Remember a scene from your childhood: a movie that you saw for the first time, which made a lasting impression on you. Depending on how old you are, it might have been Gladiator, Apollo 13, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, or even something older. Try to remember how you felt watching it, who you were at the time; where you lived, how life was, how the space around you was; what kinds of thoughts you had at that age, what kind of hopes. Hold that thought. Let’s talk about the timelessness of that experience.
Few things can make one more miserable than being stuck in a bad marriage or in an unhappy relationship. Hours, days, weeks, months, years of emptiness, lack of empathy, lack of intimacy, animosity, hatred. Why on earth would anyone want to stay in such a situation? After all, our time in this world is finite. The scent of cardamom and cinnamon while decorating the Christmas tree, the feeling of waves gently lapping on your feet as you enter the sea, the full moons you admire in the hot August night – endless, don’t they seem? Hard to believe you have 10, 20, maybe 30 of those left before you die. Why would you waste them being with someone that doesn’t love you and, most probably, despises you? Maybe the Bard has the answer:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
Perhaps it’s all a matter of habit, of fearing the change.
Once I gave my Gothic fiction students an exercise: I divided them into two teams, with the first team asked to argue why it would be nice to live in a utopia, and the second team asked to do the same for a dystopia. The latter team, upon hearing they needed to argue how great it would be to live in a dystopia, began to murmur – in the style of “oh man, how are we gonna argue for that?”
During the exercise, feelings changed – which had been my plan all along. The team that had to argue for the dystopia began to realize how horrible a utopia would actually be: no change, no possibility to make things better, no real progress. The other team, instead, had real trouble coming up with arguments.
Dystopias are ugly. But they can get better. Utopias can get only worse
