Heartbreak in the Cornucopian Age

Notwithstanding my incredible luck that has allowed me live as I do, and and to move about the world in relative comfort as I have done, there are certainly a great many people out there in a America especially who are living lives full of great suffering.

One can feel it in many places around the country---in small hamlets and faded towns where the last public structures are the post office and a small church, in decaying old cities of rotting downtown structures, in the overrun-by-homeless sidewalks and parks of beach towns,  and even in the places that look beautiful on the surface---suburbs with palm trees where the big box parking lots are full of cars one missed payment away from repossession, sparkling capitals where bureaucrats burn tax money, and buoyant college towns driven by massive piles of unpayable debt. Most of the prosperous towns in America have felt like Potemkin villages of digital-wealth-driven mirages for many years now.

There is a critical mass of this kind of feeling right now in America that makes it feel like the default American vibe. It feels like desperation, or at the minimum a raw struggle. Only certain areas are genuinely immune from it, in my experience. Watford City, North Dakota is one place where you don't feel it, for example. There you get a sense of what it must have been like to live in America before, 1957, which is about the year the Great American Unwind started to kick in.

Traveling around, it is truly heartbreaking to sense this vibe of deprivation in what seemingly should be a time of great plenitude. We live the Cornucopian Age. Even the poorest person in America could, with a few lucky breaks, wind up living like a king. Most don't, of course. Most never will. The poor you will always have with you, as someone once said.

When I lived in want, my material situation was a direct reflection of a poverity of spirit. Back then, had someone given me this job I have, and the modest bankroll I have, I could not have handled living the way I do now.  I had to climb each step one by one. Sure I have afforded myself more things, perhaps, and certain challenges would have been easier on the surface, but overall I know I would have found a way in the same small bubble of fright. I knew only the way of poverty.

To get to the next level, and the ones beyond that, first I had to unwind the parts of me that were keeping me from giving myself permission to go to that higher level. I had certain strategies for doing that which turned out to be successful.

In a broad sense, there was apparently only one way to do it---to dive into the fear and the challenges in a way that was highly personal to me. The specific instruction manual I created for myself along the way would probably seem unintelligible and useless to someone else, I suppose.

Or maybe it is useful after all. That notion probably what keeps me writing this blog at this point, as I mentioned before.