Moving to Metaphorical Cuba

I read something interesting this morning.

Ok, sorry, no, saying "I read something interesting this morning" sounds like I picked up a newspaper and rubbed my chin, and said, "Hm, yes. Yes, indeed." I was scrolling through instagram stories and one of my friends shared a s post from an account that reposts tweets. (I hate the world that we live in so much.)

Regardless, the tweet made me think and made me speculate wildly about the author and the state of the world we will be living in soon.

To summarize, the original poster was soliciting stories from men asking them to share stories of abortion. It's nice. It's a good thing. It helps share one side of the story that we don't get to hear often, and I think that's a valuable experience. We're not talking about abortion today though.

One of the respondents to the tweet was a young man, still in college, who is kinda dating a young woman, but decides that it's not working out. He calls her over to break up with her, he does so, but at the end, she lets him know that she's pregnant.

(Oh god, I just realized that I am recounting an instagram story which was a repost of an account which reposts tweets. I am a part of the world I hate so much.)

Anyway, the young man mentions he never wanted to be a father because he:

...long planned to to live fast and die young before the water wars start. I don't believe much in hope for the future because evidence right now tells me there is very little. I cannot in good conscience bring a child into this world. I made that decision around when I first started identifying the various ways in which things are absolutely fucked, when I was in high school.

 Now, I'm going to put on my cynical hat to start to acknowledge some criticism before I get into what I really think. There is a non-zero chance that this guy doesn't really believe all of this, or at least, not seriously. First, because I was 18 years old once too, and I also had an extremely negative view of the world with no clue how to solve anything, which left me feeling hopeless. That hopelessness translated into wild, wild ideas. I was going to live on the road, make ends meet by doing menial labor, and writing, of course. Or find a farm somewhere to grow potatoes and avoid people and write, of course.

I don't have to speculate that the author had similar ideas, because he tells me.

I planned to martyr myself for political causes. I planned to run away to Cuba. I planned to load trucks at UPS for the next 25 years.

Cynical Hat.

A big part of getting older and experiencing hardship and tasks that we never feel prepared for is learning to navigate these feelings. I think deep down we are all and always terrified of dealing with life. But we get through it. I just recently was lucky enough to be able to buy a house, and that makes me feel like I am cosplaying as a real person. Whenever I get up to go to work in the morning and I wear a suit, it's a costume. And even as happy as I am in my life, there is still this little intrusive thought that pops up sometimes like, "This is hard, but moving to Ethiopia to write a travel blog would be easy."

But I don't. Most people have these thoughts and almost nobody follows through with them. Grow up, kid. You were never going to move to Cuba because we all don't have the balls to do that.

That's what I would say if I had my cynical hat on, but today, I have my empathetic hat on.

M'emphathy

The thing is though, I get it. I actually know what he's talking about because in some small way, I've done what he's thinking about doing. After college I really did pack up all of my shit, left home, moved across the country and tried writing for a living. When I realized that I wasn't good enough at writing and wasn't smart enough to say anything, I emigrated from the US to go learn about the world, and I have never moved back there. And since then, spent a not-insignificant amount of my life crashing on couches, sleeping in the back seat of a car, or in shitty apartments with no running water in the toilet. So, fuck, man, I get you. I understand you.

Now you might be thinking: "Alright, Kevin, I am also wearing sartorial items of the cynical variety. Isn't that just what people do when they're younger?" First of all, lovely scarf, looks great on you. Brings out your eyes. But second of all, that feeling hasn't gone away because the world hasn't improved. If anything it feels worse now.

I'm not sure if this young man ever actually wanted kids. Maybe he never did, and that's fine. But I also wonder if the desire to have kids hasn't been beaten out of him by the world he lives in. I wonder if the life that he wishes he could be living and the realistic options presented to him are so far out of sync that he can't help but imagine completely exiting the system. He has no hope for the future, and I really wish that I could imagine him as a selfish, immature kid who wants to avoid child-rearing responsibilities, but honestly, I think he's just being conscious of the state of affairs we're living in.

And I think he's not the only one, either. Well, I definitely know he's not the only one because I felt the same way and I still feel the same way. I just self-destructed my whole career after 16 years because I feel the same way. But more importantly, I think there are many others out there like him (like us). One of the more persistent topics that comes up when discussing rebellion, terrorism, and resistance is the lack of hope. You look at somewhere willing to live in the rainforest or arid mountains, and fight an enemy much more powerful and well-equipped than they are, you have to ask, "Why?"

The answer that I always come back to is that people like them (like us) look around at the conditions they're living in, examine their options, and decide that violence is the best choice they have. It's probably not what they want, but it's what they feel forced into. I read the story of this young man, and I can't help but speculate. I wonder how many others his age feel the same. I wonder how many people there has to be before things get violent.