HOW TO SURVIVE TIMES LIKE THESE

SURVIVAL MODE, HYPER-RESPONSIBILITY, AND DESCENDING VS TRANSCENDING

We live in fetid times. Squalid ones. And the stench rises from us. The acrid heat of fear. The sallow tinge of corrosion. The rising bile of greed. All the demons are here now. Are they inside us, now? The world is inhabited by monsters. There’s Trump, his tongue flickering, setting fire to something else today.

How to survive times like these. The questions cuts our way of thinking open like a knife to a blade of grass. The answer is difficult, even if it’s simple. We either become the monsters, or we remain true to ourselves. I know. What a cliche! Terrible! You just want to know what to do. Don’t worry. I will share that with you. Step by step, we will come to the end of the road monsters walk.

And we will find out, too, where another road leads.

My friends don’t know it. I observe them carefully. Unconsciously, they’ve “adopted strategies.” Modern parlance. Let me try to put in a truer way. They are frightened out of their wits. And there, in that place, the depths of the unconscious mind take control.

Observe with me. Some are perpetually on the run. They move, over and over again. They change jobs, time and again. Some are fixed in place. Deer in the headlights. Everything’s fine, they say, smiling, and just behind that, we both know that they’re lying. The eyes give it away. The rictus smile is betrayed by panic blossoming in the iris. Some try to run, some try to hide.

Some plunge their identities into accumulation. They try to amass wealth, and of course, fail, because this is a game that requires a set of traits most don’t have, psychopathic ones. Or perhaps they try to accumulate in other ways, books, mantras, the stuff of soothing and consolation.

Fight or flight, freeze or fawn. Here are the cliches, too, that modern psychology presents us with. Let us try to go deeper than those, and arrive at the truth. That is all that matters now.

None of these are adequate responses to times like these. “Times like these,” meaning, turning points in human history. Eras where the world as we know it unravels before us, it’s threads pinning us to the devices of self-destruction. There we are, roped onto the bed, lulled asleep by the narcotic fixes of the End of the World as We Know It. Do they help, either? Does the glow of the screen do for the human soul what the light of the stars or the fire do?

These are all maladaptive responses, to use more modern parlance. They are strategies of appeasement, placation, and accommodation. They do not work for my friends. Here is what happens when they’re employed. If you try to run, you never stop running. If you try to hide, you will slowly disappear. If you try to build a fortress, you will only end up in a prison of your own making. Fight flight freeze fawn. This is what happens in the jungle.

And the more that we make of ourselves prey in the jungle, the more of our agency, selfhood, power, truth, beauty, and goodness we lose. We are not just prey in the jungle. We are something more. Aren’t we? When we treat ourselves this way, we are doing just what the monsters and predators who now run the world want. We have done their work for them. We have diminished, disappeared, erased, vandalized ourselves.

The correct answer to surviving times like these is something like this: hyper-responsibility.

That means: being responsible in a true way. For the stuff of a life. Wealth. Relationships. Your livelihood. Your sociality. Your selfhood. Your connection, too, to history, time, dust, the universe.

I say this because it’s become de rigeuer, fashionable, not to take responsibility for any of this. And I am not saying that the tired old myth of self-reliance can somehow compensate for the decompensation of systems breaking down around us—far from it. I am broaching a new kind of concept with you, which is hyper-responsibility, and it is not just individualistic.

Let me give you my own example. Many of you reached out to me and asked me to what to do about money. So I created Havens. This is here to help guide and teach you. In this way, I am sheltering you from the hurricanes raging around us. This is a small example of hyper-responsibility, which means something like: we take responsibility now for all those we love, and do it in mature, adult, genuinely loving ways.

This is a subtle notion, so let me contrast it with the fetid stench of now. We are becoming what the monsters want. Relationships are breaking down. People are not having sex, which, yes, is one indication of love and care, a crucial one, by the way. Careers and professions are imploding. Social bonds have disintegrated in dramatic ways, to the point that in America, people barely speak to one another.

These are indication that a kind of hyper-individualism is spreading. And that’s to be expected. When the ship is sinking, it quickly becomes every man for himself. But to the point that relationships don’t form? That people stop being intimate? That everyone’s reduced to this? Being a pure atom of individualism, purely focused on survival, as the world breaks down around us?

It’s not good enough. Everyone’s in survival mode now. But survival mode is not how to get out of this mess, for ourselves, for our loved ones, or for our societies. Survival mode means: we snap, we’re quick to anger, relationships, shared visions, plans, judgments, become things we don’t have time for. Our cortexes aren’t working. We can’t think clearly. We can’t envision three steps ahead, five years from now, can’t form plans, can’t, can’t, can’t. We’re overwhelmed by the littlest things, and—bang!—just like that, we snap.

Survival mode has made us so, so brittle. And try as we might to laugh this brittleness away, with cheap jokes—who needs men! ha-ha, women are just meat! oh look, I don’t have a career anymore! LOL, nobody will ever have enough money to retire! So funny, food’s becoming unaffordable!—the laughter itself is the brittlest thing of all. Because when it stops…there’s just the deafening silence of a grief we can’t bear to face.

Hyper responsibility. This means something like: being the one who makes the plans for all the loved ones in your extended family. They need you to be that person. It means being the one to advise people in the ways you can, whether its relationships, finance, careers, or more. They need you to be that person. It means being aware, deeply, of the state of your own well-being, too, financially, emotionally, spiritually, socially, and taking responsibility for it, and where it’s not working, to mend, fix, heal, restore, and even transcend it.

They need you to be that person, and you need you to be that person. Do you know who nobody needs anybody to be right now? The brittle, frightened things we’ve become. The ones who can’t bear a difficult conversation, who don’t have time for anyone else, who can’t focus on three steps ahead, because everything’s now survival mode.

It’s not good enough. And I know all the excuses. They’re good excuses—yes, life is tough, yes, making ends meet is difficult, yes, nobody has enough money, yes, everything is overwhelming. And yet they remain what they are, excuses, and “excuses” mean explanations for not fulfilling a challenge, moment, role, place, responsibility.

Nobody needs us to be the people we’re becoming. These wretched things. Weak, morally, spiritually, mentally, emotionally. Drained, exhausted, unable to cope, barely hanging in there, hanging on by a thread…always at the brink of snapping. We need to be better than that, for ourselves, and for the people that we love.

One answer, yes, is therapeutic. Talking into the pain of it all. But the other one is acceptance. Accepting the hyper responsibility that’s placed on our shoulders now. If we’re not going to be responsible for the money, connections, relationships, happiness, health, of those we love, beginning with ourselves, who will be? Our failed systems? The monsters who’ve reduced us to absences?

Courage, my friends. Strength. Compassion. I am asking a great deal of you. I know it. I am teaching you something you unbearable and terrible. It is not OK to go on being weak in times like these. I am not saying that only the strong survive. I am saying that times like these call for a truer strength in which the mantra that only the strong survive is revealed to be the foolish, idiotic, cruel lie it has always been. That we don’t just “survival mode” our way through times like these.

We transcend them. Their bitterness. Their stench. The foul odor, the miasma, rising from them, in which we’re trapped, mired, enmeshed, slowed to a crawl, barely able to think. We transcend times like these. With a truer kind of love. In this there is the strength, courage, and power we are searching for. It will never come—never—from merely running or hiding, fleeing or fawning. It comes from learning how to rise, this art of flight, of soaring away from the ground, which is just ashes, scarred and burned, by the depredations of demons.

Sometimes I feel it on me, too. The stench of times like these. The acrid fear. The sallow corrosion. The bitter taste of envy, the sudden heat of anger, the ice-cold depths of panic. I won’t lie to you and say that I’m immune. I’m not. I’m only human.

But I know too, that, survival mode is not good enough for times like these. It reduces us to prey, which is just what the monsters want. When you’re running and hiding, you’re not thinking three steps ahead. Your mind shuts down—clank. Everything flickers. Nothing is left, in the end, but staying inches away from the jaws this way. How does that game end? This is the fall, the descent, the abyss. In it lies the downward spiral of civilization itself.

We survive times like these by transcending them. Not descending deeper into survival mode.

Being for the people we love those who they need us to be, which is the very ones who we need ourselves to be, too. And we choose descending or transcending now, with every breath we take.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)