The earth is a ball of solid rock with a molten core ~6,500km in diameter, with a thin, layer of air of about 10km sticking precariously to it. Beyond, it’s harsh vacuum and hard radiation. About 0.15%. That thin layer and a modest magnetic field are all that sustains life.

Sometimes I think mutual human consideration/kindness is like that. In absolute terms, a pathetic slice of space sandwiched between a rock and a hard place. But it is everything. Lose that and you lose humanity. The rock is brutish animal nature, the hard place is certain death.

Here’s the odd thing: when you’re young you generally don’t appreciate this enough, but you feel every hardship more deeply, and almost always react with harsh unkindness. It’s ironic, you create the very conditions that make coping harder.

But when older, you generally appreciate the thin atmosphere of kindness more. You realize it’s all we have. This is the “mellowing” even tough guys go through. You have a thicker skin, you feel same hardships less, but you appreciate kindness more even though you need it less.

It’s weird but though I personally need kindness a lot less now than 25y ago, I am more distressed by the general lack of it. Especially when much younger people are needlessly cruel/harsh to each other. But I guess I survived and so will they. But it seems so unnecessary.

Problems get harder with age until they get impossible, and then you die. But until then, the thin atmosphere of kindness/consideration humans are capable of creating for each other is 90% of what makes life worthwhile. It’s the basic substance of humanity. Yet we undervalue it.

We go from needing it a lot but not appreciating it enough to not needing it much but appreciating it a lot. That’s the irony of the human condition: we carefully skirt its essence as we chart our courses from cradle to grave. Suspicious of the very atmosphere that sustains us.

Makes me sad at our spiritual stupidity. Many go through life entirely dismissing this substance of humanity as mere superficiality that can be dispensed with, and then fruitlessly search for substance elsewhere, only to be disappointed at the vast emptiness of “deeper” things.

And this is why I have such a strong reaction to the Trump era. Personally it has barely affected my life in any major way. But at the same time, it feels like a steady, relentless, and fundamentally pointless poisoning of the substance of humanity, and calling it “strength”