Now Is Usually A Bad Time
For the 2,922nd day in a row, it's the stupidest day in American history. I am spending the day addressing save the dates for my wedding and slow-cooking some short rib. It feels strange to be going about my usual business during world-historical moments, but since "weeks where decades happen" have been happening with an alarming regularity for quite some time, it seems like the only thing to do.
In retrospect this was a pretty bad week to decide to give Bluesky a shot. I used Skybridge to import my old follows from Twitter (which was a pretty smooth experience! I'm still not sure how I feel about ATProto in general, but its burgeoning dev ecosystem and credible exit philosophy are promising). I don't exactly know what I expected, but what I found is that a lot of people are freaking out and a lot of bad things are happening. Bluesky as a company and app are really just offering "Twitter like it used to be", and they're certainly delivering. Twitter was always a monkey's paw - know what's going on at all times, in exchange for the derangement-inducing effects of doing so. Mostly, on Bluesky as it was on Twitter, I am being exposed to a lot of information that I can do nothing about but still causes me immense psychic damage.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” - James Baldwin
Nobody's wrong to be losing it right now. A lot of bad things are coming. But in times like these I take a cold sort of comfort in looking at things from a historical viewpoint. At any moment in history that we view through rose-colored glasses, the parts we prefer to remember are standing on the backs of the parts we prefer to forget. America was founded by slaveowners. The roaring Twenties were in large part to due the greatest level of income inequality in modern history (although we may be setting a new mark in this century). During the "greatest generation", plenty of Americans were openly pro-Hitler before Pearl Harbor. The post-WWII, pre-Vietnam era so many want to return to were marked by segregation and oppression at home, and naked aggression abroad. Fukuyama's "end of history", the two-decade neoliberal world order we were supposed to have forever, was the exception, not the rule. And we managed to start a forever war during it anyway.
The big differentiator of the past decade or so is that now we have 24/7 access to everything bad happening in the world as it happens. I think now is probably the most overwhelming time to be alive, whether or not it's the worst one. There's value in taking a step back to recognize that a lot of the difference between the idealized then and the monstrous now is that we know about all the bad shit that's happening, and it's happening to us.
Things have always been bad, is what I'm getting at here. The human brain tends to treat the current crisis as the worst one, but history is just a long series of worst ones. I'm not saying this to say we shouldn't care, or to diminish the severity of the present moment. Rather, it helps me to remember that, while history is happening, people have always gotten up and gone about their days, trying their best to make things better in whatever way they can. Take some time to read your history, to realize how much of what we feel has been felt over and over and over by people who didn't let it break them. All we can do is try to follow their example.
