One of the surprise cultural touchstones of 2020 has been the popularity of the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The game is an open world builder in which you progressively build an island resort thing for a bunch of animals.
In the current time of Coronavirus, I think that people are looking for a distraction from not only the world that waits outside but the always ever present world that lives inside people. Animal Crossing provides a very cute sandbox to play inside; with a heap of characters be who are mostly equally cute.
I think that the world that we've collectively built for ourselves in the twenty-first century is more in line with the projected dystopia of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' or Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' than George Orwell's '1984'; for the simple reason that the organisations which want to sell stuff to us, have all found it easier to bait us with honey than scare us with force.
The big problem that neither Huxley nor Bradbury could address, is what happens when we find out that our permanently-happy-drug-Soma-filled holiday, or the TV show with the Screaming Clown is over? Then what? In all three of these dystopias, the main character is broken to some degree and owing to the way that this kind of literature works, there is no method offered of putting anyone back together again. In fact the only solution ever offered, if indeed you can call it that, is in Brave New World and that solution is a sort of drug induced suicide. That is certainly no way to live. In the world that we've created and are currently living in, we've built for ourselves the ability to be entertained constantly and yet, people are still finding that our Soma-filled holiday has stopped and there's no method of putting anyone back together again.
One question posed in a Zoom group that I was in recently was "What is the biggest disease in the world today?" and while there are lots of compelling answers such as people's selfishness, cruelty, thoughtlessness, ignorance, racism, fear, and megalomania, the one disease which I am finding compellingly visible in other people, is the enduring diseases of loneliness which has been exacerbated by social distancing or isolation.
The one thing which this current moment in time has taught lots of people, is that who you were before this, is the biggest determinant on how you are going to react to it. Likewise, when the next big catastrophic thing comes (and it will do) the person who you are you are going into it, will be the person who is left to deal with it.
I mention that I have observed this in other people because although I like everyone else who has ever lived knows what it is like to be lonely, I have probably also learned that it is fine to be alone as well. Admittedly the method by which I was taught that by society at large was probably unfriendly, it is still a valuable thing to learn.
I also feel as though I have certain unfair advantages in all of this: namely that due to the nature of my job which is in an office and is still ongoing, and because I am married which means that I always come home to someone lovely, and because I am connected to a church community, my life has probably been the least disrupted of everyone that I know.
I also have another advantage which I am unexpectedly grateful for; that is that I have had some truly awful experiences that I wouldn't wish on anyone. I know what it's like to be that kid on the outside; whom people have decided that they don't like. I know what it's like to be actually forgotten and left somewhere. I know what it's like to have people waiting for you who want to be nasty to you. I know what it's like to feel so alone that you don't know how to ask any questions that might help you. If that sounds like a really strange thing to be grateful for, then it's worth considering what the effects of that are.
Granted that I am probably not the most radiant or likeable person in the world but if I am the one who has to live inside this, then to a very very large degree, I have had to build the fortress of my mind from the inside. When the world without is very much not a holiday, then the world within has to become a refuge.
What does any of this have to do with Animal Crossing? This:
As someone who has never played the game but who has seen videos of other people either playing it or sharing highlights from it, then I understand that the game actively encourages you to find friends to help you out. This however, is the loading screen which comes up when there is no one around to help.
Bob the Cat is aware that there is no one around to help and yet he looks like he is fine with it. We can layer what ever story we like on top of Bob because this is an open canvas; so the story that I want to lay on this is one of resilience. We have no idea exactly how Bob got to be this way but almost certainly it has cost him a lot of pain and suffering because virtue and character is invariably paid for with the coin of pain and suffering. We can see Bob dancing but we can't see all of the thousands of steps that brought him here.
I think that this current pandemic is forcing a lot of people who have maybe never experienced social isolation to finally confront it; in possibly the brutal way imaginable. Maybe for the first time in a long time, some people have had to work out how to operate when their entire set of social networks have been placed on pause.
I don't really want to diminish the importance of mental health here, because that's a whole other set of really important and serious questions. If you think that you need help, or think that you know someone who needs help with mental health care, get help.
Setting that aside for a bit, I will ask the question of what happens when there is no one around to help?
I am hardly qualified to offer anything like meaningful advice but I will suggest that this current pandemic has brought into sharp focus, the importance of cultivating an inner life. There are certainly people in the world of whom it would appear on the outside that they never pause to think about anything deeply at all and I suspect that those kinds of people, who are also more likely to be extroverted and draw their energy from outside of themselves, are also more likely to be impacted when that source is removed. If someone's personal mine of thought is shallow, then they are going to find it more difficult to mine for new thought if they have to break the ground for the first time.
My sort of global observation here is that people who have already gone through something hard, generally find it easier to go through something else hard because the tools which they have forged through experience have been work hardened. It could also be that having been through a hard experience, means that they already have the tools in hand to cope with the next hard thing.
I fully endorse the idea that humans are social creatures and that we supposed to live in community. Even hyper-capitalists are hyper-hypocrites if you investigate this as an idea because they will promote the idea of a corporation which by very definition is just another collective purchasing arrangement. Virtually every big thing that people have built has been a collective effort by people working together, even if the rewards for that effort haven't fairly (and in a lot of cases, brutally unfairly) distributed.
However, this pandemic apart from asking us how we look after ourselves collectively is also asking us individually how we look after ourselves.
The other thing of note here is that this pandemic has also not been fair with what it has metered out to everyone. The trouble that it has brought has not in any way been handed out evenly or fairly. Despite all of this, those people to whom the world previously been unkind to, seem to have better coping skills in this moment when the world is being unkind to everyone. Those unpopular virtues of patience, long-suffering, and what not, are expensively won.
No one is around to help - and for some people, that might not be all that hard to deal with because it isn't new. For Bob though, no-one's around to help and that's fine.
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