Long History.

There's something wrong about 24/7 news coming to you from 247 different channels, in addition to the added inundation of what you're getting from your friends, on social, via texts. Even the "news" you get if you take a cab, or fill up with gasoline. Because in amerika in 2024, you are never, never, never further than an axe's length from a screen blaring something.

The always-on-ness of the news hurts. Because it delivers a constant stream of more. It would be like going to a restaurant and being served 247 courses. You barely have time to savor course number 58 before you're hit with 59. Before long, you can no longer taste, remember, enjoy. Before long, you're obese, bursting at the seams, and too captive to even realize what's happening.

Another way of thinking about this is to imagine your brain as a bucket. Water is filling the bucket at a gallon a minute. You can only bail out the bucket at three-quarts a minute. The bucket overflows. All you can do is keep bailing. You have no time to mop up what's spilling all-over your hard-wood, old-growth lumber floors.

This is not fully-formed in my head. But history, learning, even understanding takes perspective. 

I'd imagine when Phoenician letter-forms came to Greece thousands of years ago, it took a long time to get from recognizing the shapes, to associating the shape with a sound, to putting sounds together, to understanding the sounds as words, to meaning. We don't think about that because our brains are trained to that process--but it wasn't always that way.

I think we're having the same issue understanding advertising in a typical commercial break and always on information. We lose what's been beamed at us for the next bit of beaming.

Life today reminds me of the snail who was mugged by a turtle. When the cops finally arrived on the scene and asked the snail what happened, the snail could only reply, "I don't know. It all happened so fast."

When the Covid pandemic started, historians, particularly Walter Schiedel started trying to look at what was happening with a long history point of view. 99.999-percent of people we're busy worrying about who's sick, what's happening at work, who's wearing a mask, where's it spreading and how-many people died today. A similar dynamic appeared, I'm sure 700 years ago when the Black Death killed more than one-out-of-every-three Europeans.

It takes long-history, a special kind of perspective to say, "the Black Death led to the modern economy because it led to labor shortages. Labor shortages gave more power to workers. The tethers of serfdom frayed, and workers left baronial estates for higher wages elsewhere. It set the world in motion and changed everything."

Of course, you can't think about stuff like this when everyone around you is dying and you're afraid you might be next. But you don't have to be a marxist to recognize that history--that which cannot be destroyed--is a dialectic. A struggle--an ongoing, never-ending struggle between tectonic forces. With different sides "winning" at different times. 

For a while, I'd say the little guys had the upper-hand. All at once we could work-from-home, there were worker shortages and wages rose. The momentum like a pendulum metronomes wildly, like Khactaturian on amphetamines. Where it stops, nobody knows.'

Actually, it never stops.

But you can.

And you can try perspective.