pav.alxndr

There was a thing I noticed when I absent-mindedly opened Twitter on my phone the other day. I say absent-mindedly because if I’m not using Twitter for work, I’m almost certainly doing it out of habit, not because I have something to say or am experiencing a sudden hunger for tweets. Anyway, the thing I noticed was how my anxiety level went up almost immediately.

Hold on, Paul, I can hear you thinking. That’s not some novel insight. Everyone knows that Twitter makes us all crazy. Yes, yes, but before you so rudely interrupted me, I was going to say that I noticed why I became so much more anxious (compared to my normal slow-boil-anxiety that is ever-present).

Yes, Paul, you’re butting in with again. We know why: because everything is terrible and there’s nothing to be done. You’ve already written this essay, Paul. Well, that’s what you think, know-it-all imaginary reader! I’m still one step ahead of you.

What I noticed—and no more interrupting, please—was that my surge of stress had less to do with the particulars of each individual example of things-being-terrible, and more to do with the dizzying variety of topics of concern to which I was being exposed, and about which I was implicitly expected to feel something. Strongly.

And I just wouldn’t.

Now, I almost typed “couldn’t,” but in fact the whole point of me even telling you about this (assuming you haven’t already left because I made you mad earlier in this piece) was because I realized that I had a kind of agency here. I realized, or at least remembered, that I could choose my areas of concern. I actually don’t have to have Big Feelings about everything.

Think of this. In another era, before the internet was a thing, there was only so much we were likely to be exposed to in our day-to-day lives. Assuming a moderate degree of cultural literacy and interest in affairs beyond oneself, a person might have Big Feelings about things in their own lives, in things going on in their families and communities, and in the broader sweeps of current events (in other words, what was in the newspapers or on the evening news).

In addition to these more universal areas of concern, a person might have particular interests in one or more subject matters of some social relevance; the environment, business, homelessness, racism, naughty words in popular music, whatever. You’d probably have your ways of keeping up with the developments in those areas and have corresponding Big Feelings about things that happened within them.

If you cared a lot about, say, environmentalism to the exclusion of most other things, you might not have any idea what was going on in the fight for racial justice. Or maybe you would! If you did, it was because you sought that information out, proactively. You chose to add that area of concern to your plate. And good for you!

But here’s what wouldn’t happen. You probably wouldn’t be aware of what was happening in, say, evangelical Christianity, or computer programming, or crime and policing. Maybe you did! But it would be because you chose to. Unless you sought out information about those topics, you probably didn’t know a lot about what was happening within those spheres of concern, and therefore were spared having Big Feelings about things that happened within those spheres.

You were also likely spared the expectation of having Big Feelings about them.

Hell, if you were someone whose primary area of concern was environmentalism, it could be that you were really focused on, say, the preservation of forests in New England, and maybe had little idea what air pollution was doing to people in China. You might have no idea how neglected infrastructure caused water to be undrinkable in American minority communities. It’s all environmentalism, but there existed no firehose of information that would force ideas upon you that came from branches of a larger topic (air pollution in China), or interconnected with others (systemic racism leading to the neglect of a community’s water supply).

Today, because of the internet, there is a much better chance that we can be made aware of all these other areas of concern. Far, far too many important issues have gone unaddressed for ages, in large part because most folks simply never encountered them. They didn’t know what was happening outside their existing areas of concern. The fact that those of us who care a lot about climate change are now acutely aware of how global warming will harm the global poor, for example, is really good. In an earlier age, we might not have known that, or not really understood it.

A single human, however, cannot carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. There is a fine line between being well-informed and overwhelmed. The well-intentioned person who cares about those New England forests should also know what smog does to the lungs of people in Beijing, and how a broken system can allow Black people in Flint to be sickened by lead in their water.

But the lava-flow of information from social media makes the implicit demand that our naïve environmentalist also be aware of, concerned over, and have Big Feelings about, say, every crazy thing a Fox News personality says, every shady dealing by business executives, every hint of hurtful cultural stereotyping or appropriation in popular media, every lie told by a politician, every new statistic about job loss and poverty, every wasteful expenditure by the federal government, every idiotic and backward bill introduced in a state legislature, every abuse of authority by police, every example of neglect of military servicemembers, every instance of unfair preferential treatment, every poorly conceived public musing on unfamiliar topics, every foot inserted into every mouth, every head inserted into every ass.

It’s good that we know what’s going on in spheres to which we once did not have had access. It’s good that gross injustices are now being put squarely before the eyes of people who would otherwise have looked away. It is a blessing. We can do more to make more things better because we know more.

An individual, however, can only do so much. They have a finite store of emotion and processing power. Yet the social media universe demands Big Feelings about almost literally everything.

So what I figured out was, hey, I don’t have to do that. I can allocate my anxiety. I can decide how much of my concern will be distributed among a set of issues. I can choose the issues into which I will dive deeply, and which ones I will merely wade into. And I can choose to keep my eyes and mind open to new areas of concern as they cross my awareness, and from those, decide which I will allocate my emotional and intellectual resources, and which ones I will leave to others better suited to do something about them.

This is not about assigning absolute value to one issue or another, to say that environmental issue X is more or less important than racial-justice issue Y or corporate-ethics issue Z. It is about deciding, of my own volition, where my particular talents, experience, interests, and skills are best directed. I can care very much about corporate ethics, but good lord I know nothing about business. I can choose to learn more about it, of course, or I can choose to offer my support to those who know what the hell they’re doing. If I were to writhe and churn over every wrongdoing by a CEO, I would merely make myself ill, and do nothing to further the cause of reform. I can support good efforts without accepting a personal emotional stake.

The idea isn’t that we shouldn’t care, or that we care too much, but that we, as individual human animals, can’t live in that feeling, that concern, that outrage for such heightened frequencies, intensities, and durations. We can genuinely and deeply care about a wide array of issues without taking each new infraction, offense, or horror as an emergency for which we are responsible to witness, demand redress, and emotionally digest. We aren’t built for it.

Whatever your bag is, whatever gets you passionate about making the world less shitty than it is, go and dig deeply into it. Take advantage of the many tendrils of the Information Superhighway and expose yourself to the secondary and tertiary issues that overlap with yours. Follow the intellectual paths that speak to you and make it a point to keep learning more. Let your moral circle widen, and as Vonnegut said, let your soul grow.

But a widened moral circle needn’t contain a porous heart. Be intentional about the frequency, volume, and quality of the information you allow into your sphere of concern; resist the expectation that you voluntarily convert each piece of information into shrapnel to be lodged in your chest. You can care without rending yourself asunder. I know it’s possible.

And of course, there’s plenty we can just stop caring so much about altogether. Moments ago, the twitterverse demanded I have Very Strong Feelings about a rude word emblazoned on a ring worn by a U.S. senator.

I declined.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor. If you find this newsletter or anything else I produce useful or pleasing, perhaps you’d consider tossing some currency my way.

It’s freezing. I can’t stop shivering. I’m in the middle of a snow-blighted wasteland, and everything is white, and it would be hard to tell day from night if not for the fact that night is much colder. My only source of heat is some threadbare clothing recently issued to me, that at least includes a hood. I’m exhausted, badly needing sleep, and starving, but carrying precious little food. There’s a school—my school, actually—that’s really not all that far off, but the last time I tried to take shelter there, a mob of criminals tried to kill me. I barely escaped with my life. I know they’re waiting for me back there. There is a world of other places I could go—safe places, warm places—but I am on foot in this blizzard, and I don’t think I would survive the walk.

It doesn’t help matters that we reptilians are especially sensitive to cold.

I’m obviously not describing real life, but a scenario from a video game. I’m playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but with a twist: I’ve activated its official “survival mode,” which adds a slew of extra hinderances to the normal game experience. My character can not only be hurt by the usual melee blows, magic attacks, and dragon bites, but by much more banal forces: hunger, fatigue, and extreme temperatures. Skyrim’s survival mode requires one’s would-be dragonslaying adventurer to eat at regular intervals, keep cold and heat at bay, and sleep—in fact, leveling up actually requires getting shuteye.

Okay, fine, so you carry a lot of food, bundle up, and rest whenever you can. Except that survival mode also significantly reduces your character’s maximum carrying capacity, so inventory management becomes an even bigger headache than it normally is. And one can only sleep in specially designated places that are not owned by somebody else. You can’t just plop down on the ground and sleep, you have to find an inn or a friendly house or eventually learn how to craft camping supplies—supplies which, of course, have weight.

And honestly, one’s Skyrim character is supposed to be the Dragonborn, the prophesied savior of all Tamriel (the major continent and empire of the Elder Scrolls franchise). You’d think they’d be a little more, you know, hardy.

I am not usually a fan of survival type games; keeping myself alive seems difficult enough without having to worry about a fictional self. And I definitely don’t go out of my way to make difficult games even more difficult. But I have been playing so much Skyrim over the last year, and I kept finding myself to be too powerful, too easily defeating even the toughest enemies, sometimes to a laughable extent. (My sneaking abilities were apparently so refined that professional murderers couldn’t see me as I stood directly in front of them, turning their faces into pincushions for arrows fired point-blank. Dude, I‘m right here. I’m the guy stuffing you with arrows.)

Watching Twitch streamer LucindaTTV a few weeks ago (I’ve started streaming on Twitch myself, so you should come and follow me there), I heard her talk about playing the game on survival mode without any other character-enhancing modifications (or “mods”), and how she found it a very satisfying challenge. Well, I wasn’t prepared to abandon my favorite game (and favorite alternate reality), so I decided to give it a shot. I fired up a new Skyrim game, set it to its highest difficulty setting (“Legendary”), and clicked on survival mode.

And then, the freezing, the starving, and the getting killed over and over and over.

Here’s the thing, though. As maddening as it’s been, Lucinda was right. Having the game layered with these additional impediments has been oddly illuminating, and my victories—now much fewer and farther between—are all the sweeter. They are also usually by the skin of my teeth.

Along with the heightened difficulty of the game, survival mode also brings a heavy helping of tedium. I already mentioned the many frustrations of inventory and carrying-capacity management. But there’s also the raw consumption of real-world time taken up by simply going from point A to point B in the game, as, I think I forgot to mention, survival mode also disables “fast travel.” Normally, once the Dragonborn has visited a location, they can essentially teleport back there at any time. You want to start working on a quest based in far-eastern Windhelm, but you’re mucking about in Markarth in the west? No problem. As long as you’re outdoors, you just, as the Muppets put it, “travel by map.”

No more of that in survival mode. If you want to go from one major metropolis (or “hold”) to the other, you have to either walk or get a horse. There are some carriages and boats for hire in some places, but they are rare, and they don’t go everywhere. I started my game, like a genius, in a town called Winterhold, where there are no forms of transportation at all. And it’s always cold there. And I’m a lizard-person (or, in the game lore, an Argonian or a Saxhleel). Smart move, me.

This all means that there’s a good deal of planning that goes into every task you set out to complete. Let’s say the local jarl (sort of a duke or governor) wants me to go to such-and-such dungeon to fetch some artifact or other, which, successfully done, will see me rewarded with gold and maybe even a fancy title of nobility. Normally, you’d just stock up on your healing potions and head out. If you’ve already been to a location sort of near the destination, you zap yourself there and hoof it the rest of the way.

Not so now. In survival mode, you need to consider your current levels of fatigue, and decide whether to sleep first, and then take a guess at whether you might be able to find places to stop on the way to get more sleep and perhaps restock on food and supplies. How cold will it be? Maybe your best fighting gear isn’t sufficient to hold back the elements, but you can only carry so much, so you have to choose. Bring a wide variety of weapons? My heavy armor? A barrel’s worth of potions? If I own them, but can’t take them with me, there’s nowhere for me to store them in the meantime (at least until I’ve advanced enough to purchase property, but even then, it would all be stored in that location, which I’d have to travel back to the hard way in order to make any use of it.)

It’s like planning road trips for every time you play, charting out stops for food and overnight stays. Except you’re not driving. And you’re probably going to get killed by something called a Deathlord.

And I’m a lizard.

But because of the additional drudgery imposed by survival mode, I’ve found that I’ve done much more exploring than I had in previous games, when I was much more powerful and less apt to get killed. Indeed, forced foot travel in Skyrim necessitates exploration, trudging one’s way across vast expanses of a fantasy world that has been littered with surprises and mysteries, many I had missed when playing under normal circumstances. Very early in my survival mode playthrough, desperately trying to make my way to some kind of safe harbor in the blinding winter of Skyrim’s northeast, I happened upon a lighthouse I had no idea was there. It was pitch dark outside, and my character’s vision was blurred with exhaustion, hunger, and hypothermia. With my last ounce of strength, I made it to the door of the lighthouse and entered, delightedly warming up from the fireplace in the next room.

Seconds later, of course, I found that beside the hearth was a recently-murdered body splayed on the floor with an axe in its chest. Despite the clicking sound of nearby monsters that reminded me of A Quiet Place, my weary reptilian gratefully ate the food that had been strewn about the floor in the preceding struggle, and slept happily in the bed of the recently departed.

The discovery of the lighthouse of course kicked off an entire quest, a quest that I was utterly unable to make headway in because of all the limitations I’d placed on myself. So I had to abandon it halfway through, and once again cast myself out into the freezing cold to find the next oasis, and having no idea where it might be. (I had some idea, as I have played the game a lot, but as anyone who knows me will tell you, “direction” and “understanding my orientation in space” are not my strong suits.)

And I knew that at some point, lord help me, I’d have to come back. Ugh!

And I did! Much later, of course, when my character was strong enough to stand a chance against the enemies lurking in the tunnels beneath the lighthouse. But even then, it was crushingly difficult, requiring innumerable do-overs.

But even these seemingly impossible quests have been deeply satisfying, in that they have asked much more of me as a strategist. No more can I trust in my character’s durability to withstand an onslaught of enemies as I hack and slash my way to victory. These guys were killing me in one or two strokes. I couldn’t count on supernatural levels of stealth to save me; not only were enemies far more keen to my whereabouts, but because they could now take much more punishment on Legendary difficulty, I’d find myself constantly running out of arrows, my only projectile weapons. Skyrim became more and more similar to Metal Gear Solid and Bushido Blade…but in good ways, I mean.

In other words, I could no longer simply think, well, I’m at level X, and I have these weapons and spells, so can safely assume that I can fight my way though any quest. No, I’d have to take each chamber, each corridor, each corner as its own quest, every turn was a new battle that required new tactics, and always mitigated by my constantly-dwindling resources.

It sounds cliché to say it, but playing Skyrim on survival mode has helped me appreciate what’s required of all of us when we want to accomplish anything meaningful. We don’t have unlimited resources, we don’t have unlimited energy, and so we need to plan. We need to make difficult choices; choices about what we will keep and what we will leave behind; what we will dare to attempt, and what we must wait to pursue; what ideals we will hold fast to, and which ones we will have to abandon.

(I steal a lot more in this playthrough than I ever have before, and keep singing to myself “Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat…”)

I’m not entirely sure I’ll stick with survival mode for my entire playthrough as Luap-Keshu of the Black Marsh. Sometimes the tedium does overwhelm the fun, and the last thing I ever want is for my precious video game free time to feel like work. But then I find a new location I’d never known about, or overcome some challenge I never thought I could, and I think of how much more meaningful those victories are. And if my lizard-guy ever gets far enough to own a home, adopt a child, marry, earn a lordship or several—and maybe save the world—I’ll know that for each of those triumphs, he’ll have truly earned it.

A long time ago, I began to take a serious interest in music; that is, listening to it, singing along with it, and indulging in fantasies about being a musician. I was about 8 years old when Nickelodeon started running old episodes of The Monkees (a sitcom featuring a prefabricated band about the misadventures of a fictional version of said prefabricated band), and I just loved it. I didn’t own any Monkees records, and had no means of going and purchasing any, and it never really occurred to me that one could buy a Monkees record; I think I assumed they simply didn’t exist for some reason. I mean, I was 8.

So to satisfy this need, I took what was already at the time a gravely outdated cassette recorder, and when The Monkees aired on cable, I held the device up to the TV and hit record when a song played on the show. I did this over the course of a few episodes and soon had a decent collection of Monkees songs on my crappy little tape deck with a single mono speaker—not that this mattered, because of course I was recording from the TV’s speaker. I listened to it all the time.

When my dad realized I had been doing this, he said, “You know, we can buy you a Monkees tape.” That was really nice of him, but in my 8-year-old brain, it was kind of silly. I already had all the songs, dad!

I did eventually acquire The Monkees’ Greatest Hits on audio cassette, and I was very glad to have it. The songs were way longer on the album than on the TV show! The theme song even had a second verse! And there were a bunch of songs that weren’t even on the show! And wow, “Listen to the Band,” that one was weird!

While I also noticed that I could hear more of the instrumentation on the album than on my tape of TV audio, it wasn’t all that much different to me. I mean, it was still the same crummy old tape deck with the mono speaker. It didn’t seem crummy at all to me, as I had little to compare it to. So it was fine! When I eventually got other tapes—“Weird Al” Yankovic, the soundtracks to Ghostbusters and Transformers: The Movie, and so on—it was the same. I was just happy to have them.

I wasn’t done recording music straight from the TV, either. Over the next couple of years I would also start recording music from my video games (good lord did I love the music from Mega Man II), other kinds of music I was growing to like from MTV and VH1, and even sketches from Nick at Nite’s reruns of SCTV. These were the crappiest possible ways to get this kind of audio, but I didn’t know, and therefore didn’t care. I could now listen to those SCTV sketches over and over, memorizing them without intending to, and reenacting them on my own recordings. And I could listen to my Phil Collins and Genesis songs all I wanted, pulled right from the tinny sound coming out of the tiny TV set in my room.

At some point, I was given a portable cassette player (what I would call a Walkman, but of course wasn’t). I’d still listen to the same stuff, poorly recorded by me, totally unaware that “audio production” was a thing that mattered a lot to people who made and listened to music.

And yes, my family thought it was very weird. Especially the TV-recorded video game music. My grandfather couldn’t even fathom it. My dad summarily dismissed the music itself as “probably written by a computer.” Whatever, dad! You’ll never understand me!

As my music tastes matured, I started digging through my dad’s collection of tapes, most of which were themselves copies from vinyl LPs. Dad, himself a savant of a musician, had an extensive (and today, one would definitely say quality) record collection, and I began to avail myself of the stuff I thought I might be into. I already knew I liked the Beatles—every car ride with few exceptions was an extended Beatles session—but I had never really listened to them on my own. They were a good place to start.

At some point I had also gotten a better tape deck, one that actually had two speakers for stereo. I had no idea what difference that made because, again, most of what I was listening to was recorded from the TV speaker and into a tape deck’s built-in microphone. Also, I think around this time the “Walkman” had probably stopped working. One evening, I decided to listen to a Beatles tape—a real “dub” from a real record—through a set of cheap earbud headphones plugged into the tape deck. I don’t remember which album, but I would guess it was one that had some collection of songs I already knew; “Eight Days a Week” rings a bell, so it may have been Beatles for Sale, but so does and “Drive My Car” and “Nowhere Man,” so maybe it was Rubber Soul. But it could also just have been a mix.

I was probably 10 years old, and I still remember the sensation of hearing different instruments and different voices seeming to come from different locations around my ears. The boys sounded like they were singing into one ear, and the drums and guitar sounded like they were coming into the other ear! It wasn’t all just a mush of sounds. It was like a tapestry. Or a stage play, where you see every actor, every prop, every set piece. It was utterly transporting.

(Apparently, I was also singing along and doing a poor job of harmonizing, as my little brother would later complain, “You sounded terrible.”)

I was certainly going to raid my dad’s collection for more music. And I wasn’t going back to sounds recorded from a TV speaker.

This is not the origin story of an audiophile. But by my late twenties and early thirties, when I had a real job and enjoyed a living wage, I did begin to care much more about maximizing the quality of the means by which my ears received the air vibrations of music. I had several agonizing crises over what headphones to buy, which only became more fraught when I’d go into a store and sample headphones well outside my price range. Holy shit, I didn’t know music could sound this good!!! Every uptick in audio quality I experienced spoiled whatever I had previously enjoyed. Hell, just knowing that there were better things out there made it difficult to be happy with whatever I had.

This comes up in countless other ways. When Apple introduced “Retina displays” with the iPhone 4, screens with sufficiently high resolution that individual pixels became indistinguishable in normal use, it ruined me for all other displays. Reading text on a non-Retina screen, something I had been doing for some thirty years without complaint or problem, now felt like having my eyeballs scraped by jagged text.

At least that came from actual lived experience, wherein a demonstrably superior execution of a particular kind of product makes previous iterations look worse, because they are, in fact, worse. But I also bought the iPhone 12 when it came out while I already owned an iPhone 11. Why? Did I have direct experience with the new model, and thereby knew that my current phone was now teetering on obsolescence? Of course not. It was just new, it looked a little cooler, and the marketing all said it was better. You will not be surprised to know that a few months into owning the iPhone 12, it has not provided me a meaningfully better smartphone experience than the iPhone 11. Nor whatever phone I owned before that. But just being aware of new things, by comparing what I have to what might be, often convinces me, with great conviction, that I must acquire it. I had been fine before. The curse of new knowledge, however, robbed me of that contentment. Or, more accurately, I let it myself be robbed. I invited the burglar in and offered him a sandwich.

I recently bought a new laptop. Or, rather, I should say I recently bought three laptops, because the first two, since returned, had flaws on their displays. Since this was intended for gaming, I had made peace with needing to settle for an eye-scratching, non-Retina display, something years of Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Galaxies had ruined me for.

But the first laptop had what seemed to me to be a lot of what is called IPS glow, the light haze around the borders of the screen. This is apparently fairly normal for these kinds of machines, but I had now been conditioned by Retina displays and quad-HD OLEDs, so it seemed unacceptable. The next laptop had a slight blemish of light bleed in the center of the display (I think that one was a reasonable rejection). The last one, the one I’m using now to type this, was just fine. More expensive, of course. It does have a tiny bit of light bleed at the very bottom corner, but I am trying to be okay with it.

This will seem like a divergence, but it’s not. I have spent a lot less time on social media in the last few weeks. Like many folks, this is in part because the world seems less on fire than it did a few weeks ago, and doomscrolling the news feels less necessary. It never was necessary, of course.

Apart from lowering my overall anxiety levels about the state of civilization (which, for the record, remain high), social media distancing has also made me feel less compelled to produce. Longtime readers of mine (all six of you) will know that I am gripped by a feeling of obligation to make myself relevant through my creative work, be it my writing, music, or other endeavors. I often feel that in order to justify my existence, in order to atone for all the things I never accomplished when I was younger, and in order to feel that I have somehow mattered, I must Become Known and cross some threshold of relevance and significance.

In recent weeks, though, I have felt this pang much less sharply than usual. It could merely be the fact that I feel very wrapped up in my gaming, which is a new thing for me. It could also have something to do with the changing political reality.

But I think that it’s mainly because I’m looking at Twitter way less.

Think back to the beginning of the pandemic. Suddenly everyone (it seemed) was part of this renaissance-of-the-remote, people writing novels and cooking and painting and performing and streaming and Tik-Tokking, and I’d be damned if I was going to be left in the creative dust. I started a newsletter. I revived my blog. I recorded some music. I made videos. I was going to matter.

I felt like I had to matter. It was a kind of race, one I had already been losing, when suddenly a lot more runners appeared on the track. Hey! Slow down up there! I was trying to matter first!

I was comparing myself and my output to what I saw from social media. But of course, what I see on social media will always tend to be stuff from those who have already broken through. Of course I was seeing things from people who were already in a position to create. Of course I would see things from people who already had the freedom to churn out content.

Yet I compared. I compared and found myself lacking. And as Dogberry says in Much Ado about Nothing, “Comparisons are odorous.”

When I was listening to the Monkees on my old mono tape deck from sounds recorded from a cable TV rerun, I had no idea what I was missing. Comparing my tapes to the stereo sounds of a professionally produced album out of actual headphones, I learned there was a deeper, more meaningful experience of music to be had. It was good that I compared one to the other. But I was also happy before.

Just because something is better (in fact or in perception) doesn’t make it necessary. And it definitely doesn’t make it necessarily good for me. Or you, I bet.

As an awkward, neurotic, bespectacled smartypants, one might stereotypically presume that I am a fan of superheroes. And so I am! But only fairly recently.

When I was a kid, I liked the cartoons and toys associated with characters like Spider-Man and Superman, but no more than I liked any other inescapable franchise at the time. My prime action figure playing years were much more focused on Transformers, He-Man, Ghostbusters, and, just as I was becoming a little too old for such things, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Once I had grown out of toys, the Star Trek universe became my obsession. Superheroes didn't capture my imagination the way they have for so many other kids who later go on to become true fans and indulge in superhero geekdom.

I think part of the reason is their roots in comic books, and when I say "comic books," I mean the byzantine lattice of comic book culture and lore; the dizzying array of characters, story threads, reboots, crossovers, and timelines. Whenever I would dip my toes into a given title, I would inevitably run into that asterisk in some panel, in which a major piece of information would be hinted at in a character's passing comment, only to be directed to a footnote telling me, "SEE [COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SERIES] #657!" Well, I haven't seen whats-its-whatever issue 657, so I guess I'm just going to be lost.

But that's another story.* (*SEE BLOG POST 6-23-2014!)

Despite my compulsion for completionism, I'm now mostly at peace with that aspect of superhero comics (mostly). My latter-day enthusiasm for superheroes, along with some help from digital comic book all-you-can-eat subscription services, have made it so that I can now dive into comics with a much reduced sense of cultural intimidation.

I think the other reason I didn't take to superheroes earlier was that they often seemed to me to be sort of dopey. This is no doubt in large part because my first frames of reference were shows like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and Super Friends, which were really, really dopey. As I grew up, the idea that folks with superpowers would dress up in colorful, tight-fitting costumes, beat up bank robbers, and fight evil clowns and superintelligent gorillas just seemed kind of silly. Superheroes seemed like a form of escapism that was dated and irrelevant. Star Trek, by contrast, was all about the future and what we might be capable of in the coming centuries (and was also sometimes dopey, but different-dopey). Superheroes were essentially cops with absurd outfits who could fly or punch really hard.

Now I’m in my 40s, and I absolutely love superheroes. What happened?

I suppose like a lot of people, I got bitten by the radioactive superhero bug in large part due to the Marvel Cinematic Universe films of the past decade-plus, as well as the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight films. Previously, a lot of superhero shows and films I'd seen could sort of be summed up with a pretty basic template: Regular person becomes endowed with powers, an evil force threatens the status quo, hero fights this evil by using their superpowers.

The Marvel and Dark Knight movies, however, gave me more to chew on. Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, and Steve Rogers were never just fighting an evil nemesis. They were also struggling with themselves and with a society that either created them, marginalized them, created their enemies, or any combination thereof.

Steve Rogers didn't get his powers by accident of birth or extraordinary circumstances, and he wasn't worthy of becoming Captain America because he was the best soldier. He was a superhero because he was a good man, the guy who was most willing to give every ounce of himself to save others. Tony Stark was forced to contend with his destructive legacy as a plundering industrialist, as well as his mammoth ego. Bruce Wayne was consumed by his own darkness, and struggled to harness his inner demons so that he could stop outer demons from bringing darkness to others.

And these were just the first handful of those movies. Mostly, they kept getting better.

These stories had a different kind of template, something like this: Protagonist witnesses unacceptable injustices or perceives a grave threat. They discover the possibility of having extraordinary powers, but must then become worthy of those powers through some struggle with themselves or other malign force, and then give everything of themselves—including, if necessary, their lives—in order to right that injustice or defeat that threat. And often victory raises new questions and perhaps creates new problems.

The Nolan Dark Knight films, and the Frank Miller graphic novels that inspired them, are a little different, in that they tell a story of a world so terrible that it creates ever-more terrible villains, which then requires a response from heroes that must become ever-more terrible themselves. But the struggle of those heroes is still central to the story and, for me, their appeal. And even the Avengers films acknowledge the arms-race dynamic of increasingly existential dangers requiring ever more extreme reactions from the good guys, which, as Vision says in Captain America: Civil War, "invites challenge" from even more powerful villains, and the ensuing conflict "breeds catastrophe."

At the core, I suppose, is that courage—that of the hero and perhaps others in the story—must be cultivated and achieved. It isn't presumed. And that is something that moves me at a very deep level.

Because of course the central problem for a good superhero story is how to offer a superpowered person a genuine challenge. An almost all-powerful being like Kal-El (Superman) isn't courageous because he saves the passengers on a runaway train about to fall into an abyss. He knows he'll be fine whether he carries the train to safety or lays down to have his body serve as the track. He needs to have adversaries thrown at him that equal and exceed him in strength (Zod, Doomsday, etc.), and he needs to be faced with enemies that can't be defeated with brute force: finding purpose, finding belonging among an alien species, grieving the loss of a family and a world he never got the chance to know, using his powers responsibly, balancing freedom and security, and so on.

While I am very much delighted by a good old fashioned Superman vs. Zod smackdown, I'm captivated by the choices Superman will have to make in order to defeat Zod and protect the world he's adopted without becoming Zod himself.

You can apply this across the board of superhero stories. It works for "street-level" heroes like Bruce Wayne (Batman), Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), Matt Murdock (Daredevil), or Oliver Queen (Green Arrow), and it works for more "cosmic" heroes like Thor, Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), or Diana of Themyscira (Wonder Woman). What are they willing to do to defeat evil-doers? Are they willing to do evil themselves? What and who are they willing to sacrifice? Their extraordinary abilities are a given, the status quo of the world of the story. The power of their stories is not only what they choose to do with those powers, but how they arrive at those decisions; what must they give of their own lives, their beliefs, their souls?

Alright, well, this is all very highfalutin and whatnot, but my enthusiasm for superhero stories has another equally important factor: Fantasy escapism.

You don't need me to tell you how the world is going to hell right now, and that our assumptions about what is good and what is evil have been muddied. Our illusions about who and what we can trust have been shattered. For all the struggles with moral ambiguity in good superhero storytelling, it's no wonder that I find it incredibly appealing that, at the very least, choices are made and executed on. Whereas in the real world, it feels like all we can do is tread moral waters and examine our failures into infinity, but superheroes eventually make a choice and act on it.

If done well, they do so with awe-inspiring spectacle, suspense, wit, and heart. I have been delighting in the full lineup of CW's DC "Arrowverse" superhero series, from the faux-gritty Arrow to the more explicitly-comedic Legends of Tomorrow (working my way up to the big "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover event), and part of their appeal for me is that they are a little, well, dopey. But whereas the superhero cartoons of my childhood were dopey in the sense of being shoddy products, the DC shows embrace their campiness.

They are not satire by any means. They are not mocking the genre, but embracing its quirks. When something outlandish happens (Felicity Smoak's paralysis is technologically cured in the middle of a couple's spat with Oliver Queen! Barry Allen altered everyone's lives when he time-traveled too much! Former supervillain Mick Rory became best friends with George Washington!), the event is acknowledged as outlandish, and then promptly folded into the story and taken as seriously as anything else. And it works.

And I also think part of why these shows work for me is that they operate more or less like comic books. Each scene feels like a page of panels, and any rush-through of complicated plot points feels justified by the succinctness demanded by the format. And like the comic books, they come with complicated backstories and lore that enriches the experience for those who are immersed in it, but doesn't totally alienate those who are tuning in for the first time. Of course, I am making a point of going through the entire "Arrowverse," episode by episode, because I'm just like that.

I guess what it all comes down to is this: In a time when things feel so dark, I'm glad I've made the choice to spend time with stories in which people with extraordinary powers or abilities make the choice to use those abilities for something other than personal gain. They choose to save the world.

As always, if you find this stuff valuable, you can toss some currency my way.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so they say. Wicked deeds and ideas can be defeated by offering them up to public scrutiny, exposing them as morally unacceptable and shaming them out of the mainstream and out of power.

There are times when this has been true, when the public has been exposed to some gross injustice, rejected it, and appealed to authorities to make a change.

Cable news and social media are fueled by these kinds of appeals. During the Obama years, I had to stop watching cable news because I could no longer stomach the hours of broadcast dedicated to telling me how racism, religious zealotry, and plutocratic criminality were taking over the country. To save my own sanity during the Trump era, I tried to prune my social media feeds of accounts that shared primarily political content, because nearly everything I saw was dedicated to making me angry about every single morally repugnant whim expressed by malicious actors. And it was all terrible and morally repugnant!

But my attempts to lessen the amount of political outrage in my feed were futile, for in the era of Trump, it feels like it's all there was to talk about. I began the (also futile) practice of replying to or quoting tweets about the latest horror by appending, "So what do we do?" I wanted more than tattling. I wanted marching orders. They never came.

Because it's not just regular folks tweeting out their outrage. It's politicians, prominent media personalities, major cultural figures, renowned academics—people in positions of real, genuine power. If all they could do was point to bad things happening to say, "You see???" then what were we of the unwashed masses supposed to do about it?

Other than vote. I get it. And we did, and it mostly worked out for the better, but it wasn't nearly enough. And the horrors will, and do, just continue. And we will continue to go "you see???"

But who are we talking to when we do that? Every time we stoke our collective ire and give attention to the genuinely destructive torrent of moral and ethical horrors, whether they come from presidents, media figures, local politicians, or everyday despicable people, we are pointing it out for a reason. We are asking for someone to do something about it.

We are aggrieved customers in the marketplace of ideas, and we are demanding to speak to the manager. We are all Karens now.

Here's the problem I think most of us have yet to acknowledge: There is no manager. Our emails to customer support are bouncing back. We are dialing a complaint hotline to nowhere.

There are elections, of course, in which the customers can, in effect, hire and fire the managers of the store's government and policy department, but this has little to no impact on the store's other aisles. The racism section is still being stocked, the science-denial section is getting novel new products in every day, and the theocracy department just opened up an outlet store. Business is booming.

It doesn't matter how much we complain about what are objectively abysmal things being done and the abysmal people doing them. Those managers don't hear our complaints because we're not their customers.

One such abysmal human with abysmal ideas is Jordan Peterson, and you may have heard that employees at Penguin Press are disgusted that they are publishing Peterson's latest book, as I would be if I worked there. Fredrik deBoer, whose post on this subject helped clarify my thinking for this piece, says this is an example of a poor tactic on the part of progressives: appealing to authorities to protect them from people with harmful ideas:

What if there is no authority to which you can appeal to make Jordan Peterson go away? What if Jordan Peterson is a fact of life? Let’s set aside God for a moment. What is the authority that could shut Peterson up? A Canadian citizen with tenure, a large network of conservative admirers, the ability to broadcast directly to his fans, and a talent for encoding reactionary ideas without the out-and-out hateful trappings of many of his contemporaries, he simply does not strike me as someone you can silence even if you wanted to.

Now, that doesn't change the fact that Penguin Press could make the moral choice not to be part of the machinery that helps Peterson spread and profit off of his message, even knowing that someone else will gladly do it instead. But the larger point holds: Peterson will get his captive audience regardless of any complaints to the manager.

DeBoer says the only real solution to the problem of Peterson and what he represents is to persuade people he's wrong and make a convincing case for something better. "I get that this is more complicated, and less emotionally fulfilling, than running to the teacher to get him in trouble," writes deBoer. "But what’s the alternative? ... There is no authority which will simply remove Jordan Peterson from public life for you."

For public officeholders, usually the best we can do is to know who we're dealing with and vote accordingly. But at some point we have to acknowledge that all the things that horrify us about politicians like Trump, Louie Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Matt Gaetz, or any other garbage officeholders and candidates, are the very things that give them their power. For their market, their vileness is their primary selling feature. Pointing it out over and over mostly serves as free advertising.

Instead, we have to be better. We have to build movements, support candidates, make arguments, develop ideas, and produce media that are better than theirs. We have to be more than aggrieved, we must be active. We must do more than point out the bad things, we must, ourselves, be the sources of good things.

No one will do it for us. You see?

^{Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash}

The United States is politically held hostage by tens of millions of people living in a delusional version of reality. No matter the facts staring them in the face, just a little less than half of the electorate seems to believe in an alternate universe in which Trump won the election, left-wing terrorists are destroying our cities, COVID is a hoax or an exaggerated flu, and white Christians are the most oppressed group in history.

So I had a thought.

Information silos, filter bubbles, and algorithms can obviously make millions of people believe almost anything. So if what the Cult of Trump needs is to live in a fake reality, well, maybe we can just let them. And then the rest of us can carry on with actual reality.

I turned this thought into a bit of speculative fiction.

* * *

After a hard day at work, Rick plops down on the couch and flips through his phone to see what's new.

He's a father of three, but two of the kids are grown and out of the house, and the other is out with friends. His wife, Danielle, is making dinner, which she always does unless she's not feeling well.

Rick scrolls through his social media feeds and gets updated on some of the latest headlines. The border wall had just been completed, and the pictures were stunning. 30-foot high partitions, black as midnight, effectively invisible in the dark, but reflective so that the sun blazed in the eyes of anyone who looked at it from the right angle. Smooth, unscalable, and a true monument to America's force of will against invaders. President Trump would be there tomorrow afternoon for a ceremony celebrating this achievement.

It's a good time for this kind of morale boost, as China has made more threats against the United States, promising to choke the American economy while making incursions into our Pacific territory. And who knows when they might release another virus. The president has been undeterred, however, and Rick is reassured when he hears Trump call China's bluff. You just try it, thinks Rick. See what Donald does.

It is 2023. Joe Biden is embroiled in several lawsuits over his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Hunter Biden is in prison in Moscow. Kamala Harris is still out there, working with AOC, Antifa, and George Soros (now 93 and obviously being kept alive with some kind of secret pharmaceuticals or cybernetic implants) to foment a revolution and take over the country. (No chance, thinks Rick.) Black rioters have nearly destroyed several major Democrat-run cities, so they are now being occupied by federal agents who are arresting criminals, guarding property, and saving the lives of innocent Americans. The president has forced Twitter to shut down for censoring conservatives, which is against the Constitution. Facebook has learned its lesson and now treats conservative voices fairly.

As he scrolls through his feed, Rick almost skips past a headline that said something about someone on Fox News saying something about Joe Biden. He reverses the direction of his thumb swiping to find the item. And there it is. The post reads, "Fox News Guest Says Joe Biden is Currently President!" Rick chuckles out loud.

"What's so funny?" Danielle asks from the kitchen.

"Something really stupid," says Rick. "Not important."

It is stupid. Everyone knows that Fox News went off the rails back in 2020, and really couldn't be trusted anymore, except for a few hosts like Hannity and Tucker. But what kind of delusional nonsense was this? Why would anyone say that Joe Biden was actually president right now? Some kind of hangover from the 2020 election debacle? The facts are the facts! Trump won the election, even though Democrats tried to steal it with loads of fake votes. But President Trump refused to concede, vowed to keep fighting, and eventually (and inevitably) triumphed in the courts. Thank you, Justice Barrett!

Some say that Trump is thinking about running for a third term. That would be just fine with Rick.

Danielle coughs from the kitchen. And then again, and emits a little bit of a groan.

Rick calls out, "You okay, honey?" Danielle had been under the weather ever since they went to that basketball game Danielle's nephew was playing in. It was actually a really good game, and the place was packed! She probably picked up some bug going around.

"I've been better," she responds. "I'll lay down after dinner."

Rick makes a mental note to check her temperature, and maybe his own. He's not feeling so great either, but he's never been one to admit when he's sick.

Then he remembers what he was looking at. Right, that dumb Fox News person who said Biden's the president. Rick taps on the item.

The post had been deleted.

That's weird. Fake news never really goes away, does it? You just have to keep vigilant, and only trust the sources that you know for sure are giving it to you straight.

Rick thinks back to the border wall, and he smiles. Yeah, he thinks, Trump is doing a fantastic job in his second term. A third term would be just fine by him.

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I’m beginning to hate natural selection.

I’m not talking about the theory of evolution as a scientific concept, I mean I am having some strong feelings about what a pain in the ass natural selection is to me, right now.

If you’re new to my writing, let me just give you a quick status report: my sense of self is kind of garbage. I’m not currently experiencing existential anguish, per se (but, you know, catch me on a different day and see what you get), but I am wrestling with a crisis about who I am and why I bother existing.

And a lot of that hinges on a deep, aggravating need for validation. I need other people to justify my existence for me. It’s a big reason why I was a professional actor, why I write, why I make music, and why I do pretty much anything else not directly related to my own survival or the well-being of those I love. I need to be told by The World that I belong.

For the last few years, I’ve been able to pin some of the blame for this on my autism, having been diagnosed with Asperger’s at the age of 39. As you might imagine, someone with my particular neurological quirks might grow up developing a sense of alienation. That’s what happens when you 1) feel like you’re not the same as everyone else, and 2) are constantly told you are not the same as everyone else, often in very painful terms.

So of course I seek validation now! I’ve been conditioned over several decades to expect to be an outcast, to believe that any sense of belonging I do manage to experience is temporary and tenuous at best, and that I am not capable of judging for myself whether or not I possess sufficient value as a person to continue existing.

Damn you, autism!

The thing is, the need to feel belonging with a tribe is not particular to the neurodivergent. It’s hard-wired into humanity as a whole at the deepest levels. Many humans achieve this belonging rather easily (or so it seems to me). They provide value to their families and communities, they receive the benefits of being a part of those families and communities, and they are validated for playing their part in those social systems. They don’t have to think about it.

But threaten that belonging, cause someone to feel like their place in the tribe could be reduced or taken away, and see what atavistic shit comes up.

For someone like me, that sense of threat is ever-present, and I feel it on every level: I feel like humanity on Earth doesn’t want me, and I also assume I am perpetually on the edge of being rejected by the people Iove. Any minute now, they’re going to decide they’ve had it.

So maybe I feel this kind of alienation and anxiety more often or more severely than most, but all of us have it in us. We’re supposed to! It’s how early humans survived through our time as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

It was Robert Wright, in Why Buddhism is True, who clarified this point for me, that this anxiety over other’s opinions of us is all natural selection’s fault:

Why would natural selection design organisms to feel discomfort that seems so pointless? Maybe because in the environment of our ancestors it wouldn’t have been pointless; in a hunter-gatherer society, you’re pretty much always performing in front of people you’ll see again and whose opinions therefore matter. My mother used to say, “We wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.” She was right; our assumption that people give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion, as is our unspoken sense that it matters what pretty much everyone we see thinks of us. But these intuitions were less often illusory in the environment of our evolution, and that’s one reason they’re so persistent today.

That’s right, natural selection wants us to be insecure.

There’s so much else that natural selection “wants” us to do that is ultimately harmful to us now. And it seems to me that so much of what we think of as human civilization and progress is really a big species-wide struggle against natural selection and all the things it pushes us to do against our own interests, from the desire to eat too much sugar to the urge to decimate nearby tribes and take their resources. Self-doubt is just one more thing.

I think natural selection and I need to have a talk. I need to thank it for getting us all this far, what with the conscious brains, the opposable thumbs, and whatnot. And then I need to tell it, honestly, that its time with me is over, because it’s holding me back from, well, evolving.

I need to remember that my ache for belonging, while exacerbated by my autism and other quirks, ultimately stems from an instinct that no longer serves its purpose, and that I am free to let it go. To be at peace with who I am and where I am, I think I to kick natural selection out of the tribe.

I am trying to disconnect without isolating. I am trying to find meaning without validation. I am trying to unburden without irresponsibility. I am trying to be aware without being overwhelmed. I am trying to be at peace without being passive. I am trying to matter without having to ask whether I matter. I am trying to fit in without being too ordinary. I am trying to stand out without jutting. I am trying to have hope without being crushed by it.

Maybe it’s that last one that needs to go.

Derrick Jensen wrote a few years ago in praise of giving up on hope. He’s talking about this in the context of his struggle to defend the natural world from decimation by humanity. To me, it applies universally. It’s not even about rejecting hope, but simply not dealing with it one way or the other. Once hope becomes irrelevant, Jensen says:

...you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems ... and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

This is not the same as hopelessness. Hopelessness implies defeat, pessimism, resignation to things getting worse. This is something else.

Here’s the part that’s both the most appealing about this idea and the most frightening:

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they — those in power — cannot really touch you anymore. … The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are.

As someone who has wasted so much precious life trying to define himself through others’ perceptions, who could not find any value in himself without the explicit approval of everyone else, this is tantalizing and bewildering.

When I was first wrestling with my identity in the aftermath of my diagnosis as autistic a few years ago, I thought it might be an opportunity to redefine who I was, to shed my masks, discover the person underneath them, and let that person live their life. The frightening part was not knowing who that might be, because the masks seemed to be as much a part of who I was as anything else.

Later, I began to take a more nuanced view. While I must still learn to accept my unmasked, unfiltered self, there is still power to be had with intentional masking, endowing myself with aspects of an identity in order to achieve the things my unmasked self might seek. One can adapt without self-deception. One can modulate one’s behavior without imprisoning oneself. One can augment, and those augmentations are under the control of the “true” self.

But whether one is masking, passing, augmenting, retrofitting, or what have you, I wonder now if it’s hope that is still an ingredient of falseness. Maybe I can’t get free of the fetters I’ve fitted myself with, nor the ones that the culture has clapped onto me, because I maintain a delusion that meaning, peace, and validation will still be given to me by Someone Else, by some force Out There. Maybe by shedding hope, I empower myself to provide it on my own.

“When you quit relying on hope,” writes Jensen, “and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.”

In my case, “those in power” are the imaginary blessings from an amorphous other. That’s what I’ve allowed to have power over me, the wish, the hope, that at some point I’d prove myself worthy to be One of You, worthy to belong to this world.

Maybe if I give up on hope, the ache for validation, the yearning to matter, will ease.

But that’s just a hope, too, isn’t it?

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Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the Trump era has been how establishment Republicans have rolled over for him, aiding and abetting Trump in every asinine, narcissistic urge, never having the guts to do anything to stop him from laying waste to the republic. Mitt Romney has had his good moments, but they were too few and too late.

Throughout the election, I have nursed a wish that President George W. Bush would put down his paint brush, get in front of a camera, and tell the folks who still love him that Trump needs to go. He’s never done that, even though you know he believes it.

Now, Election Day is nigh, and Trump continues to assert that he will refuse to concede if and when he loses. Lord only knows what he will do with the enormous power he thoughtlessly wields in order to remain in office.

If Trump loses and attempts to deny Biden the presidency, my last hope is that Bush will finally speak up and urge his fellow Republicans to accept the results of the election. He probably won’t.

But just in case he’s thinking about it, but doesn’t know quite what to say, I thought I could do my part as an American, and help our former president out. Here is my draft of what could be President George W. Bush’s address to the nation if President Trump refuses to concede a lost election.

President Bush, I am open to changes. Have your people get in touch.

UPDATE: I made a video for the speech, just to really drive it all home. I am helping!

[youtu.be/tJKSCOqWY...](https://youtu.be/tJKSCOqWYQk)

Address to the nation by former President George W. Bush on the outcome of the presidential election, November 2020.

Let’s get right to it.

One score and none years ago, I was declared the winner of the presidential election because our side was better at whatcha call “political maneuverings.” Me and Al Gore pretty much wound up in a tie, and you can’t have two presidents at the same time, so our guys just did a better job of greasin’ the wheels and workin’ the refs, simple as that.

It wasn’t all above-board, those ballots in Florida where old Jewish folks were accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan was some real sketchy shit, and to give it to ya straight, even we were surprised when the Supreme Court just kinda let me be president. But like I said, it really was just a tie, and I think everyone figured it was just the other team’s turn to be in charge for a while. It weren’t pretty, but the thing got settled and we moved on.

But here’s the real important part, and I probably should have said more about this at the time, but the reason things got settled is because of Al Gore. Listen, Al was sure as hell that he’s the one that won that election. He was positive he’d won Florida, and hell, maybe he really did. “Butterfly ballots”! I mean, goddamn. But both sides filed all their lawsuits, both sides did their PR bullshit on TV, and in the end, those five Justices shut it all down. Al coulda’ kept fighting. I don’t think it’d’a changed anything in the long term, but you never know, and it’s not like we’re talkin’ about a fight over who gets to be employee of the month at a Pep Boys. This is the presidency. It doesn’t get any bigger’n that.

So think about what Al must’ve been feeling. He believed he’d won more votes in Florida. He believed the Supreme Court was screwin’ him over because they liked me better. That’s probably true! And what’s for sure true is that Al won more votes than me overall. He beat me by about a half a million in the national popular vote — and don’t think I didn’t feel that sting for the next four years, til I definitively kicked Kerry’s ass in ’04. Now, winning the popular vote doesn’t mean shit if you don’t win enough’a them electoral votes, and he knew that, but you just know it all had to be makin’ him nuts.

I mean, imagine, you’ve been the Vice President of the United States for eight years, you’re the smartest guy you know and you’re not only sure you’d be a better president than the guy you’re running against, but you know you’d be way better than the skirt-chasin’ hillbilly who’s shadow you been stuck under for a decade. You run your race, you win more votes than the other guy, and then it all comes apart because of a bunch of technicalities and bullshit.

But listen. After all that, even though he believed in his heart that he was being wronged, he stopped, he put the best interests of the country ahead of his own, and he opened wide to take an enormous bite of the biggest shit sandwich ever served in American history. On December 13, in the year of our lord 2000, Al Gore went in front of those cameras and told the American people that it was over, and that I was his president.

I mean, holy shit.

Now while you think about that, then look at where we are today. There’s no technicalities. There ain’t no tie. Everyone knows that Joe Biden beat the pants off of Donald Trump. Yeah, sure, there are a bunch of mail-in votes that ain’t been counted yet in Pennsylvania or whatever. But come the hell on. Trump lost this election the second he told folks to think about injecting themselves with bleach. I mean, you all know I said some stupid shit when I was president, and even I spat out my O’Doul’s when I heard that one. Mike Murphy says that the country has been tryin’ to cough up Trump like a hairball, and I’m tellin’ you this election was the cat’s final hork. But now the hairball is trying to haul its soggy ass back into the cat’s mouth. That’s just gross.

And it just ain’t gonna fly.

A lotta folks who supported me back in the day also supported Trump. I get it. I ain’t exactly excited about Biden bein’ president. But the race is over. Biden won it, plain as day.

Trump is tellin’ you that he’s been robbed, that the election was fixed by some Deep State antifa pizza parlor tinfoil hat shit. He wants to make you scared and angry. But that’s because he’s scared and angry.

He’s humiliated. You best believe I had my doubts about whether I belonged in that Oval Office, but deep down, Donald Trump knows he sure as shit never shoulda been there. And now he can’t stand the idea of lettin’ it all go. So he’s pulling every trick he can think of so he can stick around. Too many goddamn people who certainly know better are letting him.

Since he won’t do it, I will. I’m here to tell you, it’s over.

To my fellow Republicans, my fellow conservatives, I know you don’t like the idea of a Democrat in the White House. Lord knows, I don’t either. But the people have spoken, and they have not been subtle about it. Joe Biden won, and he’s gotta get sworn in on January 20, and Donald Trump has to let it go.

Republicans in Congress and in your state governments need to hear from you, right now, that they need to step up, like I’m doing now, and to tell their president to stand down. Don’t let Trump rile you up with a bunch of crazy, made-up conspiracies about a rigged election. Don’t let the cable news folks and the talk radio folks get your blood boilin’ and making you think you been screwed. I know the system’s screwed you over a bunch of times before, but this ain’t one of ‘em.

Joe Biden’s a hell of a good guy. He talks too much, and it makes me tired just thinking about him going on and on about how some guy he met in some town had some damn expression and on and on. But he’s a good man who won fair and square. And if you don’t like what he does, and you do like some of what Trump was doing in terms of policy and what have you, well then you vote for Republicans for Congress in the next election, and you support the next Republican candidate for president with everything you got. Fight like hell, and beat ’em fair and square.

But let’s not do it like this. What Trump is doing now, it’s unseemly. It’s unsportsmanlike. It’s weak.

Remember ol’ Al Gore. He had an honest-to-God claim to say that he’d won that race back in 2000, and that he oughta’ve been president. But he knew that the peaceful transition of power was more important than him being president, and more important even than keepin’ someone whose guts he hated from getting the job instead. He put his country first, and he took it like a man. He took it like an American.

Republicans can take this one too. Donald Trump can’t, so we’ll have to do it for him. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

Of course he’s got it.

Of course they’re all infected. Honestly, how could we have expected anything else? If you deny the severity of a viciously infectious disease, if you delight in flouting all measures to prevent its spread, and you spend each day interacting with hundreds of people — all of whom agree heartily with your denial and flouting — of course you’re going to get the goddamned virus.

In the course of just a handful of weeks, we’ve had all these “bombshells,” and I know I have been unable to withstand the psychological and emotional shellacking of it all. Less than a month ago, we learned that Trump knew — and personally accepted the fact — that the coronavirus was deadly serious. A few days later, Ruth Badger Ginsburg died, followed by the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace her. A few days after that, the New York Times released its major story on Trump’s taxes, where we learned about his avoidance of taxes and his gobsmacking financial losses and debts. A few days after that, we endured the 90-minute trauma that was the presidential debate, where we learned that Trump was absolutely not going to concede the election if he lost, and that he was encouraging white supremacist violence. A few days after that, we learned that he, his wife, several of people on his staff and in his campaign, two U.S. senators, and others who had been in contact with him, had been infected.

All this we learned. All this shocked us, roiled us, and caused varying degrees of anxiety, horror, and panic.

But I am just now realizing, really, we have learned nothing. And nothing has changed.

Let’s jump back to 2016. You know, how all the polls were wrong and Trump pulled out a surprise victory? The polls weren’t wrong. The results of that election were absolutely in line with what the polls were showing. Nothing weird happened. Voters who leaned Republican voted for the Republican, voters who leaned Democratic voted for the Democrat, and the results for each state more or less wound up well within the margin of error. In terms of consequences, the election of 2016 was monumental. In terms of probabilities, it was unremarkable.

Trump himself is figure of unprecedented abnormality for his position. So his behavior has roiled the collective psyche of the nation, pummeling us all out of any sense of time or orientation. But he is not magic.

The polls for the 2020 presidential election have been almost freakishly stable. For months, Biden has polled just above 50 percent, and Trump just around 42 or so. Even after the aforementioned events of September beat us all about the head, the polls remained eerily static. Why?

It’s pretty easy. It’s really obvious who Trump is now. After four years of him being president, you didn’t need to think too hard about whether you liked how it was going or not. He made it really easy. He faced his most important test in having to deal with a pandemic, and there was no getting around it, so if you were at all on the fence about him, his handling of COVID-19 probably gave you your last push. There’s nothing new to learn. People have settled on their preferences.

But what about this crazy month? Well, no one really thought that Trump didn’t believe the virus was serious. It’s news that he was stupid enough to say so to a journalist while being recorded, but it’s not surprising. Everyone already knew that Trump is a cheat, and that he’s avoided paying taxes. Indeed, he’s boasted about his ability to evade them. It’s also well known that he’s been a colossal failure as a businessman. He’s been siding with white supremacists for ages, publicly. He threatened to contest the election of 2016 if he didn’t win. None of this is new.

And now, he gets COVID-19. It’s “shocking” in the sense that it’s the President of the United States, and that’s just a de facto big-goddamn-deal. But, you know, come on. Of course he was going to get it.

After four years of Mussolini-But-Dumber, people know what they got. If they love it, they love it, and that’s all there is to that. The rest of us — most of us — don’t, and we’re going to vote him out of office. There’s nothing weird about that, either.

We may feel as a nation that we’ve been batted about like a cat toy, but it’s the same cat. It acts like a cat. It doesn’t grow wings or breathe fire.

Just like the 2016 election, the 2020 election just might be (and I can’t believe I’m about to type this) a normal election with an abnormal candidate. A majority of voters will reject the president because he’s done an obviously shitty job and is an obviously shitty person. We know this because this is what the polls say is by far the most likely outcome. 2016 polls showed that Trump’s upset victory was entirely plausible. This time, he could still plausibly win, and it wouldn’t be a miracle if he did, but it’s just not where things are. Putting aside malfeasance, manipulation, or a mustering of forces to hold onto power (and I don’t necessarily doubt those things), this election is, in a way, like any other. It will revert to the mean.

Water seeks its own level. Viruses infect people who put themselves in a position to get infected. People in a shitty situation will choose to get out of it. Trump’s behavior, and now his health, are dangerous unknown factors. But everything else is, I am realizing, obvious.

Two years ago, almost exactly, I wrote a piece expressing a sort of resigned panic about the state of the republic, and essentially asking the reader — but really, I suppose, asking the gods — to tell me how I was wrong. At the time, I was afraid that I was being melodramatic and overstating the problem.

But I wasn’t. Not even a little.

“If we’ve learned nothing else from the past decade,” I wrote, “it’s that if Republicans can’t win through persuasion, they’ll simply rewrite the rules. They are eternally controlling Boardwalk and Park Place. It’s written right on the inside of the box, that they shall eternally passeth Go, over and over, forever and ever, amen.”

What I didn’t foresee — and really should have — was how overt the repeal of democracy would be. I think I imagined that most of the foul dealings would happen behind the scenes, in ways that politicos understood, but didn’t penetrate the national consciousness. Even the hypocrisy of the Republican Senate’s position on appointing a successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, while obvious, I suspect remains below the radar, and outside the realm of interest, to most Americans. I assume they see it as just another example of politicians being politicians.

But the President of the United States now says that any election that he doesn’t win is invalid. The election itself is moot, and he will use what influence he wields to ensure it. If he needs to use the Department of Justice to challenge the validity of mail-in ballots, he’ll do that. If he needs to disappear voters through the use of secret police, he’ll do it. If he needs to dispatch his cult of gun-toting fanatical ignoramuses to literally block the entrances to polling places, he’ll do it. If he needs to strongarm Republican governors and state legislators into disqualifying unfavorable slates of electors, he’ll do it. For each one of these actions, he has either already announced his intention to carry them out, or his minions have informed the press of the plan. Some of it already has happened.

It’s not a secret conspiracy. It’s out in the open. He intends no transfer of power, of any kind, at any time. Not in January of 2021, and almost certainly not in January of 2025 either.

In that same 2018 piece, I wrote that those who are really paying attention could sense what felt like an emergency. “It is an emergency. I do believe that people are waking up to that simple fact. Many millions of people have come to realize that things have not only gone wrong, but horribly, existentially wrong. The republic is in mortal danger, and the blight will not be contained within our borders. It’s soaking into the Earth’s crust. It’s riding the oceans’ currents. It’s attached to the very molecules we breathe.”

I said that I feared that our better angels are simply no match for our worst demons. But there, I might have been wrong. Not because I have any illusions that Republicans will discover a dormant conscience and put a stop to this madness. Rather, I suspect that our topple into fascism hinges not on the winner in the battle of angels versus demons, but because of the inaction of everyone in between.

Career civil servants will, by and large, do what they’re told. Mainstream news outlets will say and print what is necessary to keep from being shut down. Corporations will require the favor of the regime in order to continue operating and remain neutral. Some in positions of power will make noises about norms and democracy, but it will be just that, noise. You’ve heard it before; it’s the sound of senators tweeting about their “concern” about a grievous outrage and then doing nothing about it.

“Point me to the light at the end of the tunnel, and prove to me that the tunnel hasn’t already caved in,” I wrote then. “Because I can’t see it, and it’s getting harder to breathe.”

I could still be wrong. So I renew my plea from two years ago: If I’m wrong, tell me how.

Otherwise, I don’t know what to do with this, this knowing. I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know what to do now, nor what to do when what’s happened becomes obvious to everyone.

A million years ago, when I was attending the Actors Studio Drama School in New York, my class took part in a fascinating three-week workshop on performance in masks. While considered sort of avant-garde today, theatre more or less began with performers masking themselves or disguising their faces to tell stories. The classics of the Greeks and the slapstick buffoonery of commedia dell’arte were all originally performed in masks. The most common icon for theatre today is a pair of masks, one for comedy and one for tragedy. So this was going to be some exciting work in getting back to the roots of our craft, learning some vital fundamentals.

The sessions began even more fundamentally than we expected. To the surprise I think of many of my classmates, the first week’s session was absolutely free of masks. After a rather reverent introduction to mask work, we spent the rest of our time staring at our own faces in the mirror. Up close.

Literally face to face with ourselves, we were instructed to look deeply and coldly at our reflections. We were told to examine every line, curve, spot, and flaw with excruciating detail and meditative patience. We were made to drop all attempts at animation or expression, to let our faces find a state of absolute rest, to give up control of our facial muscles to gravity.

It was difficult and emotionally challenging, and yet we were to refrain from showing that emotion. We needed to simultaneously investigate our own faces with impartiality while also retaining mastery over them. This would be hard, I think, for anyone to do, but imagine the struggles of a room full of actors, all building their careers and lives on the imperfect, asymmetrical image before them.

As the workshop sessions went on, the reasoning for subjecting us to this became clear. Before we could ever be allowed to put on a mask, we had to reckon with the ones we were already wearing.

It’s a cliche to say that we all wear a mask to some degree, actors and non-actors alike, but it’s also true. The metaphor of the mask has special resonance with me, not just because of my life as an actor, but for the masks of normalcy that I have shielded myself with for decades. I won’t recount all the ways in which I am an odd duck, but consider the utility of “masking” for someone who has always been small, anxious, and awkward, creative and highly sensitive, bullied mercilessly in childhood and subject to other traumas in adulthood, and, for the kicker, on the autism spectrum.

Particularly since being diagnosed with Asperger’s only a few years ago, I have been working very hard to deconstruct those masks, to peel them away, layer by layer, and discover who the person behind them actually is. To pass as human had been the enterprise of my life, and over time it exhausted and sickened me. I lost myself within those masks, and I was terrified of who I’d find once they were gone.

I didn’t need to be. Here I am in my early 40s, getting on just fine, all things considered. It was enormously difficult, but I have learned to accept a great deal about who I am and who I never will be. I have grown to appreciate things about myself I never allowed myself to before, and I’ve acknowledged ugly truths about myself as well.

But just as I miss my life as a professional actor, taking on roles and living different lives, sometimes I miss the masks. Just as a costume can help bring an actor more fully into the mind of their character, a metaphorical mask allows a person to adopt qualities they might not otherwise possess. A personality enhanced by a mask may not be “genuine,” but is it necessarily false?

As part of coming to terms with my true self, I’ve had to accept and own my introversion and social awkwardness. But in the areas of my life where more confidence and gregariousness are called for, as in many work-related situations, am I better served by resigning to my “true self,” or might it be warranted to augment myself with the traits necessary for success? In other words, if I’m shy, but I decide to pretend to be outgoing, am I betraying myself?

A few years ago, I might have answered yes.

Part of the work of self-acceptance has been to insist on that same acceptance from everyone else — not for my own validation, but to be able to present myself truly, as I am, without the need to excuse or apologize for who I am. It’s been an essential part of this journey.

But that doesn’t mean that my “true self” always serves me best. An easy example of this comes from parenting. While I am very honest with my kids about who I am and what I’m like, there are always going to be moments when I am doing my duty to them as a father by presenting to them a person who is stronger, more assured, and wiser than I know myself to be. This isn’t to fool them, but to give them the care or the example they need in that moment. It’s not false, but it is a kind of mask.

And of course, there’s work, as I mentioned. As a communications professional, I can only achieve so much with creative-but-anxious, and I fail my employers if I shrug and say, well, this is who I truly am! Like an actor putting on a costume and reciting lines written by someone else, I have to put on my mask, the one that represents a character that is more confident and assertive than the real person wearing it.

This is a case of mask-as-augmentation, and I think it’s distinct from mask-as-shield. In a less self-accepting time, my masks were ways to hide who I was, to defend myself from being identified as different, to thwart anyone’s attempts to scrutinize my true self.

A defensive mask is always ill-fitting. It slips off too easily, or else constricts one’s circulation. The eyes don’t line up with the holes, or it makes it hard to breathe. To wear a mask defensively is to be in a constant state of disaster-aversion.

The relationship changes, I think, once we’ve come to accept our true face, when we take ownership of who we really are, for all our flaws. If we can get to a place where we have a handle on the whole of ourselves, strengths and weaknesses together, I think then a mask is not necessarily a shield or a disguise, but a tool.

If we mask with intention, we can thoughtfully and deliberately augment ourselves to better navigate different situations. When our natural state isn’t suited to a meaningful undertaking, we can choose the mask that supports our goals, adopting the specific qualities that help us get where we need to go, or build what we want to see come into being.

This is what we were learning in those first hours of that theatre workshop. Before the instructor would allow us to put on one of the masks she’d brought, and begin to inhabit — and be inhabited by — the character the mask represented, we needed to accept and master our own faces. We needed to take off our defensive masks, stop hiding from ourselves, and see our true faces as they really are.

To have used those masks as disguises would have been to miss the point. The goal must never be to disappear. Rather, the mask allowed us to bring something new into being. The mask was not hiding our true selves. Our true selves were giving life to the mask.

Accepting who we really are is just the start, not the end. Self-acceptance isn’t about stasis. It’s about taking responsibility for who we really are, and with intention and new understanding, finding the strength to see what else is possible. One way to find out is to try on a few masks. Who knows who might show up.

I have this idea about the relationship between courage and laziness.

Courage, as I define it, is when a person acts out of principle, knowing that the act will cause them suffering. John Lewis knew he faced beatings, imprisonment, and possibly death when he marched. Susan B. Anthony knew she faced scorn, jail, and infamy if she cast a vote. Steve Rogers knew he’d be blown to bits when he leapt on that grenade that turned out to be a dud. (Fictional examples are helpful and illustrative so back off.)

I have lamented on countless occasions my inability to choose a Major Project of some kind and see it through to fruition. (One Major Project I actually did, finally, complete, and I will eagerly share it with you when it comes into full being sometime next year.) I’d like to write a novel. I’d like to start a theatre troupe. I’d like to write nonfiction books on a number of subjects and in a number of styles. I’d like to host a podcast, write and record an album of new songs, play my music live for audiences, get into voice acting, write a newsletter, make a satire news site, and so on.

Rarely do I even begin on these fantasy projects, let alone stick with them long enough for them take flight. Why?

Sometimes, a project just isn’t the right fit. It doesn’t interest me as much as I’d hoped, or it involves commitments I am simply incapable of making. That’s no reason for anyone to beat themselves up. I mean, I will still beat myself up about it, but I shouldn’t.

But more often than not, I think what holds me back is what I’ll call laziness. That might not be an entirely fair word to use, but I want to make a point. When evaluating a Major Project, any number of factors can weigh on my mind and convince me it’s not worth beginning, or not feasible. It could be that I don’t think I have the time, or that I don’t really know how to get started. It could be that I don’t see a market for what I’d offer, or that said market is already flooded. It could be that it would require that I ask for help or collaboration with others, possibly even strangers, and my intense wincing at the thought of being socially entwined with anyone drains my resolve. It could be that I perceive that it would require a financial commitment that I can’t make, or am unwilling to try to fulfill.

All of these are justifications for inaction. Reasons not to start. Reasons not to try. Some of them might be really good reasons! Some of them might be sober and realistic assessments that lead to the reasonable conclusion that something is just not worth taking on.

Some. But not most.

Mostly, they’re about unwillingness. A lack of will, all because of an imaginary cost-benefit calculation that I have made based on a slew of unknowable factors. It’s bad math. And because the result of actually making the effort to see something to its fruition is more likely to be a valuable end in itself, regardless of anything else, it really is, for lack of a better word, laziness.

To take the first step in a new enterprise, and then to take as many additional steps as possible, is an uncomfortable thought. And each step brings with it the possibility of stubbing one’s toe, tripping, or stepping on a rake. One could take a few steps very awkwardly and wind up looking ridiculous for several paces. One could walk for a very, very long time and get very, very tired, or run out of energy entirely and collapse to the ground. One could even reach the ultimate, dreamed-of destination and find that it actually kind of sucks there. All those things could be true, and most of them almost certainly will be true.

Then what is required to do it anyway? Courage. To undertake an action of importance even though we know that a lot of the experience will be negative, even though we might not even finish it, even though what we make in the end might be kind of crappy. To work in spite of those possibilities takes courage. To put aside precious free time and resources that we may never get back takes courage. To allow oneself to be vulnerable and entreat others for help and collaboration is risky and, to me, terrifying, and it takes courage.

I’ve berated myself for being lazy for most of my life. I’ve been ashamed at my lack of courage in other instances as well. I’ve learned a great deal about myself in recent years, and I better understand the roots of my fears and aversions. But only now am I beginning to understand that what I see as my own laziness and my dearth of courage might be the same thing.

Because, in the end, laziness is about being unwilling to endure discomfort. Courage is being willing to heap it on.

I know I can endure discomfort. I believe I can take on even more. And I suspect that it might be worth it.

There is the moment, at the point of a major crisis when it can no longer be denied, and must now be accepted as a new part of our everyday reality, that we tell the kids that everything has changed.

I didn’t have children at the time of the 9/11 attacks, but I can imagine that parents of young kids at the time had to find that right moment to explain what had happened with those planes, and why everyone was sad, scared, and angry. All of a sudden, everything was different. So much so that the kids needed to be sat down and told so in serious yet reassuring terms. I don’t know, of course, but I can guess.

I am a parent of young kids now, when the COVID-19 pandemic has really, truly changed everything. 9/11 probably didn’t fundamentally alter anything about kids’ lives back in the early 2000s, but the pandemic has utterly upended the lives of today’s kids, and it shows no signs of stopping any time soon. When schools shut down last spring as the virus broke loose, in a United States too stupid and delusional to even acknowledge it, the everything-has-changed conversation was inevitable.

My own kids had known that something called the coronavirus existed, and it sounded scary, but they had been reassured countless times that, while it was a serious problem for many people, it was not something that was likely to affect their lives or put them at any risk. I strongly suspected I might be wrong about this when I said it to them, but I didn’t know. Americans had largely avoided any upheavals due to the first SARS, West Nile Virus, H1N1, and Ebola, so it seemed like a safe bet that we’d be alright this time too. Ha.

Those several conversations with my kids over a period of weeks and months, about how they wouldn’t be going back to school for the rest of the year, about how there would be no summer camps or activities, how they couldn’t go and be with their friends, how we couldn’t bring them into the grocery store with us, how money was suddenly tighter and we wouldn’t be ordering pizza as often, and how they would be entering into a weird new quasi-school situation in the fall, they all bore the weight of that central premise: everything was different now.

Here’s the part where I admit to something uncomfortable. I genuinely regret all that my kids are losing and missing during this pandemic, and I grieve for the millions of souls lost or made to suffer from this disease. But I also felt (and, I suppose still feel) a certain twinge of satisfaction as I delivered the news of a New Normal to my kids. I think it’s because I know that the world desperately needs a new normal, a realignment of what we value and prioritize, a sober and clear-eyed look at the absurd fragility of our society. Maybe this pandemic would give our shallow, boorish culture the chance to reevaluate what really matters.

That’s not all. On a much more selfish level, I actually like some of the changes to interpersonal interaction that the virus has necessitated. I’m a severely introverted autistic with Asperger’s, I already work from home, I have little desire for travel, and I don’t have any meaningful non-familial connections that live anywhere near me. My pastimes of choice do not involve me leaving my home. The situation to which everyone else was suddenly struggling to adapt was already my comfort zone.

As I’ve written previously, I even have a soft spot for face masks, as they further anonymize me to a species that has consistently shown me that I am, at best, merely tolerated.

It’s more than that, though, because I have to hope that after such a major disruption of everyday life for an entire society, some reconsideration and recalibration will have to occur. There must be a new way of being that emerges from a disaster that is largely and plainly of our own making. If nothing else, perhaps we would experience something akin to the classic tech support cliché: we turn the whole thing off and then turn it back on again. The reboot clears away the cruft and bugs, giving us a clean slate and a fresh start.

But now, I don’t know.

Freddie de Boer recently wrote about “romanticizing the post-apocalypse,”similarly hoping for something valuable to emerge from the chaos and death. “What I do want is some sign that we have reached a break, that events have forced us to face up to an old then and a new now, and that the tyranny of normal has been defeated at last.”

But like me, he is skeptical. “What this virus has taught me is the supreme durability of normal, the dogged survival of the mundane world, the near-impossibility of some new era in which all old expectations of civility and social norms will just extinguish or burn away…”

This is indeed what I see. While the pandemic has certainly brought out the best, most charitable, and most empathetic selves in many of us, I think for most Americans, it has simply been a pain in the ass that we need to be done with as soon as possible. Not, I should say, as soon as is best, or as soon as it’s safe, but just, like, now. This is obviously the mode of the utterly corrupt Trump administration, and we see it all the time in the outrage-inducing stories of churches flaunting social distancing rules or stupid teenagers mass-infecting each other at parties. But it’s more insidious than that, more subtle.

It’s in the insistence that we shove our kids back into classrooms rather than decide as a society that we should just pay people to stay home. It’s the delusions about how death statistics are being exaggerated (they’re not), how kids are magically resistant (they’re not), and the absurd tribalization of mask wearing.

It’s in the excuses we all keep making about who we imagine it’s safe to congregate with, because they’re family, close friends, or just people that we somehow simply know have been safe and surely aren’t carrying the virus (and, of course, neither are we!). I’m sure I’ve done it, and I bet you have too.

And yeah, it’s in the polls that show that despite the mass death, suffering, and economic calamity, we’re still a coin flip from reelecting (or reinstalling) the guy who’s primarily responsible for running us through this meat grinder.

We are simply determined not to give a shit.

Many of us have given many shits. Many of us have no more shits to give. Too many of us never did to begin with.

In a recent piece for OneZero, Douglas Rushkoff recalls the tech billionaires who have been constructing self-sustaining fortresses in remote locations to shield them against coming disasters such as climate change, global unrest, or pandemics.

“These solar-powered hilltop resorts, chains of defensible floating islands, and robotically tilled eco-farms were less last resorts than escape fantasies for billionaires who aren’t quite rich enough to build space programs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk,” he writes. “No, they weren’t scared for the Event; on some level, they were hoping for it.”

Well, if I had their resources, I don’t think I’d hope for disaster, but I can imagine having a silent wish in the back of my head that I’d get some excuse to go ahead and take refuge in my own personal — and perfectly furnished — Helm’s Deep.

Indeed, Rushkoff says those of us who enjoy the privileges of being able to work from home and not be gripped by the terror of imminent eviction or starvation are making a calculation: “How much are we allowed to use our wealth and our technologies to insulate ourselves and our families from the rest of the world?” he writes. “And, like a devil on our shoulder, our technology is telling us to go it alone.”

I have always found it easiest to go it alone, and I have long been grateful to the technologies of the Information Era that have given me the means to do so, ever reducing the frequency with which I am required to involuntarily interact with humans on any meaningfully personal basis. I have been trying to insulate myself for decades.

I suppose the difference is that I have not by any means lost my sense of moral responsibility to the world I share with these inconvenient humans. The fact that the current crisis resides in the form of a highly infectious pathogen, and that I live with and care for children and a severely immunocomprised partner, limits what I can do outside the home. But I try to play my part from here, with donations to those who need it and can best use it, advocacy for the right causes, and, minimal as it may be, sharing thoughts like this with you right now. It’s not enough, I know.

I do prefer the safety and distance of the domestic-digital life. I do wish, fervently, that this crisis will shake us out of our collective stupor and make us appreciate each other at a basic level. But I do not wish for the end of all things. I do not want to hide while the world burns. I want a new world to grow from this one, a better one inhabited by a people with better hearts. A new world where I don’t need to hide, but in which I retain the option to do so when the time comes.

Everything has changed, and yet it feels like nothing has. Let’s not have gone through this for nothing.