One of the problems of the world--and there are no shortage of problems--is "present-ism."
We think the age we're living in is the peak.
The most-important.
The scariest.
The worst. Or even the worsterest.
The most dire and cataclysmic.
We think the age we're living in faces the most existential of all threats the world has ever faced.
We think the now matters.
That we are approaching the 'end times.'
Such is the ego-centricity of humanity.
We think we are important.
My children might say this to me today.
"So what the Russians were pointing 10,000 nukes at you and the Chinese 5,000 more. So what you had a mad president who claimed all you needed to survive a nuclear exchange was a shovel and a foot of dirt. So what, today we have __________."
In his new-ish book "Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World," Dorian Lynskey writes:
"The corpus of end-of-the-world stories is immense and ever-growing. In the past decade or so, we have seen dramas, horrors, war movies, comedies and satires; sitcoms, animations and songs; TV shows based on comic books, computer games and bestselling novels .
"These stories are increasingly pessimistic: the comet hits, the zombies reign, the planet burns. ... There is simply no end of ends."
Living in the present sucks if you haven't the historical acuity and apprehension to understand that life on earth--everywhere and at all times--has always had a huge helping of horror, misery and doom. They are the "forever chemicals" of life on earth.
If you don't read history--or even think about life when your parents were young or your kids--you acquire a certain ego-centricity that could lead you to traipse to the side of suicide.
When I was at Ogilvy, along with a bunch of other senior people, I was sent to David's Castle in Touffou, France. A 12th-century chateau complete with a dungeon, a chapel and its own moat.
I remember standing against an old stone wall with another writer. It was summertime and we were wearing shorts, our knees against the ancient stones. He said, "When this wall was built, if you scraped your knee, you could die."
Comrade Lenin famously said, "There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen."
Clearly today, under the projectile-vomistration of trumpism, decades seem to happen every minute. Decades of cruelty and injustice that undoes so much of what so many have believed in for so long.
Bringing this back to advertising--the nominal topic of this blog--we have lived over the past 30 years through centuries of change. I have sat in so many meetings, have heard about so many trends, technologies, channels, gizmos and fads that were the sine qua non of changing-everything-ness that it leads me to believe that a lot of these so-called earth-shaking events weren't even tremors. They were cosmic farts that evaporated before they could clear the room.
I think most of the horrors of today will fizzle about as quickly as Google+, the Metaverse or the Omnicom-IPG merger. Sure jobs and maybe fortunes will be lost--people will be hurt. But life will go on.
As the great historian and two-time Pulitzer-prize winner Barbara Tuchman once said,
The whole thing is worth clipping and saving. Because the saving might be saving your sanity.
But especially mind this thought, which I've edited. (When you run a famous blog, you have permission to sully Pulitzer-winners.)
"The persistence of normal is strong."
Try to keep that in mind.
Try to keep your mind in mind.
Stop minding the "news," which is designed to frighten you.
Frightened you = controlled you.
Pay it no mind.
