Member-only story
The Atlantic posted an article today with the title: “Four Timelines for Everything Returning to Normal.” Don’t be deceived, however, because there is no returning to normal; thankfully, our sense of normal has been shattered — and normal, really, is just a collectively woven, ever-self-weaving, narrative. When we stop seeing things as frozen, they start to thaw. It’s that simple. Despite my own — entirely media driven fear and anxiety — I’m glad this is happening… in a certain sense. I mean no disrespect to the dead; I’m not arguing for sacrificing anyone. What I am arguing for is accepting and embracing death and chaos, which were always part of the world, and which have simply become more visible in our social discourse; by feeling fragile, we automatically become more anti-fragile; by feeling mortal, we become more alive.
Unless you’re afraid of immanently dying or in danger of immanent financial collapse, stay home and turn off your phone and the TV. If you’re not an idiot, you already have a library at home to occupy you; if you are an idiot, now is the time to unravel the process of self-stupefaction and start ordering some books. It’s never too late to contribute something to your own private sum of wisdom: your existential retirement fund.
A very disturbing observation about Twitter: for the all the irony, there are no ironists, or rather, for all the ironists, there is no irony. Don’t let this quarantine go without a dose of irony, which can’t be found — I think for very deep, systematic, recursive reasons — on social media (including on this very earnest Medium diary).
