As I write this, it is the twentieth day of February and the year is two thousand and twenty-five. It’s a Thursday. Here’s how your day went:
6 to 8: You wake up in bed in your house or apartment. You yawn. Slowly you reach over to the nightstand and grab your phone for a morning scroll, making the wise and healthy decision to bathe your eyeballs in the nutritious glow of an OLED screen. Look at the outrage. Can you believe it? Wow. Everyone in the country is dumb and evil except for you. After some time you roll over and get up and go to the bathroom. You brush your teeth and get dressed, ready for the morning commute. It’s twenty to forty minutes to the office depending on traffic and you’re hungry but you tell yourself you’ll wait until lunch to eat. You see a billboard for a sausage, egg, and cheese. You cave. Dunkin Donuts. Not the healthiest option but you were running late.
9 to 12: Work. Getting the day started. The office has a coffee machine and you make sure to get a pot going after dropping your stuff off at your desk. You don’t need coffee, but you enjoy it. Not like some people. Not like Carol who can’t seem to function without three hundred milligrams of caffeine. There’s small talk. Denise is still going on about her vacation. Do you know how expensive cruises are this time of year? Do you want to see the photos? Have you noticed how dark she gets when she tans? Emails. Schedule. Fingers click clack on your keyboard. That customer again. Ugh. Why won’t they go away?
Lunch: You brought lunch from home today. Chicken and rice in a plastic container. In the 80s your mom did the same thing and she would’ve called it Tupperware. It vaguely crosses your mind that Tupperware is no longer in business. Unsure. Waiting for it to heat in the microwave you can hear Denise’s bracelets jangling as she animates her conversation with her hands. Behind her back, you’ve heard Denise described as “floppy.” She has a new diet. She’s eating a cookie. In an effort to get out of the conversation you make an excuse to look at your phone. Doug’s trying to tell you about how much snow he had to shovel off his driveway this morning. He threatens to move to Florida. Donald Trump is brought up somehow. There are emotions. People hold tongues.
1 to 5: If you’re honest with yourself you know you’re not really very productive in the afternoon. It’s kind of a wash honestly. For the first hour after lunch you’re too busy digesting and you want a nap and then, after four, it’s basically quitting time. No sense getting into anything then. From maybe two to three-thirty you’re locked in though. Spreadsheets. Line items and work orders and a couple of zoom calls. Denise is using her “patient” voice with a customer on the phone.
5 to 6: Two hands on the wheel, two eyes on the road. The great American meditation. The car is where you get your thinking done. Do you still like your husband? Why doesn’t he want kids? Do you even want kids? You’re playing a Yoga podcast but turn it off because they make you feel bad talking about the health benefits of kombucha while you have a Dr. Pepper between your legs. Red light. Green. Red again. Oh, you like that Starbucks. It’s better than the other one, cause the other one’s not as good.
7 to 10: Dinner. Spouse comes home. You and the wife watch T.V. after getting back from the gym. Older show. None of the new ones seem that good. The kids are fighting in the den and being loud and she nudges you to go take care of it. You end up yelling at them. You didn’t mean to but that’s what happens and everyone is sent to their rooms. Oh well. It’s bedtime anyway. Everyone brushes their teeth and your wife sits down to read them a story. You listen while playing a mobile game on the floor. It’s Fishdom. You’re on level five thousand two-hundred and fifty-two, a fact you’re both proud and embarrassed about. You start singing “Baa Baa Blacksheep”. You have to watch an ad.
Bed: After a long evening playing video games and letting people on TikTok make you mad about politics, you climb into bed alone. You haven’t found anybody yet. Maybe one day. Maybe not though. I mean, the economy, right? Capitalism. The 1% and immigrants. Everything’s awful. You meant to be asleep thirty minutes ago but you’re still up doom scrolling. The world is ending and everything’s awful. Fire is going to rain down from the sky and kill everybody and somehow you still have to get up in five hours and go to work.
Okay.
Now notice that that’s what you did in 2019 too.
And in 2012.
And 2004.
And 1988 and 1973 and 1952.
I mean, sure, yes, there've been variations. Some of that time you were a student. Some of it you were a baby. Some of it you weren’t born yet, or you were a newly minted parent and spent a lot more of the day fussing with a toddler. Maybe ten years ago you were divorced and now your married. Maybe your wife died. Maybe you changed jobs and so now you actually work nights instead and so the entire schedule I just laid out for you is wrong.
Sure.
But, broadly speaking though, that timeline is how life works for most people, and how it has worked for… well… decades. Maybe for more than a hundred years. Doom scrolling used to be Talk Radio, granted, and email used to come in envelopes, but, though the actors change, all the roles have stayed more or less the same. In by-gone times the role of Trump was played by Obama or Carter or Bush and the spot of Boogie-Man been filled by everyone from communists to viruses to the KKK. All that accepted, nonetheless the day-to-day beats of life in the modern world have gone on mostly unchanged for generations, and the get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep Rhythm has persisted across ten thousand Doomer Narratives.
The world is ending? Okay, sure. Sill, Suburbia Abides. Somehow, despite constant catastrophe, you still have a day-to-day life to live.
Global Warming. West Nile. Nuclear War. The coming Ice Age. Russia. Spanish Flu. Housing Crash. AIDS. World War 2. Vietnam. Peak Oil. Earthquakes. Floods. A.I. China. Japan. Mount Saint Helen’s. Yellowstone Caldera. Iran. Iraq. Vietnam. Space Shuttles turning to fire in the sky and towers falling down. Opioid crises. Crack epidemic. War on drugs. A tidal wave in 2004 that killed 230,000 people on the coasts of the Indian Ocean. White Flight. Civil Rights. Sandy Hook. Covid. Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugary Ray, Panmunjom. Brando, “The King and I”, and “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Fire’s always burning.
We didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
As it stands today, the Panic de jure…
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