"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered."

The only answer I can arrive at is that we're all in this together. We need actual social media to reconnect.

Or, “actual social” (less or entirely unmediated)

I just had my first and need to give this a rewatch. I think this film, Oryx and Crake, and The Wire spurred me at that point in my life to become extremely involved in movement organizing. First around civic engagement then anti-racism then even further left efforts.

In the decade+ that I've been doing this, I don't think I've ever felt despondent and hopeless. I think a lot about the 'what would you be doing if this were the time of a slave economy/indigenous genocide/segregation/etc' - and that I, myself, am practically doing all that I can with the freetime that I have and that is all that I can do.

I may not be able to halt the course for the increasingly dystopian society we live in now but I'm, at minimum, not doing nothing, and that's something I'll be proudly able to communicate and maybe teach to my children in the future.

> Watching the movie after kids

After you seen Villeneuve's Arrival ?

Or Spielberg's AI...