Note from Holly: I’m running guest posts for the rest of August while I handle two legal messes I didn’t create — one with my landlord, one with Verizon — and try to keep my planned trauma recovery retreat on the calendar. For now, my Substack and art print income are going toward legal and moving costs. If you’ve been thinking about subscribing or picking up a print, this would be a great time.
I. Greetings, gentle readers. Today I’m here to raise the alarm about an insidious and profound risk to you, your welfare, your spirit. If you haven’t yet noticed, a toxic drip of take the blackpill is polluting our information stream. I want to persuade you to resist this poisonous muck so you don’t lose sight of your goals and values.
Those may well be exactly what you need to stay the course through dire circumstances, so it’s doubly important you hold them close.
If you’re already objecting that everything’s a mess, that it’s all breaking down, and there’s no point trying to build anything good anymore, I’m talking to you especially. You’re already in trouble. Lately I’ve encountered people using this narrative to avoid responsibility for more mundane issues, things they can and should handle. Guess what happens at scale when enough people shrug?
II. You may be asking, “Why should I listen to A Kat?” Let me provide some background. The story that follows gives necessary context, but I must keep certain aspects vague on purpose. Despite being a Millennial, I do not actually relish spilling my guts all over the internet. Especially on matters of this nature. I’ll suck it up, because I need you to know me.
You don’t know me yet. This is because I have failed to achieve several professional and personal objectives I should have completed by now. See, I was close. For a while there I was doing well, pivoting into a new career and gaining momentum across multiple areas of life.
Then, a few years ago, I started to have…problems. Physical problems that were merely annoying at first, then alarming.
We’ll skip the gory details, but the upshot is, I have been reduced to a shadow by a malady the current medical system is uniquely unsuited to handle: a collection of chronic, debilitating symptoms of uncertain origin. Since I know what prior judgments that can evoke given recent history (anything from “It’s long COVID/vaccine injury!” to “She’s faking to secure the diagnosis du jour!”), I’ll add that they’re most likely traceable to a cycle of musculoskeletal and then neurological injury and degeneration, not some exposure to microbes or materials. None of that is important. What you need to understand is the effect this prolonged decline has had on me.
I used to be, in brief, a person who did things. I once roamed as I pleased all over the US and even other continents. Now I hardly make it to the office. I have trophies and a championship ring from collegiate athletics. Now a simple movement gone wrong can wreck my day. Most of the time I’m only marginally functional as a human, so it’s hard to get anything done even when opportunities arise (and I’ve had plenty).
Between the issues themselves and the exhaustion of dealing with it all, it’s hard to think straight. Worse, since everything comes and goes, the looming threat of an incident lives in the back of my mind even while things are temporarily OK.
I’ve faced several serious challenges over my lifetime, but this situation is a special hell because it’s taken away the qualities that allowed me to deal with such challenges. That, in turn, has eroded my very identity as a capable person, especially as years slipped by with no solid answers for how to get better.
I’m a huge comic book nerd, so I can’t help but frame it in these terms: this feels like my “depowered” arc.
One of my favorite franchises is the X-Men. One of the original X-men was a guy named Angel whose mutant abilities depended entirely on two giant-ass feathered wings anchored to his back. When those wings were crippled and then amputated, Angel had no idea how to be. It no longer mattered that he was rich, handsome, and beloved. He was utterly lost. And it makes perfect sense why he threw it all away to serve Apocalypse as one of his four horsemen — if the devil himself showed up at my door tomorrow and offered to fix my body or give me a new superhuman one at the cost of every good thing in my life (and even now, there are many!), I’d be sorely tempted.
I’d always been focused on my future, perhaps excessively so. But fairly often these days my body frantically screams at me that I have no future, that the end is imminent (and since I’m still here, that means my body is lying to me, an extra layer of dysfunction on top of the rest). The only way not to despair in these dark and terrible moments is to stop caring what happens to me, and that’s what I began to do, but…I have to fight not to let it linger because deep in my heart, I know: that attitude will corrode the soul.
After all, if you don’t care what becomes of you, why do anything at all?
III. Enough of that. Let’s talk about our general experience of the world. If you’re like me or most of the people I know, you’ve noticed all kinds of things don’t seem to work too well these days. Maybe it’s increasingly crappy customer service, or technology that gets more adversarial with every new release. It’s a widespread sentiment. The term “enshittification”, once a staple of conferences and thinkpieces, has broken containment and entered common parlance.
In fact, everywhere you turn you are met with a litany of complaints about Present Day: You can’t buy a house. You can’t find a job if you don’t already have one. Trying to date is nightmarish. People don’t keep their commitments, as evidenced by flaking out and ghosting. And the price of basic necessities continues its climb.
But this kind of talk isn’t just “out there”, online. Familiar communities spread it too. If I may pick on my professional colleagues a little bit, I’ve been in many a meeting where someone bemoans the ills of late stage capitalism or the sociopolitical hellscape. It’s an unstated assumption that everyone is worn down and anxious and terrified either as a member of or on behalf of some marginalized group. (Bonus points if you have correctly surmised from the above that I’m an academic.)
It may seem I’m making light of these problems. Though I may rank the severity or salience of particular issues lower than others who are more concerned, on the whole I take it all seriously. People are struggling. That’s real.
But perhaps in part due to the violent dislocation of my own life these past few years, I am at some remove from this soup of sorrow. It washes over me, yet doesn’t penetrate. This unexpected inoculation against it has allowed me to see more clearly what defeatist perspective have done to others, and it’s not pretty.
People are losing the will to confront day-to-day problems, issues that hit close to home — things for which they should be responsible. Because hey, what does it matter anyway when we’re all boned?
It’s an excuse people use to avoid active participation in their own lives.
IV. When presented with a fatalistic outlook, I consider it within the context of history, including the distant past. That is, I’m inclined to take the long view. This could be related to my academic training. Before I switched fields, my area of study was ecology, evolution, and behavior, a discipline which depends on consideration of timescales and analyzes the effects of processes that unfold over millennia.
If you tell me that our current environment is especially bad, my question for you is, compared to what? The moment soon after the rise of modern humans when our effective population size was reduced to a few thousand individuals? You may object to that level of drama. Fair enough, we’ll keep it to the period of recorded history. Are we talking “in the path of Mongol invasion” levels of badness? How about in Europe at the height of the Black Plague? Or is it the middle of World War II and your city is being bombed?
Maybe your kid merely stepped on a nail and antibiotics aren’t widely available yet? That could be all right, because after all, chances are one or two of your ten sickly and starving children will make it to adulthood.
People living in all of these conditions continued about their daily business, sometimes assertively so. (Keep Calm and Carry On, anyone?) Not all of them made it through, of course, but some of them did, and that was enough. And if you think my historical comparisons are not relevant, remember this is in response to the hidden premise underlying doomerism: that our present situations are uniquely bad.
Even though there’s much in the modern world to be grateful for, I’m not going to give you the line that we’re living in paradise. I’m just saying chances are the people who got through the awful periods of yore were no better equipped to deal with them than you are for your life now, and they still made it.
V. So what do I expect you to take from all this? Well, first and foremost, responsibility. Personal responsibility is the antidote to the blackpill. It’s no stain on your record if you’re unable to solve disorder in your city as a regular Joe, but it is on you if you fail to dispose of your garbage properly or let your registration expire. (I can’t help but read this back to myself in Hank Hill’s voice.)
You are most tempted to throw up your hands and mutter about decline when you’ve let something in your own life slip through the cracks, aren’t you? Do this enough and it’ll become a self-reinforcing belief as your affairs fall into disarray. Knock it off.
But there’s a social aspect at play here too. As I mentioned before with my colleagues, demoralization spreads as people take for granted that others feel as helpless as they do and seek commiseration. Of course you are not responsible for others’ internal states — thinking that you are leads to terrible outcomes for you and them. However, you can set an example of resilience for others, or at least avoid contributing to the downward spiral.
If good things come your way, you’re allowed to be happy about it. The fact that someone somewhere is suffering doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your life. I’m not saying you should respond to a friend’s story of a specific problem with “actually my marriage is great and I just got a raise” apropos of nothing. But don’t be shy about drawing people’s attention to the things that are functional, that are improving, or at least that they can take charge of when the time is right. Being a positive influence is not an obligation, but all other things being equal, it’s noble. If you help buck others up, especially by relying on what’s real and true and beautiful, you should be proud of that.
In case the connection between my personal misfortunes and my admonition for you to spit out the blackpill is not yet clear, I will make it explicit. You’d think by this point I’d be clamoring for a Get Out of Jail Free card, right? I should be relieved, by some perverse logic, if everything is in a state of decline because then I’m off the hook for trying to get better. What’s the big deal if I let my long years of work to build a life and a name for myself come to nothing? If we were all doomed from the start, then it never would have worked out. I can give up my maddening quest to unravel what’s wrong with me, stop trying to get back to regular activities, maybe go on disability to absolve me from supporting myself. Rot on my couch without a shred of guilt.
I reject this with every fiber of my being. I roar in rebuke, “NO.” Even if all my efforts prove to be futile someday, I would rather have tried than never given myself a chance. That’s what it is to live. You know it too. You know, if you’re fully honest with yourself, the difference between living and merely existing. Do not value your brief time on Earth so cheaply as to deny yourself that dignity.
VI. “I Will Not Bow” is the title of a Breaking Benjamin song. It’s been one of my favorites from the moment I first heard it over fifteen years ago, and since then I’ve sung it hundreds of times. It’s not as straightforwardly defiant as the name suggests. Instead, it acknowledges that refusal to be broken has its own cost and meditates on the conflict between protecting yourself and leaving your mark on the world. (Not going to quote any lyrics here — just go listen to it.) But the underlying sentiment is still strength, or at least profound resilience, at its heart. Even in the face of doom.
It’s not possible to revamp your entire outlook on life if you have taken the blackpill. Fortunately, it’s not necessary. Rejecting fatalism and digging yourself out of the hole is yet another entry filed under “simple but not easy”. To get started, you merely have to do one thing. Find one thing that you can do that will practically improve your situation and commit to doing it. Although I suggest picking something with a high chance of success, even if it doesn’t work out, you’re signaling to yourself that you are invested in your own life. You are, in essence, ante-ing up so that you’ll be motivated to play the hand. The key is to do it in an area that matters to you.
My one thing is writing this. Yes, seriously. Writing is one of my core skills, essential to my profession, and also one of the abilities I’ve had nerfed. Indeed, completing this piece was difficult. Not because I didn’t know what to say, no. The thinking and planning side of things still works all right. But the actual mechanics, between being able to muster enough of my limited energy and sitting long enough to type, made it tough. Several would-be scholarly journal articles and the serial fiction Substack it might have been nice to shill to all of you have been scrubbed due to how hard it’s become to write. But that wasn’t the only obstacle. Because you see, since these trials dealt a serious blow to my confidence, I too now hear the voice telling me “it’s pointless to write, it makes no difference.” So I’m putting my money where my mouth is, modeling the behavior I want to see in the world, and fulfilling a commitment at a time where promising and following through has seemed a fool’s errand. I’m sharing my thoughts with you because I take them seriously. I do have things to say that matter. Chances are, so do you.
For the sake of full disclosure, though, I have to tell you I’m not doing this for you. Of course I wish you well, even if I don’t know you, and I hope you find value or at the very least entertainment in reading this. But I wrote this for myself. In fact, I always write best when I write for myself. You should do things for your own sake as well. Take your life seriously, then take charge of it. It won’t fix the world, of course. What it may be able to fix is you: if you feel brought to your knees, pick one of them up, and if you’re up on one knee then stand. I’ve shown you one way. I bet you can do better. Will you take me up on it?
A. Kat isn’t writing on Substack yet, but you can follow her here.