WE HAVE VERY FEW REAL PROBLEMS
I know that sounds crazy. But bear with me…
I write fiction: stories people do not believe. Sometimes I think this newsletter is the mirror to that: deconstructing the stories people automatically believe.
The idea for this week came from the news story about the water problem in the Western states of the US and the incredible droughts in Europe. Namely, that there isn’t any water. (I mean, I love the TV show Drain the Ocean, but it’s not supposed to be literal!)
LIFE IN CONSTANT DROUGHT
I grew up in Colorado, and it’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t grown up rationing water what it is like. Residents for decades filled fountains with lights instead of water and transformed our yards into rocks and took military showers.
But more than any one action, this mindset infects you until it’s almost instinct.
The craving for water as you watch the world turn beige and light on fire every year. As your skin desiccates and your hair crackles. As new residents clutch their chapstick and all their bath products stop working, and they wonder, “It’s so dry here.” As you discuss what you would save in the fire because everyone knows someone who’s lost their house.
I thought it was a universal experience, that everyone hoards water until I went to England where there is water everywhere. Where people took showers for as long as they wanted. Where it never stopped raining. Where huge plants soaked up everything and grew to the sky. Where lakes dotted every field. And nobody thought for a single second about what was coming out of their tap. It took me months to grasp that it’s not that they didn’t worry – they didn’t think about it at all.
This may be the first real problem the developed world has faced in a long time.
We have more energy than we know what to do with, which means we have enough to feed, house, and care for everyone. On a practical level, what else do we need?
OUR SELF-INFLICTED PROBLEMS
I want to be extremely clear. I am not saying we don’t have real suffering. There is no end to the way we make ourselves miserable, especially the marginalized among us, who suffer the absolute most. But none of those are real problems.
It’s the definition of prejudice: it doesn’t actually exist. It’s a made-up story that is killing people.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died from gun violence, none of which was necessary. It’s a made-up fight. With real casualties. Hundreds of thousands of kids are stuffed into overcrowded classrooms getting an inferior education with books decided by political actors. Totally made-up problems. (Though they’ll be real enough when those kids come of age.)
WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT IS NOT?
I ran a grocery store through the pandemic, and this became a constant refrain: What is real and what is not real?
There was a lot of policy coming out of corporate. (Side note, never stick a bunch of executives at home and bored again. Just don’t do it.) Some of the changes were absolutely essential to our own protection, and some were absolutely ridiculous.
Safety was real. Getting food on the shelves was real. Making sure the signs were right so we didn’t kill somebody with a nut allergy was real.
Making sure that the automatic schedule was not manually adjusted too many times was not real. Making sure the hourly orders were recorded on paper in real time was not real. Making sure that all the marketing decals for the next holiday matched the map sent by marketing was not real.
And you know what? I was right. Letting that stuff slide didn’t make a single difference.
Oh, eventually our overlords would get a bee in their bonnet about one number or another. For a memorable three months, right at the beginning of the pandemic, it was cold rotisserie chicken sales. I’m not kidding.
We were up to our elbows in bleach and panic and getting calls about our low numbers of leftover chicken. And then that suddenly became real, because you know, staying employed is a real problem, so we’d worry about it for a few weeks, and then it’d be onto something else.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to jump through as many corporate hoops as the next person, but when you’re out there making life and death decisions, and there is not enough time in the day, you have to prioritize what is real.
WE HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO TO KEEP FROM RUNNING OUT OF WATER. IMMEDIATELY.
There’s no blaming one side or the other. I mean you can try, but that doesn’t get you more water. You can even put up a sound bite or graph about climate change. Or one denying climate change. There is still no water. Finally, we must do some actual governing. With actual solutions.
It’s almost refreshing. There is no room for bluster. There is no room for experimenting. We don’t have any water.
Sadly, and happily, there will be more and more real problems as our fight over fantasy problems lead to real-world consequences. The stress sucks, but the simplicity is almost a relief.
I know this sounds weird coming from a writer of fiction, to pay close attention to reality. Still, it is perhaps my time spent focused on fiction that allows me to recognize it so easily in the vast majority of our politics and news.
At work, in news, in everything else, I promise it’s a great thing for your blood pressure and your ability to plan your day to ask: What is real and what is not real?