We Are Enjoying Peak Humanity Right Now

So, last time, I left you, on Christmas Eve, hanging on the proposition of the impending decline of Western Civilization. Merry nothin'!

What's the positive take on such a gloomy message? Let me state the obvious - so flagrantly obvious that almost no one can see it. So obvious that I forget I need to keep restating it. Here goes:


We are currently - right now; right this second! - riding the crest of the best experience humanity has ever had, and likely ever will have. We perch, impossibly, on the tippy top of the curve of declining results. We enjoy plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and personal motorized coaches, and antibiotics, and all is comparatively safe and quiet. You live the magical life of fairy tale royalty compared to your great grandparents, who, themselves, were vastly privileged compared to their forebears.

What's more, we are not yet experiencing the severe repercussions of our aristocratic perch. It feels tempestuous out there, sure, but come back to your senses, in here. Are you safe? Are you eating? Reasonably healthy? Any chunks fallen off lately? Is your life a crisis so dire that you continually run to the bathroom to vomit from hot hopeless desperation? Is anyone hunting you down to kill you and your loved ones? Do your kids risk death from infected paper cuts and scrapes? Is your feudal landlord demanding his monthly night of pleasure with your wife? No? Just "another day in paradise," you report, wryly, from ACTUAL PARADISE, which you deem a mixed bag at best because it doesn't present every facet of perfect perfection you’ve ever contemplated?

Right at this moment, we have all the power and freedom and comfort and security and peace and entertainment and self-determination and options, with none of the yawing maladies actually ruining anything. If we had a time machine and could choose anytime to live, we could not have done better. We took the cherry off the sundae. We grabbed the gold ring. We KILLED IT.

No one has punched me in years. I walk around with a plastic thingee in my heart keeping me impossibly alive and a device in my pocket offering all knowledge, entertainment, and communication, on demand. Drivers will literally pull over to allow a special medical truck to rush me to hospital as the top civic priority, like I was Julius Freaking Caesar. Actuality is tremendous, which explains why we're compulsively drawn to dramatically dire thinking, simply to ballast the extreme excess of perfectly appropriate happiness!

So just suck up the awesomeness…if you can do so amid 300 million people insisting everything sucks! They are entitled, blinkered, over-privileged aristocrats all, especially the ones most stridently claiming victimhood. But don't let them harsh your buzz. Rather, soothe them like the adorable, innocent babies they are...or at least engage your intention to do so. Simply frame them thus. You'll feel better, and they'll feel better-seen. They're just a bit burpy, that’s all.

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"But wait;" you might ask, "aren't you really saying it's all downhill from here?"

That's awfully dramatic. Potential loss of snidely unappreciated privilege has always been the aristocrat’s anxiety. I hate hate hate my position, but will squeal like a cut pig if they try to take it away.

Look, if you can’t muster gratitude for the Right Now of it all, bucking enormous odds to live during this brief window of Peak Humanity, and can only focus on its (forecasted potential) loss - richly ironic despair given that, just five minutes ago, you imagined you were already languishing in Hell - then you don’t deserve Peak Humanity.

What's more, you'd have ditzily and needlessly pushed the eject button, framing yourself out of Heaven (What IS) and into Hell (a not-here/not-now mental story you've made yourself believe), just as I foolishly did one Christmas Eve many years ago. An entitled demand for Perfect Forever Perfection makes you the aristocrat; the leading edge; the very cause of the downfall, both internally and externally. So why not opt out of such foolishness? C'mon, it's Christmas!!!

I've described Actuality. I realize your peer groups sharply disagree, and you yourself feel vexed by a plethora of petty mattress peas while striving for seamlessly serene repose. But we all are the very luckiest of our entire funnel of ancestors, back to the first proto-mammal venturing out of the ocean barely imagining lasagna or fleece-lined sweatpants!

And with that, I wish you, very heartfully, a very Merry Christmas!