's actually takes place, and whether it places or not is entirely your choice.

We Yearn For The Real

There are so many things all happening at once that its difficult to select one particular thread that can bind them all together.

But over the last few days especially, a certain feature has become more prescient for me. The increasing use of conferencing apps and software for friends to remotely connect in order to bridge the sense of there being a divide and an effort to keep at bay the spectre of loneliness.

But I see the emerging trend towards the use of technologies that require increasing levels of our belief invested into it in order to render the experience as real as possible, a bit of a double-edged sword. I

Belief is such a fascinating currency. And civilisation needs to run on the shit. At the same time belief is just a belief. It's nothing really.

And so at this particular moment in time, facing a predicament which is a concentrated and necessary version of the thing which the system was eliciting anyway - namely social alienation. This is quite dangerous territory I think.

What happens when the yearning to be connected with other can be satisfied no longer? When people's desire for the real thing cannot be fully quenched by imbibing synthetic or artificial replacements?

Life doesn't cease being Faustian at any point, but more so during a global pandemic. There will always be a price to pay, at some point in the future, for whatever you have just gained even though may seem as though you are only accumulating good beneficial shit.

And the thing is, it's not all bad. I quite like and approve of many of the things that are getting clarified right now. The coronavirus is a clarifying event. THIS is the event which helps us see clearly, in 2020.

COVID-19 is making is painfully clear that pandemics do not care much for marketing rhetoric. They are nonplussed about your rapidly diminishing hopes of election success.You cannot gaslight a contagious disease even if you feel like you speak its language.

So clarification of what is, is the take home for me from all this. The reassertion of science and facts (not alternative ones). A reassertion of the value of love, of compassion, of truth, of cooperation and the sharing of burdens which in turn boosts performance and efficiency and expertise naturally. With a bit of luck, it will all become clear to us.

In the future, celebrities will judge each other by the upkeep of their anus

In the near future, the nipple-slip will be replaced by the anus-peep and it will be desirable to have a part of the body not normally associated with cleanliness, to be clean and always kissable, such is society's obsession for paradoxes and maintaining impossibly high standards that set apart the elite from the plebs.

Soon, music celebrities will be suffering from 'wardrobe malfunctions' that accidentally reveal their delicately bleached perfect puckers.

In turn the general public will become anus crazy, another taboo will have been conquered and personal grooming will have reached its zenith.