Living In History
On ordinary life in an era of systemic collapse
I planned my return to California back in February. I booked my tickets, got my doggie a reservation, and booked my Turo car rental for the five months I’ll be there. Then Trump bombed Iran while the war in Ukraine is still going on without a reprieve, massively disrupting an already destabilized energy security. While political pundits kept arguing the merits and causes of his decision, by April, airlines had canceled many flights to and connecting around the Middle East. Gas prices and, with that, prices for pretty much everything crept up. More airlines canceled more flights, unable to operate because of a jet fuel shortage.
Then the Lufthansa pilots, flight attendants, and ground personnel went on strike, demanding higher pay. My flights got canceled once. Then twice. Then, the third time, I was delayed by three hours. Meanwhile, my Turo was canceled two days before I was supposed to pick it up, leaving me stranded and facing three times more expensive options.
All along, I kept seeing more and more reports of people detained at the airport upon arrival, their phones and computers searched by Border Patrol agents. Technically, US citizens have the right to refuse a search. In practice, those who did got their devices held “for further inspection.” Many of them never got them back.
It made me nervous, to say the least. I considered deleting my social media apps and logging out of all my email and cloud storage, worried about my privacy and what would happen to Lulu if I were detained for any reason. Sometimes, the reason is a mistaken identity - citizen or not. Other times, they are just mean.
Violations of rights seem to be the norm rather than the exception these days. The courts can’t keep up with lawsuits against the government by individuals, class actions, states, universities, companies seeking to recover their tariff money, and civil rights organizations. Everyone is suing the government. Even Trump. He wants $10 billion from his own Treasury Department and IRS, alleging they failed to prevent the unauthorized leak of his confidential tax returns, the same tax returns every President before him voluntarily disclosed.
My problems are small potatoes compared to people unable to access life-saving medical care because of rural hospital closures. Others can no longer afford to feed their families, lose their jobs or sanity to AI, and their right to representation thanks to the latest SCOTUS decision gutting the Civil Rights Act.
Even nature is not spared. Everything that blows up in these two major wars goes up into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming and erratic weather patterns, causing various environmental crises around the globe. From floods, fires, and droughts to rising sea levels, species disappearing, and famine. Meanwhile, the US drills more for fossil fuels, opens up the National Parks for logging and digging, and defunds the NPS.
Nations are at each other’s throats, alliances breaking. Long-standing cooperative organizations designed to ensure world stability are losing members. Meanwhile, according to major global democracy monitors like Freedom House and the V-Dem Institute, the number of authoritarian regimes has demonstrably increased over the last decade. As a result of these trends, approximately 72% of the global population now lives under autocratic rule.
The best way I can describe the fundamental experience of being an individual right now is a scale mismatch — the problems are planetary, the disruptions systemic, and yet you still have to wake up, make coffee, and figure out what to do with your life. That gap between the enormity of what’s happening and the smallness of individual agency is, I think, the defining psychic condition of this era.
