You’re Painfully Alive in a Drugged and Dying Culture
By: Erik Rittenberry
“It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares anymore; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
— Richard Yates
It’s quiet here in the early morning and no one’s around—just the way I like it. I’m sitting on a bench, sipping black coffee on an old dock, looking out over the ancient lake. I watch with an incredible sense of serenity as the fog dies out with the rising sun. There’s a peculiar stillness here in these early hours.
The sky grows lighter and lighter. A subtle breeze makes small ripples in the water. The fish jump and splash, the birds chirp and flutter, and everything seems joyful and harmonious. The great hum of life.
Behind me, the world is not so joyous and harmonious.
Behind me is a society I, too, belong to—a society teetering on the edge of all-out madness. We, the people, seem to be half-asleep at the wheel and completely entangled in a web of false narratives and social delusions. Our semiconscious society of disenfranchised people is at war with each other over manufactured illusions and irrational beliefs. We are completely alienated from each other, our deeper selves, and the soil that sustains us.
“Every realm of society is permeated with falsity and falsification,” the great Henry Miller reminded us so many years ago. He’s still right—probably more so today.
As the morning unfolds, the commotion begins much like it did the day before. Alarm clocks fire off. The TV’s flick-on and the news prompt us as to what we should be afraid of today. Antagonizing headlines heave us into a partisan frenzy before we even step foot in the shower. No one cares too much about the TRUTH because our minds are already made up.
This is the modern world.
The water splashes the face. The coffee is brewed. The social media is checked and updated and the emails are read over breakfast. Tired and heavily medicated souls make their way onto the billboard-littered highway to inch along in bumper-to-bumper traffic to a job they despise.
The kids are dropped off at their prison-like education camps, where they are segregated by age and forced to submit to an outdated national curriculum concocted by some inept bureaucratic process. Here, the inherent curiosities of little unique individuals are smashed out, and their little minds are molded and standardized and taught the “virtue” of conformity and obedience.
They become much like ourselves—well-adjusted disciples of the status quo, well-fed but inwardly starving, and spiritually depleted by a senseless haste that seems to be required to function in modern culture.