I saw this Reel the other day of a guy getting in and out of bed on loop as the voices of anxiety and the fear of starvation take turns convincing him to stay put and/or get up and at ’em, and I couldn’t think of a better synecdoche of my energy since settling back into the flow of things here. There’s so much to do and so little motivation to do it, and yet we must, we must — muss es sein? es muss sein! — infinitely recurring, forever.
It feels like the avenues for maneuvering are narrowing by the day. We put on our best look of determination, but the reality is that our world is a hundred tons heavier than it’s been for a while. The dangers are looming ever closer while our ability to respond to them doesn’t seem to get any better. It’s enough to suck the life out of anyone.
So, it’s good to be a part of something. If we’re fucked, we won’t be fucked alone, at least. And if we’re to figure any way out of this mess, we’re certainly better off figuring it out with others. Everyone’s mitigating and making contingency plans. It might not be visible on the surface, but it’s happening. It can be a lot when you need a backchannel for every backchannel just to breathe, but here we are. This is our generation. We’re stepping up best we can.
There’s no secret location from which to plan our attack, nor an outer perimeter to fall back on and regroup; we just have these mundane places where we live and work and do our thing. We only have the here and now. And this makes every day feel like a battle, but so it is, and so it must be. There is no viable alternative.