Elizabeth C. Haynes

Today is a day I want to document, because today I picked up the book I was working on back in late 2020 and decided to have a go at it again. And I don’t mean the book I was reading…I mean the book I was writing.

I published my first book in mid-2020 after laboring over it for more than five years. I think I was expecting something miraculous to arise from accomplishing this goal because it was also my fifth attempt to write a book. I was expecting a total life change, career change, focus change, purpose change. I thought I was finally doing the thing I was meant to do, and therefore all sorts of good would follow.

Except none of that actually happened, and I instead fell into a deep depression and creative void.

Yes, a number of people said my book made a difference in their lives. And this was truly gratifying and heartwarming, because it was the entire reason I’d created it. But what happened was that it didn’t make a difference in my life like I thought it would.

Nothing about my daily living changed after my book. My income didn’t change (in fact I actually lost money on that book, which is comical in a sad sort of way), my career path didn’t change, my sense of purpose (or lack thereof) didn’t change, my days didn’t change. In truth, what happened was that I’d gotten so discouraged by the publishing experience and my “failure” to be what I thought was a success, that I’d stopped writing altogether. For what ended up being years – the longest writing break of my entire adult life.

I think I was hoping to finally be something more than I was, and to escape from the corporate drudgery – which has always been what I think of as a necessary evil for my physical survival. These jobs have created varying degrees of unhappiness and suffering for me, and a feeling of being caged, and “success” for me would be to finally get out.

I was also hoping to become an “important” human on the planet who really made a difference for others, and who made something of herself in the accepted sort of way.

I guess it’s taken me a long time to understand that I am important simply because I am here and because I exist. And also that I am likely a small force in the world, not a large one, and that this is okay. Meaning, what I have to offer may be for smaller groups of people looking for something very specific, and therefore I may never find wide “commercial” success.

On many levels I am now totally fine with this. On other levels, I wonder how I can possibly perform this type of “smaller” work while maintaining an income I can live on.

I haven’t been able to answer that question in the 22 years I’ve been working post-college, so I continue to find myself in corporate environments because I excel at what I do and I can make a good living there. But I also continue to find disillusionment, and a feeling that I’m on the right path but I’m also not quite. It’s probably because I have allowed those jobs to steal too much from me – health, happiness, joy, creativity. I have also allowed those jobs to snuff out my creative work and to generate feelings of inadequacy that then produces a sense of inertia. Although I will say, a lot of my inertia lately has been because of a bunch of stress and uprooting and people dying and life.

I think step one is forcing myself to get back on my creative track, which is what I’m working harder to do now. We’ll see how consistent I can remain in the midst of a world that feels increasingly chaotic, dark, and distracting, but I’m going to try.

The next step? Well, I truly don’t know. I think l’ve reached a point where I’m waiting to see what comes after AI finally destroys the viability of my income stream. I know I’m on borrowed time, and I have moments where I’m terrified of the possible financial repercussions. But I also have a sense of wonder and hope about what may happen if that comes to pass. Would the dissolution of my income, and also of most replacement income streams, send me in a new direction? What would it be? Would it better support my creativity and my personal mission(s) on the planet?

I think it must. It has to. We are all here for a reason and for a mission, although I am still not really clear on what mine is. But I do know when I feel alive and when I do not. Up to this point in my life, most of my days have been spent doing a thing that makes me feel alive (writing) in environments that consistently do not. So I’m partway there I guess.

I wrote recently about dreaming new dreams and this is definitely one area that I am strongly leaning into. What was I put on Earth to do? Have I done part of it? Have I done very little of it? Have I now completed the internal part in preparation for an external part that is to come?

It’s interesting to think about, anyway. Helps distract me from the stress and fear of potentially losing my income stream and having to find a new way. But I know I will get the help I need when that happens. I always do. As long as I’m taking steps in the right direction.

Recently I’ve realized that life sometimes forces you to shift to a different version of a dream you had, or to even abandon a dream altogether.

I have an acquaintance who has long wanted to be an actress in Hollywood. She’s built her entire life and identity around acting…even though she’s in her 50s now, only gets the occasional low-budget TikTok gig, and isn’t all that compelling to watch in the stuff she posts online. I often wonder how much longer it will be before she finally realizes this particular dream is just not meant for her, and that she has to find a new version of it or try to focus on something else entirely.

I hope that doesn’t sound harsh, because I don’t mean it to be. It’s just that I’ve always had this belief that you should try and try and try…for a contained period of time. And “contained” could be weeks or years or decades, but at some point you need to pivot if you’ve exhausted every version of the dream you’re pursuing and are still hitting concrete cinderblocks. Sometimes you’re just in the wrong lane.

So for my acquaintance, maybe she’s supposed to shift slightly to be an acting coach, or an agent, or work in dialogue, or write scripts. Maybe she’s in the general vicinity of her dream but has never been able to go in the direction she’s meant to go, because she can’t let go of this one road. Or maybe she’s using her creativity in the totally wrong way and she’s supposed to abandon acting and do something completely different with her life. Again, since she hasn’t been able to let go of this one road, she hasn’t been able to explore other paths. And isn’t that a shame?

Which brings me to myself.

I’ve had a couple of dreams over my 45 years on planet Earth. Not many, to be honest, because most of the time I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing or why I’m actually here. But I will say my only real career dream has been to be a writer. This isn’t something “I always knew I wanted to be” or that I’ve done in my free time since childhood, but it is something I have a natural aptitude for, that is an important part of my creative expression, and that (perhaps most importantly) puts me into a flow state.

Anything that puts you into a flow state is something you are meant to do.

I’ve tried different versions of writing and have had varying success (technical writing, marketing content, ghostwriting, poems, a book), so I think I’m on the right track. But even though I would still love to be an author and poet, right now I’m having success as a technical writer, which means this is the road I’m supposed to be on. And I’m staying on it until it dead ends and I am guided by life to move onto another one. Or until life says I am ready for a different road.

This is not to say that all roads actually have an end, as a few people do one exact thing for their entire lives and that is their destiny, but I do know that my current one does. Not just because of the realities of our economic structures and the AI bullsh*t, which has dumped slime on all of our lives like Double Dare (anyone else remember that game show?!). But also because I feel in my soul that this particular road does have an end. I don’t know when or how, but at some point I will need to find another way forward. Most likely it will be time to pursue another version of this dream, but maybe it will be time find another one entirely – perhaps around the other activities that put me into a flow state (watercolor and tending to plants). I still have no idea, but I know that if I get out of the way and just let things unfold, life will help me figure it all out.

My other dream…well, this one is more in my face and is why I even started writing this piece. My other dream was to leave Texas (did that), move to the northeast (did that too), buy a house here (can’t seem to do that), and settle into a new community near the water (not sure if that’s feasible anymore). In other words, my new dream version of home was to plant myself permanently in a place of my own, build a big garden, feed the birds and squirrels, make friends, and grow old with the ocean breezes streaming in through the windows from across the Sound.

It’s been a difficult time as I’ve started to understand, over a lot of trial and error for 3.5 years, that maybe this particular dream isn’t for me. That maybe I’m like the acquaintance I mentioned earlier who wants desperately to be an actress, but it’s seemingly just not in the cards for her. Well, I think this dream may not be in the cards for me either. And unlike my writing dream where I’ve had success with different versions, so I know I’m at least headed in the right direction, it seems like I have to totally give up on this one because I’m hitting blocks every way I go.

I think over the last month, as we abandoned our home purchase search again because the math just isn’t mathing and the home we so wanted isn’t materializing, I’ve finally found more acceptance about having to find a different life and a different version of home. And this gave me the space to start pondering new dreams.

What is my life going to be now, I wonder? I don’t see the version I’d planned for anymore, but I also don’t see anything at all yet. So I’ve started trying different things on to see how they feel. Maybe I’ll do this, maybe I’ll do that, maybe I’ll live here, maybe I’ll live there. Maybe my life will look and feel like this instead of that.

And actually, it’s kind of fun to ponder a different future now that I’ve finally let go of what isn’t meant for me. It’s exciting to have the chance to create new dreams in my forties.

I guess the lesson in all of this is that life is more intelligent than our human brains and our fickle emotions. Sometimes we are steered from the things we think we want and moved instead toward the things that would be even better for us. And I think that’s the key: we have to trust that, when our dreams don’t come to fruition, something even better is planned for us. And then we have to decide to be ok with it and get out of the way.

Everything usually works out when we finally release what isn’t working, and decide to be open to something else.

I haven’t been very motivated to do…anything…as of late. And I don’t think I blame myself for those feelings, or anyone else who is just trying to get out of bed in the morning while the world is falling apart/burning down/insert your own destructive verb here.

But I have done one thing that I think is helping me with my motivation to come, and that is:

Moving my art table.

People always talk about how a change of scenery either can help (because sometimes you need a fresh start), or doesn’t help at all (because wherever you go there you are). But I am of the former camp. I feel this way because I left Texas just over 3.5 years ago and moved to the northeast, and that massive change of scenery had a really positive impact on my life. Yes, wherever you go there you are, but sometimes your scenery is directly degrading your quality of life.

Anyway, back to the art table.

When we moved to our current rental back in October, I put my table where it had been at our last place – in my office. Except this office was way smaller, so I was almost bumping into it when I worked at my desk every day. And it was also sandwiched between the litter boxes and the wall, which meant that whenever I painted, I was not only staring at my work computer but I was also inhaling wisps of kitty litter.

No wonder I wasn’t feeling motivated to paint.

After pondering things over for a few weeks, I finally proclaimed to my husband that I’d like to move the table downstairs. I was pretty sure about the move by this time, and I had to be, because it’s a heavy table and there was no going back up the stairs with it. So on a Monday evening a few weeks ago, we each grabbed an end and headed toward the stairs.

“Ok hang on, let me prepare myself before we go.”

So we stood there, at the top of the stairs, waiting for Elizabeth to find her Herculean strength while she was also staring at her husband’s adequate biceps.

It helped that he went first, because he took on most of the weight. But as I mentioned, this is not a light table. I felt my muscles burning as we moved down, step by step, but there was no stopping because…it’s stairs. How do you put a rectangular table, with the metal legs wide apart, down on the stairs without also losing your balance and scratching up your landlord’s floor?

It took everything I had to not drop that table when we finally made it to the bottom, because I’d hit my max a few steps back.

“Phew. Ok give me a minute.”

Eventually we got going again and set the table down in its final destination – the living room. Now this rental is unlike all of our others in that it has a pretty large living room, and there was some unused space by the front windows. We’d capitalized on it last year for our Christmas tree, but otherwise there was nothing there except an air purifier and a small storage cube from Ikea that Jack sat on to look out the window.

After we got done with the table, I did several more trips to move the two chairs, the small lamp, and the tray of supplies that I’d kept on the table itself. I moved the Ikea cube to the small hallway by the half bath, and then I quit until another day. (Getting all of my remaining supplies out of the upstairs closet and moving them would require several more trips up and down, and 45-year-old me decided, “Nah, I’m good.”)

Fast forward to now, and I’ve got my art table right by the window and in the room where I relax at night. It’s not by my work computer anymore nor is it by the litter boxes, although Jack does leave his fur all over the chair since it’s his new favorite spot. It’s been great, too, because the setup has filled out the previously empty section of the living room while also making painting feel exciting and attractive again.

And that is step 1 when you’re lacking motivation: having some sort of spark, which at some point finally gets you going again.

I’ve only painted once in that time, and it felt very primitive because it’s been several months. But my one evening session was more than the zero sessions I’d had since I’d painted my dad a snowy forest in early December, and I know I’m now primed to paint some more.

So back to the whole change of scenery thing. Yes, I am firmly in the camp that sometimes you need to change your scenery when you’re feeling depressed, uninspired, stuck, unproductive. Sometimes that scenery is moving across the country, changing jobs, changing homes. But sometimes it’s just moving your furniture around.

It really can be that simple.

Have you ever thought about how none of this is real? How when you drive from one state to another, or fly from one country to another, there is a border but yet there isn’t. It doesn’t actually exist anywhere you can see; it’s just something made up by the humans. We’ve decided to create imaginary lines across planet Earth – our collective home – that fall exactly on the left side of this tree, in the middle of that river, on the other side of this hill, or right through that blade of grass.

We fight wars and we hate our neighbors because of invisible lines. Kind of crazy right?

And then sometimes I open my banking app and I look at my balance. As I’ve gotten older and as technology has changed our world, money feels increasingly illusory because I almost never actually hold any of it in my hands. Back in my teenage years, when I only had a seldom-used savings account, I took a paper check with some numbers on it to the bank and I came out with bills, which I could spend somewhere else and get something in return. And yet even then, all of that was so much make believe.

Who decided those little green bills had value? Why not rocks? Why not feathers? Why not pieces of cotton? No, the little green bills with pictures of men I’d never met on them had the power to feed me and clothe me and put a roof over my head. Oh and only the real ones, not the fraudulent ones that look just like them.

These days I pull out a plastic card that manipulates those numbers (no more little green bills), and the only reason the numbers exist or mean anything is because we’ve decided they do. We have even gone so far as to build an entire economic machine around numbers, which used to be backed by something physical (gold) but I don’t even know if they are anymore.

Who decided gold was valuable anyway? Why not brass? Why not ore? Why not aluminum?

Humans perpetuate every single make-believe structure we’ve devised, and the people who stand to gain the most from our fake systems are the ones who perpetuate the exploitative parts.

I think it’s normal to have a hierarchy of some sort when you look at all species on planet Earth. If you put up a bird feeder, you will quickly see the social order at play. But what isn’t normal is for one bird to hoard more seed than he can eat while all the other birds around him starve. What isn’t normal is for a squirrel to charge a fee for the other squirrels to share a habitat, or to live in any of the surrounding habitats. What isn’t normal is for an eagle to hit a dividing line where they are no longer allowed to fly, because they weren’t born on the other side and therefore can’t enter unless they pay a fee and don’t overstay their welcome.

This is all fake, you guys. All of it. The problem is we’ve devised both good fake things (laws) and bad fake things (paying to exist), and we currently have an excess of bad fake things while all of the good fake things are no longer being enforced by certain humans, because they profit off of them too much and are drunk on power.

I say this because I’m sitting here watching our laws, the good fake things we’ve collectively agreed to abide by as a specific version of human called “American,” suddenly cease to exist simply because a small group of those humans decided they could profit more if they got rid of them. It is a call to become more introspective about not only how none of this is real if we don’t decide it is, but also how some of this fakeness was devised to help us live more harmoniously with one another. Humans have a unique capacity for hatred and corruption.

I think it’s also a call to redesign some of these fake structures into something that is more aligned with who we are at our core (a mammal, one species, one group) and that respects the only home we have. There will always be a need to create some structures in order to contain the worst of humanity, and there are social orders in nature to do the same. But we need to make sure that our fake structures actually make sense as Earth citizens and as social mammals who depend on this planet (and on one another) for survival. We need to not allow a small group of humans to harm the rest of us, as seems to happen time and time again from corrupt political structures to repetitive wars to abusive corporations.

I don’t know why we seemingly always choose to build our fake structures based on fear, exclusion, hate, dominance, and power. Sometimes I get really distraught about it because it feels like insanity. And then other times I remind myself that none of this is actually real. I’m here to learn, to grow, to impact the planet where I can, and then to return to wherever I came from so I can proceed onward.

That’s what my grandmother told me anyway, the time she came to me in a dream more than a decade after she’d died. “I’m working to get to the next level,” she’d said, and somehow I understood what she’d meant.

I wish we could do the same here on Earth. We seem to just repeat ourselves over and over again, century to century, and never learn a damn thing.

It’s a Saturday and I’ve been up since sometime after 5:00 a.m. I laid in bed a while listening to the wind howl and watching the snow blow sideways and then up and then in swirls.

The last 6 months have, I don’t know, done me in? In that time:

1. My mother-in-law died.
2. I moved (again), to a different state and town (again).
3. I got reorged at work after (more) layoffs and got a different boss (again).
4. I traveled multiple times (again), despite having no energy to do so.

Those are the major dots on the map, if you will. But in between all of that I’ve been slowly falling into a sort of overloaded paralysis that is punctuated by constant aches and pains, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, despair, anger, hopelessness. There are so many words out there that I could choose, and it feels like every single one would apply.

I made a decision to take time off at Christmas for a deeper rest, because it seemed like I would be rendered fully disabled if I didn’t. But respites don’t really work when you have to jump right back into fire when the time is up. And respites don’t really work when it feels like your life is snowballing on all fronts, and like everything is continuing to get worse and less manageable rather than diminishing in intensity. That there is nothing at all you can control about what’s swirling around you. Kind of like the snowstorm this morning.

I think maybe part of what I’m thinking about is how the broader culture is impacting my already stressful life. On the one hand, I recognize daily how fortunate I am in so many ways. I have a lot of good, and a lot to be grateful for. On the other hand, my life really is just not going well on multiple fronts and it’s partly because of the systems around me. They simply do not support wellness during life’s tougher moments. And what I’m witnessing is the slow destruction, again (this happened in 2019), of both my physical and emotional health. I have yet to find a way out.

I’ve said for the last year or so that I desperately need a few months off to sleep. But unfortunately our society is not built for that. It’s not built for the rhythms of being a human – the activity and the rest, the seasons, the emotions, the relationships, the births and deaths, the changing decades and changing form. It’s built for capitalism, at least in the spot where I find myself on this planet. America values productivity, market dominance, money. Humans come last on America’s list. They are a means to an end an nothing more.

To that end, I have witnessed many wealthy C-suiters over the course of my career decide to “take some time to rest and recharge.” But people like me don’t have that luxury. People like me have bills due every month that must be paid, expensive medications that require health insurance, a rapidly approaching post-midlife era that must somehow be funded, and the knowledge that perhaps we’ll never get to do what we’d hoped to do with our lives.

March on, they say. March on.

Sometimes I stop and wonder how we got here. Like, how we arrived at our current cultural and political moment. Not on a scholarly level, e.g. economics, although that knowledge is important too. But on an obvious level, like what I observe when I look at the world every day or turn on a screen of some sort.

I wrote recently about how I feel like there is a reckoning coming because the rich and powerful are about to start cannibalizing themselves. When and how, I don’t know. But it seems like we’ve really gone off the rails as a species – not just in the areas that matter to our economic systems and our planet, but in areas like community, common decency, accountability, and kindness.

America is supposed to be a land of freedom, but I really don’t feel that way anymore and haven’t for a while. Do you? I feel like I live in a surveillance state full of ordinary humans who are increasingly frustrated, angry, isolated, and desperate. It seems like the impacts of being surveilled have made it really difficult to do basic things like secure housing, get a job, obtain a loan, etc. Things that I remember being a lot easier when I was younger.

Going back not too far, to the early 2000s, I remember being able to get an apartment without a crazy income requirement. Without multiple references. Without signing a 150-page lease that forced me to give up all legal rights should I be mistreated.

I remember this because I was rooming with someone over the summer while in college (I was not on the lease) and it went south within a few weeks, so I walked down to the leasing office and asked for an available one bedroom of my own. They gave it to me based on my super part-time job and meager savings, didn’t ask for a guarantor, and I moved in two days later.

I also remember being able to get a basic, entry-level job without a check into my entire life history. And also without needing to already know how to do the job, without already having multiple years of exact experience in a long list of requirements, and without competing with 2,000 other applicants who tried for it in the first 5 hours.

Back then it was pretty hard to run any kind of surveillance check on someone beyond calling the provided prior employers, checking on an address, and verifying higher-level education. And it was impossible to use any kind of surveillance software to weed out hoards of applicants in 3 seconds via a single click.

I’m not saying things have always been easy. But I am saying that the world we live in now, where we have no more anonymity and where those in power know our every move as well as our entire life histories, has made living exponentially harder – to the point where it’s impossible for some people to secure basic items, basic survival, basic safety, basic jobs, basic healthcare.

I do often think that positive human traits must still exist within many of us, but perhaps the visibility of these humans has been snuffed out by corporate-owned media and engineered social feeds (that also, may I add, surveil us). At the same time, it seems increasingly evident that we have more dysfunction in America than in some other countries. We have a uniquely brutal culture that is becoming more brutal as of late, yet it’s been part of our fabric since the beginning.

So I wonder…do we ever fight back and decide that we’ve reached a type of existence that is unacceptable and needlessly hard, and also rather unpleasant? If so, when? And, more importantly because right now I have no idea, how?

We recently transitioned into a new calendar year. Most years, while I don’t do much for the occasion, I do stay up late and wait for midnight. I also often sip a little bit of sparkling wine. But this year something in me was very different. I didn’t stay up and in fact didn’t at all want to.

I just wanted to go to bed.

I feel like this has been a theme for me over the past 8 months or so. Somewhere around April of last year, after having to travel multiple weeks in a row for my dad, a wedding, and work, I totally crashed and burned. I never got to recover, either, because the travel continued all summer, and then my mother-in-law died and I had more back-to-back travel plus an out-of-state funeral.

And then we moved. Again. To yet another state. So I really crashed out in October, and after traveling yet again in November I was ready to hide from life for a year.

I’ve been off work since the 24^th trying to recover mentally and physically, and I’m a bit frustrated because I don’t really feel like I’ve put a dent in the exhaustion. So I honestly wasn’t too surprised to find that I was in my pajamas by 7 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and in bed a bit after 10.

But beyond that, I’ve been trying to think about why the holiday just didn’t really mean anything to me this year. I’ve determined it’s a few things:

1. I’m tired, as I mentioned.
2. This past year was really hard on a collective level, and the insanity seems to be continuing unabated into 2026.
3. I’ve realized that every day is about the same, at a macro level anyway.

Have you ever thought about how it is humans who have invented the constructs of days, weeks, months, years? In that way, it is only humans who perceive “time” because we are the only ones who track it and either celebrate it or bemoan it. Otherwise, the rest of planet Earth experiences cycles. Day, night, seasons, jet streams, tides. There are no birthdays. No months. No clocks. And by that token, there is no sense of aging either. Everything just is (in a cyclical sort of way).

Could it be that, at least during this particular chapter of my life, I’m falling more in line with the rest of the plants and animals on the planet?

It could also be more simple. It could be that my dad is still very sick, and how the story ends is still unknown, but what is known is that this year is starting out just like the last one although my physical location is different. So maybe that’s why I didn’t feel like celebrating the “new beginning” that humans say is January 1, 2026.

I don’t know. I’ve got two more days off of work to ponder it. Or maybe not. It’s probably a waste of “time.” 🙂

Every day, I make a conscious effort to find gratitude. This is significant for me because I’ve only recently been able to do such a thing.

My childhood is a yucky blur that I’d prefer not to revisit. My younger adulthood (twenties) is also a stressful, unhappy blur, as were much of my thirties. I’m well into my forties now (45…how did that happen?) and these past two years have been some of the hardest of my life. But they’ve also allowed me, for the first time, to readily summon gratitude when I hadn’t been able to before.

When I talk about gratitude, for me it looks like appreciation of everything good in my life (despite all of the undeniably hard things) and a newfound feeling of abundance (despite the continuing areas of lack). There are still a lot of things I don’t have, and a lot of things I hope maybe I will have someday, but there are also copious good things to report about my life right now if I actually take inventory.

I was reading up recently on Christopher Reeve, because my father is in a similar situation and I was looking for some sort of insight or commiseration. I learned that after he went through his initial grief, he came to a crossroads with himself and decided that he could either succumb to the paralysis and depression, or he could choose to try to do something positive with his life. And he chose the latter.

I’m not saying what I’m doing is the same thing or at the same level. But in some ways we all deal with crossroads and dichotomies of circumstance, where some parts of your life are good and some are not so good, and sometimes you have to make a choice about how to feel about the whole of it.

I think one of the turning points for me was when I decided that life – for all of us – is meant to flow, and none of us can really control the overall direction or the speed. I now believe that my role is mostly to float along and see what unfolds, to make small turns and corrections where needed, of course, and also to go in and out of the turbulent areas, but to generally treat it as a ride that I’m on – not one that I initiated or am in control of, nor one that I get to decide when or how it ends.

The better way to approach the ride is to focus on all the amazing parts of it.

I also believe that you can control the view, in a way. You can either ride along under a thunderstorm, or you can bask under the sun and listen to the birds sing. And perhaps your thoughts also create little forks in the river, allowing you to find a slightly smoother (or harder) tributary to your final destination? I’m not sure. Who knows really?

But why make life even harder than it has to be?

The only part of this ride you can truly control, sometimes, is how you respond to it. I have my hard days/weeks, where I start sliding into a pit and can’t crawl out for a while, but overall I’ve chosen gratitude. My daily reality doesn’t matter as much to me, anymore, as how I decide to feel about it every day.

I have this thought. Now, I’m not an economist and I don’t pretend to really know how everything works. But I am observant. And I have a theory about the state of things.

If I were to make a thesis statement about it, it would be something like: Corporations, politicians, and billionaires will eventually cannibalize themselves.

I don’t know how long it will take or how it will unfold, and I do wonder if a few straggler entities will still linger in the end, but I feel like we are on a path to self-destruction.

You don’t have to be an economist to know that you can only extract finite resources for so long. Eventually, the resources run out. And when I look at the greater world around me, I see the extraction of both the planet and the human species happening in a way that is far beyond what either one can bear.

Which to me says, eventually something is going to break. It has to. There is no other outcome. Maybe it will happen as a slow rumble or maybe it’ll be a sudden earthquake, but I do think eventually something about this imbalanced relationship is going to break.

This is definitely my opinion, but I suppose I’m writing this because it’s also my hope? We can’t go on this way.

On the factual side, it seems like we have once again (this has happened before in America, in the 1920s) reached a point where our societal inequality is at extreme levels. But now the planet is also hurting alongside the humans.

And because we have built our entire economic model on the continuous consumption of finite resources, both human and natural, it also seems to me that there is no other outcome but for things to begin to collapse. The pocketbooks and patience of many humans are running low, as are our precious natural resources.

I think the most dangerous times in history happen when humans struggle for the very basics of survival, so much so that they begin to feel they have nothing to lose. The result is all sorts of negative consequences from a species that is fighting for, well, life. It seems like we are really close to that scenario if we are not there already.

I hope, therefore, that a collective call to action begins arising. Maybe in 2026. Maybe in 2027. Maybe not until the 2030s (eek, I hope it doesn’t take that long). We need a widespread “fed up” sentiment in order for anything about the toxicity of the current moment to change, because humans tend to only change when staying the same is impossible. And we need sweeping change at this point. A major cleanup, gut job, and remodel.

Because this moment in history is toxic. I kind of liken it to an abuser maintaining control over the abused, but on a really massive scale. It’s true that relationships like these sometimes end badly for the abused, but it’s also true that many abused people eventually rise up. They finally turn their backs on the dynamic and move on to create something new and healthier.

I think there are too many good humans out there to have the end of this story be one of cowering, and of deference to widespread toxicity. And I have hope that, as the rich and powerful begin to eat their own, to turn to infighting and a civil war for the last bits of money and influence, the sane humans will rise back up and quelch them all like a tsunami. It’s long past time we retook control of our lives, of our right to basic dignities like food and shelter and healthcare, and of our precious home that allows us to even exist (planet Earth).

It feels like the essence of America has become a big, pervasive advertisement. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without being bombarded by ads. They are intrusive and, worse, they purposely seek not to persuade but to manipulate.

Gross.

One of the more annoying examples is, to me, the autoplay feature. Which goes right along with the infinite scroll.

Used to be, you would finish watching something and then take a breather before deciding what to do next. You’d go back to your list of content to think about what else you may want to watch, or you’d watch a commercial and get a pause to think. But over time, companies learned that they should steal these breaks from us as a way to increase how much money they extract. They decided they should disallow us from making any decisions about our time, and instead force their product upon us in ways that make it hard for our brains to decide to take a break.

I have noticed that every single video streaming platform now has a countdown, or a banner, or some other indicator that, before the credits even finish for the thing you just watched, you’re going to be pushed into the next thing that might capture your interest enough to keep you on the platform. Then they can grab your attention for another 30 minutes or 2 hours, attempt to do it again after that, rinse repeat.

I can’t figure out why we as a society put up with not just strategies like this, but egregious stuff like ads repeatedly interrupting a video mid-word or mid-sentence. Or ads blaring at us while we fill up our gas tanks. Or ads interrupting our social media feeds. Or ads on nearly every public surface we encounter, from benches to walls to billboards. And now, even ads when we hit “pause” on something we’re watching.

The only answer I can come up with is that these companies just have too much power. They do it because we don’t have alternatives and can’t get away, and there is also no societal will to rein in the behavior.

I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten fed up with <insert platform here> only to realize that there is no alternative platform available. I say this often about YouTube, where I watch watercolor tutorials and cooking videos that are continuously interrupted by longer and longer ads. But some of those creators don’t have their content anywhere else right now, so it’s either watch it there and put up with the nonsense, or don’t watch it at all.

I’m inching closer to “don’t watch it at all.”

I think we are going to reach a point (maybe soon?) where large groups of people just start disconnecting from tech because they’re finally sick of it. I’m already seeing hints of this happening, with “analog lifestyles” now in the lexicon and owning physical media becoming fashionable. I think we’re all worn down from the constant extortion, whether it’s of our time via ads and addictive design, or of our money via endless subscriptions and never owning anything.

I’m also starting to see a pull back from social media and a movement to less ad-ridden platforms, which is a longtime coming and probably for some of the same reasons. These “social” platforms don’t steal our money directly, but they sure do purposely steal our time in exchange for money. And when I really sit back and think about it, and about how this is done deliberately and everyone knows it, it’s a sad commentary on the wider dysfunction of how humans treat one another.

Because there is a long list of other terrible things done on purpose and everyone knows it, like how the conglomerates put all the crap into our food that either addicts us or kills us. Or how they continue to use non-renewable materials and planned obsolescence, even though it’s impacting the planet in such a way that we may not survive as a species.

We continue to allow it all…why?

In my own little microcosm, I’ve tried for years to quit social media, to quit scrolling, to quit these leeching content platforms that use my one life for a profit. And I do ok for a while before being sucked in again, because everyone is on them. All of the content I want to ingest for learning or for entertainment is on them, my friends are on them, my job and colleagues are on them. I’ve found very few workarounds.

But I guess it’s like everything else, as far as what drives broader change: large groups of people finally getting fed up and organizing en masse. As more of us start divesting from these entities and saying no, I think we will start to see some change.

In the interim, those of us who are feeling fed up should keep trying to find alternatives. We should seek out other ways to connect, like in person or on less corporatized platforms. We should buy physical books. We should buy physical media. We should do “analog” things like going to coffee shops and to live theatre, and we should buy physical things we can own and hold in our hands. This is the only way to ensure we engage with products and services that do not have their primary goal of extracting money from us but of enriching our lives.

Maybe eventually it’ll catch on.