I've written about how sedentary I've become, how more and more I seem to spend hours on Twitter rather than actually accomplish anything. Even when I do manage to get something done—a couple days ago I wrote the next installment for the weekly blog I maintain under my real name—I find it hard to give a shit. I still have weekly calls with Marie and with Debbie (not together, to be clear), but I never have any news. "Yeah, I spent the last week sitting around uselessly like a bump on a log. How about you?" All I really want to do is sleep. I'm pretty sure this is what depression looks like.
(It's true that I was able to rouse myself out of my torpor to call Marie a few weeks ago and make arrangements to go to Paris. So I guess I'm not irretrievably lost yet. But now that we've booked the flight and the hotel, I'm not exactly doing a lot more to prepare. I tell myself that I've got a couple of months.)
What I have also observed is that a lot of the stuff I doomscroll on Twitter is politics, and I don't discuss it with anyone. This is part of where I get my running title, "Waiting for the end of the world": it seems like the political problems I keep reading about are intractable and will ultimately pull us apart. Or what is actually more likely, I think, is not that we will pull apart into some kind of civil war, but just that we will slowly unwind—kind of like the old Soviet Union did in the 1980's. Every year things will get just a little bit less effective and a little bit less useful, until one day we are trying to do something routine in our statecraft and the handle will break off in our hand.
Discussion might be useful: part of what keeps me so becalmed (or depressed) is that I have so little interaction with other people. If I were talking with more people more often, the social stimulation might help me to pull my shit together. But it seems like political discussion has become absolutely toxic these days. So I don't know where I would start. With whom could I discuss what I see happening in the world?
- Not with Marie.
- Not with Debbie.
- I've never really felt like Mother or Brother were interested in long political discussions.
- Father would be a good person to talk to about this stuff if not for the inconvenient fact that he died eight years ago.
What about more distant friends? Well, most if them I'm not in touch with any more. Of the few that I am in touch with, mostly I think I know their political opinions and I don't see how a conversation can get off the ground.
- I wrote Inga a few days ago—kind of out of the blue, first email between us in a year—to ask what she thought of the way people have been discussing the intelligence community during the first stages of the Presidential campaign. We exchanged a couple of emails, but there wasn't enough in her reply to spin into a long conversation. Or maybe I'm just getting rusty with lack of practice, so I'm forgetting how.
Part of the problem is that I find my political opinions seem to be drifting farther and farther to the Right—not because I've changed much, but because the world has gone crazy around me and therefore America's default Overton window has been skidding to the Left. Or rather, I don't actually think that Right and Left (as traditionally understood) have anything to do with what's going on. Maybe I should just leave it at saying that the world has gone crazy.
Or maybe it's just that I shouldn't get all my news from Twitter.
Originally this was one monster-long post about politics. Let me break it into pieces, though, to keep it manageable. They won't be of the same size, but I guess that doesn't matter.
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