I'm going to keep this weeknote fairly short as the weeks come to an end very quickly and I think allowing myself to write shorter updates will keep me on track.
I want to highlight a couple of articles I read this week which deal in very different ways about things not working. When I say things it's doing a lot of heavy lifting for the reality which is everything. The first piece by Rosie Spinks looks at the idea of collapse. It's quite a long read but asks the fundamental question of how do we prepare ourselves and exist in the present knowing that gradually the world we have understood to exist will collapse.
It’s a nagging sense that has hung over modern life since 2020, or 2016, or 2008, or 2001 — pick your start date — that things are not working anymore. And that waiting for them to get better after the next Most Important Election of Our Lives, or another war to end, or a new economic recovery cycle doesn’t seem to be having the desired effects.
Millennials have experienced all of our adulthood under this specter. Most people I know feel it to some extent, we even joke about it, but it’s admittedly hard to confront what comes next. Making space for the idea that the progress we were raised on is not guaranteed requires a lot of time and space. It requires grieving, uncertainty, and sitting with difficult feelings. These are things, in western culture at least, we studiously avoid.
Rosie's essay deals specifically with the collapse of the climate which will have unknown effects on us but they will be every level of catastrophic based on our current trajectory. I think most people at some stage recently or at least those who are not in denial have engaged with the idea that this is on the way and reconciling this understanding with living in the moment and the excesses of contemporary living is what Rosie tries to guide us through.
On the more direct side of things is Grant Slatton's essay Nobody Cares which looks at how pretty much everything is broken because, well nobody cares. I think this chimes quite well with Rosie's essay and what they're both analysing is living through Late Stage Capitalism and both writers are grappling with different elements of it.
Nobody cares. Rather, there is a tiny minority of activists who care. They spend all their free time doing activist stuff — basically fighting the city to try to make the bureaucrats care about little bits here and there.
But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.
I think this quote will chime to most people reading this, basic stuff in the UK is broken as it is in the US. We can probably trace much of this back to when the neoliberal ideology took over our politics in the 70s. Thatcher famously said "there is no such thing as society" and that's exactly where we've ended up.