This world will wear you out

And you'll build a new one anyway

It feels like so many of us are tired, all the time. I know I am. We live in an exhausting world, both physically and mentally. Whether it’s work (multiple jobs, irregular hours, just working too much) or the news (from Gaza to the election to the latest fascist development to come out of a state legislature) or the heat (and being painfully aware of what’s causing it), life is exhausting. There’s no way around it, for most people. The psychological toll is real, and the material toll is as real as it gets.

In a strange way the world we need is not so far from the world we have. As desperation grows, both in the U.S. and across the globe, people reach out for something more, something better. Some of the reaching involves relatively smaller, but important, moves like inching towards a four-day work week. Others are more drastic and potentially transformative, like the uprising against the ongoing French colonial rule in New Caledonia. But all speak to how, on the other side of immense exhaustion, and more specifically a profound dissatisfaction and anger and thorough done-ness with the current state of things, sits the possibility of radical change.

Accessing that potential is something very different than being aware of its existence. At the risk of stating the obvious, mass organizing is something very different than seeing the truth about society and being immensely fed up with it. The first step is significant, but it remains just the first step. And we’re at a juncture where millions and millions of people have taken that initial leap, but a troubling combination of the way our systems function, the way much of the left interacts with one another, and the ways we conceptualize change leave us further exhausted, angry, and frozen in place. Without significant shifts in approach we’ll be going down an even darker path at this pivotal juncture, rather than towards freedom. The U.S. is already hot on the heels of the reactionary fascist movement sweeping Europe, from six-day workweeks in Greece to authoritarianism in Hungary to far-right Islamophobes gaining power across the continent. And without multiple significant shifts that will just be the start, both in America and across the pond.