More Alarms & More Surprises Please

At this moment in time, the Coronavirus pandemic is unquestionably the greatest source of turmoil and anxiety in the world. As all-consuming as it might seem right now, it's still inevitable that, just like everything else, one day the pandemic will eventually come to an end and most of us will have to go back to fretting about more mundane things again. For those of us who are lucky enough to live in countries where the majority of the people don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, in normal times, one of the biggest sources of unhappiness is the vague sense of dissatisfaction which a sizeable chunk of our population spend their whole lives coping with.

Before you continue reading this, I don't want you to get me wrong here; I'm not suggesting for a second that nobody who lives in a wealthy country suffers from real material lack. Even within my own country Ireland, ranked as one of the ten richest countries in the world by the UN, years of government mismanagement of the housing market has made it impossible for lots of people, even people in well paying jobs, to be able to afford to put a secure roof over their heads. But, I would still think that within well-off countries there are even more people who's main problem is actually just a terrible feeling that their lives haven't turned out the way they'd like them to be.

Everybody who's suffering from this condition likely has their own theory as to the cause of it; the ghost of a long lost love, a talent they neglected to develop, a potentially life changing career opportunity that they missed out on. For a lot of people, it's not something as obvious as the result of a single moment, but the adding up of lots of small ones. Often the feeling comes from the realization that, although you might not be short of food, water, shelter and the other basics, the path that you've taken through life has brought you to a place where your day to day existence isn't fulfilling you. For many, particularly a lot of those who are actually doing well economically, their waking life is now so rigid it's almost as if they're hurtling through their daily routine like a train on a track; back and forth from home to work, from picking the kids up after school to doing the weekly shop, constantly praying for the weekend to arrive for a temporary bit of relief in the same way that a train's thirsty wheels cry out for a drop of oil.

With time spent at work taking up such a big part of that routine, it's only natural that an awful lot of people put an expectation on their jobs to give them not only financial security but also to bring meaning into their lives. A great many of them end up disappointed. The alarming rise of extreme political movements, both on the right and on the left, in countries where for years politics had been almost pleasantly boring, is thought by experts to be the result of a large mass of people feeling that they've not been rewarded with the lives that their hard work has entitled them to. I don't think there's much question that this is true, but it's very important to remember that for a lot of people feeling this way, they're not just annoyed that their work isn't bringing them enough in the way of financial compensation; the feeling that what they contribute makes no difference in the grand scheme of things is just as bad. For someone who's work makes them enough to make sure that nobody is going to come along and throw them out on the street any time soon, there comes a point when almost no amount of further money can liven up the black hole of time spent in a sterile office playing around with emails and word documents sent on from people you've never met for the benefit of other people you'll never meet. At least, not when a person has become so numb through repetition that the consequences of not doing that don't seem real any more. Although the effect isn't felt nearly as quickly, the prolonged absence of personal connection and a sense of purpose can be as harmful to a human being as going without water and food. This hunger for meaning in a society where more and more work seems to be lacking it is becoming more and more ravenous by the day. And just like being physically hungry, for the sufferer the feeling gets worse in stages. First they feel cranky, then annoyed, then downright angry. Anger that builds up for too long will always end in an explosion.

In 2016, a “crazy-at the-time” year which looks positively quaint in comparison with 2020, a lot of that frustration began to spill over from unspoken public sentiment into actual public action. The public of Britain and America veered away from common sense and found outlets for their simmering feelings of resentment through two of the most unexpected protest votes (Brexit & Trump) in history. At Christmas of that year, I remember nervously walking up a raised concrete ramp into the belly of a hideous office block, which for a few weeks had become Ireland's outlet for our venting of the same universal dissatisfaction. The building was called Apollo House and it had sat crumbling away on the fringe of Dublin's city centre for years before anyone had decided to pay attention to it. A deserted former public building, it went from obscurity to becoming the focal point of the whole country's attention overnight when a group of housing activists (for those unsure or distrustful of what they do, in my experience their duties include holding information sessions letting tenants living in fear of eviction know about their legal rights and rallying round to offer support when the same tenants end up with the landlord's agents knocking on their door) occupied the building and filled it up with homeless people taken from the street, as a protest against the government's disastrous housing policy. For a couple of weeks at the end of that year, the occupation become the country's number one cause celebre, with film-maker Jim Sheridan making a TV documentary about the event, zany-celebrity salesman Mattress Mick donating beds for the homeless residents and a couple of local rock stars holding sing-alongs on the roof. The occupation of Apollo House, which ended amicably in the middle of January of the next year, has left a very divisive legacy amongst the still, sadly, very active housing activist community in Dublin, with the phrase “don't mention the war” actually being used by one of the other attendees when I brought it up at a later meeting I had dropped in on. There are still a great deal of mixed feelings as to what the project achieved in the long term, but for myself, I remember I felt a great amount of pride in watching the reaction of the Irish public to it. The Irish people unreservedly stood behind the activists; over 100,000 of them donated food and supplies to the cause and when singer Glen Hansard appeared on an Irish talk show to explain the occupier's motives the audience applauded him. Ireland has always been both literally and metaphorically between Britain and America, and in the same year when both of those countries had chosen to take out their anger at the establishment by voting for politicians and policies that blamed their problems on disadvantaged minorities, I was so heartened to see Ireland going in the opposite direction.

For the few weeks that the house was occupied, Apollo was home to an amazing cross section of the human race. The building needed to be manned with volunteers at all times, both to look after it's new residents and also to make sure that the police didn't get inside and start throwing everybody out. The volunteers who bustled about inside were as likely to be practising reiki healers or tarot card readers as they were to be off-duty nurses or out of work bricklayers. I volunteered inside the house about 4 or 5 times and met all of these people and more, but by far the encounter that sticks in my mind the most of was with a tiny red haired woman who I spent an hour with carting things up and down a flight of stairs. In a world where the news cycle was already getting shorter by the day, keeping the occupation in the public's attention was vital, so we had been given the job by the in-house media team of setting up a corner of an unused floor for a promotional photo shoot with some of the building's residents. This basically involved clearing out the derelict old office furniture and debris scattered around the huge open plan floor to carve out enough space for the photographer to set up his lights. As we hauled broken desks and swivel chairs down the stairs to the rubbish area, the red haired woman told me her life story. She came from an area of Dublin with a less than glowing reputation when it came to crime and drugs. Even though she was only in her early 20's she already had two small children, the first having been born when she was still in her teens. She had left school at an early age and had never had a job; unsurprisingly, most of her life over the past number of years had been devoted to taking care of her kids. It was clear to me as my new friend and I strained and heaved our way down the winding concrete steps that even though she was lacking in formal work experience she wasn't someone who was short of ambition. As noble an occupation as it have been, motherhood wasn't the only thing that she wanted out of her life. Also, it wasn't a way to pay the bills and so she had had to enlist government support in order to make ends meet. From the time she had left school, meetings with social welfare officers had been a regular part of her routine. As she was a single parent and not a job seeker, she hadn't been obliged to look for work but, despite that, her options and opportunities would still have been explained to her from time to time at her little chats with her case officers. Now and again these conversations would come round to the kind of training courses and work placement schemes that would be available to her if a time came when she was able to take part in one, but from the way she spoke as she recalled them, it was clear that she'd always been given the impression from any of the welfare officers that they never really believed that she was going to make use of anything they put in front of her.

What the red haired girl meant by this wasn't that the people who had been sitting in the opposite chair from her at the meetings had meant her any harm, but that they equally had no interest in her or the outcome of her story. In their eyes, she'd probably already achieved all that she could be expected to have out of life given her circumstances and the meetings they found themselves in with her from time to time were nothing but a formality. Although they might have attempted to give her a pep talk about the possibilities of her getting work behind a checkout or as a barmaid, their hearts and minds were somewhere else as they talked. The girl sitting in front of them was nothing but a box to be ticked on a file that would be sent to somebody else, a somebody who was never even going to meet her and had even less reason to be invested than they did. For the people appointed to sit and talk to her about her options, the meetings were both of the highest importance and of no importance at all; they were of no importance because no matter what was said in them no change was ever going to come about in the girl's life but they were of the highest importance because by virtue of performing the ritual both she and they could make sure that the stability of their lives was going to be maintained. The money they both needed to keep the show on the road would be waiting for them when the dance was over, either as a stack of notes in the post office or of the right amount of numbers appearing on the screen that told them what their bank balance was. Taking all that into account, was there any reason to expect this girl would ever have been anything but perpetually unemployed? That she would feel any obligation to participate in a society that, admittedly had kept her alive, but had let her know it had been doing so as an act of charity and not because it saw her as an investment for the future? After she'd been told all of her life that nothing was expected of her, nothing she did mattered and that she would never really belong in the society that surrounded but her of which she was'nt really a part? Especially when the people who were supposed to convince her that the opposite was true had been attempting to do so while they were sitting on the other side of a thick pane of glass? And yet as we grunted and puffed our way down the stairs, both of us worrying simultaneously about not letting our end of the load drop on our partner and trying not to miss the next step for fear of breaking our own necks, it was pretty obvious that the tiny girl had far more to offer than any of her case workers had ever given her credit for. A person who'd been written off as having nothing to contribute was lugging battered and broken bits of furniture that were twice her size around the place, doing a job that no employer in a conventional job would ever hire a girl her age and build to do. She wasn't doing it for money, or even for glamour or glory. She was doing it for no other reason than because she thought it was for a worthwhile cause, practically jumping up and down with excitement each time we got down to the landing with our cargo and got closer and closer to the completion of the task. While I was knackered after the first 20 minutes, she was still buzzing with energy and ready to take on whatever was going to asked of her next. Inside Apollo House, regardless of the ideology that the organizers believed in or whether or not you agreed with the methods they'd used in getting those ideas across, everyone who volunteered in there did so because they believed in a cause that was bigger than themselves. People teamed up into groups, met face to face and worked along side each other. Each person felt that the work that they were doing mattered and was being appreciated by other people that they could actually see, rather than disappearing off into the black hole at the bottom of a filing cabinets or a hard drive somewhere far away.

The nature of work was far less important than knowing that it actually counted for something.

In trying to make a difference to the lives of others, the red-haired woman had ended up making a difference to her own. After we'd finally gotten rid of the last of the stuff, I was sweeping the carpet in the now empty corner of the building and she came towards me having just helped the photographer unravel the long extension chord from his lights as they hung from their stands. She rubbing her hands and grinned. “What's next?” she said.