Having decided to ride it out for the duration, you settle back and get comfortable with your own disgust. You say, There’s nothing wrong with me except I thought the world would be better than it is; I thought that people would be more idealistic and courageous than they are; I thought that institutions would foster more creativity than they do; I thought people would not be as backstabbing as they are.

You admit to yourself: I was wrong. Actually, people do suck. You admit that man is a frightened, weaselly, vicious creature who builds elaborate and powerful institutions in his image.

Reeling from the shock of this recognition — your first up-close glimpse of the horror of Jerk-Weasel matter — you look back over your life and you see, wow, maybe I’ve spent a lot of time in a sort of cocoon. Maybe the cocoon was an elite university in an upper-middle-class town; maybe the cocoon was a family whose members were tolerant and wise; maybe the cocoon was a lifestyle that gave you the time and fresh air and liberty to enjoy your own thoughts, express yourself and be rewarded for being who you are, living out, essentially, the kind of dream espoused long ago by the founders of this country. Whatever it was, it was a lucky and beautiful thing. You were blessed to have a view of life as a nurturing, profound experience.

But now you are coming out of that cocoon and looking around and going, Man, what was I thinking? This place is seriously messed up! Like, even more messed up than I realized, even though I always knew it was messed up. Wow!

Good for you for seeing that this place is sick and messed up. It did not get sick and messed up all on its own with no help from people. We invented the atomic bomb and we came up with methods of mass slaughter and starvation and police states and widespread torture and repression. That was us.

We came up with this stuff because we are tragically ill-equipped to live together in peace, and we are indeed troubled by the incongruity of what we know to be true and our daily failure to act in any meaningful way to change it. We don’t face the limits of our resources, plan realistically, or care for the poor. We hoard, we squander and we plunder. We live in fear. If we did not live in fear — if we lived in a religious bliss or an ecological harmony, well, things would be different.

But we don’t. And they aren’t.

You should have seen what happened a few weeks ago when my wife and I were up at Marconi Conference Center with our new iPhones trying to get AT&T to give us the free Wi-Fi service to which we are entitled with our exorbitant monthly subscription to AT&T. It was a hall of mirrors with which I am sure you are familiar, involving, at one point, the suggestion to my wife that she have me fax my driver’s license to some unseen office in a parade of unseen offices and conflicting information. It took hours.

Something indeed has happened to the way we individuals communicate with business organizations. Something monstrous and ridiculous has indeed happened. Advances in technology have outstripped human capacity for organized behavior; our machines are godlike, but our organizational instincts are still apelike.

So … I hear you. I don’t have the solution. Mainly I keep my head down and feel grateful for the chance to write every day and to be in communication with people who see some of the same monstrously strange and weird things that I see.

My suggestion? Stick close to your loved ones. Invite kindred spirits to dinner. Keep writing in your journal. Care for those around you and keep a cabin in the woods stocked with food and water.