Jason Gale is a senior Editor at Bloomberg News. He’s the author of the recently-released After Covid: The Health Impacts That Will Last Generations, a comprehensive look at how the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, and the myriad issues we still face from it. I wanted to talk to him about why we as a society are still in denial of the Covid’s effects, including the effects it’s still having on millions of people’s bodies and brains.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

Can you tell me a bit about why you wanted to write this book? It feels like mainstream discourse has totally moved on from Covid. Was there a gap in that discourse you wanted to fill?

I thought that there was definitely room to write a book that tried to trace how the pandemic unraveled, and its continuing consequences. And one of the reasons was that I could see that our memories and recollections of the event—which is in many ways still ongoing—are very prone to suggestion and manipulation and alternative narratives. So I really wanted to try to create a fairly honest, truthful record of what happened.

Do you feel like most people have memory-holed the pandemic and never think about it now?

I think that part of our resilience strategy is to put bad things behind us and move on. So I think it’s very understandable that we want to forget what happened and almost, in a way, make light of it. But it’s harder to do that in some places. If you’re in New York, you probably remember the morgue trucks parked on streets outside hospitals, the mass graves being dug on Hart Island off the Bronx. Some of those things were highly traumatic.

But I also think part of the reason it’s hard for some people to remember is that, as you write in your book, our memories of the pandemic can be used for different political goals, or manipulated.

Absolutely. I’ve seen a number of physicians and nurses on social media recently talking about how, really, there were no overwhelmed hospitals during the height of the pandemic. That that wasn’t happening. But that’s because the pandemic hit different places differently. Hospitals were overwhelmed in New York City and Boston and San Francisco and Los Angeles, but not everywhere. And that’s partially because our mitigation strategies were working. We have to remember there were certain measures put in place designed to prevent all hospitals from being overwhelmed. So that was kind of a success if your hospital wasn’t overwhelmed with Covid patients. But that’s being used now to claim that the pandemic was completely overblown and exaggerated, which I don’t think is correct.

There’s also debate about whether we’re still actually in a pandemic or not, right?

It’s interesting when you ask about whether the pandemic is ongoing. And there are certainly people who look back and think: well, in 2023 the World Health Organization and the U.S. government and other governments said that the emergency phase of the pandemic was over. That occurred in May 2023. But we know that SARS-CoV-2 is still evolving, still infecting people, still causing chronic illness and even deaths all around the world. So from that basis, the pandemic is still going.

I think that there is a debate going on about whether the pandemic is over or not. And I certainly see Covid-cautious people, especially people who have Long Covid who are very vulnerable to infection, being very frustrated at the lack of acknowledgement that SARS-CoV-2 is still circulating and evolving in societies.

When you talk to to scientists and researchers, were you surprised about just how many effects are still ongoing; how this really isn’t in the rearview mirror?

Yeah, so one of the earlier stories I wrote about the pandemic, which was really surprising to me, was in 2022. I interviewed Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist with the VA health system in St. Louis. And he reported in Nature Medicine that there was an increase in new diagnoses of diabetes after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. And I thought that that was really odd. I think we’re seeing now that the virus, particularly in the early days when people had no immunity from vaccines and no natural immunity, that it could be an accelerant of all kinds of different diseases, from kidney disease to heart disease. And now we’re seeing increasingly its association with with dementia, which is really concerning.

Something that always freaks me out is that it’s so hard to know what’s caused by Covid. Dementia, depression, any mental health issue, stuff with more nebulous symptoms like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—it’s impossible to pick it all apart and know what’s been caused by the virus.

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I remember the moment in 11^th grade. My friend and I climbing out of the subway station on the Upper West Side near our school, discussing, as we so often did, the state of the world and our place in it, and her turning to me and asking: why do so many adults abandon their politics and become cogs in the machine? Is it that they know more than us, or that they have it beaten out of them?

I don’t know why, I told her. But I said I wasn’t worried. We were different. That would never happen to us.

At that point, both of us were as far left as two teens could be—anarcho-communists and anti-imperialists. We’d attend any and every protest for a leftist cause. My friend organized a school club inspired by Columbia’s SDS. That school year, I traveled with dozens of my classmates to Venezuela to tour the Bolivarian socialist revolution and take notes on how we could possibly foment something similar back home.

It was only a matter of time, I thought, before the United States turned into a socialist paradise. All we had to do was usher it along. And I was ready to do the ushering.

And then…things changed. Not my politics, really—I’m still an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It’s more that, a few years ago, I realized my sense of possibility had dramatically decreased.

My Overton window hadn’t shifted; it’d developed a layer of grime that made possible futures seem hazier and less bright.

You cannot fight for what you cannot envision.

In short: I had become my (and my friend’s) worst fear: a cog.

Or maybe a frog.

Looking back at the last two decades of my life since that conversation in high school, I can see what happened to me. And my friend and I were both wrong—it’s not that adults have their idealism beaten out of them. And it’s not that we simply know more—that we are mature enough to be realists instead of idealists. It’s that the longer you exist in this world, the longer you spend in its psychosociopolitical milieu, and thus become increasingly infused with whatever is around you.

It’s easier to be a radical when you’re young not because you’re naive, but because you haven’t yet absorbed the messaging of the world that tells you good things are often impossible. And, crucially, all the people around you—your young peers—haven’t yet either.

When I was a teen at a semi-socialist educational institution, I existed within a positive feedback loop, my peers steeping me in their hopes and beliefs so that my hopes and beliefs did not feel unrealistic. You are what you read, you are what you eat, and, also, maybe, you are who you see.

But then, as you age, the people you see change. You get a job and your thoughts of revolution aren’t so much beat out of you as they are supplanted. You think of money and building a life and all the rest, and everyone else around you does too. As your milieu changes, so do you. And any kind of fantastical future gets hazier and hazier.

How, then, to recommit?

The first step, I believe, is to realize that you do indeed exist in a milieu in the first place; to not take for granted that you are influenced by what you consume and who you talk to and what you spend your time doing.

You do not need to attend a leftist public school to believe in a better future. But you do need to become aware of the water in which you sit. Perhaps for years you have marinated there, not realizing how far from what you once believed you’ve strayed. Perhaps you’ve normalized the lack of hope, or aggrievedness inside of you, because everything else around you feels the same. Perhaps the water has gotten slightly warmer over the years without you noticing. Perhaps now is the perfect opportunity to jump out.

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Anson Tong (she/her) is a writer, photographer, and behavioral scientist based in Chicago.

is a journalist reporting on influencer parents and their children. She is the author of Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.

Family influencers are now a multi-billion dollar industry largely built on voyeurism and selling consumer goods. Family influencers are also a microcosm of what’s happening on the internet writ large these days—it’s just one of the ways in which people are monetizing loneliness and isolation, using parasocial relationships between digital families and real people to sell the promise of connection and relatability.

While we as a culture reckon with how child stars of the 2000s and 2010s were treated in the public eye, a more diffuse (and harder to regulate) cohort of child influencers are growing up surveilled and exploited. Influencer behavior online trickles down to people posting on their personal accounts, and also shapes the aspirations of children, many of whom now want to become professional content creators. Horror stories that make the news often elicit a sense that we should pull the plug and shut social media down, but the most dramatic stories also distract from the fact that this industry is about much more than a few extreme cases—it’s the milieu in which we now all live.

I was excited to talk to Fortesa about her book, parents posting their kids on social media, and who’s watching all this content.

[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

I’d love it if you could tell me about how you ended up on this beat and how you define the child influencer, family influencer, the ecosystem.

When 16 and Pregnant came out on MTV, I was obsessed, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. I was watching it and I watched Teen Mom for all these years. I was like wow, these kids are becoming teenagers, they’re shaving their legs for the first time, they’re getting their learner’s permits on TV.

Then I would get on social media and all these kids are going through the same things as the Teen Mom kids where everything that they do is recorded and monetized and put online. It struck me as very similar but extremely different because the Teen Mom kids or other reality TV kids film a few days a month.

So I started looking around as any journalist who has a hunch does, and I found a young woman who was in her teens who had grown up on a family vlogging channel.

I asked her, “What would you say to your parents if you could say anything?” And she said, “Nothing they do now can take back the years of work I had to put in.”

There’s merch with her name on it. And there’s photos of her from baby to toddler to a kid to a tween to a teen, and I could just watch her grow up online and she was like, if it were up to me, none of those billions of hours of YouTube views would exist.

So I wrote that story. I published it, and I was really excited about it, but I had no idea that it would resonate the way it did, and that people would feel the way they did about it, and that it would become my beat and a book.

One of the mom influencers you interview says something along the lines of, “well, everyone has problems with their parents. If my kid is upset about me putting them online, I’ll deal with it.”

I make decisions for my daughter all the time that obviously she can’t consent to or that she hasn’t agreed with because she’s not even 2. That is the work of being a parent; and the work of being a child is reckoning with those decisions that your parents made for you. But like at least in almost every other circumstance, that reckoning happens privately and doesn’t have public implications, whereas this has public implications. The decisions I’m making for my daughter are private, although my husband likes to joke that she’s gonna hate me for not making her a YouTube star.

There’s so much money on the table that you’re leaving behind! Relatedly, what do you think has made family influencing such a huge industry?

I know I’m like, should I be a mom influencer? They’re making my yearly salary in one post. I think that family vloggers and mom influencers are so popular because American parenthood and specifically American motherhood is so lonely. In my postpartum period, my daughter would only sleep on top of me so I would just be sitting there for 8 hours a day, letting her sleep on me, and I would be on my phone watching these mom influencers and these family vloggers.

If we had better social safety nets and systems, like everyone says we need a village to raise a child. If we all had those villages, we would be much less tempted by these people.

Influencing is worldwide, but it seems to me a uniquely American pursuit because it’s the American dream. A regular person can become fabulously wealthy through their own efforts. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, start posting on YouTube, and who knows what could happen? In this time of economic precarity, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s getting more and more popular because women, especially women and moms, are looking around and they’re like, what am I gonna do?

Influencing and family vlogging is the only career on earth that I can think of where having a child is a benefit to your career. I love my daughter. I would do anything for her. But I love my work and she has not been a benefit to it.

Where do you think the line is between letting a kid do something because they want to, versus protecting them from these consequences they might not understand?

If my daughter had her way, she would only eat ketchup for every meal, but just because she wants to eat ketchup all the time doesn’t mean that she should or that it’s good for her. I think my job as a parent is saying, “Okay, you really like ketchup, but how much ketchup is actually okay for you and how much is too much?” And that’s kind of how I feel about social media.

I do think there can be a way for kids to have this form of expression and for parents to have this career and for kids to have this career without it being this terrible thing. God forbid, not every story is a Ruby Franke story. I don’t think that it’s black-and-white. I don’t think that if you post your kids online and monetize the content that you’re immoral and you’re evil and you’re a terrible parent. Personally, I’m not comfortable with it for my own family and in my own life, but I can see how people would make the trade-off.

So much of the family content is very ordinary. What do you think makes it so addictive to people when it’s so boring?

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We so take for granted the idea that emotional connection is necessary for human existence that we don’t even notice how much of our lives revolve around attempting to optimize it. We go to therapy to work on our relational issues. We browse Instagram and TikTok for the countless videos of pop psychologists problematizing and then proposing solutions to your “attachment style” (are you avoidant, or insecure, or dismissive-avoidant, or disorganized, or secure (is anyone??). You know you keep going back to that man who is mean to you, even though you know he’s mean to you, because so deep is the need for the warm embrace of another human.

But for many decades, psychologists and Western culture writ large operated on the assumption that emotional connection and comfort were, at best, secondary to other basic needs, and, at worst, harmful to the human psyche.

In the 1940s and 50s, the prevailing wisdom on raising children was that showing them love was counterproductive and dangerous. John B. Watson, the head of the American Psychological Association beginning in 1915, advised parents to barely have any physical contact with their children and to keep an emotional distance from them, lest they become spoiled. “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” he once said.

Enter Harry Harlow, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who, in the late 1950s, decided to disprove his field’s theories in the most fucked up way imaginable.

From his lab on campus, which was known as Goon Park (seriously), Harlow and his students began separating baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers just a few hours after their birth. After a period of isolation in what Harlow called the “pit of despair,” he’d then introduce the monkeys to various “surrogate mothers” made of wood and wire to see which the babies preferred. Some of the wire mothers were covered in soft materials like terrycloth and some were left bare. The experiments were sometimes almost comically evil—one surrogate mother had its head attached backwards in an attempt to scare the babies, another shot compressed air at the babies, and one wire mother, which Harlow called “the Iron Maiden” had brass spikes that popped out intermittently to jab the baby monkeys.

The experiments proved what Harlow wanted them to: that connection and comfort can be as important as any other basic need.

The baby rhesus monkeys spent much more time clinging to the soft mothers than they did the wire ones, even if the wire ones gave the babies food and the terrycloth ones did not. When exposed to frightening situations in the lab, the monkeys would cling harder to the soft surrogates. And without their presence, the babies would refuse to explore their environments at all. They’d sit still, sucking their thumbs, paralyzed in fear. Even if the cloth mothers hurt the monkeys, they’d still cling on. Connection, even connection that came with pain, was worth it.

***

It was not until the 1960s that the world began to treat tobacco use as a major health epidemic; it was not until the 1990s that the World Health Organization first recognized that the word’s lack of access to fresh and nutritious food was causing myriad health problems. It will likely take another few decades for us to fully come to terms with our crisis of disconnection.

And so, in the interim, we are left to fend for ourselves; left to find substitutes for what we actually need, even if those substitutes are often harmful to our wellbeing. The systemic problem—that the world has become ever-more isolating and alienating—has been met with individualist solutions.

Over the past year or so, I’ve watched as the world has gawked at stories of people falling in love with AI chatbots, or committing suicide when they’re told to do so by those bots. These stories are often framed as extreme cases of extremely lonely people being wooed by a seductive new technology built with insufficient safeguards.

But I think by understanding these stories as exceptional, we’ve let ourselves off the hook. AI psychosis is just the furthest node on a spectrum of an entire world’s attempt to replace a withheld real connection with surrogate support.

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I keep waiting for something to crack—for the state of our country to get so obviously bad that there’s no choice but to believe its badness. But that keeps not happening. No matter how many countries the Trump Administration illegally bombs, no matter how many innocent people they kill or detain, no matter how many lives are worsened in ways that, to me, seem so obviously a consequence of our government and their disdain for human life, so many people seem willing to keep on going.

Perhaps the most depressing story I read in the last few weeks was a New York Times temperature check of Trump voters after his unilateral and illegal bombing of Iran had begun. The article can be summed up as: sure, my life sucks and I can’t afford groceries, but I believe he’s doing the right thing, in Iran and everywhere else! One supporter described himself as a “long-term patriot,” a phrase that seems to mean, “it doesn’t matter if things are going badly now because I have blind faith things will eventually get better as long as I believe thoroughly enough in some abstract concept.” A recent CNN poll found that 82 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s presidency.

You can say this is denial, or a consequence of constant propaganda. And, of course, it is both. But also: perhaps this is what people want. Not because it makes them happy. But because it makes the people making their lives miserable happy. And that is what they care about, whether they know it or not.

Our current political situation can, in part, be explained by steadfast and increasing belief in a system of trickle-down emotions—the idea that if the people you admire appear satisfied or strong or free that you will eventually too, as long as you continue to let them do their thing. It is a system of sunk costs and delayed gratification. And it is a system that is thus self-reinforcing—the more those in power can make your life miserable, the more appealing the idea becomes that supporting them will eventually make your life better.

Trump supporters aren’t the only people who participate in this system. You can see it everywhere these days: in the Elon Musk fanboys who explain every stupid thing he does as the moves of a 1,000-dimensional chess master; in the hustle culture bros who defend billionaires and insist that the reason they run the world is because they are just smarter than everyone else (presumably including the bros who adore them). And it’s not just a right-wing thing. Think of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg shirts and Obama posters everywhere in the 2010s—sure, their supporters liked some of their political positions, but they also found them inspiring. Americans wanted to know the details of the Obamas date-nights and travels as much as they wanted to know about what laws Barack was supporting. One could argue the main point of the position of any First Lady is as a kind of wellspring of emotional health to be disseminated to the American public—if you lived like her, if you acted with such poise, you too could be…well…not First Lady…but at least not the sad, poor, American you that you are.

Much of the world operates within this framework of unquestioning support for the powerful (whether politically or economically or culturally so) for theoretical future emotional gain. To see just how much fealty the public pledges to people who will do very little in return for their loyalty, go online and post a light criticism of a K Pop star (though, at least they return fans’ devotion with momentary auditory pleasure, unlike politicians, who return to their fans only more debt and destruction and death).

Whether K Pop stan or Trump fan, religion is the blueprint for all of this. What is Christianity but a system of emotional debt (and often economic debt too, in the form of tithing) and fealty to a powerful figure in exchange for supposed future gain—gain in the afterlife in most traditional forms of Christianity, gain in this life for those who believe in prosperity gospel?

Things will get better, if only you believe hard enough.

As many philosophers like Walter Benjamin have pointed out over the decades, capitalism itself can be thought of as a religion in this way—a system of totalizing belief in which people are manipulated to give more and more of themselves for the (usually false) promise of future reward. As Giorgio Agamben put it succinctly in a 2012 interview: “God didn’t die, he was transformed into money.”

So, this unyielding fealty to bad actors in the hopes that that fealty will result in some kind of bounty is not new. Indeed it can be said to be a constant feature of Western industrialized civilization. But it seems as if we’re at a particularly high point of the phenomenon’s presence in our society, and the question is why.

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I have had several surgeries on my face—I had my jawbone and forehead shaved and had my nose broken and reformed into a different nose, and had my eyelids turned into a slightly different shape and had some botox put in right above my lip to “flip” it. Most of this, blissfully, was covered by medicaid several years ago, as all “gender affirming” surgeries are required to be if you have publicly-funded insurance in New York State.

My face might be worth $100,000. I don’t know. I never got a bill.

For 7 years I’ve injected hormones into my butt cheek. I’ve injected other medications that modify these hormones as well.

I go to the gym to become more toned.

Much of my life has been dedicated to changing my appearance.

Which is to say: looksmaxxers have nothing on me.

For years, I’ve struggled to parse why I should feel good about all this, and feel morally repulsed by other forms of body modification. Why am I encouraged by my lefty and liberal peers to do whatever the fuck I want to my body because it will make me more me, make me feel happier, make me into a more stable person capable of love, while cis women getting botox is seen by those same people as a form of conformity to sexist beauty standards, and while the women in Trump’s circle getting god-knows-what surgeries are considered ghoulish fascists for their aesthetic decisions (in addition to all their other evil decisions), and while straight men who take peptides and steroids and exercise and, increasingly, get surgeries too, are considered incel freaks for messing with their own bodies?

How are any of these things different?

Over the last few months, the internet-based, incel-born subculture of “looksmaxxing” has gone mainstream. One of its most prominent proponents, the 20-year old streamer Braden Peters, who goes by the moniker Clavicular, has been in the pages of GQ, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times (the GQ profile is the best one, BTW). The profiles of Peters range from quizzical looks at his day-to-day life (he walked the runway of a Dimes Square darling’s fashion show; he got into a fight in a club, he streamed and made content, he ate fast food), to dire warnings that he represents a fast-encroaching misogynistic fascism infecting America’s young men.

The fascination with Clavicular was at first puzzling to me, because the main thing you learn from all those profiles is that he is boring and stupid. He doesn’t know who Zohran Mamdani is. He doesn’t know what Seinfeld is. He hasn’t read a book in years, if ever. He can’t really articulate his views on the world or himself at all—it’s not that he has no coherent politics, it’s that he has no coherent thoughts.

But, I guess, it makes sense. He’s popular for two reasons:

The first is that Clavicular’s real skill isn’t body modification, it’s in milking the internet for clicks and money—figuring out the exact right formula of controversial-sounding soundbites and stunts to make himself exit the orbit of inceldom and enter the orbit of the mainstream media, which then funnels more people back to his orbit, where he makes millions of dollars from streaming and selling “courses” to lonely men on how to look better and successfully talk to women for $49 a month.

The second is that the mainstream world isn’t yet accustomed to the idea of extensive body modification. It’s novel to them. For trans and queer people, what Clavicular and his ilk do is—while different in the specifics of the substances and surgeries—very similar to what we’ve been doing for eons. Trans people become trans largely through modifying their bodies—taking medications often developed for purposes other than transition, and figuring out how to use them to become the people they want to be. Even garden-variety gay people are often experts on body modification. Ask the gay guys around you how much they go to the gym, what supplement stack they’re on, what steroids and/or hormones and/or peptides they take to bulk up or slim down.

So how do we square these two things if they’re so similar? How can some people support trans and queer body modification, while looking askance at cis men dabbling in hormones and surgeries and all the rest?

Well, the answer is that we’re looking at the wrong thing.

Body modification is a practice that is common throughout many cultures, but it is not the culture itself. Modifying one’s anatomy is what the external world sees of a much larger set of goals and communal beliefs.

And it is in those beliefs and goals where Clavicular and the looksmaxxers deviate from trans and queer people. Because one culture is, or at least can be, or at least has been in the past, liberatory, and the other helps to concretize and exacerbate already-existing power structures.

Looksmaxxers aren’t right-wing because they looksmaxx, they’re right-wing because their primary concern is gaining power and money by selling false solutions to vulnerable people looking for connection and reprieve from the dispiriting and isolating nature of capitalism.

These looks-based features of right-wing culture are getting attention because they feel new, but they follow the same trajectory of what the entire right-wing playbook has become: identify a feeling of powerlessness amongst vulnerable people, identify a cause of this powerlessness, and then sell individualist snake oil cures until the problem and solution become an ouroboros, exacerbating whatever issue the cure was meant to solve, and thus creating new customers for said cure.

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Sometimes, especially when I compile news for this newsletter, I feel like I’m in Groundhog Day, the 1993 Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell movie that terrified me as a child due to its central plot device—a man wakes up repeating the same day over and over again. Watching that movie made me think I might someday get trapped in a cycle of never-ending sameness and be gaslit by everyone around me into thinking that that wasn’t true.

Which, I guess, in many ways, is what my life is, TBH. What else is this life but Groundhog Day? What else am I supposed to feel upon reading the news each morning? What else is a world in which we wake up repeating the same disasters and being told by everyone around us—politicians, the news media—that we should expect different results?

I am confused how anyone ever saw Groundhog Day as a lighthearted family comedy.

The movie made a lot more sense to me when I learned that director Harold Ramis was a Jew-turned-Buddhist and saw the screenplay as a meditation on Buddhism. He said that weatherman Phil Connors’s repetitious day took place not over a few weeks, as many of the film’s viewers assumed, but over something like 10,000 YEARS, because that is how long it takes a soul to achieve perfection in some Buddhist philosophy.

The film’s screenwriter Danny Rubin also saw the movie as a commentary on how long it takes to change one’s life and/or soul.

“It became this weird political issue because if you asked the studio, ‘How long was the repetition?’, they’d say, ‘Two weeks’. But the point of the movie to me was that you had to feel you were enduring something that was going on for a long time.... For me it had to be—I don’t know. A hundred years. A lifetime,” Rubin said in 2005.

Angela Zito, who was a director for the Center for Religion and Media at NYU in the early 2000s, told the New York Times in 2003 that the movie was a perfect distillation of samsara, the notion of constant rebirth in Buddhism. She said the most important theme of the movie was a central one to Mahayana Buddhism—that you cannot escape the cycle of samsara without helping everyone else do so too.

“Nobody ever imagines they are going to escape samsara until everybody else does,” she said. “That is why you have bodhisattvas, who reach the brink of nirvana, and stop and come back and save the rest of us. Bill Murray is the bodhisattva. He is not going to abandon the world. On the contrary, he is released back into the world to save it.’‘

This is a nice read of the movie, one in which the unending mental anguish of living the same day over and over again leads to something positive instead of, say, despondency and suicide (which also does happen in the movie—Phil Connors attempts to kill himself several times, only to wake up in the same day again).

And that’s how I’m trying to view life right now as well. Not just my life, but the world in general. It is easy to become depressed about how frequently and consistently we all repeat the same mistakes, both at an individual and societal level (see: reelecting Trump). But perhaps we are like Phil Connors: in need of more repetition so that we can learn a bit each time and, eventually, add it all up into something that finally allows us to escape this closed circuit of hellish nowness.

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A little experiment for you: the next time you decide to order food via a delivery app, ask yourself why. Is it that you are lazy, or tired, or that you believe the experience will bring you joy? Or is there something else going on? Do you, for example, become filled with dread at the prospect of the human interaction necessary to go to a restaurant, or even to pick up the phone and call an order in? Are ease and convenience misnomers for anxiety and fear?

These are important questions to ask, because we as a society are becoming severely addicted to not leaving the house.

Some depressing stats: Nearly three out of every four restaurant orders in 2024 were eaten not in an actual restaurant. Food delivery has doubled since 2019, according to the National Restaurant Association. One-third of Americans use delivery apps for food at least once a week.

“I am so burned out and tired, I would rather just throw my credit card at the problem and delay that unhappiness until the bill comes,” one delivery app super-user who is spending $700 a week on food delivery told The New York Times.

“I still have friends here, but I don’t go out anymore,” another super user in Los Angeles told the Times. “So I randomly see people, and they’re like, ‘I didn’t know you were back!’”

What’s striking about the people interviewed in that Times piece is that nearly all of them seem aware there’s a problem with what they’re doing—that it’s disconnecting them from friends, draining their bank accounts, de-skilling them to the point that they no longer know how to cook or even grocery shop effectively. And yet they, and so many of us, keep relying on these apps.

It is easy to blame the delivery apps themselves, and every technology of convenience that’s been developed in the last decade or two—social media, ride hailing services—for addicting us to lives of sedentary ease. And they, of course, do deserve much of the blame: these massive tech companies use casino-like tactics of dopaminergic reward to trap us within their ecosystems.

But not everyone who goes to a casino gets addicted to gambling. Not everyone who uses drugs grows to need them.

To understand why someone is prone to any addiction—whether that thing is gambling or a drug or a lifestyle that’s bad for them—it’s helpful to understand what pain they’re trying to ameliorate, or what feature of their lives or their psyches they’re attempting to avoid dealing with.

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Everyone is friction-maxxing these days—finding ways to wean themselves off technologies of convenience and into practices that might feel harder on the psyche, but result in better or more interesting or more satisfying outcomes. This is good, I think.

But in most pontifications about how technology has impacted our lives, I think we’ve misplaced the cause and effect, and thus set people up to fail at finding a more friction-filled life. Opinion columnists insist the base problem is that we’ve become to accustomed to an easy existence supported by automation and algorithms, and that that has made us lazy and ungrateful for the things that come harder in life.

I think this is wrong. We’re not all just slothful sinners looking for the easiest way through. No one is born wanting to scroll TikTok for the rest of their lives.

IMHO, it’s not that life has gotten too easy; if anything, it’s gotten much harder for many of us—the economy sucks, our political system feels hopeless, billionaires are becoming more cartoon-villainesque by the day, destroying our environment and our democracy and our brains in the process. And so, I think, the base problem is that because life has gotten harder, the allure of easiness has exponentially increased. The more beaten down and tired and aggravated we feel, the more we’ve been encouraged and enticed to addresses our aches and pains with the supposed salves sold to us by the same people making our world an actively more hostile place. We reach for our phones for the same reason we reach for a glass of wine at the end of the night or a vape or whatever other vice—not because our lives are good, but because our bodies and minds yearn for a temporary reprieve.

There’s nothing wrong with this. I like nicotine and wine as much as the next person. But, as with any vice, returns are diminishing. If you drink 10 glasses of wine a day, one glass will no longer relax you. If you reach for your phone 10 times an hour (or more), one Instagram Reel will no longer provide you with a bit of dopaminergic joy.

It is hard to decide how much of this is our individual responsibility. Drug addiction exists not because we live in a society of millions of individual failures unable to moderate their indulgences, but because we live in a society that causes an immense amount of pain and thus one in which people must constantly search for relief. Similarly, it is not just that the phones in our pockets are alluring to us, but that the deteriorating conditions of life around us make the phones so alluring.

But this systemic view can encourage us to abdicate our responsibility to ourselves: People throw up their hands and say that there’s nothing that can be done because we have so little power over the world and thus over our own lives.

In my opinion, one can take a systems-based understanding of vice and still encourage individuals to individually make progress—to go to rehab or therapy or AA. One can acknowledge that phones and algorithms are only part of the problem, while still taking the responsibility to use them responsibly. Or, really, one can acknowledge that all of these problems are part of the same problem, and that tackling one part of this large problem can help solve the other parts.

If we become accustomed to a frictionless life in which we are searching for self-soothing via constant hits of electronic dopamine, it becomes much harder to do the work of making the world a place in which we do not need self-soothing via constant hits of electronic dopamine. You cannot easily create a revolution or even a community if you cannot concentrate. You cannot begin to address the systems-level problems if you don’t have the discipline to address the individual-level ones.

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The world as we know it can be encapsulated within the experience of retail, on either side of the cash register (or, more commonly these days, the card reader). It is a fundamental building block of capitalist life, the place, both physical and virtual, where people enact a sliver of their decision-making capacity.

These decisions perform multiple functions beyond the acquisition of a product. They signal to others a person’s preferences—some might be more inclined to call it their “taste”—and confer a sense of control. What one has to buy to live, what is sought after but unaffordable, and what’s within reach but probably frivolous and wasteful. There are gradations here, especially for the destitute and the desperate, where buying necessities like food and clothing, however cheap, however poorly made, is not a matter of high-minded cultivation, but a brutal, often humiliating reality of struggling to navigate an unjust society where plentiful resources are hoarded, where the price of those resources are subject to the whims of the market.

I’m forced to think in these sorts of unwieldy, materialist terms on a weekly basis at a retail job where the primary commodity we sell, books, is fast becoming a luxury item. As prices have gone up due to inflation and tariffs (items that involve color printing like art and photography books or graphic novels tend to be manufactured abroad), more and more customers have endeavored to become discerning consumers. These people, understandably, want their money to be spent on things that will give them pleasure (beyond the dopamine hit of simply buying something), but also status, however minor or fleeting. The book-as-object is a major point of fascination for booksellers who witness how much waste the publishing industry generates year to year: advanced copies that never get read and are thrown out, remaindered books that don’t get pulped, tons of plastic packaging in which books are sealed and delivered. All for “limited edition” copies that are not rare or even unique-looking, but present a pleasingly neat picture for Instagram.

I’ve never worked in a retail landscape that wasn’t in some sense influenced by the ways in which social media has altered the average consumer’s brain. Capitalism is in part driven by mimetic thrall, a desire for and covetousness of another’s aesthetic presentation. Whether in pursuit of physical objects or a certain mood, generating a feeling of lack in a consumer is a way of generating revenue through jealousy and insecurity. It instills a greed that doesn’t feel like greed, but nonetheless activates the same selfish impulses. This inner void, or really the illusion of one, manifests in increasingly virtual terms, in an amorphous but palpable itch for an ineffable something that someone else has, and the feeling that one might buy their way into respectability and status.

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I used to be shy. I still am, in a way. It’s sometimes hard for me to put myself out there.

But I once did not know how to talk to people. I assumed this was an innate feature. Some people are better small-talkers, I thought. Some people have more swag, or rizz, or whatever. Random socializing was just not for me, I thought.

For two decades, I got along fine in this state. I had friends. In large groups I might’ve fallen silent, but this did not impact my social life, or so I thought. When alone, I moved through the world in my own world. Headphones on on the train. This never really bothered me.

And then, at the age of 20, a man named Fred, the news director of a tiny NPR station in rural Western Massachusetts, where I was doing my first-ever internship, handed me a microphone. He told me to go interview people. I was terrified. I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t, I realized, know how to talk to people! So Fred sent me to an event down the road from the studio. U.S. Representative Barney Frank was speaking at a community center. Fred told me to walk up to him after his speech and ask him some hard-hitting questions.

All I remember is that my hand was so sweaty that the microphone kept slipping out of it as I pushed past the audience and towards the Representative. The rest I can’t recall—I’d kinda blacked out.

I’ve been a journalist for the past 15 years, and the biggest thing it’s taught me is that everything involving human interaction—understanding others and listening to them deeply, and making your own words intelligible enough to be understood by others deeply—requires practice. Socializing is a skill. You can get better at it. You can, if you fall out of practice, get worse at it.

Our environment directly impacts our abilities to practice this skill, of course. If you live in a tennis academy, you’re more likely to get better at tennis than if you live nowhere near a court, or don’t even have a racket.

Our current built environment does not encourage practicing the skill of socializing. Usually, it actively discourages it. The suburbs trap us apart from each other; phones help keep our heads pointed downward so that there is less spontaneous conversation in public, even if we live in crowded cities.

And so we as a society have gotten progressively worse at everything that once made our lives tick and flourish. People don’t know how to flirt anymore; people don’t know how to make friends anymore. What was the last time you approached someone at a bar or a bookstore and struck up a conversation?

This de-skilling creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral: the less we practice socializing, the worse we become at it; the worse we become at it, the less we feel comfortable practicing it. What might have once caused slight discomfort—going up to the cute girl at the coffee shop or whatever—now causes your nervous system to go into overdrive. And, worse still, because that theoretical girl lives in the same society as you, the one in which speaking to strangers has become something quite strange, if you do approach her, there’s more chance than there used to be that she’ll find it off-putting. The spiral towards complete automatonization intensifies.

I have a lot of empathy for the de-skilled in this scenario. It’s not your fault that the world has made it that much harder for you to form connection. You did not create the suburbs. You did not invent the iPhone.

But I have less empathy for how we’ve begun to excuse our inability to socialize as something innate, neutral, or even good. It’s easy to blame people like incels for unfairly lashing out at society for something—their inability to socialize—that they could theoretically improve on themselves. But do many of us not do something similar? How many of us find identities through which we abdicate our responsibility for living in a pro-social world?

Without negating the realness of neurodivergence, I think it’s fine to say that we live in a culture that excuses our lack of practice and skill at socializing via diagnosis and identity.

Autism, for example, is the perfect diagnosis for the internet era because it frames the purposeful social de-skilling brought about by the internet as something innate within each person, rather than wrought upon you by massive corporations that have a vested interest in keeping you isolated and under-socialized. And it has been joined by a host of other DSM diagnoses that help people excuse their lack of social ability and lack of opportunity to practice it. On TikTok, teens who’ve never been given much chance to learn how to interact with each other decide they have BPD or other personality disorders as a way to explain away their lack of ability to make connections.

It’s no coincidence that the masters of our economic and political systems, despite being anti-identity politics and generally fascist-leaning, make exceptions for specific forms of neurodivergence—both Elon Musk and the CEO of Palantir Alex Karp identify as autistic, for example. They’ve built the world to suit their preferred forms of socializing and preferred views of humanity and in doing so, molded our own minds to be more like theirs—dependent on the technologies they create to mediate every interaction and interpretation of the world.

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The American Dream has, of course, always been a lie. But it at one point served a purpose. With enough work, the indoctrination taught us, any of us could make it—get married, buy a house, save money, retire.

Perhaps more people these days are realizing that this dream is a fantasy. Perhaps more people have seen it for what it is—a way to encourage us all to keep our heads down and not challenge the system, in hopes that some day our exploitation would lead us to greener pastures.

But even for those of us who never believed in this dream, we, for much of recent history, had alternative dreams—ways of envisioning the future that provided us hope.

The progressive version of the American Dream was a collectivist riff on its central premise—that with enough work, things would get better. In place of individual capital accumulation were things like racial and gender and economic equality. Collectivist movements were built around the idea that, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

There seemed to be an inflection point between these two dreams in 2020. The Covid lockdowns made chasing individualist American Dream seem more preposterous than ever.

First by showing us how tenuous those materialist things we’d supposedly been working toward had always been: If the world, our lives, our health, were not guaranteed, then what, exactly, were we hustling for? If a virus could shatter the world’s supply chains within a matter of weeks to the point that the ability to buy toilet paper was no longer a given, then how stable was the future we looked toward anyway?

And then by showing us that there was another kind of dream available to us, one that was more collective and exciting. Protests over racism and police violence exploded onto America’s streets partially because people were angry over these things, but also, I believe, because the other American dream, the one in which we worked for our own white picket futures, no longer made sense. A space had been opened for something else.

The original American Dream reminds me of Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel onto the side of a mountain, only to trick himself into running into it. Somewhere in us, we know that the premise of chasing individualist success for diminishing returns is silly, but we keep running anyway, certain that if someone—that damn Road Runner, for example—can run through the mountain and get to the other side, then we can too. And then, of course, smack.

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In 1932, the German writer Siegfried Kracauer wrote of one of Berlin’s shopping districts, where shops were constantly shuttering and being replaced by new ones, that the streets were “the embodiment of empty flowing time, where nothing persists.”

‘‘That which once was is never to be seen again, and that which is current occupies the present one hundred percent,” he wrote1. ‘‘Constant change purges memory.’’

When I walk down the streets of the neighborhood I grew up in, that is how it feels: depressingly current.

The West Village in Manhattan has gone from a bohemian bastion for queer people to a paradise for billionaires in just a few decades. One of my first memories of my home is stepping outside my apartment and seeing some men across the West Side Highway, on the same piers memorialized by countless queer artists like David Wojnarowicz, engaged in an orgy. That would…not happen today. There is no memory there. Only now.

There was nothing particularly notable about that orgy. But it was one of a plethora of memories of the neighborhood that collectively made me who I am; memories that taught me that cities could be fun, that life could take place in public, that being gay was normal, and, perhaps most crucially, that people living atop of and intertwined with one another was a massive benefit to a sense of community and a sense of self.

These days in the Village, bleach-blonde finance wives carry their frufru little dogs to bland but expensive cafes to lunch (verb) with their girlies. Those once-gay piers across from my childhood apartment are now a private-security-patrolled jogging path for people who undoubtedly work for Halliburton or somewhere equally evil.

I grieve for my neighborhood. But mostly I grieve the fact that few others know what I’m talking about. I can envision a different kind of city because I carry a mental history of a different kind of city. For the new entrants to New York, there is nothing to grieve, because it is all new. But more than that: there is nothing better to look forward to, because there is no memory bank of better or different times to pull from. The entire concept of a more equitable, more exciting city, has been erased.

In this sense, memory is a very fragile thing. For memory to work it must be collective. It cannot be me or anyone else screaming into the void. We must share a language and reference points. Any cog to drop out of the machine of collective memory threatens the whole structure. And without a sound structure, a downward spiral begins in which the needs of capital always win out: the people made by a memoryless place (such as the new entrants to the West Village today) have less power or desire to push for places that create new memories; this further blandifies that place; and so people after them have even less of a memory to pull from and therefore even less of a future to fight for; until one day we will all be born in a Chase Bank lobby, unwilling or unable to fight our way out of it, because, as far as we know, the entire world is and always has been a Chase Bank lobby.

Without collective memory, we exist in a depressingly-static present. Memory is not just a past to grieve, but the fire in which the future is forged.

The world today feels much like the West Village: stuck in a deeply unsatisfying present, unable to push for a better future because the erasure of our memory has left us with little to fight for, and little knowledge of how to fight.

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This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the internet and memory. This one is free. The second one, which will be more about the history of people’s attempt to control memory, won’t be.

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A few months ago, I picked up a friend whom I hadn’t seen in a few weeks from a train station. As we drove, we shared recent things from our lives: what we’d experienced, what we were thinking about. Except, we began to realize, most of those things were things we’d seen online. “Did you see that article in the New Yorker?” Or, even worse: “Did you see that meme on Twitter,” and “did you see that Reel on Instagram?”

As soon as we realized this, we hung our heads in shame, and made a concerted effort to stop mentioning the internet and instead catch up about only what was happening in our real lives. Except, we realized very quickly, that seemed much harder.

It’s not only that we’d both been in particularly bad places with our respective internet addictions, it’s that those addictions appeared to have erased everything surrounding them. Our individual lives had been supplanted with a shared internet memory of memes and articles and videos that, yes, provided us with a basis for conversation, but also seemingly took away from us everything else that mattered—namely, our own lives.

I began to see this collective internet memory everywhere: in the social media slang, usually bastardized from queer and black cultures, that had become a quick way to get a laugh, or simply a way to fill dead space at parties (I cannot count how many times have I said something, expecting a followup question from my interlocutor, only to hear “slay” or “tea” or “boots” followed by nothing (and I don’t want to think about how many times I’ve done the same thing.)); in the way memes became a kind of shorthand for conversation and the sharing of feelings at bars or in friends’ living rooms (“OMG that deeply personal thing you just told me is just like a video I saw.”).

Except to call it “collective internet memory” is probably a misnomer, because beyond its most superficial layer of friends and strangers sharing things with each other, there’s nothing collective about it. The internet’s inner workings are extremely concentrated and top-down. It is, essentially, five corporations in a trenchcoat. Or, really, five corporations behind a projector, projecting what seems like an infinite, kaleidoscopic horizon onto our eyeballs, but one that is in actuality much of the same shit over and over again, and shit that, not coincidentally, is turning the world swiftly rightward.

If we think of our time as a zero-sum game (and it is, because we will all die), then what effect does it have on our minds for our limited spaces for communal understandings of the world (e.g. interpersonal conversations) to be colonized by this for-profit machine run by psychopathic billionaires?

The infection of our conversation by the internet might seem innocuous, or even cutesy and fun, but if even the most offline thing you can do—speak with other people in the flesh—has been populated by the preferred language of the ruling class (which is not to say that they want us to say “slay” but to say that they want us to be stupid, which is maybe the same thing), then it stands to reason that something fundamental is at risk within our systems of human communication: the ability to communicate without the influence of those who want to maintain the status quo.

Take the conversation I had with my friend, and blow it up to a global scale: the internet acts as an Amnesia Machine. It is not only that it provides content that stupefies us, and algorithmically filters people towards fascism, but that in its constant deluge has the power to help us forget other forms of knowledge-making and sharing. The internet is a technology of memory erasure, a deterritorializing mega-force that helps us forget our actual surroundings and histories, and replaces them with ones algorithmically generated by and beneficial to the richest people in the universe.

The more the internet becomes our way of understanding the world, the worse the world gets.

And now the world is getting worse!

The New York Times has an interesting story about how 50 years after the death of Francisco Franco, Spaniards, and especially young Spaniards, are starting to revise their view of the dictator. Twenty percent of the country’s youth now have a positive view of his reign. The culprit is, of course, largely social media, where far-right influencers have flooded people’s feeds with pro-Franco content.

But another way to say this is that the internet has helped erase the memory of all the horrific things Franco did. If you were not alive to experience those things, and if most of your information comes from the internet, and if that internet is run by people who are likely sympathetic to Franco or at least unwilling to restrain the content of people who are, then other narratives get lost to history. The internet, like an invasive weed, overtakes other forms of information, ones that are less conducive to a techno-libertarian world (see: forms of information created by liberalism-supporting institutions like journalism and government education).

This control of information is the often explicit goal of the far-right billionaires: Elon Musk created “Grokipedia” with the explicit goal of challenging the influence of Wikipedia, which, with its reliance on journalism and primary sources, is based in actual history as opposed to the made-up history (see: conspiracy theories) so-often favored by white supremacists. The site makes reference to explicitly white nationalist sources 42 times.

Other billionaires are less obvious in their goals but no less (and probably much more) successful. What is ChatGPT except a memory-erasure machine? By severely de-emphasizing the sources it relies on to spew out its content, it trains people to become less familiar with where information actually comes from, and more dependent on itself, which is to say more dependent on the information it allows through, information ultimately controlled by right-wing-friendly billionaires.

It’s no coincidence that the internet has been found to weaken people’s memory to the point it has a term in academia—“digital amnesia”—because this is one of its explicit purposes. The more we rely on Google to remember everything for us, to do research for us, to even autocomplete sentences for us (even though, in my experience, that feature has never, ever, ever been faster than just typing out three or four words on your own), the less we can remember how to live our lives without the help of these billionaires overlords.

Their mission is succeeding: people have become less skilled at doing their own research, and less trustful of actual information than of information filtered through algorithms. Forty Five percent of U.S. teens now think journalists do more harm to democracy than good, but have very little problem getting their “news” from streamers and influencers (who are usually just spewing bastardized and versions of the news that these teens seem to distrust, twisted into whatever shape that the billionaire-backed platforms algorithmically deem supportable).

One of the greatest tricks ever pulled was convincing us that the internet is some neutral technology, as opposed to a platform controlled by people with a vested interest in controlling us. Perhaps now that the consequences of this control are becoming obvious, we will have less of a problem recognizing that our digital lives are not only being corrupted, but corrupting the diminishing real lives we have left.

And that’s tea, lol.

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Helllllllloooooooooooooooo,

For today’s Link Drop, there’s more people than ever arguing about whether everything wrong with our brains is due to the phones or our school system or our politics or even, simply, each other. But left unsaid in much of these debates is what, to me, should be an obvious fact: they all have the same cause!

Arguing about which of these factors is primary in leading us to lives of stupidity and meaninglessness is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Or worse: it’s like blaming the chairs for the ship sinking, and not even realizing you’re on a ship to begin with.

To make more sense: A world built via hypercapitalism is a world that creates increasing inequality, and increasing inequality is bad for everything, including our brains. The phones, the schooling, the discourse—all of it is part of the same rot at the root of our society.

The reason people are getting more stupid, can’t read, and are supporting policies that go against their self-interest is the same reason people are dying earlier and can’t access healthy food and are turning to dangerous drugs to ease their pain: inequality affects and infects everything.

For some reason, we tend to think of our brains and the information that feeds them as somehow separate from everything else in this world. But consolidated corporate control of any system leads to worse outcomes, and this is no less true for our information and education ecosystems than it is for our food system or housing system or transportation system.

To that end:

-New York Magazine has a good series of stories pondering why people are getting dumber. The stories contain some alarming stats that show what we all intuitively know to be true to be true. One of the stories cites the research of Elizabeth Dworak, who, as part of her 2023 master’s thesis, looked at IQ trends and found that we’ve been in a downward IQ spiral since 2006. IQ, of course, is an imperfect measure of intelligence, but other measures seem to point to the same trend: ACT scores, for example, are at their lowest level in over three decades, and high school math scores are at their lowest in two decades.

Features writer Lane Brown posits this decline has less to do with technology as a whole, and more to do with what technology has enabled—namely the ability for all of us to yammer on about everything at each other forever, without anyone needing to know what they’re really talking about.

“Everybody in the developed world now has Airdrop access to everyone else’s mind,” she writes. “Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team. Bad ideas had a harder time scaling and reproducing, so lots of stupidity stayed local, and everyone else could happily overestimate the average person’s intelligence because they saw less of it. But then we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think.”

It’s a fine thesis for a piece, but one that misses the larger systemic reason for this. To say “it’s not the phones but what we do on them” elides that what we do on the phones is completely controlled by the makers of those phones and the makers of those things called apps on those phones. We think we have the freedom to yammer, but really the forms our yammering take—the fact that the worst and stupidest and most incendiary stuff (the “junk food” of human thought, if you will) is all that’s accessible to most people—has everything to do with the fact that the internet is nearly completely controlled by six companies (Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, TikTok).

It’s a shame so many people get lost in the details of this stuff, because it disenables any kind of holistic fight against it. Sure, ChatGPT might be evil, but it’s not simply that the technology itself is evil, it’s that these technologies are given near-limitless power over our eyeballs and brains by a government that is essentially run by the corporations themselves.

To use an analogy: Monsanto’s GMO corn seeds might be horrible for the environment and our bodies, but one farm growing them is much different than crony capitalism essentially mandating that all commodity crops use Monsanto (or Dow Chemical or BASF) seeds. When we go to the grocery store, we are given the illusion of choice of thousands of products, when really those products are mostly just corn, soy, sugar and cheap fats, thanks to our government-supported agricultural monoculture. This is similar to how the internet functions these days: we have the illusion of countless forms of information, when really nearly all that information comes from a vanishingly small and decreasing number of sources. The industry of finding new information—i.e. journalism—has completely collapsed. Our eyes are all on a diet of proverbial high-fructose corn syrup.

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Over the last few years, getting physical—tennis, weightlifting, massage, acupuncture—has been the main way I’ve kept my life worth living. Of these bodywork practices, tennis has been the most important to me. It’s the way I get out of my head, discharge stress, feel my anger, transpose it from my psyche into a little yellow ball that I then get to smack as hard as I can.

I love my friends whom I play tennis with, but on the court I love beating them. I relish in watching the ball skim a few inches above the net and land a few inches from the baseline and just enough to either side of their bodies that they can’t reach it. This doesn’t happen every point, of course—my friends often beat me, and I often miss even easy shots—but when it does, it’s like an orgasm: this fantastic release of pent-up energy, all my frustration at the world expelled from arm to racket to ball and into the ground near my opponent’s feet.

I am a cloud, and there is a charge built up inside me, and when I hit a good shot, that’s lightning.

Well, last week, as I reached for a forehand, I plopped my right foot down, felt a “pop” in my calf, and could no longer move. My friend/opponent helped me hobble to the car. I’ve been hobbling ever since.

For the first two days I thought: this will be annoying, but not that bad. Like having a cold; a brief period of being stuck mostly in the house. But, really, it has been bad. I’ve felt unexpectedly emotionally affected by my setback. I know it’s just been a week, and I know I’m being a baby, but without the ability to partake in my usual physical modes of emotional release, I’ve begun to feel pent-up. If I am a cloud, then I am becoming one with too much charge. I need a discharge.

Or, to use another metaphor: think of yourself as a cup. At the bottom, you are filled with the energy of the inherent stressfulness of life—conflicts with family and friends, your job, that annoying guy who cut you off in traffic. Atop that, add in your traumas—the things that keep you up at night, the things that add unnecessary weight to all the inherent stresses of life, make them triggering, make them expand in volume.

On a good day, my cup is perhaps 80 percent full. I am stressed, but I can handle it. The day progresses. On a bad day, perhaps one in which something triggers my PTSD, my cup overflows: I cry over the proverbial spilled milk not because I am sad about the milk but because my cup was already nearly full, and the milk was more than my mind could handle—it was too busy dealing with processing my traumas while also dealing with the stress of any normal day.

The reason physical activity has become so important to me, especially since experiencing some major psychic traumas years ago, is because it has been an effective way to reduce what’s in my cup. Whatever the particular mix of liquid I was dealing with on a given day, physical activity acted as a siphon, removing perhaps 10 to 30 percent of the load each day and sending it down the drain.

There are two problems with this strategy of emotional regulation though.

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Arguing with one roommate who insisted this would all only last two weeks.

Going to the grocery store for the first time, in shitty homemade masks, attempting to stay six feet away from people. There was still toilet paper there, phew.

Sitting in my bedroom in New Orleans, at my desk, staring at my laptop. I tried to trade stocks for the first time. I was not good at it. Anything for dopamine.

Attempting to go on a two-hour walk in 100-degree Louisiana heat and nearly passing out. I saw a bunch of lizards.

Texting someone in New York I’d become infatuated with not because they were good for me but because they were the ultimate distraction.

Arguing with the other roommate about literally anything for no reason whatsoever.

It’s hard for me to remember anything else. I eventually moved back to New York. Life went, kind of, back to normal.

Except a few images, even though they were on a computer screen, more than all the bad ones, more than the phone calls from New York about the bodies in trucks, have stuck in my brain: wild boar roaming the streets of a Spanish city; monkeys in India; deer all over; a sea lion in Argentina.

Nature is healing, we said.

Usually, when we talk about “memory holing” something, the something is bad. We’re using the term as it was originally used, in George Orwell’s 1984, in which government functionaries would toss any document perceived as potentially damaging to the totalitarian state down “memory holes”—chutes in an office building that whisked away paper to a giant furnace to be destroyed.

And to be sure, we do memory hole lots of bad things these days: people have argued that Trump has successfully memory-holed the January 6th riot at the Capitol; people have argued that we’ve collectively memory-holed the pandemic and the mass death it caused because it was so traumatic.

This kind of memory holing is a useful tool—it enables politicians and the rich to get away with mass violence. If the population has the memory of a goldfish, then the powerful can do as they please, help us forget, and rinse and repeat.

That’s why the Trump administration and conservatives are so concerned about control of the mainstream media—attempting to kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air, ensuring right-wing control of CBS, buying up newspapers and social media platforms: it’s not just about managing the narrative, it’s about managing history. If, a few years from now, people want to determine how they feel about a certain politician, searching the internet to develop an accurate picture of what they’ve done or positions they’ve taken might be hard. Their actions will have been memory holed.

But…the animals. Such a powerful image, to me at least. To me, at least, a sign of a better world. More than that: a sign that the better world was already there; that it wouldn’t take very much for it to be brought to fruition—less a matter of creation, more a matter of scraping off the gunk on top to reveal the beautiful underneath.

While the erasure of our collective memory of negative things is certainly bad, I think we don’t think enough about the memory holing of positive things. It is one thing to be forced to forget what you were fighting against, but it is even more powerfully dangerous to be forced to forget what you were, and could and should still be, fighting for.

There are so many things we’ve painted over. So much beauty we’ve forgotten about in the last few years. During the peak of the Covid lockdowns, animals were found to have enjoyed greater freedom than they had in decades. In areas in which lockdowns were most strict, researchers found that animals’ movement over a 10-day period grew by 73 percent. “Animals were able to go about their business without having to worry about where the humans were,” Marlee Tucker told the New York Times.

It wasn’t just the animals, of course. We, too, began to envision a freer world than the one we’d grown accustomed to. Millions protested against police violence and racism. At these actions, the sense of freedom came less from the inherent camaraderie of marching with thousands of comrades, and more from a recognition that the rules we’d internalized about how the world worked might no longer apply. Highways stopped being sites of (in)efficient transportation for the benefit of capital, and instead became sites of demonstration and catharsis. Many friends challenged the idea of private property itself: each broken window not only a result of their anger, but a symbol of what a new world less beholden to capital might look like. Even the $600 unemployment checks the government began depositing in our accounts became a sign of better things to come; the possibility of a government that actually cared. I remember when I first got back to New York City and the vaccines first became available, going into a cavernous middle school gym in Bushwick where an army of nurses injected people by the hundreds. I felt, dare I say, proud of my country, or at least my city. This is what the world might look like if we tried just a little tiny bit.

Covid was (and is) horrible, yes, but it was also a turpentine, peeling away the layers of normal awfulness we’d grown so accustomed to. And what emerged underneath, it seemed, was compassion for humanity.

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One weekend, after a house party in the middle of which no fewer than four people broke down crying (I was one of the four), my friends and I agreed life currently feels like that reaction video in which a dinner party is interrupted by an alarm and everyone runs and grabs random shit and eventually a gun—total chaos emanating from no identifiable source.

These past few months have been bad and scary, yes, but, also, unexpectedly bizarre. It’s not just that fascism marches on, it’s that it’s marching on in ways that seem designed to make everyone feel insane.

At first, I thought of this as a kind of inevitable randomness—each day of American history becoming more stupid than the last—owing to the fact that everyone in power is stupid. But now I’ve come to believe there’s a direct relationship between these things. The bizarreness, the badness, they’re the same thing. They necessitate each other.

A world barreling toward authoritarianism, a world in which there are fewer and fewer avenues through which to experience any kind of sustainable happiness or human connection, must force its smile wider and wider in order to hide all the growing pain underneath. And so that is what I have been experiencing: a kind of ecstatic and manic rush that helps ease the pain of the violence undergirding my life.

The Joker is perhaps a trite example to pull here, but, yes, that is what is happening: an exaggerated smile to conceal an as-yet-unsatiated violence. No wonder so many men gravitated towards the character in the last decade, no wonder he became a kind of hero to them. To the rest of us, The Joker was social commentary. But to them he was an emotional reality. As the vanguard of fascism, these right-wing men were the first to realize the duality of the process we are now all living through: an ever-expanding violence, concealed by an ever-widening smile.

I think of Hunter S. Thompson, high on ether and mescaline, entering Las Vegas’s Circus Circus casino, right around the time Nixon came to power, and seeing the vulgarities—the booze- and gambling-crazed Americans sloshing around a fenced-in area like pigs, belly-laughing as if they were experiencing joy and freedom. Upon seeing this, Thompson remarked the casino was what “the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” Nixon, Thompson said, would be a perfect mayor for Las Vegas.

That’s what Thompson understood: it is not one or the other, but both: violence begets empty glee, and empty glee ameliorates the violence so that we can produce more of it.

All of which is to say it should not have been surprising to me that Taylor Swift’s new album was her best-selling yet, despite nearly every review and reaction I’d seen determining it was somewhere between underwhelming and deeply and scarily empty and craven as an artistic project, even by her standards. The album and its sales were yet another sign of this growing and interlinked chasm: the worse the world gets, the more empty the culture gets, and vis versa. No, I do not think Taylor Swift is a Nazi, but her album is what the whole hep world might sound like if the Nazis had won the war—asinine, removed from reality and thus incapable of helping people navigate theirs, depraved not in its message (intellectual, sonic) but in its lack of one; each and every variant of her record sold a little twist of the wrench: open up wider, let me see more teeth.

There is of course a lot of bad music out there. That is not singular to Swift. But what I am saying is that the emptiness of Swift’s new album and the fact that it is her highest-selling ever are linked—that in a world that feels increasingly inhospitable to the human psyche, people gravitate specifically toward the kind of saccharine, empty pleasures of records like these; that we crave things that make the world feel more child-like.

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Read This When Things Fall Apart is a forthcoming book edited by Kelly Hayes that compiles over 20 letters from activists and movement leaders, each providing guidance on how to take care of yourself and keep fighting during these demoralizing times. Hayes was kind enough to let me excerpt a chapter here. The below chapter is called Read This if You Are Struggling with Your Mental Health. It’s a letter from organizer Aaron Goggans.

Get the book!

Dear Beloved,

(For that is what you are, even though we have never met. You are loved.)

This letter is for anyone struggling with their mental health in the movement. Maybe worrying if struggling with mental health in the movement makes them crazy.

In my experience as a neurodivergent organizer with a history of anxiety, mood swings, and nonnormative information processing, the line between mental illness and what Martin Luther King Jr. called being “creatively maladjusted” to society has never seemed clear to me. For King, we must never be well adjusted to injustice. It was a call to push back against the pathologizing of people who resisted their oppression. Our mental health, like our personalities and worldviews, are a result of some mix of nature, nurture, and social environment.

I think the same neurodivergence that can make us anxious in social situations, or hyper-fixate on details, or swing from grandiose thoughts to deep over-focus on flaws can often be part of what makes us good organizers. It’s also the flip side of sensitivity that allows us to read situations well, plan ahead, or connect deeply with the world. I’m not suggesting that “mental illness is a super power” but that the same way of sensing, perceiving, and experiencing the world that makes our day-to-day lives challenging also helps us imagine and live into other worlds.

Those of us with diagnosable mental illness or neuro­divergence (even if we don’t have the means to be formally diagnosed) have had to live in the margins long enough to learn a thing or two about surviving while being creatively maladjusted. So, as someone who identifies as crazy, I’m going to be speaking to all of us who have become creatively maladjusted because I think the advice is equally relevant for those of us for whom mental illness is more temporary and situational and those of us for whom it is a lifelong reality.

With the rise of fascism, we are going to experience those in power using everything within their power to warp consensus reality. From news media to nonsensical laws or theatrical shows of force, they will try to twist everyone’s worldview into one in which their actions are justified. This is frightening and literally produces anxiety and depression. In the coming years, lessons in how to thrive, learned by those of us who are born with a strong tendency to step outside consensus reality, might be lifesaving to more neurotypical organizers.

Being an organizer means you have enough wisdom and experience to know that your community or nation (or the world) has some serious problems that no existing formation can fix but you think you might be able to convince enough other people to make the change. It also means that you push past the consensus reality, the eternal messaging that says, “Everything is fine,” or “Okay, things are messed up, but you gotta leave these sorts of things to men in power.”

Can you imagine a better definition of being creatively maladjusted than living outside the consensus reality? Add to that having the audacity not only to envision another world but to act, day in and day out, as if that world is as real as the world other people live in. To organize well is to live on an alternative timeline in which we get free, and to start acting as if you already are.

So again, if you find yourself wondering, after weeks or perhaps months of constant stress, maybe some panic attacks or lashing out at your comrades, or perhaps even waking up in the middle of the night terrified of jackboots at your door, if you are going crazy, I’d offer that maybe that’s the wrong question. The better question is, how can we take care of our mental health while either refusing—or being just plain unable—to adjust ourselves to injustice?

So, now that we have set aside fears of being crazy, at least for a second, where do we go from here?

First: Tend to your body. Sleep, eat something hearty, get a hug, and touch earth. It may seem trite, especially if your mental health challenges arise—at least in part—from the stress of your movement work. These four things are a great place to start. We are basically big children. Or maybe more accurately, children are just small people who don’t have coping mechanisms yet. Yet the reason that most kids’ problems can be solved with a nap, food, a hug, or playing outside is not because their lives are simple but because those are the basic things all humans need to regulate our emotions.

Not to be too on the nose, but to be creatively maladjusted is a mercurial gift. Many of us have seen stress and trauma turn the shared reality of a tight-knit group of people into something toxic. I have distinct memories of supporting Black-led organizing collectives during the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd uprisings that have burned this realization into my soul.

I spent about three months in Louisville, Kentucky, during the height of the 2020 uprisings. By the time I arrived, the local activist community was already a hundred days into consecutive actions. That meant at least one action—though often more—every day for a hundred days. Many of these actions were banner drops or marches, but some included shutting down bridges or camping out on the front lawn of an elected official.

Activists and organizers were beaten, tear-gassed, and snatched off the street. They were woken up and questioned in the middle of the night. Still, they got up every morning, planned more actions, and ran a mutual aid network that fed hundreds (sometimes thousands) of residents a day. One hundred days turned a group of college students and young adults into committed revolutionaries—committed revolutionaries who were so paranoid that they wouldn’t give their local activist group their social security number so that they could become an employee, because they didn’t want the feds (who already knew who they were) to have that information.

They organized without pay for eighty hours a week. They ran a food-delivery service because the only grocery store on the Black side of the city had been closed after a Black man was killed on the property by the National Guard. They ran a housing program because developers were hiring police to evict Black residents from certain neighborhoods. They knew that without food, without housing, members of their community would die.

It took hours of conversations, constant reminders that they need to eat vegetables, and sometimes my refusal to meet with them until they slept for them to hear that if they did not stop, they might die. As my collective supported them in slowing down, we heard more and more about what the uprising had taken from them. How their affiliation with the protests had lost them jobs, or how something they tweeted got reposted by one of Trump’s children, leading to someone finding out where they lived and kicking the door down.

They had formed what you might call trauma bonds with their idea of what movement was. A trauma bond is where someone feels deeply connected to their abuser because after the harm, the abuser lavishes love and praise on them to “make it okay” and promises never to do it again. The negative feelings of the abuse become closely connected to positive feelings that come from the lavishing of care, attention, and support that comes after. Eventually, our bodies can’t distinguish well between the two, even if our minds can. Praise reminds us of the abuse and the abuse gets interpreted as love.

In the same way, cultures of self-sacrifice and disposability can creep into our movements. Many of us develop the misbelief that you must put your body and spirit on the line, often with no plan for how to care for yourself after. Then there is a picture of you at the protest that goes viral and people comment on how brave we are or talk about how this is a new civil rights movement and we are following in the footsteps of giants. At the debrief, the action organizers might even provide food, and that might be the only way you can afford to eat now that you’ve lost your job.

In many (though by no means all) movement spaces, destructive ideas about the nature of healing and restoration remain pervasive: that healing is the responsibility of individual organizers; that burnout is neither avoidable nor the organization or community’s responsibility; that mental illness is a sign of inherent weakness. These false beliefs can keep you pushing through unnecessary pain, blaming yourself for your inability to get over it.

At the same time, there is no feeling better than a movement high. Even as I was supporting younger activists in Louisville, trying to encourage them to slow down, I was exhilarated by their energy. I felt compelled to push myself harder to support them, meeting them at any time of the day they needed me. I felt so seen and valuable when they would open up about how helpful our collective was. Even as I was tired, even as I was devastated by sitting with the family of a man killed by police as they read the letter from city hall blaming their child for their own death, I felt more alive than I have ever felt.

This cycle can create a weird world, a new reality, that only your equally creatively maladjusted activist friends understand. You can form such intense—if dysfunctional—bonds with your comrades that you seek to be with them all the time. Yet, in some cases, the only thing you do together is more traumatic actions. Eventually, activists find themselves passing harm back and forth, asking more and more of each other because they live in a world where the stakes are impossibly high. The next action has to be bigger to justify all that we have sacrificed. You can’t put your own needs for sleep or rest ahead of the movement, because if the movement is not worth our lives, then why did we give up everything for it?

Unfortunately, there is also no low like a movement low. The depths of my usual depressive episodes cannot compare to the existential languishing that a movement conflict or setback can trigger in me. It’s one thing to think your life is hopeless, but a badly executed action or a mass arrest can make it seem like the world will never improve. No matter how much your body hurts, no matter how hard it is to get out of bed, a movement depression will gaslight you into jumping back into the fire before you are ready.

A sleep-deprived, hungry brain can’t see that the more you resource yourself, the more you will have to give; that an hour of work that comes after eight hours of sleep, a healthy interpersonal interaction, and equally healthy meal is going to be a hundred times more productive than an hour of work that comes after three weeks of little sleep and a Hot Cheetos–based diet.

An overwhelmed person who has been doing actions to avoid having the time to sit with their emotions is not going to see how much pain they cause when they lash out and chastise those who are not willing to sacrifice as much as them. They are unable to see that if they really paused and took stock of the cost, they wouldn’t want to sacrifice any more either.

Like so many of us, I had to learn the hard way that every challenge we face is harder to deal with when we are tired, hungry, lonely, or have been stuck inside for long periods of time. It was only through losing myself to the movement, getting sick and never being quite the same again, that I realized self-care is crucial. I’ve come to think of these things as mental health hygiene—things you have to do every day to maintain as much of your health as you can. They won’t fix anything on their own, but they at least they will slow the pace of things getting worse. These actions all increase our nervous system’s ability to regulate itself.

“Dysregulation” is probably the best term I know to describe the deterioration of mental health. When you are dysregulated, your body can have unskillful or self-defeating reactions to stimuli. This could mean being irritable over small things or reading all social interaction for potential threats (i.e., experiencing paranoia). Yet it can also mean the opposite: a lack of response. It can mean not caring about the risks of a situation, feeling little empathy for others’ pain, or having little interest in the things you used to love.

If you’re an organizer, you have probably spent years being somewhat dysregulated. Unfortunately, many movement spaces have normalized dysregulation. So many overwork because if they stop, they can’t help but notice all the uncomfortable feelings they have been bottling up inside. Our people might be open to risky actions because they can’t really feel anything else and the chaos of risky actions are the only times they feel alive. Our people might only be able to see what is wrong with the situation, or why some choice is problematic. We can often write this off as “the curse of knowledge,” but it can often be a narrowing of vision and rigidity that comes from unprocessed emotion.

For many of us, our dysregulation is complicated by trauma. “Trauma” is a word that gets tossed around a lot. It has gotten to the point where it seems like every social behavior is based in trauma. Personally, I believe that this is because, while not everything is trauma, trauma is everywhere. We live in a deeply traumatic society and at a particularly traumatic point in the history the planet’s climate. I think of trauma as a time-traveling somatic (or embodied) experience. It is experienced when our bodies react to stimuli based on a story of previous harm in order to avoid or prevent future harm.

Trauma occurs when your fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response is triggered yet, for some reason, your body cannot release all the energy of that activation. Often this is an experience for which you have no context, something that is so extreme, foreign, or novel that you can’t situate it in your story of self or story of the world. This is also why childhood trauma is so impactful: it occurs at the time where you have the least amount of personal context.

The danger might pass, but your body files away a somatic connection to whatever triggered the response so that the next time you experience the trigger, you respond in the way your body has learned to respond. In this sense, trauma is deeply tied to an overwhelming of one’s capacity for self-regulation. Trauma can occur when you experience more activation than your system can effectively dissipate, or when the kind of activation you experience is something your body doesn’t know how to handle.

As Resmaa Menakem writes in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, “Contrary to what many people believe, trauma is not primarily an emotional response. Trauma always happens in the body. It is a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage.” A trauma response can be triggered by anything the body perceives as threat, rightly or wrongly. It is important to note that the brain experiences threat to social status the same way it deals with threats to the body. Somatically, the experiences are almost identical. This is why we say things like “I almost died of shame.” Ego death—the destruction of things to which we cling in order to build a sense of self—is experienced somatically as a threat to life.

This means that if you have been dysregulated for months, you can be traumatized by things that wouldn’t have affected you much if you were healthy. To me, this is a big reason movement conflicts are so volatile and frequent. It’s a bunch of tired people whose long-standing unmet needs for sleep, food, connection, and validation are exacerbated by interactions with the police and with the strategies of reactions that are designed to increase stress. When conflict happens, it is primed to set off other pains, other time-traveling emotions, that are not connected to the conflict in question and thus cannot be fully resolved by resolving the disagreement that started the conflict in the first place.

Back in 2016, I was an organizer with Black Lives Matter DMV. The police put these bright flashing lights outside my and my sister’s bedrooms. It was so bright that it was hard to sleep. It was a reactionary strategy developed by the Israeli military for use in Palestine. It brings to “community policing” a familiar interrogation (or what might more reasonably be called torture) technique: preventing detained people from sleeping. This lack of sleep wreaked havoc on my and my sister’s relationships as we were just constantly cranky. It was not until we were able to make the connection to the lights that we could stop engaging in petty arguments and redirect our ire toward the cops. But that was easier said than done, given how much trauma we were accumulating together.

Now, it is crucial to state here that not all trauma is the same. Like most things, it exists on a spectrum. In the same way that some people will respond to a precipitating event with brief, mild depression and others might experience chronic episodes of crippling depression with no discernible trigger, trauma can be simple and worked through with deep breathing and thought stopping, or it can be complex and take years of therapy to recognize and even more years to lessen levels of activation (that may never completely go away).

Likewise, what traumatizes one person may barely affect another. While there are some events, like witnessing serious violence, that tend to be traumatic for most people, nearly anything that activates a sense of flight or fright can be traumatic.

If any of what I’ve said resonates with a conflict you are dealing with right now, then please eat a good meal, rest, get a hug from a safe person, and go outside. As organizers, it’s so easy to fall into the cult of “maximal effort.” We can rush into restorative or transformative processes, principled struggle, or even a defense posture because we think it’s the ethical thing to do. Especially when we have caused harm, we can be worried that taking time to rest is selfish or avoiding accountability.

But hear me when I say: no one is served by your entering into or facilitating a process when you don’t have the capacity to self-regulate. To do so is to run the risk of making things worse with unskillful action, or of opening up more pain than you have the capacity to process, leading to even more trauma. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen so-called restorative spaces cause more harm than they were attempting to heal.

I once felt so responsible for a space I had helped organize that I tried to facilitate through a conflict on little sleep and with a facilitation team that was so triggered that they had checked out. In hindsight, everyone would have been better served by me just walking away. Instead, my maximal effort fed the conflict and led to me being asked to leave a space I had helped organize. It caused a rift in an organizing community that, half a decade later, hasn’t fully healed.

That leads me to my last point. Whether a conflict is keeping you up at night, memories of an arrest cause you to lose time, or you experience anxiety at the thought of going to a meeting, you are not alone. I can assure you that another organizer has experienced something similar. Likewise, another organizer has been where you are and got the help they needed to make it through to the other side. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, and you don’t get any bonus points for struggling alone.

Reach out, ask for help, and accept the help that is offered—especially when you think you are unworthy. Giving comrades opportunities to show up for us is an exercise in solidarity. Take all the naps. Eat all the food that makes you feel good. Find the people who make you feel safe and connected and ask them to help you regulate. Touch the earth.

It seems so small, but it’s so crucial. About two weeks into supporting activists in Louisville, we realized that all our years of training in crisis intervention were sometimes less immediately helpful than just inviting people to drink some tea, cleaning their homes for them, and giving them a hug. We realized that telling people to rest is not enough. We had to make rest easy. We held meetings outside, letting people soak in the sun, feeding them solid meals, and then scheduling a two-hour break in rooms full of fluffy couches.

We realized, too, that many people didn’t actually know how to self-regulate and weren’t around anyone stable enough to coregulate with. So we incorporated groundings into every meeting. We started off with active grounding in music or pose making to help people release some of the energy that had been accumulating, before it could become trauma. As people’s nervous systems calmed, we would introduce breathing exercises and guided meditation into the mix. To offer another way for people to regulate themselves, one elder began running Qigong lessons in the morning and evening.

We worked with leadership to ensure that there were no other meetings happening during grounding times. That way, all those traumatized activists who were afraid to be alone could gather around an activity that actually resourced them, rather than asking them to sacrifice more. Eventually, we were able to have more one-on-one relationships where we could ask each organizer what they used to do for fun, or what activities had brought them joy. We encouraged them to bring activities like coloring or singing by incorporating them into meeting agendas.

Once they connected with joy and saw how much more energy it brought them, we introduced something even more radical. What if we allowed ourselves joy just because joy connects us to what it means to be human? What if your joy or rest didn’t have to make us more productive? For many, this idea was too radical. The idea of doing anything other than pushing harder was literally unthinkable.

Unfortunately, not all of us survived the uprising with our lives or with our spirits intact. Too many of our ancestors and peers gave everything to movements that refused to facilitate their rest or reconnection to joy. To borrow from Allen Ginsberg, we have seen some of the best minds of our generation destroyed by an under-resourced madness—a creative maladjustment that was not allowed to be human and to be resourced by joy, love, and connection and so turned in on itself.

The reality is that joy, laughter, and rest are not only the best medicine; they are also the best measurements of our mental health. To paraphrase Emma Goldman, if we are not laughing, dancing, or singing, there might be something wrong with our revolution. If there is one piece of advice I can give you in these perilous times, it’s that sometimes your very maladaptiveness will be what keeps you from despair or, worse, accommodating fascism.

I think King was right to say that the fate of the world is in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. We cannot afford to adjust ourselves to the cruelty of fascism, the disposability of late-stage capitalism, or apathy of indifference to the plight of fellow humans. With the future in our hands, we must nurture our ability to see and live into new worlds by caring for each other and normalizing rest and joy.

In and love and solidarity,

Aaron

Aaron Goggans is an organizer, writer, and movement infrastructure builder, born and raised in Colorado. His politics were shaped by interfaith organizing in the Great Plains, labor and housing organizing on the South Side of Chicago, Black Liberation organizing in Washington, DC, and international delegations to Korea, Hong Kong, and South Africa. He is currently the Steward of the Pattern at the WildSeed Society, a Black-led, BIPOC-focused organization that supports movement stewards building a better world.

I don’t know if you’ve had this experience of leaving a movie theater: feeling for a few minutes or hours that you now exist within the world of the movie. I remember seeing 28 Years Later a few months ago and as soon as I exited onto the street sensing that a zombie might run after me at any moment. Rather quickly, this feeling faded—I got a drink with a friend and forgot about it.

But last week, I saw One Battle After Another, the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie about revolutionaries trying, and mostly failing, to affect change in an increasingly fascistic United States of America—one in which the police and military are always watching, always ready to ruin people’s lives, and frequently doing so for petty, personal, ego-driven reasons—and something shifted in me.

I saw it at one of the few venues projecting it in VistaVision—the screen was huge and the sound surround and the experience so, so much fun. And as I exited the Union Square Regal at 2am, that familiar feeling returned. I was in the movie. A cop car turned the corner and I nearly grabbed one of my friends to jump behind a barricade to evade some theoretical arrest, as if I was Leo DiCaprio, on the run for my involvement in a series of semi-violent anti-state actions.

Except, this time, the feeling did not fade. A week later, it still hasn’t. Instead, it’s transformed into something more subtle, and yet more all-encompassing. It’s not that I’m ducking and running from cop cars every day; it’s that the movie has convinced me the world it represents is not only our own, but somehow realer than our own.

In “real” life, it is very easy to become distracted and impotent and give in to a kind of pre-defeat, figuring that anything you do cannot possibly change the increasingly fascistic world around you. But in the world of One Battle After Another, these issues—fighting for migrants, fighting against capitalism, doing whatever it takes to ensure that the most psychotic power-hoarders on earth do not ruin the earth more than they already have—feel as constantly present and consequential as they actually, in real life, are.

The facts of the world as represented by OBAA are not necessarily realer than the real world, but the feeling of the world in the film—stripped from all the distractions and mundanities of real life—is, in my opinion, realer.

In the real world, there is a near-constant gauze wrapped around my eyes, separating me from all I know to be true—that I am depressed and anxious and fearful because of the evilness all around us, and that that must be directly confronted if anything is to change. The camera lens of One Battle After Another is gauze-free. It is clear-eyed. And, thus, by watching it, I felt the gauze between me and my world begin to unravel as soon as I left the theater. In short, its fictions clarified reality.

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