Let’s explore a difficult question together.
Before I tell you what it is, we need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: If you’re reading this in the United States, your material circumstances are likely to get much worse in coming years. Even if the far right suffers crippling defeats at the ballot box, inflation stops dead in its tracks, and Donald Trump ends up in prison for the rest of his miserable life, we are probably still stuck on an irreversible slow boat to Hell. This isn’t just a cynical academic sharing vibes. Organizations and people who are way smarter than me have said the same: Disinformation will become more prevalent and more difficult to ferret out, global authoritarian reversion is happening before our eyes, and we are past the point of deciding we might want to bail on the whole “let’s get rich by cooking our children in greenhouse gases” scheme. The bleakness of our short-term collective future is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and almost impossible to deny. As I write this, American democracy as we know it may only have months left to go.
So my question is: What if this is the best part of your life? What if, in this little nook of time, you are just as successful, healthy, and happy as you will ever be? What if you were able to look at the grand arc of your existence, from start to end, and see that things never got any better than they are right now? How would you handle that?
