Valentine’s Day is in February, so some of our content naturally skews that way—see our Tiny Love Stories on the center spread—and the original idea was that we use this space to elaborate on romance.
But, as I was patiently watching global events unfold from the convenience of my iPhone, an opportunity to shift trajectory presented itself to me.
And then, the next day, everything changed. Yesterday’s notions started sliding away like sand around the feet of some desert wanderer. But I still had to write about something.
I was going to write about the trade war. I had the entire train of thought mapped out in my head, but when I checked the news the next day everything had changed.
If the reality we are currently experiencing had a solid foundation, here is where I would say all the sensible things: support your community, support your friends, support your family, support your country (depending on which country, I guess).
This would come from a place of conviction. I would say it with my whole chest—and then the next day everything I put forward would become irrelevant and lose the context of currency.
Doesn’t this feel like the point? The confusion, the lack of certainty. Hanging off every word and piece of news.
I am going to ask someone who knows about game theory to elaborate on this for me, but for now I will keep pushing the outrage button and scrolling to the next thing on my phone.
I told a handful of people that my New Year’s resolution was to watch 1,000,000 Instagram reels.
This was a joke about depression and brain rot, how they work in tandem to ensure suffering that is vacuous and inescapable. Like a lot of jokes—the good ones anyway in my opinion—this one is built upon a dark premise with a kernel of truth.
I am addicted to my phone; I am addicted to outrage and too aware of how it is impacting my existence.
We are viewing a large part of the world through a very distorted lens. We look up to the sky, into the void, whatever metaphor, and then we don’t look down at the soil where we must tend to our roots.
The term “hyper-normalization” was coined by Alexei Yurchak, an anthropology professor born in Leningrad who later taught at Berkeley. The term describes the paradox of Soviet life in the middle of the Cold War.
In Yurchak’s words, the failure of the Soviet system was palpable, but with no tangible alternatives, politicians and citizens were “resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.”
Yurchak’s theories have been used to describe a destabilizing of the Western psyche, and I think they are an excellent jumping off point for anyone who seeks to peel back the layers on what is happening.
For now, yes, drink beer they make in Canada etc. But also, tend to your roots. We are not useful to ourselves when constant uncertainty makes us complacent. That’s kind of the point. The power you have is in the community you nurture around yourself.
And in the worst timeline, that’s pretty much all that we’ve got left.
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