The problem that fascinates me (10)

This feeling of paralysis is what I want to know better. Where does it come from, and is it true—are we really unable to do anything?

 

The further away we look—towards global ecological and political crises, away from everyday life—the more reasonable it seems. At those scales, the desires and actions of individual citizens seem meaningless. And a peculiar feature of the modern world is how much of our time and energy we do spend thinking about events and conditions that are far away an enormous, which we cannot directly see or touch, and over which we have no control. The news is largely responsible for this, and this is why I do not read the news.

 

But what is strange is that, when we turn our attention to the immediate conditions of our lives, we still feel trapped and unable to act.

 

We want to live differently—we want community, relations with our neighbors that are social not legalistic, objects that are well made by people we know, not shoddily in mysterious factories thousands of miles away; we want to use technology not be used by it, to do jobs that seem worthwhile, within institutions that do not seem utterly misguided and broken, in the service of neighborhoods that are not segregated, divided, alienated.

 

For a long time many people have felt this, and more and more are coming to feel it with each passing year. Yet, no one knows where to begin.

 

This is the problem that fascinates me, in some sense the problem at the heart of the loaf I’m crumbling.