Dispatches Mailbag: 2024, The Politics of Collapse, and the Age of Demoralization
Once more, we've opened up the mailbag to subscribers and, once more, you brought the heat
As we tiptoe into Summer 2023, I find myself in strange waters. Since 1987, for over thirty-five years, I’ve lived through the lens of the academic calendar. School from August to May with June and July as months filled with alternating attempts at rest and manic flourishes of grinding work. Heading into finals I was a flurry of energy with an eye on what I thought of as “open days.” Before they even arrived my calendar was full and I was panicked with a fear that I wouldn’t be able to get the work in that was required of me.
Somehow I always did. I worked harder in the summer months. Longer. As I chronicled the Trump Years and then the authoritarian slide, I was getting books and research together. Trying to publish warnings that might make a difference before an election, before an insurrection, before before before.
This will be the first summer where I know for a fact there is no return date. After leaving academia to become a full-time writer and analyst, I’ve found my days operating based on a schedule of my choosing. Well, as much as anything is our choosing, anyway. And, once again, I have a larger project I’m beginning to chew on: a look at the state, or rather state of disarray, of American mental health, and how it has led to this moment with all of its threats and dangers. Already I’m astounded by what I’ve learned. How much I am learning daily, really. How the threads of politics and history are relating to psychology and sociology and the general hum of Now. I’m excited and inspired and overwhelmed, all the necessary components for a book and a life’s work. And the calendar is…still there.
I think what I want to say, before I get to your questions, is this: there is always a perception of normality that runs through this. Sometimes it is a job getting you down, a relationship, a financial situation. And with those things comes this belief that maybe it’ll all get better or easier if one of those things falls by the wayside or changes. And then, when it does, it’s still you in the room. It’s still you looking at the clock on the wall. And it’s still you that needs to adapt and change and grow and heal and work.
My time is mine now, but it also isn’t. It belongs, and has belonged, to the anxiety and dysfunction that has stolen seconds and hours and days and weeks and months and years. That has eaten into the time I needed to do the work, but also, especially, the time I could have used to spend with the people I love and doing things that replenished my energy that could have helped get those things done that needed done.
And this is me saying all this, or rather typing it, as a measure of accountability through exposure. Time to get chopping.
All right. Here we are, with a mailbag of your questions. Thank you as always for your support and your insights. We’ll be getting into the 2024 Election as it stands, my process as an analyst in these times, how the collapse of the American Empire is affecting everything, recognizing demoralization and rising above it, and other heady topics, like what kind of ice I prefer, my experiences with ketamine therapy, and more!