Tuesday, May 10th 2022
Have people become more indifferent?
This seems to be a question that Google is indifferent about. It groups it together with a bunch of other questions and some psychological videos about indifference and apathy. No help.
When I was in high school, a student was running for class president and made a speech about apathy. He said that we should, as a group, try to be less apathetic. He thought the correct answer was that we should care more and that people’s indifference to, I don’t actually remember what we are indifferent of, was bad and caring was good.
I seem to be seconding this idea these days so possibly he was an influence or his speech was. Or maybe it was just that he was a visionary and was thinking.
Yesterday I got into this thought about why people like being stupid. Maybe that’s a harsh way to say it but it does seem to be preferable to let your mind go. I can agree with this. I understand it and I am guilty of wanting to turn the noise off by the end of the day. In my case these days it’s just about physical labor that I don’t want to do anymore. I would like to rest. This just means that I understand it.
But I think what we’re talking about here is perpetual escapism. I think what we’re talking about is the fear or running away from the fear of involvement.
The concept of indifference can be expressed by the phrase “I don’t care”. When I was teaching, this was the magic word to end our class. If the student either said or demonstrated indifference or apathy or even said the words I don’t care, I also didn’t care and the lessons would be at an end by the end of our contract cycle. There was no point in trying to be someone else’s motivation. If they didn’t come with a desire to do the work, there wasn’t going to be any work or any results and there was no point in my retaining the student.
My father used to scream at me for letting my students go, especially the ones who were willing to pay money. “Take the money!”, he would say. But I wouldn’t. It was a mistake. They had a willingness to pay money but they were unwilling to involve themselves in the task.
Right now I’m thinking of cleaning out my well. The act of cleaning a well is not high technology. You put a long ladder down into the well, you drain all the water you possibly can and then you fill buckets with the mud and sediment at the bottom and haul it to the top. Probably getting one more meter out of the well might be enough to solve my watering problems so this makes it a good idea.
The issue though is who will do this work. I myself am not going down that well. It’s not fear of physical labor, I just don’t see it as being physically possible for me to do all things considered. I’m not saying this happily, I’m just saying it’s a matter of technology. It is possible that my ex partner might want to do this herself. She’s a bulldog and likes getting physical on the weekends. But the most likely choice would be to find some local guys who will do it for a reasonable price.
How this relates to what I’m talking about is the difference between paying money for something and physically doing it yourself. There are parts of this job that I would happily do myself. Hauling the bucket up or carrying the sediment out dumping it on the road in some particularly low place to be a better paving material. But if all I did was pay the money to have this work done, this is a different thing. I suppose you take a feeling of accomplishment by doing something by paying for it and I think it’s pretty normal in the world to let your money work for you.
In this case, let’s say that I was some kind of American homeowner. I can use my dad’s residence in Florida as an example. I suppose he had neighbors who were gardeners but they had a lot of rules about what the landscape should look like. They were very big on uniformity and the retirement complex itself had a series of gardeners that went around keeping the place up. Where I live, the state office hires a guy to trim the grass with a weed wacker along the streets. I don’t know why he does this but he does and it’s a horrible noise. But the point is that my father was obligated to pay a rather large amount of money every month to have someone else keep the place manicured. It was very, very important to maintain a particular visual aesthetic where he lived.
Just add on to it, my father was in the car business. I don’t hate cars because of some Oedipus thing. But what I do remember was that at one point in my life, I got into motorcycles which meant getting into motors. And I used to buy and sell motorcycles. I would buy something old that had some value, take it apart and put it back together and then sell it for a higher price. And I remember a moment where my dad came to visit my house and I had a brake assembly taken apart on the floor and he seemed shocked that I actually knew what I was doing. He made his living in the car business most of his life and he himself knew absolutely nothing about cars.
He didn’t have to know about it. He would pay someone else to do that work.
So where is this thought going? I am wondering why people are genuinely so apathetic to the war going on in Ukraine. I understand that our president cut off his finger in support of Vladimir Putin and agreed that we would all die for him. He literally said this some years ago. He never wanted there to be a minute where Belarus was not subservient and happy to be in the care of Moscow. Whether this was for fear or whether he simply was paid to do this is not that important. This is what we do.
However, there is always the possibility that the Russians roll across our borders and start shooting at us. Why would they do this? It doesn’t really matter. They could and truthfully, there’s not really that much difference between Ukraine and Belarus. The weather is a little bit different and perhaps the people are a little bit different but Slavic is Slavic and we have a lot more in common then we are different. And in fact in this region that I live in, we are mostly Ukrainian and the region was under the same flag many times throughout history.
But we are indifferent. People were a little bit frightened, maybe a lot frightened when the shooting started. When the Russians used the country to stage its war effort and even held war games with the Belarusian army, people were freaked out. When they fired missiles from a neighboring town and were flying military jets directly over town, people were seriously afraid. But now, people are just doing their jobs. They’re not worried about it very much. They have become completely indifferent.
So, why don’t we care? The first thought that comes to my mind is that we are really only focused on making money. Very, very few people here choose their trades based on anything but acquiring money. Almost all anyone does is hunt for money one way or another. And because money is all there is, we just don’t really worry about the consequences or what happens to other people. The second part of it is that people believe that paying for things is some kind of accomplishment. Perhaps it is in an economy like the one here where people are usually extremely poor. But there’s a big difference between digging mud out of a well and paying someone to dig mud out of a well. And there is a gigantic difference between paying for an English class and doing your homework.
My guess is that we are suffering from global indifference. I think the world is depressed as hell and I think that people are extremely apathetic. I’m saying this from experience and specifically from the experience of this writing that I have been doing for the last couple of years.
When you ask people to care, they become frightened. It is possible for people to give money, sometimes, but it is impossible to inspire someone to action.
I don’t think this is the entire thing though. I think money and the economic problem are a huge part of things. The way that we live and the money centered world that we revolve around definitely breeds apathy but I think the biggest thing that has happened is this machine that I am working with right now. I think computers have destroyed our hearts.
I talk a lot about what happened to this region starting in 2014 when the Russians first invaded Ukraine. There was a wave of Russian propaganda and the Russian internet exploded. I’ve mentioned my ex-girlfriend being carried away by Russian propaganda. Most of my students definitely became more Russian and less Belarusian overnight. And the entirety of the population of people who were coming to me for lessons completely fell into apathy almost immediately. Everybody went lazy.
Most probably, something happened to open the markets to smartphones. Most probably we had a trade deal that allowed Chinese phones into the Belarusian market. Suddenly, everybody had a smartphone and access to the internet in their hands and suddenly, everybody quit moving.
I’m guilty of this. I’m extremely guilty of this. I can be working and suddenly a thought comes into my head and I will stop working to express the thought. Why? Because it’s much easier to play with my phone than it is to push a wheelbarrow around.
Or basically speaking, we stopped caring because it was easier to play with our phones.
I guess I could continue pulling ideas out of the sky to go along with what I’m saying but the point is that there are very few people left who give a damn about anything anymore. I jump on my next door neighbors quite a bit and they deserve it but the truth is that they are the same as most people. Sure, they are trailer trash but so are most people. And it has been proven that all we need to do is look at pictures provided to us on our phone and that’s really all we need. And it doesn’t take any more effort than the flick of a finger.
***
I’m going to say that mulching is a definite positive. I checked the boxes this morning and everywhere that the leaves and Forest debris was covering was still wet from the overnight dew. Also the cabbages that did not die out right look a lot better this morning than they did yesterday morning. The watering probably helped a little and I think keeping moisture in the box itself is also a good thing.
What I’m really thinking of is that if we’re going to do vegetables, I need to convert these boxes to tents. This would mean either building a greenhouse structure over all of them or putting hoops over each individual box. I’m really not into investing in plastic and I think I would rather do this with glass or at least an extremely long lasting polymer. Or junk. Something.
I also found that I really like this one rake that I have. It’s all metal and about 20 cm wide. It’s not perfect for raking leaves but it does actually do a good job to collect Forest debris and if you use it as a measurement for planting, it is excellent for creating disturbance in between the plants. I noticed this in the bean field. It is a great tool to go through and keep the weeds down and away from the growing bean plants. I like it.
I guess I’m going to go for a bit of a walk today. Maybe I’ll take the bike or maybe I’ll just do the walk. I need to find if there are any people who would be willing to come clean out my well. I am really unhappy with the quality of the water since pumping it out last time. It is very silty and yellow in color. I have a piece of crap water filter that I bought a year or so ago. I’ve been drinking the well water unfiltered and I have not had any problems. I boil it mostly but I have not gotten sick or had any physical problems. But I’m not happy with drinking yellow water.
Other than this, I cleaned up one area underneath a big walnut tree. I managed to get three cart loads of leaves and grass and threw them underneath some of the berry bushes. I don’t know if this is proper practice or not and I have been warned about things getting rotten from too much water. I just don’t think too much water is going to be a problem here. I think this may be common thinking from a time that is no longer with us. And as we all can see, the world is not going to do anything to slow down anytime soon and everybody keeps planning for 10 years down the line. They’re going to keep burning oil until there is no oil left to burn.
That’s another thing that people here say. They say that they’re just going to take it all, every drop that can possibly get their hands on and they don’t care what happens to the planet. If this is true, and it probably is, we are talking about a race. They are going to try and make every penny they can and they will simply hope that they do not actually destroy the entire planet in the pursuit.
I only have one metaphor about this and I think I’ve written about it before. When my ex-wife and I had a house in the San Francisco Bay area, for the first year or two that we lived there, we used our garage for a gym for weightlifting. I had kind of a mix and match weight set and it was possible to do quite a few variations of lifting. It was a pretty imaginative set and I even had some pulleys set up. But then I got into motorcycles and suddenly the garage was not fun to be in anymore. When we were just lifting weights, it was a very clean room and suddenly it was a place of oil and grease and auto fumes. Literally, bringing the auto business into my house broke the house.
I think there is more to this though. Bringing the cars into the garage, which was directly under our bedroom probably brought more Auto fumes into our life. Our thinking changed. We became more paranoid. Our happiness changed as well and things started to go a little dicey.
Noticing the correlation between cars and people and the personalities of people who are surrounded by industry or Auto fumes is starting to take on a pattern. The people who live in my little village who do not drive cars are generally pretty calm people. They don’t get upset very easily and move very gently socially. The people who are car people and especially those who work around factories are extremely brutal and loud.
I think it’s about the sickness you get from being around fossil fuels or around burning fossil fuels. I don’t think this is very healthy at all for anybody.
I know I’m getting a bit redundant here but the world definitely needs to consider slowing down for the sake of life on the planet. I don’t know how many species of life we have destroyed in our quest for money but we need to stop. The planet is not going to survive this race and we have nowhere else to go.
There’s one more piece of mathematics to put on this idea about racing with time for money. If you play the game of chess, it is almost impossible to play without trading pieces. Usually, chess pieces are referred to as material much the way people who work for governments are known as assets. It’s such a lovely dehumanizing term. But at the end of a chess game, regardless who wins, both sides are decimated. If you had to play two chess games in a row but in the second game, you could only play with the pieces remaining, There is almost no chance you would win.
This piece of wisdom should genuinely serve us when we think about what we are doing. We are playing with the only planet we know how to live on. We are playing with our habitat and poisoning it everyday because we do not believe there is any other way to live other than chasing money. We don’t just feed each other and we don’t allow different types of currencies to carry the time of our lives. We don’t do anything intelligent anywhere and we just amuse ourselves with drugs that we can buy.
This habit of living this way is extremely counterproductive to life. There is no winning the war we are fighting. We are just destroying ourselves senselessly. We are committing suicide.
If anybody would like to argue with me, please feel free. I don’t think you’re going to impress me with your argument though. You better think hard before you start this war.
***
It’s about 20 after four and I am crashed out on the couch in the office. It isn’t really that I worked so hard today. I really didn’t do very much work at all today. I just had a really fantastic vegan bar food type dinner and I just sat down here and closed my eyes for a while.
I hadn’t had any beans in a few days and I started feeling like it was a mistake. Last night’s dinner of horseradish greens and noodles was fantastic and I woke up in a serious mood. But the big part of today’s day was just a walk I took around the neighborhood. It was nothing special and I only had one conversation with a retiree.
We got along well and agreed on my observations about global warming and the water problem. His house is on the main road and he told me that he has lived all of his 72 years in this place. And yes, he can’t open his windows because of the dust from the cars. To handle it, it’s just that he allows progress to go by and that’s all. Both of us by the way I had the exact same view of the world and neither of us thought that there was nothing good to look forward to in the next 10 years. Things were going to get worse and there was no way they were going to get better.
But then I mentioned the war with our neighbors and he very much agreed that the Russians had the right to go in. Ukrainians were Nazis and they were abusing Russian citizens. That particular region of Ukraine had at one point been Russian and the Russian army was doing the good thing by cleaning the bastards out. I threw a few ideas at him about the president being jewish, he agreed, that the parcel of land we ourselves were currently sitting on could have just as easily been Poland or Lithuanian, he agreed, but he had a problem understanding that the war was more about money and oil. He agreed that the Americans were behind it. He held no particular problem with me though another neighbor immediately blamed me for being with the Americans. I don’t really have more to say about this. Propaganda works and some people believe it because it’s just that easy to convince them.
After that, I lost interest in walking around and went home. My real reason for going out was to find Misha and Sasha, to fellows that live together who apparently are the ones to go to about cleaning out a well. I have held the belief in my head that they might actually show up to talk to me but after a while, I quit and made dinner instead.
Dinner was actually just what we call cutlets. Vegan cutlets of course but nothing out of the ordinary and nothing that locals don’t understand. I started by parboiling some chickpeas and some small potatoes. When the water was gone, I tossed them into my food processor with half an onion, some oatmeal, a little bit of spice and a bit of white flour. The flower was mostly for structure.
I ground everything together until it came to be a sticky mess and then cooked it in my big Skillet with a little bit of oil. I fried the last of the onion in there and topped it with some spaghetti sauce that took the place of ketchup. Outrageously delicious. Perfect vegan bar food and if I had wanted to, I could have served it on rye bread.
But now I am quite full and like I said, I just crashed on the couch. No reason to go on with the day. I had had enough sun, a little exercise, a purposeless walk around town and a really good dinner. Now I’m just finishing my day.
I don’t know whether it’s worth mentioning or not but I got a message from a friend who is kind of helping out with some legal advice concerning my family. He examined my documents and listened to my point of view and wrote me a really interesting letter. Most of which had to do with what he believed was my really bad luck for having a psychotic relative in my family.
He said that my cousin was probably suffering from bipolar disorder and for some reason came to the belief that he had ownership over me. He said my situation was more like a celebrity who was unfortunately blessed with a psychotic stalker. My relative was under the delusion of having the right to punish me for something and most probably, if I wanted to go all in, I had a really good lawsuit.
You know, I don’t feel better when people agree with my point of view. I don’t need acceptance or particular understanding from people from my problems. I don’t really have such a great need for social acceptance and I kind of take my life as it is at face value. Most probably, so everything he said was the truth, it’s more connected with their ability to make money off of my misery than anything. Such is life in the economic system we live under.
None of this means that the end is coming anytime soon. I would just prefer to have this person out of my life truthfully. Every word this character said was true but it still doesn’t end the nightmare. Nothing ever seems to end the nightmare. People just cannot help themselves but participate in the nightmare.
Anyway, I don’t really have much left of this day to worry about. I’m probably just going to run some movies and go to sleep. I could use a shower though so I might consider going to town tomorrow or Thursday. I don’t really think I have any major work to do here. I cleaned up the front part of my house and used most of the leaves for mulch around my garden. But with this job done and without any agreement from Misha and Sasha about cleaning the well, I don’t really have much to do until the next watering day. That will either be tomorrow or Thursday depending on whether or not I need to go to town. And I don’t really need anything in town except to perhaps say hello to my ex partner and pick up some nuts.
I know this all seems kind of small. It seems pretty small to me too. This is not exactly the way I plan on living my life but it is pretty much what’s going on right now. Maybe I’m making a mistake or maybe my mind is not in the right place. I’m just doing what I do. I’m trying to get by the best I can. There is a hole somewhere. There is a hole and I don’t seem to be able to fill it. I feel like I bought a jigsaw puzzle and when I opened the box, there was a piece missing and there’s just nothing I can do about it. I know how to put the puzzle together but it just won’t fit.
About why I feel like this, I guess you could use your own judgment. But to me, it’s just about living wrong. Everybody’s making a big mistake and nobody’s willing to stop and say they are wrong. I don’t know why I’m so lucky.
***
I just found this and thought I would share it but here are some pictures from the victory Day party in Pinsk. Because this is my blog, you are free to think anything you want.
And for what it’s worth, my friends at the Barents Observer had the same celebration. They however take a bit more notice of Ukraine at least in the color scheme of the flowers. The irony is well recognized in Norway.
***
It’s about 7:30 and I guess now I’m going to close up for the day. I kind of thought I was done earlier but I guess I wasn’t.
I had a lot of cleanup that needed to be done. I had to put some things away in the barn from the field work and I genuinely needed to do dishes. The water problem is ridiculous right now. I can’t even drink directly from the well because it’s still filled with silt several days later. Tomorrow is definitely a watering day but I am out of my mind with negative thinking. I just can’t get over how horrible everything is.
A little while ago I decided I needed to go to the store. I just couldn’t wait another day without going down there. I don’t know if I needed to or not but I decided to go.
I had a hard time getting my bike started. I still ride a track bike but the road is so bad and full of sand right now that you need to find something even reasonably hard to ride on. The trick is to not turn your wheels so much and to absolutely bully the rear wheel into movement. My new gear makes this a little bit easier but if you want to know how to ride through sound, you just let the bike go directly forward and refuse to back down. Maybe this is my nature because I didn’t fall or stop or get stopped even once.
I greeted some of the old folks along the way but didn’t stop to talk with him this time. You could see on their faces that they were expecting that I would and you could also see that my previous conversation was now part of their current conversation. I don’t want to say that I did journalism today but I guess if I wrote about it, I did. Probably they were discussing my point of view. I said it was about oil and that the entire Nazi idea was nothing but empty propaganda. By how uncomfortable they were to say hi to me, the thought hit home that maybe I was on to something. They are never going to think of me as anything but an American and as a representative, I am obviously never going to be local.
At the store, I was told that what I needed was more songs. It means getting drunk and playing the guitar and singing familiar songs. I don’t really know Russian songs that much. I mean, I know the chord progressions and I know the basic infrastructure of music that they understand but I don’t know any specific songs and I don’t have any specific artists that I have listened to many times. I can’t introduce the Beatles to them whether they know about them or not.
In line at the market, I stood next to one person who thought it was extremely important to tell me that he had a rifle at home. У меня есть карбин и не одна. I have more than one rifle. Someone could probably take the time to explain to me why someone thought it important to tell me this. I went on my bicycle to the local store and it is important for someone to say that I am his neighbor and that I should know that he has guns.
No, I don’t really understand why people feel it is so important to be violent with me or to let me know that they are capable of violence. No, I don’t understand any of this at all.
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