Dispatch from a Dying Empire
Time is speeding up, we need to pace ourselves
When my mother died, I ended up sorting through quite a lot of her belongings by myself. I found one journal of mine from circa 2002 where I had scrawled large across the page: “Did it feel the same to come-of-age at the end of other Empires?”*
And I find myself wanting to answer my young teenage self: no, what we ended up with is worse, look at how our brains are poisoned, the food we eat, the media we consume. But before we were dumbing ourselves down with generative AI, ancient Romans were dumbing themselves down with lead in their cosmetics, their air, and their wine.
It’s more global now, yes. More interconnected**. The fall of the Roman Empire didn’t change the way the Han Dynasty ran things– they were too far away to have that kind of impact. But now? As the American experiment comes to a close (sorry to say it, y’all, but I think we failed), there is a sharp decline in relevancy that I actually hadn’t seen coming to this degree, or with this speed.
I’m thinking a lot, these days, about Terence McKenna’s final interview. He talks about how time is speeding up:
Which lasts longer? A million years in which nothing happens, or ten seconds with 50,000 events crammed into it?
In 1998, when that interview was recorded, it still seemed far off, but in 2026 it feels like this era is undeniably up to a rate of 5000 events per second. And so many of them are so fucking bad.
There’s the horrors, and the nightmares on top of that, but: this is a fever pitch of an illness going back generations. White supremacist patriarchy was never going down without a violent death rattle; that’s kind of its whole vibe.
We are going to have to adapt to the new world that is being born quickly. Which is a real drag, because we didn’t have to, the sirens have been wailing so long it’s become background noise, like living next to a waterfall, if that waterfall was inevitably eventually going to kill you and everything else. It’s frustrating, to say the least. Vindication is a helluva drug, it’s intoxicating, but it keeps you stuck. Being proven right is ultimately meaningless if the conversation stops there.
I’m tired of people saying we’re cooked. Yes, some stuff is over. The old way of being, for sure, that’s done. The world isn’t ending, just your vision of it: the comfort you’re accustomed to, the future you assumed you’d have. We are about to be way more inconvenienced than we ever have been before. Buckle up babes, it’s going to be uncomfortable!
Through all of this, I’ve been thinking about the process of rebirth. The phoenix has to turn fully to ash before it is able to reemerge. If you halt the process halfway through, all you’ve got is a crispy little wing and a lot of problems.
You know that whole, it’s always darkest before the dawn? You have to let yourself touch the full pitch-black inkiest darkness, the kind where you don’t know if your eyes are opened or closed. The price of admission to that warm glowing sunrise is staying patient, holding faith before you have any evidence it’s coming. It’s unfortunate, and there is no escaping it over the course of a human life. Sorry. I don’t make the rules.
Unfortunately for me, working with death and grief doesn’t make the pain of grief any less acute. What it has done is already granted me permission from myself to surrender fully to the grief experience, however that may look moment-to-moment. While I might not be able to see my hand in front of me, I maintain awareness that all is change, including my eyes and my hands, including this dark. Still scared, for sure, but not frozen. I know that if I turn towards my deep sadness or anger or fear or whatever else may be bubbling up in that moment, it won’t kill me. I think a lot of people are afraid to touch the depth of their emotions because they might drown. But I promise you: turning towards it is actually the fastest way to move through it. This is the only productivity hack I know.
So: How to live in a world where many of the worst conspiracy theories have turned out to be true? Ultimately, this is what America has been doing all over the world for longer than any of us have been alive. I believe that humanity is in its adolescence as a species, reckless and impulsive and selfish and refusing to listen to Mom, even though, provided we make it to a more mature stage, we’ll finally acknowledge she was right all along.
McKenna says:
We are all gathered here at the endgame of developmental processes on this planet. We are about to become unrecognizable to ourselves as a species. Our technologies, our religions, our science has pushed us toward this for thousands of years without us awakening to what the denouement would be.
I really do believe that so long as we can divert this dystopian track we’re on, the next phase of human history could be really fucking cool. And I will believe in that possibility with every fiber of my being until I see a mushroom cloud through my window.
This type of healing work cannot be done (just) in the Western individualistic approach to healing. Francis Weller wrote in The Wild Edge of Sorrow: “A healthy village requires healthy individuals. And to become a healthy individual, you need a healthy village.”
What do we do when none of it is healthy? We do our best to heal both simultaneously, bit by bit, each bolstering the other. This is where I’ve been taking solace lately, and placing a lot of my focus. We stagger our breathing like a choir, so everyone has to show up, but everyone has the ability to rest. Because stamina is going to be really important medicine in the coming weeks, months, and years.
McKenna recognized that no one knew what our evolving society would bring, but he continued: “Now we stand close enough to it, and I think all but the most lumpen among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and the transformative.” In that vein, I am following that tug and creating a few transcendental, transformative spaces where we can seek solace, while reckoning with the realization that so much of our lives turned out to be constructed with malicious intent. Together we can alchemize that knowledge into something beautiful. I’d love to see you there.
Sunday, Feb 15 6pm-7:30pm est: Grief Circle for Everything: Turning helplessness into hope & activism (virtual)
Monday, Feb 16 7pm-9pm: Grief Circle at Anima Mundi Apothecary (Brooklyn)
Wednesday, Feb 25 6:30pm-8pm est: Dead Parents Club (virtual)
Sunday, Mar 1 3pm-5pm Grief Circle at Dear Eleanor (Miami)
And if you want something that’s heavier on the strategy and less in the feelings (with a holistic approached and trauma-informed) on Saturday, Feb 14 from 2-5pm est, check out The Nest: A Decolonial Incubator for Liberatory Ideas (virtual). There will be facilitated strategy sessions, a lot of community building, sharing, and learning. Free, registration required.
*yes, I’ve always been this person
**more directly interconnected