The Alert

A brief aside from gamedev worries... to process larger and more existential worries.

This is a stupid and frustrating time to be alive.

Being alive is still probably better than the alternative, but don’t quote me on that.

If you’re alert, if you know enough history or economics or just human nature, you can see the path we’re on and where it’s leading. These dismal sciences can’t predict every bump, but they show the cliff.

A war led by fools will lead to dire costs as predicted. Those costs will lead to a predictable recession. That recession will predictably pop an economic bubble that your world rests upon. And if it all goes as predicted, it’ll be followed by even bigger fools.

You know the arrow of time flies in one direction. But to its target, it looks like it’s just hanging in mid-air. Unmoving, yet looming ever-larger as you watch.

Until
it
impales
you.

So we dive for cover into art and the creations of others. For shelter, for wisdom, for distraction. Just to know that other people faced other stupid and frustrating times, and they lived anyway. How?

One soldier talked about a little man who went to war and wished it need not have happened in his time. His friend just kept smoking and told him to do something about it.

Big words coming from someone twice as tall and full of magic. Then again, he’s the one who ended up dying. Even if he was reborn afterwards, he still saw plenty of death.

So it goes, as another soldier said. That one found his own way to unstick himself in time. A different kind of trick, but still the same magic: a way to live in spite of death.

The soldiers who happen upon that magic are the ones who get to write about it afterwards. The others... do what soldiers usually do in war: the alternative.

So they go.

Back to today’s war. It probably won’t be the end of the world. But it will be the end of some people’s worlds. It might well be the end of the old world you know.

That might even be a good thing. If you keep living. If a little magic saves you from the alternative.

Because as they say, there’s a new world struggling to be born. Now is the time when monstrous midwifes are trying to shape it in their own image. But that’s not how the quote really goes and sources disagree about who the real monsters are and you’re not allowed into the delivery room, anyway.

So, sure, the old world is dying. But it probably won’t be dead by the first of the month, and you’ve got rent. Either way, the old bastard world will have sent someone around to collect.

And you go to work, and you do laundry, and you don’t think about it. And you scroll on your phone, and you side-eye the war, and you wait for it. And you skim the news and skip ahead and zone out and sleep in and so on until maybe really finally for god-damned fuck’s sake yes you see it:

The alert.

*Ping! Breaking news! Things fell apart!*

The alarm you’ve been anticipating, but still want to snooze a couple times.

*Ping! Find out now which centre couldn’t hold!*

It’s Armageddon and you found out from a sponsored ad.

*Ping! You won’t believe what rough beast’s hour has come round at last!*

Fine, you’ll say, let’s get this apocalypse over with. Let’s get to the exciting part.

Because post-apocalyptic fantasies are so much more appealing than this. In them, you’re free of everything that seemed to hold you back before. No more nuance. No more rules. No more innocents.

Things are so much simpler when your deadlines are literal.

At last, you can think about what you need to rebuild. What gets scrapped or salvaged. Your purpose is clear.

You’ll stop saying, “someone should do something”, and you’ll start doing something. At least, once you pick yourself up off the floor. Does that count as something? It’s not nothing.

You can work from home!
(if you still have a home.)

There’ll be space to start a community garden!
(once you clear away the rubble of your neighbor.)

All those skyscraper shards could be a beautiful mosaic!
(and your cut fingers will provide such vibrant dye.)

Yes, the post-apocalypse is enticing and immediate, whether you dream that you magically survive, or imagine the alternative.

It’s the mid-apocalypse that’s exhausting. And it lasts so much longer these days.

Time was, it’d all happen in a flash: a firework montage set to ironic music. Now it’s just a slog. Cable news coverage stretching one omnishambles over 24 hours and then repeat.

But rebuilding can’t wait. Anxious hands need something to do. People at their breaking point need something to make whole. We need to make our own magic if we want to write about it afterwards.

Better to start making things now, while it’s easier. Sing while there’s less screaming. Plant a garden while we have a neighbor to share it with. Make a mosaic that doesn’t have to be your last. While we have time to practice.

Practice building that better world now. Practice finding the words for what you want to save. Practice working with your neighbor to make something real.

It isn’t just practice. It is effort. It is magic. It is doing something. And it is better than waiting. Than dreading. Than the alternative.

Do it fast. Do it together. Do it before you overthink it. Do it badly and learn from it and do it better the next time.

Because you will have to re-do it, again and again, whether or not this old world actually does collapse as predicted.

You may get so good at doing it that people call it magic. Or you may never feel like you’re doing it right, but keep doing it anyway because it’s satisfying in a way that waiting for the alternative never was. You will do it because it keeps you alive and alert.

You will do it until you hand it to others to continue doing it when you’re done.

That’s the work of living.

Especially in stupid and frustrating times.

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