Nothing is how it’s supposed to be

It’s hard to fathom that these types of ships used to be the latest and greatest. (British Library)

Once, I came back to my business location after several weeks away only to find a giant, dead tree.

I had a great team running things. And yet, when I walked up to the building, the first thing I saw was that the eighty-foot oak tree next to the front steps had brown leaves in the middle of summer.

Everything else was green. The dead tree was hard to miss. But no one else had seen it. Or if they had, they hadn't said anything about it.

This kind of thing happens all the time. A piano bench is wiggly because its screws are loose. A paper towel dispenser releases an inch worth of its contents with every pull. A wall calendar is still turned to February on the tenth of March.

On some level, everyone who sees these broken, misplaced, or mediocre items thinks that they are supposed to be that way — that that's just how it is, and the person in charge must be aware of it.

In reality, the person in charge is trusting everyone else to be their eyes and ears and convey the necessary information, and that doesn't happen.

I'm no different when it's not my thing. I used to feel a sense of responsibility to let someone know when things were amiss ("You're out of toilet paper in the bathroom"). As a business owner, I would want to know. But it's exhausting to constantly be on the lookout for mess-ups and problems, and I got to a point where I just gave up.

I can't see everything anyway. I'm only attuned to the kinds of things I would tend to notice. I have serious blind spots. As a Gen Xer, I accepted Baby Boomer culture as the way things were and the way they would always be. It's been fascinating to watch the Millennials and Gen Z transform the world and the way we talk about it. Things that I always took for granted, like the stigma against talking about mental illness or the dominance of guitar-based rock, are no longer givens.

I'm not aware of what's fashionable — I am twenty years out of date. My lack of freshness is simply invisible to me. I am only able to acknowledge that this is the case because I vaguely remember what it was like to be young and notice that the older generation was still dressing like it was the twentieth century and referencing cultural touchstones that were no longer in vogue.

The antidotes to my closed mind include traveling, interacting with people who are different from me, and studying the work of bigger thinkers. When I recognize that things haven't always been the way they currently are or observe that they are different elsewhere, I can hang on to the idea that nothing is how it is supposed to be. In fact, there is no way that it is supposed to be. Anything can change, and a lot of things probably should.

We humans have had war as long as we've recorded our history. We lie. We treat each other unfairly. We can't imagine our world without plastic, and now we'll never have a world without plastic because it's going to be in our landfills for all eternity — but two hundred years ago, there was no such thing. We foolishly destroyed most of the railroad lines in North America and paved everything for the convenience of cars, which also didn't exist two hundred years ago. That plan turns out to have been very short-sighted.

Things don't have to be the way they are. There didn't used to be a such thing as a diamond engagement ring. It's hard to imagine alternatives to the established norms, but we can try. We can practice seeing what isn't there. We can try to practice seeing clearly what is there (just as difficult, really).

There are no guarantees that our interpretation of reality is the accurate or permanent one, and accepting this gives us the teensy bit of humility that keeps us from unquestioning obedience to whatever government, tech company, or charismatic cult leader might wish to own us.

I don't know how to fix the problems of the world. But I believe that they can be fixed, even if I don't have the imagination to figure it out right now. I won't resign myself to the way things are — I know it's not how they have to be. That belief keeps me going even when I can't see the evidence to the contrary.