Notes: July 2nd, 2026
Lately, I have started every morning with a purposeful shedding of identity. At 6am, I drank coffee on the roof of my building while looking out over the tops of palm trees and listening to the squawking of parrots. I used to feel a sense of elation at the sight of the Los Angeles skyline, especially the white speck of the Getty in the distance. In childhood I was taught to revere cultural landmarks, and these features still light a little spark of something deep in my chest. I realize now that I grasped this sense of something larger than myself out of desire for a sense of permanency, both immediate and metaphysical. The grounding sensation that results from mapping your environment is often intermingled with a desire to belong to something that has been around much longer than yourself. I feel like the ability to do this is slipping away.
As I drink my coffee I peel the layers of who I consider myself to be away one by one, so I can think about the future. All of the things I considered myself to be that are not utterly timeless must be forgotten. National identity, cultural identity, social identities, stripped away one by one. What stays for the mental framework required by a disintegrating climate and a declining, suicidal empire? That which is entirely human, the things we all possess and all have the potential to refine- the only worthwhile investments in a time like this. Resilience, strength, creativity, endurance, hope. Love too, I think.
The oceans are warming. The fires are starting, again. 1000 dead in four days in France.
Be quick like a fox, but don’t run too far.
There is no escape except a new place in your brain that allows you to run thought experiments with any set of parameters. For this space to be established you need to eliminate the parts of yourself that limit your imagination. The part that says “I am American” will make you desire the continuation of the country. The part that says “I am competent” will prevent you from understanding that human history is defined by our inability to plan more than a few minutes into the future. The part that has dignity keeps you from imagining what you and others are capable of after three days with no food. Breaking down all of these parts over my morning cup of coffee means I can meet the day as I am: a fragile mammal doing its best.
Tonight I will meet up with friends. We will play board games and talk about plans for the future. Last time, we talked about subsistence farming and off-grid solar arrays. My friend group is mostly engineers and scientists. At some point last year, the unconscious expectation that society would sustain itself disappeared without us talking about it. My husband is in business, and he seemed to want to hang on to illusions longer than the rest of us. Too many of the layers of his existence and livelihood were built on denying the reality of the situation. His understanding of the world around him is generally far more comfortable than ours, but much less sustainable. In business truths can be massaged. Science is crueler but more reliable.
Once I establish a place in my brain for reality to flourish, I can start my day. I will be inundated with messaging about the American semiquincentennial, and I know that I will see plenty of messaging attempting to to guilt me for not giving a shit. My mind will flash back to seeing Obama speak in person at age 17 and believing a better world was possible. I am 33 now and I have whiplash. The old beliefs have to die for new ones to come into existence, and those include my beliefs about myself and everything else I have ever known.