JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

My life, and all of our lives here in the “first world” are obsessed with, organized around, and circumscribed completely by the three words that make up the title of this post: me, here, now. Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, where we are famous for our collective national amnesia, and have been for multiple centuries now, not that anyone remembers who said that about us first.

We are hyper-focused on ourselves, what we are doing at this very moment, where we are right now. Even our counter-culture, if you could call the self-indulgent me-fest of the 1960’s a counter-culture, exhorts us to Be Here Now, to over-develop our sense of self, our obsessive awareness of our surroundings (home decoration, clothing, etc) and our myopic devotion to right now, eschewing any past, any history, any story that does not star us, doing this, right now. Currently, one need to look no further than the fringes of right-libertarianism and lifestyle anarchism to find paeans to the revolutionary possibility of becoming even more devoted to self, isolated in a permanent insurrectionary present.

There are however, activities that work to break down this hegemony of immediatism, activities that reconnect us to a great chain of human history, that locate us inside a timeline, instead of outside all time and space, contemplating our perfect, individual now. Outside of the basic biological functions of the human body - which certainly have a part to play in breaking down our barriers to considering the distant, temporal world - the activities that most challenge these notions of atomized Thatcherite/Right-Libertarian self-obsession are the ones that humans have always engaged in, telling stories, building our own shelter, hunting, growing food…

These activities change our perception of time and of history. They lengthen the scale of our personal time to encompass all of history (and pre-history). No one can long kneel on the ground, hands in the dirt, coaxing plants out of the soil without feeling some connection to almost every human being who has ever come before. No one can sit around a campfire and hear a story told or a song sung and not become aware of how primal and basic to being human this activity is. No one can stalk their quarry through the woods as silently as they know how without some inkling of how we, as humans, have always lived and died.

So, for me, here, now, writing this down for all to see, publishing it across a vast web of common knowledge; for me, and for anyone else who has despaired at the relentlessly vapid simulacrum of modern life, this is a simple reminder that there are still ‘real’ activities out there. All it takes is getting up off of the couch, walking away from this ‘technosphere’ full of good little atomized people consuming each others lives, and spending time face to face with other people, with the animals of the field and forest, and our food as it comes out of the ground. Ennui cannot survive in the face of reality, and reality is right outside your door.