When everything that mattered stops mattering
Could it be so stupidly simple that pretending a hostile alien invasion was coming TODAY, every day, might give me the ability to say "I don't fucking care!” about things that won’t matter in the end?
This week I turned 43, a full decade past the age I was when I first started trying to get sober.
Ten years ago, the weekend I turned 33, I was so fucked up. I was the walking dead, and as some kind of Hail Mary to fix that brokenness, I booked a weekend at Esalen to learn how to meditate.
I almost didn't go, almost stayed in bed and passed my birthday alone with a lot of weed and alcohol and 30 Rock. But at the last minute, I peeled myself out of bed and packed a bag and rented a car.
Esalen is about three hours south of San Francisco, where I was living at the time, and you have to drive along a cliff-hugging patched together stretch of Highway 1 to get there. I didn't get out of San Francisco that Friday until dusk, a storm hit an hour or so into the trip, and just ten miles away from the entrance I was caught in a rockslide that took out my front tire.
It was late, dark, empty; there was no cell service; I was stuck in the rain by myself. Eventually a tow truck driver dragging the area for folks like me came by, fixed the flat, did not kill me as I'd definitely expected, and I rolled into Esalen around midnight. The whole circus of getting there felt like an appropriate metaphor for my life at the time: I would try to be good, and God threw rocks.
I spent the weekend learning to meditate and it opened a portal in me (I saw the light, for sure), and by Sunday afternoon I believed I’d had a full spiritual conversion and would never drink or use drugs again.
Hours later, at a Super Bowl party back in San Francisco, someone passed me a joint and I forgot, totally, about my conversion experience. It took another year of walking around like the living dead—another year of actively trying to murder my own person—before I finally took my life seriously.
I thought about all this last Wednesday, on my 43rd birthday, which I didn't celebrate.
I ran four miles, I edited a podcast, I got a jalapeño grilled cheese sandwich from The Roost, I watched the final episodes of Station Eleven. I didn't downplay this birthday because I don't believe I'm a person who deserves to be celebrated, which has been true in the past. It was just that this year I was too fucking tired to care, as I'm sure you all understand at this point in time when we're all too fucking tired to [insert everything here].
I can't stop watching post-apocalyptic films, especially since the pandemic began. The Leftovers, Patriot, Station Eleven, Don't Look Up, Years and Years, (Finch, Midnight Sky, Arrival, The Road, Dune, Children of Men…). This is also true of survivor-type films or series, such as Lost or, more recently, Yellowjackets.
When I say this to enough people, the reflex response (from those who are v. unlike me) is that it reflects something dark, something off, something gone; a sick part of me revealed. At the end of Don't Look Up my mom tried not to vomit and I clapped, which is the exact reversal of our corporeal and psychic responses to Twitter: she hate-tweets like the future of the world depends on it, and I try not to vomit.
Who's to say which one of us is stomaching the right thing? To me her tweets feel reminiscent of someone screaming into a telephone when the wire has been cut; she believes Twitter is somehow preventing the ice caps from melting—her last attempt to give her grandkids some kind of shot at a non-post-apocalyptic future. She can't stand the post-apocalyptic scenario—the world completely imploding in on itself—and I love it because I'm pretty sure that's already happened and at least in those films, we're getting on with it already. She's trying to preserve, and all I see are ghosts. Her approach is hopeful. Mine is, too.
I could probably spend a year writing about what fascinates me—and emotionally and physically releases me—when I watch humanity's worst-case scenario. There's the whole communal thing, the connections formed when we're forced to rely on one another for survival: If you're in a post-apocalyptic film, you almost certainly form a new post-apocalyptic dysfunctional family (whether it's you, a dog, and a robot, or you and Jennifer Lawrence), and that always seems so much better than the kind of community we have in the pre-apocalyptic scenario.
There's the aliveness that comes when you're in the Canadian wilderness and your soccer coach needs to have his leg amputated: you find your strength, your power, things inside of you that you Did Not Think Were There, and you grab the fucking hatchet. Sometimes everyone gets a tan, always everyone stops counting calories. Your hair somehow gets better, sinewy muscles often form, and survivor fashion is how I tend to dress anyway. In enough cases, you're in nature all the time* (*if there is any left). Sometimes the earth is regenerating itself with so many fewer of us around that even ferns grow up through your 42nd-floor apartment. Perhaps you learn to cook things and kill things and skin things and make fires from obscure objects or soups from foraged goods. You can stop relying on phones or clocks or Google Maps and live by the sun and the moon and the stars.
You have nowhere to go; all the people who hated you probably die; your career, your purpose, your reputation, your calendar, your unanswered email? Gone. You lose the internet and the backlog of comments, the petty fights, what even is a troll? Fashion stops mattering, so too does productivity hacking, and you don't have to learn about NFTs or crypto or TikTok or Keto. Forget warfare, forget organized religion, forget Who Wore It Best and Botox and taking hair out of your ass and planting it into your eyebrows because now we're supposed to have eyebrows again. There's no professions so degrees don't count unless you have one of five meaningful skills. You have nowhere to be and nothing to do but survive and all that matters is what's in front of you, the people around you, the shelter above you. Do you have food and water? A knife? Can you start a fire? Are you breathing? You're good, come with me, forget LinkedIn, how Robin Arzon Gets It Done; forget your morning routine, how many steps you took yesterday, your dirty dishes, your last dental checkup, the taxes you owe. Forget all of that, the past is dead, anything is possible.
How is that not paradise?
To be clear, I don't wish for this kind of outcome. I am not excited about human extinction, earth-ending asteroids, exploding flus, or plane crashes in the Canadian wild.
But the thing all these kinds of films make so clear to me is that one day, in my exact life, be it now or fifty years from now, the things I am worried about—that I spend most of my time fretting over, that are primarily responsible for my adrenal fatigue and high levels of cortisol—will not matter.
And so if there's a period of time in the near or distant future where none of this counts (because I'll be dead, or everyone else will be, etc.) then is it possible to act like none of it counts now either? Is it possible to just let it all go, today? Is it possible to live like all that matters is what's in front of me and the people around me and the roof over my head and the food in my fridge and the water in my well? Could it be so stupidly simple that just pretending the exploding flu or a hostile alien invasion was coming TODAY, every day, might guide me in a different way, give me the ability to say "I don't fucking care!!" about things that, well, I don't fucking care about? That won't matter to me in the end?
I saw a tweet last week by @PallaviGunalan that said "I feel insane that everyone (including me) is trying to further their careers while a virus that has unknown long-term effects rages on wtf are we even doing." Adele, fucking Adele!, broke me with her heartbreak over not being able to make her tour work because the world is burning down and things don't work like they used to and it hurts in this specific way, in the way where we are supposed to carry on like nothing happened, supposed to care about the things that mattered in the Before Times, but it's all happened, and we're still stuck pretending to have to care about things that do not fucking matter.
This week, for my birthday, thanks to way too much TV and way too many fictional narratives where it all falls apart and we cannot pretend any longer, I got a sneak peek at what it could feel like to focus only on the things that fulfill me, to let go of all those petty things that rip me apart cell by cell, slowly, drip drip drip.
Not because I meditated some certain hours, not because I did a lot of yoga, not because of therapy or sobriety or the hundred thousand million zillion things that people like me have to do to not use drugs all the time, but because of all those things, and because of the pandemic and what it actually means, what it has actually done to me.
I remember an article by Glennon Doyle that she wrote years ago about why we need the addicted and mentally different, and in it she said, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Fine, I'll stop doing the drugs and the booze. But if I'm going back into the world without these things, I can't pretend anymore." (A direct quote found from a second source: “We are too smart to rejoin a party we couldn’t stomach.”)
The world is sick; we are not. We are not supposed to keep trying to make this work. We are supposed to meet on Midsummer’s Eve at the Old Gas Station so we can make something better; bring whatever you have left, it’s enough.
This week, I told my therapist this revelation, of playacting like it’s actually the end of the world and taking inventory of what matters and proceeding accordingly. She asked what it felt like in my body, and I said freedom.
All these things that keep me up at night—career and reputation and purpose and productivity and did I sound too needy in my text to this person or nasolabial folds or mean shit on the internet or the growing bags of clothes I need to get to the dry cleaner or the fucking toilet leak that I keep putting off fixing—all these things that haunt me! All these things that will absolutely not matter in a post-apocalyptic scenario!! All these things I don’t have to wait to lay down because by some measure, we’re already there. We’re already in it. It’s happened. We can start the sorting process; the piles of what matters go on the left; they will be small; the rest we can burn.
Maybe this newfound perspective will only last like that first weekend of meditation, until I take a drug three days into it and fall back asleep. But in that case, even then, I came to again. I saw something that weekend—the light—and I couldn't unsee it no matter how hard I tried. Maybe that’s what’s happening to all of us. Maybe we’re all just seeing something that we can't unsee that we don't know what to do with yet.
I don't know why we are experiencing what we are right now. I do know that it’s begging us to choose differently and that our future as a species depends on us choosing differently. Maybe our way out or forward isn’t complicated at all; maybe it’s as simple as imagining we’re the last people on earth, and everything that mattered—except what counts in a post-apocalyptic scenario—doesn’t.
This essay was originally written in January 2022. I turn 47 in a week. Everything in here remains truer than ever. Love you.
Such a good reminder that how you see the world in any given moment is all about your perspective. We are raising our nephew, who has significant social/emotional/behavioral issues due to FASD. I think about the person I was before him (caring about so many things that you reference here, career, looks, what people think of me, productivity) and the person I am now. Our world has both expanded and contracted. My capacity to care about anything surface level is nonexistent. Which is why I love your writing/work! 💕
Thank you so much for this. I was just thinking this week that oh, ok, we’re living in a crumbling empire, so all those plans and goals and kind of luxurious desires I had don’t matter when the only option left is just to survive, right? And I thought about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, how capitalism has made industries out of our self-actualization desire and turned it into an obsessive pursuit of self-optimization, and how empty and awful that feels all the time.
But people have been surviving through instability for centuries. And it feels good to band together and support each other and just focus on what’s in front of you, today.
I am in no way happy to be living through all this shit, and fretting for the victims of this collapse and wondering when the powerful come for me is not something I ever thought I’d be seriously considering. But you articulated acceptance and clarity in a time we’re all stunned by it all (“they can just DO that?”). And you articulated a way forward: all we have is today, and each other.
Thank you, Holly, for all that you do.