Existential crisis or laundry?
These days, I guess it’s it’s both
These days it feels like I just can’t have a normal Saturday.
I wake up to a gaggle of creatures positioned around the room, anxiously awaiting the slow opening of my eyes in anticipation of breakfast. This makes me happy and for a moment, I enjoy the happy banter, the silly songs I sing them as my little four legged friends scramble into position as I fill their bowls.
The joyous reverie doesn’t last long. As I sit down with my morning coffee and make the mistake, we all do, I open up my phone and am reminded that the world that we live in now isn’t filled with the innocence and unconditional love of a beloved pet just happy for a bowl of kibble.
I sit outside in front of my apartment building with my coffee and my cigarette. Knowing that, while I enjoy the sensation of the first puff and sip of coffee, my neighbors don’t need to inhale all my smoke. This gives me the opportunity to observe the world waking up, people rushing off to work, people walking their dogs, the construction workers, pulling their tools from their trucks. Everyone just trying to go about their lives while the reality we all thought we built burns to the ground.
This morning’s onslaught of terror wasn’t just the fact that my country is indiscriminately bombing other countries because old white men don’t know how to do anything else. It came from an article I read about the impact of AI on industries and careers.
I think about my kids just beginning to make their way in the world, I think about the young people I see walking past with their dogs, oblivious to the reality that within the next couple of years the job they worked so hard to get will no longer exist. That the years we parents dreamt of, and inspired them to get an education for, will be for naught.
Because essentially, sooner than we think, the only jobs available to people will be those of laborers. And there won’t be enough of those to go around because who can afford to build houses, when nobody can buy them? Who can afford to grow crops when no one can afford the food.
This morning‘s coffee feels dark. Not only that, apparently, by simply writing this, I am considered a terrorist under the new cyber security rules being created by our government. You see, now, if I write anything that disparages our fascist leader, I’m now a domestic terrorist.
I’m not even sure what to do with any of this anymore. To be honest I suppose I’ll do my laundry, sweep the floor and take out the trash.
Yep, me too. Overcast, chilly, today, and I'm hard-pressed to think of anything I can do that will matter in these contentious times. So I cleaned the house, did laundry, shifted things around. Tonight I’ll rehearse with a couple other fossils, old rock and country. Try to sleep tonight and hope the nightmare is gone tomorrow.
That’s the hardest part of this moment. Once you see the patterns forming, you can’t unsee them. All we can really do is pay attention, prepare as best we can, and start building relational communities around us where people actually know and support each other. Because the people holding most of the power right now seem incapable of thinking beyond the next election cycle. The short-sightedness is staggering, and it leaves the rest of us trying to figure out how to live responsibly inside systems that are clearly wobbling.
If I’m being honest, I spend a lot of time wondering what the hell we’re actually supposed to do with that awareness. Seeing the pattern doesn’t automatically give you a roadmap. But it does make me more certain that the future will be shaped locally, in small circles of trust and cooperation, not by the same old power structures that got us here. And I’ll admit, there are moments when I’m quietly grateful I chose not to have children, because imagining raising them inside this particular chapter of history would keep me up at night. Mostly, though, it leaves me asking the same question many of us are asking right now: what do we build next, and who do we build it with?