There's No Going Back

Life at normal speed.

Photo by Hongjin Wang on Unsplash

Life feels fundamentally different now.

Because it is.

Recently, a U.S. president threatened to destroy an entire civilization over a trade route. Then he walked his threats back like it was just another Tuesday. And you know the worst part? Basically, it was.

It was just another Tuesday.

When I was looking for the right photo for this essay, I stopped on this one. A rocket launch. It felt perfect. It sums up everything.

A rocket launch can represent hope and progress, but it’s also violent, chaotic, overwhelming, dangerous, destructive, and from a certain perspective, it also represents the arrogance of humanity to think we’re ready to find other planets when we can’t even manage this one. And yet, in a more humanistic sense, it’s by learning about our place in the universe that we come to develop an appropriate sense of humility and responsibility. Also: You don’t exactly un-launch a rocket. Once it leaves the ground, you’re going for a ride.

A rocket launch says it all.

So, there it is…

In this new era, threats to destroy civilization have become another news cycle. Before the latest horrors, this regime threatened to invade Greenland. They kidnapped the president of another country. They shot two civilians to death in broad daylight for almost nothing. They upended our vaccine schedules. They canceled late night talkshow hosts out of pure spite. They commandeered at least one major news network. Then they destroyed one of the world’s biggest social media platforms and arenas of free speech by handing it to a billionaire friend. Then they started turning warehouses into concentration camps.

Between tariffs and government shutdowns, it’s hard to articulate the amount of damage just one corrupt gang of fascists can do.

No doubt, all of this represents an extension of U.S. neoliberal policy and doctrine rather than a departure, but it’s quite the evolution, isn’t it? The gloves have really come off in a big way. The masks have really slipped down. Some of us always knew. We read the history, or we lived it. But if you know the history, then you also know just how disturbing it is to watch the current felons in charge double and tiple down on the absolute worst of our heritage, not even trying to do better, not even pretending, and with a reckless bravado that makes you wonder if they really don’t see a future for any of us anymore, or even themselves.

That’s just the last 12 months.

There’s so much more.

Before all of that, we spent years watching a genocide on our phones. We watched a majority of our friends and families ignore it. We watched pileups of thousand-year disasters, culminating in a hurricane so powerful it brought record floods to the mountains of Appalachia, utterly destroying supposed climate safe havens like Asheville. Since then, the world’s richest men have pledged their allegiance to AI and abandoned their climate promises.

Now, the same crew who promised to save the world tells us to stop caring so much, right before an avalanche of documents validates the worst conspiracy theories of all time. Yeah, they really were trafficking girls on private islands and ranches in the desert, murdering them, and burying them on golf courses. It’s no wonder they didn’t solve world hunger. They were too busy doing that. They spent most of their day planning wild sex parties with teenage girls.

What else?

Someone shot a healthcare CEO to death in the street, and public jubilation motivated the super rich to hire the world’s most ruthless cyber defense company to start building a massive database that tracks every detail of our lives. I know it’s not such a straight causal line, but it’s not wrong either.

As public health collapses, every year exposes us to an ever-widening list of diseases that can either kill or disable us. We watched the world quietly give up on any hope of staying under 1.5C of global warming. Taylor Swift fans started dropping dead at her concerts from heat stroke. She shed one tear and then climbed right back on her private jet, and sued the guy tracking it. Everyone from Elon Musk to Mila Kunis has shown us who they really care about.

Not us. Not survivors of sexual assault. Not survivors of climate disasters. They care about themselves, their reputations, each other.

We can just… die already.

Maybe they’re not actively trying to kill us, but they’re not trying to save us either. Not anymore, if ever. It’s too expensive. They don’t need as many of us as they thought. They’re really putting all their eggs in the robot slave basket now. Did you hear? They’re not even trying to colonize Mars anymore.

If you’re looking for one word to describe what’s changed: It’s pretense. That’s really the biggest shift. For the last few decades, our institutions offered a pretense of caring about us. They offered a narrative. There wasn’t much substance to it, but there was a sense that you could still shame the Peter Thiels of the world into doing the right thing, or at least force them to stop doing the worst things.

That pretense offered a sense of comfort, however false, however illusory, and it made everything else go down a little easier.

That pretense has largely eroded.

They’re not promising us vacations on Mars anymore. They’re not promoting hustle and grind. They’re not offering the digital nomad lifestyle.

They’re basically putting a gun to our heads and telling us to work until we die, or a robot replaces us, whichever comes first.

That’s what it feels like.

Maybe that’s the biggest shift since the release of the Epstein files. There’s no pretending anymore. Most of the politicians, billionaires, CEOs, bankers, lobbyists, and so on are just as bad as we always wondered. Perhaps they’re even worse than we feared, and there’s no sweeping it away now. It’s just there, in plain sight, and you either look at it or look away.

We’ve learned to live with a level of pain and uncertainty that felt unthinkable ten years ago. As I learned even before all of this, stress and trauma can rewire your brain. So in a sense, we’ve changed on a biochemical level.

Sit down for a minute and listen to yourself.

You can sense it.

(I can.)

Everyone is dealing with this cold new world in different ways. Some of us are facing it with fight songs and protests. Some of us are prepping our way through. Some of us are just keeping our heads above water. Millions more have learned to sublimate, to just push it all down and pretend harder that everything is fine.

Believe it or not, millions of people out there, especially Americans, have no idea what’s going on. That’s how they manage to get by.

What about the rest of us?

Well, I can only tell you what I’m doing. I’ve spent the last several years not running from any of this, but facing it and learning how to process it.

I’ve learned what I can do to protect myself from all these new threats, and what I can’t. I’ve gamed out how bad the future can get for my family. I’ve sat with it. I’ve accepted it. I’ve come up with plans and plans.

I’ve executed the plans.

We live on two wavelengths now, one where we hold on to the moral and ethical center that never allows us to become desensitized to the horrors unfolding, while simultaneously growing mental and emotional callouses that allow us to function in a world with soul-crushing, stupefying amounts of cruelty.

And that would be the right phrasing, I think.

Callouses. Tough skin.

Armor.

I’ve learned who I can be honest with. I’ve figured out how to talk to people about doom without saying the words “doom.” I’ve carved out spaces and routines for myself. I’ve learned when to turn off my phone and go outside. I’ve learned what signals to pay attention to, and what noise to ignore.

There’s no magic ride to this better place, but it starts with something simple enough. Maybe you know it, but let’s say it anyway:

You have to accept the current reality. You can devote yourself to making a better future, but you have to live in the present. You have to acknowledge what’s happening, not what you want to be happening. It sounds easy until you see how many people out there aren’t doing it. They’re not living in reality. They’re living in a matrix they created for themselves. In those moments when the matrix glitches, they comfort themselves with the notion that we’ll somehow find a way back to the comforting narrative pretenses of last decade.

But we can’t go back. In some ways, I even tried. I couldn’t recreate the high. It’s gone. Once you’ve seen what we’ve seen, once you’ve lived through what we have, you don’t go back. A big part of you doesn’t even want to.

The things that once brought me a sense of comfort and peace years ago? They don’t do that anymore. Now, I ground myself by listening to thunderstorms. I go for short walks. Or I sit in total silence, with my noise-canceling earbuds. I think about what I need to do. I anticipate problems and come up with solutions.

And then I sit and think about nothing.

I love thinking about nothing.

So, if you don’t know where to start, or you know someone who doesn’t, then go with something small and simple. Accept this:

Stop trying to go back in time. Stop trying to rewind to a prior age.

Stop trying to fast-forward to a happy ending.

Just live at normal speed.

It’s the only way.