Apathy, but make it self-care
Hiding under a rock has a growing appeal, doesn’t it?
I’m not certain, by the way, that that’s untrue for almost everyone living through what has to be the dumbest era on record— red hat or bearded Ezra Klein poster-haver alike.
“I could care less.”
I used to love that comeback in high school, when someone offered their unprovoked care-meter in passing.
Oh, no? And I think you mean you couldn’t care less. As in, even if you tried your fucking hardest you just couldn’t muster up a single flying fuck. This was of course well before we started tacking on a hard, fast literally to every statement of feeling.
Now “literally” is stapled to everything, even things that are definitively not literal. “I literally died.” “I’m literally obsessed.” We’ve diluted meaning into a high-fructose TikTok smoothie of emphasis. No one’s sure what anything means anymore, but we’re all extremely sure that we mean it.
We don’t say things because they’re true; we say them because they sound like something a truthful person might say. But to be fair, we are running tremendously low on role models— who’s to say which perspectives are correct (or truthful) anyhow?
So yeah, that rock? I get it. It sounds fucking lovely under there.
An endorsement for apathy this is not— maybe self-preservation; because America is showing its true colors right now. And if you think that’s a statement aimed at the right, it’s not—not entirely.
This is the whole us.
The left doesn’t get to play the good guys anymore. Not like this. This isn’t a reckoning—it’s a reboot. And honestly? It might even require a trip to the Genius Bar. Literally.