How to Feel Well in a Collapsing World Drained of Meaning

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” — Antonio Gramsci

Touch grass, knock souls, paint for the ones beneath the boot, beneath the law, beneath the gaze. Make love on dreary afternoons: taken softly from behind, hips pressed against dishevelled bathroom counters. Look your pleasure in the mirror, if only to remember your face before it becomes a facsimile. Make babies not just to have and hold, but to send forth as torchbearers of truth in a world cloaked in shadow. Let them see the sun — its violent rays penetrating beneath their skin.

Grow things in ash-fallen forests. Feed those whose hunger has not been satiated. Plant seeds that otherwise would never be harvested. Tend to beauty amid the rot. Practice altruism. Give love without attachment to the outcome. Put people before task, humanity over currency, authenticity over performance.

But don’t forget that you’re still complicit, still stitched into the fabric of the machine you despise. Every pleasure, every joy, tangled in blood-soaked supply chains. Everything of value a reproduction — produced and distributed on the backs of the nameless, the buried. Front-row seats to slaughtered goats, bleating until the blood drains. Just to keep you warm. Your inner peace a lie. Your sense of truth, distorted and rendered utterly meaningless. Everything you know is tainted. Everyone you love can be bought and sold: their labour, their time, pumped like oil into the engine. Their bright, creative genius, squeezed like pulp from an orange, and cast aside. But the feed is hungry again, and so…

What’s the news today?

That’s the perfect meme to send to my husband.

Wow, did she get work done? She looks amazing.

Wait… why’s she back to her maiden name? Divorce, probably.

That’s so sad.

Everyone’s on Ozempic now.

My God, what’s happening in America?

I miss when politics were civil.

Ha! This momfluencer gets it: the chaos of raising kids.

Send to the group chat.

Tag three friends, share this: 50% off promo code.

Shit, that reminds me: I need to make my Prime Day list.

Why are salmon sperm facials always in my feed?

…maybe it’s worth a shot.

Time to post a thirst trap.

Will I even remember my face in ten years? My friends’ voices? What my kids talked about at breakfast before their faces lit up at screens instead of me?

Then the next reel calls…

Somewhere, half a world away from your blue, painted-on sky, a brown, limp fetus is being extracted from the womb of a mother, whose body, once meant to harbour new life, was snuffed out by daily airstrikes.

Amid the whiplash of the algorithm, you linger on the image of that bombed womb, of that baby whose eyes never opened to look upon the sun, and you feel ashamed for briefly thinking,

Maybe it’s better not to know.

Better than tasting life, only to starve anyway.

Daffodils & Dog Shit - My Boy's First Feature Film, Sleeping in Separate Bedrooms, Podcast Planning

Daffodils:

To my son, who spent last week on the set of his first feature film. He shared the screen with a critically acclaimed actor, and learned some pretty cool cowboy roping techniques behind the scenes. It's been a busy month of acting—I am sincere when I say that he's spent the entire month on set. But I love how he can be so in it when he's at work, and carve out that much needed time to be a kid when the cameras aren't rolling.

To clinical pilates for rebuilding my core. I can tell I'm getting stronger, even though it'll be a long haul yet.

To my dear friend who I'm in the process of recording a leftist podcast with (amongst other things). We wanted to do this way back, but various events in our lives (namely my pregnancy) changed the course of things. It's exciting to get the ball rolling again.

To belated birthday lunches and time spent with friends.

Dog Shit:

To the bleakness of this world. I'll save this one for something more stream-of-consciousness because nothing more really needs to be said here. In any case, my sensitive ass is feeling it.

To sleeping in separate bedrooms. It's the season of life that we're in, but it's a challenge all the same. We're outgrowing our house and have to move my eldest daughter to the downstairs bedroom as the baby is ready to move into her own space. But for reasons beyond our control, it's simply not feasible right now. I'm feeling the hit intimacy wise, and even though it's temporary, I feel slightly resentful about it.

To vehicle repairs. My new van is costing me a lot of money these days. Super annoying. But first world problems, eh?

Remember Yourself Before You Die.

Someday she’ll be gone. Her pretty, rotten head turned to bone and dust. She’ll live on in eulogies and the eyes of babies—wide, unblinking, filled with hunger. Pulses of her combustible heart will echo in the man who loved her in roars, in tattoos and wedding bands, in houses built and children born, their little feet dancing in the same halls where he chased her down to make love on rainy Groundhog Day afternoons. She’ll live on in the fire-forged bonds and weathered pride of a shared lifetime.

And in the heart of the one who loved her only in whispers, she is kept like an unholy relic pressed delicately between the final pages of a novel, her rising day glowing faint as ember-ash. Marked as memory in the briefest passage of a shadow-cast chapter. All the things she did to make him ache, laid bare in cryptic prose, so that only the two of them would see it there. The sunken goddess, permanently footnoted in the margins of a mortal tale.

And if this gentle fire starter ever walked you home, you’d remember her passion—how it roared through the door like a summer storm: untameable, urgent, righteous in its timing. You’d remember her tenderness, too—how it felt like a razor held too close to the skin.

But the most precious of them, those most unfortunate inheritors of her raw edges and unvarnished truths, will conjure her in the tremors felt inside their chests: a fiery resurrection of seismic sparks and slack-jawed sentience, forever lit by all her secret sorrows.

They’ll be better than she ever was. Maps and blueprints made it clear: this was the plan all along.

God knows, she wasn’t easy to hold. In a world that rewards numbness, she refused not to feel. She bled to paint the canvas bright. Her vulnerability the thing that made her strong. Let it be known that she loved the world, but not the inequalities and institutions created to keep people in line. Why can’t everyone be allowed to burn in technicolor? Why only the chosen few?

Alas, she was among them. At least for a time.