There Is Beauty Everywhere. Even In Dystopia. Even In Armageddon.
One point I will always adamantly insist on is that it’s entirely possible to live a joyful and exuberant life in the midst of this abusive dystopia.
There’s a pervasive, unexamined notion throughout revolutionary politics that there’s some kind of nobility in being miserable. If it isn’t seen as noble, it’s at least seen as rational, because everything is so unjust and unhealthy.
There’s a widespread assumption that your level of political awareness should have an inverse correlation to your level of personal happiness, because of all the tyranny, injustice, poverty, genocide and ecocide. That it would be selfish to be happy in a world so deeply troubled.
But that’s rubbish. Nobody is helped by your misery. By depriving yourself of joy, you are only depriving the world of that much joy. Being more joyful makes you more energized, more helpful, and more useful to the cause, and it brings joy to everyone around you.
Being joyful is a skill, and like any other skill it takes practice. But it’s something we all have access to if we want it.
Being joyful doesn’t entail hiding from the misery of the world or compartmentalizing away from the reality of what’s happening; quite the opposite, in fact. It entails opening yourself all the way up to what’s happening in each moment and feeling it all with the heart of a poet. It means becoming more sensitive, not less, because a stripped-open sensitivity is where ubiquitous beauty is found.
We always have access to joy because we always have access to beauty. Beauty is everywhere. Even in dystopia. Even in this slow-motion armageddon we now find ourselves in. Even in the exhaust fumes and the flashing screens. Even in the polluted oceans and falling bombs. Everywhere you look, everywhere you feel, everywhere you listen, an overpowering beauty shines forth.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s false. Beauty is in everything. The failure to see beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is just another word for the experience of having truly seen something. If the eye is failing to see the beauty in a given moment, the fault lies with the perceiver, not with the perceived.
You know that feeling when you’re showing someone your favorite movie for the first time, and it’s at your favorite part, and you look over at them to see their response, and they’re missing the whole thing because they’re looking at their phone?
Most people live their whole lives that way. Missing all the best parts while fixating on empty nonsense. Keeping their attention wrapped up in their mental monologues of judgement and worry. In their endless search to distract themselves from the present moment. In their doomscrolling and other addictive behaviors.
They’re missing moment after moment of radiant, electrifying beauty, and they’re trading it all for so very, very little. They’re going to look back on their lives from their deathbeds and realize that they weren’t really there for it. That they missed all the best parts while chasing their goals, running away from their aversions, and trying to distract themselves from the tedium of it all.
The best parts that get missed are the parts our minds tend to dismiss as boring and unworthy of our attention. The daily commute. The wait in the elevator. The kitchen cleanup. The hanging of laundry. The sights outside the window. The sounds inside the room. The feeling of the floor under the feet and the air in the lungs. Every single moment of this is packed full of staggering beauty.
I insist that this is true. Insist on it. If we were fighting holy wars over this principle, I would happily die on the front lines defending it. There are very few things in life that I hold a rock-solid uncompromising view on, but the fact that there is beauty in everything is one of them. Anyone who disagrees is simply wrong, and I will tell them so with great vehemence in my voice.
Don’t waste your precious time here missing the beauty of each moment. This is more important now than ever, because we don’t know how long humanity’s adventure on this miraculous blue world will last. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed to any of us, but these days it’s not even guaranteed to our species.
We are all going to die. Maybe we will die one by one, or maybe we will all die together in one frightening moment. In either case, we owe it to ourselves and to our world to try our very best to deeply appreciate every moment of every day of the time that we have left.
Just keep bringing your attention back to what’s here and now, and keep looking for the beauty in it. I swear to you it’s there. It’s there in the feelings in the body. It’s there in the sights, sounds and smells of everyday living, no matter what else is happening in your life or in our world. Keep looking for it, and you’ll get better and better at seeing it.
That’s how life becomes more joyful. Not by chasing the highs or running from the lows, but from learning to relish the beauty that’s inherent in terrestrial sensory experience every single moment of your life, no matter what else happens to be occurring.
Learn to do this, and you can live the rest of your life knowing that even if it all comes crashing down one day, at least you’ll know you tried your very best to make sure you didn’t miss the miraculousness of your time here.
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I love the timing of this article!
For the past week I've had a headache, partially from heat and wildfire smoke, and I've been anxious about the possibility of losing my home and community to fire.
But this afternoon a friend told me about a new locally made plant based fudgesicle, and I went out and bought one as soon as I could. I spent a moment in the shade enjoying a beautiful summer day, eating my fudgesicle, enjoying every nibble. Then I rode my bike home when it was half eaten, eating the rest while coasting down the road.
There's still every possibility of a forest fire, but for a brief moment I enjoyed the feeling of a beautiful summer day anyways.
I will hang onto that feeling. It was like a kind of making peace.
If there's no beauty and joy to be had in this world, why are we struggling for peace, justice and the wellbeing of our fellow humans, animals and ecology?
Make peace, be kind, be gentle.