Stop This Crazy Thing! (Existential Violence, part three)

Let's go back for a moment, one more time, to my first post on this:
Part of the problem with the midlife crisis of motorcycle dude was that it wasn't sustainable. I don't think these kinds of things ever are. As I said, the wife who worked in the flower shop didn't work there, initially, because she needed to: It was just an avenue for social interaction for her. However, one of the things she frequently talked about was her fear that her job would actually become necessary due to all of the money her husband was spending on his reckless behavior. She didn't handle the money beyond what she made in the flower shop, so she didn't even know how he was doing things like buying little red sports cars and street-racing motorcycles at the drop of a hat. Not to mention the various medical bills they'd incurred due to his injuries from his... activities.

Unfortunately (for you), I don't know how all of that worked out. Summer came to an end, and I went back to school. I've never really even thought about it again until recently. My question, now, is whether she ever got to a point where she said, "Enough is enough. Stop this shit now." Or did he kill himself? Or did he work through his issues without killing himself before she got to that point? Since it was only his own life he was endangering (well, except for some other people who were endangering their lives in the same way as he was), did she even have a right to tell him to stop?

This is where everything gets complicated.

But let's look at things another way:

When I was a sophomore in college, I was coming back from some place or other with a friend in his car. We got into one of those deep philosophical questions that college students are apt to get into:
If the speed limit is 65mph, why does the speedometer go all the way up to 120mph? Does the car really go that fast, or is it just to make you think that the car could go that fast? I suppose this was an important question to us, but, for me, it was just an abstract one... until we started talking about how fast we'd ever driven.

Now, as I mentioned last post, I had a Hyundai. The speedometer in it only went up to 100mph, but I liked to joke that the car wouldn't even fall that fast, and the fastest I'd driven it was in the 75mph range, and that was more a function of the fact that I was listening to music and kind of just going along with the traffic... until I looked down and saw how fast I was going and slowed back down to the speed limit. Yes, even at 20, I wasn't a speeder. At least not on purpose.

My friend, though, was one of those people who didn't believe in going under the speed limit and, even as we were discussing all of this, we were zipping along in the 75 range. He admitted to having gone 90 on multiple occasions, then began to lament how he'd never gone up to 100. This while in the midst of the discussion of why his speedometer went to 120. At which point he did something that I was adamantly not okay with: He said, "Let's find out," and, as the saying goes, put the pedal to the metal.

I'm going to say three things about this:
At 100mph, you are no longer really driving a car, at least not a car that's not made for those kinds of speeds with the kinds of tires designed to allow you to keep control of your car. I wasn't driving, but I could still feel that the car was doing something more akin to gliding, like a toboggan going down a snowy slope. We were fortunate that the road was fairly straight where we were in East Texas at that point.
However, hills, even smalls ones, are not your friend at those kinds of speeds.
After going 100, 70 feels slow.

Also, I never got back into a car with him again with him as the driver.

The problem here is that I was a nonconsensual partner in what he was doing, and it was life-threatening. We were lucky. Fortunately, once he got above 100 and felt like he couldn't make the car go any faster without burning up the engine, he took his foot off the gas and let it slow back down. However, I protested the whole thing the whole time it was happening; it's not like I was a silent partner in the whole business, and he ignored what I was saying until he'd done what he wanted to do.

And this is how I feel, kind of all the time, in the U.S. right now. Like I'm stuck in a car with some dude in the midst of midlife crisis who is doing his best to get his car up to 120mph, and I have no way to make him stop. Or stick more closely to the analogy, I'm hanging on for dear life to some guy on a dirt bike while he speeds along one of those dirt bike tracks with all the hills and stuff and my options are to keep holding on until he crashes or to let go and hope the fall doesn't kill me.

Which makes me wonder if there was a part of motorcycle dude's brain screaming to be let off during his whole breakdown with reality.

But I kind of doubt it, because when you're in a state like that, you are left without any ability to reason. Like about 1/3 of the country, right now, driving us down the freeway at top speed with no intent to slow down. And they can't see the danger or, even, comprehend that there might be danger. And they don't really care, because  they think they have it all under control.

Anyway... I had intended this to only be three parts, but this post is getting long, so it looks like I'm going to have to do one more.

The Fundamental Crisis (Existential Violence, part two)

Philosophers have been debating the meaning of life for... well, for longer than there have been philosophers. It was probably this question, in fact, that birthed philosophy. What is existence and what does it mean? What does it mean that "I am"? All of which led to existentialism, which is not exactly related to the existential crisis.

And none of which is related in any way to any time a high school student says, "It's, like, so existential, dude."

While existentialism may have to do with existence and what it is; the existential crisis has to do, specifically, with the meaning of that existence. "Does my life have meaning?" or some variation of that question. Maybe a better way of putting it is, "What's the point of all of this?" Honestly, it's not a bad question to ask, though it may be the cause of so many mid-life adults suddenly finding themselves expounding on the virtues of their childhood religion; here in the USA, that would be "christianity." They can't find any internal meaning to their lives, so they are left with having to rely on an external meaning, false though it may be (it is). For most people, a belief in something false is better than no belief at all (as expressed in the horrible move The Life of Pi).

But, if it's a good question to ask, what, then, is the problem?

And there are sooo many problems...
but I'll just mention two:
1. The inherent violence involved in the internal conflict.
2. The tendency of those who have "achieved meaning" to try to force that on everyone else.
oh, and maybe
3. The attempt to find an answer to something that is essentially unanswerable. Because, face it, this is not a math problem or, if it is, it's the kind where each individual is his/her own variable arriving at a different solution when you plug the person into the equation.

While not every midlife crisis expresses itself in the way the one I spoke about in part one of this series did, it is certainly a good example of the cliche mid-life crisis. Something only becomes a cliche by being, essentially, common. So common in fact that when my dad had his own mid-life crisis which just so happened to correspond with the need for a new car for my family, my mom said, "He better not get a red one." He did, of course, get a red one. Not a sports car, mind you, because we couldn't afford anything like that, but the sportiest red thing we could afford. A Hyundai. heh

Going out and buying a red Hyundai may not sound "violent," but at the time, Hyundai was a very new car company so, actually, this was risky behavior. It was as risky as my dad could afford to be and, probably, more money than my parents could easily afford since it was a brand new car and not used. It was the same behavior as the guy in the last post, just on a much lower level.

The need to prove or derive that one's life has or has had meaning must be maddening. Maddening to the point of insanity. Not actual clinical insanity (though maybe it should be?), but enough to make people do things they previously would never have considered. And you can't talk to these people about their behavior because it's all unreasoned behavior. You can't talk reason to people acting on their emotions or on their instincts.

It's difficult, here, to not get bogged down in all the minutia involved in all of this, but this is only a blog post, not one of the myriad of books that have been published dealing with this issue. Anyway...

In the end, it all comes down to two ways of approaching the issue of the meaning of the individual life, which can be expressed in the wording of the question the individual asks:
1. What's the point of all of this, my life? Look at all the things I've missed out on because I was working/having a family/being responsible (or whatever it was you were doing rather than the things you think you really wanted to do).
2. What's the point of all of this, my life? Will anyone remember me after I'm dead and gone? What difference have I made?

I think, right now, in the US, we're caught up in the conflict between these two questions. On a national level. It's the existential crisis of the American soul:

"Hey, look at all of this stuff I've missed out on because we (the USA) have been so busy being the responsible one and taking care of other countries and other people! It's my turn! I want mine! Fuck everyone else and let them burn! Let the whole world burn for all I care, because it's my turn and I want what's rightfully mine!"

"Hey, I want history to look back and see that this was the point where the US became a real force for good in the world, became a country that tackled climate change and poverty and health care. Became a country that put people's needs ahead of corporate profit. It's time to make a difference in the world!"

It's irreconcilable. Unfortunately. Because you can't reason with the people who suddenly find themselves in a position where they need to "feel" alive. You can't explain to them that if they continue to do dangerous stunts on dirt bikes or cliff diving or whatever that, at best, they're going to get seriously injured and, at worst, they're going to get themselves and, possibly, others killed. They... don't... care.

Which is the current problem:
Republicans don't care.
I don't just mean Republican politicians; I mean Republicans.
Because if Republicans cared about, say, the rights of women to not be unwillingly groped, they wouldn't vote for many, many of the Republicans in office, including the one in the highest office (#fakepresident) who bragged about it.
Because if Republicans cared about, say, children being taken from their parents and put in dog cages, they would speak out against it and force their representatives to do the same.
Because if Republicans cared about, say, preserving the environment for future generations, they would stand up against the fossil fuel industry.
Because if Republicans cared about children being murdered in their schools, they would demand stricter gun controls and give up on that whole prying their guns from their cold, dead hands.

So, in essence, we have an unresolvable conflict of interest. Or, at least, one that I can't see a resolution for. What I know, all I know, is that enough is enough.
But more on that next time...

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