We all feel it every day in myriad ways. But there’s a lot of “everything is fine” denial going on, perhaps because there’s no obvious way to fix anything.
I’ve been trying to make a list of everything that’s broken for ages now and then Tara Henley posted this on her substack “Lean Out,” so succinct it’s worth quoting at length:
“We know that luggage will get lost and flights will get delayed. That public transportation will be slow, and crowded, and possibly unsafe. That city construction projects will not stick to schedule. That calling a bank, or a cell phone provider, or a cable company, or the government will mean spending an entire morning on hold.
We know that medical appointments will be hard to secure and apartments difficult to rent, and that we will have to wait in long lines for the privilege of paying plenty of our hard-earned cash to multinational mega-corporations, in exchange for unhealthy food or poorly-made clothing (and we may even have to check ourselves out and bag our own goods, too).
We know that everything is scarce — from daycare spots to parking, from jobs to money, from friendship to potential mates, from time with family to the mental health care we all increasingly need to treat our distress.
We know, too, that there is no reasonable amount of income that will entirely insulate us from this avalanche of stress. From the relentless parade of frustrations, large and small.”
I pay $7/mo. to subscribe to Henley’s substack. That’s a lot to pay for basically one article by one writer per week, certainly when compared to what we used to pay for newspapers, but Henley’s a pro, publishing one interesting interview consistently week in week out (plus a weekend bonus opinion piece). It’s the most refreshing critical take on the creeping myopia and authoritarianism around us you are likely to find.
Check it out: https://tarahenley.substack.com/
Transcripts of interviews are free a few days after they are posted as a podcast, but if you subscribe you get to comment on her posts, which makes for some pretty lively exchanges. To this particular post, I commented that I believe there to be no fixes and that, contrary to all reason or intuition, this brokenness is sustainable, at least it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Welcome to the new normal.
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