Something Inevitably Happens

To prepare for the inevitable, we must confront the metaphysical questions that our hyper-materialist culture has trained us to ignore.

Something inevitably happens. The whole thing has to collapse eventually.

“Nothing ever happens!” is the slogan Team Normalcy Bias loves to recite after each crisis (or potential crisis) has come and gone. Of course, that’s not literally true; something is always happening. But in terms of cataclysms that completely and irreparably destroy the existing order, nothing ever happens. The Globohomo Empire survives the storms that assail it; the system may bend, but it never breaks. (So far …)

And that is what Team Normalcy Bias means when they say nothing ever happens: they believe that the current socioeconomic order is here to stay; it may change gradually over time, but in spite of these changes, it will essentially remain the same system. On the macro level, nothing ever happens.

The System Bends, but It Never Breaks (Until It Does)

Sure, big events occasionally splash across the news cycle like a large rock crashing into a pond. From the point of view of a dragonfly hovering over the water’s surface, the waves caused by the impact may seem ominously large and violent, but from a bird’s eye view a hundred feet above the pond, the waves are inconsequential. Eventually, no matter how big they are, the waves subside, leaving the surface of the water smooth and serene, as if nothing had ever happened. The pond is a system, and that system may bend, but it never breaks.

Nothing Ever Happens in Life?

Following this analogy, you could say “Nothing ever happens!” about your own life. Yeah, you may grow as a person, passing through markedly different life stages as you do; you may move thousands of miles away from where you grew up; you may get married and have children and be transformed from a crazy young buck into a conventional middle-aged family man; you may get older and wiser, until eventually you get so old that you become senile and unable to remember any of that wisdom; you may encounter plenty of challenges and even a few genuine crises along the way; but each new change in life, no matter how profound, eventually subsides into a new normal. Times of stress and strife are inevitably followed by seasons of boredom and banality. Episodes of illness or injury may leave their scars, but the body is resilient, and life goes on. Your biological life is a system (or a system of systems), and that system may bend, but it never breaks.

Except that it does, eventually, break. It happens only once, but that’s all it takes, because when the system finally breaks, you die. Your (biological) life ends. In terms of your own mortality, it’s true that “nothing ever happens,” right up until the very end.

An ER Physician reassuring a bedridden patient that he’ll be fine, because Nothing ever happens! (At least, 99.9% of the time, so far …)