the black sky rushed at us / like we were falling upwards
If you work in / around media and technology and/or care about electoral integrity but not in a “Stop the steal” way, you’re likely dealing with variations on grim.
It took me a long time to figure this out, but when I did I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s a class of people (often but not always already independently wealthy) who define their work as “mission-driven” but what they do not mean by that is “challenging to them, personally.” Sure they will work through a weekend to hit a deadline, or tolerate being yelled at by some executive or answer emails and text messages 24/7. But what they will not do is brook any conversation that suggests their work is not, in fact, changing the world for the better or that the world is changing (needs to change) in ways that they aren’t contributing to or that they, in fact, are the problem.
It is not ~fun~ to hear that whole those weekends at the office didn’t matter, or that your “public commitment to diversity” doesn’t mean anything if your primary criteria for hiring is “the CEO thinks they can have a beer with them” or that actually the most useful thing you could do in this moment is funnel money to people who’ve got domain expertise and years of relationships and an actual track record of executing under demanding circumstances.
Anyway a lot of tech and media people are losing their jobs, or will be losing their jobs, or are being confronted by the relative futility of whatever we thought our roles were in ~ making the world a better place ~ and it is very easy under those circumstances to take other people down with us, to take up a lot of time and space and energy bemoaning our own circumstances. We can work through this in the intimate spaces that are hopefully also spaces for truth and introspection and calling-in.
There are many people who do not quite know how they will be able to pay their bills in the coming weeks, and there are many people who will be able to pay their bills just fine but think their crisis of identity is the bigger problem here.
Crises are a catalyst, but mostly they are a mirror.
Attribution:
Flat on our backs,
the bitumen scuffing
the back of our calves,
the black sky rushed at us
like we were falling upwards
into the sparse stars.— stars by Christine Chia