There’s a fun show called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, there’s one episode on it with a guy named Joel Hodgson that has recently come to my mind a lot, particularly one quote from the episode.
So, they’re at a diner and Jerry and Joel are commenting on the diner and Jerry says:“:ook at this diner it’s looking back, why is it looking back all the time, why aren’t we looking to the future” and Joel says : “You know what to say about the past, you don’t know what to say about the future” which is a refined way of saying hindsight is 20/20 and invalidating the concept of foresight.
In a sense, 2020 is all about hindsight being 20/20.
Well, what if we know what’s going to happen in the future. I’ve been mulling over a concept called the Nopacalypse for a while.
In essence it’s a form of a Kafkatrap, but, instead of trapping an individual, we trap humanity as a whole using a unfalsifiable premise.
The premise is one of two things, The apocalypse has already happened, we’re in denial of it or we are here to cause the apocalypse, we aren’t aware of this mission/purpose.
I’m not sure how one would go about proving this premise to be wrong.
In a sense, we are all living in the Nopacalypse, denying the world’s destruction, thereby proving the Nopacalypse. On the other hand, if we accept it, we’re still living in the Nopacalypse.
The past few months have been super weird, one of my favourite commentaries about the pandemic was in the form of a brief tweet
So, maybe that happened. Maybe it didn’t, maybe this is just the natural progression of our purpose on Earth or to take the other premise, our purpose on Earth is complete and it’s trying to be done with us.
There’s a lot of different takes on ‘why’ crises like the one we’re facing are so frequent, which are definitely far superior to this farcical take on the same issue, but, the only thing I’m trying to provoke into truth unto myself is to stop being in denial of this reality, whatever be the cause.
I’m not a doomer, I’m not an apocalyptic person nor do I wish it on the world, I’m optimistic about the future, while at the same time being incredibly pessimistic about the present.
I’m not trying to get into the nitty gritties of how the world will change, my stance on this is: If anyone thinks they can predict this, they better have predicted the impact and our reaction to the pandemic too.
It’s sad to see lives and livelihoods being lost at a pace that I’ve certainly never seen before, I was too young to experience the impact when 2008 happened, now on the other hand, I have my company’s bank relationship manager calling me to check up on my business while at the same time telling me that the bank itself has put its plans of opening a new branch on hold. C’est la vie maintenant.
The reason I brought up the quote from the show at the beginning is that I’ve noticed a tendency from myself and maybe some others to conflate reminiscing for a brighter future with a return to a recent normal past, I don’t know how wise this is, just because we know happened doesn’t mean we know what is going to happen.
We seem to have a lot of ideas about how the future is going to be, but, clearly didn’t see this one coming.
This has gone into a bit of ramble, I won’t hold you for any longer.
These are just some brief thoughts on the pandemic that I’d been having that I wanted to jot down and publish for whatever its worth.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this if it provokes any.
I wish you good health.
Thank you for reading
Sainath