Sitting with uncertainty
If you're wondering what to do next you're not alone
Paid subscribers receive early access to this post. I’ll make it available to everyone on Tuesday. -M
Ever since the election, I’ve been thinking obsessively about how to prepare for what comes next. Some of this is inevitable, given my work and writing CARD each week. I have a professional obligation to help people think through worst-case scenarios or at least likely scenarios.
At the same time, I’ve been struggling personally. I got into politics to oppose the Bush Administration and make America better. Twenty-two years later, I can’t help but question what, if anything, actually made a difference or, in some cases, did I make things worse? There are more losses than wins on my resume, and this most recent loss has filled me with existential dread. This time around,d I’m a parent, and I can’t help but wonder what I could have done differently to make the world better for my kids and all of our kids. It’s a lot to sit with.
Writer Anand Giridharadas wrote a post for his newsletter, a meditation on what we’ve been through and how we’re thinking about what comes next that spoke to how I’m feeling. Read the whole thing, but I want to highlight this passage specifically:
What I see and hear around me is a lot of people, in all walks of life, who are looking up at the national scene and then down at their watches, starting to think about their time on this planet. How much of your life can you spend yelling in opposition to something? Yelling in fury about something that most voters seemed to want? I was 33 when Trump rode down the golden escalator. I am 43 now. I am as devoted as anyone I know to democracy and freedom and the American constitutional order. But it occurs to me from time to time that I do not wish to spend the better part of my adult life in a posture of opposition to a vulgar demagogue. I wish to be and live about other, richer, bigger things.
But you don’t get to choose your era. I know that. The people I’ve been listening to know that. They are not welcoming the cruelties and hatreds that have been promised by Trump. I think what they’re wondering is how you actually end up getting the country you deserve.
Giridharadas and I are around the same age, and I can’t speak for him, but I’ve found that in my 40s, I spend a lot more time and energy thinking about how much time I have left and how I want to spend it. Especially since my Dad died two years ago. He’s right that you don’t get to choose your era, but I think it’s fair to be mad at where you find yourself.
I resent how much Trump and the MAGA movement have taken from us all. I get bitter thinking about spending at least four more years fighting this death cult of assholes and even more bitter at how many people in power seem happy to roll out the red carpet for them. I’m bitter about everyone who lived through the first Trump Administration, who witnessed the violent attempt to overthrow our newly elected government and still cast their ballot for Trump or opted not to vote and hand him the presidency by default. None of this should have happened. But it did and we have to move forward anyway.
Practically speaking, we can’t operate like we did before. Trump has made it clear he intends to enact harm against both his political opponents and marginalized communities. I haven’t done much work outside of the US but I’ve done enough work with activists living under authoritarian governments that I know the calculations have to change. Part of the reason we’re no longer in #resistance mode is it isn’t necessarily safe to have large demonstrations and massive direct actions. And that’s before we even get into the threats on social media platforms (which I’ll cover in more depth on Sunday.) We’re in a different reality now. We have to operate strategically and put more emphasis on protecting ourselves and our communities.
There’s a spiritual element, too. We’ve been through so much since the last Trump Administration, including a global pandemic that killed 20 million people. The insurrection and so many domestic terrorist incidents that I’ve lost count. And as Giridharadas points out we’re all older now, in different phases of our lives. We’re not the same people anymore. We couldn’t respond the same way even if we wanted to.
Am I still in the fight? Absolutely. Do I know what that looks like or what my role is? Not right now. That’s not a comfortable place to be, especially when you are making your living in advocacy. Or when you’re the person, your readers and people in your life rely on to help them figure out what to do in these moments. But it’s an honest assessment of where I am.
If you’re in a similar place, I want to give us all permission to be OK with that. At least for now. We’ve suffered a huge loss, and it makes sense to fall back, grieve, and regroup. It’s OK and necessary to change up our strategy and take a different approach. It’s OK if you don’t know what comes next or your role. It’s OK to trust that you’ll figure it out or that we’ll all figure it out together.
Love seeing you on Bluesky!!
At the tender age of 70, I think I'm gonna make sure I can still do everything I can to protect my people. That includes the 3 cats and 1 dog. My kids, my hubby, my business, my home, and my dearly beloved relatives... all deserve all I can do to ensure that their lives continue to be as stress-free as possible. In the process, I'm gonna de-stress as much as I can personally. If that requires backing away from social media and the news for a time, then so be it.
Right this minute, I'm engaged enough to know what's going on out there. I'm following the orange idiot's most egregious utterances, and watching what my representatives in government do about it. I'm dipping in and out of social media (Bluesky), but making time for 'me.' With any luck, with all of us working different aspects of it, we can manage to ensure that the bloviator in chief does not completely kill the world's oldest democracy. I will be with you as much as possible in the next 4 years!! <3
Thank you, Melissa -- this is excellent. It beautifully expresses many of the things also rolling around in my head.
I'm older -- late 50s. It recently occurred to me that if I stay on the same path that I have tread upon all of my adult life -- a path of always trying to figure out how to make the world a better place -- I will be fighting this fight for the rest of my career. And I just don't want to do that. I'm tired. Whenever my career ends: at 65, 70...who knows? I want to look back and know that I accomplished something, rather than have toiled away for 50ish years just to see that we are worse off than where I started.
Millions of people live their lives without having them revolve around something that it's impossible to change individually, that requires millions of other people to behave in a particular way. I'm not saying I want to walk around oblivious to it all either, but I have to find a better balance now that the passion and energy I brought to the work is mostly gone, and I may not find it back before my work life winds down.
I'm coming around to the idea that changing the world may no longer be my goal. Maybe it's just making my little corner of the world livable, knowing what I know about the way things *should* be. Then trusting the rest of it to work itself out without a major contribution from me. That it will have to be up to those coming behind me to clean up the mess and fix what was broken in this era.
It feels like giving up, and maybe it is. Or maybe it's just a recognition of the life cycle, and that you just can't tackle in your 60s and 70s what you might have been able to in your 20s and 30s. I don't know yet -- I know that I just don't have much left in the tank anymore to tackle the systemic problems I've spent my life identifying.