Welcome, reader. It’s good you’re here.
As I write this article, the date is April 7, 2026. Donald Trump has just committed an unforgivable act of terrorism, threatening an entire nation with obliteration. Social media has erupted; there are calls for impeachment, there are calls for the Vice President to invoke the 25th Amendment, there are calls for soldiers to refuse orders to commit war crimes.
Everyone is calling for someone else to do something.
I understand the impulse. The world is so much bigger than you or me; when something this awful happens, it feels like there’s nothing we can do about it. All the real decisions get made by people with more power, with more money, or with more connections than us, and it seems like all you or I can hope is that we make enough noise to get their attention and maybe change their minds.
This is an optical illusion. It is one of the cruelest tricks the twenty-first century has played on the minds of the human race, and I wish I could do more to stop it than simply teaching you how to defend yourself from it.
Have you ever taken a long trip somewhere, but when you finally arrive at your destination it feels like you’re still traveling? My grandmother used to say that “your body gets there first but your spirit takes a little while to catch up,” and as with most old sayings, there’s a lot of truth in there if you know how to look.
To start, the physical explanation. When you travel, you put your body under stress. When you ride a moving vehicle, even as a passenger, your body is constantly making minute adjustments to compensate for how the seat moves under you. It’s part of what’s known as “travel fatigue,” and it can leave you feeling stressed and exhausted after a long day on the road, even if all you’ve been doing is sitting still.
Then there’s the mental exhaustion. Our brains are constantly taking in sensory information from outside and filtering it out for us, before it even reaches the level of our conscious awareness. For autistic people like me, that filter can sometimes be a bit faulty, but we all have one; we started building it from the moment we emerged into this blinding, deafening, overwhelming world, when all we could do was scream.
As adults, we don’t even notice the filter, most of the time; it’s a part of our brain structure that’s deeper and older than the need for conscious thought. When we’re in a familiar environment, like our home or office, it excels; most everything around us, it has already seen and categorized as the known, and so the filter doesn’t need to let it through. That’s where the “invisible corner” of mess in your closet (or at least in mine) comes from; you’ve already seen it, you know it’s there, it hasn’t changed, so it doesn’t even enter your awareness when you open the door.
When you travel, your senses are constantly being bombarded by new and different information. The further you go from home, the more unfamiliar your surroundings, and so the more your filter will let things past, into your conscious awareness. Part of the allure of travel, for those who enjoy it, is that you can literally see more of the world when you’re away from the familiar. The cost of all this additional information, though, is paid in mental energy. In short: travel fatigue.
That’s all well and good for the physical and biochemical explanation, but there’s more to it than that, as there always is with humans. We are greater than just the sum of our parts; I don’t care if you call it your spirit, or your soul, or your ineffable consciousness that no science can pinpoint, but each of us has a fundamental sense of self, beyond simply our name, our shape, and our skills. That self, that spirit, has an inertia to it; it isn’t geographical, though, it’s conceptual.
We humans aren’t very good at adapting to fundamental change, despite being orders of magnitude better at it than most of the species we see around us. We form an image of ourself in our head, and it becomes as much part of our “familiar environment” as the invisible corner in the bedroom closet. We grow comfortable with ourselves, with the picture of who we are inside.
When you set off on a journey to a new place (and not just on the commute to work), you are making a fundamental, if temporary, change to your view of yourself. You are no longer a person in a routine; you are now a traveler. Your old sense of self slowly and gently subsides as you drive, or walk, or ride, out of your home environment; you might start your journey by running through a mental list of all the things you did before leaving home, and you might think about the food still in the fridge when you pass your local grocery store; but by the time you’ve made it to the next town over, you are now a person thinking about the path you’re taking and where it will lead you. A traveler.
When you reach a destination you’ve never been to before, there is no similar chance to gradually bring yourself back from that fundamental alignment of spirit before you arrive. One moment you are a traveler; the next you are no longer traveling. The change is imposed from outside rather than from inside, and it jars your sense of self until you have a chance to adjust.
My grandmother said it much more succinctly, of course: your body gets there first, but your spirit takes a little while to catch up.
The cruel trick of the twenty-first century is a little bit about traveling, and it is a little bit about that fundamental sense of self, and it is a lot about that subconscious filter that I was talking about seven or eight paragraphs ago.
The most important thing to remember is that our brains are doing the best they can. They’re made out of genetic structures dating back millions of years, survival instincts dating back tens of thousands, and societal norms going back centuries, and on top of all that, they have to remember that glowing rectangles are some of the most important objects in the entire world. What I’m saying is, be gentle with them; they weren’t designed for this.
Of all the differences between the world everyone alive today grew up in, versus the world that the overwhelming majority of humans who ever lived grew up in, our range is the one that seems hardest to adjust to, in my experience and observation. If you’d lived in pre-industrial times, you might suffer travel fatigue like we do today, but you’d never experience jet lag; it simply wasn’t possible to travel far enough, fast enough to disrupt your body’s natural rhythms.
You also never knew what was going on a country away, except in the most general terms like “at war with.” You rarely knew what was going on even a town away, and the only time the outside world made an impact on your life was when it intruded physically on your hometown, whether in the form of armies, tax collectors, travelers, or the natural world.
Thus, there were only ever two kinds of conflict you had to concern yourself with, in those times: conflicts between neighbor and neighbor, and conflicts between your town and the outside world. The first kind of conflict is part of the human condition; wherever there are people, we will squabble with each other. Though these conflicts might grow vicious, even bloody, they remained small. It was easy enough for you to see where the conflict started and understand its scope, even if there might have been a debate about exactly who it was that started it.
The other kind of conflict, in-town versus out-of-town, was one where you always knew who your allies were. They might not have been able to help you—a swarm of locusts would devour everyone’s crops equally—but they would understand, and they would commiserate. Everyone around you shared the same context you did, and you saw them, if not every day, then every month at least.
Humans are social creatures. We derive stability and safety by staying in community with each other, and we have for tens of thousands of years. All of our instincts tell us to band together in the face of danger, and they also tell us when the danger is too great to face, even all of us together. Way down at the level of that automatic filter, your brain gives you an estimate of how many people stand with you, whenever you find yourself in need of allies.
It truly is amazing how we have adapted to the twenty-first century. Where we could once only make community with people who live nearby, we can now form groups with people who live further away than most people travel in a lifetime. The deep, old parts of our brains are perfectly happy to treat a profile picture and a username as a close, trusted friend, just as well as they might the smiling face of your next-door neighbor.
People can only hold so many “neighbors” in their head at once, though. When a community grows larger, either in geographic size or digital population, we necessarily end up only being able to personally remember a smaller and smaller fraction of them, either individually or as a statistic.
Do you see it, reader? We get our news from across the entire globe. We are exposed in lurid detail to conflicts greater than any of us can imagine, and in the back of our minds we’re comparing the entire amount of us we’ve ever met in our whole lives with the number of them we see day-to-day in the news, and we come up short. Like the farmer with the locusts, each of us knows in the deep place in our hearts that we are on our own against this onslaught. Doomscrolling is only one side-effect of that.
I’ve never had much luck staying away from the news, myself. Even when I try and focus on other things, the state of the world always looms in the back of my mind; it colors all my emotions over the course of the day. When I do focus on it, the scale of the injustice in this world is so great it makes me feel utterly, completely insignificant.
I can’t pretend, even to myself, that the greater happenings in our world are anything less than a nightmare. What I remind myself instead, every time the task ahead seems insurmountable, is that whenever I act in any way, it is not only my strength that I act with. Whenever I make a decision, it is not only me that makes that decision; it is also the uncountably many others in this world who think as I do, whom I may never meet but who came to the same conclusion I did, for the same reasons. My cohort.
When I was in the industry, I got to see firsthand how marketing executives divide the public into cohorts, how each and every view someone might hold an opinion on can be expressed as a percentage of how many of what type of population agree. Even the “individualist” crowd is a cohort—a very lucrative one, for a certain kind of market.
I find that archetype to be especially common among us Americans; it demands we each strive to be utterly unique, to be as different from others as we possibly can be, to be singular shining stars in the universe. Perhaps others find more fulfillment in that than I do; personally, I find it comforting to know that, simply due to the sheer number of humans in the world, it is a statistical certainty that there are many, many other people who want the same things I do, who hold the same values important.
Take care, however; once you truly understand that your actions count for more than yourself, it can be tempting to punish yourself too harshly for your inactions and your failures. Please resist the impulse. When you come home after your second shift of the day and all you can do is collapse in front of the TV, give yourself that room to collapse. Prioritize yourself when you need to, and know that when you do so you are not just taking care of yourself, you’re taking care of every member of your cohort. Build your energy up so that when the day comes for us to speak for ourselves, we can do so with a voice like no one has ever heard. Stay safe, reader.
Stay safe.
This will be the last article of Unfucking The World that I publish, for a little while. As I write these words, I have not yet published even the first; I have no way to know what kind of reception UTW has enjoyed by the time you’re reading this. I can only suspect the size of my cohort, among those of us who are ready to do the work and make a change; realistically, though, I expect the response has fallen into one of two broad categories.
In the first and most likely, UTW has achieved some minor popularity. There are a few comments under each article, maybe even as many as a couple dozen. The online community has attracted some members, but most are inactive; some people find my ideas compelling, and some think they’re dangerous, but by and large, most treat UTW as an addition to the online discourse, and nothing more. America might want change, but we no longer have the strength to reach out and grab for it.
Or.
In the second response, America has decided that enough is enough. Maybe the comment sections are as tame as they are above; maybe they’ve become a flurry of activity, with people debating points back and forth. The real difference, though, is the community. It is growing past just a few people with questions into a dedicated group of people from both sides of the aisle who are willing to take action: to make phone calls, to send emails, and to walk up and speak with people in person, to gather the support we need to make our will into a reality.
I have to ask for your help now, reader. I have done my best to show you my vision for our future, but you can see better from where you are, now, on the day you’re reading this, than I can from here in the past. How does it look? Have you and I spoken? I hope so. I hope I’ve gotten to speak with each and every person who wants to take the world and demand that it change to suit us, instead of always the other way around.
The next chapter of Unfucking The World will be written not in words but in action. I’ll still publish articles, but not as often; I hope to be spending most of my time making things happen and helping you do the same. Send me any burning questions you have, about No Confidence, about Restricted Elections, about the state of the world, even I suppose about me; I’ll answer as many as I can, in the next article. Stay safe, reader, but also?
Kick ass.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. There is no possible way for me to fully express the gratitude I feel, that you have allowed me to share this dream with you. Regardless of how things change over the coming months, I want you to know that it has been the honor of my life to be so trusted by so many, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that I never betray that.
The next article of Unfucking The World will be published two weeks from today, on Saturday, July 18. In the meantime, I’ll be figuring out what kind of ongoing schedule I can maintain as UTW moves forward, and I’ll be sure to let you know then. If you haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to do so.
Questions, challenges, additions, and thoughtful disagreements are encouraged in the comments; bring your good faith, and others will do the same. Today’s topic: what are you hearing about UTW in the area where you live, whether that’s in the US or abroad?
It’s time. Let’s go.
–Danielle
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