Worldwide sickness

This starts out really sad but there's a positive payoff I swear

The world is sick. Look around. You see it everywhere, day to day. Ask someone, they might say it's not, but ask them about symptoms, they'll list them out. The summers getting hotter, the people getting meaner, the system failing more and more every day. They say it's the hottest summer on record this year. They said the same the year before.

It's hard for me to believe it's meant to be a coincidence. It's hard to sit back and watch it happen, but I've developed a healthy detachment from the world. Maybe it's cause it's easier, maybe it's cause I'm a coward. Maybe I'm just too tired. But isn't that the problem?

We let the world be sick because we are sick.

Every person has an influence and a consequence on their environment. We influence other people, through our actions and accomplishments, and through our words and beliefs. Every person you have ever met, you have influenced. You've influenced every person you have ever met. So with all those people, all that influence, we are bound to negatively influence some, and be negatively influenced by others. The average person speaks to 16 people a day. Let's say one person a day out of the bunch is bad. How many is that a day? A week? A month? What effect does that have on you, even in the slightest of ways?

Is it any surprise we're tired? Is it any surprise we got sick along our path? I'm not surprised, and I certainly don't blame anyone. I definitely don't want to critique my fellow man, or myself, because I understand. Because, either by accident or design, we're all a little ill.

Maybe you don't relate. Maybe it's just me who feels the way I do. Maybe I'm just too woke because I see a woman die at her desk and no one notices for 4 days and think it's fucked that people let that happen. Maybe I'm in the wrong for thinking there's something wrong with whole houses being burned down in Indigenous communities because they don't have the infrastructure we do. Maybe I'm in the wrong for being a radical thinker, demanding the world to change from it's capitalistic, totalitarian, power hungry ways. But what else can I do? I donate to the palestinian relief funds when they grace my memory, and I post on social media about the change I want to see. I'm going into journalism because my heart can't bear to watch it happen.

Maybe you don't relate. Maybe it's just me who feels the way I do. So speaking from myself, I see the symptoms of decay. I see the unfostered joy in a child's eye as they wave to me while I scan their parent's groceries, and I see the contempt in some older gentleman's eyes as he tells me about his twelve hour workweek. I see hope in his eyes, and I see joy, but it's never what I see first, and it's never what the children show me first.

Hozier said he was born sick, but I don't think he was. I think we're born pure into an intrinsically sick world. This sickness is passed down through the smallest of things, like impatient kindergarten teachers or television shows normalizing violence. Slowly, the sickness takes root. It grows and fosters as we grow, in mean people and unfair systems, until we're so used to being bedridden we think it's normal. The sickness is pain, and it spreads to every individual, no matter what you grew up around.

I don't want to confuse the sickness of pain with other pains. Competition, struggle, conflict, these are parts of life that help. Competition, when done properly, teaches discipline and emotional maturity. Struggle, when it doesn't overcome you, leads to shine. Conflict is the basis for all growth, and the key ingredient in any decent story. The sickness of pain does not build us up, and we never look back on it fondly. It holds us back, hurts us, and stains our memories and future.

We see the effects of sickness in our world everywhere.

Global warming in the ozone layer, deforestation in the amazon, pollution in the pacific, all of it are symptoms of the sickness. The sickness leads men to hoard their wealth and to disregard the consequences for everyone else around them. The sickness led to chains of command where, the lower you are, the more replacable you are. The sickness led to the anxiety, stress and depression that comes with the secular world. The sickness led to mass production without a care for human life in poor countries, where human beings are worth as many minion-themed toys they can produce.

Each individual is plagued with their own struggles. Loneliness. Isolation. Depression. Loss. Heartbreak. Discrimination. Abuse. Racism, xenophobia, misogeny, domestic abuse, homelessness, corruption, immigration stresses and so many more problems in the news and on our social medias. There is in fact so much sickness in pain, that most of it isn't even considered 'newsworthy,' like anger resentment, regret, cynicism, rejection, apathy, dishonesty, even just sadness.

What now? The world is sick, and we are sick, and as humanity grows and progresses, the sickness gets deeper, in society and in each one of us until we don't even notice it anymore! What now?

Well, while we're born into a world of sickness, I believe we're born with a cure, too. Though we may not like them, we share this sick world with other sick people. They've been infected with heartbreak and loss, so they understand. They've been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, so they understand. The average person meets and interacts with 16 people a day, give or take. 1 of those people may infect us, but the other 15 can heal us. Hell, even if 10 heal us, that's still a positive outcome.

We live in a world where pain infects everything, so love has to cure it all. People cause pain, so people must heal pain.

I've tried leaving my voice out of this piece so far, but in my life I have what I call phoenix moments. Cause either by my own pain or other's, I lose so much, and I sink to rock bottom. In that place, when I feel the sickness swelling through my whole body, toes to face, it is people who help me to rise. I am reborn like the phoenix.

I recently made the mistake of isolating during my lowest. I told friends I shouldn't see them until I've figured myself out, as I had a good reason to think I had NPD. I didn't want anyone to get hurt, so I tried to stay away from people. I felt like I was the enemy, that I was just, too sick. That I couldn't be cured. It was the people around me who helped. Because of love, the people around me listened to my problems and helped me through my crisis of self. Because of my love for others, I saw a councillor and used the resources she gave me to get back on track. Hell, because of love, my independant driving instructor went above and beyond to make videos to help teach his students, all because he believes in karma. Because of love, my girlfriend is patient with me through my healing process, and because of love, I am patient with hers.

The old saying goes that laughter is the best medicine. That saying is more true today than it ever has been, because while it has gotten so much worse the last few years, it's gotten better, too. As we grow, sickness grows with us, sure, but so does love's cure, and love is expressed through laughter. It's cliqué, but laughter is love's language. We laugh because we love what we're laughing at. So laugh, and the spread will stop, if not even momentarily.

Words are only 30% of communication though, so we can't only laugh to show love. No, true love is built off gestures. Opening the door for a stranger and saying thank you, giving up the seat on a bus, talking to the person sitting next to you while you wait for an interview, hell even smiling when you accidentally make eye contact with a stranger, these are all gestures of love. We show love to those we care through gestures, too. We do the dishes for our parents when we're young, and put food on our kid's plates when we're old. We cut time out of our week to catch up with friends and go on dates with partners. We round up our grocery bills to the nearest dollar to support charities.

But the greatest act of love we can employ is patience. Patience when we are hurt, patience when we are tired, patience when other's pain infects us. Patience is remembering that every single thing around us is infected with pain, and being patient enough to give the benefit of the doubt. Patience is the purest form of love.

Robert Axelrod invented something called the trust game. It's basically the prisoner's dilemna, except it's played hundreds of times over. In it, he found that most contestants would cooperate with one another because they didn't want to screw each other over down the line, compared to the prisoner's dilemna, where you only have to do it once. After running the game a few times, doing a few experiments and analyzing it over the course of decades with studies and TedTalks and video essays and so on, Game Theory of all people boiled it down in a philosophy that I still follow. I call it the four steps of love.

Step 1: Be trusting and have an open mind.

Step 2: Be firm and hold others accountable.

Step 3: Be forgiving and accept people's fallings.

Step 4: Be honest and practice transparency.

I believe that these four steps are the secret cure to the sickness of pain, and that we can all slowly heal the world day by day if we follow them. As Matpat put it:

"When I read these outcomes, what really struck me first was how they present a really hopeful view of the world, a hopeful view that I don't think a lot of us carry around. I mean, it's easy to assume thateveryone out there is out to get you, and it's easier to close off to those that wronged us in the past, but [this] specifically proves that assumption wrong."

So be patient, and laugh, and do good gestures, and follow the four steps of love, and slowly we will all heal a slowly dying world. Pain will not win out against us, and we will all be cured. Thank you for reading.