How To Endure the Unbearable
I believe that as Americans we’re all exploring an unbearability in our own ways, albeit some more consciously than others, united together in the collective doom our current predicament promises. At my job, I’m attempting to ensure that the tours I manage, which describe the first battle of the American Revolution, focus on themes of self-determination and unalienable rights through rigorous contextualization, although it’s proving to be a difficult task in many regards. In my free time, I’m reading the disgusting language of recent executive orders, witnessing the genocide of Palestinians, the war in Ukraine, tariffs and why they’re so dumb, and general European admiration for authoritarianism. And, just to keep things lively, my days are decorated by news of wildfires destroying Los Angeles, helicopters crashing into planes, AI’s cultural normalization while ignoring its environmental and social calamity, American concentration camps, more planes crashing out of the blue, and other splendid things organized through social media and internet sites designed not to inform us but to exploit our brains of their time and energy.
It’s an exceptional time in the sense that so many things are exceptionally fucking shit. And besides being a sensitive person with a pretty thin skin anyways, I believe that it’s important to be responsive to ones environment, to allow it to pierce you to reshape who you are and how you think. Myself from years ago would look at me today as a radical and extremist (which people I’ve previously met that are actually radical would scoff at), but I now see that younger version of myself as unobservant and idealistic. Who was he to be so naive? Because in a way, nothing has changed, and current events are simply a realization of dormant (to put it lightly), brewing (to put it less lightly), and active (to put it accurately) philosophies of carnage for the sake of power. But that’s not to say that we’re experiencing something inevitable. These current events are all choices (shoutout John Green), especially any phenomenon that may appear to some as out of human control, particularly climate change. Simply put, I’m paralyzed and scared. Asking “What can I do?” feels as futile as it is embarrassing as it is innocent as it is naive as it is hopeless. I mean even the fucking Kansas City Chiefs are in the Super Bowl again.
We all cope and take action in different ways, but in the words of a wise queen, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” I believe it’s crucial now for us all to take stock of what gives us pleasure, catharsis, and energy. I’ve thus compiled a short list of some of my personal practices that, even if my choices are different than yours, perhaps will give you pause to consider how you can take of yourself and others to make the world a better place:
1. Crack
Coffee was so 2011. Back then, mustaches were unironically tattooed on fingers, the Lumineers were activating women’s lesbianism like a bell makes Pavlovian dogs salivate, and nobody gave a shit about vinyl records. In this Brave New World of 2025, our diets require greater strength to endure the world, both in the qualities of our products and in what they allow our human bodies to achieve. In the words of Tom Waits, “Reality is for people who can’t face drugs.”, and coffee just doesn’t cut it anymore. Maybe best described as lukewarm water with a smidge of diarrhea juice spritzed in there, all forms of coffee are a concoction of microplastics, forced labor, and irritability incarnate. Meanwhile, crack is organic. It’s fun. It can be a substitute for pretty much every meal in the day if you allow it to, and it gets me to where I need to be physically, mentally, spiritually, metrosexually, figuratively, and sometimes literally. For example, I was informed by a nervous friend with wide eyes that I was hit by a car recently, but have become so impervious to the world’s qualms due to my friends Mr. and Mrs. Crack-Rock that I didn’t even notice the massive internal bleeding and loss of sensation in my entire right side. Or is that because I had a stroke the other day?
2. Ethel Cain - “Perverts”
Dread is the new escapism, and I find a familiarity and warmth in “Perverts” that is lacking in my otherwise complicated reality. Separate from the specific events occurring in our world, the feelings and atmosphere that Cain creates make me feel like a cinnamon bun cooking in an oven powered by love. I’m fascinated by Cain’s appreciation for the divine and holy, but rarely consider such themes and am instead enraptured by the desolate tones and dearth this project envelopes me in. While records like Ramleh’s “Hole in the Heart” or Primitive Man’s “Caustic” provide a cathartic release, or while John Oswald’s “Plexure” and This Heat’s “This Heat” are breezy pop bops that I dance the night away to, I have found great solace in a sublime space between life and inanimate patterns that “Perverts” actualizes. I’ve tried to explain this to my older colleagues at work multiple times, but I am apparently “getting a bit too real” and “interrupting the vibe” by doing so.
3. Reading Books
How the human brain can so instantly recognize a learned language is too often taken for granted. We automatically look at random scribbles and identify an ultra-specific meaning, informed by society and culture but understood to mean something unique through an individual’s learned experiences. How cool is that? I believe we ought to routinely celebrate that gift. Not only can it re-frame our brains and our understanding of others, but it can re-frame how we perceive our own brains, and how we perceive that perception, and also consider what overthinking is, and then cry. Anyways, here’s what I’ve been digging recently:
- Crockett Johnson, “The Purple Crayon”
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Message”
- Georges Bataille, “The Absence of Myth (Writings on Surrealism)”
- Emmanuele Coccia, “Philosophy of the Home (Domestic Space and Happiness)”
- Margaret Wise Brown, “Goodnight Moon”
- Ramin Jahanbegloo, “Nonviolence (An Idea Whose Time Has Come)”
In conclusion, I am not doing well, but that is largely due to my empathy for others weighing heavily on my shoulders and conscience. I’m lucky enough to be born into the circumstances allowing for my current existence, which is rich and white. Per usual, consequential world events have little effect on me as both a victim a perpetrator of this bubble that’s really more like an iron wall. Yet, the cognitive dissonance I’m feeling by witnessing the incredible pain of many in this country and around the world wrangles me in fits of confusion and hysteria. My mind feels primed to burst from my own hypocrisy.
Comedy has been a valuable construct in the past and present to counteract similar situations and emotions that we’re now facing and experiencing, where the guaranteed positive outcome of comedic narratives offers relief from present realities. But my brain will not currently allow for that possibility. Instead, I find energy and joy in being humorous, or in interpreting and reflecting an absurd and terrifying world in a more human and digestible form. My smile is thus quite wry, and acts as a filter which both obfuscates and clarifies the world. It’s always a possibility to see humor in something, and the humor that you find in anything is unique to you. It’s a choice to see it, recognize it, and use it to stay focused. It’s often hard to communicate, and the ease or struggle of that process offers us another choice to consider how others resonate or recoil from our perception.
I implore you to allow the humor of absurdity to pierce your perceptions and inform you how best to navigate this overwhelmingly unnavigable doom. Otherwise, we suffer by understanding our reality through the dominating decree of others, and can only truly begin to rebel by knowing that our lived reality is ours and ours alone. Control your own perception, think critically, and act accordingly. Stay strong my friends.
- Jackson