To think that it'll be a new year tomorrow. I know time passes whether we want it to or not, but it never feels like it until we see it happen directly.
I wonder what people will think of 2022. Personally, if I had to sum it up, I'd go with "The year tragedy became so common, people forgot how to feel sad." Well, maybe that's just me. I hope it's just me.
I think the world's waiting for the moment everything falls apart, but I'm just waiting for the moment things finally get better. I can't look into a crystal ball, so I don't know when it will happen, and the cynical part of me keeps pointing out that things may never get better. After all, didn't we think that World War II marked the end of Fascism? I'm not giving up though. Mostly because I don't know how I'll keep going if I do.
I don't know what scares me more, the idea that we'll fall to the evil that lurks within our hearts, or the possibility that we'll never move past the twentieth century. We're in 2022, and I still see remnants of it everywhere I look. It feels like we're in a story that never got a chance to end, so we're stuck living out the same plotline over and over again. Endlessly pretending things were better, even though it's the same as it was, we've just seen it so many times we can no longer ignore the stage effects. I keep hearing people insist that pointless retreads are the only kinds of stories that matter, that changing the tools in our toolbox just leads to more problems than it could ever solve.
Maybe if I was a decent writer, I'd agree with that, but I'm not. The whole reason I'm not trying to be a great writer is that I want to be allowed to write whatever I want without the pressure of writing a decent story with compelling characters. I don't want to deal with being so famous I'm no longer allowed to say what's on my mind. It bothers me that we're so focused on having the perfect plot that we don't want to tell the stories we love so much. The ones that have lasted forever because they were simple, repeatable, and everyone could understand them.
I think that people don't understand that the thing that makes culture special is that it's made of all the stories we tell one another. All the ways we take the meaningless, random events that make up our lives and tie them together. We now live in a world where those in charge don't want anyone but them to be allowed to tell society's story, which is not only selfish, but dangerous.
When I hear people beg to go back to the world before the Pandemic, I wonder where our love of storytelling went. What happened to cause us to forget how to make the meaningless meaningful? I don't know why it happened, nor do I think anyone should be blamed, but I do know that it doesn't need to be an act of god to matter. If nothing else, can't it become the story of how we remembered who we are, and what we were meant to do?
I write every day, but I apparently had more thoughts than I realized. I'm just not sure whether to call this a good year or a bad one. As someone who's working to create a way for us to cope with the Infinite, which I'm increasingly noticing, I worry about how poorly equiped we are to face a world without a predetermined plotline. I don't think the old gods can help us, but I can't be the only person who thinks we need something to believe in. Why, I wonder, did we sacrifice everything in our search for the truth?
Someday this will mean something. I just need to look for the right story to tell.
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