Karma Barbie in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

It’s been such a weird month. I looked around at everything happening and thought to myself, something has to be in retrograde like Mercury or Venus or the 5th House or whatever this stuff means…

I usually don’t try to find explanations for things because I spent too much of my life thinking about things that weren’t really within my grasp and found that I wasted much of my life on them.

That’s one of the reasons I’m not really keen on seeing Barbie. I don’t really have anything against it, I’m just not a fan of Greta Gerwig (it being set in my hometown, I can tell you Lady Bird was absolutely insufferable), plus I’ve heard about how it’s about a kind of existential angst, and I already watched one Toy Story movie and I don’t really need to have those kinds of pious deep thoughts again.

It’s like those people on Instagram or Tik Tok who film themselves giving sandwiches to the homeless… does your need for validation have to come at the expense of humiliating these people. You deserve legitimate praise for what you’ve done, but don’t exploit these people who have already been mistreated by society.

I’m frustrated by the fact that there are two types of people right now: I suffered so now I don’t want you to suffer or I suffered so you have to suffer, too. People don’t seem to understand this argument, especially as it relates to student debt… “I had to pay off all my student loans, so forgiving others’ debt isn’t fair!” is like saying “I beat cancer so finding a cure for cancer isn’t fair to me who had to suffer”.

I think this is really coming up for me because Thailand has this sense of fairness that interpolates it with karma and retribution yet ignores grace and forgiveness. There is a reason their country is stuck in some of the places it is, and it’s because they believe the poor are paying some kind of karmic debt for sins that they’re unaware they committed.

I remember reading a quote from Bono that said, and I’m paraphrasing, he believes in karma as a law of the universe because that is the reason Christianity exists. Jesus came to interrupt karma. To not give people what they deserve and to give them love, forgiveness and hope.

Whenever I heard that quote, and I heard it endlessly in my early 20s, I always cringed. It sounds so self-righteous and superior, but now I get it. Wishing for karma to be interrupted, for someone to not get what they deserve is a good thing, not as some form of self-adulation, but because it finally interrupts the cycle of abuse… and true healing can begin from there.

Hurt people hurt people. So let’s stop hurting people.

But anyways, I don’t want to see Barbie because I don’t want any deep thoughts…