It had been a cloudy evening after a day of heavy and continuous rainfall. He noticed that the sun now shone brightly through underneath the immense dark grey duvet covering the sky, just before it kissed goodnight to the day until the dawn. There was a rainbow high in the East. He sat in the shadows trying to focus on the words on the page while another hour past. Since the sun had sunk, the twilight was fading and he had not yet broken his concentration to get up and turn on the light.

Just outside his window there were two spiders engaged in some kind of slow ritualistic embrace. Not the kind of embrace he wished to be any part of or replicate. One was much larger than the other and they were certainly not fighting. Was the male’s fate sealed? Could we expect a clan of tiny spider babies to appear in the coming days? A large black silhouette flew slowly past a dusk-filled gap in the trees, too slow and large to be a pigeon or a bat. Probably an owl. This seemed like a magical evening after a decidedly dull day.

He started to find it harder to concentrate as his thoughts meandered from one topic to the next. The words on the page were bypassing any real processing, and only with some luck may perhaps have been lodging themselves somewhere in his subconscious. This was the time he usually felt best to stop reading and rest his eyes and his brain. The sun now well below the horizon, he did put the book down, but allowed his thoughts to continue.

It was several weeks since his thoughts had gone into hibernation in the darkest realms of his subconscious, leaving him never really present. So the magic of this moment he was experiencing was accompanied by an understated sense of renewal, awakening, excitement, and anticipation. Thoughts are important, you see. They might not be important to anyone else, but yours are important to you, and these thoughts were important to him. He thought how, while his taste in film and TV over the years had always been eclectic, he had always enjoyed an affinity with those stories that portray society as broken. Fight Club, The Matrix, Captain Fantastic, Mr Robot, and many others, all told him in a fictional setting that our existence was governed by a small number of very powerful individuals, families, or corporations. This narrative had always allowed him to feel somewhat “happy” about being alienated, to an extent, from a society that is based on consumerism, advertising, and oppression for profit, while distracting and containing the masses. He couldn’t stand the thought of marketing and PR persuading him that certain brands would improve his life, or that certain lifestyles were better than others. Neither could he stomach the onslaught of advertising convincing him to empty his pockets in exchange for something that he didn’t realise he needed. The innovation of being able to pause live TV or watch recordings so that he could fast forward the ads was, at least for a time, a revelation for him.

Such stories, and the fact that he “enjoyed” them, had always left him with a false sense of superiority over most other people. Like he was somehow smarter than them because he had realised that there was a real truth in this fiction. His hypocrisy as well as the irony in this regard had recently become clearer, and not only because he was just as much of a consumer as the next person despite his best efforts. It was also because his resulting moral self isolation from society was exactly the kind of effect that those in power wanted for the public, especially those of them which had decided that something was not right (beyond what the media allowed them to learn).

Reading Chomsky, as he currently was, had been an eye opening experience, to put it mildly. To see that the fiction he had enjoyed for the last 30 years or so was largely based on actual, not to mention recent, world history, was a lot to come to terms with. He had always known that this was the case to an extent, but the number of real world examples that Chomsky draws upon is almost incomprehensible.

Maybe it’s better that we don’t discuss how society allows the global population to continue to be exploited, with poorer countries being railroaded by the rich into producing for export. Maybe it’s better if we don’t talk about how this in turn makes the poorer country appear financially better off, meanwhile the majority of its own population starve because they haven’t produced enough for themselves. (And of course, the rich few continue to live in luxury.) Perhaps it’s best for everyone that we don’t learn how many times the US has been responsible for derailing attempts to establish democracy in foreign countries. Or on the other hand, maybe it would be better if more people dug deeper into the history of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Indonesia… The list goes on. It’s OK for individuals or small pockets of people to discuss these things as long as they remain mostly segregated.

With the event of his father’s passing in the last three months or so, his mind had w[a|o]ndered into some dark places. In a nutshell, they ranged from realising his own mortality to the mortality of those closest to him, future generations, all life on earth, the sun, the milky way, and the entire universe. Of course he always “knew” that nothing lived forever. But he had never truly felt it until now. In an effort to try and escape from this dark place he had turned to trying to understand more about the world around him. Thanks to Captain Fantastic, he decided to see what Chomsky had to say.

He looked out of the window one more time. There was no sign of the clouds, or the sun, the rainbow, or the spiders. The warm summer air must have dissipated the clouds, revealing instead a black quilt with a print of bright stars in familiar arrangement. He thought of going to bed, but instead headed to the garden and collected a sun lounger from the shed. Setting it up on the grass, he lay down and covered himself with a blanket. It was August and the Perseids were starting to pick up so with any luck he might be in for a bit of a show.

In a way, he was grateful to Chomsky for enlightening him to these stark truths about how the world works, and how people naturally tend to behave. And once again, he found himself having stumbled upon information that made him feel smarter and superior in some way to the masses. (Given that 50% of the population are below average intelligence, he at least had a 50% chance of that being true, depending on what day you caught him and what the subject matter was.) He asked himself, what is the use of this knowledge if you don’t do something constructive with it? And if you’re not going to do something constructive, then what was the point in reading about it? How can anyone live with themselves in the knowledge that the world works in the way that it does, unless they take up the charge to actively try and make things better? He was waiting to read Chomsky’s writing on optimism over despair to see if it helped.

So far, the general message seemed to be that society rewards subservience to the system. Most of us stand at least a small chance of improving our situation if we operate within the tolerance of higher powers of business and suck up to the right people. But stray too far from the path, and you risk losing everything through government or corporate enforcement. He recalled a recent case where he had stated his thoughts on social media about the unethical behaviour of a large financial institution. His boss had fired a warning shot across his bow, because there was some kind of relationship between his employer and said financial institution. Don’t underestimate the courage required in those cases of history where people have successfully organised themselves and stood up to oppression. It still happens today when the situation is dire enough. Are the benefits worth the human cost? Maybe not to the individual, but to the following generations, the answer must surely be yes. He took some perverse consolation from the thought that even if his existence was comfortable, human nature is only willing to accept so much oppression and people do rise up when enough is enough. In his example, the only sacrifice required was that he quit his job, but not without first finding a better one to go to. No real sacrifice at all compared to the truly oppressed.

It’s always darkest before the dawn. “Before the dawn”, being the time prior to light starting to increase again ahead of the sunrise, is the best for seeing shooting stars. While he recalled this phrase, he realised that he ultimately needed to find peace, and be happy, and rediscover the fun loving, invincible individual he used to be. He needed this not just for himself but for his family, as radiating such negativity can have disastrous consequences on relationships and the mental health of those one loves. The saying goes that you should have courage to change the things you can, and humility to accept the things that you can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. It occurred to him that there is a Venn diagram of sorts here, with the overlap being the danger zone; the area of risk that you may be prepared to enter when the circumstances demand it, with the potential consequences being to lose all that you have.

Where to go from here? He pondered and thought to himself: If you decide you want a red car, then you will start to see them everywhere. Likewise, if you look for trouble and strife, then you will see it everywhere, and it will make you troubled. But if you look for beauty and joy, then that is what you will find, and that is what you will become. That is the journey of discovery that he now decided to embark upon again. Because what is the sense in worrying about all of the world’s problems if he was unwilling or unable to fix them?

And so with that, the forces that dictate our lives may have won another victory, safe in the knowledge that little old he will not rise up and risk making a fool of himself, trying to convince others that there is something monstrous reigning over us that needs to be defeated. But let it be known that he knew. And that he would selfishly and consciously choose the happiness of his family over the war against injustice. He would try to win small battles here and there where he could and where he thought he actually might win. But be assured that they would not be big enough to rock any boats or draw too much attention.

His thoughts delved deeper into his version of logic and reason. He thought that it is true that there is constant pain and suffering in unfathomable amounts in this world. And we will all get our share of it at some point in our lives if we have not already. It is also true that there is an incredible amount of happiness being experienced at any one moment. So why go looking for the suffering, when we know that it will find us one day anyway? Why not look instead for the happiness? Not just happiness for ourselves, but the observation of it and appreciation of it wherever we find it. He considered for a moment how privileged he was to be able to make this kind of conscious decision. This came with a certain amount of guilt, but now was not the time to focus on that.

By this time, at least 80 bright meteors had burned bright across the sky. Maybe one of them might head directly for his garden and smash a hole in the ground next to him, releasing ancient and other-worldly biochemistry into the air he was breathing. Who knows, right? Anything could happen.

Truth is a variable. Or rather, the truth that any one mind is capable of ingesting and interpreting is finite and varies greatly between individuals and from day to day. With that knowledge, he chose to look for the truth that is beauty and joy. This felt at first a little like taking the blue pill. But he didn’t truly believe that to be so. He thought it was more like having taken the red pill, but trying to maintain an aura of positivity for the benefit of his own mind and of those closest to him.

As he started to nod off on his sun lounger, he recalled a song that his father used to sing, and with this the words of Simon and Garfunkel lingered into his dreams: “it’s no matter whether you’re born to play the king or pawn, for the line is thinly drawn between joy and sorrow”. And while he dreamed, he crossed back from one side of that line to the other.

This was the moment just before everything changed.