September 11, 2021
20 years after 9/11, Doom scrolling, other assorted
There’s something about the stillness of a Saturday morning that makes you believe that the world exists just for you, its serenity a promise of a revolution about to arrive.
It’s been twenty years since 9/11. All of our lives changed forever that day. I remember the times before 9/11. It was not all sunshine and roses but there was a certain almost naive, carefree joy to those times. We could walk all the way to the gate of an airport even if we weren’t flying. We didn’t have to go through metal detectors, take off our shoes or belts or pay attention to the ounces of liquids we carried on board. I remember, a few months after 9/11, landing in Singapore and seeing armed soldiers walking through the airport. It was astonishing and scary. I recall, on a flight to Sydney, my colleague and I observed a couple of bearded Muslim guys in flowing white robes on the other side of the aisle. One of them had his eyes closed and was praying with his palms facing up. The other was bent down, holding his head between his knees. On a normal day, this would have been a non-event. This was after 9/11. So, we had thoughts of a certain kind. Were these guys destructive fiends? My colleague was convinced that something bad was about to happen. I tried to tell him that the bearded bloke was simply having a panic attack. To this day, I’m not sure if I was trying to convince him or myself.
Truth is that the world has a lot of bad people in it. Why are they so bad? I don’t know. Karmic baggage maybe? Truth is also that none of us are perfect. We’re all messing up all the time. We are born with some sophisticated apparatus like minds, memories, cognition etc and we misuse it all the time. None of us will ever get it right. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the 20 years after 9/11, it’s that we must stop expecting each other to be perfect and infallible. We have to be more forgiving of each other. We have to stop hurting each other. As the Buddha famously said, there are two arrows that wound us. The first is the arrow the world fires at us. Wounds and scars are inevitable. These things happen. The second, the more hurtful one, is the arrow we fire at ourselves. Osama, Mohammad Atta et al fired the first arrow, for which there is no forgiveness in any realm. But what we did to ourselves after that..the second arrow we fired at ourselves, calling each other names, one thing leading to another and eventually ending up with a lame loser like Trump.. That was not necessary. Aeschylus said that wisdom comes from suffering. It doesn’t have to be that way. But it almost always is. Therein lies the rub.
Have you heard of a term called doom scrolling? It’s the habit of thoughtlessly and compulsively and aimlessly scrolling through our infinite feeds, often late at night when we ought to be sleeping, with the result of inducing greater degrees of anxiety and unease. It’s our response when asked to navigate potentially alarming situations with little information and no clarity on what we ought to do. It rises out of our need to construct neat maps of the world. More often than not, what we’re after is not information but an effective fix for our anxieties. This term has become very popular during the pandemic although it was well in vogue prior to it. The assumption we make is we need more information to navigate uncertainty.
Good information does help in making good choices, of course. But, I’d argue that what we suffer from these days is not a deficit in information, but a surplus of information. Believing that we need more information only leads to endless searching and what we need seems always to lie just beyond the realm of the actual, hidden beyond the horizon of the possible. Paradoxically, it sinks us deeper into indecision and anxiety because an abundance of information, especially when presented as disparate, incoherent bits, only generates more uncertainty and confusion.
What we truly need when faced with uncertainty is not more information but old fashioned virtues such as courage, patience, kindness, trust, and friendships. Lacking these, I can see how we might take refuge in the idea that we need more information. It’s easy to mask a lack of courage with a pretense of holding out for more information. The best way to deal with uncertainty, of course, is by letting go of our impulses to control, manage, shape and master. Who better to have on this journey than friends and family who will sustain us in failures and celebrate our triumphs? If I alone must bear the consequences of my decisions and there is no one I can trust, then it becomes tempting to seek perfect knowledge before acting and thus become paralyzed in its absence. We don’t have to face anything alone. We need family and friends now more than ever as anchors and a refuge from the disorienting tumult of the public sphere and fickleness of our social worlds.
I’m not gonna lie. I’m nervous about Newsom. California has a big choice to make by Sept 14. Pretty much everything is on the line. So fearful of the humiliation that awaits us Californians if Newsom somehow loses the recall. Maybe I'm overdoing it. I mean, New Jersey managed to survive Chris Christie, for heaven's sake. It can't be much worse than that, right? I hope we don’t get to find out.
Andrew Yang apparently “no longer identifies as a Democrat” and plans to start a third party. I’m so sorry to hear that he’s having trouble with his pronouns. Yang has been doing things in reverse for a while now. He started as a successful businessman, then ran for POTUS, then ran for mayor of New York city, wrote a memoir, and now is starting a third party. I expect he’ll finish with a stint on Dancing with the Stars.
Other random thoughts-
The other day someone mentioned the Sound of Music, the movie. It occurred to me that if I got a new nanny and she made me wear the curtains and forced me to sing loudly every ten minutes or so, I’d be like, “What. Is. Going. On. Here.”
I can confirm that it is true that Freaks and Geeks may be one of the greatest TV shows of all time, after Modern Family and before Seinfeld.
That’s all I got. Stay safe. Have a wonderful week ahead.