Harlem Trash
Ioan Sameli (CC BY-SA 2.0)
I’m sure that many (most?) Disinfonauts are familiar with this irrationally infamous Black and Blue dress. It was all over the interwebz for several days last week, to an extent that it was basically the only thing one could read about in certain corners of it. I’m sure many of you thought it was a waste of time. A trifling and trivial thing to devote so much energy on.
There are certainly a number of valid reasons for feeling as much. But I didn’t. I found the whole thing fascinating. Legitimately so. The situation roused a certain wonder within me that I don’t feel near enough these days. I found it incredible that people could look at the same exact picture and see two so wildly distinct and divergent things. Moreover, it was stupefying that most people saw the dress as white and gold when its real color was the less common sight of black and blue. In many ways, it was a truly amazing phenomenon that taught us all many things about ourselves.
It was also the perfect example of how easily human beings can be so confident about something that they are so obviously wrong about. This strict adherence to mistaken perceptions can create so much havoc, especially when those perceptions are regarding things that are actually meaningful.
For what it’s worth, I was team white and gold. And I was so certain of my perceptions that I even went so far as to declare my position on the only place such things matter: Facebook. It was a decision that led to a number of old relatives and friends who I hadn’t seen in literally years commenting on my status to weigh in on the subject. (One example of a particularly eloquent response: “Fuck it. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere. Let’s drink some beer.” ) So, if nothing else, a stupid debate about a stupid dress allowed me to—if even for a few brief moments and through the intermediary of computer technology— interact with some people I care about, but whom circumstance has not allowed me to maintain contact with. We joked, we cursed, we insulted each other and many “lol”s were typed. All in all, if nothing else, it was a mildly fun waste of life…for a few minutes.
Of course, at some point someone had to come and dump fecal matter all over my parade. The dreaded Party Pooper. We all know one. In this case, it was my godmother, who joined into the conversation and stated something along the lines of, “I can’t believe people waste so much time on this junk. Who cares about hunger and conflict and poverty when there’s a meaningless dress to be argued over?” Please note that this is a 60-year-old woman who spent the 80s attempting to bed various members of the Denver Nuggets, and when that didn’t pan out, set her scope on trying to snag a doctor. She did, and now she lives in a 6,000 sq. ft. mansion with heated flooring and heated driveway on the side of a mountain in Boulder, CO, and has lived there for at least 20 years now. I, on the other hand, live across the street from two of my heroin-addicted clients, but, you know, who’s keeping track? This is a woman who still follows the NBA religiously, and never once have I told her, “Hey, I can’t believe people waste so much time and money over this junk. Who cares about addiction and rape and poverty when there’s a basketball game to be watched?” And I’ve never said anything of the kind to her because it would be fucking stupid for so many reasons you couldn’t count them all.
I bring all of this up not to put my godmother on blast (which would be merely a desirable side-effect… if I didn’t write under a pseudonym), but to point out that, um, you know…if people can’t even agree on what color a stupid dress is, HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO AGREE ON HOW TO DEAL WITH THINGS LIKE HUNGER AND CONFLICT AND POVERTY?
Hold on a second. I will come back to this.
A couple of weeks ago, during a boring Saturday night (most of my Saturday nights are fairly boring. I am not an exciting person, as should be evidenced by these essay-like substances I write), I was watching Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations.” In this particular episode, Mr. Bourdain was traipsing all over Mexico and Central America eating and drinking and smoking too much. None of which is exceptional for any of his shows. That’s sort of what he does. But what stood out to me this time was a little detour he took while in Nicaragua. He took some time and stopped by a local garbage dump where many of Nicaragua’s most impoverished scavenge for food and other materials to hock within Nicaragua’s own free-market matrix. If you watch the clip, you see how the whole thing is filmed with a sense of dreariness, grief, loss, despair. Mr. Bourdain says something like, “This is fucked up, man.” And for good reason. There are entire swaths of human beings hiking through mounds of literal trash for the hopes of finding something they could sell for a few cents.
Watching this episode made me reconsider my entire notion that freedom is best accessed through poverty. Had my romantic notions of the nobility of poverty been misguided? Was it possible to be truly happy if you were forced by circumstance to forage daily through literal pyramids of garbage just to feed your family? That doesn’t seem right. And then when you consider all the other terrible shit some people are going through in the world–Thai shrimp slavery, genocide, grotesquely violent environments, etc.– I have to wonder if my pro-Apathy stance was foolhardy.
At least for a few seconds.
After all, if I had been mistaken about a color of a dress so easily, how easy would it be to be mistaken about a philosophy on how to live life?
It all reminded me of the Wu-Tang song, “I Can’t go to Sleep.” (“Babies with flies on their cheeks, it’s hard to go to sleep.” etc.) What kind of a human being am I if I have little difficulty sleeping each night while knowing that other human beings are rummaging through heaps of filthy, odorous, slimy trash, fueled only by the grim desperation of hoping that they can somehow make enough money to prevent their children from starving? I’m an evil prick, if that’s the case. Right? I’m part of the problem.
And then it hit me. I am part of the problem. But I was making the same mistake all the misguided do-gooders make when they talk to me: I never said what was going on was “ok.” In fact what is going on is NOT OK. It’s fucking repugnant. It creates within me existential pangs of guilt and anger.
Therefore, my pro-apathy stance is a response to the understanding that all the major ills of the world are the necessary and unavoidable results of a crooked system. A rigged game. And my pro-apathy stance comes from the realization that, because I am part of the problem, the only way to truly deal with the evils of the world is stop playing the game.
Nicaragua is poor because, in the world economy as it is, somebody has to be poor. That’s the way it works. It’s unavoidable and inevitable. Just like all the other ills are unavoidable and inevitable. For example, there are sex slaves because there are people willing to pay for their services. And they get the money to pay for those services from people like me and you who pay our monthly cell phone bills or satellite bills or whatever. Young men in Africa are enslaved and dismembered because we confuse diamonds with love. Mexico’s civil war continues to occur precisely because we refuse to legalize drugs, because somebody with a lot of power is making a lot of money off it. The list goes on and on.
If we play the game (and I do), we’re the ones responsible for the ills (and I am).
Regardless, a quick google search actually confirms my initial hypothesis, however: The garbage collectors of Nicaragua, for all their poverty, are happier than Americans. They are happy precisely because they don’t have shit. And because they don’t have shit, they are forced to do things like, I don’t know… develop meaningful relationships with others and enjoy life itself, instead of trying to enjoy a bunch of shit you sell your life to own.
Anthony Bourdain thought it was fucked up. Probably because it made for good television. But the only thing fucked up in that scene was how unhappy Bourdain assumed people were just because they didn’t own anything.
But here’s the thing, though, right? Maybe the Nicaraguan garbage collectors aren’t unhappy, because they simply don’t know better. I’m miserable so much of the time because I make the mistake of watching too much TV or surfing too much of the internet, and I see people with nice cars and big houses and supermodel mistresses and so on and so forth. I’m constantly reminded of what I don’t have. The Nicaraguan trash pickers, because they have so little, are probably happy for what they do have, and they’re not constantly being bombarded with images of good looking people who look like they smell good and who have way more shit than they do.
And here’s the thing: it is so pathetic to feel so sorry for ourselves when we have so much. Yet, self-pity is basically America’s favorite past time. It’s what we do. We’re good at it. We even sort of enjoy it. Some say it’s the desire for More that is the battery that powers this nation.
This is the reality of the situation, so what do we do about it?
The nice thing about Apathy is that it’s highly applicable to any situation. I touched on this before in my original essay. At your worst, you can simply be apathetic about not being apathetic enough. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is understanding the source of our discontent, so that we can stop giving a shit about it.
One of the great mistakes of the modern spiritual or “new-age” movements is that they want to present happiness as, one: something attainable; and, two: something that’s relatively easy to attain. And if you’re not happy, you’re doing something wrong.
I’m reading this book called Manifesting Change. The second half of the title of the book is literally It’s That Simple. Typically this is a book I would only pretend to read if I were single and I thought it would help me get laid. But there’s a client that I’m working with who’s reading the book and he wanted me to read along with him, so we could discuss certain things that came up. It’s an interesting book. It’s full of shit, but it’s interesting. Literally one of the main ideas of the book is that if your goals are specific-yet-vague-enough, “The Universe” will do most of the work to make those goals come true. (Note that how when these people speak of “The Universe” they don’t really tell you what it is or what they mean by it.)
I can tell you from personal experience, that this is the stupidest fucking idea in the world. This is the idea that I had between the ages of around 17-23 and it made my life fucking miserable. None of my vague goals came true. Not even close. Even now, my only real goal in life is to not have to work an 8:00-5:00 job. This has been my only real goal for as long as I can remember. And what I have done with my life over the past 8 years? Worked nothing but 8:00-5:00 jobs. And when these goals don’t come true, I unfairly feel gypped by life, because my expectations were/are so fucking idiotic. What the fuck? I don’t even know where I got the idea from. It was just sort of there. If I would’ve known better I would’ve written a stupid goddamn book about it.
Anyway…the point here is that making your life even a modicum less shitty is hard fucking work. It’s shitty fucking work. It’s deflating. It’s discouraging. While you’re trying valiantly to manifest your own dreams, 7 billion other people are working to manifest theirs. And your dreams and their dreams are almost always at odds, because we’re all working to change things for ourselves. At least when we’re taking this kind of approach, we are.
But life in and of itself isn’t supposed to be easy, so how can we pretend that living a happy life is supposed to be? I believe one of the reasons why the Nicaraguan trash pickers are so happy is because their circumstances have made it so they can’t have any misconceptions about life. Life is hard. Life is beautiful, but it sucks. Can you imagine being one of the trash pickers, waking up each morning like, “Welp. Time to go finger some hot, wet, slippery, filthy fucking trash for the next 8 hours”? That’s not an easy life.
But somehow it’s apparently a happy one.
It’s a happy life because the Nicaraguan trash pickers know something we don’t–my guess (because I don’t know, either) is that they realize life sucks, without exception, and they’re ok with it. That’s a functional, enlightened Apathy, my friends.
This is something I myself have been working on lately. I spend way too much time imagining all the ways I’d prefer my life to look like. Mostly, I want a life where I can be lazier, but I’ll settle for a number of other slightly less-desirable scenarios.
And this is precisely the source of my discontent–that I imagine a life for myself that is essentially free of all the things that make me suffer.
This is what I mean about the power of our perceptions. What makes them so devastating is that we’re not even aware that our perceptions are precisely the source of our discontent. We blame it on people who we imagine care more about a black and blue dress than they do world hunger. We blame it on the people who “don’t get our music, man.” We blame it on our boss, our line of work, our salary. We blame it on the democrats or republicans. We blame it on the Christians or Muslims. We blame it on the one-percent.
But what do the trash-picking Nicaraguans give a fuck about all these things? They’re happy precisely because they don’t have the luxury of worrying about such shit. The crooked fucking system we live in affects them, truthfully, more than it does us. I’ve got food to eat. I don’t have to dig through a landfill to earn my money. And yet…I’m the one bitching about it. And I’m the one bitching about it because I’m the one who’s part of the system.
The Nicaraguan trash pickers aren’t part of the system. They’re out. They were never invited to the game. And so they were never corrupted and co-opted by it. Their perceptions were never manipulated by a media that promotes constant feelings of fear and insecurity, and with unrealistic images of a life lived without suffering.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that people should not get upset when they cross paths with an idiot-asshole. He explained that when we become frustrated with another human being, we should close our eyes and try to imagine a world without idiot-assholes. Is it possible? Is it possible for the world to exist without them?
Of course not. We need idiot-assholes so we know what it looks like when someone isn’t an idiot-asshole. It’s the whole dualism thing that we’re stuck with when we live in the human plane of consciousness. We only know when we’re happy because we know what it feels like when we’re sad. We only know love because we’re familiar with hate. We only know smart, kind, respectable people because we’ve stumbled across idiot-assholes.
The point of all of this being: It’s foolish to think life exists without struggle. It’s foolish to believe that the world we live in can exist without powerful people in powerful places exhibiting selfishness and greed and general pettiness. It’s foolish to believe there will never be violence or poverty. It’s foolish to believe a ruling system can ever be in place that won’t be rigged in favor of the bullies. (And if I’m wrong, I will ecstatically be so.)
None of this is new of course. We all know this. Or, at the very least, we’ve all heard and thought about this. But none of us believe it. Even me. I say I do, but I don’t, obviously, because I’m always so grumpy about how much I have to struggle through life–even though I struggle far less than the vast majority of people on this planet.
Because if we did believe as much, we would invite the struggle. Crave the struggle. Bask in the struggle. And we don’t. We’re afraid of the struggle. Which, if you think about it, is the same as being afraid of adventure. We’re afraid of adventure. We’ve traded adventure for comfort, and it’s making us insane.
And, more than that, it’s sad. Just as the great soldier needs battle to prove her greatness, the brave soul needs adversity to prove its bravery.
However, it seems that there’s currently a dearth of bravery in our culture….
And, finally, I circle back to the blue and black, white and gold dress. Yeah, it’s something of a symptom of cowardly comfort and luxury to have the time and energy to worry about something so trivial.
But… it’s also a symptom of cowardly comfort and luxury to worry about the people worrying about something so trivial. Especially if you’re doing so from a mansion on the side of a mountain in Boulder, CO.
If we should’ve learned anything from that stupid dress, it’s that a lot of the shit that we fight about is out of our control. Our minds see what they want to see. I know the dress is black and blue–science has proven as much– and yet whenever I stare at that stupid picture, all I see is white and gold. So what does it all mean?
That we can’t live life without conflict. The System we live in is certainly rigged… but it appears that the game of human life, in and of itself, is rigged. We’re not meant to agree on everything. The the human central nervous system has developed in a way in which we all cannot possibly be on the same page. Our minds have minds of their own, and that’s what we are struggling against each and every day–to simply be more aware of our own bullshit, which–it seems to me–the more shit we own, the more bullshit our minds are addled with (see, again: the Nicaraguan Trash Pickers).
This is the “Bright” side of Apathy. Understanding that it is impossible to live a life without conflict, so I’m not going to bitch and moan and mislead myself about it. Instead, I might even invite the conflict. I’m going to embrace the struggle. Again, it’s not “antipathy.” If I find myself in a position to help someone, I do so, even if it is inconvenient for me–because I’m apathetic about whether it is inconvenient to me or my desires. Some people might prefer to call it equanimity or reasonableness or whatever. You say black and blue, I say white and gold. Call it what you want, but don’t simply dismiss it.
There is, of course, a “Dark” side to Apathy. Usually we call it “Nihilism.” It’s believing that the struggle holds no meaning, and therefore, that nothing is worth doing. This kind of thinking leads to selfishness, greed, even violence. This is not the kind of apathy I’m talking bout.
I have to do my best to make this clear, because some people will never get it. This is an important distinction to make. And one perhaps best made in a different piece of writing.
Ultimately, though, I think the biggest lesson the blue and black, white and gold dress teaches us is to stay off our high horses. We don’t need to travel to Nicaragua, or go to war, or even read a lot of books to learn things. It’s RIGHT THERE. Right in front of us, every hour, of every day. NOTHING is meaningless, unless we allow it to be.
And I’m sure every single person who reads this, agrees with me.
Right?
The post What that Black and Blue (or White and Gold) Dress Teaches us about our Over-Privileged Lives (Hint: It’s not what You Think) appeared first on disinformation.