Soon I will be turning 26 years old. At this age I will have experienced a myriad of societal upheavals that are supposedly “once in a lifetime” situations, at least according to news sources, family, and those older than myself. These include: the destruction of the twin-towers, the collapse of the US housing market that crashed the world economy, war between two “developed” first-world states, the hottest global temperatures recorded in human history, unprecedented migration levels due to the on-going climate crisis, and a global pandemic.
These are just some of the global moments of the past 22 years alone. And from everything we’re being told now, it’s meant to only get worse. As the climate crisis deepens, governments refuse to act, companies prioritise profits over sustainable practice, and aging populations become disillusioned with any real hope for meaningful change to happen, I honeslty have such little hope for our future on Earth.
As such, I’ve found myself turning away from the news and tried to focus on my own life, and find enjoyment and hope amongst my immediate circles of friends, family, colleagues, and community. But even disconnected from the world, there’s this unshrugable sense of things worsening.
I have a full-time job working in the public sector, for NHS England, in the midst of its Government mandated merger, and it has this constant feeling of… fakeness.
We are asked to play constant games with Human Resources, Communications, the company Executives, essentially anyone outside your immediate team, in order to get them to do actions you need. But instead, they always find some way to finagle out of your request. It’s the constant sense that asking for what you actually need, or giving honest, uncensored feedback to bad systems is taboo, and that the “corporate method” requires skullduggery and conniving. It’s rude to be genuine, and corporate culture requires all external-team discussions to be layered in a form of doublespeak.
This is not exclusive to NHS England, or politics, as it runs rampant throughout all layers of decision-making roles throughout the western world, and beyond. My friends living in the UK speak of the same dynamics, language, and strain, as they work a whole extra dynamic relationship on top of their existing lives. Their work becomes a different realm, in which they disappear, and emerge from feeling tired, unhappy, and meaningless. But we all continue to do our work, because what else are we meant to do?
Mostly everyone is struggling to earn enough to pay their rent, utilities, and food with their current working lives. With this, we’re also being asked to work more intensely for less, as companies refuse to increase pay in response to a wide-range of strikes, instead wanting to maximise stakeholder payouts, or Executive bonuses. Or in my public sector case, in the name of austerity, as the Government “cannot afford it”. All this whilst article after article details the failure of the PPE program during the pandemic, and how ministers used their positions of power to siphon millions of pounds from their own government into their own pockets.
This is all happening whilst our supermarket shelves gouge us with higher price tags every week, quality of the health care system falls to lower and lower lows, energy prices rise (though they are lowering slightly, for now), and the systems set in place to support and protect the population are unable to do so under austerity.
It’s difficult to describe this feeling, but there’s a phrase coined by an anthropologist who grew up in the Soviet Union, that I feel at least puts a name to it all.
It describes the state of society in the Union’s final years, where everyone was aware of how the system was failing, but could not conceive of an alternative. How everyone knew their jobs were meaningless, their shops were non-functioning, their money was devoid of value, politicians had no solutions to their problems, and all they could do was pretend everything was okay. Everyone knew the others were also faking their belief, and that fakeness became the truth. It was termed hypernormalisation by Alexei Yurchak, and describes the collapse of a society, which puppeted its corpse with belief alone.
What it reveals is that despite what everyone believes, considers true, or demands is real, it doesn’t matter. You can pretend there is no problem and not look up, you can argue with others and convince them their problems are not that bad, or simply ignore the problem and gesture to it occasionally to say you’re doing what you can, whilst doing nothing about it and having a party at downing street instead. No matter what, the problem still exists, it’s still a threat, and will eventually rear its head and burn your world down, beliefs and all.
And I don’t know what to do about it, short of just looking after those I care about.
It’s either that, or getting a dog.
Fun-fact
According to the United Kingdom (UK) Cabinet Office’s National Risk Register 2023, which released on the 3 of August, the three most likely, and most impactful risks to the UK are:
- a pandemic.
- failure of the National Electricity Transmission System (NETS).
- larger scale chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) attacks.
That is to say, if someone were to contract pandemic level virus, again, spread it to a number of people in an airport terminal, then crash into a bus load of NETS engineers on their way to a Christmas dinner, we’re fucked.
Ian D. W. 