May 2025

May 13: incoherent rambling

I've been thinking about the following passage from They Thought They Were Free:

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. [...] You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

It feels too apt for the current moment. We have accepted so many unacceptable things. Things keep happening and they are almost uniformly awful. I cannot remember a piece of news that felt inspiring or optimistic. I cannot remember what it feels like not to feel total horror.

I was beginning to wonder about my feelings of sluggishness until I read My Brain Finally Broke by Jia Tolentino. Tolentino only briefly mentions the pandemic when she lets slip that her third COVID infection might have left her with lasting brain fog. But she does list all of the things that have happened recently in the United States, and I dare anyone to read that list and not feel helpless, scared and tired.

I remember, at the beginning of the pandemic, talking about what we would do when the pandemic was over. The pandemic is ongoing but we refuse to admit this. Instead, we exist in a twilight zone of pretend normality. A normality so fragile that epic levels of denial are required to sustain it. Unless you are the sort of person who does not have such herculean reserves of denial and is willing to be shunned.

I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say. I think I'm trying to elucidate a feeling of fatigue and dread that feels heavier with each passing day and never lifts. My life is still in reasonably good shape, a fact that astounds me and causes me to live as if I'm about to be struck on the head and won't be able to do anything about it.

So much has collapsed: public health, the health care system, a shared reality, the climate. Although the collapse started years ago, it has been accelerated by the pandemic. We exist in a viral soup surrounded by rubble.