Those corny slapstick family comedies in the vein of National Lampoon Vacation used to seem so dumb to me. The way one blunder led to another became incredibly stupid. Incredible in the sense of, unbelievable or unrealistic. How many times can one step on a rake or get hit in the crotch? I thought it was just cheap humour.
But there is something accidentally wise about tropes like these. It is the reality that when it all falls apart, often one is thrust into a vortex of one catastrophe after another. In a sick cosmic version of pouring when it’s raining, bad events tend to lead to even more bad events.
The Bible spells it out as if it written in the stars for it to be so.
Matthew 25:29 - “For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
How is that fair?
When one faces disgrace they are reduced to nothing, or at least it feels that way but to add injury to insult, that same sense of nothingness is often replaced with another, somehow lower nothingness. Like, a bigger zero.
One discovers that whatever stage of hell they find themselves at, there is a stage below that is worse. One of the most important survival strategies after losing it all is to somehow stop the hemmoraghing and keep one’s self from losing even more. However bad it is right now, it can be worse, you can make it worse, and you really don’t want to do that.
It’s not that there is a cosmic force trying to push your face further into the mud. It’s that when we face our social and existential doom our decision making abilities are significantly compromised. We develop an anxiety induced tunnel vision that makes it difficult to trust our own judgment.
Be aware that in the panic of catastrophe you are at a high risk of making poor choices that will lead to further stress and despair. Maybe your financial situation has been threatened so you put your last few resources on a risky investment or business opportunity despite all the signs of scam and now your situation is worse. Maybe your reputation has been damaged and you seek affirmation or sympathy from a an untrustworthy person who then takes advantage of your situation and now you feel even lower in status. Maybe your stress makes you hard to be around and you start pushing away your allies and loved ones, leaving you lonely and more dejected than when you started.
There are vultures who are counting on coming across injured ducks like you. Writer Naomi Klein introduced the idea of “Disaster Capitalism” in which powerful entities benefit off of catastrophes. Think war profiteers or price gouging during a crisis. “Never let a catastrophe go to waste,” claimed former Chicago Mayor Rahm Immanuel. There are plenty of those waiting for you to be in crisis so that they can sell their snake oil solution and in your state of hopelessness and desperation you might buy.
The world is constantly in a state of decay. It is the second law of thermodynamics. Everything falls apart. But we don’t need to help speed up that process either. Like an escalator moving down when we’re wanting to go up, if we do nothing we descend. With just minimal effort we can stay in the same place, and with a burst of energy we can actually start to ascend.
While the universe is random and constantly falling apart, we as human beings are the creative force that turn nothing into something, chaos into order, and catastrophe into opportunity. You may have never dealt with such blinding crisis before and it might seem completely overwhelming and hopeless but this is still an opportunity to become and to build something new. It’s what you’re built to do. You are an agent of creation and meaning making.
Sometimes your frantic attempt to “fix” the problem will make things worse. Instead, consider zooming out and grieving the fact that this is your life right now. This will always be a part of your life story. Eventually you will be able to grab a pen and work on how this part of your story will be told. Will it be a never ending comedy of errors? Rake after rake in the face?
Or will this be the stage of your life, riddle with challenge and obstacles that you will have eventually overcome? Can you imagine the possibility that one day you will look back at this time of crisis and be proud of how you got out of the mud and cleaned yourself off? How you turned adversity into opportunity? You might even admit how comical your many mistakes were… one day.