"what fresh hell is this?" i ask, surprised by the freshness of the hell at my local neighborhood hell store.

November 16, 2021

To be honest, hell is no longer fresh. You and I have been circling the drain for two years now. Just going around in endless circles, waiting to be dropped down the gurgling hole in the middle. Except, this hole is actually a concentric circle of holes, and you just keep moving down the ladder of despair. While uncomfortable, waiting is still manageable. Unfortunately, some of us haven’t been that lucky.

If you, too, are a card-carrying cynic, 2021 was another landmark year. The Pantone colour of the year was despair¹. We have inherited a raging wildfire, and we would like to tell everyone that we did not start it, but we knew this would happen. Never have I ever wanted so badly to be proven wrong by literally everything.

What Did We Do Before?

I hear the phrase “back to normal”, and I really don’t know if there is anything normal to go back to. Was there ever? Imagine if you went to a dinner party and the rug in the kitchen had a giant slowly spreading dark red stain in the middle. You ignored it entirely and complimented the host for their taste in rugs. That would be going “back to normal.”

What was normal? The definition for most people seems to be doing things outside of a residence and around other people. But, of course, the things themselves were always a proxy for the human contact and experiences that they provided. If this has always been a mainstay of Life for you, and it is, for many, you are understandably distraught. You took precautions for your safety and also for others’ safety, and you did your part, and now you are being told, “Get back in there! The war is not over!” If you took precautions in the name of the greater good, this betrayal by our cavalier ilk stings a lot. I think many of us are hurt more by the knowledge that nothing we could do would have been enough. We did our best to be “good”, but that was barely a drop in the ocean².

I have always been a fan of the great indoors, but I surprised myself with how well I adapted to the Present. I was forced to accept long ago that “I did nothing today” is a good thing, and I suggest you do the same. Welcome to Life as many others, the immunocompromised, for example, have known forever. I am lucky for having moved through the last two years relatively unscathed. Not everyone can work from home. Yes, there have been the occasional scares and the countless sleepless nights and the regularly scheduled reminders of mortality and the unshakeable feeling that every new notification on my phone must bear ill tidings and the general sense of helplessness due to being oceans away from my parents. But, apart from that, my personal and professional Life remains largely unaffected. The elderly and the working class have suffered more. The developing world had it worse and still does. If you had thought you could build an ark and live out this flood, you need to discard that illusion. You will continue to see the shore intermittently but be cautious. Landfall is a distant possibility.

What Now?

A new untapped source of despair for many of us has been the realization that our systems failed. The machine that just won’t be stopped, the epistemological rot that shadows the “news”, the haves, our collective inability to envision a different path forward, the gulf between what we know and what we actually do, the usual suspects.

The end-of-year holidays will bring a new localized source of despair. I am an immigrant in America, and like many other immigrants, the holidays have always been about missing home. For many, this will be another year when they are forced to deal with this feeling. However, I think the more profound underlying sadness that will affect us is the feeling of lost time and progress not made. No one likes being on a treadmill forever³.

A lot changed, but I think we are still holding out hope for a sweeping transformative change in our way of life. The persistent “Life is Short” reminders motivate us to do something else. Their barrage also brings the threat of burnout. The general lack of meaning in most things we call work has been noticed, and there are attempts to redefine it. But the deplorable state of working conditions for a large percentage of the working class continues. The lack of systemic justice has helped scale citizen courts in social media. Our inability to envision a future reflects the re-emergence of the past in design. Repackaging nostalgia is viable due to the safety of familiarity and the waves of burnout that are hitting both creators and consumers. Catching a glimpse of a chin feels like a forbidden act now. On some level, we have all lost something, even though it may not look like or feel like the kind of loss that you are familiar with. The immense loss of life might be the most tangible, but going to school via Zoom is also a loss.

Expecting the circumstances to persist endlessly is a reasonable response. What were we doing before? Just more of the same. Everything is worse, and apparently, it has always been worse. We are getting a lot of practice ignoring reminders that it never ends.

I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing. Nothing bothers me as much as the lack of a clear answer. I know that I must keep looking for an answer. It is the least I can do. It is perhaps the only thing I can do. I was forced to confront the acute pain of reality when I was thirteen. Like most bildungsroman⁴ protagonists, I found that the only way to get through Life was by resenting it. I have thankfully worked myself out of that notion, but it took at least thirteen more years to do that. I don’t expect an answer out of our current predicament to arrive immediately. I have spent considerable time advocating against positive thinking as a crutch and the cult of productivity it inspires.

Consequently, Life not being “good” is not a surprise for me, and I suspect there are several like me. If you are a new entrant to the club, know that the seats are uncomfortable and the view is unsatisfactory. Everyone in here loves pointing out the “true” nature of reality. We really need to invite the Escapists to attend the club meetings. Is that the answer then: telling each other stories?

Brazil

In Brazil (1985), there is a scene where the protagonist’s boss spies on his subordinates and observes that they are all watching Casablanca instead of working. He opens his office door to investigate and sees everyone hard at work. The workers respond to a meaningless job by resisting productivity. The system continues unharmed.

The protagonist, Sam Lowry, is a valuable employee of the Ministry. He has repeatedly declined promotion even though he is very good at his excessively dull job. He has a domineering mother who tells him what to do, and even though he lives on his own, he is barely an adult. He is, in fact, an overgrown boy who fantasizes a different reality, complete with a dream girl. This fantasy of idealized romantic love with cinematic obstacles allows him to believe that he is “resisting” while being a cog in the system. Sam Lowry is not the hero of this tale⁵.

His dream girl, Jill, and the mysterious guerilla plumber, Harry Tuttle, are better candidates for heroes. Jill cares about people and asks questions that provoke Sam to finally stop drinking the kool-aid. Tuttle ignores the bureaucracy to focus on solving problems directly. For example, he fixes Sam’s heating problem despite the absence of the now-famous form “27 b stroke 6.” Unfortunately, Tuttle’s approach leads Sam to get into more trouble. Both Jill and Tuttle come close to resisting the system, but both eventually fail. The system is adept at neutralizing individual resistance. The pandemic and nature itself can’t be countered by individual choices alone. Every day brings a reminder that all we can do is help each other swim against its tide. To whip a dead horse, we are all in it together. Ultimately, the film points out that an individual’s “escape” is not a solution. Sam’s dreams are largely ineffectual, but the fantasies they represent are not. They are the only instances of light breaking through in an incredibly dark (literally and metaphorically) world ⁶.

It is easy to conclude that nothing ever will change, which is why perhaps we must choose the hard path. Maybe do it as a reverse jinx on the Inevitable. Maybe do it because years of reading fiction has taught you that resistance in the face of insurmountable odds is charming. Maybe do it because despair can’t persist on its own. It needs fear or hope to stabilize it, and maybe we have some power over which form it chooses.

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