Some days I think the United States doesn’t actually want to fix anything. I think the country is addicted to decline the same way some people are addicted to astrology. I think that’s bcause it’s easier to believe Mercury is in retrograde than to admit you forgot to pay your bills.
Everyone is screaming about apocalypse like it’s a sport. Right-wing apocalypse, left-wing apocalypse, climate apocalypse, AI apocalypse, “the immigrants will replace us” apocalypse. Literally every demographic has its own flavor of doom. It’s like Baskin Robbins, except instead of ice cream it’s existential panic.
And somehow, miraculously, no one ever suggests doing the extremely boring work of making things better. Because reform isn’t dramatic. Reform doesn’t go viral. No one wants to livestream “The Great Compromise of 2025.” They want collapses, coups, constitutional crises, and whatever fresh insanity Florida invents next. (At this point they’re just running experiments to see how much democracy can be replaced with theme-park energy.)
My personal theory? The U.S. is a teenager trapped in a superpower’s body. All hormones and bravado, no impulse control, constantly insisting it doesn’t need help while simultaneously begging the universe for attention. And maybe that worked when cable news ran on dramatic music and red banners, but in the age of TikTok it’s just embarrassing. You can’t claim to be the beacon of democracy when your entire political system can be derailed by a meme account in Ohio.
But the real tragedy isn’t that America loves panic. It’s that panic is profitable. Outrage is a subscription model. Fear has a marketing department. People don’t get elected by promising sanity; they get elected by promising that the world will end unless you put them in charge of it.
And the rest of us? We just sit here, refreshing our feeds, convincing ourselves we’re informed while being slowly pickled in anxiety brine. But we keep participating because it gives us a sense of control. If everything is ending, at least you’re not responsible for fixing it.
Here’s my unsolicited advice all the way from Zimbabwe, maybe the U.S. should stop fantasizing about collapse and try fantasizing about competence. Imagine a country that builds things again, solves problems again, remembers that democracy isn’t a Netflix series with weekly plot twists.
But who am I kidding? Tomorrow someone will declare that a grocery-store barcode is communist mind control and we’ll all go back to scrolling.
I miss boring politics. I miss when national crises didn’t have merch.
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