3-Point Plan to Defy the Global Enshittification
Tomorrow we enter what a friend of mine called “the dumbest timeline.” I’ve been waking up each day this week with a little more anxiety, a little more sludge in my system. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough free-range, extended-remix despair over the past few years to last me several lifetimes. More to the point, I am refusing to allow the global enshittification to leach my will to live from me. (I have fought the depression monsters too hard and for too long to let anything else take up that particular mantle yet again.)
This isn’t about denial; it’s the opposite, in fact. It’s a mighty and potent mixture of radical acceptance and radical refusal. Like the way, each time your heart breaks, you have to open it wider. It’s backwards and upside down and also the only way forward. It is a counterintuitive approach that exists in countless iterations; this is just mine. I believe it will save me, and I’m sharing it here in case it’s useful for anyone else.
- First off, they can have my soul when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. It sounds like tough-talk but it’s about doing everything I can to maintain my joy. If I’m not in love with life, I’m a zombie—there’s no middle ground for me. Joy is going to be the key to my survival. Nothing is too small, too mundane. I’m talking laughing uncontrollably with a loved one, super cute dogs, the way David Bowie says, “With our backs on the arch” in The Bewlay Brothers. I’m talking the way my velvet bedspread feels against my skin, spending time looking up into the night sky, the silly jokes my little family uses and re-uses. My entire deal will be to live as though I’m in the greatest Pinterest board ever. I’m assembling a factory of joy, motherfuckers.
2. All the gloves are off now, including mine. I’mma be 160% who I am, all the time. I will be weird as fuck. I will be kind as fuck. I will show up for you. I will make you believe in yourself so much that it will get awkward. Unless you’re down with harming others. In that case, you get nothing. Good day.
3. When despair creeps in (because it will, because that’s how I’m wired) I will re-focus my efforts on healthy habits and do them out of sheer defiance. (I don’t advocate for living one’s life in this mode; this is my back-up plan, for when nothing else works.) You think you can bring me down, enshittification? Watch me get healthier, stronger, happier! See what great care I take of me and mine! Look upon my vast creative works and you despair!
I hope you’ll reach out if you need encouragement or any other kind of help. I may just reach out to you when I do. We’re all we have, man. Let’s take care of each other.
Love,
Emma