You will be okay

There is a giant hole in my chest. It is there when I wake up, it is there when I restlessly lie awake in my bed at night. It is carved by what I observe and experience through the lens of media every day. Our inability to build together, shape a future by using all of the tools at our disposal. Our inability to build a future that is no longer about individual success. A future that provides social welfare and human coherence that goes beyond any type of rule or object driven system like we have today. We can't seem to build something that goes beyond what we experience as friendships, society, cults. The void in my chest resembles the lack of unity in our world.

I am an avid believer that we have all the tools already to our disposal to make everyone wealthy and prosperous. We seem to be inefficient at getting there. I believe in the control we have together over the environments we live in, control over the way we interact with each other. So nothing is holding us back I could think.

But, there is an intruder in our path to solving for my desired state. When a piece of stainless steel is scratched, the alloy re-oxidizes locally, preventing further spread. The whole of the metal works together to keep its purity. Corrosion is a core property of metals, as it is a core property of our society. We seem to need some corrosion to keep us on our toes, to fight the things we actually don't want. We might need the corrosion to steer us in the right direction. Our steel will settle and carry.

The intruder does not scratch. Scratches are mended by sacrificing some surface of the metal to the corrosion to protect the strong inside.

The hole in my chest is created by the intruder, who makes our living fibre, our steel, porous. The intruder carves cavities, chasms, craters between us. They expand our exposed surface area, making us more susceptible to the corruption those people try to imprint from them to us.

It is people, the intruder, that is doing this to us. It is our own. It is not a volcano covering us in ash, it is not an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, followed by mass destruction. We are this big group of people desiring to have the best for others and ourselves, a massive, strong, corrosion-resistant ball of evolution and creativity and desire to belong. And yet we are being bent, manipulated, and processed, like a large sheet of raw metal being shaped into whatever the producers want us to be. We are the material that should be used to build the sturdiest structures and most ingenious inventions. Instead, we are experimented on, stress tested in a lab until we break, and thrown away. We have given away control, and are giving away more.

It's not all scrap and rust. The hole is only in my chest. It might be in yours too. I can't seem to change in that part of my body, but I have more than just that hole.

There is this organ in my skull, which I do seem to be able to steer and control. I can observe that hole in my chest, and it has convinced itself that the hole is wrong. It knows the hole should not be there. It has compassion with that void.

The brain hosted in my skull believes something very different than the stainless steel metaphor. It believes that every other brain like itself, however obsessed with gold, however in need of company of others, however rotten by consumption of short format image flashing, has a force of good intent in it that cannot be escaped. If not there today, it will be there eventually.

I commanded my brain to believe this. Not doing so makes me part of a weak metal that is prone to corrosion. Prone to create divisions that are not like the one above, but between others just like me, wanting better. Divisions that we all know exist, between every possible observable or invisible difference. I don't want that.

So the current status of the world can be found to be more than 'not scrap and rust'. We all have this innate power to change how we think. It's free, it is yours, it is a pleasure to share it. I believe we will easily combat the gloomy future that sometimes looks like it is dawning on us. I believe in the good of everyone, but also in our strength. I don't believe we will end together with and by mass consumerism and experimentation like metal. I don't believe that what most of us want are the few intruders that corrupt the world, or that most of us will let happen or continue to let happen.

I think I want to let you know that I still believe, I have not and will not give up. I want you to believe this too, as doing so will make us two or more, part of a bigger group that will aid us forwards.

I want you to know that you will be okay.