Reda Ameioud — News

The Three Times the World Nearly Ended

2025-12-01T00:00:00Z

History freezes in strange places. Not in decorated marble halls, or on blood-spilled battlefields mapped by generals. History is truly only created in bunkers that smell of sweat and fear, in submarines where the air runs thick as soup, in flooded basements lit by flashlights held in shaking hands.

The world has ended three times. You were there for each one. So was I. We just didn’t know it.

Sometimes, men hold the trigger and choose not to pull it. Men look into the mouth of annihilation and say, quietly, “No. Not today.” Men whose names you probably don’t know, whose faces never make the history books your children will read.

But we’re here because of them. Breathing. Arguing. Loving. Forgetting.

1. Twenty-Three Minutes to Save the World

The bunker walls were white. Not clean-white, but the kind of institutional white that absorbs light and gives nothing back. Serpukhov-15, sixty-two miles south of Moscow, September 26, 1983, just past midnight. The Russian winter hadn’t yet arrived, but wisps of wind snaked around the facility’s domes above ground, where the moon hung full and pale.

Below, in the underground command center, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov sat in the commander’s chair. Forty-four years old. Dark curls threatening to slip from their combed-back position. Blue eyes threatening to glaze over from watching screens that hadn’t changed for hours. He was filling in for a colleague who’d called in sick. His day job was troubleshooting the main computer. But tonight? He was watching satellite data from Oko, the Soviet early warning system—Russian for “Eye.”

Buttons and beeps. The hum of refrigerated electronics. Patience meeting its match.

Then, a siren.

Not any siren. The kind that rattles your skull from the inside. The screens pulsed with the command: Запуск!—LAUNCH!

One intercontinental ballistic missile detected. Then another. Then another. Five missiles total. Heading toward the Soviet Union from the United States. The computer system indicated the reliability of information was at its highest level.

It was Petrov’s job—his only job in that moment—to pick up the phone. To relay the warning up the chain of command: Petrov to headquarters, headquarters to general staff, general staff to Yuri Andropov, who would approve a retaliatory strike. Launch on warning. Mutual assured destruction. The doctrine was clear.

“All I had to do was reach for the phone,” Petrov told BBC News in 2013. “But I couldn’t move.”

Twenty-three weeks earlier, Soviet fighters had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all 269 people aboard, including U.S. Congressman Lawrence McDonald. Tensions were hair-trigger. The Soviet Union as a system. Not just the Kremlin, not just Andropov, not just the KGB, but as a system was geared to expect an attack and to retaliate very quickly. It was very nervous. Prone to mistakes.

Petrov had a funny feeling in his gut.

The computer system was new. He didn’t trust it. Ground radar hadn’t picked up corroborating evidence. And he’d been trained: any U.S. first strike would be massive. Hundreds of missiles, not five. Five seemed illogical. Five seemed wrong.

So five minutes after the first siren, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov decided not to report the alarms.

Then he sweated it out.

The missiles never arrived. The satellites had mistaken the reflection of sun off clouds for an attack.

Twenty-three minutes. One decision. Billions saved.

Three weeks later, Petrov was reprimanded for failing to record the event in his logbook. He received no reward. The incident embarrassed his superiors and the scientists responsible for the system. He was reassigned to a less sensitive post. Took early retirement. Suffered a nervous breakdown.

He died in 2017, in relative obscurity, in his Moscow apartment.

“I was simply doing my job,” he said. “I was the right person at the right time, that’s all.”

Source

2. Four Hours in a Flooded Submarine

October 27, 1962. Caribbean Sea, near Cuba.

Inside Soviet submarine B-59, the temperature had climbed to 45–50°C (113–140°F). The diesel-electric Foxtrot-class sub wasn’t designed for tropical waters. The ventilation system had malfunctioned in the Atlantic. Carbon dioxide levels rose. The crew of 78 could barely breathe. Sailors fainted. Headaches. Heat stroke. Rashes. Severe dehydration.

The constant noise from three propellers hammered exhausted eardrums. Metal barrel, sledgehammer. Boom. Boom. Boom.

They hadn’t surfaced in days. The batteries had run very low. The air conditioning had failed. The air was stale, hot, stuffy. The submarine was reaching above 50°C in some compartments. Oxygen depleting.

Above them: eleven U.S. Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph, dropping practice depth charges. Small explosions meant to force the submarine to surface. Non-lethal. Warning shots.

But the B-59 crew had no contact with Moscow for days. They didn’t know whether World War III had already begun. Many thought the worst, that war had started, they were being attacked.

An intelligence officer later wrote in his memoirs: “The Americans hit us with something stronger than grenades and apparently an underwater charge. We thought the end had come.”

Captain Valentin Savitsky made a decision. “Perhaps the war has started at the top. Let’s blow it up! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

The submarine carried a nuclear torpedo with a 10-kiloton warhead, only slightly less powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. On most Soviet submarines, launching it required authorization from two officers: the captain and the political officer.

But B-59 was different. It was the flagship. A third signature was needed.

Vasily Arkhipov. Thirty-four years old. Chief of Staff of the submarine flotilla, also serving as executive officer aboard B-59. Equal in rank to Captain Savitsky, but more senior. And the only one who’d survived a nuclear accident before—the K-19 reactor failure in 1961, where he’d been exposed to massive radiation helping prevent a meltdown.

The political officer, Ivan Maslennikov, agreed with Savitsky. Launch.

Arkhipov said no.

An argument followed. Four hours of heated debate in the flooded, overheated submarine. The kind where you can taste the salt of other men’s sweat in the recycled air. Where the metal walls close in. Where every breath is borrowed.

Arkhipov remained calm. He was the only one who kept his cool, who understood that the Americans knew very well where they were, that the “attacks” had failed on purpose. He persuaded Savitsky that the charges were non-lethal, that they were not under attack. He suggested they surface and await instructions from Moscow.

Savitsky relented.

Late in the evening of October 27, B-59 surfaced. They were quickly surrounded by aircraft and helicopters, blinded with spotlights, warning fire across the bow, destroyers training guns on the hull. But no attack. In the distance, a U.S. Navy destroyer asked them to identify themselves.

The submarine withdrew. Crisis averted.

Thomas Blanton, director of the U.S. National Security Archive: “A man called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

Arkhipov died in 1998, at age 72, from cancer likely related to his radiation exposure on K-19. The world didn’t learn about what happened aboard B-59 until 2002, forty years later, when retired Commander Vadim Orlov confirmed the submarines carried nuclear torpedoes and credited Arkhipov with preventing their use.

Four hours of arguments. Then rising to the surface. Then sailing home.

That’s it.

Source

3. Waist-Deep in Radioactive Water

May 4, 1986. Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine.

Eight days after the initial explosion and fire. The reactor core, around 185 tons of nuclear material, was still melting down and slowly burning through the concrete floor. Beneath it was a massive bubbler pool containing thousands of tons of water, used as coolant for the plant.

If the molten core reached the water, the resulting steam explosion would throw radioactive material across much of Europe, rendering it uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Some calculations suggested it would contaminate water supplies used by 30 million people and make northern Ukraine uninhabitable for over a century.

The pool had to be drained. Immediately.

But the valves controlling the sluice gates were located in a flooded corridor in a subterranean annex adjacent to the reactor building. In the dark. Under radioactive water. No remote control. Someone had to go down there and turn them manually.

Mechanical engineer Alexei Ananenko. Senior engineer Valeri Bespalov. Shift supervisor Boris Baranov.

They put on wetsuits, respirators, carried powerful lights, a radio station, and dosimeters. Two each, one attached to the chest, one around the ankle. Ananenko brought an adjustable spanner in case the valve became stuck. The operational staff honestly warned them about the high risk of receiving a fatal dose of radiation. If they didn’t survive, their families would be taken care of.

The men descended into the semi-flooded basement levels beneath Reactor 4, beneath the melting core. The water reached up to their knees, though some accounts say waist-deep. Radioactive. Dark. The kind of dark where your light creates more shadows than it banishes.

“Everyone at the Chernobyl nuclear power station was watching this operation,” Ananenko later told Soviet media. “When the searchlight beam fell on a pipe, we were joyous: The pipe led to the valves.”

They found both valves. Nobody believed they could be opened—these valves were needed only for the installation period, when the concrete bowl was filled and checked for leaks. They hadn’t been touched in years.

Baranov held the light. Ananenko and Bespalov manually opened the drain lines.

It took about 15 minutes.

“We heard the rush of water out of the tank,” Ananenko said. “And in a few more minutes we were being embraced by the guys.”

When they returned and checked their dosimeters: 10 annual norms. Bad, but not immediately lethal.

Fire brigade pumps then drained the basement. The operation wasn’t completed until May 8. 20,000 tonnes of water pumped out. Europe didn’t become uninhabitable.

For years, the internet repeated a myth: all three men died within weeks, buried in lead-lined coffins. But the truth is simpler and stranger.

All three suffered radiation sickness. Black spots appeared on Ananenko’s legs—“radioactive tan,” he called it. They washed themselves repeatedly in the showers but kept setting off radiation alarms. The diving suits hadn’t protected them from the radiation.

But no, they didn’t die.

Ananenko continued working at Chernobyl for three more years as one of the liquidators. Bespalov worked at the plant until retirement in 2008. Baranov died in 2005 from a heart attack, age 64.

In 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko presented all three with the Order For Courage. Ananenko and Bespalov received theirs in person. Baranov’s was awarded posthumously.

When asked about it years later, Ananenko said: “I never thought it might mean death. They only sent me because I knew how to do it. I was the one who knew where the valves were.”

Fifteen minutes. Knew where the valves were. Europe saved.

“I’m no hero,” he said. “I was just doing my job.”

Coda

I don’t think there are no statues tall enough. No medals heavy enough. No words grand enough. Three times, the world balanced on the edge of a decision made by people who were tired, frightened, far from home. Those who didn’t think of themselves as heroes and instead later shrugged and said they were simply doing their jobs. Following training, turning valves, making the logical choice.

We are all saved by the quiet refusal. Not by the person who wanted to be a hero, but by the person who happened to be there when the choice arrived.

Petrov’s gut feeling. Arkhipov’s calm. Ananenko’s wrench.

Twenty-three minutes. Four hours. Fifteen minutes. That’s how close we came. That’s how much time it took.

And now, here we are. Still breathing, still alive, still unaware of how many times we’ve almost stopped. Coffee still brews. The sun still rises. Children still laugh in playgrounds, oblivious to the fact that they exist because someone, somewhere, in the heat and the dark and the fear, decided to wait just a little longer before ending the world.

We owe them everything and we remember them hardly at all.

References

“The Other Close Call of 1983,” Veterans Breakfast Club, https://veteransbreakfastclub.org/the-other-close-call-of-1983/
“Stanislav Petrov: ‘I had a funny feeling in my gut,’” National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/media/28890/ocr
“Man Who Saved the World Dies at 77,” Arms Control Association, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017-10/news-briefs/man-who-saved-world-dies-77
“Stanislav Petrov, Soviet Officer Who Helped Avert Nuclear War, Is Dead at 77,” TIME, https://time.com/4947879/stanislav-petrov-russia-nuclear-war-obituary/
“Vasily Arkhipov Saved the World,” Beyond Nuclear International, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/10/16/vasily-arkhipov-saved-the-world/
“If Vasili Arkhipov Were A Pushover, None Of Us Would Likely Be Alive Right Now,” Medium, https://asherkaye.medium.com/if-vasili-arkhipov-were-a-pushover-none-of-us-would-likely-be-alive-right-now-5f525d354661
“Russian naval officer, the man who saved the world from nuclear war,” Telegrafi, https://telegrafi.com/en/Russian-naval-officer,-the-man-who-saved-the-world-from-nuclear-war-photo/
“55 Years After Preventing Nuclear Attack, Arkhipov Honored With Inaugural Future of Life Award,” Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/recent-news/55-years-preventing-nuclear-attack-arkhipov-honored-inaugural-future-life-award/
“Vasili Arkhipov: The Unsung Hero Who Saved the World from Nuclear Annihilation,” History Tools, https://www.historytools.org/stories/vasili-arkhipov-the-unsung-hero-who-saved-the-world-from-nuclear-annihilation
“Three Men Who Saved Millions,” The Trumpet, https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-millions
“Chernobyl Divers—Truth or Legend?,” ScubaBoard, https://scubaboard.com/community/threads/chernobyl-divers-truth-or-legend.588518/
“The Real Story of the Chernobyl Divers,” History, https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-real-story-of-the-chernobyl-divers
“Chernobyl Interview: Alexei Ananenko,” Exutopia, https://www.exutopia.com/chernobyl-interview-alexei-ananenko/
“The Real Story of the Chernobyl Divers,” The Scuba Shop, https://www.thescubashop.co.za/the-real-story-of-the-chernobyl-divers/
“The truth about the feat of three Chernobyl divers who saved millions,” Pictolic, https://pictolic.com/en/article/the-truth-about-the-feat-of-three-chernobyl-divers-who-saved-millions

Your Civic Duty to Make Art

2025-11-18T00:00:00Z

Soft humming of the radiator is all I hear as the fire glow of sunrise bleeds through the window. I’m awake too early to write this. Eating Mediterranean crackers between paragraphs. Lighting the vanilla incense from the Tibetan shop in Inglewood. Light on my desk from green tea candle my girlfriend let me have because she has too many.

Prelude

The black plastic Sony stereo to my right, CBC Radio One on low. I fret about them losing funding even though they don’t fairly report on the Gaza genocide. The blue Compliments water bottle re-used out of executive dysfunction, filling me with microplastics. A Rexall receipt. The stack of Field Notes. Metal lamps. The watercolour painting of the wolf and the lamb. Japanese erasers shaped like apple juice and milk cartons. The tick tick tick of the analog clock. The sunlight slowly turning sky blue as I keep writing.

I. NaNoWriMo & Rejections

This is my November 2025. I’ve been writing nearly an article a day. Two to three thousand words per article, fact-checked, with actionable steps for readers. A spin-off experiment from the now-defunct NaNoWriMo.

You might have heard about their spectacular implosion. In August 2024, the organization, which for 25 years encouraged writers to draft 50,000 words in November, announced they wouldn’t condemn the use of AI in their writing challenge. Worse, they claimed that opposing AI was “classist and ableist.”

Four board members resigned immediately. Their major sponsor, Ellipsus, withdrew. Authors like Erin Morgenstern, whose The Night Circus began as a NaNoWriMo project, publicly distanced themselves. Chuck Wendig put it best:

“The privileged viewpoint is the viewpoint in favour of generative AI. The intrusion of generative artificial intelligence into art and writing suits one group and one group only: the fucking tech companies.” But this controversy was merely the visible rot. The organization had been crumbling for years with problematic publisher partnerships, accusations regarding moderator misconduct toward younger participants, and a fundamental shift from hands-on literary support to hands-out donation begging. NaNoWriMo died not because of AI. It died because it stopped believing that the work itself mattered.

So here I am, doing my own version. Writing every day. For almost no one.

My stats page tells me twenty to thirty people will read this. Maybe more if I’m lucky and get boosted. That’s the reality of writing online in 2025. Let me give you the broader picture. The typical self-published print-on-demand book sells fewer than 200 physical copies. Half of all published books are self-published and only sell a handful of copies. A significant portion of self-published authors earn less than $1,000 annually from book sales.

The chances of getting traditionally published? Between 1% and 2%. Over 95% of manuscripts received by publishers are below the standard required. And even if you write something brilliant, most of those quality manuscripts still get rejected simply because you aren’t the right fit.

In 2023, an estimated 500,000 new books were self-published in the United States alone. That’s 500,000 people pouring their hearts onto pages that, statistically, almost no one will read.

Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected 30 times. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter was rejected over 10 times. Chicken Soup for the Soul suffered 144 rejections. Rejections happen because people kept writing. Kept showing up. Kept believing the work mattered even when the market said it didn’t.

The question I keep circling back to: Where do we pour ourselves? Not just time, though that’s part of it. But our attention. Our care. Our irreplaceable human capacity to notice things and make meaning from them.

We live overextended. Most of us work day jobs. Sixty-six percent of emerging authors work day jobs to support their income. We’re exhausted. We have families, obligations, a world that keeps demanding we prove we deserve to exist by constantly being productive in ways that can be monetized.

And into this exhaustion, I’m suggesting you add more work. Unpaid work. Work that will likely never be widely read. Work that statistics say will fail.

I know how this sounds. Masochistic. Delusional. Self-indulgent. But I’m going to argue something more radical. Making art is not self-indulgence. It’s civic duty.

II. Creativity in Democracy

John Dewey wrote in 1939, while witnessing the rise of fascism in Europe:

“The task of democracy is forever that of the creation of a freer and more human experience in which all share and to which all contribute.” Democracy as creative practice. Not democracy as voting every four years and then checking out. Democracy as an ongoing, participatory act of imagination. Democracy, the value and its practice, requires constant nurturing, widespread participation, regular renewal, visible processes, and meaningful outcomes.

It is not a given nor a natural state of human affairs.

When you write, or when you paint, compose, dance, build, you are participating in the collective imagination of what’s possible. You are adding your voice to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be human.

Arts-based civic practices have transformed juvenile justice systems, made streets safer for women and girls, turned community organizing into visible, tangible change. Theatre of the Oppressed and Legislative Theatre bring public servants, constituents, and activists into creative spaces to brainstorm, test, deliberate and enact new policies. Augusto Boal, creator of Theatre of the Oppressed, said:

“We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.” To make art is to say I notice things. I have perspective. I refuse to let the dominant narrative be the only narrative. Creative practice runs through everything. Community gardens, affordable housing, historic preservation, community organizing, economic development, sustainability, politics and policy. It’s the warp to democracy’s weft.

You think you’re just writing a poem about your grandmother’s hands. But you’re also documenting a particular kind of immigrant labour, a particular kind of love, a particular way of being in the world that the algorithm doesn’t care about and the market won’t reward but that matters because it happened and you witnessed it.

III. Radical Freedom

There’s this meme that’s been circulating, where people commenting on videos of others doing absurd, silly things with “what a way to exercise free will.” The joke captures how we have radical freedom that most of us never touch.

We’re so colonized by capitalist logic that we can’t imagine doing something that doesn’t serve our career or brand or monetization strategy. We’ve internalized the question “What’s it for?” so deeply that we’ve forgotten acts can exist for their own sake.

Shave your head. Move to a different state. Change your name. Register a KDP account and independently publish a book. Join a new Meetup group. Volunteer for a local organization. Life is far, far too short to not indulge in the optional, in the absurdity.

We have a civic duty to use our talents for a greater good. But first we must care for and tend those talents, or they’ll rot and waste away. Self-punishment and pity do no good. If ridicule made us more productive, it would have worked already.

Stand in front of the mirror every morning. Hand on chest. Say good morning. Proclaim you love yourself. Eventually the sentiment will become honest and genuine. Ask more of yourself. Ask less of the world. Deny what you think you’re obligated to do.

How awake are you right now, truly?

How aware are you of the body you inhabit? Think of the oxygenation, the pulse, the blinking and weight and location. We sleepwalk. Most of us, most of the time. We scroll. We consume. We numb.

Consistent writing practice trains your brain to respond and engage more creatively. Writing regularly helps you tap into the phenomenon of ‘flow’. A state of deep immersion where creativity and productivity peak.

When you make writing a daily habit, it becomes less intimidating. You’re more likely to push through periods of creative drought. Habits create neural pathways that strengthen with repetition. The more you write, the easier it becomes to overcome initial resistance.

Hemingway once compared his writing content to water in a well. When you write, you’re drawing from that well. If you drain it completely, it takes longer to refill. Regular, measured writing sessions allow the creative well to replenish naturally. This is waking up. Paying attention. Refusing numbness.

We require heat, acid, fat and salt. We need nourishment and balm. We are gentle creatures, inherently. I know this much to be true.

IV. The Bread We Bake

The why is what I always circle back to. I recognize that I’m still mostly just soapboxing out into the void. How I can look at my stats page and see only twenty or thirty people will ever read this.

But this is the surrender. This is where we put our faith and grace. We must practice repeatability. We must write every day the way bread is baked every day, even if it’s sadly discarded after a stale week.

You show up anyway. You write the bad draft. You make the terrible painting. You sing off-key. You dance awkwardly. You do it badly until you do it less badly and then one day you look up and realize you’ve made something that matters.

The best part of writing isn’t publishing. It isn’t the readers or the accolades or even finishing the damn thing.

The best part is the practice itself. The showing up. The two hours before dawn when it’s just you and the page and the radiator humming and the sky slowly turning blue. E.B. White said:

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

V. Dichotomy

There’s a false dichotomy between the textbook and real life, theory and practice. This has always been a clever way of pitting us against one another.

People say “that’s just academic” or “that’s not how the real world works.” As if thinking deeply about something makes it less valid. As if the real world doesn’t need people who’ve spent time considering how things could be different.

Curiosity is the antidote. To interrogate what is considered default and de facto, whether in the world or in our own mind. We must meet challenges with questions rather than accusations or surrender.

The only thing we ought to surrender to is what we cannot change. The immovable static. But wisdom comes in knowing what that is and isn’t. Most of what we think is immovable isn’t. We’ve just never tried to move it.

This essay will reach twenty people. Maybe thirty. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, a hundred.

Those are terrible numbers if I’m treating writing as marketing. If this is lead generation or brand building or any of the other phrases we use to pretend we’re not just trying to be heard. But what if those twenty people are exactly who need to read this?

What if one of them is standing in their kitchen at 5 AM, staring at their laptop, wondering if it’s worth it to keep going? What if another is on the edge of quitting because they’ve been rejected again and the statistics say it’s pointless?

What if the twenty people who read this are the twenty people who needed to know they’re not alone in pouring themselves into work that won’t be rewarded?

Postlude

Show up because democracy requires imagination and you have a perspective no one else has. Show up because being a citizen means changing society, not just living in it. Show up because we need your weird specific observations about light through windows or the way your grandmother’s voice changed when she lied or the precise shade of blue the sky turns at 6:47 AM in November in Calgary.

Show up because the alternative is sleepwalking through the one absurd miraculous life you get.

The radiator still hums. The sun has fully risen now. The incense has burned down to ash. The candle flickers. I’ve written another article almost no one will read. And tomorrow I’ll do it again. And the day after that. I refuse to waste the time I have left waiting for permission that’s never coming.

NaNoWriMo died because it stopped believing the work mattered. I’m here in November 2025 doing my own version because I refuse to stop believing. Not fifty thousand words of a novel, but thousands of words a day poured into essays almost no one will read. The metrics don’t justify it. The market doesn’t reward it. I’m doing it anyway.

Your civic duty isn’t to be successful. It’s to pay attention. To notice. To make. The work itself is the point. Everything else is just commentary.

Now go. Write your twenty people their message. Trust me, they need it.

Brennan Kenneth Brown is a Queer Métis author and web developer based in Calgary, Alberta. He founded Write Club, a creative collective that has raised funds for literacy nonprofits. His work spans poetry, literary criticism, and independent journalism, with over a decade of writing publicly on Medium and nine published books. He runs Berry House, a values-driven studio building accessible JAMstack websites while offering pro bono support to marginalized communities.

Support my work: Ko-fi | Patreon | GitHub Sponsors | Gumroad | Amazon Author Page. Find more at blog.brennanbrown.ca.

THE COMPASSION ECONOMY

2025-11-11T00:00:00Z

Windows at Element Cafe fog with steam and breath. There’s the ambient noise of me and twenty other people who should be at work. 2:47pm on a Tuesday afternoon in Calgary. Everyone locked into a staring contest with laptop screens, performing the theatre of productivity while actually refreshing job boards, editing resumes that will be scanned by ATS algorithms trained to reject us. I imagine them messaging each other about how we can’t do this anymore.

PART ONE: THE ROMANCE OF BEING LAZY.

The +15 skywalks connect empty office towers like arteries in a body forgetting how to pump blood.

I’m supposed to write a story about work here. But in 2025, nobody is happy at work. Thirty-five percent of Gen Z reported being happy at their jobs last year. Not fulfilled or passionate, but happy. Thirty-five percent. Which means two-thirds of us are performing an elaborate charade where we pretend that spending the majority of our waking hours doing something that makes us miserable is normal, is necessary, is the only way to live.

The older generations call us entitled. Lazy. There’s a viral terminology around our refusal to participate in their delusion: quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, lazy girl jobs. But where did it come from?

The creator of the “lazy girl job”

Gabrielle Judge was 26 when she coined the term “lazy girl job” in a TikTok that got 3.6 million views. She wasn’t celebrating laziness. She was naming something we all felt but couldn’t articulate. The absurdity of a system that calls you lazy for wanting to pay your rent and have dinner with friends. For choosing a job that doesn’t require you to romanticize your own exploitation.

She chose the word “lazy” on purpose. Satire as survival mechanism. Anything less than burning yourself out is considered a moral failure in American hustle culture.

Another woman created Bare Minimum Mondays, the radical idea that you might ease into your work week instead of arriving Monday morning already exhausted from the dread that consumed your entire Sunday. Marisa Jo Mayes was 29 when she started it. She’s received hundreds of messages from people whose bosses quietly adopted it. Hundreds of messages that all say the same thing. I thought I was the only one.

That’s the quiet part nobody wants to say out loud. We all think we’re alone in feeling like this. Like we’re the problem. Like if we just worked harder, wanted it more, optimized our morning routine, we’d finally be okay. 82% of employees are at risk of burnout this year. Eighty-two percent. There’s no personal moral failure, just intentional design flaw.

There’s a meme that went viral on r/antiwork, the Reddit community that exploded from 100,000 to 2.9 million members during the pandemic. It shows a person applying clown makeup in stages. First panel: “Maybe if I work hard.” Second panel: “Go above and beyond.” Third panel: “Never use sick or vacation days.” Final panel, full clown makeup: “The company will notice and appreciate.”

A woman named Penny saw that meme and immediately recognized herself. She’d been working 60-hour weeks as a pharmaceutical consultant, asking for help, asking for support, getting promises and pay raises but never the actual thing she needed: less work. She quit. Went freelance. Now uses r/antiwork to remind herself she’s not alone in pursuing a life that isn’t dominated by work.

She saw herself in the clown. You probably do too.

All the statistics feel like science fiction until you realize they’re just describing your life. Peak burnout now hits at age 25 instead of 42. Think about that. We used to burn out at 42, after decades of work. Now we’re burning out before we’ve even finished paying off student loans.

70% of Gen Z and Millennials reported burnout symptoms within the last year. 91% experienced high pressure or stress at some point. The cost? $322 billion annually in lost productivity. But that’s the wrong question, isn’t it? The wrong math. It doesn’t matter what it costs businesses, it matters what it costs us.

Nearly 60% of Gen Z graduates can’t find jobs. That’s not a typo. Sixty percent. 4.3 million young people are NEETs—not in education, employment, or training. Just… existing in the gap between what we were promised and what’s actually available.

In Calgary, where I write this, youth unemployment sits at 18.3%. The office towers downtown are gorgeous, especially at sunset. Steel and glass reaching toward sky. But walk through them on a Friday and count the empty desks. The hybrid work revolution means we’ve learned we can do these jobs from anywhere. And so we’ve learned most of these jobs probably don’t need to exist.

Photo by Alexis Fauvet on Unsplash

Let me tell you about meaninglessness. Not as a philosophical concept, but as a documented psychological state. Work alienation has four dimensions: powerlessness, meaninglessness, social isolation, and self-estrangement. Corporate speak which translates to: you have no control, your tasks are pointless, you’re disconnected from your coworkers, and you no longer recognize yourself.

Meaninglessness comes from working on tasks that lack variety, perceived significance, and identity. From being asked to do things that feel illegitimate. Irrelevant. Like when you spend three hours in a meeting that could have been an email, or when you’re told your work is essential while being paid $15 an hour with no benefits, or when you realize your entire job is to make a rich person richer while you can’t afford your own rent.

Social isolation is the exclusion from, or absence of relationships with, colleagues. Which sounds like a nice way of saying you’re lonely at work. Workplace loneliness reduces work engagement and causes job dissatisfaction. It makes you physically present but psychologically absent. A withdrawal state. A living death.

And self-estrangement—that’s the worst one. That’s when you look in the mirror and don’t recognize the person staring back. When you’ve spent so long performing a role that you’ve forgotten who you are underneath the performance.

You might think this is depression, but it isn’t. This is a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. The World Health Organization classified this as an occupational phenomenon. Your job is making you sick and that’s deemed normal and okay.

Ann Hubbard is 56. She’s a retail worker, a member of the Communist Party, active on r/antiwork. She used to be a history teacher until her mother got dementia and she had to quit to provide care. Lost her house. Struggled to find teaching work after her mother died. Ended up at a retail store, barely getting by.

“You’re not worth anything if you don’t generate revenue,” she said. “It’s very, very stressful to know that you’re not valued by society.”

There’s another story from r/antiwork. Nick from Phoenix. Worked in a factory. A kiln exploded during ignition and nearly killed him. He was an expert. The equipment was ancient and improperly maintained. They fired him instead of improving safety.

And Alison, who left New York: “Since I started my working career at age 16, I’ve never once had an employer that didn’t harass me or discriminate against me for my gender, my age or my disabilities.” These aren’t isolated incidents. This is a system working exactly as designed.

PART TWO: A REAL SOLUTION.

What do we do? That’s the question, right? The one that follows all the depressing statistics and personal horror stories. What do we actually do.

Here’s where I’m supposed to offer a solution. Links to a flashy landing page with ten steps to better work-life balance. A newsletter that will give you five ways to optimize your career. A self-help conclusion that makes you feel hopeful while changing absolutely nothing.

But this problem isn’t individual. The solution can’t be either.

Only 6% of Gen Z say their primary career goal is to reach a leadership position. We’re looking for the emergency exit instead of climbing the corporate ladder. And once we find it, we will build something else entirely.

There’s a different economy happening in the margins. No stock ticker or quarterly earnings report. The operating principles sound naive until you realize they’re actually ancient. Reciprocity, solidarity, care.

Mutual aid is what happens when communities take care of each other because governments won’t and corporations can’t profit from it. It’s not charity, but rather solidarity. It treats everyone as equals and focuses on collective care and shared responsibility.

During the pandemic, mutual aid networks sprouted up everywhere. Not because people suddenly got generous. Because systems failed and we realized we could save each other. Community fridges where you take food without proving you deserve it. Neighborhood meal shares. Carpools and childcare swaps and rent strikes and tenants unions.

Every time someone takes food from a community fridge without having to debase themselves, that’s a small revolution.

Research shows that community mutual aid networks and social relationship capital significantly reduce household financial vulnerability. That’s not touchy-feely stuff. That’s measurable impact.

The solidarity economy is the formal term for what I’m calling the compassion economy. A post-capitalist framework built on equity, cooperation, democracy, sustainability. It includes worker cooperatives, community land trusts, time banks, participatory budgeting. Ways of organizing economic life that don’t require someone to be exploited for someone else to profit.

People’s faith in the status quo is gone. There’s growing openness to new narratives, new models, new paradigms. This moment—this crisis of meaning and burnout and impossibility—is also an opening.

In May 2025, over 300 organizers gathered in Atlanta for “Solidarity at Scale: Converging Our Movements for Systems Change.” They’re not waiting for permission, and are building alternative institutions that put people and planet over profit, creating “a world in which many worlds fit.”

It’s happening in Jackson, Mississippi. In Cleveland. In Barcelona. In mutual aid networks across Los Angeles and Chicago. In community land trusts and worker cooperatives and time banks. A million small acts of refusal and creation.

Dean Spade writes that mutual aid is “the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.” It’s grounded in solidarity, not charity. It acknowledges that when basic needs aren’t met, it’s not a personal failing—it’s systemic.

I’m writing this from Calgary, where the unemployment numbers make national news and the oil money bleeds more than it flows, and young people flood in from across Canada looking for opportunity, only to find the same impossible math everywhere. Rent costs $1,800 for a one-bedroom and entry-level jobs pay $16 an hour and you need five years of experience for a junior position and also you might be laid off in six months when the market shifts.

But there are those who organize the community, who are learning the names of their neighbours and their struggles instead of their LinkedIn profile. The compassion economy isn’t a distant utopia. It’s happening now. In the margins, in the gaps, in the spaces between what capitalism offers and what we actually need to survive.

We’re not advocating for laziness. We’re advocating for actual lives. Where you can afford rent and go to your friend’s birthday party. Where taking a sick day doesn’t risk your job. Where your value as a human isn’t determined by how much wealth you generate for someone else.

We’re tired of the work ethic that says suffering is virtue. We’re done performing passion for jobs that don’t pay enough to live. We’re refusing to pretend that this is sustainable.

48% of Gen Z don’t feel financially secure. More than half live paycheck to paycheck. This while we’re told to be grateful for the opportunity to work. Plainly, the answer isn’t to try harder within this system. The answer is to stop pretending the system is immutable and inevitable.

I used to think I wasn’t resilient enough, wasn’t driven enough, wasn’t willing to sacrifice enough for success. Then I found people organizing mutual aid in their neighbourhoods. Found the solidarity economy framework that names what we’re all feeling. This is broken, and we don’t have to accept it.

We’re building something else. Not asking permission. Not waiting for institutions to change. Just… building.

Community fridges. Time banks. Cooperative housing. Worker-owned businesses. Childcare collectives. Tool libraries. Skill shares. Tenant unions.

Profit isn’t the point. Care is the point. Connection is the point. Building a world where we acknowledge the interdependence of our well-being instead of pretending we’re all isolated individuals competing for scarce resources.

The coffee shop is closing. We’re all packing up our laptops, our false productivity, our performance of purpose. Outside, the +15 skywalks still connect those empty offices. I think of how, only a few blocks away in Sunalta, at street level, there’s a community garden. A little free library. A sign for the neighbourhood meal share.

The question isn’t whether alternative economies are possible. They already exist. The question is whether we have the courage and imagination to make this central instead of marginal. To stop treating capitalism as inevitable and start treating compassion as foundational.

We’re practicing a different kind of world. Where your value isn’t determined by your productivity. Where community isn’t a luxury. Where care is reciprocal instead of transactional.

Every time you share food with a neighbour, you’re practising it. Every time you swap childcare or fix someone’s bike or teach a skill without charging, you’re practising it. Every time you refuse to perform gratitude for exploitation, you’re practising it. There’s a quiet revolution in refusing to be a clown anymore. To fail at capitalism is to succeed at aiding humanity.

Mutual Aid Networks in Mohkinstsis

Calgarians Helping Calgarians (Facebook Group) Over 5,200 members helping each other with food, moving, essentials, and support. Managed by sisters Kathy Fyfe and Sharon Moore for over a decade. No money requests allowed—just neighbors helping neighbors. As one member said: “This group has saved me—literally saved me.”

United African Diaspora Mutual aid serving Calgary’s Black and African communities. Started summer 2020 to address gaps in support for newcomers and marginalized communities during COVID-19.

Calgary Community Fridge Take what you need, leave what you can. No questions asked, no proof of need required. Fresh produce available to anyone, anytime.

Housing Cooperatives

Southern Alberta Co-operative Housing Association (SACHA) 403–233–0969 | #110, 2526 Battleford Ave SW

SACHA supports 13 housing co-ops across Calgary with approximately 1,200 units. Co-op housing offers security of tenure, democratic control, and monthly costs ranging from $500-$1,387 for three-bedroom units—significantly below market rent. Waitlists can be 2–8 years, but they’re worth joining.

Individual Calgary Co-ops:

Sunnyhill Housing Co-operative (Sunnyside)
Ramsay Heights Co-operative—403–264–6615
Hunter Estates Housing Co-operative—403–275–2534
Prairie Sky Cohousing (intentional community model, ~40 people in 18 units)

Food Security

Calgary Food Bank 403–253–2055 (Hamper Request Line) | 5000 11 Street SE Emergency food hampers available every 14 days. Now operates on a client choice model—you pick what you need instead of receiving a pre-packed hamper.

Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids (BB4CK) 403–264–7979 | #110, 909 11 Ave SW Provides free school lunches to kids at over 230 Calgary schools. If your child needs lunch, they’ll work with you and the school to make it happen. No limit on how many times you can access support.

Calgary Co-op In 2024, Calgary Co-op raised $2.8 million through community campaigns. Drop off non-perishables at any location. They also support Fresh Food Rescue initiatives.

General Support & Resources

211 Alberta Call/Text: 211 (24/7) Free service connecting you to community, social, health, and government services across Alberta. If you’re struggling, start here.

United Way of Calgary and Area Funds programs addressing poverty, housing, mental health, and community building across Calgary.

Calgary Homeless Foundation Beyond emergency shelter, they provide prevention programs, diversion supports, and one-time financial aid to help keep people housed.

What You Can Do Right Now

If you need help:

Call 211 to find services that match your needs
Join “Calgarians Helping Calgarians” on Facebook
Request a food hamper from Calgary Food Bank (403–253–2055)
Apply to housing co-op waitlists through SACHA—even if they’re long, get on them now

If you want to help:

Stock the Calgary Community Fridge with fresh food
Join mutual aid groups and respond to requests
Volunteer with BB4CK to pack school lunches (12+ years old)
Drop non-perishables at any Calgary Co-op location
Donate to organizations through Calgary Foundation’s Community Knowledge Centre

If you want to organize:

Research starting your own community fridge or meal share
Connect with SACHA about converting existing buildings into co-op housing
Start a neighborhood skill-share or time bank
Organize tenant meetings in your building
Create your own Facebook group for your community

Originally posted here.

Witnessing Palestine & the United States

2025-11-08T00:00:00Z

Most Indigenous folks know and will tell you plainly that our world already ended. Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) stated in a 2019 Dissent Magazine interview: “Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic. In some cases, we have undergone several apocalypses.” He cited the destruction of buffalo herds, animal relatives, and river homelands as distinct catastrophes his community survived. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) writes “Indigenous peoples have been engaged in over 4 centuries of resistance against a violent backdrop of conquest, genocide, expansive dispossession, unfettered capitalist exploitation, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and environmental apocalypse.” Our ways of living and knowing already ended centuries ago, with unflinching brutality.

Windows down, scream along
To some America First rap, country song
A slaughterhouse, an outlet mall
Slot machines, fear of God.—Phoebe Bridgers, “I Know the End”

You say the ocean’s rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did
You’re not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried.—Bo Burnham, “All Eyes on Me”

And, funnily enough, most Westerners are people who yearn for such a way of living, to be off-grid, untethered to having their worth and survival directly attached to wage and labour. Harbinger Journal’s analysis reveals, “the homesteader fantasy of living outside of the capitalist system is in fact impossible; it rests on the benefits of Indigenous land dispossession, racist implementation of land policies, and ongoing state subsidies.” The pastoral fantasy, the commune, the gatherer—they all become increasingly distant in our peripheral, available only to those with the privilege to opt out.

But I have seen, throughout my life, how even these distant fantasies recede further still.

The past couple years have been explicit in atrocity unique compared to the past few decades. We have witnessed what has been categorically and formally labelled a genocide. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Commission Chair Navi Pillay stated how the “international community cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza. When clear signs and evidence of genocide emerge, the absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity.”

Between October 7, 2023 and July 31, 2025, 60,199 Palestinians were killed including 18,430 children and 9,735 women. Life expectancy in Gaza decreased from 75.5 years to 40.5 years—a 46.3% decline. UNICEF reported that more than 50,000 children have been killed or injured, with at least 100 children killed or injured every day since the ceasefire breakdown. Human Rights Watch’s 179-page December 2024 report concluded Israeli authorities committed “crime against humanity of extermination” and “acts of genocide.” Amnesty International’s 296-page report stated there is “sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide.”

And yet supposedly intellectual and moral people still go up to bat for an apartheid state that has claimed the lives of thousands of children.

As the United States—a supposedly first-world nation—has had people of all ages flailing and screaming as plain-clothed masked men allegedly working for a just government disappears these individuals—some citizens, some with cancer—without any due process whatsoever. In April 2025, ICE deported a 4-year-old U.S. citizen child with Stage 4 kidney cancer to Honduras after arresting the mother. The ACLU lawsuit states: “U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.”

The ACLU’s 2024 report “Deadly Failures” found that 95% of deaths examined from 2017–2021 were deemed preventable or possibly preventable with adequate medical care. The study found 88% of deaths involved incorrect or incomplete diagnoses, and 61% had falsified or insufficient medical documentation.

And in the dozens of videos of these people being disappeared, there are countless unharmed citizens on the sidelines doing nothing. Witnesses first-hand to atrocities committed. I think of what Einstein wrote in his March 30, 1953 letter: “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”

This is not even to mention the genocides occurring in Sudan and the Congo. In Sudan, the US Senate estimated that actual deaths could reach 150,000—ten to fifteen times higher than official counts. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab documented 31+ clusters of objects consistent with human bodies (1.3–2 meters in length) in El-Fasher, with red discoloration visible from space around body clusters—blood visible from orbit. They documented 43+ villages burned near El Fasher by June 2024, with over 100 predominantly Masalit and Zaghawa communities destroyed across Darfur. The US State Department formally determined on January 7, 2025 that the Rapid Support Forces committed genocide in Darfur.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Prime Minister Judith Suminwa reported on February 24, 2025 that 7,000+ people were killed since January 2025 alone, including 3,000 deaths in Goma. The UN Human Rights Office documented at least 319 civilians killed by M23 between July 9–21, 2025 in 14 villages near Virunga National Park. The historic death toll since the conflict began exceeds 6 million lives—one of deadliest conflicts since WWII. Currently 7.8 million are internally displaced and 28 million face food insecurity.

These conflicts have become so violent that the blood of the innocent is visible from space.

Are we doing anything?

Complicit.

This essay is not finger-wagging or pearl-clutching. I am as complicit as everybody else not risking their lives to save others. The most I can say I’ve done is that I created 🍉 Watermelon Club as a way for Canadian students to start activism initiatives, I’ve attended protests, I’ve practised boycotting. So what?

I think of the moral framework that is systematic to all of us, and that I write about often—of sin, corruption, the tainting of the innocent, what salvation means and how one can achieve it. We must somehow, collectively, figure a way to reckon with our complicity. With the horrors that are so easy to find and witness and caused by those who are supposed to be responsible for justice.

One of my favourite books on the topic is succinctly titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. Omar El Akkad’s viral October 25, 2023 tweet captured the phenomenon of retroactive moral revisionism: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” Posted after three weeks of Gaza bombardment, the tweet received over 10 million views and became the title of his first nonfiction book. In a Literary Hub interview, El Akkad explained: “I’m just so preemptively furious at the moment, many years from now, when we’re gonna get all of those, you know, ‘Hiroshima’-type stories. The after-the-fact shared grief, the how-could-we-let-this-happen type stuff. I’m just so furious that we’re going to do it again.”

I think of how these past few years in particular will be washed and retroactively made clean. How the protests against South Africa apartheid or the Vietnam war or the invasion of Iraq have already had such rebranding. For the Iraq War, 72% of Americans supported it when it began in March 2003, but by 2015 only 38% admitted they supported sending troops. A 2015 YouGov poll found that while more than 60% actually favored sending ground troops in February 2003, most Americans now remember themselves as opposed. The memory gap is most severe among Democrats: in 2003, more than half of Democrats supported the war, but today only 19% admit they supported it while two-thirds remember themselves as anti-war.

For Vietnam, in August 1965, 60% said it was not a mistake to send troops, with only 24% saying it was a mistake. A 1968 Gallup poll found 56% approved of Chicago police beating anti-war protesters. Yet by November 2000, 69% believed sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake. The complete reversal from majority support to majority opposition happened gradually, but today’s memory suggests everyone was always against it.

The Neoliberal Dream.

I was born in 1996, I was eleven-years-old when Barack Obama was elected president. My parents vote NDP. I was raised with this surrounding and culture of progressive neoliberal idealism. We were told to foster empathy for others unlike us. Every school I attended was inundated with posters of multi-racial utopias telling us love is love. That things were only going to get just and fair and equitable for all. I was fortunate enough to witness, with the aid of effective propaganda, a world where people started caring more about the rights for all and the rights for our planet. A rise of acceptance, of mindfulness towards environmental initiatives and social justice.

And then, as I entered adulthood, I watched all of this progress bleed. I witnessed rot festered under the floorboards of our ideals. A return and a normalization of what is labelled conservative tendencies and principles but what is truly just malfeasance and intentional harm. The stripping of public and social welfare, the return of slurs to vernacular, the normalization of dehumanization and elimination of personhood from others.

This month began with the ongoing government shutdown that started October 1, 2025, threatening to eliminate SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans. The USDA initially announced that “the well has run dry” and benefits would not be issued November 1st.

Multiple states warned recipients that November SNAP benefits would not be paid until the shutdown ends. There is no indication of it ending.

It is understood that no society is more than three meals away from revolution, right? And yet again the United States, the great American experiment proves this idiom wrong, with popular discourse getting in the weeds of what exactly food stamps are used for and who is worthy of them—even as millions face immediate hunger with Thanksgiving approaching.

The human cost is immediate. Brian McGrain, executive director of Michigan Community Action, stated: “If [SNAP] benefits go unfunded, where are people going to turn? We know that a wave could be coming and we may not be able to meet that emergency need.” Food banks across the country are already under strain from recent cuts to SNAP that will cause 22.3 million families to lose some or all of their benefits according to the Urban Institute.

This isn’t abstract policy—it’s happening right now, as I write this, as you read this.

And likewise, what are schools now? Teachers inform us that the new normal in classrooms is the unbridled rage and violence of children, that they now must endure desks being hurled at them. An American Psychological Association survey of nearly 15,000 teachers and school staff found 14% of teachers were physically attacked by students, 33% experienced verbal harassment or threat of violence, and 43% said they wanted to quit. Catherine Brendel, a San Antonio teacher, was attacked by a student who “smashed textbook against her head” and “punched her in abdomen and arm.” She suffered a concussion, tinnitus, severe headaches, chronic dizziness, and developed PTSD and night terrors. She stated: “I promise you that today, chairs were thrown in classrooms, scissors were thrown in classrooms, and bulletin boards were pulled down. It’s horrible, and we have all got to change it.”

Our lexicon mirrors this. Everything is a psy-op, everything is ragebait, everything is brainrot.

Similar to Prometheus and fire, we stole silicon, we turned it into an incomprehensible device that fits in our pocket and as a result everyday we are devoured, only to regenerate the next day.

How We Reckon.

How do we reckon with all of this? How do we continue? How can we possibly endure with our heart intact? Again, I think back to the witnesses of ICE abuse and government-sanctioned terrorism.

I think of Audre Lorde and her idea of self-care. Not self-indulgence, but a radical act of self-preservation and political warfare necessary for marginalized groups to survive and thrive in a hostile world. From “A Burst of Light: And Other Essays” (1988): “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde wrote this as a Black disabled lesbian experiencing multiple forms of oppression, from journal entries chronicling her experience after her breast cancer metastasized to her liver. Get enough sleep, exercise, eat well with others. Self-care is crucial for maintaining the ability to continue fighting for liberation and is not a luxury but a necessity.

I think of love. Specifically, to quote Freire, how “love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation.” This appears in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 3, written during exile from Brazil based on his work with peasants in literacy programs. Freire explicitly connects this to revolutionary struggle, arguing that dialogue cannot exist without “profound love for the world and for people” and that love “is thus necessarily the task of responsible Subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination.”

Be scared, try something. Flail. Scream. Anything is certainly better than nothing. Do not let your eyes gloss over, do not go gently into that dark night in front of us. Act human, please, for the love of God. It is the only way we can properly restore humanity.

Our collective inability to let go of certain comforts and status quo is to our own detriment. The future will only become exponentially more uncomfortable, difficult, and laborious. We need to be willing to risk more to help those who cannot help ourselves. Do the (minorly) uncomfortable thing of reaching out to others, of talking to strangers and neighbours, of being informed, of realizing there is an extremely compelling power in numbers.

Our ability to become numb, our excellent cognitive dissonance is the greatest threat to our collective future. All we have is each other.

Joy.

One of the most important things I think we can do to both endure and fight back is to cultivate our joy. Queer joy, Black joy, Disabled joy, Indigenous joy, Palestinian joy.

In Queer communities, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, founded 1987) pioneered combining “serious politics and joyful living” as member Maxine Wolfe described it. During the AIDS crisis and government inaction, ACT UP used pleasure as “an integral part of their resistance—they used it to raise hell and hold government officials accountable,” creating spaces where dance parties, sexual liberation, and direct action coexisted. Texas LGBTQ+ activists demonstrated this during 2023 legislative attacks by creating “spaces of queer joy: nail salons at the capitol, karaoke while waiting to testify,” asserting that “queer joy is perhaps our greatest tool of resistance in our march for freedom.”

Black Joy as a formalized movement emerged from Kleaver Cruz’s work beginning in November 2015. During depression and after loss, Cruz posted a photo of their mother with #BlackJoy and challenged others to “bombard the internet with joy.” Cruz founded The Black Joy Project, explaining: “Black joy is not dismissing or creating an ‘alternate’ black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustice in tension with the joy we experience. It’s about using that joy as an entry into understanding the oppressive forces we navigate through as a means to imagine and create a world free of them.”

Disabled Joy emerges from the Disability Justice Movement founded in 2005 by the Sins Invalid collective. Patty Berne articulated: “Joy is a vital part of Disability Justice and Utopia building because where happiness is often given and taken away from us by the oppressor, joy is something that we create from within. It’s not something that can be taken away.” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha stated: “As disabled people, we’re told we don’t deserve pleasure, [that] we just deserve this utilitarian, bland life and we’re lucky not to be dead.”

Indigenous Joy builds upon the concept of “survivance” articulated by Gerald Vizenor (2008), meaning “not simply surviving the centuries of harm by settler colonialists; rather, it is active resistance through critical consciousness and radical healing.” Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer communities particularly emphasize joy as medicine and survivance. Shilo George (Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho) and Brianna Bragg host “Your Two-Spirit Aunties” podcast, noting how “there is something about being Two-Spirit that feels magic. It’s medicine.” The Paths (Re)Membered Project’s photo series “Remembering Queer Indigenous Joy” by Evan Bennally Atwood (Diné/Navajo) documents “joyfully existing as a Queer Indigenous person is an act of survivance and reclamation.”

Palestinian Joy operates under conditions of active genocide and occupation, making it perhaps the most defiant form of resistance. Ibrahim Nasrallah, Palestinian author, articulated: “The job of the writer, sometimes, is to remind people that they have feet still capable of dancing.” Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti wrote: “The oppressed lose if, deep within, they fail to hold more beauty than their oppressors.”

The Palestine Writes Literature Festival (September 22–24, 2023) at University of Pennsylvania drew over 1,500 attendees celebrating Palestinian writers, featuring hakawati (storytelling), dabke performances, and children on stage naming their Palestinian villages of heritage. Abdelrahman Elgendy documented: “In the hallways, people hugged and cried; they embodied a celebration of an exceptional capability of joy. Of bearing the weight of decades-long generational scattering in one hand, and the warm maftoul of Palestinian grandmothers in the other.” Dabke, traditional Palestinian folk dance, has been “transformed from celebratory entertainment into profound resistance—a joyful defiance” where “each stomp declares existence, each leap celebrates survival” and “each stamp on the ground asserts: we exist, we persist, and we will not be erased.”

When ceasefire took effect in January 2025, Al Jazeera’s headline read “Joy beyond measure” as families dismantled tents and returned home despite destruction. Children waved Palestinian flags while one person stated: “Here, we are always scared and worried, but back home we will be very happy, and joy will come back to our lives.” Israeli authorities immediately imposed military operations and checkpoints to suppress these celebrations, attempting to ban public displays of joy at prisoner releases. Despite these attempts, families celebrated released prisoners wearing their prayer beads and singing liberation songs, with one mother describing her son’s release as “his wedding day.”

There is, somehow, life to be lived waiting in the wings of all of this. Joy is the fuel sustaining our resistance. It is the assertion that we are still here, still human, still capable of beauty despite everything trying to crush us.

What You Can Do Right Now

I know you’re reading this feeling overwhelmed. Maybe you’re thinking “what can I possibly do?” Paralysis is exactly what those in power want. So here’s what you do:

This Week:

Search for existing mutual aid networks in your area. Start by looking up “[your city] mutual aid” on social media. Dean Spade’s book and Mariame Kaba and AOC’s Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit provide step-by-step instructions.
Attend one organizing meeting or training. The Ruckus Society, Training for Change, and local organizations offer regular trainings.
Have three one-on-one conversations with people about taking action. Not just talking about how bad things are—actually planning what you’ll do together.

This Month:

Join or start a study group with 5–15 people. The People’s Forum offers courses and recorded lectures. The Red Nation’s reading lists ground Indigenous organizing.
Form a pod of 5–10 people for mutual support using pod mapping worksheets. Create a neighborhood group you can count on.
Take one solidarity action responding to frontline organizers’ call. Long COVID Justice’s Direct Action Toolkit provides COVID-safer action ideas.

Direction Action Resources:

CrimethInc’s Direct Action Guide provides comprehensive planning for coordinated actions
Community Defense Zone Starter Guide helps create phone trees and text alerts for ICE raids or police activity
ACT UP Civil Disobedience Training Manual offers complete training from AIDS activism experience
Critical Resistance’s Abolitionist Toolkit provides comprehensive organizing strategies

Long-term Commitment:

Build consistent relationships with community organizations
Show up regularly to meetings and actions
Share resources through mutual aid networks like HUMANs
Keep learning through political education
Practice security culture to protect vulnerable community members The key is to start somewhere. Don’t wait until you feel ready or until you have it all figured out. The Commons Social Change Library and Activist Handbook provide comprehensive resources for sustained organizing.

Cultivate your joy. Connect with others. Build power. The future depends on what we do today.

The Dying Art of Having Something to Say

2025-09-26T00:00:00Z

In 2017, I wrote about blogging with the wide-eyed idealism of someone who still believed in the democracy of the Internet. I was twenty-two, convinced that “the way Gutenberg gave everybody the power to read, the Internet gave everybody the power to write.”

**A Personal History of Blogging
Trying to Understand the Democracy of the Internet
blog.brennanbrown.ca

I.

It’s 2025 now. I’ve been blogging for a decade. The landscape has shifted so dramatically that when I search for “blogging”—if anyone even uses Google anymore—what surfaces is a grotesque parody of what we once called writing: Here’s how to start a WordPress (with my referral and affiliate codes) in order to write content with longtail keyword SEO and funnelling and integration and —

Oh my God.

The word has been hollowed out, its corpse animated by marketing speak. What we call “blogging” today bears no resemblance to its original intention. It’s not even the same word anymore.

II.

Don’t misunderstand me. Good writing still exists. Substack thrives as a “creator economy” focused on “newsletters.” Writers are finding their audiences, their voices, their revenue streams. Maybe this is semantics—maybe the medium doesn’t matter if the message survives.

But something fundamental is missing.

Something has been lost in translation from blog to brand, from writer to content creator, from having something to say to having something to sell.

III.

People point to short-form video—TikTok, Shorts, Reels, whatever the fuck you want to call them—as the ultimate democratization of the Internet. And yes, there’s something to be said for the frictionless nature of recording yourself with your phone’s camera, uploading in short bursts to an audience hungry for distraction.

You don’t need to know how to write. You don’t even need to know how to read.

But this is pure ephemera. You might get thousands of views compared to the dozens who read your written work, but only because people consume thousands of these tiny videos daily. How much is being remembered? How much changes us?

Short-form video content and the cynical, crony-capitalist version of blogging share the same existential problem: meaninglessness. A decay of our humanity, not an uplifting of it.

IV.

To have a blog—to have your own website where you write, to be part of the independent Internet—remains available to anyone. Anybody can become a writer, a reader, an intellectual. These are not gatekept, elitist intellectual pursuits, no matter how much mainstream propaganda pretends they still are.

Create something that lasts. A legacy.

To perform the practice and ritual of writing is to create an identity, to create tangible impact on the world. How many of your TikToks will your grandchildren view? In contrast, how much of your writing will they read?

V.

Consider the staying power of different media. Consider universal compatibility. Consider the lesser chances of rot and erasure.

Enrich yourself. Live slower. Take in words instead of drowning in the infinite pool of doomscrolled videos. Find solace in a community of people with intrinsic motivation to create and cultivate, rather than those who seek clout or money or validation.

VI.

In the dire, frankly terrifying state the world is in now, it needs thinkers. It needs people willing to believe they have something worth saying, a voice worth hearing.

The world needs writers more than ever.

Not content creators. Not influencers. Not SEO optimizers or funnel builders or growth hackers.

Writers.

People who understand that words, arranged with intention and care, can outlast platforms and trends and the endless churn of algorithmic feeds. People who know that in a world increasingly hostile to sustained thought, the simple act of putting pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—becomes a form of resistance.

VII.

I think about Mr. Rehak, my fifth and sixth grade teacher who first introduced me to blogging. He was a huge geek back when it wasn’t cool to be one. Every day after lunch, we’d read for an hour to Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. He’d try to engage our young, meager class in political and philosophical discussions.

He understood something that now feels revolutionary, giving children the tools to share their thoughts with a global audience was inherently valuable. Before the terms monetization and personal branding were even in nomenclature. For the simple, radical act of believing that what they had to say mattered.

That blog is still online, by the way. Our silly childhood musings, preserved in amber while millions of videos disappear into the digital ether.

VIII.

The creator’s intent doesn’t matter, I wrote in 2017. The audience creates meaning wherever they see fit. I still believe this, but I’ve learned to value intention more deeply. To understand that how we create—with what motivations, what hopes, what fears—shapes not just the work but the world that work enters.

When we optimize for engagement over enlightenment, for virality over veracity, for metrics over meaning, we don’t just change our art. We change ourselves.

IX.

Write anyway. Write without keywords. Write without funnels. Write without a clear path to monetization. Write because you have something to say, not because you have something to sell.

Write for the kid who might stumble across your words and realize that their thoughts, too, might be worth preserving. Write for your grandchildren, who will inherit a world drowning in content but starving for meaning.

Write because in a world of infinite scroll, the simple act of finishing a thought becomes revolutionary. Write because the democracy of the Internet has been buried under layers of optimization and automation and algorithmic mediation.

Write because the blank page is still the most radical space we have. A place where anyone can become anyone, say anything, change everything.

Write because the world needs writers now more than ever.

Not content creators.

Writers.

Originally posted here.

The Great Forgetting

2025-02-05T00:00:00Z

Do you remember Doge? Not the new United States government department currently operating a coup, or even the cryptocurrency. I mean the original meme, the Shiba Inu with the Comic Sans text.

Can you recall what color “The Dress” actually was, that viral image that tore the internet apart? What about Alex from Target, or “on fleek,” or Why You Always Lying? Can you piece together what actually happened during Gamergate, or why everyone was suddenly talking about a dentist who shot a lion? Do you remember why #BringBackOurGirls was trending, or what became of those girls? Without Googling, can you explain what the Arab Spring actually accomplished, or name three concrete outcomes of Occupy Wall Street?

You might feel a flutter of recognition at some of these references—a vague “oh yeah, that was a thing”—but chances are you can’t reconstruct the actual substance, the context, the meaning, or the aftermath of any of it. That’s not your fault. That’s The Great Forgetting at work.

Humanity has unprecedented access to information. Yet, we face a paradoxical and profound crisis: we are forgetting how to remember. According to a devastating 2024 Pew Research study, nearly 40% of all web pages from just a decade ago have completely vanished. Graves marked by 404 errors.

This isn’t about failing to recall specific facts or dates—it’s the systematic unraveling of our capacity to know who we are, where we came from, and why any of it matters.

The crisis manifests in multiple, interconnected ways. Most alarming is the decay of the Internet, the system we’ve entrusted with preserving our collective knowledge.

The Pew study found that a staggering “54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one broken link in their References section,” while “23% of news web pages contain broken links.” Digital rot is the active disintegration of our modern historical record.

The Arab Spring—that moment when humanity glimpsed its own power to transform reality, exists now primarily in disappeared blog posts and dead links. GeoCities, once a vibrant cosmos of human expression, has been reduced to ash. Our governments, supposed guardians of collective memory, are now actively participating in this mass erasure.

The sheer volume of information we now produce paradoxically contributes to our inability to remember. Walter (2024) warns in a recent paper that social media is becoming “less about connecting humans to other people but about consuming content and getting hooked by deliberately targeted dopamine hits in our brains, leading to a multiplication of online addictions and behavioral difficulties.” We have real systemic neurological harm colloquially known as brainrot.

We process more information in a single day than our ancestors might have encountered in a lifetime. Cognitive overflow leads us to what psychologists call “digital amnesia”—our growing tendency to immediately forget information we know we can easily find online.

Ancient ways of knowing are going dark like dying stars. As noted in the Spiceworks community’s analysis of disappearing digital heritage, “87% of video games released before 2010 are endangered (e.g., abandoned or neglected),” representing an unprecedented loss of our current cultural artifacts.

The Sami people of Scandinavia once carried entire maps of migration patterns, weather systems, and survival knowledge in their traditional joik songs. Now their grandchildren navigate by Google Maps, their ancestral wisdom replaced by algorithms that know everything about the land except how to love it.

Our news cycles are a cruel parody of memory. Perpetual present tense that devours itself. The Pew study reveals that “nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted,” with 60% of these disappearances due to accounts being made private, suspended, or deleted entirely.

We are living through multiple extinction-level events—climate collapse, democratic decay, the death of truth itself—but we can’t sustain attention long enough to even acknowledge our own apocalypse.

Walter’s research on the “Dead Internet Theory” suggests we’re rapidly approaching a point where the distinction between human-generated and AI-generated content becomes not just blurred but irrelevant.

The meta-horror of our situation is that we’re not just forgetting—we’re forgetting that we’re forgetting. Lost in a perpetual present tense, unable to recognize the extent of our own deterioration. The Pew findings show that “even for pages collected in the 2021 snapshot, about one-in-five were no longer accessible just two years later.” We’re raising children who have never had to remember a phone number, never had to hold a physical photograph.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The war against forgetting must be fought with the ferocity of those who know that survival itself is at stake. Memory isn’t a quaint cultural artifact—it’s the difference between being human and dust, between living in history and drowning in an endless, meaningless now.

A grandmother’s hands remember the exact pressure needed to knead bread—knowledge more profound than any YouTube tutorial could capture. How an old mechanic diagnoses an engine’s illness by its song, no diagnostic computer can truly replicate. Embodied prophecies of what we could still be if we refuse to surrender to digital amnesia.

We need space for slowness like we need air to breathe. Forest bathing as emergency medicine. Libraries with “slow reading rooms” as bunkers to preserve human consciousness itself. The Internet Archive making a last stand against the forces of corporate-sponsored amnesia.

We need new rituals of remembrance like we need water in a desert. We need to carve our most vital knowledge into stone if necessary, because paper outlasts hard drives and memory outlasts civilizations.

Education must be transformed from an exercise in AI-assisted regurgitation into a radical practice of remembering. Information literacy isn’t just another academic subject—it’s training for survival in an age of manufactured forgetting.

Our fractured attention spans need to be healed like broken bones. Reclaiming the human right to complete thoughts. Meditation isn’t self-care—it’s resistance against the forces trying to reduce us to stimulus-response machines.

Communities are the last bastions of genuine memory. Swedish study circles aren’t social gatherings—they’re memory militias fighting against the atomization of knowledge. Indigenous memory practices aren’t primitive but sophisticated technologies for maintaining human consciousness across centuries. Physical objects and spaces are memory anchors.

We must restore the art of real conversation—not the shallow pinging of messages across devices, but the deep, meandering dialogues. Third places are the temporal sanctuaries where stories can breathe and memories can take root.

We must maintain our capacity to be fully human in an increasingly posthuman world. Every story passed down, every skill taught face-to-face, every memory preserved outside of faulty, fragile digital systems.

We stand at a crossroads between remembering and oblivion.

The choice isn’t just about how we store information—it’s about whether we remain human in any meaningful sense. The future of memory may look different from its past, but if we don’t fight for it now, we won’t even remember enough to mourn what we’ve lost.

Originally posted here.

OUR HYSTERICAL STRENGTH

2025-01-19T00:00:00Z

In 1982, a mother’s hands found the underside of a Chevrolet Impala. The metal was still warm from her son’s work beneath it, the jack having given way like so many other false supports. Angela Cavallo didn’t think—thinking would have meant hesitation, would have meant loss. Her fingers curled around two tons of American steel, and she lifted.

We know the science of what happened next: adrenaline flooding her system, protective limits dissolving like sugar in rain, muscles recruiting beyond their prescribed boundaries. Her body understood something her mind could not grasp—that limitations are sometimes just stories we tell ourselves, stories that keep us safe until safety becomes its own kind of danger. The term for this phenomenon is, I think, fitting. Hysterical strength. The word hurled at us often for our beliefs, our values, our compulsion to move forward for the betterment of all by any means necessary.

I think about Angela’s hands a lot these days. About how they looked afterward, probably trembling, probably torn. About how they could never repeat what they had done, even if she had wanted to. The price of miraculous strength is usually paid in slow installments of pain, in the quiet accounting of damaged tissue and exhausted systems.

But her son lived.

We stand now in our own moment of falling jacks and trapped futures. The weight above us is not steel but something more diffuse—a convergence of crises that press against our collective chest, making it harder to breathe. Climate readings tick upward like a mechanical countdown. Democracy shudders on its foundations. The bonds between us fray like old rope.

The question isn’t whether we’ll have to lift this weight. The question is whether we’ll do it together, before the crushing begins in earnest.

Science tells us what happens in these moments of impossible strength, but science cannot tell us why a grandfather in Minnesota once lifted a grain auger off his grandson, then never spoke of it again. Cannot explain why, in 2015, when Lauren Kornacki found her father trapped beneath a BMW, her body somehow knew exactly what to do, even as her mind went blank with terror. The weight of metal, the weight of love, the weight of necessity—all of these conspire to remake us into creatures of pure possibility.

They never talk about the trembling afterward. How Lauren’s hands shook for days. How that grandfather probably woke up in the dark, haunted not by what he did, but by how close he came to having to live in a world where he hadn’t been strong enough.

Our world trembles now with similar weight. We watch as algorithms sort humanity into profitable segments of rage. We see children in schools practicing how to die, while legislators debate the price of their fear. We witness the temperature climb degree by degree, each tick upward another pound of pressure on our collective chest. The seas rise. The forests burn. The very air becomes a carrier of our collective failures.

In Utah, 2011: A group of teenagers lifted a burning car off a trapped motorcyclist. None of them could have done it alone. Together, their bodies wrote a new chapter in the physics of possibility. Their muscles screamed. Their tendons stretched to breaking. But they held on.

We must hold on.

When Jeff Smith’s teenaged daughters lifted that tractor off of him 2012, the girls didn’t stop to calculate the cost to her body. When Tom Boyle lifted a Chevrolet Camaro off a trapped cyclist in 2006, he didn’t pause to consider the years of back pain that would follow. They simply looked at what needed to be done and did it.

Look around. Really look. See how hate speech flows through our social media like poison through veins. Watch how artificial intelligence threatens to remake the world before we’ve learned to remake ourselves. Feel how economic inequality has become a boot on the throat of democracy. The geopolitical tensions between superpowers vibrate like a wire pulled too tight, while mental health crises bloom in our communities like dark flowers.

These are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different masks. They are the car that has fallen, the tractor that has rolled, the fire that spreads. And we—all of us who can still feel the weight of tomorrow pressing down—we are the ones who must lift.

Our muscles are already recruiting: in mutual aid networks spreading like mycelium through cities, in youth climate movements rising like tides, in communities organizing against fascism with the desperate strength of those who know exactly what’s at stake. Every protest, every mutual aid kitchen, every encrypted message group, every union drive, every act of solidarity—these are our fingers finding purchase on the underside of history.

Yes, we will be damaged. Yes, some of us are already feeling the strain—the anxiety that comes with knowing too much, the depression that follows bearing witness, the exhaustion of fighting systems designed to exhaust us. Our tendons will tear. Our muscles will scream. Some of us will never be the same.

But what is the alternative? To stand aside and watch the weight descend? To live in the aftermath of our own hesitation?

No. Like Angela Cavallo, like Lauren Kornacki, like Hannah and Hayley Smith, like all those whose bodies have rewritten the rules of possibility, we must lift. Together, with the strength of the desperate, with the power of those who have run out of alternatives. We must lift until the weight shifts, until those trapped beneath can breathe again, until we have rewritten the rules of what is possible.

Our hands are finding their places now. Can you feel it?

Originally posted here.

WOMEN'S RIGHT TO VOTE NOW PART OF THE CONSTITUTION

1920-08-26T00:00:00Z

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26.—The women of America were today formally enfranchised. Secretary of State Colby at 8 o'clock this morning signed the proclamation which makes the suffrage amendment a part of the United States Constitution.

The signing took place at the Secretary's home without ceremony of any kind. None of the leaders of the woman's suffrage movement was present.

Colby signed the proclamation as soon as he arrived at his home from the State Department, where he had been working on the document until a late hour last night.

The proclamation was signed in the presence of several officials of the State Department.

The women of the country have been waiting for this moment for more than half a century. The 19th amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1878.

The ratification of the amendment was completed by the Tennessee legislature last week. The certificate of ratification from Tennessee reached Washington early this morning.

Suffrage leaders were somewhat disappointed when they learned that the proclamation had been signed without any public ceremony. They had hoped to be present when the document was signed.

However, they were quick to express their joy at the final victory.

"This is the greatest day in the history of American women," said one of the leaders. "We have won a long and hard fight, and we are now ready to take our place as full citizens of the United States."

The enfranchisement of women will add about 27,000,000 voters to the electorate of the country.

Also in the News Today:

MILK TAKES ANOTHER HIKE IN COLUMBIA

All Dairy Products, Except Butter, Increased in Prices.

Milk in all its forms save butter, has taken another hike in price in Columbia. Whereas fifteen and sixteen cents a quart were the prices two weeks ago, today the best Columbia housewives can do is to buy it over the counters at the dairies for sixteen cents and take it home in their own pails. It costs from 17 to 19 cents a quart set down on the back porch.

BABE RUTH MAKES HIS 44TH

Yankee Slugger Drives Ball Into the Bleachers.

POLO GROUNDS, New York, Aug. 26.—Babe Ruth smashed out his 44th home run of the season here today when he drove one far into the right field bleachers. The hit came in the first inning of the Chicago-New York game.