Baking on the Roof While Everything Burns

I almost let a parking spot ruin my day but I didn’t even have the energy. That’s how fried I am. That’s how fried we all are. There’s a Josh Johnson joke about how we’re too burnt out for a civil war and honestly he’s right. We’re all just trying to remember our passwords and keep a houseplant alive. We’re in the decline of an empire and I’m over here trying to choose a career path. Trying to date. Trying to find sunscreen.

That’s the absurdity of it. The emotional bandwidth required just to participate in modern life borders on inhumane. It’s like we’re trapped inside a crumbling museum exhibit labeled “Hope Under Late-Stage Capitalism.” You try to build a dream life while the ground shifts beneath you like sand. You send out résumés while billionaires cyberbully each other on the social platforms they bought to feel something. You write affirmations while our somehow-president-again throws himself a birthday military parade, flanked by citizens holding signs that scream “Not My King.” It’s almost funny. Almost.

And yet, I keep asking myself:

What do I want to build inside a dying empire?

Something molecularly symbiotic. That’s the phrase I keep coming back to. I want work that aligns with the beat of my inner life. I want meaning, not performance. I want to offer something real — not as a product, but as a presence. But it's disorienting, trying to vision-build in a place that’s allergic to nuance. Where politics are theater, leadership is branding, and even dreams feel like they need a monetization strategy.

How do I keep loving, creating, dreaming while the systems rot and reveal themselves?

I think about Ilana Glazer’s line: “What do we do right after we die? We shit ourselves. America is shitting itself right now. But you know when else you shit yourself? When you give birth.”

So maybe we’re dying. And maybe we’re birthing. And maybe we’re doing both at once. And in the meantime, I go up to the roof. I bake like a lizard in the sun with music in my ears and no plan for productivity. Because dreaming right now is resistance. Loving deeply, softly, and without certainty is my quiet rebellion. Creating is not a luxury; it’s a way to prove I’m still alive.

Can I live a life of integrity in a time of collapse?

Some days, I don’t know. I feel hollow. I miss having a confidant. Someone to hold my swirl of feelings. Someone I trust with the unfiltered chaos of being this awake, this often. And it’s embarrassing, how much I crave that intimacy. How much I want to be seen without being asked to shrink. I try to pour presence into myself, but I keep hitting the bottom of the glass.

Still, I don’t want to harden. I don’t want to adapt to injustice by becoming numb. I want to stay soft. I want to say true things. I want to believe in a future that hasn’t arrived yet — not out of delusion but out of devotion.

So no, I don’t have the job or the partner or the solid ground right now. But I have a rooftop. I have music. I have questions.

And I have the stubborn, echoing belief that it’s still worth asking them.