When There's Nothing Left
Thoughts on despair
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I haven’t been writing as much as I feel like I should lately. Between working mandatory overtime and business travel, when the day is done my brain can barely summon the energy to read a novel or even play a video game. I used to play a lot of video games. But there’s another reason I haven’t been writing as much; I just am not sure how much I have left to say. This statement would come as a shock to anyone who has known me for a long time. I always have something to say. But I started this project to give myself a place to write about the world and how to make it better, and to try to make sense of the things that don’t make any sense at all. In short, to try to instill a sense of revolutionary optimism and hope in people that we can find a way to pull ourselves back from the brink and right the ship. Current events have left no shortage of catastrophy to opine about but I find myself questioning if I have anything new to say about it at all. On Twitter, it can feel like we have all been stuck in an endless discourse loop for the past several years. We react to outrageous crimes, we express our anger, we condemn the butchers and monsters and corrupt leaders, and so often each other. We let minor squabbles over irrelevant bullshit distract us for a week or two. Rinse and repeat. This is so far from what it felt like even 6 short years ago. There was still this pervading sense of hope in the world back then. Like yeah, it was bad, things were bad and hard and unequal and unfair, but there was a feeling that we could change it. No more. Now it often feels like the only thing we have to cling to is our rage. Impotent rage. We use our rage as the barometer of the extent to which we have maintained our humanity in the face of such inhuman conditions. And I would argue that this is a fair metric - if you’re not outraged you are either a barbarian or a fool - but it feels sometimes that this is all that’s left. Absent the hope for something better, all we have to cling to is an anger at what is and will perhaps always be. I feel it too.
If I squint, I can still find the places the light shines, but these places are fewer and further between every day. More and more it feels like the future is one of dead ends and devolution. The bad guys are winning everywhere you look. I’ve found this inextricable from the conditions of my own life as well. I feel like I’m in constant mourning for what my life could’ve been if I weren’t forced to produce profit for someone else, ever teetering on the brink of being back at my lowest and most immiserated, while Silicon Valley sociopaths threaten the very source of my ability to care for myself and my family. Of wishing my daughter, who will be entering college soon, wasn’t on the precipice of entering a world of infinite struggle and hardship and chaos and uncertainty. A little over half a decade ago, I was among the cohort of people who thought things could change if we won an election, or maybe several. Now it feels like “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is the liminal space that my mind occupies most of the time. While revolution is technically possible, the likelihood of it feels impossible to imagine. And the rub is, of course, that revolution has never been more urgent. Everything we care about is slipping through our fingers, and trying to gain hold of it is like trying to contain the water rushing out to sea.
There came a point some time into the genocide in Gaza where I felt like I had spent every word, every synonym, I could possibly muster to describe the barbarity of Israel. I didn’t stop speaking out, but I felt like there was nothing sufficient to describe the horror. That, despite the half a million words or so in the English language, nothing could come close to capturing the depravity of this crime. I often feel like this about the quotidian horrors of life in this moment, too. What is there to say? Does there really need to be another voice telling you how awful this all is, or that we have to mobilize to stop it? Don’t you already know that?
In some ways, the left nihilists are at least directionally correct when they distrust the next leftish politician running on the Democratic ballot line. They are at least directionally correct to be skeptical that million man marches that make no demands can’t move the needle in any way. Of course I could sit here and tell you that it is your responsibility to go there and talk to those people and organize them and bring them to your side. This is true and I’ve said it before. But who can really blame people for feeling frustrated and helpless and powerless when we’ve lost battle after battle after battle and time is running out? An estimated 30 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests, and the police killed even more people the next year. The mass protest era has very little to show for it in an age where politicians are totally unresponsive to any demands, unaccountable to the people, fully captured by capital, with a stranglehold over civic engagement. I know the purpose of protest isn’t actually to make change but to connect people and move them into something useful… but do they? How many have received the message that nothing they do will change things, internalized that, and stopped engaging whatsoever?
I still firmly believe we have a moral responsibility to intervene wherever we can and bring others around to a better understanding of the world and our place in it. This hasn’t changed for me. And maybe I’ll keep writing in the hopes that one or two people on the margins will read something I have to say and begin to understand the stakes. They really could not be higher, and yet the terrain before us couldn’t be more uphill. We are dangling over the edge hanging on by the tips of our fingers, before the gaping maw of an abyss too awful to even imagine, with the worst people in the world ensuring that we free-fall.
I think the thing that has changed for me is that existential dread has overwhelmed me, and I don’t feel compelled to sugarcoat that or act like the task before us is easy or guaranteed to win. I wish that I could reclaim the naive optimism I felt 6 years ago, when it seemed so easy to just prevail and fix this, but this moment requires so much more from us than that. At the same time, we still have to tend to the daily minutiae of our lives and do so many little things that don’t even fucking matter just to survive under this system for as long as we are able.
Sometimes it feels like the only thing keeping me going is rage and the spite of knowing that giving up is exactly what the monsters want. The only thing that differentiates us from them is that we have managed to maintain our humanity. We haven’t sold out the living earth for a temporary bump in our own material conditions. We can grieve for people we have never met and perhaps will never meet. We aren’t willing to sacrifice our souls for personal gain. We care about the people inhabiting this planet, whether they can do something for us or not.
Life is not a fairytale, and not everything has a happy ending. In real life, the bad guys often win and win and win again. There are no guarantees of victory or karmic score settling. The universe won’t mete out punishment, and there’s no retribution in some afterlife that will right the wrongs. It’s all we can do some days to not forfeit the part of us that is ensouled; to not give in to the pressure to seek comfort for ourselves and our own at the expense of others. Maybe our rage will be enough to keep us going on the days that our hope can’t. Maybe not giving in to the forces that want to destroy us isn’t enough, but it’s not nothing either. If a critical mass of us did that then things could change. So I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it’s easy, or not to despair, or that we will win. I can’t know that. The only thing I know is that you still being here, that you still being able to muster that rage or mourn for those you do not know, it is something. It might be all you have, it might not even be enough, but it’s something. And you should hold onto it with everything you have.
Felt