Ruminating

I re-watched a favorite episode of Mad Men recently. Season 2, Episode 2, Fight One. A plane crashes; Pete Campbell’s father was on it. We have a great exchange between Draper and Campbell, which ends with this exchange. Then Pete and his family have to prepare for the funeral. They sit in a stuffy parlor and passive-aggressively snipe at each other.

So many of the tasks necessary and vital for survival have been made obsolete or trivial or redundant in Western society. You don’t have to hunt for food. You don’t have to protect yourself from wild animals. You’ve got a grocery store down the street. You’ve got four walls and a high-powered shotgun in case any of them get knocked down.

Most Americans barely have to work. I mean, you have to work, if you define work as involving sitting in an office chair and typing.

All the small things are taken care of. All that’s left are the big and unanswerable questions, the ones that previous generations of human beings never dealt with until their minds were numb with exhaustion from working so desperately hard to survive.

But we’ve got so much more excess energy and so much free time, only some of which can be filled with going to the gym or watching Oprah or playing Halo. So we dwell.

And then something like death happens. Humans used to dig a hole, throw in the body, perform a quick ritual, cover the corpse and then move on. They were tired and they knew they had to do something important and mentally and physically demanding the next day, like trail the herd of buffalo that was their food source.

So what do we do now? We have nothing so vital to distract us, nothing so simple and mundane to engage our minds. We dwell. We dwell and dwell and we sit in our parlors and we simmer in the depths of the thick fog of our anxiety and fear. We smoke cigarettes and shoot heroin and write pathetic online blogs just to take the edge off, but it doesn’t work.

Our consciousness has evolved to the point where it is persistently aware of our mortality. Our society has advanced to the point where the only question left for humans to answer is death.

And there are no more distractions.

So we ruminate and stew.