Naked Imperialism

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Dear 2120, 

You already know this, of course, but 2026 is off to a turbulent start. The US has kidnapped the Venezuelan president under the pretense of him being a ‘narcoterrorist’ – whatever that means. For the Trump administration it means supplying the US with drugs and contributing to the fentanyl crisis. Trump, however, has subsequently been characteristically forthright and disturbingly honest about what they’re actually doing in Venezuela: seizing control of the country’s world-leading oil production.

Now, Maduro is certainly no saint, and Venezuela’s government is clearly an oppressive dictatorship. But any sane person can see that this is just another imperialist US power grab. It’s about the oil; it’s about consolidating the American position in a global political landscape with China on the rise.

There’s nothing new to these sorts of power grabs. What’s new is the complete and utter honesty from the Trump administration about their brazen colonial intentions.

In the old days, US coups required plausible deniability: CIA-backed insurgents, carefully staged color revolutions, years of economic warfare disguised as sanctions. Before Trump, the US would manage it coups and invasions in more surreptitious and clandestine ways, pretending to ‘spread democracy’ and whatnot.

Now they barely give a fuck. They just copy the Iraq propaganda playbook (which was pretty sketchy to begin with), and let DJT say the quiet part out loud because he can do no wrong in the eyes of the MAGA cult.

They might be coming for Greenland next. Watch this space. Or not. It’s already in your history books, I guess.  

2025: The Year in Review

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Dear 2120,

What are we doing? Where’s this going? What is this? Who am I?

If 2025 was an extremely discombobulating year offering more questions than answers, it looks like we’d better buckle up: 2026 is set to be even more intense. The US is sliding into a bizarre form of tech-enabled proto-fascism, dubbed by zany jokesters as ‘The Nerd Reich.’ Palestine keeps suffering despite the so-called ceasefire. The far right has surged across Europe. And we’ve breached 7 out of 9 planetary boundaries, according to PIK. It’s bleak AF out there.

But good things are happening too. Zohran Mamdani became New York’s new socialist mayor, running a fearless campaign for working-class affordability. The Green Party’s Zack Polanski is now the UK’s most popular party leader, championing a similar progressive agenda. Across the world, people are organizing, resisting, building alternatives.

At this point, people here in 2025 usually wheel out that Gramsci quote about monsters as a way of sounding worldly while managing their metacrisis anxiety. I like Gramsci. It’s a good quote. But here’s the thing: there’s no guarantee these monsters are disappearing anytime soon. In fact, they’re having a pretty good run. They seem invigorated, like they’re having a grand old time wreaking untold damage on us and the planet in their deranged pursuit of influence, control, and obscene wealth. There’s definitely some form of sociopathy at play here. 

The brutal truth is that they’re not going to stop unless someone stops them.

Enter Regenerative Propaganda

This situation, this clusterfuck, this slow-motion collapse, whatever you want to call it,  is what prompted me to start my own company, Regenerative Propaganda. After spending most of my career in culture, communications, and advertising, watching talented people waste their abilities on stupid and harmful things, I decided to just go do what I always wanted without compromising. No more quietly rolling my eyes like a surly teenager when my boss told me to write or make something more “palatable to the market.”

So I went and did it.

I wouldn’t call it an overnight success story. But I’m at a point where it’s starting to make sense financially. I still hustle in the old world of extractive consumerism  (selling people shit they don’t need) to make ends meet. But I think it balances out on the good vs. bad scale. And every month, the balance tips a little more toward the work that matters.

What I’ve Learned This Year

→There’s very little money in actual regenerative communication. And I mean actual regenerative communication: degrowth, sufficiency, having fewer material possessions to focus on what truly matters: community, care, ecology, purpose. It should be the world’s biggest open goal, but here we are. To an alarming and frustrating degree, the system rewards the people selling the disease, not the cure.

→The work finds you if you’re patient. Once I stopped chasing every gig and started being clear about what I stand for, the right projects started appearing. Not many. Not enough. But the right ones. People and organizations who actually want transformation, not just greenwash their way through quarterly reports.

→You can’t do this alone. Building something regenerative in a degenerative system is exhausting. You need community, co-conspirators, people who get it. This year I’ve been lucky to connect with others doing similar work — designers, strategists, activists, artists — all trying to build the world we actually want to live in.

→Compromise is inevitable, but capitulation isn’t. Yes, I still take work that makes me wince sometimes. But there’s a difference between bending and breaking. I’m learning where my lines are, what I can live with, what I can’t. It’s messy and imperfect, but that’s the reality of trying to operate ethically under capitalism.

→This is going to take longer than any of us want. The monsters aren’t going anywhere fast. The systems that produce them are deeply entrenched. Real change is slow, frustrating, unglamorous work. But it’s the only work worth doing.

What’s Next

In 2026, I want to do more of the work that matters and less of the work that just pays the bills. I want to collaborate with people building genuine alternatives; community energy projects, worker cooperatives, regenerative farms, mutual aid networks, social movements that actually threaten exploitative empire. I want to help tell their stories, amplify their work, and make the case for a world beyond endless growth and extraction.

I’m also thinking about how to build more resilient structures for this kind of work. How do we fund truly regenerative communication without compromising its integrity? How do we support each other through the inevitable precarity? How do we build something that lasts?

I don’t have all the fully-formed answers. But I’m learning, adapting, trying to practice what I preach.

Here’s to a turbulent, terrifying, occasionally beautiful 2026.

We’re Cooked (again)

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Dear 2120,

Reality is coming apart at the seams, it would seem. If you’re wondering why I haven’t sent you an AI-themed letter yet, it’s mostly because: A) I’d like to try and forget the work and money it’s costing me as a person who makes a living writing things, and B) the indisputable fact that the legions of people who yap incessantly about AI here in 2025 are among the most insufferable members of our species.

This caught my attention, however. Made me think The Matrix wasn’t a pipe dream – and maybe not even that far away.

RIP, the real world.

How Fossil-Fueled Expansion Engineered Our Obsession With Newness and Reinvention

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Still from Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

Dear 2120,

I hope you’re settled. Because we’re not. We’re addicted to newness. New stuff, new looks, new versions of ourselves. It feels totally normal, but it’s actually a pretty recent thing, engineered by cheap fossil fuels and the insane growth they made possible.

How It Started

Fossil fuels powered more than factories. They rewired how we think about stuff and identity. When production exploded in the 20th century, buying things became who you are. “New” turned into shorthand for progress, success, basically everything good.

Cities powered by cheap energy became testing grounds for different lifestyles. Novelty stopped being special and became expected. Your identity became something you’re supposed to constantly upgrade.

Breaking Rules Became the Rule

Fast change made disruption a virtue. People who broke boundaries became heroes. The growth-at-all-costs mindset loved rule-breakers because they suggested more expansion was possible.

This logic runs everything now. Tech worship “disruption.” Culture chases the next edgy thing. If you’re not breaking something, you’re boring. Transgression went from rebellious to required.

The Reinvention Hamster Wheel

Global supply chains and social media algorithms cranked this into overdrive. Now we cycle through trends and identities constantly. Reinvention went from meaningful choice to compulsive behavior. Staying the same feels like stagnation. Change became convention.

You end up with this restless psychology where you have to keep reinventing yourself just to feel relevant.

When Reality Isn’t Enough

Umberto Eco wrote about how we became obsessed with making things that feel more real than reality. Prosperity stopped being about actual material comfort and became a vibe you engineer. We remake reality to be louder, shinier, more intense every time.

The ‘new’ is addictive because you can always design it to feel better than what actually exists. Culture turned into an escalation machine where each iteration has to top the last one.

The Dark Side

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood shows where this psychology goes. Daniel Plainview builds an oil empire through pure conquest. He violates every boundary to expand and dominate. Competition defines his whole identity. He wants wealth for the myth of it, not what it provides. Prosperity as spectacle.

And where does it end? Isolation and self-destruction. That’s what happens when transgression becomes your whole personality.

What It Cost Us

This mindset gave us climate chaos, biodiversity collapse, and depleted resources. But it also did internal damage; constant restlessness, insecurity, loss of meaning.

Transgression used to challenge power structures. Now the system just absorbed it and uses it as fuel for faster cycles of consumption and novelty.

What’s Next

We need to rethink what prosperity, desire, and creativity even mean. Stuff like degrowth, regenerative design, doughnut economics: these show how novelty can come from restoration instead of extraction.

The goal is redirecting creativity and transgression, not killing them. Transgression can mean breaking with the logic of “more, faster, louder” itself. Reinvention can mean getting back to balance. Novelty can mean building things that actually last.

The 20th century trained us to crave endless newness. We escalated that into fake realities that feel more abundant than real life (Eco). We built a psychology of conquest disguised as ambition (Anderson).

The myth we inherited says progress has to break boundaries. Always. Forever.

But there’s a different way. Value having enough over having more. Depth over escalation. Sticking with things over constant reinvention. Transgression as refusing the destructive playbook we were handed, not as domination.

That’s the shift we’re trying to figure out. I hope for our sake and yours that it does.

Aphex Twin Just Dropped Two New Tracks

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Dear 2120,

Aphex Twin, ‘the electronic Mozart’ of our era, just uploaded two tracks to SoundCloud. The description says he’s annoyed about UK rain and there are “probably better mixes” he’ll share if he finds them.

That’s it. 

Everything online is supposed to be polished and optimized to compete for attention. But he’s been using SoundCloud like a messy folder, just dropping rough recordings and sketches whenever. No strategy. 

It’s small, but it matters. Not everything has to be content. Not everything has to be finished. Some stuff can just exist for people who are actually listening.

Maybe you’ll look back and see this as artists learning to opt out of the content mill. Or maybe by then it’ll just be normal to share work without needing it to perform.

Antimemetics: The Death of the ‘When’ Meme

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Dear 2120,

I want to tell you about a book called Antimemetics and why it matters – both now and hopefully for you too. It’s about ideas that don’t spread. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re too complex, too uncomfortable, or too inconvenient to go viral. Memes spread everywhere. Antimemes just… vanish. They leave barely any trace except in quiet corners where people are actually paying attention.

This hits different right now, to stay in the parlance of meme culture, because of how our platforms work. Everything’s optimized for speed and visibility. The ideas that win aren’t the most important ones – they’re just the loudest, the catchiest, the most entertaining. Meanwhile, the slow stuff, the complicated truths about climate and justice and how we actually relate to each other get buried. Antimemetics gives us language for that. For what disappears even though it matters.

Here’s what’s interesting from a futures perspective: if attention is our main currency, then invisibility becomes a kind of resistance. The ideas that refuse to be broadcast: cooperative economies, regenerative systems, ways of valuing things beyond money. Those might be the real foundation of whatever comes after capitalism.

Bifo Berardi wrote about how late capitalism exhausts our attention, and how that exhaustion might open up new ways of thinking. David Graeber showed how everyday cultural practices can hide radical possibilities. Italo Calvino reminded us that entire worlds can exist in the imagination if we bother to look. They’re all pointing at the same thing: the invisible is where new worlds grow.

A century from now, you might look at Antimemetics as a snapshot of a weird transition period. A time when the most important ideas couldn’t compete for attention. When what shaped culture was as much about what was absent as what was everywhere. You might trace back to the quiet networks and experimental practices that survived in the margins The stuff we couldn’t see clearly but that somehow carried us forward. All our viral spectacles will look silly, but those invisible signals might be what actually mattered.

I’m writing this because paying attention is the first step of caring about something. Cultivating the invisible means cultivating possibility. Antimemetics teaches us to notice what resists the algorithm, to follow what doesn’t want to be broadcast, and to protect the seeds of ideas that might actually build something lasting.

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading


Imagining 2120: Generating Desire for Postcapitalism

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Dear 2120,

Writing to you feels weird. Like texting someone who won’t read it for a century. But here we are, stuck between a world that’s clearly breaking and one we haven’t figured out how to build yet.

Here’s the thing: we’re supposed to imagine the future, but we’re really bad at it. Most of what we get fed is either dystopian nightmares or the same capitalism we have now, just with fancier phones and flooded cities. Mark Fisher (quoting Jameson) said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. He/they nailed it.

But something’s definitely shifting. People are starting to realize that what we want – like, actually want – matters politically. Our desires either keep this broken system running or help bring something new into being.

Ursula Le Guin said the future is a kind of fiction, and she was right. We don’t have to accept Silicon Valley’s depressing version as the only story. We can write different ones. Slower, weirder, more human.

There’s this idea from Jacques Attali that every dying system contains hints of what comes next. And yeah, we’re definitely dying; supply chains failing, climate chaos, institutions crumbling. But in all that noise, we’re hearing something else. Mutualism replacing rigid hierarchies. Local communities thriving within global networks. Economies that measure health instead of just growth. The next thing isn’t going to show up complete, it’s emerging in pieces, visible in the cracks.

The problem is we’ve been trained to want the wrong things. We’re addicted to ownership, competition, endless accumulation – and these habits keep us locked into a system that’s literally killing us. Even people who want change often want it to be easy, comfortable, something they can buy into without real disruption.

So the challenge isn’t just building new systems. It’s rewiring how we imagine life itself. Making the postcapitalist world feel not just possible but genuinely desirable.

What if creativity wasn’t about competing but about contributing? What if technology helped people and ecosystems thrive instead of extracting from them? What if pleasure came from connection rather than consumption? What if status meant what you gave, not what you owned? What if growth meant maturing, not just expanding?

Writing to you instead of just about you changes something. It makes you real – not some abstract concept but someone we’re in relationship with. You’re not a prediction; you’re who comes after us. And you’ll inherit both our mess and whatever we manage to get right.

We’re trying to build you something that doesn’t eat itself. A world where abundance is about ecology, not money. Where resilience is collective, not just a personal brand. Where liberation includes everyone or it’s meaningless.

If we pull this off, your world will seem obvious. Just like feudalism looks absurd to us now, our obsession with markets and competition and individual success will seem embarrassingly primitive to you. Maybe you’ll laugh at how we measured everything in productivity and profit. Or maybe you’ll just be relieved we finally moved on.

I’m not writing this as prophecy – more like a reminder that we can shape what we want. Desire isn’t fixed. We can redirect it. The future isn’t something we just watch happen. It’s something we create.

If we learn to want different things, we’ll build different things.

And if we build different things, maybe you’ll inherit a world that actually works.

We’re still figuring it out. But we are actually trying.

At the Edge of Whatever’s Next

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Dear 2120,

Four years have gone by since my last letter. Apologies. The years have been eventful. I have two kids now, and a bunch of other things eating up my time here in late-stage capitalism, rendering unpaid writing, ruminating on the state of the world, outside of my immediate priorities. Still, I managed to squeeze in this message from early 2025 to let you know how I’m doing.

I hope you’re hanging in there. Chances are you might not be hanging in there. If the recent trajectory maintains its exponential nosedive, the letter I’m currently writing will find you in some sort of next-level chaos that our tiny minds can’t even begin to comprehend. To put it bluntly, we’re doing a spectacularly shitty job of protecting the future. I don’t mean to sound needy or act all weird about it, but I genuinely hope you’re okay.  

As I type these words into an oligarch-powered digital void, the world’s dominant superpower is getting hijacked by power-hungry techno-authoritarians. It’s very intimidating, but not without its farcical, clown-like elements; it weirdly feels like we’re stuck in some future comedy sketch about the 2020s — with Trump playing the cartoonish capitalist villain, all filtered through whatever distorted, misremembering history books you guys have left. 

And that’s just politics. We’ve got a polycrisis on our hands:

  • Oceans being killed
  • Forests vanishing
  • Soil turning to dust
  • Big animals being wiped out
  • Insects disappearing
  • Mass extinctions accelerating
  • Plastic literally in our bloodstreams
  • Climate scientists basically screaming into the void
  • Endless wars and genocide   

Oh, and did I mention the asteroid coming to kills us all, or the methane bubble in the Arctic that might burst, annihilating every living thing in its wake like some flatulent sleeper assassin the size of a small country? Some academics are even saying that AI could mean the end of civilization. I mean…why not throw a flesh-eating, zombie-virus into the mix to keep things interesting?

The whole thing feels like whoever’s running this simulation suddenly got bored and started throwing random disasters at us. Like, ‘Let’s make Elon go off the rails! Send a hot, weird girl his way, make her break up with him and see what happens.’

Well, it worked, simulation overlords. I gotta say, though, in reference to Roy Logan in Succession: you’re not serious people. It feels like you’re just making shit up at this point. You’ve got him doing Nazi salutes, stirring up far-right chaos in Europe, and stealing social security numbers from senior citizens with the help of over-caffeinated teenage bros. X, formerly Twitter, the social media he bought for a cajilion dollars to spread his misinformation, is calling him “Hurt Copain” now, offering a little comic relief in dark and tumultuous times.

What isn’t funny, are the accelerationist aspirations of Curtis Yarvin, the rising idealogue whispering his ‘dark enlightenment’ talking points into Vice president JD Vance’s ears. According to the Guardian:

‘Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.’

My initial action to these extremist fringe ideas occupying such a pivotal position in contemporary geopolitics were shock and surprise. However, having thought about it for a little while, my more considered stance is that it sort of makes sense. I don’t agree with any of it, of course. But in a world so utterly disenchanted by hollow consumerism, whoever dares to champion the grand narrative, while turning up the amp on the pomp & populism, stands to gain everything. We’re essentially numb from too much information and starved from too little meaning—and we’ll watch whatever trauma-pornographic Netflix show that ‘s on offer or latch onto any seemingly meaningful movement to feel something, anything.

In The Crisis of Narration, Byung Chul Han argues that our information-saturated society has undermined a fundamental human practice: narration.

While therapists practicing cognitive behavioral therapy encourage patients to examine their internal narratives, and politicians craft storylines to maintain their base, Han contends these are narratives in name only—lacking the profound world-shaping quality of myths or religious ceremonies. Genuine narration, according to Han, “combines events and objects, even seemingly trivial, minor, or random things, into a coherent story.” Put differently, true narration infuses our surroundings with meaning.

To sum up: neoliberalism and its digital byproduct, the relentless cascade of online information distributed via social media, has drained the world of color, leaving us begging for meager scraps from the numbing entertainment matrix, as well as apathetic, directionless and susceptible to domination.

I’m tempted to call this a non-stop tragicomical clusterfuck with no end in sight. Nobody has a clue where we’re heading, even if they pretend otherwise. It’s probably gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Or I don’t know…maybe this cartoon villany will come crashing down sooner than expected. They’ve certainly proved their glaring and goofy incompetence on more than one occasion. Let’s hope these are the last, somewhat bizarre, death throes of a dying paradigm.

Wish you could send something back. You know how it plays out. I don’t have the slightest idea. Maybe those UFO-sightings in New Jersey were you trying to get through to us?

In any case, it’s getting weird out here.

Absolute Sæxophone–the Playlist

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Dear 2120,

I’d like to introduce you to a dear and horny friend of mine. It’s shiny, sexy, complicated as hell and smoother than a television evangelist wooing a soap opera starlet at a Napa County winescapade. Sometimes it’s punk, sometimes it’s on a yacht. There are times when it’s jazzy and spacy—and then it can veer off into different directions, smelling like dank NYC basement and starch-addled suits. My friend can travel further along the evolutionary road and add color, ambiance and sophistication to a house music atmosphere. I’ve been in a sticky, tempestuous relationship with this particular friend for as long as I can remember.

     

Despite its imperfect legacy, my best musical friend will forever be the saxophone. Here in 2021, a lot of people tend to think of stupid hats, gyrating Moldovans and cloying, coked-out sentimentality when picturing the storied woodwind instrument. In other words, they don’t take it seriously. And they don’t know what they’re missing. Now, I’m not gonna deny that listening to the sounds of the saxophone comes with its share of sleazy, schmaltzy imagery—that’s a central part of its rakish charm. But the simple fact remains that what is commonly known as ‘the devil’s horn’ plants a horn-emblazoned flag in our innermost human desires. That’s why it rears its shiny head all over the musical spectrum from basic, shitty beer jazz to genre-expanding, intergenerational experimentation. It’s why Kenny G and Sun Ra are united in their common humanity over this one vital thing that defies the reductive, compartmentalizing ‘takes’ of the internet age. In simpler terms, the saxophone transcends all that impermanent bullshit. There’s a certain timelessness embedded in its fluctuating tonality. An eternally relevant, distinct, yet elusive energy—a time-traveling, mood-altering tonic filled with uncontainable passion and yearning that I think you might just dig in 2120.                

I would even go so far as to say that in a billion years when all is said and done, when our civilization fades into view and the Earth is restored to its natural equilibrium––that’s when the aliens come to visit the now untouched planet without a name and the most fitting monument to humanity with its infinite capacity for lust, love, pain, imagination, porn addiction and half-baked conspiracy theories would be: a blaring saxophone encased in a giant monolith made of indestructible silicone. A tad melodramatic, you say? This is a saxophone playlist.          

Listen to Absolute Sæxophone, a playlist lovingly compiled by me. Music about fucking and fighting made for you.

      

A Letter from Quarantine

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Dear 2120,

 

Here’s one for the history books. Maybe the year 2020 is part of the curriculum in your schools and educational institutions? I’m wondering if you’ve been reading my letters thinking: ‘When is he getting to the global pandemic? I bet that’s gonna be something else.’ If that sort of vicarious thrill-seeking floats your fusion-powered hydro-vessel, you’ll be interested to know that coronavirus is upon us, and that it’s toying mercilessly with our tiny minds.

april

A photo from 2020 taken in Toronto, Canada.

It’s the strangest thing. A virus that predominantly preys on the vulnerable and the elderly. The rationalistic part of me is reluctant to admit this, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re being tested. Tried on our moral convictions and collective ability to adapt and find common ground in the face of a rapidly proliferating challenge. Maybe the overlords running the simulation have unleashed a black swan event to see how we measure up with new upheavals thrust upon us. Or maybe this was bound to happen in one way or another as an inevitable by-product of our failure to engage with the world in a meaningful and sustainable way. It’s the latter, of course. Quarantine has made me go off on a slightly unhinged, quasi-spiritual nerd tangent. I guess that entertaining the fantastical sci-fi fantasy makes it less real and scary for a split-second or two. It’s been very real and pretty scary.

Whenever coronavirus hits a new country, the onslaught consistently induces the same behavioral pattern: indifference; followed by jokey comparisons with the common flu; and then, when it finally lands that this unstoppable viral phenomenon has the very real potential to upend living as you know it, shock and varying degrees of panic begin to set in.

As of April 8, 2020, 82.000 people have died amid nationwide lockdowns, far-reaching restrictions on social interaction and a global economy brought to its quivering knees. Here in Denmark, a generation with little to no experience in collective hardship or adversity are holed up in their homes, frightened and #alonetogether, moods swinging like brittle chandeliers on the Titanic, with dubious, personal information-stealing media as their primary source of connection. In the midst of fear-inducing pandemonium arriving on our doorstep and proceeding to seep into our sheltered home like a highly contagious, invisible ghost, It feels as if reality itself is in some sort of flux. We’ve been shoved out of our comfort zones without a moment’s notice into an eerie precarious existence that grief expert David Kessler calls ‘anticipatory grief.’

 

‘The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.’

 

As a learned friend of mine rightfully pointed out, that shitty feeling of uncertainty is the rule and not the exception for two-thirds of the world’s population. The unfairly balanced distribution of wealth and resources means that some of us have gotten free passes up until now. To a certain extent, we’ve been living in a wilfully oblivious fantasy world. An old-world reality, which is now coming to an abrupt, unceremonious end. Some people are calling it the end of globalization. We’ll see. In any event, I hope that doctors and medical experts don’t stop sharing new findings and knowledge across borders. If that positive side-effect of globalization ceases, we’re truly done for. It’s the neoliberalist part of globalization that needs to die, not the part where we collectively get more intelligent.

The deficit of hindsight
We should have seen it coming. Many ominous articles have been written on the dangers of multi-resistant bacteria. Countless warnings have been issued by people we should have listened to. It’s possible that we’ve been too busy lamenting our spiritual poverty in flights of self-absorbed navel-gazing. One thing is clear, however; the world has changed overnight. It’s a fairly unsettling thing to watch.

IMG_4887

Distancing existences
Certain forms of distancing are required in this virulent, new reality. Social distancing, the preferred protective measure of the world’s governing bodies sounds fancy and academic, but it really just means staying at home to avoid spreading or contracting the virus. Then there’s emotional distancing, the act of removing yourself from reality because it sometimes becomes too heavy and too much to bear. People are dying in droves. Your parents are categorized as being in the ‘at-risk’ group. Jobs are being cut on a massive scale and you can’t be completely sure if you have one in a month or two because the future has never looked more uncertain. You need to keep reality at bay to keep your head above water.

Apparently, this disengagement from the real world means embracing eco-fascist ideas for some people:

In my book, widening inequality, the handful of corporations killing the planet, and the military-industrial complex are the culprits here, not humanity.  We all have our coping mechanisms, I guess.

It’s also been suggested that Mother Earth has sent us to our rooms to think about what we’ve done. To me, it feels more paralyzing. More vindictive and severe. More like a mean-spirited, older sibling kneeling on your chest and writing  ‘dickhead’ on your forehead with a permanent marker – and then proceeding to shove you into your room, quickly maneuvering to hold the door shut while you bang on the other side filled with impotent rage and despair.

Grounds for optimism
Still, it’s not all bad. There are actually positive stories to be found beneath the mounting rubble of this world-toppling crisis. Glimpses of what the world might be like if we finally decided to get our act together. C02 emissions have taken a drastic downturn, pollution levels are plummeting and the sky is literally clearer for it.

china_trop_2020056

Maps show drastic drop in air pollution after COVID-19.

Screen Shot 2020-04-08 at 16.30.37 The Himalayas are visible for the first time in 30 years as pollution levels in India plummet. 

The word ‘solidarity’ has been mainstreamed within the space of a week or two. Collectivism seems to be growing stronger as people are robbed of social contact and realize how much they depend on one another, and prominent voices from across the political spectrum are calling for unified action on climate change.

Don’t fuck it up
This feels like one of those pivotal moments. With the global population being jolted out of their daily routines and comfort zones, comes fear and anxiety, but it also produces a range of opportunities. The chance to change our common mindset and with it the collective trajectory, which is currently set for unimaginable hardship if business as usual continues. The course we’re on has been altered for a moment in time and we’re all scratching our heads in collective reflection and wonderment. New things – things that seemed far-fetched to most people a month ago – are suddenly viable options. And so, what we do next will have significant implications on how we live in the future. As Indian activist and author Arundhati Roy writes in the Financial Times (of all places):

 

‘Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.’

 

As an optimist by choice, I have to believe that this historical event, challenging and grief-riddled as it undoubtedly is, can steer us in a direction that recalibrates our systemics, repurposes the way we organize ourselves, and reimagines how we engage with our natural surroundings. But that’s for you to know and me to find out, I suppose. For now, I guess I’ll just keep going a little cray in the quar. While we’re on that topic, I, for one, hope that the unpredictable whims of the benevolent Simulation Overlords don’t take us too far over the edge.