History Is a Masochist’s Playbook
The Future is just the past with Push Notifications. No one learns. They just run faster.
Ecclesiastes 1:9: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:14: I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are vanity (a chasing after the wind).
That’s Blood on the Ground
Rome’s plebs gorged on bread, drank cheap wine, stamped their feet, cheered and shouted their primal screams while gladiators slit throats painting the sand red. They were lucky, the plebs. Better than the slaves and the women and the foreigners roiling around the outside of the colosseum fighting for leftover scraps. But not as good as the men serving in the senate or the aristocrats with stuffed purses or the priesthood. The plebs were in their favored spot on the front row. Calling for more, more, more.
Victorian tycoons stuffed factories with soot-caked, snot-nosed kids and spewed out products and waste. They fed boilers with coal and lungs with black dust, then wallpapered the air with gas-lit street lights emitting a modern glow and handing out patent-tonic elixirs that cured any ailment. Laudanum hushed the factory cough, cheap rail tickets whisked clerks to candy-floss seasides, penny dreadfuls served doses of paper adrenaline hawked by kids at night. Lamps flickered progress. Sewers buried and hid stink. Sugar from afar spiked the afternoon tea. It was all proof that misery had been conquered. But the Thames frothed with arsenic, tenements were stacked like rotting crates, and everyone dozed between stimulants, mistaking the hum of machines for salvation.
Now every pocket carries an eyeball-scorching sun. Wildfires char broil continents we’ll never smell, drones erase villages we’ve never heard of, and a DoorDash ping promises comfort within thirty minutes or less. Endless scrolling. Outrage, meme, soft-serve ad, fentanyl obituary, another meme, babies, death, both packaged and sanitized. Algorithms drip-feed dopamine calibrated to keep us looking for more. We punch likes instead of ballots. We outsource thought and call it connecting. We’re productized and monetized. Data. We’re just zeros and ones. When the server farms finally overheat, we’ll still be swiping for the last discount code, wondering why the sky is the color of a low-battery warning.
It’s the same generation after generation.
We’re not “learning from history.” We’re not learning period. We’re consuming. Ranting and raving and looking for someone to blame because it can’t be us. Don’t cause problems. Hell, buy a bigger screen. Consume. Help the economy. Binge.
We go along and along and along. But then the pain becomes too great. And plebs wake up. Victorians form unions and storm parliaments. We put our phones down and think. Read. We vote.
“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
—George Santayana, quoted mostly by people sitting in front of a screen repeating and repeating without actually thinking about the words
Santayana was wrong. There’s nothing to remember but pain. We don’t want to remember. It’s embarrassing, our past. It’s painful to remember how blind we’ve been. How ignorant we are. We think we’re so much smarter now. So we do repeat. We repeat because forgetting is more profitable, more comfortable, and now, thanks to technology, easier. Technology soothes us. We wrap ourselves in outrage and find a tribe and scream into the void. We shout State’s Rights. And Immigrant horde. And point out ‘evil’ books.
Until we’re overcome by pain.
Pain Is the Only Real Teacher
History is sold as a wise professor. Nope. It’s a masochist’s hobby. You stare at catalogues of human agony, swear you’ll do better, then wander off to brunch. Change only comes when collective pain spikes higher than society’s numbness setting.
Call it The Pain-Threshold Law:
Change = Suffering – Numbness = Pain
If we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned to suffer. It’s our place. Churches tell us so. Politicians tell us so. Billionaires tell us so. And we just thank them. Because we don’t need to make a decision. We don’t need to think. We just sacrifice our freedom and responsibility because numb is better. It’s hard to be responsible for yourself. And why bother? It’s easier to outsource our values.
When the suffering becomes greater than our numbness, then and only then, do we act. Suffering overpowers numbness then becomes pain. Pain is more difficult to ignore. So we quit. Or we fight. We fight for our survival. We evolve.
Why Does It Take So Long to Feel the Pain
1. Digital Dopamine - numbness feels good (not really good but it doesn’t hurt) and technology is the best distributor of pain meds yet.
Your thumb is the lab rat. Every swipe leads to the next meme, the next image, the next snippet and then it drops a sugar cube. Follow and you get rewarded. Outrage headline, kitten reel, discount code, dopamine. You aren’t scrolling, not really. You’re being scrolled. Your thumb leads the way. It guides the algorithm. It caches your data and learns what you need. It sedates.
2. Precision Violence
War used to arrive with body bags. You felt it because it changed your neighborhood. The kid next door is gone. Your cousin is dead. The toll is felt throughout society.
Now war is live streamed. Joysticks in Nevada vaporize houses in Kabul. Precision strikes are called successful with body counts. It’s a scoreboard. A death tally. We can sit back, safe, and watch the battle presented as entertainment. Isn’t it cool, that bomb, flying through the streets, around building and through windows, and boom. There’s no flag-draped boxes on this level. Not ours anyway. Morality? Don’t worry. The events all seem remote. You don’t have to think about it so much. It’s other people’s tragedy. It’s other people’s homes being burned. They had it coming and it’s far away. We’re still wearing our squeaky clean sneakers. Off-screen can’t touch us. So we watch and shake our heads and say it had to be done.
Relentless images don’t spark action. They create familiarity.
3. Comfort Logistics
We can get everything we want from our sofa. DoorDash for the gut. A pill for our waist, our erection, our sanity, our comfort. Why wrestle with existential dread when you can Amazon Prime a weighted blanket to snuggle under and binge? Pain postponed, empathy postponed, collapse on back-order. Death denied.
No Pain No Gain
The whole thing is just tiring. Hurt. Pain. The amount of work that has to be done. It’s always there, this constant drip, drip, drip of the next thing that needs to get done.
Muscle fibers tear and then they grow. Pain is not the enemy of progress. It’s the catalyst.
Biology is on pain’s side. Hormesis—small stressors that trigger repair—drives everything from heat-shock proteins to long-term memory formation. Skip the stress and you skip the upgrade. Accomplishing anything requires embracing the uncomfortable and learning.
Psychology is on pain’s side. Post-traumatic growth studies show survivors often gain sharper priorities and deeper empathy if they are allowed to process the hurt rather than narcotize it.
History is on pain’s side. Every reform era, abolition, women’s suffrage, civil-rights, labor law, kid’s detention, began as an ache or challenge no polite society or parent wanted to feel. Pressure becomes change.
Make Pain Useful
Numbness is optional; pain is inevitable.
Get to it faster.
Radical Attention: Pick a 24-hour window and starve the dopamine feed. Delete the shortcut to your favorite news/social/entertainment app. Set your phone to airplane mode. Then force-feed your senses one unfiltered reality. This is not easy and there is an argument that nothing is unfiltered. But give it a shot. Sit through a court case. Volunteer in an under-staffed ER, or homeless shelter, or food bank. Spend two hours reading municipal water-quality reports or the municipal budget. It’ll be boring but you’ll be involved. When your skin itches keep going.
Micro-Acts of Agency: Big systems feel bullet-proof. The task seems impossible. It’s too big. So break it down into small chunks. Anything great gets done by doing something simple and small on a daily basis. Go small. But go.
Try these small steps: File a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a single city contract. Even if you don’t read it, ask for it.
Or audit the next school-board budget: Just showing up will make a difference. Prepare a question before hand. Ask for an explanation on a specific budget line. Make it an obscure one. Get an explanation.
Are you handy? Organize a three-family repair weekend. Lay out your tools and offer to fix things for the group. Someone can cook, someone can organize games for the kids outside, and someone can fix stuff. It’ll stop the “buy-toss-scroll” cycle. It teaches you and the family to appreciate what you have instead of just consuming.
Create a Neighborhood Learning Cell: Three neighbors, one public-domain reading list, and a moderator’s hat that rotates each week. Meet in a garage, library nook, or video chat. Put your notes into a chatbot. Ask it questions. Once a month invite an outsider whose worldview collides with yours. Work to get a 360 degree view of issues. Nurse debates coder, trucker debates professor, etc. Require participation. Make it chaotic but respectful.
Pick a discomforting issue you can deal with today: Cold-call the neighbor you avoid, fast for twelve hours, hand-write apologies to the people you subtweeted. You are rehearsing for larger collisions ahead. You are dealing with issues directly. You’re getting stronger.
Choose Your Own Ache
There may be nothing new under the sun but there is choice. Don’t choose numbness.
Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science has given them bread so long they remain free. In the end they will lay down their freedom at our feet, and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us’.”
- The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
Until then, may your weekend be just uncomfortable enough to remind you, you’re alive, and accountable. Feel the sting. Swing the hammer.
Carve your own path.
Think About It…
Is it possible to use pain to our benefit? Can we harden ourselves by facing our fears? Should we seek out pain? Should we keep pushing the boulder up the hill, tearing our hands, stubbing our toes, straining our muscles all the while knowing we’ll fail? That the boulder will come crashing down?
Will it?
Or will our newly won toughness eventually prevail?
What ya’ think?
Do it…
Accept the pain: Kill one numbing habit, tackle one small civic chore that hurts just enough to feel, and start one conversation with someone with a different opinion. A conversation not an argument. Not someone that hates. Just someone that takes a different view of things than you do. We don’t have time for hate. They can find their own way. Or not.
Read it: Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good? This is an important read. It’s not political in the sense of pushing an agenda of red or blue. It does address the underlying issues that may cause us as a society to follow certain leaders. Gotta read it to decide for yourself.
Listen to it: Bettye LaVette: Maybe I’m Amazed, everything she does is great.
Want some great reading lists? Check out my book shop here. I’ve read every book on this list. No book shall pass onto the list unread. A portion of all purchases are used to support local book stores. It may be a little more expensive than Amazon but your community is worth it. Fight the Power.
And I do get a small commission to help support my writings. But hey, you were going to buy the a book anyway. Might as well buy it here.
Any suggestions on books to add to my lists below:
Get dirty. Get grimy. Crime at its best.
Mysteries! Put on your thinking caps. (Still working on this one. But it’s a start)
Books to Help You Fight the Power (Just started this one. Send some recommendations you think will fit the category).
Sometimes its just the platform. I do my very best to never celebrate the downfall of anyone. Regardless of my personal opinion on their deeds. But we do need to know of our past and look at why we go down certain paths. We can make a difference as individuals but we have understand that it is hard. And without a conscious effort we are likely to take the least difficult path. Which is usually go along to get along. Until we don't or can't go along anymore. I'll write something a little happier next time.
My X feed has been nothing but people celebrating the downfall of others for the last 3 days. IYKYK. Its been startling how enthusiastic and overjoyed everyone is about it.