What Do We Do Now That We're Here?

TL;DR in case you don’t read the whole thing: What follows is an announcement about some changes and additions I’m making to this newsletter. Don’t worry, this monthly edition will remain the same—and free.

I started this newsletter six or seven years ago as a form of self promotion, long before Substack was the career pivot du jour of journalism. Back then, I had a lot of urgency. Urgency to find stories and tell them. Urgency to build a career that other people would see as successful. Urgency to arrive at some place where I would feel like I could finally exhale.  

In the last year and a half, I lost pretty much all of that urgency. I just want to be here, without too much striving. But if there’s one part of the urgency that remains, it’s around a single question, one that I think about every single day: How are we supposed to live now? 

I am certain you wonder this too, especially during these summer months, when the end of the world starts to feel startlingly close and “the great outdoors [gives] way to the great indoors” in growing swathes of the world. It’s present in that moment when you’re scrolling the timeline or news, and see the seventh story about how it’s hotter in Seattle than Las Vegas, or how the scientists are using very unscientific language like “deep, deep shit” in reference to climate instability, or how there is actually way more methane being emitted in the Arctic than the already-dire predictions thought.

You momentarily feel a jolt of deep unease. Then you go back to whatever you were doing, with that sick feeling lingering in your stomach. Like a trash compactor in your insides, you swiftly push down that queasiness — the one which is screaming to be dealt with — because, well, what else can you do? You can’t change this world we live in.

But how to live in it? To be alive in the world as it is right now — to continue to do things like book vacations and post career updates on LinkedIn and think about your retirement fund — requires a stunning level of cognitive dissonance that borders on split personality. We all engage in it, because it’s a condition of capitalism. 

Back when I was in the thrum of daily journalism, it was ostensibly part of my job to report on the ways the world was burning, or at least keep tabs on it. But I still felt like a fraud. My life as a business journalist was entirely predicated on that trash compactor operating swiftly in my insides, many times per day. I focused diligently on the small stories to avoid the colossal one.

After all, I couldn’t field press releases about some buzzy tech company or industry innovation if I thought too hard about the fact that its business model was indicative of every single thing that’s wrong with the world and our economy. I’d simply never get anything done. Even when I was pointing out the ways companies were doing all manner of fucked up things, I still had to operate in a framework where I pretended that things like quarterly earnings calls made logical sense to me — remember, growth is good! No matter what! Every time I did it, the trash compactor would hum along as I filed my story.

You see, if I acknowledged to myself what the future might look like, if I allowed myself to be fully overcome with grief and fear for what will change in my lifetime, I couldn’t possibly have found it within myself to keep up with the minutiae of my personal ambition-driven life. So I avoided it, relegated it to the margins, and I did what most people do: I kept going to work amidst a mass extinction event.

In the last year, forced by the pandemic and my long-suffering nervous system, I stopped doing that. I made a lot of changes, and finally found some time and space to figure out what I don’t want. As a result, I have little interest in writing about most of the things I used to — or even succeeding in mainstream journalism for that matter — because I don’t think any of it is adequately addressing this question: How are you supposed to live in the world when there’s mounting evidence that the current state of affairs is completely untenable?

As we just barely ascend out of one crisis and descend ever more swiftly into an exponentially larger one, I can’t figure out how my life is supposed to look now. Living through Covid gave me what science fiction writers call a new “structure of feeling” — a set of baseline assumptions about what’s possible in the world (or perhaps, what’s no longer possible) and what it feels like to be alive. But I feel like I’m still lacking a playbook for what to do next, for how to live honestly and meaningfully in that new structure. I suspect I’m not alone.

What Do We Do Now That We’re Here?

I’m still a reporter at heart, so I’ve decided to bring the work of answering that question to this newsletter. It’s called: What do we do now that we’re here?

Things are very bad. And I’m sorry to tell you if you ignore articles and books about the climate emergency, the chances are vanishingly small that they will get better. So I’m interested in figuring out the most sane way to live now. I intend to find out by asking people with experiences and insight that are far more interesting, diverse, and evolved than my own. In short, I want to talk to people who are living lives that seem to respond to the moment honestly and bravely, rather than discordantly and chock full of denial. 

I should be clear that when I ask “what do we do now that we’re here?” I mean that practically, spiritually, financially, intellectually, psychologically. I mean while still paying our bills and raising children — if we should still be having those — and managing to just barely exist under a crippling and precarious economic system. I would like to know if our options extend beyond A) utter and all-encompassing denial or B) figuring out how to become agrarian homesteaders. (Though I admit I’m not entirely opposed to the latter.)

So what exactly will this newsletter contain, you might wonder. Is it activism, lifestyle journalism, doomsaying, personal development, climate science, spiritual advice to survive the apocalypse? I suppose, in a way, it’s a bit of each of those things. But one thing that the media never seems to talk about, especially when it comes to the climate emergency, is the thing I’m always talking about: The outer work starts with the inner work.

The reason we are not adequately responding to the climate emergency is not intellectual or logical. We have all the facts; in fact, “​​all the right words on climate have already been said.” Rather, our avoidance is emotional, psychological, and spiritual. We don’t need to “raise awareness” anymore. We need to direct our awareness to why we’re ignoring what we already know. And we need to do it pretty damn quick.

I see this project as my own frank acknowledgement that the future will be very tough, but an investigation into whether it can be beautiful, too. It is my attempt to find the place between denial and nihilism, and to set up a life there. It is my invitation for you to join me. 

The T&Cs

The free monthly newsletter you’ve been receiving will remain the same: free and available to all, with the same essay, links, and recommendations. Existing free subscribers will also get previews and snippets of the pay-walled content here and there, including the first installment. 

If you subscribe at $5 per month — or a reduced yearly rate of $45** — you will get one in-depth Q&A post each month (I’ll aim for about a ten minute read), which features a person who is answering and living this question well. You will also get an additional third post each month which will be a simple, actionable lifestyle recommendation, from looking at what your pension is funding (probably fossil fuels) to the surprising insights that come from spending more time outside barefoot. 

Substack requires a minimum monthly payment of $5, and I recognize that this price tag is steep for the amount of content I’m offering. If there is considerable interest and momentum, I hope to offer more down the line for that same price. But if you’ve been a fan of my work, and want to read more in this vein, this is a good way to ensure that happens. If you’re a huge fan, and want to support the project more generously, there is a patron option of $100 per year.

I’ll finish by saying that this isn’t so much a newsletter about how to fight the climate emergency and inequality and injustice and all manner of other scary things in an activist or solutions-oriented sense. There are newsletters already doing that much better than I can. Rather, it’s about how to honestly respond and adapt to the conditions as they are, with a healthy dose of compassion for yourself and others. I want you to turn off the trash compactor and start dealing with what’s festering in there. From there, I hope you can make some more honest decisions about how to live your life — and perhaps encourage others to do the same.

After the last year and a half, that’s the only thing I’m interested in writing about, so I hope you’ll be interested in reading it. If you have any feedback or questions, I’d love to hear them: rosiespinks@gmail.com. You can subscribe to the paid version here.

**Annoyingly, if you’re paying in a currency that’s not USD, it will incur a 1.4% transaction fee. I’ve made the yearly cost much lower in part to offset that for those of you paying in GBP, EUR, or something else. I’ll keep seeking a better solution to this moving forward. (NB: If you work at Substack, please fix this.)

Things I Enjoyed Reading

• I’m never not amazed out how gravely the average person misunderstands the societal forces that drive homelessness. Many of the comments on this (excellent) piece about the growing problem in Venice Beach are a grotesque example of that. [NYT Magazine]

• If your parents helped you buy your first piece of property, be honest about it. [Refinery29]

• “My anxiety has brought about exactly the kind of stress or frustration I was hoping to avoid infinitely more times than it has prevented it from happening. Don’t ride out to meet your ruin.” [Forge]

• Good advice about what to do if you’re feeling existential malaise at the prospect of going back to restaurants and offices and other things that are supposed to feel normal but don’t. [The Guardian]

• Seriously why are people still going into six figure debt for elite grad school programs when what they really want to do is just make art? Just make the goddamn art! [WSJ]

• “The reason that large companies are fighting the remote future is that to accept remote work is to … admit they’ve spent a great deal of money on beautiful real estate that, deep down, actually provides minimal function, other than making people more tired and more annoyed.” [Ed Z]

• “When I told people what I was planning to do, they all either said I was mad or (which amounted to the same thing) brave.” [The Guardian]

Things I Enjoyed Listening To

• The Content Mines is a great way to keep tabs on the meta narrative of internet culture if, like me, you don’t care at all about its week-to-week happenings. It also reliably makes me laugh every Friday. [The Content Mines]

• Ann Friedman and Otegha Uwagba have a candid, granular conversation about self employment, intellectual property, and thinking of your ideas as more than just “content” (ick). It inspired me to finally launch the paid part of this newsletter. [In Good Company] (Bonus: Otegha’s newsletter is also reliably great.)

• A really great conversation about how to approach conflict, especially with a partner. Remember that you are dealing with their inner child as much as you’re dealing with the adult in front of you. [We Can Do Hard Things]

A Recommendation

I rarely get excited about apps and I don’t plan to make it a habit of recommending them. However, I’ve really been enjoying the Seek app from National Geographic. It uses image recognition technology to tell you the taxonomy of plants you come across, and … it sort of feels like magic? It’s a nice way to engage with your neighborhood on your evening walks, if that’s your thing. [Seek]

Word Soup

If we weren’t so single minded
about keeping our lives moving
and could maybe do nothing for once
a huge silence might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves,
of threatening ourselves with death;
perhaps the earth could teach us;
everything would seem dead
and then be alive.
—Pablo Neruda

As always, thank you for reading. If you enjoy this newsletter, it helps a surprising amount if you forward it to a friend or two, or share it on social media. The subscribe link is here.