Is it a diagnosis or the end of the world?
For the last four years, I’ve been fighting a general malaise that waffles between mostly tolerable to completely unsurvivable. Back in 2020, everyone seemed to understand that a mass-disabling global pandemic that caused the end of society as we know it might make a person feel a little down.
From 2021–2022, there was this glimmer that maybe we’d learned something. That society as we knew it was broken to begin with, and that we have the capacity and infrastructure to create something better for everyone. It felt so close, so achievable. It felt like people were starting to wake up and demand more for our lives.
In 2024, the world around me seems to have returned to a state of apathy with an edge of callousness toward vulnerability that I don’t remember prior to the global shut down. This is not business as usual, this is bootstrap mentality on steroids. Perhaps before all this, I was simply in my early 20s with a vibrant social life and fulfilling career at the time. Perhaps young adulthood affords us with a natural levity to help us cope with the heavy unknown of the future.
I’ve always lived my life through the modality of collective care: when we are struggling we lean on each other; we assume good intentions of those…
