RANT: OUR HUMAN STRUGGLE
None of us asked to be born…
but here we are, each of us shaping our own struggle to live. There's an old expression, "everyone you meet is fighting their own war." Remember this next time you have a face-to-face interaction with a stranger. Pay close attention to how this idea affects your perceptions of that person. Why must everything be a struggle? You can see this struggle in everyone as our lives are stripped of meaningful work and projects with purpose. There are darker forces fueled by racism and greed at play here. For the moment I want to put those dark forces and bad actors aside and focus on those of us who choose to acknowledge white privilege and systemic racism. Those of us for who the struggle is to live as humble human beings who put respect for others and our shared space on planet Earth above all us.
This idea of struggle consumed my thoughts as we were trying to have our first child. Why must everything be a struggle? Now that we have two kids in full-on "teenage mode" difficult questions are part of the daily grind. A heated debate about life and purpose emerged during dinner recently when my son asked, "why do anything anymore?" My daughter expanded on this question by proclaiming that life has been reduced to a series of perpetual crises. OMG! Is their genetic memory kicking in? Did my anxieties plant this seed so to speak? Or have we put this thought in their heads? Either way, I was heart broken by their cynicism. And they're right to cynical! Just look around at what the "adults in control" tolerate, and even celebrate – extreme weather, normalized school shootings, victim shaming, police brutality, systemic racism, sexism, pandemics, insurrection, cultism. We choose to expose our young to multiple forms of trauma and then ask them to live happily as if nothing were wrong. Well something is wrong, we broke (and are breaking) this shit. The kids are losing interest in the struggle because we are failing to show them ambition and purpose. My children see a bleak world strip-mined of optimism for the sake of fuzzy progress. A world I've enabled through designerly opportunism, hyper-consumerism and apathetic workaholism.
How do I find value in the struggle again?
How can I inspire my kids to appreciate the struggle to advance the human project, while humans are the primary barrier to meaningful momentum. I have to find new grounding in my my design faith. Faith that human capacity aimed at socially aligned goals will create collective momentum towards iterative planning and community action. It's the age old faith in work. But the faith does not live in a vacuum, it thrives in environments that welcome collective problem solving and in people who desire connection through creativity.
As we crawl out of the tragedy that was 2020 what are we left with? What are we rebuilding? Why should our kids give a damn? I have to look back to when I was more optimistic about the future, what did I see? And more importantly, what did my biases hide from me?