Tired of fear and loathing in Los Angeles

Hey Joe,

I have been reading your articles for about a year running now and each paragraph pushes me a little closer to escape. Each article shines more light on the psychotic vampire of a socio-economic system we live under. I can see the blood dripping from its fangs. But I am confused, lost. You see, I happen to have a very specific skill that the Hollywood mythmakers find very appealing. As a result, I am 23 and making more money than 99% of the world's citizens. Yet it does not feel that way. Living in this city drains you as fast as it fills you, be it gas, food, rent or entertainment. I spent $40 on four drinks Friday.

I can't stand it here anymore, yet I find it impossible to leave. I used to like my job, but now I can't see it outside of the context of the greater machine: I create amazing visual events for people to be awed by. A modern shaman. Instead of spinning tales of heroism or epic journeys, I merely create the vast explosions and immense destruction demanded by the modern audience. But why do they need this? To pepper their lives with some element of the spectacular? I wonder if what I am doing is any good. Sure, people have a good time going to the movies, but more and more, I leave the cinema feeling worthless, controlled and foolish. I don't think entertainment in its current incarnation has much to offer the world.

So I wish to escape. I want to run, to leave what this nation has become, even though I love what is was. But all the signs are pointing, the klaxons are blaring. This is the time. I need to leave. But I am scared. My father is dying, I am young and stupid, and no one seems to understand what it is that upsets me so much about this American life, beyond my sister and fellow bloggers like JHK and The Oil Drum crowd.

I first got into this through the peak oil connection, and now peak oil is starting to get major press. But it seems that the whole horrible affair goes much deeper than mere oil supplies. I think I am watching my fellow countrymen be mentally crippled, incapable of thought or action. Incapable of organization and fearful of his peers.

I am tired of this fear, tired of this loathing. Is it better elsewhere in the world or is this just a manifestation of my own maladaptive attitudes?

There is a studio in Wellington, New Zealand willing to pay me far more than what I am probably worth. Should I take the jump?

Thanks,

A friend in Los Angeles

------

Well friend,

Yours is one of the most amazing letters I've received from a younger person. As you say, you are a 23-year old shaman of the holographic illusion called the American consciousness. As an insider you know more than 99% of the Americans unto whom you deliver spectacle and digital bread and circuses. A craftsman of the great illusion, one of those behind the curtain. Yet you are not spared the effects of extractive capitalism any more than anyone else. The amazing part is that you see it. I have an in-law working in Hollywood who makes extravagant money, which is sucked away by the machinery of capitalism, yet he cannot see what you, a person half his age, sees. You are certainly not, as you put it, "young and stupid." Far from it.

As for no one seeming to understand why you are so upset, well, having vision and character and a love of the truth never has been easy. Obviously you do "see outside the context of the greater machine," or at least have had a serious glimpse of it. Like you said, " ... all the signs are pointing, the klaxons are blaring." Any of us not sleepwalking cannot avoid it.

Is it any better anywhere else in the world? I dunno. Experience and expectations are quite subjective. At 23 I was still searching hard for something on a higher level than what was being served up in America. And what was being served then looks like haute cuisine compared to now. As to someplace else being "better," who knows? To me better means happier. And as far as I can tell happiness has to do with being grateful for things already available to the whole world. I don't think that happiness is geographically specific. I've seen starving peasants far happier than I.

But you never know unless you take risks. Big risks. Because when you do you find there really was no risk at all. Just moving forward into the world with mind and heart wide open to the matrix of happiness, which seems to be the earth itself. The ease of good weather, the smell of a woman who has just stepped out of the sea into the slanting light of dusk, the devotion of dogs, the moon unobscured by city lights -- even the stench and crush of humanity in what are supposed to be the most miserable places on earth by American standards. Yeah, I know, it sounds like some New Age crap. But it's all I know about happiness. It is experiential, not intellectual. Strip away the technological hubris of post-modern man, and what you have left is a pretty simple creature. The same one he always was before he swallowed civilization's greatest lie (or bit down on the apple in the garden at the advice of a serpant) -- that complexity is progress and that material gain is the guiding paradigm. Those two together are deadly to the soul.

I would never presume to tell someone else whether they should "take the jump or not." As the old Jewish saying goes, "Every man carried his own hide to the tanner."

But regarding your wondering whether you do any good or not, I will be so presumptuous as to say: "Of course not. That's why you feel like shit."

It has been my experience that real courage offers no guarantees. That's why they call it courage. Another thing I'm pretty sure of is that there is no escape, but merely making choices we can live with, or even be proud of in the end.

In art and labor,

Joe