Panic attack-related ER visits: 0.

This is progress. I, however, go to the ER for a mystery burning pain in my left eye. The horseface brunette nurse does not like me. She washes my eye out anyway and it feels like being waterboarded by a passive aggressive bureaucratic entity. I walk home over the Williamsburg bridge for an hour and a half.

Crush count: one and a half.

I like one guy fully despite knowing essentially nothing about him and the other guy I’m only half crushing on, the nice half, the other half is too volatile (bpd?) though I suspect the erratic half is the real one. Joan Didion said we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Maybe that’s why women like true crime.

Scoliosis exercises done: 0.

I should really start doing them. My Sarajevo pulmonologist looks at my spine on a lung scan and says it looks “horrendous”. She’s funny the way Bosnian women are funny, which is to say that she has decided at one point that humor was the only remaining option. I tell her I’d been depressed since I was 9, and that last year I had to decide firmly whether I wanted to keep going or let go. She looks at me the way you look at something that doesn’t quite add up. She does not understand why I live in America.

Chess.com rating: decreased.

I’m not focused but I keep playing. This actor sitting next to me at the Euphoria watch party in Chinatown gives up on opening a stubborn bottle of red wine with one of those corks that has swollen shut. He puts it down and walks away to the terrace saying “it just won’t move.” Because he said that I stop trying, too.

Euthanasia: not yet available in Bosnia.

My friend’s friend chose to die after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. I ask her what the mood was like before she died and she says her family tried to keep things happy and positive in the house. This was in California. I heard that in some places in America they don’t call it a funeral, they call it a celebration of life. I can’t imagine anything like this happening in Bosnia. Balkan people wouldn’t mind the quick death. They’d mind the optimism.

Got laid: 0.

I’m not going on dates. I’m waiting on either of my one and a half crushes to magically show up in my life, which is my default orientation towards reality. I went to Mexico City instead of finishing my grad school application. My fling from New Zealand printed out my visa forms in a Mexican mall so I could get back to America after I stayed with him for two weeks not having sex. Then, instead of booking my flight back, I went to a shamanic sweat lodge somewhere in the desert and got a panic attack in the middle of the ceremony. One of the half-naked women there grabbed my hand as I started crawling out of the lodge grasping for air and remembering for a moment that God may be real. She said “If you leave now, you’ll ruin the experience for everyone.” I thought to myself, with respect, I have ruined far greater things than this. But I stayed inside.

The conservative husbands of this country are wearing fake tits but we’re still paranoid about Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. Six seasons of the show and what we’ve learned is that the American cultural imagination can only picture oppression when it comes wearing a bonnet and Sydney Sweeney’s bad acting in it.

And now, we’re even getting a sequel series. The show has been renewed, rewarded, and wept over at Park Slope wine nights, it has become less a television show than a load-bearing myth — the bedtime story a particular class of NPR subscribers tells itself about what danger looks like.

Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia of coherence: the villain believes something, wears robes, follows hierarchy, holds a clipboard you can argue with, quotes scripture you can rebut. Evil has a structure and a recognizable shape. This is, medically speaking, cope. Comfort food for people who need their oppression narratively satisfying.

But the actual enemy we’re fighting right now requires no belief at all and no ideology you can argue against. We are fighting the void — a system organized around nothing except continuation, where meaning arrives in fragments that never add up, where atrocity and entertainment share the same feed with equal weight, where you can watch genocide between ads for probiotics and experience both as equally valid content.

There’s no villain to argue with because there’s no argument being made. Just the endless production of engagement that goes nowhere. This is the threat liberalism cannot name because naming it would implicate everything they’ve built.

Here’s what nobody wants to say plainly: the problem isn’t that we have bad values. It’s that we have torn down the infrastructure required for values to actually matter for the sake of elevating personal choice.

The mechanisms that used to convert individual moral conviction into collective moral fact — the church, the union, the party, the shared narrative, the institution you could trust without performing irony — have all been either discredited or captured.

What replaced them? The market and the algorithm, which are the same entity, and which have exactly one value: continuation. The algorithm doesn’t want you to feel good or bad. It wants you to feel, because feeling generates engagement, and engagement is the only metric the system recognizes.

Outrage performs exactly as well as horniness. Both monetize beautifully. Neither leads anywhere. Neither was designed to. There IS a word for a world organized exclusively around this principle, and it’s not fascism nor theocracy, and Sydney Sweeney’s bonnet has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The Spectacle

A Reddit incel-looking French guy named Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and the book is six hundred theses long and reads like a man who is extremely angry about something he cannot quite point to.

His argument is not really about television or advertising as a dinner-party abstraction, though it contains all of those. It is about something more interior and harder to name: the feeling of living in a world where experience keeps arriving already processed. Already captioned and already understood.

Where nothing quite touches you because everything has been pre-digested into an image of itself before it reaches you, and you consume the image, and you have the feeling of having felt something, and then you scroll.

Debord called this the spectacle, by which he did not mean spectacle in the sense of something dramatic and large. He meant the totality, the accumulated product of a civilization that had learned to replace lived experience with the representation of lived experience so seamlessly that the replacement stopped feeling like loss.

Love becomes a six-month situationship nobody names. Community becomes a groupchat. Politics becomes the picture of politics. The infographic reposted at eleven at night and ten good seconds of being someone who cares. And the feeling is real, that’s the thing, you do care, it just doesn’t go anywhere.

Inside the spectacle, we can be entirely honest and entirely right and it still doesn’t matter. You know the app is built to keep you there, and you know the repost did nothing. You can name the mechanism and explain it better than the people running it, and you go on doing it anyway. My reading of Debord’s is that the spectacle is not so much a film laid over the world that clear sight could peel off, but the very shape the world has taken. You live somewhere the question of what’s real stopped being answerable, and then stopped being asked.

What Debord was describing is the experience of nothing adding up. Of being a whole person — feeling things, wanting things, believing in something for a week at a time — inside a machine that takes all of it, processes it as content, and sells it back to you at a markup.

He wrote that in 1967. The next spring Parisian students pried the paving stones out of the road and stacked them into barricades — May ‘68, ten million on strike, the biggest in French history. Debord was in the occupied Sorbonne, printing the slogans people still put on tote bags. He came out of it convinced he’d watched the image of a revolution stand in for one. The feeling of resistance, arriving instead of resistance, and everyone going home in June.

Donald Jared Trump

Which brings us, unfortunately, to Trump. I don’t know if his middle name is Jared but I like to think it is.

What is interesting about Trump is not that he is bad, which he is, obviously. What is interesting is that he is the first purely amoral political figure — not immoral, which implies a relationship to morality, even if adversarial, but amoral in the clinical sense: morality simply does not parse for him.

He does not believe wrong things. He does not believe things. He performs, and the performance works, and it works because it is perfectly calibrated to an environment that has replaced belief with vibes and consequence with engagement. He’s not the disease, but the most legible symptom of an environment in which nothing means anything and the guy who noticed first wins.

He didn’t emerge from the churches or the Heritage Foundation policy wonk infrastructure. He emerged from the New York Post gossip pages, a world where fame and notoriety share a currency and the only sin is being irrelevant.

From Atlantic City casinos that went bankrupt while he collected management fees — the first proof of concept that the brand survives product failure. From The Apprentice, which is, without exaggeration, the most consequential work of political fiction produced in the last fifty years. Fourteen seasons of NBC brainworms taught Middle America he was a competent executive. This was a fiction the network produced, the audience consumed, and the Electoral College eventually ratified. The image of competence replaced competence.

And then the algorithms did what algorithms do: they detected he generated engagement, engagement is the only value the system recognizes, so they fed him to everyone regardless of preference or sanity or whether it would destroy democracy.

By the time Jeb Bush had spent $90 million in super PAC money on what turned out to be a vibes problem, it was over. Trump had the funny takes. In a culture that has elevated entertainment to the primary mode of political experience, the take IS the thing, a fact currently being monetized by approximately every podcast in existence.

The Nihilistic Goonerism of It All

We keep trying to frame this as a political problem because framing it as a civilizational one would require looking in the mirror. We’re fighting about Gilead — the theological dystopia — because the theological dystopia at least implies something matters enough to be worth controlling. An enemy with a Bible has a moral framework, which means morality still exists as a category, which means we’re still in a world where things mean things. We’re not in that world anymore. We are in the void.

The nothingness arrived quietly sometime between Web 2.0 and whatever cursed phase of internet brain rot we’re in now, and it made itself at home, and we adjusted the way humans adjust, because adjustment is what we do, and now we live here. We scroll through climate collapse updates between targeted ads for luxury skincare and we feel something — outrage, despair, the specific exhaustion of people who understand what’s happening and can’t stop it but also can’t stop checking — and then we feel nothing, and then we scroll again.

I cried at a video about a dog once and forgot about it in four minutes. That's the register. Not numbness — I'd take numbness. It's more like having a very responsive emotional system wired to nothing at all. Everything registers and nothing carries. You go to bed having felt eleven things and having done none of them. The system doesn't want you numb. It wants you feeling EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME, in a way that keeps you engaged but never focused, never actually threatening to anything.

The only thing that has ever interrupted a spectacle is finding something the spectacle cannot digest — work that won’t photograph, love that resists documentation, grief too private to perform. But here’s the problem: even suggesting this becomes content. Even “log off” is a brand now. The spectacle is so total it can absorb its own critique. I’m writing this, you’re reading it, and we both know nothing will change. The quarterly earnings are strong.

Debord thought the only exit was to refuse the spectacle entirely, to drop out, to build situations instead of consuming images. He dissolved his own movement, moved to the south of France, drank heavily, and eventually shot himself, which is one way to log off permanently.

The rest of us are still here, still scrolling, still feeling the feelings that go nowhere, and someone just paid $8 for a blue checkmark to argue about Gaza more effectively, and the exclusive pickleball club has a waitlist, and somewhere out there Kristi Noem’s husband is in a Victoria’s Secret dressing room trying on a push-up bra and a content creator is filming it and we will have all moved on before you finish reading this sentence.

This is fine. This is fine. Everything is fine.