Maybe it is not such a bad idea!
Prophetic books and movies have been preparing me for years.
Should I start packing?
By Anastasia Kogka
Dear Reader,
Are you ready to change? The obvious reply would be “But I have already changed. The pandemic had a tremendous impact on my life”.
Yes, but does it stop here? What lies ahead has always been well hidden from humanity or has not?
I have always considered art, especially books and movies as predictions for the future. Some of them have almost been prophetic. Orwell’s “1984”, Huxley’s “Brave New World”, Saramago’s “Blindness” and the list goes on. Movies like “Minority Report”, “Truman Show”….
Well, a non-science fiction film was the Oscar winner this year. A film that cannot be called prophetic as it tells a true story. A woman in her sixties who, after losing everything in the Great Recession, embarks on a journey through the American West, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad. Well, “modern-day nomad”. There is a new term for you reader. In the era of high technology and advancement in architecture, construction and design of houses, this term popped up.
Are we going back? Have we spent all our lives working and paying taxes and mortgages to find ourselves one morning evicted and facing homelessness?
Hadn’t the old movies shown us the way to detached houses, cars, degrees, vacations in Greece and playing happy family that lives happily ever after?
Now what? Should I start packing? I survived recession, ten years of it. Had to change career, fight for a salary that was not even close to the national standard before recession, put up with grumpy colleagues who thought I was after their jobs, man eating bosses who denied even the slightest raise. I changed my whole world. I adapted. I cut and shrunk and struggled.
And when I started to breathe again having of course trained myself to the new working nonstop conditions, there came the Pandemic. I mean I was already broke what on earth was I supposed to do? More than a year after the situation is still the same.
Nomadland. Is that the next step? Now that I am thinking about it, maybe it is not such a bad idea. I will automatically be saved from all the hateful little papers that have the habit to appear in my mailbox every first of month. Wow! That would be a relief.
Maybe it is not that bad. Maybe being deprived of my privilege to visit the town’s supermarket and buy the latest bio, green, eco-friendly, gluten free, lactose free, sugarless products that call themselves food, is not that bad after all! I will finally stop worrying about losing weight. I will live for right now and I will throw away my watch.
There is a small book by Scheurmann Eric, “Papalagi” that describes a tribe helping each other every time one of them builds a house. They know nothing about time, and they do not understand the use of watches. Nature provides. Not bad, I had thought when I read it.
What do you think reader? Is “Nomadland” the next step or the dystopic “In Time”?
