I don’t think my parents ever really enforced a bedtime when I was a kid but I do remember my favorite Sundays were ones when the Steelers would play during Sunday Night Football. I remember how excited I would be all weekend for the game because I got to stay up late — but also because there was something about Sunday evenings that made me really sad and having something about the evening to be excited about made my weekends better.

I don’t hate Sundays evening anymore, but I definitely don’t love them either. I try to avoid using the term “hate” to describe anything nowadays as I’ve found when I cultivate such strong disdain for something that it leads me to try to articulate the disdain with the term “hate” it brings a certain negative aura in my mind that I don’t like to keep there for long. There’s something about when we tell ourselves that we hate something that it clouds our minds, boxing ourselves into a corner where we no longer see that thing as it is. Often we don’t really hate anything in the true sense of the word; instead I think we often associate that something with something else that has wrought harm on us that has resulted in us associating whatever thing we believe we hate with the pain that we experienced. 

For every rule, an exception. There are things that one can say they hate with a righteous mindset; I hate racism, bigotry, prejudice of all forms. But the root here is that hating racism is not enough to not be racist, and hating racism is not enough to be antiracist. This is true of anything that we may claim is a righteous hatred. But most of the times, the parts of our worlds we claim to hate are merely strong disdains. Even then, we can unlearn these disdains, or at least unlearn our associations between our disdains and the pains they’ve resulted in.

Even considering this, Sunday evenings are still hard for me. They’ve always been; they were days I associated with the sunsetting of fun times, homework and the beginning of another week of school, days that weren’t off days but were rather half-off days which somehow made them worse than weekdays. Maybe my experience was unique or abnormal, but it seems to me that this feeling of sadness on Sundays is a common American feeling. Maybe it has something to do with the acute awareness of something enjoyable dwindling away. 

I have a feeling part of this has to do with American work and school culture; we call the working and schooldays “weekdays” and we call the days where people are traditionally “off” “weekends” as if our weeks are not conceptualizations of time based upon a cosmic calendar but rather classified by when we are working or not. We use terms delineating our lives into two bracketed spheres that are not framed from the lens of our whole lives but more specifically our work lives. When somebody asks us whether or not we are working on any given day, they ask us if we are “off” as opposed to the opposite where we could instead assume people are not defined by the time where they are working to earn an income that allows them to live their lives how they want to. Why is “off” when we are not working? Why do we not frame things in a way that we are humans first, employees second?

I’m not naïve enough to believe that we would all suddenly be happy without traditional work, but I do relatively strongly believe America’s unhealthy relationship with work has a lot to do with the colloquial “Sunday scaries” and even worse, I suspect this toxic relationships with Sundays is cultivated from a young age. The evidence also suggests making more money doesn’t directly correlate with happiness; it has a lot more to do with people having the material conditions to be live comfortably, something that most Americans do not have. I adore humanity and people; I so strongly believe that most humans want to be happy and they want to socialize with their fellow humans. I don’t believe racism or bigotry of any kind is genetic; it is taught, learned, perpetuated, knowingly and unknowingly. Yet, it is most disappointing that we are so inventive, so intelligent, so curious and our society hardly reflects it. Early hominids weren’t strong, fast, or big; they were creative and intelligent. The average person is imaginative and creative; the systems we have created are not.

The world that exists in its current iteration is not the work on any single person but it does not reflect a world that was created by the best, brightest, most compassionate, or creative. The world — and by world I mean society — that exists does not have to exist in this way. A world could — can and hopefully will someday — exist where nobody wants for hunger, clean water, shelter or in fear of losing their livelihood due to climate calamities or political upheaval. This world could exist everywhere, not bound by human-created and arbitrary geographical borders. It could exist, and while there would require an immense restructuring and reimagining of the world as it stands, it could exist if we eliminated that is which uniquely and tragically human: Perceived differences across our species. 

I’ve not traveled as much as I’d like, but one does not have to travel to every corner of the world to educate one’s self. Traveling and seeing more of the world is a pretty damn effective way of learning just how rich and textured the world is, but we are living in the most interconnected, accessible era of human history. With a few free online tools a la Wikipedia and YouTube, we are able to learn about essentially every subject we could ever want to learn about. Through books purchased or freely available through libraries, we can read full-scale histories on any subject imaginable; we can see the perspectives of just about anybody (though, there are limitations here of course); we can immerse ourselves into places that would require expensive travel. The reality is, not every currently has the means to take time off and afford sabbaticals to travel to the ends of the earth. But anybody has the ability to vicariously explore every realm they want. Books, and a modern invention deserving of its own praises, Wikipedia, have allowed us to be practitioners of whatever we want. We underestimate our own capabilities when we convince ourselves we have to pursue four-year degrees in subjects just to summarily understand them. 

Consider libraries for a brief moment. Libraries are not businesses intended to generate revenue, let alone endless economic growth, a precondition and almost certain point of failure for businesses in the 21st century capitalist economy. Libraries exist as public services; they are places where people can exist with no expectation of purchasing a coffee, beer, or food; locals can gather there and host events; using computers and internet and printing, a requirement to engage with society in 2021 (and thus a necessary good for all of us), are freely availability; books, audiobooks, magazines are free to rent. Libraries at their cores are an example of our imagination flourishing. Sadly these ideas are few, but they don’t have to be.

This is not to say humans are imaginative. Individually, and in some spaces collectively, we are! The pieces are there: We have people everywhere that are writing about how the world could be reimagined to avoid climate or economic catastrophe. These ideas would probably receive a lot more attention if they didn’t undermine the current socio-geo-eco-political system that exists. It’s the systems, mostly due to intentional political maintenance of the status quo, that are not as imaginative or successful as they could be. Maybe it’s not all human negligence; to a degree, our system is intended to appear broken.

I’ve spent most Sundays of my life reflecting on what I think it would be that would bring me joy. I find myself lost in thoughts of exploring the world and all the beautiful landscapes and places that exist on every inch of this wonderful, breathtaking planet.

Every part of our planet is a remarkable marvel. The conditions that came together to give rise to the early days of this planet — in fact to every moment that has ever existed across the whole of the entire universe — are inextricably connected to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a moment in time where the universe arose. The atoms that have existed have always existed since the beginning of time and they will exist for trillions and trillions of years into the future until the bonds finally dissolve and they dissipate into nothingness. Our planet has been shaped by meteoroids, animals, gravitational relationships to the sun and the moon. There was a time where there was no water, no life on this planet, no atmosphere. Through a series of unlikely events, an atmosphere developed, then water, then single-celled organisms, then life exploded and was decimated and continued to explode. 

A better world is possible, I really truly believe that. I hope others do too.

tl