Looking down on empty streets, all she can see

Are the dreams all made solid, are the dreams made real

All of the buildings, all of the cars

Were once just a dream in somebody’s head

Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

All the modern things, like cars and such

Have always existed

They’ve just been waiting in a mountain

For the right moment …

To come out, and multiply, and take over

It’s their turn now

Björk, “The Modern Things”

My favorite song lyrics are stories in miniature. In “Mercy Street” and “The Modern Things”, Peter Gabriel and Björk tell very different stories about the nature of the world we live in. Gabriel’s lyrics, informed by the dark late poetry of Anne Sexton, describe the world as a dream come to life, something that is paradoxically “solid” and “real” and also insubstantial, accidental, changeable. The things of the world are provisional; blink your eyes, take a wrong turn, and a whole street can go missing, or maybe was never there in the first place. For Björk, objects have minds of their own, and the world they make up is inevitable; the iron in the mountain was destined to become cars. But her song carries the implication that while the “modern things” are dominant now, their moment, like that of the “irritating” dinosaurs, will pass. Later, on the same album, in the song “Isobel”, Björk sings, In a tower of steel / Nature forges a deal / To raise wonderful hell / Like me, like me. Someday, maybe soon, it will be Isobel’s world.

These are the kinds of stories I’m interested in right now. We need more of them. We need to dream new streets. We need to discover what is glowing in the forest pitch-dark, waiting to multiply, raise wonderful hell, and take over.

We live, to a degree that is difficult to comprehend, embedded in a dense weave of stories. When Joan Didion began her essay “The White Album” with the famous aphorism, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she meant that we use stories to make living bearable, to wring sense out of an existence that is nonsensical—in Didion’s unsurpassable words, “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Didion asserts we are unable to cope with unfiltered reality and have a desperate need for tidiness and simplicity. (This may have said more about Didion herself than the rest of us.) For this reason, our storytelling, in her postmodernist formulation, inherently distorts and reduces; it is not an additive, creative act, but an analytical process that imposes an artificial order on a chaotic world that otherwise would overwhelm us.

It’s a quintessentially cynical sentiment of its place and time, America in the Seventies, when so many of the stories people had been told or had told themselves, stories that had once seemed the implacable conveyors of inalterable truths, had been discredited as a latticework of lies. Those were the years when the very idea of truth came under suspicion. Facts all come with points of view, David Byrne would sing in 1980, facts don’t do what I want them to. We’ve been living with the consequences ever since.

That said, I’ve always heard another meaning in Didion’s words, one I do not think, in the broader context of her life’s work, she would dispute. We tell ourselves stories in order to live because stories are, quite literally, what keep us alive. They do not merely give shape to our daily existence, they are its substance, inextricable from everything we consciously do. They sustain our social bonds, our life-support systems. They create our world. They create us: our self-identities are the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. People who are incapable of maintaining the integrity of their personal stories, for instance people with advanced dementia or some forms of mental illness, become unable to care for themselves. Without our stories, we die.

Stories underpin every aspect of our world. A home is a story. A relationship, a family, a neighborhood, a nation. Even our material lives are born from stories. Houses were blueprints before they were structures. Chemists and corporations spun stories about the miracles of plastics and reshaped our physical existence. It took an act of imagination to look at a forest and see merely a source of lumber.

It’s worth noting that the life forms of Earth got along just fine for billions of years without stories. At the base of everything is physical biology—eating, drinking, sleeping, excreting, moving, laughing and crying, having sex, giving birth, seeking shelter, staying warm or staying cool. Being born, being alive, dying: most of our planet’s life forms accomplish these things perfectly well without concocting narrative explanations and justifications.

But once the Homo genus stumbled upon the weird trick of using language to create the world, it gave us such an enormous survival advantage that evolution hard-wired it into our brains in the blink of a geologic eye. We can’t stop doing it. We wrap every experience into a story, even if it’s a trivial experience, and even if it’s a bad story.

It is amazing how powerful a story, especially a bad one, can be. Our internal narratives are strong enough to drive a wedge between our self-identities and our physical selves. They can hijack our emotional centers and trick us into thinking we are above or distinct from nature. We turn eating into the torture of “dieting” and movement into the chore of “exercise,” pay obeisance to the clock and the calendar and the light bulb with little regard for our innate biological rhythms, and fantasize that death is defeatable.

Our stories are so essential to our psyches that we cling to them even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are wrong or harmful to our well-being. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and sometimes they lead us astray.

Here is a story. It is not, in itself, a good or bad story, it is just my experience. But see if you can spot the bad stories, the cultural context, woven into it.

Until recently, I worked for a large, high-profile consumer goods company, one that paid me well and gave me generous opportunities to grow my career. Actually, let me stop being coy about the company, since it’s squarely in my rearview mirror now. I worked for Nike. In the late 2010s, I joined the ranks of Nike technology’s senior management, leading an organization of dozens of people, where I made decisions that determined how millions of dollars would be used. At the time, the company’s growth seemed unstoppable, and I was a beneficiary of the profit tide that was lifting all boats.

It was soon clear to me that I had reached a professional level where I was not going to thrive in the long run. My internal organs were marinating in a perpetual bath of stress-induced cortisol. Executives who sat one rung higher from me on the corporate ladder engaged in casually sociopathic behavior that kept my moral outrage simmering at a constant low boil. The pandemic descended, and my working days became a haze of Zoom calls and free-floating rage. I needed a way out.

I got lucky and didn’t have to search for long, didn’t even have to switch employers. A friend told me that a job focused on Nike’s sustainability goals was opening up, and I jumped at it. The position was a step down, ladder-wise, but that suited me just fine. After decades of helping businesses push product into the marketplace, I had a chance to somewhat balance the environmental and karmic scales. Given the company’s dominance, it was easy to believe that by setting a positive example Nike might lead the entire footwear and apparel industry in the direction of lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, less waste, fewer toxic chemicals, and more socially responsible employment practices.

The early 2020s were the peak of corporate engagement in sustainability, triggered in part by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which had generated greater awareness of the urgent need for action. Companies like Google and Microsoft, racing to get ahead of expected regulations, were making net-zero carbon pledges. Corporate financial statements were buzzing with the language of circularity (low- or zero-waste supply chains), climate resilience, and responsible governance. If businesses didn’t lead the way toward a more sustainable future, the thinking went, they would leave themselves open to unwelcome government mandates and supply chain disruptions and would lose a potential competitive advantage in a greener economy. The world would achieve SDG targets in large part through benevolent rational corporate self-interest.

I spent four years in my sustainability role, from 2021 to 2025. My team helped Nike set sustainability goals for 2030, guided product designers to find ways to reduce GHGs, created new reporting to keep harmful chemicals out of the supply chain, and provided a more solid data foundation for regulatory reporting. We did good, sometimes exciting work. I often told the team we were an insurgency inside one of the great temples of consumer capitalism.

But by 2025, the energy I’d felt a few years earlier, that we had the opportunity to do something transformative, had largely drained away. There was a new national political climate. Also a new corporate climate: Nike had made some publicly glaring bad bets and slipped in the marketplace, and it was in the process of retrenchment, getting back to the nuts and bolts of cost controls and quarterly earnings. The threat of regulatory pressure had eased, not just in Trump’s US but also in Europe, which for years had promised to get companies into line. Globally, nearly all the SDGs were off track to meet their 2030 goals, and there seemed to be no political or economic will to do anything about it. To take one stark example, despite all that we know about the causes of climate change and all the better alternatives we have at our disposal, in 2025 humans burned more coal than in any other year in history. This week, the UN reported that the effort to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees C, a critical SDG, will certainly fail before the end of the decade.

In June 2025, a reorganization moved me out of sustainability, and 10 months later, Nike laid me off. Much of the team I had previously led was similarly scattered, and sustainability investment was recast as “resiliency.” The focus no longer centered on how to be more environmentally responsible, but rather on how to mitigate supply chain risk so the company could reclaim its marketplace dominance and resume its former trajectory of endless growth. This story has played out in one company after another. Big Tech, which five years ago was promising to set the pace toward net zero, has done a 180 and gone all-in on AI, hoovering up whatever sources of energy it can find in a desperate scramble to win the new arms race, climate change be damned.

Benevolent rational corporate self-interest is, apparently, not going to save the world after all.

Did you spot the bad stories? Let me make a few of them explicit.

Endless growth. We have known for most of my lifetime that an economy predicated on the rapacious extraction of finite resources and the production and accumulation of consumer goods will sooner or later (indeed, sooner rather than later) be unable to keep growing—will, in fact, collapse. This insight inspired the concept of “sustainable development” in the first place. Yet our financial system and most of our corporations continue to operate as if resources, though scarce, are infinite, technology will help us circumvent all limits, and markets for consumer goods will grow in perpetuity. Nike makes a billion pairs of shoes a year. What is endless growth supposed to look like at that scale, and why, at this point, do we see it as anything other than madness? Could a company like Nike even exist in a world where we respected planetary boundaries? The story of endless growth needs to get pulped.

The Sustainable Development Goals. It is perhaps too harsh to say these have been an utter failure. In the wake of their adoption, they did much of what they were intended to do in the short term, which was to generate greater public consciousness of the urgent issues we face as a species. Governments and corporations acknowledged that they had important roles to play in resolving these problems, which led to some positive actions and policy changes, and many SDG measures have shown incremental improvements over the past decade. But the SDGs were also a classic example of humans trying to have our cake and eat it too, promising that we could keep the engines of endless growth humming while somehow, through unspecified means, reducing the harms of that growth to sustainable levels. By tying the goals to one bad story, the UN spun up another bad one that allowed elites to playact concern while doing nothing to root out the actual causes of our crisis.

Benevolent rational corporate self-interest. Rational corporate self-interest, in our economic system, maximizes financial profit over all other value. Any apparent benevolence is purely coincidental, and the notion that corporate self-interest will create a world of sustainable abundance is a farce.

An insurgency in the temple of consumer capitalism. There are so many people in corporations, governments, and other institutions across the world who work themselves to the ragged edge of emotional exhaustion trying to get their organizations to do the right thing. Where the suggestion of corporate benevolence exists, it does so because of these decent, earnest people who gather data, raise concerns, and hold their leaders accountable. What they do is important and good, and it is to our collective benefit that they keep doing it. But I set the bar too high in characterizing my team as an “insurgency,” and I think, in retrospect, it contributed to the loss of morale we felt toward the end. An insurgency is a state of opposition and revolution, where what we wanted to generate was a state of collaboration and evolution. Radicals like me who suspect the whole system is beyond redemption need to remember that the stories we tell can just as easily harm our cause as help it. People generally don’t want to fight, they want to build.

Some of the stories I’ve talked about here, particularly the faith in endless growth and the wisdom of business, are foundational texts of our dominant culture, especially in the United States. We are also partial to hotheads who buck the system. Of course, the dominant culture, by definition, has tremendous mass appeal; its gravitational pull is difficult to escape. I have spent the better part of half a century dancing to its drumbeat. And if we do escape it, what then? If stories make up our world, and we tell ourselves stories in order to live, then challenging them is an existential threat. If we lose the plot, will we lose ourselves? Will we even know who we are anymore? This is not a rhetorical question, as Joan Didion knew well.

It is not enough to tear the dominant stories down, as harmful as they may be. In the absence of a compelling alternative, people have shown time and again that they prefer the devil they know. We need different stories. Not necessarily new ones, but stories that speak to the conditions of the world as it is.

Never before have there been eight billion humans alive on Earth at the same time. Never before (except in brief interludes) have humans had to reckon with a rapidly changing, volatile global climate. Never before has artificial intelligence been a force in the world. In other respects—corrupt and feckless leadership, stark economic inequality, heated competition for dwindling resources, the drumbeat of war, the imminent prospect of economic calamity—we have very much been here before.

We have reservoirs of stories from indigenous peoples and colonizers alike that speak to these problems and many others, offering paths not taken or paths once known but now forgotten and paved over. People are creating more such stories all the time, as books and movies, TV shows and poems, games and experiences, Substacks and Tik Toks, and of course, songs. I might not be able to lead an insurgency, but one thing I can do is shine a light on some of these stories, ways of remembering that nothing about our culture is inevitable, ways of imagining how it could be different.

The stories we will need to tell ourselves if we want to live.

Every time I sit down to write something, I’m forced to reckon all over again with the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Sure, I can string words together into coherent sentences, and I can stitch the sentences into easy-flowing paragraphs. I can assemble the paragraphs into sections and the sections into essays or stories that have momentum and structural integrity. I’ve practiced the craft of writing for more than four decades, and along the way I’ve acquired a level of unconscious competence that serves my purposes. The words are not the problem.

The problem is that once I start writing something, I rarely have a clear idea of where it’s going or how I will get there. I am what people in the writing business call a “pantser,” i.e., someone who writes by the seat of their pants. The opposite of a pantser is an outliner. I never outline by choice; when I am forced to do it, for instance as part of a school assignment, any resemblance between the outline and the final product is coincidental. I let the writing show me its shape.

This is true whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, whether in the form of a story or an essay, a research paper or an email. This post is no exception. Every sentence I’ve written so far, including this one, has been unpremeditated. I get to the end of a sentence, and the next one offers itself, or it doesn’t. If I’m stuck, I go back and revise what I’ve already done, adding a sentence here, tweaking a word choice there, moving paragraphs around or cutting them altogether, working my way back to the place where I’d left off. If I’m still not sure where to go, I mark a section break and start another (often seemingly unrelated) thread. I know things will come back around sooner or later. Or they won’t.

I should clarify that I’m not completely in the dark as I make my way forward. I always have a subject in mind, a reason for writing the piece. I write the way I do in order to figure out what I want to say. What I get out of the process—a better understanding of my own thoughts—is at least as important as the final product.

This particular essay is intended to be something about process and flow, about making it up as you go along, about being in between one thing and another (my original title was “In Between Days” after the Cure song). I will probably only touch lightly on these things, just enough to get somewhere that is interesting and meaningful (to me, if no one else), leaving plenty more to explore in other pieces. Eventually, I will get around to writing about the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, since that was the original impetus for the post. I’m just not sure when or how I will get there. I think adrienne maree brown would completely understand.

What is true about my writing is also true of many aspects of my life. Outside of a writing context, the opposite of a pantser is a planner, and planning is, in general, not my strong suit. I keep small piles of books around me because I never know what I will feel like reading next until I’m done with the book in my hands. At the grocery store, I always go up and down all the aisles in case I am inspired to cook something for dinner and need last-minute items that aren’t on the list. I keep a checklist of chores I need to do, but whether I will do any of them is a moment-by-moment vibe-based decision.

These are trivial examples, but I have also been a pantser about some things that many people would say should be planned more carefully. My career, for instance. I have never been one to make strategic career moves. I follow what feels like the right thing to do in the moment even if it means taking a step down on the corporate ladder (or, in a couple of instances, completely changing ladders). In most ways that have mattered to me, this approach has worked out just fine. I spent the majority of the past three-plus decades doing work that was interesting, with people I enjoyed working with, and I earned a comfortable living. Whenever I got burned out or bored or feeling stuck, I would find something else to do.

Now that I am in my fourth month of involuntary unemployment, I am realizing the downside in 2026 of having a resume that doesn’t tell a predictable linear story of career growth. My narrative makes a lot of sense to me, but it is hard to make a CV-screening AI agent understand why taking a voluntary step down from a high-stress job in the middle of a global pandemic so I could do something positive for the planet was exactly the right thing to do.

Nevertheless, I have continued to approach the search for a new job in full pantser mode. Roughly once a week, when intimations of financial anxiety move me, I go trolling on various job boards, looking for positions that are a plausible fit for my experience and/or interests. For the jobs I might really enjoy, especially those that are arts- or sustainability-related, my formal professional background has little to recommend me. Although I know I could be a kick-ass deputy director at a local literary arts nonprofit, I have no way to demonstrate it in an application. I apply anyhow, and get rejected out of hand. Meanwhile the jobs I’m qualified for on paper would, for the most part, mean a return to the corporate tech world I am hoping to escape. I’ve applied for some of them, but (fortunately or not) I don’t have enough use of AI under my belt, so there have been no nibbles there either.

I’m aware that I’m not going about this in the most effective way possible. My efforts are haphazard and perfunctory. Partly this is because, for the moment, I like being unemployed. I’m taking classes, I have time to write and go for long walks, and my stress level is the lowest it’s been in decades. The severance package I received after almost 18 years with a Dow 30 company has given our family financial breathing room; this is a luxury, and I am grateful for it, and I am taking advantage of it.

But there is something more to it. My way of job hunting, which has more in common with a discovery expedition than with hunting, ultimately feels to me like a surer path to success, at least in the ways I measure success. I’m sensing what’s out there, connecting with former co-workers and people in my sustainability classes, people who know something about my personality and capabilities and might have good ideas about where I can be helpful. Already, these conversations have started to bear fruit. I probably won’t land a job as a corporate director of something or other through this method, but I suspect I’m likelier to find something that fits who I am and what I want at this stage in my life.

At some point, we will drain the severance payout and I’ll need to get a job that gives me affordable health insurance and pays well enough to cover bills and college tuitions. That’s my ultimate objective. But there is no single, straight path to get there, and there are too many factors outside of my control to ensure that the outcome will take one particular form. Why not let myself meander a bit and see what I can find? With each step, the next step will present itself. Or not, in which case I’ll backtrack and follow another path. Along the way, I’ll understand incrementally more about what options are open to me and how I can most productively engage with the world. The journey is at least as important as the destination.

Although I didn’t know it until very recently, my approach to writing and job searching has a lot in common with what adrienne maree brown calls “emergent strategy.” Her book of that title is part philosophy, part self-help memoir, and part practical guide for facilitators, especially those who work with organizations that are working to effect change in the world. I suspect brown has a writing process similar to mine; the book stitches together essays, poems, lists, old blog posts, spells, and dozens of quotes from her peers, inspirations, and spiritual ancestors like Octavia Butler into a kind of verbal patchwork quilt, a structure that embodies the very idea of emergent strategy that it explores.

Emergent strategy, in essence, is pantserism as an operating model for people and groups who are navigating a complex, radically changing world. The term marries strategy, or the approach for attaining a goal, with emergence, a chaos theory concept in which unpredictable higher order effects “emerge” from low-level system interactions, such as consciousness arising from the firing of millions of neurons. As brown illustrates, emergence is common in the natural world; consider how groups of differentiated cells create organisms, or how mycelium and trees work together to create binding networks of communication and connection within a forest.

In brown’s formulation, emergent strategy begins, fractally, with self-reflection and self-care, the ability of the individual to cultivate intentional adaptation, to respond to change not with fear or as a crisis, but rather with a sense of purpose and intention to “create space for opportunity.” Adaptation happens in concert with others and in recognition of our dependencies on one another, and it happens cyclically, as individuals and groups become ready for it to happen. Setbacks, complications, and failures are inevitable and are opportunities to learn. Putting these practices together creates emergent possibilities that could not have been visible otherwise, changing the definition of “strategy” from “a plan of action toward a goal” to a nature-like state where “many possibilities exist.”

There is a particular type of performative earnestness laced throughout Emergent Strategy that sometimes feels like a communication from another time, a distant era when people could unironically refer to plants as “plant people” and call fiddleheads “gifted time travelers.” Whether that era is the ancient pre-pandemic 2010s (the book was published in 2017) or some yet-to-emerge punk/witchy panster’s dream future is not clear. In the end, though, brown’s book is an eminently practical one, full of bullet-point principles such as “Small is all” and “Move at the speed of trust” that can fit on corporate office posters; its last chapter is a project manager’s tactical methodology for facilitating “emergent” group workshops.

In the end, what I took away from Emergent Strategy is the core idea that process matters. We cannot plan our way out of the problems and quandaries we face, personally and globally; they are simply too numerous and too complex. We cannot outline the future. We can imagine outcomes, the jobs we might want to land, the books we might want to write, the worlds where we might want to live. But we cannot summon these things out of the ether. They emerge, conversation by conversation, word by word, choice by choice, at the end of a long and meandering path. Even when we seem to arrive somewhere, there will always be new, different problems to work through. More steps to take, more choices. The world is never finished; it is always in the process of emerging.

How do I know when an essay is done? In truth, it is arbitrary. This essay, this attempt has been several days in the making, which translates into more than a week of staring at or avoiding a blank screen and about six hours, spread over two days, of erratic typing. It’s not perfect; the shape of it is lumpy, not crystalline. I haven’t worked through more than a small fraction of all my thoughts on the subjects at hand. This irritates me. I’m working to synthesize a lot of ideas right now from my classes, my reading, and my conversations, and I have an inchoate sense that I could take what I’ve written in any number of directions, write for weeks on end and still have more to say.

But as I said at the start, I never really know what I’m doing, and as adrienne maree brown says, “Small is all.” Out of these little attempts, bigger works will fractally emerge. For now, it feels like I’ve pantsed my way to a destination, or at least a waystation. Let this be enough.

I touched on the birth of therapy culture in “Be Chill, My Bros”.

I talked about my anxiety in “Anxiety and Accommodation”.

I visited with my 15-year-old self in “Art, Artifice, Artificial”.

In the summer of 2024, for the first time in my life, I started working with a therapist. Her name was Heather. I found her in the Psychology Today listings. I’m not sure what mix of keywords I’d searched on, but after spending the majority of my waking hours on Zoom calls for my job over the previous four years, my main criterion was that we had to meet in person. Heather preferred in-person sessions, and I liked that her stated approach to therapy was “collaborative and creative.”

Things were rough that summer. At home, some folks were struggling with serious mental health issues, and it wasn’t clear whether they would get better. At work, many of my co-workers were stressed about chronic uncertainty, frustrated with the company, and in conflict with each other. It seemed like everyone around me was exhausted, sick, overwhelmed, angry, or all four.

My response in the midst of this turmoil was, characteristically, to adopt the role of the steady rock, the emotional lifeguard. I would be the one who kept my head when people around me were losing theirs. I would be the one who reframed the situation, focused on the positive, reminded people to breathe and drink water. I would provide the people I cared about with a consistent and bottomless well of support that would see them through. My time and energy would be theirs to draw upon. As long as I remained vigilant and attentive, I thought, everyone would be okay and everything would be all right.

I’d been living this way for quite a while. It was rewarding in some respects. It felt important. People told me how helpful I was, and it gave me a sense of purpose. But I wasn’t, as it turned out, a rock; I was as exhausted, sick, overwhelmed, and angry as everyone else. Inevitably, the cracks started to show. By that summer, I knew something needed to change, something in me, but I couldn’t stand the thought of letting anyone down.

It was, at long last, time to try the therapy thing. Over many years, I’d strongly encouraged family members to invest in their own mental health. Some of those same family members would sometimes point out to me that I wasn’t following my own advice. Somehow, I just never had the time to do it. Never made the time.

On a theoretical level, I’ve never been resistant to the idea of therapy, though I have issues with how it is administered in the real world, at least in the United States. I blame the insurance companies, which will only cover therapy sessions if there is diagnosis of a specific disorder. This nullifies the possibility of normalizing preventative mental health care the way we do physical health care. The “disorder” framework in general strikes me as problematic. In practice, therapists I have known often talk about neurodivergence in positive and affirming ways, but there is baked into the system an implicit assumption that differences from a mythical norm are, or could be, problems. The immediate explanatory power of the diagnosis (“finally, I understand what’s wrong with me!”) can readily turn it into a hammer in search of nails; I have seen first-hand how a disorder can become a label, a reductionist badge of self-identity.

But all that aside, the actual experience of therapy—one person giving another person close attention and active listening, creating the opportunity for focused and generous self-reflection—has an innate value, one that I genuinely think would benefit anyone and everyone.

If this is what I believed, what took me so long? Later, talking with Heather, I came to understand why I’d dragged my feet. Turning my attentive energy inward, even for one hour a week, felt selfish, like a withdrawal from the people who relied on me. Apart from the simple, hypocritical, and easily refutable equation in my head that self-care = selfishness = morally dishonorable behavior (I didn’t believe this logic applied to anyone else, so why to myself?), I had a more complex calculus going on. If I broke, yes, I would let people down, but they would understand why, and at least we would all be broken together; if I did what was necessary to take care of myself, people might feel betrayed, abandoned, victims of a bait-and-switch. Worst case, I might cause a mental breakdown in someone I loved. Better to keep soldiering on and accept the risk that I might fall apart.

This wasn’t, of course, a rational thought. It wasn’t a thought at all, more like a reflex, or, in the language of therapy, a cognitive distortion. It also resulted in a pretty terrible behavior to model for my kids, who had begun to display their own self-sacrificing, soldiering-on tendencies.

So, grudgingly (setting boundaries??—ugh, gross, if I must), with Heather’s help I started learning how to sidestep the anxiety traps I habitually laid for myself. One tangible outcome of this work was that I gave myself the gift of time to write and started this newsletter in October 2024. Re-reading that initial post, it is clear that I could only allow myself permission to write these pieces by framing them as another kind of emotional service for people I loved, specifically my kids. A couple of years later, I can acknowledge (again, grudgingly, queasily) that these pieces are first and foremost doing a service for myself, helping me process the clutter in my brain. My kids may or may not get anything out of my writing, but it still has worth because the process of crafting all these sentences helps me be more alive in the world. I think Heather would agree that it’s taken me a lot to get to the point where I could write the previous two sentences without cringing.

This week, my time with Heather, sadly, came to an end. She is moving to Tucson, Arizona, and because neither of us want to conduct the delicate work of emotional regeneration via screens, our sessions are done. It is a wrenching experience, a kind of break-up. For me, it meant saying goodbye to one important person in my life; for Heather it meant saying goodbye to maybe dozens of people with whom she had formed attachments. Not gonna lie, the thought of that loss—because I know it is a real loss for her—activates all my emotional lifeguard impulses. It is a measure of our shared success that I can recognize there is nothing here for me to fix. Heather has a community of support and her own prodigious capabilities to process her grief and the sense of dislocation she will certainly feel for a time in her new home. So I will do as she would counsel me to do and allow myself space to feel my own feelings and reflect on my own experience.

Heather and I covered a lot of ground in two years. There were many times when it felt like I was looping through the same thoughts and issues and feelings week after week, but in retrospect, a slow accumulation of insights and new frameworks of thinking has gotten me somewhere very different from where I was.

Probably the most immediately useful concept I’ve taken away from these sessions is the Internal Family Systems (IFS) idea that as we get older, we carry around multiple versions of ourselves tied to key points in our development, which inform and shape how we respond to new situations or stresses. Over many months, Heather helped me become reacquainted with my 6-year-old, 15-year-old, and 23-year-old selves. It felt natural and easy for me to access this way of thinking about my own brain; the process uses the same tools I use to interpret characters in a novel.

I learned that the 6-year-old in me has very strong feelings about how adults should behave in the world. Adults are caretakers, and when something is wrong, it is their job to fix it. Those who violate this principle trigger a six-year-old’s moral outrage in me, one that I am quick to turn on myself or anyone who has a position of authority or a clear responsibility or a duty of care. When people I love are struggling, especially my kids, this is the part of me that insists I need to make things right.

I learned that the 15-year-old in me feels like a perpetual outsider, filled with longing to be a part of something bigger than himself but completely at a loss as to how to make that happen. At the same time, he has a great conviction that the external faces we present to each other are fundamentally masks that hide the most vital parts of the self. He demands that I mask nothing, that I maintain complete authenticity in everything I do, even if it means always being an outcast, a weirdo, even if that thirst to belong will never be quenched.

I learned that the 23-year-old in me is a scrambled mess of arrogance (Heather would say confidence, but I know the difference), ambition, and idiocy. He believes a Nobel Prize in Literature is an achievable goal. He believes that standing on his own two feet, relying on absolutely no one else for anything, a golden isolation, is the measure of maturity. Yet, he hungers for approval, yearns to be seen by peers and cultural arbiters as one of the greats. His world-conquering fantasies, I’ve discovered to my dismay, are inextricable from my ability to believe that anything I write is of value to the world. He loathes and spits on my corporate manager identity; the fact that I prioritized my family’s financial security ahead of single-mindedly fulfilling my potential as a writer feels to him like the worst kind of betrayal.

I’ve embraced my 6-year-old and 15-year-old selves. They are sweet and earnest and brilliant and sad, and I understand how to reassure them. This in turn has given me breathing room to manage my reactions to the usual triggers. I don’t need to fix every broken person that comes across my line of sight. I can govern the parts of myself I want to share and the parts I want to keep to myself without compromising my authenticity.

I haven’t yet found a way to reconcile with my 23-year-old self. I don’t like him much. He’s a teller of unnecessary lies, a jerk, the kind of person who would ghost someone rather than have an uncomfortable conversation with them. He is in fact someone I consciously decided I did not want to be, someone I disavowed and suppressed through the rest of my twenties. Of course it is the parts of ourselves we suppress that have the most toxic effects on our lives, and so he and I have unfinished business.

There are other things Heather and I never completely drained (if it is even possible to do so when plumbing one’s psyche). There are certainly other selves at work in my brain, such as the hyper-pragmatic 38-year-old who went all-in on the corporate life and moved his family across the country for the sake of financial security. I have, cliche of cliches, some father issues; our relationship was complicated, and I have held on to some resentments and judgments that are neither fair to him nor helpful for me. I’ve taken tentative steps toward building a semblance of a social life but continue to struggle with the difference between making friends and accumulating people to support, nurture, and mentor. I want a writing group to work with but have lingering anxieties about what happens when I find one. I’m in a transitional state career-wise (laid off in April, back in school for the time being) and know that financial anxiety will rear its head sooner or later, which will prompt the question of whether I can ever stomach a return to corporate America (see: 38-year-old self). I’m also in a personal transition with our kids in college and starting to pull away into their new adult lives, though things on that front, I think, are feeling overall positive after a few rough years.

This is where we’ve left things. But of course they’re never just left. Life goes on. When I’m even older than I am now, assuming I am fortunate enough to get to advanced decrepitude, I feel confident I will look back on this version of myself as one of those pivotal selves, someone who understood himself and the world around him in new ways, who wanted and feared some very specific things, who continued to make demands on all the selves who followed. I think I will probably like this self. I think he’s a pretty decent person all around.

I’ll miss you, Heather. I’m glad you got to know one of my better selves. Thanks for everything.

Photo source: https://www.springbrookpark.org/pacific-blackberry-trailing-blackberry/

This past weekend, I engaged in my semiannual battle with the blackberry vine that wants to take over our yard. The Vine is adept at intertwining itself through foliage, making the experience of confronting it similar to the process of gathering up an unraveled and slightly tangled ball of yarn, if the yarn had half-inch-long spikes and was strung through branches several feet over my head. The previous owners planted rhododendrons on the side of the house, and through our benign neglect they are healthy and tall. When I see blackberry shoots poking up through the greenery, I know I’ve let things go too far again.

To get to the Vine, I need ease myself down a three-foot-high retaining wall and pick through shrubbery that towers over me, keeping an ear open for bees and wasps and treading carefully so as not to startle other kinds of animals. Last summer, a spotted towhee couple kept batting and pecking at a window on that side of the house. We assumed they wanted access to the art supplies we shelve in that corner of our library room to beautify their nest, but what’s a bird going to do with a box of rubber stamps or a calligraphy pen? I went out one morning to beat back the Vine, and after that the towhees didn’t come back. I never saw their nest, but I worry there were some abandoned eggs or babies in there. If so, it would not be the first time I’ve been responsible for the unnecessary deaths of animals.

One thing I can’t seem to kill is the Vine. My battle tactics against it are crude and probably inefficient. I grab one of the runners (unless it has grabbed me first, stabbing into my shirt or baseball cap in an earnest attempt to draw blood) and trace it back to the spot, usually a woody nub, where it has emerged from the ground. With clippers, I snip it off at the base and do the same to any other runners emerging from the vicinity. Then I yank them one at a time out of the branches overhead, disentangling them from the rhododendrons, and pile them up on the retaining wall, to be later dragged to the yard waste bin. If I’m feeling ambitious, which this weekend I was not, I will try to pull the woody parts out of the dirt, roots and all. I’m not convinced the greater effort is worth it, since the Vine always comes back.

We might not have such a determination to hold the Vine at bay if it actually gave us some decent blackberries. This time of year, our neighborhood is bursting with berries reaching their peak ripeness. You can stand in front of a thicket, or go on a tour of different patches like my wife and I did last week, and fill up on sweet huge blackberries practically falling into your hands. Reaching them often involves getting scratched and stabbed by the thorns—I would have thought the plant would want animals to have easy access to eat the little seed delivery packets into which it has put so much energy—but it is generally worth the minor suffering.

Unfortunately, our Vine only produces a minuscule number of small, raisin-like berries. It is a Pacific blackberry, which as its name suggests is native to the area. Under the right conditions, it can produce good berries, but our yard apparently does not provide the right conditions. The neighborhood plenty comes from enormous Himalayan blackberry brambles, which are highly invasive and dominate our suburban landscape. This considerably complicates my feelings about cutting back the Vine. It is, after all, being outcompeted by its Himalayan cousin, and here I am enjoying the interloper’s gaudy bounty even as I treat the native species like a weed and make it a little more difficult for it to maintain a presence in its homeland. The problem is that the Vine wants to grow where we do not want it to grow, inside our perimeter. The problem is we are settler colonialists who do not want to be inconvenienced.

I find it embarrassing to admit that my relationship with blackberry plants is a microcosm of my relationship with the natural world in general. As much as I say and intellectually believe that humans are part of nature, that we are nature, still in my habits and emotions and thought patterns I have yet to break out of the paradigm that nature is something external to me, something other.

My body knows better. We go for walks in the woods at nearby preserves and wildlife refuges, and I feel my stress dissolving, my nervous system resetting. The sensory experiences, the aroma of ozone and tree bark and soil, the diffuse quality of light, the sounds of birds and squirrels and bees and frogs, trigger some deep-seated sense of rightness in my brain. These are places where I expect to see Pacific blackberry vines, and where I would be concerned to see Himalayan brambles, no matter how many delicious berries they yielded up.

Yet, when I get home, on a gut level, nature is something I feel the need to keep at a distance, on the other side of our property boundary. In our current house, in addition to the Vine, we have worked to repel rats, which are common in the neighborhood and were removed from our attic a few years ago, and tiny black ants, which appear in mysterious waves in our kitchen and upstairs bathrooms throughout the spring and summer.

This is nothing compared to other houses we have owned. The very first place my wife and I bought, in Chelsea, Michigan, was so poorly constructed and open to invasion that it treated us to a nonstop parade of wildlife over the five years we lived in it: mice, bats, flies, spiders, yellow jackets, chipmunks, cicadas, cicada killer wasps, paper wasps, raccoons, mosquitoes, carpenter ants, carpenter bees, squirrels, and one time, three young ferrets, whom my sister discovered lurking in the crawl space while she was in the basement running laundry. I killed so many living things in and around that house, both deliberately and accidentally, that it came to feel like my personal murder house. (The ferrets lived.)

Maybe my reaction to the Vine is a trauma response.

Not all nature is banished from our current house, far from it, but it is a curated nature. We are indifferent yard-maintainers and have a smattering of volunteers that we tolerate. But most of the plants in and around the house are chosen ones, purchased from a garden store, some native, but many far from their place of origin. Our front yard is filled with an awkward, bulky Scotch pine, probably a potted Christmas tree planted by the previous owners, that grew sideways to catch the light and now looks like it may be in the process of falling in slow motion. I think of it as the tree that yearned to be a metaphor, though a metaphor of what is not yet clear because its story is not done.

In this environment, the Vine persists in claiming space and resources for itself. For all we know, it was an original resident, growing here before the house was built in 2002. Before the subdivision went up, the area was agricultural, blueberries and some kind of cherry or apple orchard whose traces are still visible. A human-shaped nature, to be sure, but one where Pacific blackberries would have had ample spaces to take root and spread. Now reduced to this lonely but tenacious straggler continuing to hold on despite my ham-fisted attempts to dispatch it.

There is a potential feel-good note I could sound here, something about the persistence of nature, where there’s a will there’s a way, the little Vine that could, yadda yadda. But at the end of a day when the temperature hit 101 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade in Portland, Oregon, nearly twenty degrees higher than the July average, reminding us that we are living within systems that are unwell, I’m fairly sure I’m thinking about this whole thing the wrong way.

Like, this entire essay has been wrong from the first sentence, where I framed my relationship with the Vine in terms of a battle. Where I said the rhododendrons were “towering over me” rather than, for instance, enveloping me. Where I played the violence I do to the plant partly for a laugh. Where I described the pieces of the plant I’d hacked away as material for the waste bin. Where I valued the transactional service I can extract from the invasive Himalayan blackberries, but never once considered the ecosystem services the Pacific blackberry plant might be providing. Where I characterized a tree as a metaphor waiting to happen rather than what it truly and simply is: a tree.

What I’ve done here is what nearly all of us who live in industrialized American culture do nearly all of the time: I’ve othered the shit out of the nature that surrounds me. The paradigm shift I mentioned before, the one I strive and fail to believe in, the one that says humans are nature, is so much more radical than it may seem. It puts difficult demands on us to see ourselves as more than just in a relationship with our ecosystem, to see that, rather, we are embedded in it, shaping and shaped by it. It forces me to acknowledge that when I go to cut back the Vine, I don’t really know what I’m doing.

We don’t really know what we are doing, not on the planetary scale, and not on the scale of our own back yards. Realizing that, acknowledging it, understanding it, does not feel good.

What does feel good, to me at least, is the possibility that the only reason I feel like I’m in a fight with the Vine is due to my own ignorance. Undoing that ignorance isn’t be easy. But it is completely within my own power.

Realizing that is how paradigms change.

Sometime in the mid-1760s, probably in Louisa County, Virginia, a woman named Hannah Evans gave birth to a son she named Ambrose. There is no known record of who Ambrose’s father was, at least online. His birth date can be estimated because he showed up in property tax records around 1782 as the owner of three horses; the fact that he could be taxed indicated he had reached young adulthood. He had a number of half-siblings who shared Hannah as their mother, all of whom were born in Amherst County, Virginia. Property tax records show Ambrose moving around in the 1780s, his property being livestock. One can speculate he was a hired hand, following the work, although whether as a farm laborer or trade worker (carpenter or blacksmith for example) is unknown.

Around 1791, Ambrose married a woman named Jane, likely a widow who already had a young family. Ambrose and Jane had a daughter named Lydia around 1794. Like Ambrose’s half-siblings, Lydia was born in Amherst County, even though Ambrose himself was probably living in Buckingham or Campbell Counties. Maybe Hannah Evans’s residence was the family home base, and maybe Ambrose knew Jane from paying visits to his mother. There is no record of when Hannah died, but by the early 1800s, Ambrose had settled in Amherst County with the rest of the family.

Ambrose, it is important to note, was a free Black man during an era when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was at its peak and slavery had been newly codified in the Constitution. In 1810, his name appears on the Federal Census as the head of a household of 6 “other free” people. From the late 1790s through the 1810s, Ambrose is noted in tax records variously as “Molatto,” “mulatto,” and a “man of color.”

In 1817, he was recorded as a witness to the marriage of his daughter, Lydia “Liddy” Evans, to John Gulliver (later spelled Golliver). Ambrose lived only a few more years after his eldest daughter’s marriage, dying sometime between 1821 and 1825.

Ambrose Evans was my great-great-great-great grandfather, and Lydia and John Golliver were my great-great-great grandparents.

The story I’ve just told about Ambrose Evans is based on sources that would not pass muster in an academic paper or a court of law. It’s pieced together from secondary and tertiary sources, the work of amateurs doing genealogical research that they have documented on websites and apps like Ancestry and WikiTree. Presumably at least some of the people who shared this information were looking at primary sources like tax records, censuses, and marriage registries. Those sources are certainly incomplete, and the secondary presentation of them is even more incomplete and prone to misreadings, misinterpretations, conflations, and unfounded speculation. The gaps in what we can know are enormous, and the little we can know is provisional, full of maybes and contradictions. For instance, one source I used has two distinct birth years for Ambrose, 1764 and 1770, though the earlier date appears to be more likely as he would not have appeared in tax records in 1782 at the age of 12. He flickers into view only through a handful of official records. Nevertheless, we know significantly more about him than we do his mother, Hannah, and we can see enough to presume that he lived a full life, surrounded by family, residing and traveling throughout the central Virginia countryside, next door to where, forty years after his death, the Civil War would be concluded at Appomattox.

We know a bit more about the extended Evans family of central and southern Virginia than we do many other people of the time, in part because there were a lot of them, and in part because we actually have a story about some of them. The Evanses were one of the most notable and populous clans of free Black Americans in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The phenomenal website freeafricanamericans.com, which appears to be built from information in primary sources, lists dozens of Evanses with birth dates as early as the 1670s, documenting the family’s spread, from tiny Surry County in the southeastern corner of the state to the midlands where Ambrose lived his life.

The story I mentioned is one of those vanishingly rare cases that bring us closer to the lived reality of colonial America. Early in the 1700s, Tom and Frances Evans were bound as indentured servants to a white property owner named Goodrich Lightfoot. (I’m sorry, names were just better back then.) Lightfoot ignored the terms of the indenture and enslaved both young people, and when he died they were sold to other slaveowners. Remarkably, several of their descendants were able to sue for their freedom in the 1790s and early 1800s by making the case that they were descended from Jane Gibson, a so-called “free Indian woman,” and should therefore never have been enslaved. The family tree sketch below was admitted into evidence in one of the suits:

I won’t go into all the details here (this nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com site, from which I copied the family tree image, has the receipts) but suffice to say the worst and, in some respects, the best of America are on display in this story.

The worst: a man was able to enslave two children given into his care without repercussion, and as young adults they were sold as property to other men.

Better: the legal system worked for the children’s descendants, giving them their day in court, weighing the evidence fairly, and granting them their rightful freedom. (That same system, of course, would have protected slaveowners’ “property” rights most of the time, so I don’t want to give too much credit. This is best understood as a case of the exception demonstrating the rule.)

Best: the Evans family themselves.

Jane Gibson Evans, the mother of Frances Evans, whose children were enslaved by Lightfoot, lived between about 1665 and 1740. She was married to Morris Evans, a free Black or mixed-race man, and testimony in one of the suits notes that she “practiced midwifery and doctoring.” She was the daughter of Jane Gibson the elder, the “free Indian woman” at the top of the tree, born around 1640, who lived more than eighty years. Jane Gibson the elder, in turn, was the daughter of Thomas Gibson, an Englishman who arrived in Jamestown in 1608, and a woman named Francis of the Paspahegh tribe (we do not know her original Paspahegh name) who were the original residents of the Jamestown land. Since the relationship between the settlers and the Paspehegh escalated quickly into violence and ended in the dispersal of the tribe, the first instance of aggressive British settler colonialism in the New World, it is hard to know how benevolent the marriage was between Thomas and Francis. But Francis’s daughter and granddaughter saw themselves as Native American. Did they also understand and identify themselves as British colonists? This is one of the many many questions I have.

I have found no record of Morris Evans’s parents online, but given the historical circumstances there can be no doubt that he was descended from West African people who were brought to Virginia as slaves. Maybe he had a parent who was freed upon the death of his or her owner, as was more common in the very early days of the colonies. Regardless, Morris himself was free and with Jane Gibson the younger built a family that has thousands of descendants today.

One way to think about the Evans clan is that they were an early example of the American melting pot, the merger of three great cultures. Of course the melting pot metaphor is problematic because it implies an erasure of differences. I’ve seen people offer the alternative metaphor of a gumbo, which brings a lot of different ingredients together but allows them to maintain their own distinct flavor and texture identities in the stew. So let’s say instead that the Evanses were an early American gumbo. I feel this is more appropriate because it is clear that despite the dissolution of the Paspehegh tribe, the Gibson women maintained a strong sense of their Native American identities more than a century after the founding of Jamestown. We have less evidence of how Morris Evans might have preserved a connection to the culture into which his parents or grandparents were born, but there is circumstantial evidence that the free mixed-race people of central and southern Virginia held themselves apart and maintained a distinct, thriving community.

Historically speaking, none of the people I’ve mentioned exist as more than names in dusty archival documents. Yet in the story of the British colonies during the 170 years between the founding of the Jamestown settlement and the Revolutionary War, it was regular people like the Gibsons and the Evanses, white and Black, British and Powhatan, enslaved and free, who built the foundation of the future nation.

There is, in this family, an early glimpse of an American ideal: free people from different backgrounds, different life stories, different cultures, combining and intermarrying and building something new. This was a path that was fully available to early Virginia, a clear alternative to the divisions of class and race that led to the large plantations, powered by the bodies of enslaved humans, that spawned the leaders of the Revolution. By the early 18th Century, the time of Goodrich Lightfoot, the die was cast. Yet, the Evans family continued to grow and persevere, maintaining a light but persistent foothold in the Virginia landscape, and eventually moving westward, carrying an alt-American history with them across the continent in their blood and bones.

The Evans branch that included Hannah and Ambrose were not part of any of the Jane Gibson lawsuits (their antecedents, like many Evanses, presumably had remained free), and for that reason it is not easy with the inconsistent sources I’ve found to demonstrate that Hannah was also descended from Morris and Jane Gibson Evans. Morris, for example, may have had siblings. So, while I would love to claim the connection to the Powhatan confederacy, as far as this part of my family tree goes, Hannah Evans is the oldest more or less definitive ancestor.

It is remarkable enough that I can even say this much. Between Hannah and our children, who were born in 2002 and 2006, is a span of 10 generations over roughly 250 years.

With the recent commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we’ve gone through yet another round of remembering and discussing and lauding and criticizing and parsing and analyzing the lives and words of a few powerful men. This is easy to do; they left behind great estates and laws and the machinery of government and so, so many words. Hannah Evans, who was born and died in obscurity, a free woman of color and a matriarch, left us only her name and her children. What was her story? How did she spend her days, how did she experience her world? Was she literate? Pious? Bawdy? Introverted? Sociable? Loving? Mean? Did she sing? What did she love to eat? Who were the fathers of her children and what drew her to them? Why did she name her son Ambrose? We can only answer these questions and ten thousand others with our imaginations.

Seeing Hannah Evans as a full, complicated human is exceedingly hard. Ambrose gives us a few more context clues, and his daughter, Lydia, gives us a few more. Hannah and Ambrose were people of color. But when Lydia and her husband, John Golliver, moved to Ohio sometime in the 1820s, she became white. On paper, at least, she left the complexities of her racial identity, her gumbo, behind.

In the next installment of this series, I will pick up the trail of the Golliver family, which will bring the story into the 20th Century.

By her own admission, Amy Edmondson stumbled into the concept of team psychological safety by accident. As a Ph.D. student in the 1990s, she was part of a group researching the conditions that led to errors in hospitals. Edmonson surveyed how medical teams self-reported their levels of collaboration, communication, and mutual respect, and correlated the data with the teams’ error rates. Counterintuitively, she found that stronger teams actually reported more errors. The key word, she realized, was reported. Teams that worked well together flagged more errors because they operated in a way that made it professionally and personally safe to do so without repercussion. Because they reported more errors, they corrected more errors and had better patient outcomes.

Edmonson went on to more broadly study this interpersonal emotional dynamic, which she called team psychological safety in an influential 1999 article, describing how its presence or absence shapes group dynamics in businesses and organizations. In her book, The Fearless Organization, she makes the case that a climate of psychological safety, or the lack of one, can make all the difference in whether a working group will thrive or fail in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Edmonson defines psychological safety as “the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking … the experience of feeling able to speak up with relevant ideas, questions or concerns.” To sharpen her definition, she also articulates what psychological safety is not. It is not passive-aggressive niceness or politeness; not rooted in a personality trait like extroversion; not trust per se, which is more a precondition for psychological safety; and most importantly, not about lowering performance standards.

Indeed, Edmonson asserts that work groups that combine high psychological safety with high performance standards are the ones poised to excel because psychological safety enables team members to better hold each other accountable for maintaining standards. She calls this dynamic the “learning zone,” which, as we have discussed in our class, is the place where change agents have the greatest opportunity to succeed. She contrasts this with the “anxiety zone” many teams sit in, where there are high standards but low psychological safety, and where team members are terrified of taking risks and making mistakes. The leaders who perpetuate these toxic conditions are the primary target of Edmonson’s book.

Edmonson presents robust evidence that psychological safety in the workplace really matters. Many work environments, she notes, still operate on a principle of hierarchical authority as a spur to work faster, work harder, satisfy management demands, and deliver continuously, or else be fired. But importantly, even where there is no explicit personal risk, studies have found that most people lean into “taken-for-granted beliefs about speaking up at work” and “the asymmetry of voice and silence,” finding it safer to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

Little is more important to us as humans than the judgment and esteem of others, and these sensitivities are heightened on a team; the complexities of social pressures and hierarchical relationships can overwhelm the best of intentions. Thus, Edmonson argues, leaders must actively create environments where speaking up is not only encouraged but expected. Those who do reap the recursive benefits of team members who continually learn and grow, perform at high levels, and stay engaged.

At the heart of Edmonson’s book are more than a dozen case studies illustrating what can go wrong when psychological safety in an organization is low, and conversely what becomes possible when it is high.

On the negative side of the ledger, she cites avoidable, massive public failures at Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, Nokia, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, reflecting how low psychological safety can perpetuate “an illusion of success that eventually turns into serious business failures.” At Volkswagen and Wells Fargo, top-down strategies coupled with a “failure is not an option” ethos drove fraudulent behavior. Nokia’s leaders created no space for their employees to innovate in the face of the smartphone revolution, leading to a collapse of market share. The FRBNY’s culture of accommodation to the financial companies it oversaw contributed directly to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. In these cases, “early warning signs that the … strategy may be falling short and needs to be revisited” were abundant. But because people were incentivized to stay silent, those signals went unappreciated and unheeded. The hierarchy left no space for teams on the ground to effect change; locked into top-down mandates, they were unable to adapt to reality.

Edmonson contrasts these cases with companies like Pixar, Bridgewater Associates, Eileen Fisher, Google X, and Barry-Wehmiller, which, in her words, have nurtured “work environments characterized by unusual levels of candor, engagement, collaboration, and risk taking.” In some of these examples, a key person at the top has modeled behaviors of saying “I don’t know,” giving and receiving candid feedback, being transparent, and actively listening, while setting an explicit expectation for the whole company. At Pixar and Google X, whose business model depends on risk-taking, fast failure is actively encouraged to the point of being celebrated. All of these companies have credited their adoption of cultural practices and mores that promote psychological safety as the secret behind their business success.

The stakes are even higher in emergency situations, where low psychological safety can lead to preventable deaths. Edmonson references the Columbia Space Shuttle explosion, the runway collision of two jets, the death of a cancer patient who was given a toxic dose of medication, and most dramatically, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. In each of these examples, important perspectives, concerned voices, and critical data were stifled or ignored. “A culture of silence,” Edmonson writes, “is … not only one that inhibits speaking up but one in which people fail to listen thoughtfully,” and it is “a dangerous culture.”

Edmonson provides a powerful counterexample to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster with its sister plant, Fukushima Daini. Facing the same crisis—catastrophic damage due to a massive earthquake and tsunamis—the superintendent, Naohiro Masuda, and his employees were able to avert a nuclear meltdown. Masuda trusted his team, shared all information he had, exposed his own fears and fallibilities, listened to and acted on team members’ ideas and concerns, and helped them adapt hour by hour to dire and daunting conditions. “In the many moments of fear for their lives over the course of those days, interpersonal fear within the group was nearly nil,” and this is what saved the plant and hundreds or thousands of lives.

In the final two chapters of the book, Edmonson turns to practical matters of how leaders can cultivate psychological safety in their groups and addresses some of the anxieties people experience along the way. She presents a tool kit for leaders that emphasizes “setting the stage” through framing and purpose; “inviting participation” by demonstrating humility, practicing inquiry, and creating structure and process; and “responding productively” through expressing appreciation, destigmatizing failure, and sanctioning violations against company values. Creating psychological safety is not a one-and-done exercise; it is a practice and a process, a “journey” and an “aspiration” that needs “continuous renewal.” “Just as skippers and crew on a sailboat must communicate and coordinate to stay the course facing shifting tides and winds,” so the members of a team need to tack and adjust as they weave their way toward a state of psychological safety. As our professor, Leith Sharp, might say, they need to “embrace the squiggle.”

The Fearless Organization was published in an era when ideas about psychological safety were coming to the cultural forefront through the #MeToo movement (which Edmonson references) and the corporate DEI push that emerged in the early 2020s. Recently, in the US, we have seen retrenchment as public leaders have modeled a top-down, fear-based approach to leadership, making the wisdom of Edmonson’s insights all the more stark. Psychologically unsafe organizations are brittle, ineffective, prone to failure, and dangerous. Massive challenges loom before us; the stakes could not be higher. Creating psychological safety in our organizations and in the culture at large so that we can bring out the best in each other and meet those challenges head-on is, more than ever, non-negotiable.

This is where my book report ends, but there is more I want to say about the distance we have come since 2019.

There was a time not long ago when it might have seemed to Edmonson that she had won the argument. I saw the change in the company where I worked during those years, as tyrannical executives who embodied a hard-driving bro culture of winning at any cost were swept out in the pre-pandemic years and #MatterOfRespect became the hot new hashtag and stated governing principle. At all-hands meetings, leaders regularly included exhortations for people to share their ideas, often adding something like, “You all are much smarter than me.” VPs became well-practiced at revealing vulnerability. There were mandatory annual training modules on creating a respectful workplace, unconscious bias, and understanding what constitutes harassment. Multiple avenues were created for people to speak up, anonymously if desired, when they experienced or saw or even just heard about #MatterOf Respect violations. A wide-ranging annual employee survey included the kinds of content Edmonson has used to assess team psychological safety: “My manager respects me. My skills and talents are valued and utilized. I can be myself at work.” The intention was clear: the company wanted to make its employees feel like they were in a psychologically safe place.

Servant leadership, multipliers, radical candor, and now psychological safety—these are very good transformational models, all of which tell a similar story, one that, if we were to actually take it seriously, would instigate radical change in the way most organizations operate, whether they be corporations, non-profits, churches, or governments. Each model has its devoted adherents who honestly attempt to put the principles into practice; I have been one of those adherents, as have many of my people-manager colleagues over the years.

But a funny thing happens to an idea on its journey from academic research focus to business school course to Ted Talk topic to corporate HR initiative. What starts as a way to deconstruct hidebound hierarchical thinking, unleash the particular knowledge and creativity of the individuals on a team, and make work a genuinely fulfilling experience for all concerned becomes for many leaders just another way to extract more productivity out of the group, just another exercise in efficiency. They adopt the vocabulary, the emotional tenor, the vibe, and I think they are generally sincere in doing so; everyone wants to believe he or she is on the side of all that is right and good. But their interest is not in radical change, it is in reducing friction. A corporate leader’s overwhelming incentive is to maximize profit, and we see time and again that whatever principles they may personally espouse will be put in service to that imperative. Rationalization is a powerful drug.

Since 2021, the technology teams I sat on or worked closely with went through four rounds of reorganization and layoffs. During that time, promotions for the most part were frozen. People were regularly shifted into new roles for which they were ill-suited or had no interest, as if they were simply names filling boxes on an org chart. Everyone I worked with directly felt stripped of agency; implied in leadership messaging was that we should be thankful to still have jobs. Each round of cuts meant there were fewer people to do the same volume of work, and so there were a series of top-down directives to find efficiencies, stop doing “unnecessary” work, and most recently, adopt AI tools. In the past couple of years, a parade of petty tyrants, screamers, micromanagers, and “failure is not an option” bros came on board; pleas sent to the “Speak Up” portals were ignored. As Bruce Springsteen said, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”

I got value from reading Edmonson’s book. Her insights are savvy and powerful, her anecdotes illuminating. But her playbook falls far short of what is needed. Psychological safety isn’t an HR initiative activated through training modules and surveys and hashtags and platitudes. It begins with leaders who actually understand that they are working with human beings, and who take conscious actions and make decisions based on that fundamental and often inconvenient truth. It would be so much easier—for them—if we were just engines of production who could be optimized by saying the right words and assuming the right postures. But we are unruly, emotional, needy, proud, brilliant creatures, and we deserve so much better than we are getting. We deserve the freedom to be fearless, and if our employers won’t give it to us, it is about time we take it for ourselves.

In the early 1780s, as the Revolutionary War was winding down, some of my father’s ancestors, the Burgars, moved from New Jersey to Ontario, Canada. While I have no documentation that directly explains this decision, the timing is certainly suggestive. What it suggests is that they did not want to live in the brand new United States.

We tend to think of the Revolution as a mass colonial uprising against British rule. But of course the reality was more complicated. Historians estimate that only about 40-45% of the population of the original colonies were Patriots, with 15-20% remaining Loyalists, and the rest neutral. After the war was over, tens of thousands of Loyalists moved to Canada, so many in fact that the new province of New Brunswick was formed in 1784 to provide local government for the migrants. This is, obviously, a story we don’t tell in the United States, with the “traitor” Benedict Arnold being the only Loyalist contributor to our nation’s founding mythology.

It seems reasonable to speculate that the Burgars were Loyalists. They probably settled near Lake Huron because sometime in the 1800s they started moving back and forth across the border between Ontario and Michigan, and some of them eventually settled down in Michigan’s thumb. My father’s mother was born Dora Burgar in 1912. She was an architect, the mother of five children, and a heavy smoker who died of a heart attack before she turned 50. I never met her, but her mother, Anna McKillop Burgar, born in 1887, was still alive when I was young, and I have a sense memory of eating a sugar cookie she baked and gave me.

The Burgars and my great-grandmother’s family, the McKillops, were not the kind of people who wind up in most history books, which is to say, they were regular people who lived apparently unremarkable lives. Sometimes, a regular person leaves behind a record, a paper trail that makes it possible to resurrect something of their social world, their material conditions, even fragments of their inner emotional state. Lauren Thatcher Ulrich was able to do this in her landmark book, A Midwife’s Tale, which drew on the diary of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Maine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Ulrich is best known as the source of the quote: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The fact is that most people, whether they are well-behaved, upstanding citizens or scoundrels and reprobates, do not make history. If we are lucky, we will have their names, maybe from census records or military pension cards or deeds or gravestones. As with the Burgars, we might be able to draw certain hypotheses about their lives. But the vast majority of their lived experiences, their material conditions, their idiosyncrasies, and their stories died with them; and as those who still had memories of them died, whatever had remained of them was swept away, except for those few traces in the official records.

We have no way to access the specific beliefs or pressures or fears or opportunities might have caused the Burgars to uproot themselves from New Jersey and migrate hundreds of miles to Canada. We don’t know if the decision was a contentious one in their household or if they were all ready to jump on the first wagon out of town. We don’t know if they were rewarded by the Crown, as many transplanted Loyalists were; we don’t know if the promise of a reward was a motivating factor. We don’t know why they went to Ontario instead of New Brunswick, where most Loyalists ended up. We don’t know why a later generation of Burgars decided to creep back over the border.

This is what most of history looks like—not written history, but actual history—a virtually infinite compendium of unknowns. Historians peer into the past like astronomers, turning telescopes to the night sky in the hope of catching a pulse of photons traveling across time and space to tell them: there was a star here. Most of the stars that have ever existed are completely lost, extinguished too long ago or too dim to see; and most of the stars accessible to us, even with our best tools, are little more than pinholes of distorted light. No wonder most folks, if they bother to look up at all, just point out the constellations, the familiar stars we can see with our naked eyes. The bright one is Jefferson. The twinkly one is Franklin. The big gaudy one is Hancock. The stars of 1776, and all that cold black space in between, where the Burgars and everyone they ever knew sit in obscurity.

As the great experiment of our democracy festers like an algae-filled pool, one way we might start to renew and restore it would be to invest in what could be called small-d democratic history, drawing the forgotten stories of regular people out of the darkness and connecting them to the world we live in today. I will illustrate what I mean in part 2 of this mini-series, where I will work my way back along a thread of my mother’s side of the family through 10 generations and 250 years, a story that changed the way I see myself in relation to American history.

(1) Exactly one song per year between 1970 and 2026.

(2) Each song had to be one I’d rated five stars on my Apple Music account. Five stars means a song I would be happy to hear any time, anywhere. I currently have 1,445 five-star songs, so in order to decide between tough choices, I gave a preference to tracks I’ve played on repeat at some point in my life.

(3) Only one artist or band (my favorite band) was allowed to have more than one song on the list.

The resulting list, like most long lists I put together, demonstrates my love of melodic guitar-bass-drums pop rock, especially if it has a punk influence. I love rap, but the only rap track is by a white British trans man; in general, the list is depressingly white. You could call it obvious; you could call it reactionary; you could call it boring; you are free to ignore it altogether. I’ll make other lists with more diversity and more weirdness. I’ll make other lists that include personal favorites like The Who, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Nirvana, Parliament-Funkadelic, Tears for Fears, Liz Phair, The Decemberists, Green Day, Massive Attack, Cotton Mather, Nine Inch Nails, KT Tunstall, Oasis, Kanye West, Neutral Milk Hotel, Dizzee Rascal, Fiona Apple, Kendrick Lamar, The National, Wilco, Youth Lagoon, Taylor Swift, Run the Jewels, Janelle Monae, Sufjan Stevens, and Big Thief/Adrianne Lenker, which this one does not. This list is not any kind of statement. It was just a birthday present I made for myself, of songs that I have been mildly obsessed with for as much as 56 years.

Happy birthday, me.

Links to the playlist:

Spotify

Apple Music

1970: “The Boxer”, Simon & Garfunkel. The intricacy of the melody. The production on this song still stuns.

1971: “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)”, Marvin Gaye. Golden voice never sounded better.

1972: “Pink Moon”, Nick Drake. Apocalyptic folk genius.

1973: “Get Up, Stand Up”, The Wailers. You can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

1974: “September Gurls”, Big Star. This is my only 5-star song from 1974.

1975: “Thunder Road”, Bruce Springsteen. In the year of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Patti Smith’s Horses, there was no greater rock & roll poetry than this.

1976: “I Wish”, Stevie Wonder. That bass line slaps so hard.

1977: “Gold Dust Woman”, Fleetwood Mac. Harrowing cocaine chaos.

1978: “Ever Fallen In Love?”, The Buzzcocks. I wish more guitars sounded like this.

1979: “Clampdown”, The Clash. A succinct statement of my lifelong feelings about corporate America.

1980: “Crosseyed and Painless”, Talking Heads. Facts don’t do what I want them to.

1981: “Invisible Sun”, The Police. Sting wrote other political songs but none of them came close to this.

1982: “From the Air”, Laurie Anderson. We’re going down. We’re all going down.

1983: “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, U2. Imagine you are 13 and the radio is full of Journey and Def Leppard and then you hear this.

1984: “Let’s Go Crazy”, Prince. The greatest guitar-playing caught on tape since Jimi Hendrix died.

1985: “Hounds of Love”, Kate Bush. It’s in the trees, it’s coming, two steps on the water.

1986: “Fall on Me”, R.E.M. Maybe my very favorite song of all time; fills me with a longing I can’t explain. Utter perfection.

1987: “Sheila Take a Bow”, The Smiths. Boot the grime of this world in the crotch, dear.

1988: “Where Is My Mind?”, Pixies. Ooooooo-ooo.

1989: “Like a Prayer”, Madonna. The bridge.

1990: “Fotzepolitic”, Cocteau Twins. What is she singing? I don’t know, but that guitar, holy shit, it sounds alien.

1991: “Four Seasons in One Day”, Crowded House. My generation’s Paul McCartney, smiling as the shit comes down.

1992: “These Are Days”, 10,000 Maniacs. Sometimes you just want to feel good, you know?

1993: “Wrong”, Archers of Loaf. I saw these guys live twice in the year after this album came out and will never forget the roar of this song on stage.

1994: “Sour Times”, Portishead. Billie Holiday vibes, the old-timey busy signal.

1995: “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, Radiohead. Such a satisfying song to sing along with, those long notes.

1996: “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”, Sleater-Kinney. As The Clash’s producer said about “Brand New Cadillac”, the best songs always speed up.

1997: “Bachelorette”, Bjork. I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl. That voice.

1998: “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands”, Elliott Smith. The simultaneous ascending and descending scales, the sheer craft in every touch.

1999: “I Don’t Believe in the Sun”, Magnetic Fields. Astronomy will have to be revised.

2000: “Aside”, The Weakerthans. I’m leaning on this broken fence between past and present tense. Also, the guitars (see: 1978).

2001: “New Slang”, The Shins. I know, so obvious, but still gives goosebumps.

2002: “It’s Summertime”, The Flaming Lips. I can understand why you still feel sad.

2003: “Where I End And You Begin (The Sky Is Falling)”, Radiohead. Yes, they are my favorite band, and this is a summation of everything they do better than anyone else. Jonny Greenwood is God.

2004: “Rebellion (Lies)”, Arcade Fire. Sleeping is giving in: my walk-on song.

2005: “Going Through the Motions”, Aimee Mann. Has the shape, melodic power, and punch of a great Beatles song, and so sad.

2006: “Crazy”, Gnarls Barkley. Possibly, probably. CeeLo’s angelic voice.

2007: “Bird Flu”, M.I.A. Chanting demon kids. SQUAWK!

2008: “Human”, The Killers. This is such a dumb song and I love it so much.

2009: “Heads Will Roll”, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The chrome sound, the build, the crescendo.

2010: “Zebra”, Beach House. The chord progression.

2011: “Wait”, M83. Sheer beauty.

2012: “Trees and Flowers”, Dum Dum Girls. More sheer beauty, the most resplendent song about agoraphobia ever.

2013: “Ya Hey”, Vampire Weekend. Gospel music for white boys. My soul swooned as I faintly heard the sound of you spinning “Israelites” into “19th Nervous Breakdown”. Ut deo.

2014: “Seasons (Waiting on You)”, Future Islands. My favorite one-hit wonders of the 21st century.

2015: “Flesh Without Blood”, Grimes. A perfect pop song. Since 2015, this is the track I have listened to the most.

2016: “Europe Is Lost”, Kae Tempest. Ten years later, every word still true.

2017: “watch”, Billie Eilish. Everything great about Billie and her brother was already in place with this one.

2018: “I Feel Free”, Dilly Dally. True heirs to Nirvana, never got the audience they deserved. The last 40 seconds melt my brain.

2019: “Ohio”, Cherry Glazerr. I don’t know why this song is called “Ohio”. But the guitars! (See: 1978)

2020: “I Know the End”, Phoebe Bridgers. I should make a playlist of songs that are two great songs grafted together into one even greater song (see: 1986).

2021: “Vbs”, Lucy Dacus. Waiting to be tasted, and ultimately wasted—is anyone writing better lyrics than this right now? Okay, Adrianne Lenker. But anyone else? I don’t think so.

2022: “Violet”, Girlpool. Harmony’s vocalizations and Avery’s guitar chasing each other in the instrumental break, blows me away every time.

2023: “I’m Your Man”, Mitski. I’ll meet judgment by the hounds, yo-ho, crickets, that eerie animal cry (a toad, apparently).

2024: “Cathedral”, Sprints. CAN ANYBODY BE HAPPY?

2025: “100 Horses”, Geese. Hooooonk. There is only dance music in times of war.

2026: “Okay Not to Be Okay”, Ecca Vandal. My most recent music crush. We’re in all kinds of fucked up times, yeah yeah yeah yeah ya.

As the title of her book suggests, in 2022, Herrington still believed there was a possibility of averting global economic collapse. But in her 2026 lecture to our class, she reported that she and other researchers who are watching these conditions closely have concluded that collapse has already begun, in no small part because of the outcome of the 2024 US election. “In the circles I run in,” she said, “we call Trump ‘The Great Accelerator.’” Consider the debilitating effects of the Iran war and how quickly it precipitated a food crisis in several Asian countries due to the rising cost of petroleum-based fertilizer, a trend that will be difficult to reverse.

It’s easy to dismiss Herrington’s gloomy assessment, for the same reasons that the Limits to Growth model itself has been dismissed by politicians, financiers, and economists for five decades. Outside of sepia-toned memories of the Great Depression, no one alive in the Western world has a lived experience of economic collapse. We’ve been through some crappy times since 1972, including stagflation, a few recessions, one bona fide economic crisis, and a pandemic, but each time we’ve seen things get better. Why should we believe things will be different in the future?

Understanding long-term risk is not a strong suit of our species. Our brains are biologically rigged to prioritize our wants and needs and fears of the here-and-now over a risky but hazy future. Climate change is a case in point. I remember learning in the early 1990s that climate change was coming if we didn’t curb our fossil fuel use. Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which brought the science of climate change into the mainstream, came out in 2006. Yet twenty years later, we continue to drill new oil wells, frack natural gas pockets, and burn coal by the metric ton, and we continue to be surprised when lethal heat waves and out of control wildfires tear through our communities, as if they were still anomalies, as if next year might be better.

Like climate change, which has announced itself one “once in a millennium” natural disaster at a time, global economic collapse, if it is indeed upon us, is not likely to be something sudden and catastrophic everywhere all at once. The effects will be different in different places, on different timelines. Like climate change, this will make it difficult for people to see it happening, and even more difficult to know what to do about it. In the US, we’ll get more reports about the price of gas and the price of eggs, more hard-luck stories about Gen Zers looking for jobs, more political gasbaggery, more and more of the same downbeat news that already hardly fazes us. We’ll have fits of frustration where we throw the Republicans out and put the Democrats in and then throw the Democrats out and put the Republicans in. We’ll harbor hopes that technology, maybe AI, maybe fusion power, will be the x factor that changes our trajectory. And meanwhile we’ll continue to depend on consumerism as our economic engine because we can’t see an alternative; we’ll continue to punish companies that fail to show continuous growth and reward those that grow even at the cost of the planet’s health; we’ll continue to live comfortably in the lie that our way of life can continue indefinitely, right up until the point when we can’t live comfortably at all, and then we will ask ourselves why we didn’t do something sooner.

The truth is that even when we can see the risk before our eyes, even when we don’t have to imagine the worst-case scenario because it is right in front of us, we are slow to take appropriate action. Emma Pattee’s novel Tilt is about a cataclysm that does happen all at once—the great Cascadia earthquake that geologists tell us will certainly strike the Pacific Northwest, and that could indeed happen at any time. Pattee’s riveting novel takes place in Portland; her narrator is a woman 37 weeks pregnant who is shopping at the Ikea near the airport when the earthquake hits. The book is the story of her journey on foot across the broken city, which plays out like Dante’s descent into hell. It is not a spoiler to say that the city she traverses is devastated, reduced to rubble. We know this will happen. Of the dozen bridges that span the Willamette River and connect the west and east sides of the city, only two are considered earthquake-resistant. Most buildings in the city were built before the earthquake risk was fully understood and were not designed for the big one. Projects to upgrade the infrastructure are in various states of planning and development, but no major earthquake-proofing project has been completed since 2016. The spirit is willing, but the financial commitment is weak, the sense of urgency non-existent.

We do not need to look very far to find a vivid example of what could be in store for the PNW. The dual earthquakes that shattered Caracas and the Venezuelan coast last week have reduced daily life to a matter of bare survival for tens of thousands of people. Thousands more remain trapped in the wreckage, with time running out for any hope of rescue. The collapse of Caracas took only a few minutes; for many, dying will take days. It could be months before Caracas begins to function as a city again, and when it does, it will be a different city. Rebuilding will take years, maybe decades. People who have lived through the ordeal could be traumatized for the rest of their lives.

Yet as Rebecca Solnit argues in her carefully-written and thoughtful anarchist treatise, A Paradise Built in Hell, when cataclysmic disaster strikes, survivors often find a deep and fulfilling sense of purpose and community while responding to the emergency. Humans may be poor at long-term risk assessment, but we are outstanding when called to step up and respond to an immediate crisis. Solnit surveys five significant disasters, beginning with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and ending with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and in each case finds plentiful examples of citizens forming spontaneous organizations to help their neighbors and provide for the common good. This narrative runs counter to the trope of predatory mayhem (looting, arson, rape, etc.) that is supposedly unleashed in the wake of catastrophe; in fact, Solnit says, where there was violence in these disasters, it was manufactured by elites looking to reassert their authority. While the “utopias” Solnit depicts generally don’t last beyond the special circumstances of the disaster, they offer a glimpse into another way of living built on resilience, solidarity, and personal agency.

As Solnit demonstrates, one thing that catastrophe does is expose the limits of existing power structures, which are not designed to cope with the highly fluid and chaotic nature of an unfolding disaster. Venezuela, whose government was already fragile, is experiencing this phenomenon right now. In the face of such an enormous wave of suffering and destruction, no government is equipped to respond adequately, and it is within the vacuum they leave behind that citizens may create localized order. There is a danger to the establishment in these spontaneous displays of altruism and self-organization. People might get it into their heads that they can handle matters just fine by themselves.

Solnit’s arguments make sense in the context of a collapse of order brought about by an earthquake or a hurricane or a terrorist act. What about when the collapse happens in slow motion, when the system, running hot and losing structural integrity over a matter of years or decades, continues to perform with adequacy, albeit on a degraded level? Do Solnit’s “utopias” only pertain to real-time disasters, or can they provide a window to a possible paradigm for building communities in a post-growth, post-global collapse world? Will national governments reveal their limits in the face of economic turmoil and leave vacuums open for alternative approaches to emerge and take root at a local level? Or will we need to create those opportunities for ourselves?

“Our choice is to either choose our own limits or have them forced upon us,” Gaya Herrington writes. Maybe, as she asserts, the great collapse of our global economic order has begun, and maybe it hasn’t; maybe it is inevitable at this point, maybe it isn’t. Maybe all of that is beside the point. Maybe the point is that we can choose a more humane, more resilient way of living simply because it is more humane and more resilient, simply because it is a better way to live. Maybe we can make a conscious practice of building for long-term survival simply because it feels wise and right to do so, no presentiments of doom required.

Catastrophe can open the door to change. But the door is right there. We don’t need to wait for a crisis to give us permission to open it. We don’t need to wait for everything to fall apart before we put it all back together new. We can do it right now.

Maybe it was projection on my part, but both of them seemed to be in a fragile state. Though they had simply delivered the words that a phalanx of lawyers had written for them, I thanked them for talking to me like a human being. I said I felt badly for them having to go through this experience of causing people distress; the HR person visibly flinched. I had a number of impertinent questions, which I knew they could not or would not answer, so after asking about one or two housekeeping items, I thanked them for their time and dropped from the call, conscious that they had many hours of reorg-ing ahead of them. I didn’t want to make anyone’s day harder than it already was.

The layoff didn’t come as a surprise. For weeks, I’d been telling people my chances of staying or going amounted to a coin flip, but in retrospect I would have been astonished if they’d kept me on. I knew that for some people, I was closely associated with played-out strategies, obsolescent technology, and defunct priorities. I had friction with my leaders and had dragged my feet adopting AI. In the midst of a return-to-the-office push, I’d been working from home several days a week without securing a formal accommodation. I’d begged off of leading a complex track of work because of needing to help my wife through a health crisis. Many people, my manager included, had told me what a good example I was setting for the team by putting my family first. How courageous I was. Even as I was exhibiting my courage, the HR department was making a list. I’d given them plenty of reasons to put my name on it.

My heart wasn’t in it anymore. In the previous reorg, which happened in June 2025, I’d stayed employed but lost the two things that had made the job purposeful beyond the utility of a paycheck and health insurance. First, I’d been moved out of the Sustainability function, where I explicitly had intended to spend the rest of my career. Second, I’d been moved out of people management into an individual contributor role. These changes had demonstrated such a complete disregard among my leaders for who I was as a person and what I had to offer the company that I didn’t know whether to be insulted or merely cynical. Looking for a way to regain some control over my situation, in January I’d signed up for two courses in a Masters program in Sustainability, and that was where I’d been putting my mental energy. The week I was laid off was the week I needed to turn in a major paper for one of the courses. I lost my job, but I got a perfect grade on the paper.

Do, or do not; there is no try, Yoda famously said in a quote beloved by corporate leaders who fancy themselves Jedi masters of business—manipulating resources, shifting units, and levitating stock prices with the power of the Force. Do what the company expects you to do, or do not.

I did not. In my final weeks, I did not even try. It was time to go.

Now I am going to school. I am very good at going to school. It is one of the few areas of my life where I am not plagued by impostor syndrome or anxiety. The things I have to do in class—pay attention to lectures, participate in discussions, research and write essays, read assigned articles and books, answer homework questions, take tests—are things I would readily do in my spare time. Learning, synthesizing, throwing big words and big ideas around: what could be better?

At some point, I will have to get a job again. Health insurance, car payments, college tuitions, mortgage, these things don’t go away just because I’m not getting a paycheck. The added complication is that I’m at the magic age where precious few prospective employers will believe I can learn anything new. Since my resume is heavy on tech and data, and everything in tech is currently being overthrown by AI tools that I have used sporadically at best, I have little reason to believe I will find many doors open. I’m making a big bet that the credential of a Sustainability Master’s degree will eventually open other kinds of doors, but that’s going to take a while.

In the meantime, being unemployed has prompted me to think long and hard about what I want to do with this writing business. In the hothouse of my sweaty brain, it feels like a make-or-break moment because when will I ever have a better opportunity than this to go all in? That self-induced pressure sent me spinning for a few weeks, but I’m getting things in order now, revising one novel, drafting another, and doing research for a non-fiction project. These things feel manageable, doable, so I am doing them.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about what I want to do with this newsletter. For several weeks I thought it would be best to just abandon it and work on my other projects. Mainly I thought this because I know that “successful” Substack authors, i.e. those that actually make money, tend to be those that go deep into a particular area of expertise. The accounts I subscribe to are nearly all laser-focused on one subject area: decarbonization in the energy sector; public health; feminism; Ukraine; music criticism; the craft of writing; American politics; queer rights. But as that list demonstrates, my interests traverse a broad spectrum, and so does my writing. I don’t have a specialization, and therefore this newsletter has no hook. All I have to offer is my own peculiar thoughts, a window into my weird brain. I literally am just some guy. I have no right to ask for anyone’s attention.

So, I went around in circles about this, and the conclusion I came to was: screw it. I can only do what I can do, and what I can do is this: notice some stuff, read some stuff, turn stuff over in my mind, write about said stuff to figure out what I actually think about it, and put the writing out into the world. If I’m lucky, someone will read it. If I’m extraordinarily lucky, then something I write might serve as a point of illumination for someone, a shift in perspective, a consolation, a connection that wasn’t there before. (That’s what lighting a candle for the kids means.)

And if no one reads it, well at least I’ve gotten something in my head a little bit clearer, at least I’ve gotten a chance to sit in a flow state for a little while and practice the craft of putting sentences together, and how lucky is that?

An essay is, in the original sense, an “attempt.” A try. In the world where I am no longer welcome, there is no try, but I never belonged in that world anyhow. I’m much more at home on the page, a place where failure, most of the time, is a given.

I’m here. This is me trying.

Our politics after a year of Trump 2.0 has the logic of a nightmare from which we cannot wake up. Everything the administration touches is soiled, everything it promises to do is monstrous, and no one in the halls of power seems willing or able to stop them.

It is self-evident that the concentrated violence and scare tactics being employed by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota are not an end in themselves, but a dry run for something much bigger. They are looking to see what they can get away with, what the Vice-President’s claim of their “absolute immunity” gives them permission to do. Kidnapping: check. Using children as hostages: check. Murder: check. Summary execution: check. The next logical step in escalation would be a mass murder, a massacre. That, of course, is something we are all drearily familiar with, to the point of numbness, in our gun-besotted country; the only difference is that this time it will come at the hands of state-sponsored terrorists. But that is a crucial difference.

It is almost a cliche now to compare ICE to the Gestapo, but we shouldn’t forget that the Nazis themselves took direct inspiration from American race laws and from the terror tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, which was in turn an evolution of the slave patrols who kept both enslaved and free Black Americans in a state of perpetual danger in the run-up to the Civil War. Everything the Nazis did to the people they hated, up to and including concentration camps and genocide, white European settler colonists and their descendants had already done to people of color in North America with the full support of federal and state governments. ICE is the next iteration of a deep and abiding tradition. There is nothing new about any of this; and if we could go back to almost any time in our history, we would find that, while for too many non-white people the nightmare has been never-ending, a majority of white Americans have either actively approved of these actions or have looked away and given them little thought.

This is why the video-documented cold-blooded killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a white woman and a white man, present a real problem for the Trump administration’s immigrant-hating agenda. As long as only brown people were being targeted for violence and intimidation, the majority of white people, whether they condoned ICE’s tactics or not, didn’t have an immediate sense of (literal) skin in the game. Now they might. It was when white civil rights workers started getting murdered in the South in the early 1960’s that broad national outrage against segregationists really took hold. White deaths at the hands of the state (see also: Kent State and the Branch Davidians) have a way of reminding white people of why they don’t like the state. The fact that Pretti in particular was a Second Amendment enthusiast and a VA ICU nurse has the real potential to upend some MAGA-curious people’s understanding of what’s going on in the streets of Minneapolis.

Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part, but Trump’s goons aren’t taking any chances. With each shooting, the DHS leadership’s first move has been to present a version of the events leading up to the fatal moment that paints the victim as a domestic terrorist, someone with hate for America in their heart who presented an immediate lethal threat to agents. In each case, overwhelming video evidence has demolished the DHS narrative as a lie. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem and her bootlickers have learned well from the President they serve. They’ve seen him lie about white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying they were “good people,” despite filmed evidence of them chanting, “Jews won’t replace us.” They’ve seen him lie about (and pardon) the deadly January 6th mob, despite copious video evidence of their culpability in service to the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.” They’ve bought into the idea that to acknowledge the truth shows weakness. Keep repeating the lie, and it will start to have its own staying power, no matter what people can see with their own eyes.

In the cases of Good’s and Pretti’s murders, the primary intent of the lie is not so much to exonerate the murderers as it is to smear the victims, to put them into a category where they lose the privileges of their whiteness, where they become, like the brown people ICE usually torments, in the out group.

The logic here is disgusting in multiple ways. But chances are it will work on those who don’t want to face the implications of what is happening and are looking for a way to rationalize it—not just the spineless members of Congress, but also many of my fellow white liberals who wield their privilege like a shield, as I have done (unconsciously and with the best of intentions) many times.

In his blistering, unforgiving, and necessary book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad holds the feet of liberals like me to the fire. When, he asks repeatedly, will there have been enough suffering in Gaza to provoke American liberals beyond the “hopes and prayers” stage of concern? What psychological and physical comforts are we willing to sacrifice to bring about a more just world? How far will we go? What will we risk for people who, in one way or another, are not like us? With regard to Gaza, I still do not have a good answer to these kinds of questions, and that is a moral failure on my part.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti showed us all what they were willing to risk on behalf of their fellow human beings of Minneapolis. I’m not sure I have their bravery, not sure I have what it will take to be my best self in the coming weeks and months, and I don’t want to be forced to find out. The way things are going, I’m not sure I, or any of us, will have much of a choice in the matter.

In Joyce’s poetic formulation, art begins with and is constructed from “the reality of experience.” But it is not simply a document of life’s raw materials; it is “forged,” a transmutation of them, an artifice that discovers and creates meaning and purpose. Perhaps most importantly, art is moral, crafted in the soul, and in fact it is the source of moral structure, the “conscience,” of the culture. Religion, for Joyce, was one of the world’s problems, not a solution; the solution was art. His use of the word “race” in this context refers to his fellow Irish folk, whom he (and by extension Stephen Dedalus) saw as a largely benighted and stunted people mired in small-minded conservative Catholic ways. Joyce ultimately had to leave Dublin for the continent in order to write freely about and for his home. Yet he felt deeply the innate, untapped beauty and grandeur of his compatriots, their humor and their language, and sought through his writing to give them a sense of their own “uncreated” capacity for glory.

All of this stirred a kind of wild ambition in my fifteen-year-old self. He wasn’t sure who his “race” was—fellow teenagers? Nerds and outcasts? Americans?—but he could feel the fire blazing in the smithy of his soul and was ready to hammer out hard truths from the raw ore of his life experience for those ready to receive them. He attempted stories featuring an alter ego named Drew, an angsty would-be writer whose thoughts and feelings mirrored his own. When the writing didn’t go well, which was nearly all of the time, he would stand at his bedroom window, listening to Psychocandy by The Jesus & Mary Chain or So by Peter Gabriel while gazing across the rooftops down the long suburban street, filled with an overwhelming, unbounded, and non-specific longing, and he would tell himself: Remember this feeling. This is the feeling you need to write about. Everything important comes from this.

He was a pretentious, dour little guy, this emo dweeb who used to be me. But at least in that one observation I think he might have been on to something.

The reality of experience. It is difficult for me now to remember what reality felt like forty years ago, before it became so intertwined with the virtual world. I have the suspicion that perhaps I was never very good at paying attention to the textures of life, although some sense memories linger from that time. I remember what it felt like learning how to touch-type on an actual typewriter, the weight of the keys and the smack of the typehead on the paper; I remember particular gradients of light and slopes of ceiling and patterns of wallpaper in the bedrooms I inhabited as a teen; I remember playing basketball with my brother in the driveway and getting so sweaty and thirsty that I would consume most of a quart of Minute Maid fruit punch straight from the carton; I remember crunching leaves underfoot, laying down a beat for an embryonic song playing in my head. I remember the feeling of holding a ballpoint pen over a blank sheet of paper, the top of the pen damp with my spit and mangled by my teeth; I remember being unable to make my hand write a single word.

But so much of my lived experience took place within the confines of my skull, which was often only tenuously connected to the world outside. I wallowed in outsized emotions (are there any other kind at age fifteen?), marinated in amorphous Big Ideas, bedazzled and tortured myself with fantasies of my possible futures. I practiced answering interview questions about books I hadn’t written yet. I had the more or less constant conviction that I was destined to produce great works and was squandering my time. I felt profoundly, irrevocably alone and misunderstood.

Of course the only person responsible for my sense of isolation was myself. I was the one who misunderstood, well, everything: other people’s intentions, the art of friendships, the dynamics of crushes and romance, the importance of taking care of my body, the sources of my joy.

I misunderstood the meaning of the words, “reality of experience.” In my mind, the emphasis was on the word “experience.” If I could only capture my tormented experience on the page, cast it in prose as faithfully and artfully as my capabilities would allow, then I would create art.

Now I see that the most important word in Joyce’s phrase is “reality.” His novel begins with the sound of Stephen Dedalus’s father telling him a bedtime story, the sight of his father’s hairy face in the mirror, and the smell of the sheets when he pees the bed. Reality is the place where our insides bump up against everything that is outside. Art is the thing that explores the shockwaves from the collisions, surveys the damage, and makes sense of the whole mess.

The smithy of my soul. Blacksmithing lives in the space in my brain that in other people is occupied by the Roman Empire. It is one of the very few things humans have ever done that was uniquely human. For millennia, the smith was an anchor of nearly every settled community in Eurasia, the artificer who fashioned the tools that made much of civilization work. Smiths were among the first people to explore and expand the boundaries of reality and in the process created new knowledge of the nature of matter and the properties of the elements.

Scenes with smiths from books I have read over the years play on loops in my head. There is the image of Hephaestus and his cyclopes from the D’Aulaires’ book of Greek myths; the opening scene of Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three, where the hero, Taran, tries to forge a sword and winds up making something that looks like a “sick snake”; Johnny Tremain, the apprentice silversmith, getting his hand horribly burned; John Wayland Smith, one of the Old Ones in The Dark Is Rising, forging shoes for the horses of the Light and the Darkness.

Reality exists at a high pitch in a smithy. It is hot, it is clamorous, there are sparks flying and the smell of scorched metal, everything is being pounded or melted or blasted, there are ringing ears and aching muscles. Everything about it is brutal, and yet it can be one of the most sophisticated and delicate of crafts.

It is hard for me to imagine a more apt metaphor for the artist. The creative process operates at a high pitch, and it is not gentle. A writer may sit silently in a quiet room, tapping softly on a keyboard, but inside his or her head every sentence and paragraph is being hammered into shape, remelted and reforged multiple times until it is sharp enough to cut.

The uncreated conscience of my race. I recently read Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Checkout 19. It is a kind of Portrait Of the Artist As a Young Woman, an example of the genre of autofiction that has become a dominant literary form in the first part of this century thanks to the influence of writers like W. G. Sebald, Karl Ove Knausgard, and Rachel Cusk. Such writers generally dispense with the device of an alter ego, giving their books a memoir-like aspect, but by calling them novels they retain the license to modify characters, rearrange events, or invent dialogue, to give selective preference to imagination over memory. Bennett’s book sits in the estuary between a presumably factual memoir like Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and the semi-autobiographical coming of age novel that was a rite of passage for so many first-time novelists of the last century, including Joyce himself.

I suspect it is no accident that autofiction has become ascendant at the same time that our lives have been shifting more and more online, and while events in the world have become more and more unhinged. One way to understand autofiction is as a somewhat reactionary response to the general feeling that our increasingly digitized lives have become untethered from the reality of experience. There are echoes here of how the Modernists used pre-Christian myths (Joyce’s second novel was Ulysses) and so-called primitive imagery as a somewhat reactionary response to the mechanized, industrialized, ahistorical, and dehumanized new civilization of the early 20th Century.

Bennett doesn’t come right out and say it the way Joyce does, but what she demonstrates in Checkout 19 is a conviction that art is a moral undertaking, a pinpoint of light in a dark world. When a boyfriend, in a fit of pique, destroys a piece of writing that she’s been working on for months, Bennett makes the reader feel the obscenity of the act, this artifact from the smithy of her soul desecrated by a small-minded man. In documenting the violation, she finds a way to transmute it by recreating the lost work and completing it, turning it into an eerie Borgesian fable that ends with a great book burning.

At least three of the four authors I mentioned above—Bennett, Sebald, and Knausgard—demonstrate a personal preoccupation with the Holocaust, with Knausgard actually naming his great autofiction work My Struggle in a provocative reference to Adolf Hitler’s political screed. Reality doesn’t get more real than the Holocaust. One could argue that Holocaust books like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table essentially invented the concept of autofiction while seeking a way to put into words an experience that is almost beyond language’s ability to convey.

We are enjoined to “never forget” the Holocaust. But in the world that is emerging before our eyes, forgetting is not the only danger, and maybe not the worst one. Something that is forgotten can be remembered. But when you can’t tell any more what is real, what is artifice, and what is artificial, what are you remembering?

Now we have quite suddenly entered the age of artificial intelligence, and at the beginning of 2026 the world is fully in its slop era. AI-generated music, videos, and books are getting picked up by the algorithms and are filling up our feeds, often indistinguishable from content made by human intelligence. The key word here is content. This stuff is filler, a diversion, a way to pass the time. We should not confuse it with art.

It will likely get harder and harder to make the distinction. This is important because to be sure, a twenty-second Tik Tok post made by a human can be art. There are creators of genius in every medium. But if we are going to take Joyce’s words to heart, and I do, then nothing AI-generated can be art. Generative AI platforms have no sense of the reality of experience; they have no senses at all, and therefore no way to have constructive collisions with the external world. Generative AI platforms do not wrestle with meaning. Generative AI platforms are inherently amoral. Over time, generative AI platforms may well create content that looks more and more like what we might call art. But what they produce will always be kitsch, not art; it is, in the most pejorative sense, artificial.

Remember this feeling, my fifteen-year-old self said. Everything important comes from this. Everything important comes from the perturbations of being alive, the ways that our sensitive souls are bruised and shaken and wrung out by the world. Everything important comes from that free-floating sense of longing and need that is a core feature of the human psyche. Everything important comes from the distance between our conviction that anything is possible and the hard fact that we often have no clue how to bring the possible to life.

More than ever, at the dawn of this unimaginable new age, our culture needs to reclaim the reality of experience. This means more than just touching grass. It means putting in the work, an investment of sweat and toil. Our culture needs a moral compass; right and wrong may be social constructs, but we are social animals, and our race—the human race—will need a conscience if it is going to survive.

We need our artists, and we need them now.

For me, 2025 has been a banner year for learning to accept that there are things I believed were within my control that in fact are not. Truthfully, I could have said the same about any year since 2017, which was when pneumonia and pulmonary embolism brought me face to face with the limits and the fragility of my own body. Since then, year by year, the sphere of my illusion of control has shrunk.

What makes this year different is my growing awareness of the role that sheer randomness plays in our lives. We have become accustomed, for example, to thinking that when someone gets sick, there must be a cause—the person has been infected with a virus that is circulating, or had some genetic predisposition, or was exposed to some carcinogen, or had behavioral risk factors. But sometimes illness is just a fluke, an accident, a roll of the dice. There is no narrative arc, no sense of cause and effect, no reason. There is no why. It’s just a bit of bad fortune.

I have realized in recent weeks that a basic understanding and acceptance of the randomness of things is a quality that humans must have cultivated for nearly all of the history of our species. In this past autumn’s Nova episodes on “Human Origins”, the host, Ella Al-Shamahi, stressed the point that there was nothing inevitable about the particular ways that Homo Sapiens developed, or the ways we have shaped our world. Our adaptability may have helped us weather unexpected and difficult times, but at both the individual and group levels, survival was often a simple matter of chance. We may have called life’s randomness something like “the will of the gods,” wrapping uncomfortable truths in just-so stories meant to reassure us that nothing happens without an ultimate reason. But all too often that reason remains obscure. The faithful Job never gets a satisfactory answer for why so many terrible things happen to him. It is God’s will, or perhaps God’s whim, to make him suffer, and with that reasoning he is expected to be content.

The point has been driven home to me by the book I’m reading, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (which, like its protagonist Thomas Cromwell, fully lives up to its reputation). Not to give spoilers, but Cromwell’s bumpy progress from an abused childhood in a backwater village to the heights of influence in Henry VIII’s court owes as much to luck, both surprisingly good and spectacularly bad, as it does to his own talents. This was the era of eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die, and a great many people around Cromwell do die sudden deaths, some naturally, some not, often without rhyme or reason. Before the era of vaccinations and effective antibiotics, before the decline of casual everyday violence, life more often than not really must have been nasty, brutish, and short. But chance could just as easily flip in a person’s favor; by a roll of the dice, a man tortured and nearly killed by one king might find decades of success and comfort as a courtier of the next king.

I grew up in a time when it was easy to believe that in America we had effectively loaded the dice in our favor. We did have vaccines and antibiotics, and lifespans were growing ever longer. We had global treaties that had brought wars of aggression to a minimum, the Cold War notwithstanding. We had an economic system that, while inequitable, had brought creature comforts to hundreds of millions of people. We had an educational system that had given millions of children the basic skills they needed to get along in society. We had no predators to fear (except the occasional human), and the fog of superstition about any number of natural phenomena (comets, great storms, eclipses) had been dissipated in the bright light of scientific rationality. We learned how to speak the language of probability. Randomness seemed to be in full retreat.

Like my notions of what I could control in my life, the idea that we had effectively buffered ourselves from randomness was an illusion. Events like 9/11, the Great Recession, and Trump’s first election shook things up, but it was the pandemic that reminded us just how precarious the system is.

Now we have leaders who are, bizarrely, actively dismantling the system that bought us some decades of relative complacency, and at the same time we are ushering a new age of AI that is already introducing new kinds of unpredictability into our lives. Climate change is turning “once in a century” events into annual catastrophes. Entropy is the new order of the day.

So this is my aspiration for 2026. I want to become acquainted with randomness, to find a way accept it into my life. This is a very hard thing for me. Having steadily relinquished a sense of control over vast swaths of my day-to-day existence, I’ve leaned on the comfort of probabilities and trends, on the idea that the past informs the present, and that we can still make choices to shape, or at least influence, the futures we want. I’ve counted on the notion that tomorrow will not be drastically different from today, just as today was not drastically different from yesterday.

But as our hunter-gatherer forebears and Thomas Cromwell knew well, putting my faith in the continuity of things is a fool’s errand. Thom Yorke said it: we don’t know what tomorrow brings. Accepting the full implications of this won’t be easy. But at 12:01 on January 1st, 2026, it seems like the wise thing to do.

It’s been more than six months since I sent out a post here, and what a time it’s been. I have some things brewing, I will start writing again, I am already writing again, but first I needed to hit the reset button and get the necessary and obligatory out of the way. We didn’t send out holiday cards this year, so our friends and family who are accustomed to getting our annual favorites lists will have to go without. But my therapist tells me I should seek out opportunities for feeling joy, and one of the things that gives me the greatest joy is foisting the music I’m loving and the books I’m reading onto other people. (I guess I should think of it as “sharing” instead of “foisting,” and “with” instead of “onto,” but the way I said it feels more true.)

I shared a couple of playlists earlier in the year—please give them a listen if you haven’t—and a few of the songs on those lists have made it onto my end of year list because they deserved it, but there’s plenty of new stuff to share as well. If you aren’t yet listening to the album Getting Killed by Geese, which provided the title for this post, you need to get on that asap. I turned fifty-five in 2025, so I’ve included fifty-five songs on my Spotify and Apple Music lists. One of the genuinely great things about the world we live in now is that I can keep increasing the number of songs on my list year over year and never even get close to the bottom of the well. More and more talented people keep putting their music into the world, and contrary to much popular and critical opinion, the best of that music just keeps getting better.

As usual, my tastes incline toward noisy and melodic guitar-based music with a smattering of electronica, R&B, folk, rap, and pop. The list starts off abrasively because that’s generally how the year felt, but as it goes on there are plenty of sunny melodies, shoegazey guitars, and stirring vocals that go down easier. (One of my top three songs of the year, “Julia’s War” by Hotline TNT, is no longer on Spotify because the band has pulled all of their music from that platform, so it’s not on the list.) I didn’t include music that was recorded years ago but only released this year—nothing, for example, from Bruce Springsteen’s monumental trove of “lost” albums. I didn’t get around to listening to a ton of stuff that I know I’ll like, such as Jeff Tweedy’s triple album and Lady Gaga’s latest pop extravaganza. And there is no easy way for me to share a song from of the year’s most celebrated and mind-blowing albums, the self-titled collection by Los Thuthanaka, so here’s a link to the full album on Youtube.

Also not on the list: a local Portland artist named Scout Arbor released their first EP in 2025 but it is only on Soundcloud. Here is a link to their song “Pandora”.

Here is the playlist:

Spotify

Apple Music

One more note about my year in music: I spent a big part of it immersed in the music of the 1960s. It’s a decade I thought I knew extremely well. Later this week, I will put together a playlist with some of the songs that were new to me. In 2026, I intend to do the same with the music of the 1970s.

***

As for books, instead of a top ten list I decided just to share the list of everything I read this year.

For those who like stats, I am on track to finish 76 books in 2025, which may be a personal lifetime record, although since I only started tracking my reading a few years ago, I can’t be sure. If I’ve ever matched that number, it would have been back in my high school or college years. Of the 76, 55 were fiction and 21 non-fiction; 37 by male authors, 35 by female authors, and 4 by man-woman writing teams; 14 by people of color; 8 dealing with queer content by notably LGBTQ authors; 63 published since 2000, and the rest published in the 20th Century. All of them were books I was reading for the first time.

A few particular factors affected my reading choices this year. I wanted to (and did) read all the books I received as gifts for Christmas 2024, which was a hefty pile. I also wanted to continue slowly making my way through the (literally) hundreds of books we’ve had on our shelves for many years, sometimes decades, that somehow I’ve never read—hence Death Is a Lonely Business, As I Lay Dying, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Ministry of Fear, No Ordinary Time, and The Good Soldier. And I have a few long series I’m working through—Mick Herron’s Slough House spy novels, Charles Todd’s Inspector Rutledge mysteries, and Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee mysteries—that make repeated appearances.

I’ve put a star next to the books that I would have considered putting onto a top ten list had I tried to make one. Consider them my top 29.

Without further ado, in the order I read them:

Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson

*A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro

*Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Women’s Hotel by Daniel Lavery

*Stay True by Hua Hsu

Dead Lions by Mick Herron (Slough House book 2)

*The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman (Leaphorn and Chee book 2)

*Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad

Death Is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury

*The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

The Darkness Manifesto by Johan Eklof

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The Bookshop by Evan Friss

The Legendary Scarlett and Browne by Jonathan Stroud (conclusion of YA trilogy)

*James by Percival Everett

Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

Legacy of the Dead by Charles Todd (Inspector Rutledge book 4)

*At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien

*The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree (Legends and Lattes book 2)

*Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

Listening Woman by Tony Hillerman (Leaphorn and Chee book 3)

*Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Real Tigers by Mick Herron (Slough House book 3)

*The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

Blood Test by Charles Baxter

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

*Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson

The Witchstone by Henry H. Neff

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

Watchers of Time by Charles Todd (Inspector Rutledge book 5)

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

The Rivals by Jane Pek (Verifiers book 2)

*The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

*The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

People of Darkness by Tony Hillerman (Leaphorn and Chee book 4)

The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

*The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Shadow of the Leviathan book 1)

The Black Death by John Hatcher

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

*The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran (conclusion of the amazing Claire DeWitt trilogy)

Beaverland by Leila Philip

*The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (sequel to The Sympathizer)

*Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

*The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Diniman (first in a series)

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro (Charlotte Holmes book 2)

*The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (Shadow of the Leviathan book 2)

Holy Hell by Elizabeth Sims

*Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

*Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

*Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

*No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Unnatural Magic by C. M. Waggoner

*The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

A Fearsome Doubt by Charles Todd (Inspector Rutledge book 6)

How Do We Look by Mary Beard

The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

*Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks

Spook Street by Mick Herron (Slough House book 4)

*Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

*Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (currently reading)

In 2008, I left the doomed Midwestern book and music retailer where I’d worked for the entirety of my adult life and took a job at a large, hip, fast-growing, high-profile company on the far end of the continent. (Because I still work there and don’t want to draw undue attention, I’m not going to name it, but it’s not hard to find my breadcrumbs on the internet.) It was my first experience as a corporate manager, a step up career-wise in numerous ways. The role was nothing I could have imagined myself doing ten years earlier (my 28-year-old self would have been somewhere on the spectrum between bewildered and enraged), and the company where I’d landed was in nearly every respect the polar opposite of the quiet, insular book business I’d left behind. I was, to say the least. outside my comfort zone. But the pay was great, the company was thriving, and my prospects, as they say, were bright; it felt imperative that I make it work. I might have come into the job a square peg, but I pragmatically and assiduously set about the task of grinding down my corners so I could fit into my new round hole.

I’d been in my new job less than two months when the economy went into meltdown. We had just bought a townhouse in Oregon, and our house in Michigan was still unsold, so in the blink of an eye we had two underwater mortgages, maxed-out credit cards, and the significant probability that I would lose my new job with no possibility of going back to my old one. I’d sweated through a couple of layoff cycles at my previous company, but the stakes this time around were so much higher.

As it happened, I made the cut, but a person who reported directly to me and who’d been with the company for several years lost his job. I did not have to deliver the bad news to him—I wasn’t even told he was on the list beforehand—and after he came out of the conference room with the papered-over windows, eyes full of pain and anger and shame, all I could think to do was offer feeble expressions of hope that he would be okay.

It wasn’t until after the cuts were done that managers like me were given talking points on what to say to those who remained. The specifics are lost to time, but having gone through several more layoffs and reorganizations over the last sixteen-plus years, I can be sure that some or all of these words would have been included:

Organizational transition.

Change keeps us strong. Maintain competitive edge. Challenging marketplace conditions.

Sad to say goodbye to valued colleagues. Complex feelings. Valid feelings.

Change feelings curve. Everyone has their own journey.

Best thing we can do is focus on the work. Our employees are our strength.

How we show up makes the difference. Again: focus on the work.

This is how we win.

My own manager would have said these things to me, and I’m sure I did my best to follow the script for my own team. That first time, when the global economy was on the brink and I keenly felt my family’s financial security on the line, I probably conveyed the message with sincerity and authenticity, in a tone that would have verged on pleading: "My ask is that you please focus on the work so that we all still have jobs six months from now.”

We showed up. We focused on the work. The “complex” feelings people were feeling, having been validated, were swept under the industrial carpet. The economy didn’t completely collapse and the company rebounded. My team grew as if the cuts had never happened, and I felt like I’d passed an important test.

* * *

There were more tests to come.

I went through management training, where I learned that to be a successful manager I would need to do a number of contradictory things simultaneously well. I needed to build trust with the people on my team, and also I needed to maintain a separation from the team and shouldn’t think of myself as their friend. I should be authentic, and I should be a positive conduit and amplifier of senior leadership directives. I had a responsibility to bring out the best in the team and also keep their expectations for raises and promotions in check. The most important part of my role was to be in service to the needs of my team, and the most important part of my role was my responsibility for ensuring the team delivered. I should look for opportunities for my team members to grow and learn new things, and I should deploy my team’s skill sets to maximize productivity. I must engender a “one-team” mentality, and I must treat full-time employees differently from contract employees due to liability concerns.

After I’d been in my job for a little over a year, a large and arduous multi-year project to implement a new financial system that had been in the planning stages for months finally got off the ground. The work accelerated quickly, and my team was given a tough deadline to deliver a sizeable number of functional specification documents. The people on my team did not think the deadline was realistic, and I agreed with them. I took our objections to the leaders of the project. “The deadline is the deadline,” they said. “You have to motivate the team to get it done.”

I know now that I could have pushed back. Reason and realism were on my side, and deadlines are always negotiable. I could have saved my team a lot of stress and lost weekends if I’d put their concerns and welfare first. But with all those contradictory directives about what it took to be a good manager rattling around in my head, I acquiesced and instead issued the team a challenge. I told them that I’d been sporting a full beard since the age of sixteen, and never in that time had I gone clean-shaven. My wife and children had never seen me without facial hair. My beard was something that just about everyone I knew thought of as a core part of my identity. But, I told them, if they managed to meet the deadline, I would shave it off.

I didn’t think it would work. The deadline was ridiculous, and the payoff for the team seemed so trivial. But somehow it worked. They delivered, and I had to pay up.

After the deed was done, as I stood looking in the bathroom mirror at a chin I hadn’t seen in more than two decades while our kiddos made sounds of distress, my wife said, “You look like your mother.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Actually,” she said, reconsidering, “you look like a middle manager.”

I’d like to say this devastating remark triggered an epiphany, that I immediately recognized the need to stop fitting myself into the role the company expected me to play. Certainly, the 28-year-old part of me recoiled at the stranger in the mirror. But also, I’d passed another test, I’d hit the deadline, and part of me felt good about that. Anyway, I still needed the job, so I stayed in it and did what I was told I needed to do. Apparently, based on my annual reviews, I did it well, but honestly I never could tell.

I might have continued on this way indefinitely if the team had been able to achieve some kind of steady state. But there never seemed to be a finish line for anything. Over time, I couldn’t ignore the steady corrosive drip of unrealistic demands, the way that each hurdle we surmounted only meant that the bar would be set higher next time. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the bizarre corporate logic that insisted an arbitrary project plan, or the company’s earnings per share trend for that matter, was more important than people’s well-being. Before the project was done, one of my team members, a kind and anxious man with two kids the same age range as our own, would have a seizure brought on by stress and exhaustion. By then, after three years in the role, my hair, and the beard I had grown back, had started to turn prematurely gray.

* * *

My early experiences as a manager of people were, among other things, a crash course in the theory and practice of what I’m going to call depersoning. I’m defining depersoning as the deliberate process of reducing individual people in a given situation to their relevant properties—their roles, status, demographics, or other descriptive attributes—so they can be managed, manipulated, or discarded. It’s in the same family as dehumanization and depersonalization, but different from both. Dehumanization has a strong implication of othering—we are human, they are subhuman—whereas depersoning sidesteps the question of humanness altogether and has the same effect on all the persons involved. Depersonalization can be an important precondition for depersoning, but it can also be a helpful psychological tool for understanding complex situations and having empathy for the perspectives of other people. (That person doesn’t hate me personally, they’re just having a bad day.)

Depersoning, on the other hand, is entirely reductive, a truncation. It abstracts and averages out with the express intent of bringing a false simplicity to complex situations. It denies the relevance of individual experience in order to make “difficult” decisions easier. Depersoned people can become functionaries, moved around interchangeably according to their common traits. They can be reorg’d. They can be let go with the illusion of no consequences.

Lest you think I’m verging on some kind of Ayn Randian rant or am about to start singing the praises of Elon Musk, fear not. This has nothing to do with specialness. I have plenty of thoughts about hyperindividualism that I’ll save for another time.

I should also note that I have no problem with, for instance, the statistical methodologies of the social sciences. It would be absurd to deny that looking at groups of people in the abstract on a mass scale can yield extremely valuable insights. For instance, we don’t need to know the details about every Black family’s individual experience of real estate redlining during the Great Migration to see the effects of the policy at large on Black generational wealth when compared to that of White families. (Redlining itself, incidentally, seems more like an example of dehumanization.)

What I’m talking about when I talk about depersoning is a specific bureaucratic process that has become so non-controversial in the corporate capitalist world that people hardly even notice when it is happening to them. What I was being trained and encouraged to do in those early years of my management career was to deperson myself and the people on my team. Not all the time, of course, but absolutely and without question in those tougher moments, when whatever was happening felt, on a basic personal level, wrong. Depersoning is the way managers are trained to accommodate what we find hard to tolerate.

Corporations, being abstract legal and financial constructs themselves, depend on depersoning to function. This is one reason why corporate culture has so many words that mean “person” or “people,” so that the words themselves can be easily avoided. People employed by the corporation are, of course, employees. They are also team members, colleagues, staff, workforce, headcount, full-time equivalents (FTEs), and contractors or external temporary workers (ETWs). They are identified by their roles, their positions, their job codes. Depending on their hierarchy level, they may be for example 35s, 40s, 45s, or VPs. In the context of a budget, they are line items, spend, fixed costs. In the office, they’re badges, desks, butts-in-seats. Online, they’re network accounts, login IDs, and user roles.

I cannot tell you how many times a day I hear all of these different synonyms for “person” rolling off the tongues of my colleagues, and yes, from my own tongue as well. In his Broadway show American Utopia, David Byrne said something to the effect that what people find most interesting in the world is other people, and on one level I find it heartening that this seems to hold true even in an environment where we are encouraged to see each other as the corporation sees us, not as we would want to be seen ourselves.

But I wonder about the broader effect of corporate depersoning in a world that has been dominated by corporations for over a century. I wonder to what degree the logic of the AI arms race is enabled by depersoning, how our dependency on algorithms devised by people working for corporations has encouraged us in our daily lives to accept our own depersoned condition. I wonder if we still see each other or even ourselves as people first, or if in more and more areas of our lives we have unwittingly adopted the corporate perspective that we are, in essence, only what the corporations value—what we do and what we consume.

* * *

I am still a middle manager at the corporation that made my hair turn white, though I do my best not to look the part—I wear tatty flannel shirts and secondhand jeans and sneakers with holes wearing out in the big toe area, and my beard is often unkempt. I do my best not to act the part either. I make a conscious effort to use person words when I refer to people. When I have tough news to give the team, as I did a couple of weeks ago when some of our people lost their jobs in another round of corporate belt-tightening, I don’t sugarcoat it, I don’t rationalize it, and I don’t follow the corporate script. I let my feelings show. I like to think I have reclaimed my square peg identity.

I won’t say “focus on the work” any more. Instead I say, “Take care of yourself. Focus on doing what you need to do for your own well-being.” I say, “Stay in touch with the people who lost their jobs.” I say, “I hope things will be better in the future. For now, we will see what we can do and look for joy where we can find it.”

My personal project, for as long as the company will let me do it, is repersoning the teams I work with. Though I can empathize with the person I felt I needed to be in my late 30’s and early 40’s, I still feel the need to make a kind of penance. It’s slow, hard restorative work that can only be done one person at a time. But right now it feels like one of the most important things I can do—to say to the people I work with, I see you.

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to note that I do in fact have anxiety. This is the diagnosis my therapist has provided to my insurance company so that it will cover my therapy. The insurance company needs to know how I am broken so it can approve the cost of me being fixed. Anxiety is how I am broken. Anxiety is my disorder.

Anxiety, to be honest, is kind of a cop-out as disorders go. It’s like calling salt a spice. There are so many more exciting flavors. Why couldn’t I have had oppositional defiant disorder? Now that’s some Hot Ones shit. Couldn’t we all use a little more of that fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me energy in our lives?

But anxiety is the thing that, per the DSM-V definition of disorder, causes me “distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities,” and so that is what I’m using therapy to fix. Sorry, not “fix.” Address. Explore. Understand. Manage. Because surely the point of therapy is not to make the anxiety go away. I’m not even sure I want it to go away. Salt may be boring, spice-wise, but it does make things taste better. For those in the know, anxiety isn’t just a way of seeing the world, it’s a way of life. Or, put another way, it’s the surest way I know I’m not dead inside.

Also, it’s the thing that makes being alive sometimes feel like my head is caught in a meat grinder while my guts are being soaked in sulfuric acid. This is I think what the DSM means more or less by “distress.”

The point of therapy, I know, is to help me deal with the distress, to reframe my situation, find ways to co-exist with my anxiety so that my mental health and life don’t unravel. If I use it well, in theory, I’ll find it easier to compartmentalize my reactions, keep a level head, and accommodate myself to reality.

But here’s where I run into a bit of a problem. Because a lot of things right now are legitimately fucking distressing. Big existential things like climate change, mass ecocide, and American fascism. Medium real life things like the financial cuts my employer is making which are hitting uncomfortably close to home and may result in my getting laid off in the next few weeks. Small personal things like the fact that there is a wait time of over a year to get into a dermatologist to treat this eczema (probably anxiety-induced!) on my leg that periodically drives me bonkers. All of which points to the reality that the important systems that govern and support our lives are under stress and starting to crack up. Which in turn prompts the question, which people have been asking in one way or another for over a century now: where is the real dysfunction—in the world, or in my response to it? Am I the disordered one? Or am I responding rationally to an intolerable situation?

* * *

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the tight coupling between the concepts of disorder and accommodation. In a recent column, M. Gessen talks about how we are at a dangerous point, one they experienced on several occasions in Putin’s Russia, where we are beginning to become numb to our own sense of shock and outrage at the transgressions of the Trump administration. This numbness paves the way for our eventual accommodation to a situation of extreme disorder that feels too big to change or too scary to challenge.

Gessen uses the word normalization, but I think accommodation is a more accurate word for what is happening in this moment. Normalization implies a kind of harmony, a broad and uncontroversial acceptance of the way things are. By and large in the last decade-plus in the US, we have normalized things like smartphones, streaming services, and gay marriage. Accommodation, by contrast, acknowledges a fundamental disharmony, a friction. During that same time period, we have accommodated social media as a sometimes-useful tool in our lives, but it remains for many a source of angst and disruption; we tolerate its toxic shittiness without fully reconciling ourselves to it. On the plus side, accommodation leaves room for dissent or even Bartleby-like refusal. On the minus side, accommodation can create schisms within ourselves. (The show Severance takes this to a logical extreme conclusion with the concept of innies and outies.)

Anxiety and accommodation are conjoined twins. The worse things get, the more assiduously we find ways to accommodate the dysfunction all around us just so we can get through the day. But none of it—none of it—feels normal, and it hasn’t for a long time. These are the conditions where anxiety thrives. The cognitive dissonance is wearing us down.

Or, okay, I’ll just speak for myself. The cognitive dissonance is wearing me down. The friction is shifting me, little by little, into a position where accommodation itself begins to look intolerable, where open dissent and loud refusal seem like the only viable options. I keep looking to people in high-profile or leadership positions—senators and CEOs, university presidents and celebrities—to set the example, to openly reject accommodation as a strategy, but with a few exceptions, most seem to be prepared to surrender the fight before it’s even properly begun. I know this is normal; the people we think of as “leaders” are almost universally one step behind the crowd, just trying to keep up. But it’s making me angry, corrosively angry. It’s making me say “Fuck yeah” when I walk past a sign in someone’s window that says “Bring back the GUILLOTINE.” It’s making me think oppositional defiant disorder might be a no-regrets lifestyle choice.

I’ll be honest. I don’t know what to do with any of this. Part of me feels like I’ve slipped into a trap that the Steve Bannons of the world set specifically for people like me. Part of me thinks the most constructive thing I can do is to pick one thing I care about and just throw myself all the way into it. Another part thinks that things probably need to break, and break badly, before we will have the courage and determination to fix them, and so I should just focus on keeping the people closest to me safe. Part of me thinks I need to find a larger group to belong to, because sitting over here all alone with my capital-A Anxiety isn’t going to make anything better for myself or anyone else.

All these things are probably to varying degrees true. And it is also true that writing all of this down and putting it out into the world, weirdly, does help a little bit. I don’t know if anything I write here has any positive effect on anyone else, and a little bit of my anxiety brain loves to chew on that. But by putting these words in order, I’m putting my thoughts in order, and I’m making myself a tiny bit less disordered. Consider it the candle I keep lit for myself.

It’s taken me over half a century of living with anxiety to understand that I’m not the problem. (This, too, is the point of therapy.) And if you’re reading this, neither are you. Our broken systems and short-sighted policies and misbegotten theories and bad leaders are the problem. Our accommodations are the problem. And we don’t need to—we must not—continue accommodating ourselves to any of it.

One of the great pleasures of spending time marinating in older music is the refreshing shock of plunging back into what’s new, like jumping out of a hot tub into a cold swimming pool. There is so much good music coming out right now. This list is just a collection of some of the tunes that for me have stood out from the pack in the past few months. I’m consciously omitting entire genres (rap, R&B, electronica, top 40 pop) because they deserve their own spotlights, so more to come. As a result, most of this list sits somewhere on the indie rock/punk spectrum. If anything, these songs are proof that more than half a century after the MC5 yelled “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” there remains no end to the visceral pleasures of loud guitars, churning basslines, clamorous percussion, and dudes singing “Na na na na na.” The soundtrack to 2025 continues to be awesome.

“Swarm”, Tune-Yards

“Sickle Walk”, YHWH Nailgun

“Drop”, Tunde Adebimpe

“Emergency”, Deep Sea Diver

“Julia’s War”, Hotline TNT

“Freak Mode”, The Tubs

“Idiot Box”, Sharon Van Etten

“I Broke My World”, Alien Boy

“Can’t Pretend to Know”, The Murder Capital

“Event of a Fire”, Blondshell

“Gumshoe (Dracula from Arkansas)”, Youth Lagoon

“Henry, come on”, Lana Del Rey

“No Front Teeth (feat. Aldous Harding”, Perfume Genius

“Went on T”, Um, Jennifer?

“Jesus Wore Drag”, Skinner

“Store Policy”, Viagra Boys

“Baltimore”, Bartees Strange

“Lift Your Heads”, Bill Fox

“happiness (live)”, Adrianne Lenker

Spotify playlist

Apple music playlist

What I’ve got now is less a fear of flying, more a fear of crashing. I realize this is a fairly common anxiety, but it’s new for me. Intellectually, I know that despite recent newsworthy incidents, air travel on average remains extraordinarily safe, in particular compared with driving. Yet when we recently had to travel across state lines, I was insistent that we drive instead of taking planes, and we wound up covering more than 3,300 miles in six exhausting days. I have no regrets.

As Kelsey Piper explains in a recent article, the safety we have come to take for granted in air travel is the product of multiple systems working together, providing multiple layers of redundancy, so that if one system fails (such as the air traffic control system glitching for a couple of minutes), other systems will cover the breach and keep planes from crashing into the ground or each other. What the most recent incidents—crashes, near misses, manufacturing debacles, and outages—imply is that those systems are under stress and starting to unravel.

So while my fear is irrational by the numbers, maybe there is a rationality to my irrationality. Maybe historical data can’t adequately tell the story of what’s happening now. Maybe just because the skies are safe now doesn’t mean they’ll keep on being safe. And maybe I don’t want to be one of the unlucky ones who finds out the hard way what happens next.

***

What is happening to air travel is happening everywhere. The health care system took blows during the pandemic that it has yet to recover from, with chronic shortages of nurses, physicians leaving the field in critical areas such as obstetrics, declining enrollment in medical schools, and hospital closures creating medical deserts. The economy is at growing risk of stagflation as tariffs disrupt supply chains and jack up prices. With hurricane season just around the corner, FEMA’s own assessment is that the agency is not ready for it. One study found that deaths and hospitalizations from food poisoning doubled in 2024 versus 2023, suggesting that our food systems are also under stress. Anti-vaccination sentiments have reopened the door to diseases that were functionally eradicated from the United States for decades. With the collapse of federal funding for scientific research, an American brain drain has already begun. Of course all of this is happening against the backdrop of climate change, which threatens the very systems that keep humans and countless other species alive, and for which the US bears a disproportionate responsibility.

All of these problems are fixable. Not only that, we actually know what we need to do to fix them, for the most part. Rationality would dictate that we start fixing, and that we do it quickly.

Instead, we have a government that is actively, aggressively, some might say deliberately making all of these problems worse by attacking the foundations of rationality itself. In his second term, Trump has largely dispensed with using terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Facts don’t enter into the picture at all; Trump’s entire cabinet of crypto-fascist creeps operates in a way that is almost entirely, and proudly, divorced from reality.

We can’t help but be affected by it, even those of us with “Science Is Real” signs on our lawns, any more than Alice could help being drawn into the chaos of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. That feeling I used to get on airplanes, that feeling of existential wrongness? It’s back, only now it’s about everything, and it’s more or less constant.

***

I’m reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, the story of how Klein became obsessed with Naomi Wolf, whom she calls Other Naomi, during the pandemic. For years, people have confused Klein and Wolf, two public intellectuals of a similar age named Naomi whose writing for decades appeared in the same left-leaning platforms. That confusion became a personal crisis for Klein as Wolf plunged down the conspiracy rabbit-hole and became a regular contributor to Steve Bannon’s podcast, spouting wild assertions about Covid-19 vaccines that amounted to Black Mirror-style parodies of Klein’s own critiques of how corporations and people in power take advantage of crises to cement their wealth and control.

One of Klein’s greatest challenges was the realization that Wolf’s irrationality had a germ of rationality. Wolf’s notions of how vaccines work and the nefarious purposes for which they could be used were plainly bonkers. But “many of Wolf’s words, however untethered from reality, tap into something true.” Klein notes that “Big Pharma peddled the drugs that set off the opioid crisis, [so] it is entirely rational to be skeptical” that their motivations in pushing the vaccines might not have been entirely benign.

Klein is no anti-vaxxer; she notes that Covid-19 vaccine resistance likely resulted in a quarter of a million unnecessary American deaths. Her point is that people like Wolf and Bannon sensed and seized an opportunity to co-opt people’s reasonable caution about new vaccines developed at “warp speed” using a new technology by companies that had previously demonstrated a cavalier attitude toward the safety of their products in the name of making a quick buck. Wolf hitched people’s free-floating anti-Big Pharma sentiment to dark fever-dreams of conspiracies by elite cabals to create new concentration camps and “reset” the world. But you don’t need to believe in a globalist conspiracy to see there was something wrong about how the drug companies profiteered off of vaccines whose development was funded largely by public dollars.

Likewise, you don’t need to marinate in conspiracy thinking to have concerns about why someone like Elon Musk has used his position with DOGE to seek access to the Social Security and tax records of American citizens. Tech companies have not exactly proven trustworthy about how they use the gobs of information they gather from us through our own voluntary participation in their platforms. What might they do with sensitive private information we never consented to share? I don’t know, but I can’t believe it will be anything good.

***

Maybe I’m just being paranoid. But maybe paranoia is a rational response right now to a power structure that seems hell bent on dismantling the way our civilization functions without any clear plan for what would replace it, apart from consolidating money and power into fewer and fewer hands.

In the song “Territorial Pissings”, Kurt Cobain sang, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you,” a lyric that resonates even more strongly today than it did thirty-four years ago. (In that same song, he also said, “Never met a wise man / If so it’s a woman.” Which is also amazingly relevant.)

I’m not really worried about anyone coming after me personally; we are not (yet) living in a police state, and I am a creature of many privileges. But I am worried that those of us who care about things like democracy, science, social safety nets, climate change, reparations, women’s health, queer rights, and justice have been paralyzed, flattened, disarmed, that we don’t even understand what playing field we’re on anymore, that we are like high school nerds walking around with “kick me” signs taped to our backs, too demoralized to stand up for ourselves. I’m worried that our predominant mood is “overwhelmed.” I’m worried that actual genuine homegrown American fascism is winning because we are letting it win, and we are letting it win because we are more exhausted than afraid, because we aren’t afraid enough.

Am I saying we should abandon rationality, start lashing out in a wild panic, fight crazy with crazier? Not at all. We need to keep our heads and resist the allure of becoming unhinged. But we also need to keep our optimism, our sense of possibility, our confidence that a better, kinder society remains well within reach. And right now, we have to be a little bit irrational to be optimistic. We have to be a little bit off-center to see what is possible. We have to pay attention to that existential dread we’re feeling, not so we can wallow in it, but so that we can find the motivation to act.

We are not six miles up with only clouds and ocean beneath us. We are not trapped in this place where we find ourselves. We have our feet on the ground and our heads on our shoulders, and we can go anywhere and do anything.

Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you. Let’s. Fucking. Go.

This is a familiar problem for me. When events in the world or in my personal life get to be too clamorous—and both the world and life have been extraordinarily noisy in recent weeks—I struggle to maintain my ability to think, much less articulate, anything other than the most immediate, reactive, and banal thoughts (Elon Musk bad, weather cold, Trump criminal, I’m hungry). My horizons shrink, and with them my ability to be conscious of anything but the most short-term concerns. Writing is the place where I get to stretch out and exercise the analytical parts of my brain, so when those parts are feeling overloaded or short-circuited, it becomes nearly impossible for me to string sentences together in a way that achieves some larger coherent meaning. I get halfway into a piece and realize I have no idea where I’m going with it, I have nothing more to say that I haven’t already said, I have nothing to add that better writers haven’t already said in better ways elsewhere. I have no words. I feel like I might as well be banging two rocks together.

What usually comes next is a bout of self-recrimination and self-loathing. A real writer, I tell myself, would just write through it. But since the inauguration, I’ve noticed that many writers I follow have been relatively slow to respond to the ransacking of the U. S. government. The same has been true of many left-wing activists and politicians who in normal times would have been happy to casually shriek their outrage. While many of these folks seem to have found their voices again in the past week, it took them a while to get there.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Here’s a banal thought: we are living in the age of the instant half-baked response, and that is exactly why this country is where it is right now. Our President who wants to be King of America has long been the king of making unfiltered, unprocessed, unfounded, and frequently unhinged responses to everything that happens. He is the ultimate avatar of our always-online culture, which cannot let anything pass by without comment, which has lost the ability to comprehend multiple perspectives on any given issue, which is superpowered by emotion and abhors reason, and which is in a perpetual state of overwhelm. We’ve adopted a way of existing online that our brains are not equipped to handle, and now the King of Spam and the tech lords who made him possible are trying to make the real world look like the virtual one.

Some commentators say that Trump and his minions are “flooding the zone,” deliberately doing so many outrageous things that we can’t possibly react to them all, exhausting our ability to resist. This may be true, but it is also true that what they are doing looks a lot like what people’s social media feeds have looked like for the past fifteen years, a torrential shitstorm of troll-spawn clickbait calculated to provoke us. Unfortunately, we can’t just ignore these trolls; they are actively working to hurt people. But we don’t need to engage in the outrage economy that keeps them fed. In a time when instant hyper-polarized hot takes are the expectation, slowing down and being thoughtful can be an act of political opposition.

So maybe this is pure rationalization, but I’m choosing to think of my struggle to write during these past few weeks as a necessary silence, a way for me to get my bearings, find my resolve, and focus my voice. Those of us who care about things like human rights, climate change, scientific research, healthy ecosystems, social justice, public information, and the rule of law certainly cannot stay quiet for long. But if we simply join the cacophony, it is difficult to see how we differentiate ourselves from the chaos spewing out of Washington. When we agree to play on the trolls’ home field, we’ve already lost.

What is the alternative? I recently read Bryan Stevenson’s memoir, Just Mercy, about his experiences as a founder of the Equal Justice Initiative working to change the carceral system and free people from death row. Hard experience taught Stevenson that his organization simply wouldn’t be capable of helping everyone who needed help, and that for those cases they did take on, they would lose many of them. Despite their best efforts, many of their clients would be killed by the state. He had to learn how to be okay with picking his fights and concentrating his team’s scarce energy and resources on a relative handful of cases, which they pursued in the face of governmental corruption, willful incompetence, threats of violence, and basic meanness—a litany of evils that sounds pretty familiar these days.

The EJI has succeeded despite those demoralizing obstacles and has driven real criminal justice reform. They’ve done it not by firing off tweets or blasting out screeds on social media, but through hard, emotionally grueling nuts-and-bolts legal work. Stevenson makes it clear that a good deal of what powers him is pure moral outrage. But what makes him powerful is his clear reasoning, careful language, adherence to legal principles, and above all radical empathy. Those seem like some pretty solid bedrock elements for a resistance that is both effective and durable, which is something we did not have in the first Trump administration.

In “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall", a 63-year-old song with a corny title about a world full of horrors that hits like a lightning bolt in 2025, Bob Dylan sings, “I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” This is good advice. I’m going to take it.

Does music actually get better during terrible times? Or is it just a basic good thing that benefits from the contrast with everything around it? I suppose it doesn’t matter either way, as long as the tunes do their job of helping us stay grounded and sane.

So far, music in 2025 looks like it’s going to be one banger after another. If American democracy and the rule of law really are in their final, badly-written season, at least we’ll get an awesome soundtrack out of it.

“Speed Freak”, Youth Lagoon

“Room of Fools”, FKA twigs

“Idols”, Ela Minus

“Mirror”, The Weather Station

“Sanctuary”, Tamino and Mitski

“Breaking in Reverse”, jasmine.4.1

“Show and Tell”, Benjamin Booker

“Have Heaven”, Florist

“California Sober”, Victoria Canal

“Pitorro de Coco”, Bad Bunny

“Orlando in Love”, Japanese Breakfast

“Kermit & Gyro”, Daneshevskaya

“Operating at a Loss”, Delivery

“Sugar in the Tank”, Julien Baker and Torres

“Ankles”, Lucy Dacus

“Megaloner”, Circuit des Yeux

“Filthy Rich Nepo Baby”, Lambrini Girls

Spotify playlist

Apple Music playlist