Landing
The future continues to be wildly unpredictable but you still need to enjoy yourself
In The Dispatcher series by John Scalzi, the world works like this - if someone kills you, there is only a 1/1000 chance of dying. The catch is, they *must* kill you intentionally. Suicide, accidents don’t count. If someone kills you, 999/1000 chance you wake up in your own home which is a place where you feel safe. *
I thought about home. If I were to land in a place where I feel safe, where would that be. There’s a home I have created in my adopted country but for the longest time it would be Mumbai, the apartment where my parents lived. For various reasons, I’m not really sure anymore that there’s any real option out there. Would I then spin out into some sort of limbo in the cosmos?
The world has become an incredibly strange place and of course this has to do with the spreading out of our sensing mechanism through social media and the internet but the world has become very very strange. If you are of a conspiratorial bent of mind and believe that there are certain conspiracies, or “things hidden since the founding of the world” that actually keep the world running, well, pretty much everything has been laid bare to mostly everyone with access to English and the Internet and that hasn’t changed much, we’re still spiralling in many ways. So ignorance might be bliss but knowledge just isn’t a variable that seems to matter very much in the overall equation.
One of the things that coming from a relatively dysfunctional countries & then spending a decent amount of time in 7 other countries with varying levels of development along various indices (including some at very extreme levels of these indices) - one of the things that it does is it teaches you about ways in which countries lie to themselves. Counterintuitive but obvious in retrospect, the less developed countries lie to themselves the least in my opinion (though they *cope* in other ways).
So when we’re talking about the world spiralling, we’re talking about some interesting situations (For this let’s call Developed countries A & Developing ones B)
B is dysfunctional but because its always been dysfunctional there is a certain level of stability because people have adapted and know the rules. So for the most part things work out, because there aren’t any big expectations only cynicism at pleasant surprises.
A is held together very well but the reasons why it held up so well have disappeared. People living in A believe that A is held together by some special magical property that they still possess.
In a time of crisis, which is the more dangerous country to live in? (depending on value of dangerous etc.)
This is a much more difficult to answer question than it appears on the surface. You can make arguments in both directions & you have to take into account your own personal situation in great detail (wealth, ethnicity, network, access, timing, grit, mindset etc.)
This is probably covered in books that I probably have on my shelf with titles like “Complex Systems”, “Why Nations Fail” etc. but I’m too busy reading Scalzi so .. yeah.
By dint of personal proclivities I’ve been prepping for “worst cases” for a long long time. Not in the “prepper” sense but at least a rough heuristic. Like the equivalent of patting your pockets to make sure you got your wallet and keys. But these days, that particular loop has also been wildly interrupted so I feel like I’m truly sailing in uncharted territory.
Do you think about where your home is?
Anyway, like I said, I’ve been binging Youtube and Instagram (and even that is revealing some disturbing patterns about me to myself) so here’s a new favorite Instagram account for you. This particular video hit me very very hard & I know many of you will be able to relate.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ck8vgC3Dc9J
*This is an ok series but Zachary Quinto has narrated it really well so its fun mafia dynamic type of setting and ok to listen to on walks and stuff.