In which I explain how a timeline actually works and what that has to do with humanity and the state of the world

Thursday 7/16/26

You see it all the time now: "I hate living in this timeline" and variations thereof.

Here we have a basic word and concept that people are no longer able to understand. They don't know what a timeline actually is. And the more that people say these things like the above, the more other people say these things, and the further everyone gets from ever being able to understand this simple thing like so many other simple things.

Then this stupid and wrong thing becomes the accepted thing, which is fine if you're stupid, and you want a world that's stupid, filled with stupid people, but if you would like something better, and would like to be better yourself, and have better people that you might know in your life, and would like humanity's problems to lessen somewhat, then this is an issue.

Not just in and of itself. But it's like so many other things. As I said yesterday, it's one thing to live a meaningless life, as almost everyone now does. But those same people are helping to strip meaning from everything in the world. When you strip away the meaning, and nothing has meaning, or whatever ascribed non-meaning you want to slap on it as a placebo of meaning, you have chaos begetting chaos. There's nothing to do but be consumed by that chaos. To become another fast-blinking light in an endless display of blinking lights that signify nothing, mean nothing, and just blink blink blink, until each of them goes out.

In a world where people can't understand the simplest things, no one is going to understand the bigger things. When that happens, the people of the world are at the mercy of and governed by the chaos they've installed--practically elected without knowing it--as the boss/dictator of the place, where the absence of order--and often natural order--is the order of every day.

The reality is that there's no overarching "this" of a timeline. A timeline is specific, often applied to indicate steps of a plan or post facto. "The timeline for the rollout of our new shower head." "The timeline of the Manassas campaign of the Civil War." Despite what one might be led to believe, parrot, and adopt by these endless utterances in a post-literate society about "This timeline is the worst." It doesn't work like that. And if it did, the post-literate/post-thinking/post-awareness aspect would be what makes it the worst and feeds all the other problems.

That is, it would ironically be the worst because of what I'm writing about here. The stripping away of all meaning in and around human lives. The inability to know...pretty much everything. The near total lack of thinking. Of cognizance. Of attempts at cognizance. Hell, knowing what that word even means.

This is why the world is what it is right now. Other things that people think are separate that suck--like Donald Trump--are a result of this thing I'm talking about. He's ultimately a byproduct of bigger issues.

The effacement of meaning. The reduction in understanding and in caring about the differences between right and wrong. The winnowing away to nothing of the required knowing, the required moral commitment, the required addressing, the required communication skills to speak to and act in service to what's right instead of what's wrong. The extirpation of the idea, to say nothing of the practice, of being accountable. How can someone be accountable when they don't know what things are and can always claim they're something else in a post-meaning world? There's the near impossibility of discernment because of what we've done to ourselves and our minds. Of knowing. Of thinking. Of learning. Growing. Or not devolving.

Things add up. That's the nature of life. There's no "Oh, it's just this..." One "just this" has innumerable others like it working in a kind of silent, inimical partnership that wrecks lives and life, makes everything so much worse and harder, abetting in the retrenchment of meaning, at the level of the individual and in the general sense and the all-around-us sense.

Things have their inherent meaning, but that's lost on us. What do we know? What can we know? What can we see for what it is? What isn't potentially beyond us? Many of us can't even grasp what a timeline is. Or don't care to. Who gives a damn, right? Or we want it to mean whatever the hell we want it to mean. What we feel like it should mean. Because that's how we usually handle things now. Same as most. Works fine so far. Who is going to interpose and correct in a world where so few people could and where they're in the extreme minority such that those in wrong always have the volume, the threat, the perceived influence of numbers on their side?

And what we would like something to mean or be true, including what a timeline is, but really it's everything, is usually a matter of what we happen to know right then and there, without looking any further, and with our lack of education, all the things we've never read, all the things we never tried to learn, all the things we didn't even know there were to learn, because we want to be right because that's how it should be given that it's us. And fuck that guy with his words. Thinks he's better than me...

A world in which we want each of us to be as limited as us (and a ton of free will has been put to use in that personal limiting; which is to say, it didn't have to, and doesn't have to, be that way) isn't a good world. Nor is such a country a good country. A town a good town. A group a good group. An industry--like the publishing industry--a good industry. They become very bad things, diametrically opposed to the things--and the people, when relevant--that would make them better.

We weaponize stupidity. We're proud of it. We double down on it. We think it makes us...independent. Or something. Unshackled. Never mind that we're really shackled by our fear, our insecurities, which is often why we brandish our stupidity about like it were a mighty cudgel. Even as we're bashing ourselves in the proverbial balls with it.

This becomes so total, as we become what we are, that hardly anyone can even tell what's happened because it looks simply like the way of things, nothing to see here, nothing to talk about, but while an incredible, incalculable toll is taken.

That becomes life. And then we normalize what that is, because it's everywhere around us and on our screens. In us. It becomes us, or we it. Doesn't much matter at that point.