The Denial on Your Shoulder

None of us actually wanted to be right.

The deeper we sink into this decade, the less "good" it feels to be the one who predicted the disaster of the moment, whether it's a pandemic or a crop failure, or just the enshittification of everything.

There's no real sense of vindication. Maybe there's some fleeting sense of inner peace that comes, but that's just the anxiety of uncertainty unwinding from our bodies as time unravels before us and behind us.

Deep down, I think even the doomiest doomers guarded a little candle of hope that our predictions wouldn't unfold as fast and as hard as we're witnessing. We had our own fantasy, that we would reach some kind of bottom and stay there, but that's not happening. The bottom keeps dropping. We find ourselves in freefall. We land on a new bottom. A few thousand or a few million of us don't make it. They break open. We sweep them up.

We hang on a little bit.

Then it drops again.