What the hell did we just live through?
Yes, let’s pretend that we’re through it. No, reframe that: let’s acknowledge that we are through something, and on its other side; but that, due to various social forces wholly above and beyond our control in 2020 and 2021, the “other side” is not a post-pandemic utopia where no one has to wear a mask and the simple act of existing will not prove lethal to hundreds of thousands of people, but rather an endemic purgatory where covid-19 and its potential impacts will be with us, cruelly constraining the most marginalized and most vulnerable among us instead of the maskless yahoos and spineless (i.e., anti-vax) goatfuckers responsible for the “social forces” above, and that this will continue as such forever / for a long, long time. We are through the period of adjustment to the fact that we fundamentally changed the conditions of the world.
What do you do with that? What do you do when the weariness sets in and doesn’t leave? When the size and the shape of the thing makes itself known, sitting like a boulder in the gut? What do you do when you realize you never get to have the big celebratory “we made it” party, never get to let your breath fully out? What do you do with that feeling in the back of your mind, persistently like you forgot something, except that when you focus on it you realize that what you forgot is how to understand how things used to be, and to chart the delta across which you’ve crossed?
What do you do when you realize it doesn’t end here?
I’ve been saying for a while now that the worst thing about the pandemic is that it’s really just the warmup act for a succession of global catastrophes incoming. That conceit presupposes that this was the first one (it wasn’t) and that the next ones are foreordained (they aren’t) but, writing-on-the-wall-wise, it’s looking like we’re all going to have to get used to looking at the experience of the rest of our lives as a day-to-day management of dissonance, between how things are right now and how, instinctively in our heads, we think they were supposed to be / ought to be / used to be. (“Make The World Great Again”?) That unsettling feeling, all the time, that we live in a shadow world, a mirror world, an alternate reality, a Multiverse of Madness. That there were other branches, and we ain’t on ‘em. And we’re dangling from the one we’ve got, fingers slipping, forearms starting to burn.
And there’s literally nothing good about MAGA-spewing, tin-foil-hat-wearing, hard right nationalist Nazi bastard fuckery, but somewhere in the middle of the popularity of that thing we need to acknowledge a possibility beyond the naked hatefulness and fascism that bubbles to the surface and makes the news. That possibility is this: that the ugly middle of those movements are made up of generally regular folks who got there first, who had their own apocalypse a decade ago or a decade further, and have been managing the idea in their minds for some time now that life is supposed to be some other way and isn’t, and are grasping at every ludicrous straw — “it’s transgender childrens’ fault!” — to try to resolve the difference.
What will we do, when the dissonance gets too much? Who will we brutalize? Ourselves, probably? There are people in this world who can pour their insecurity, their pain, and their sense of displacement onto marginalized groups (who they, perversely, think have more centrality than they do); and there are those who can only direct all that hurt inward, self-destructing in an endless doomscroll, a paralysis that becomes existential, a state of aloneness in the middle of a teeming city of like-minded isolates.
Ideally, many of us are in neither camp, standing at neither extreme, but I don’t overall love our chances; I think the forces of isolation, self-absorption, unidirectional thinking, and dopamine-based rewards platforming is somewhat inherent to all of our lives right now. Our capitalist social media content-creator outrage cycle egg-carton-condo lives. I don’t think the nominal state of “living in human society” rewards community thinking, at the present moment. And I don’t know that I think it’s going to get better, structurally; i.e., I don’t think the system’s gonna fix itself, because I think the system is working exactly as designed, generating optimal results, with no end in sight. I think instead it will take enormous presence of mind on each person’s personal level to see oneself in exactly the position one is in, and take positive, proactive steps to work against what is in-built to the design of the system: the sheer ease of it, the inviting lucrativeness of just letting your exhaustion claim you, collapsing on the coach, and letting the algorithm do its thing.
There are communities out there where this kind of resistance is happening, or can happen more easily on its own power, on its on terms; they sound more and more suspiciously like utopias, albeit utopias of hard work and chicken shit and letting the tension of things being just beyond arm’s reach rewire the brain into accepting the limitations. Paradoxically, a privileged fantasy of becoming less privileged, but perhaps that’s the mind-state we all need to strive for, the Republic of Heaven that can exist only between our ears until we start doing something about it with our hands. One person at a time, one home at a time, till the homes make a neighbourhood and the neighbourhood makes a world.