Feelings in Uncertain Times

At the time that I write this it is -9°F/-23°C, and has been something like this for quite a while. Chicago’s cold season has been interesting thus far, as it always is. We are currently in our “third Winter” of the season between brief spells of warmth. These past few months have had long strings of cold days where I shudder at the thought of making my way out into the world. This is an all too common feeling given the state of things, but it is of course a privilege to have seasons, no matter how brutal they might feel. Our planet may not afford us many more years like this one, even if our country, of course, will afford us many more years like this one in a different but likewise brutal way. It feels ironic to talk about the cold when it feels like the world is in flames. I cannot remember the last time I woke up in America where it didn’t feel like I was fighting. Violence is a language in this country, a language I wish none of us had to be so fluent in. Recently, my typical use of words has felt useless in a way that all language is an inevitable but necessary constraint, used to package our experience into something communicable. It has been a struggle in the past few weeks to figure out how to talk about any of the things that have happened.

On January 15th, 2025, David Lynch passed away at the age of 78. His death happened in the midst of a world on fire. I mean this quite literally, with recent horrific wildfires that spread across Los Angeles sadly destroying many people’s homes and everything in them. The return of the Trump administration has also come with its own share of fires started. Countless executive orders have been passed that have restricted the rights of Americans and turned back the clock on progressive policy. Entire federal departments are being illegally shut down, tech oligarchs are running away with the government, and planes are crashing into each other. 

Grief is a forever feeling, one that you learn more about as it lives inside you every single day. There is certainly a sadness, but also a level of separation when artists whose work I admire or respect pass. The nature of parasocial relationships to famous people is such that they are distant enough to where I don’t feel the need to perform my emotions in any specific kind of way, and there is also no other labor to do around the grief other than the emotion itself. At best, I am someone who has been deeply impacted in a very direct way by that person’s work, but I am not a friend or family member. In theory, I am not close enough to these people that the grief should empty me out and leave me fragile the way other griefs do. I am well aware of the boundaries of being a fan, or at least what I think those boundaries should be. Simultaneously though, there is a connection, due to their work meaning something to me, that causes grief—however small or large—at their loss, and I also find myself using them almost as an emotional ambassador for whatever other things I’m feeling that I have not yet been able to reconcile. I’m sure we’ve all thought similar things when a famous person whose work mattered to us passes. We say things like: “that’s so unfair”, “their poor family”, “too soon”, “the world lost something special”, “why them, why did this happen?” Suddenly, I don’t think we are just talking about a celebrity anymore. 

This is to say that I wept for days after David Lynch died, but I do not know if it was just because of him, or Los Angeles being ablaze, or the decisions being made by our government, or things going on in my personal life, or the emaciated pigeon I saw in its final moments when I was on a walk one day, or everything else that has continued to happen in 2025. Perhaps I did care for his work that much, or perhaps his death was an excuse to finally let myself feel the grief of seeing a world on fire. All I know is that all the fires were walking with me.

One of the things that fascinated me about David Lynch’s films was the tendency towards surrealism, dream logic, and incoherence. He made difficult films, often hostile to the viewer and to easy analysis. The curiosity in me loves the challenge. Maybe that’s the religion I was raised on talking, trying to find meaning in the difficult hurdles of life we all work to overcome by looking for lessons to take away. Maybe I just really like puzzles and the feeling of certainty that comes with knowing that there is a correct answer we can reach if we just make all the correct choices (although Lynch’s puzzles were famously unsolvable). How nice that would be, for our victory to be ensured and for the steps toward that victory to be a clear path. Surely everything will be okay if we can rise to the challenge. 

Oftentimes the surreal would suddenly collide with the everyday in his films, the macabre with the mundane. This reflected a truth about our world, how it can feel like everything is wrong and yet we are supposed to carry on business as usual. But everything feels off as we do them, a strange atmosphere or feeling of dread surrounding the day to day. The way Lynch’s more straightforward narratives would suddenly be interrupted by a series of images you couldn’t explain or understand felt like a perfect representation of how we go through our daily innocuous lives only to suddenly experience some kind of pain or trauma out of thin air. The darkness of the world interrupts life, and it can often feel like nothing makes sense anymore. Given the current state of things, this idea has only resonated with me more. How do you do anything with how bad things feel out there, how do you act like there’s nothing wrong? What if the ordinary and everyday is itself horrific? It really can feel like the waking world is operating on dream logic, where so many chaotic things are happening, and yet we accept things as normal anyway. It is not until we truly wake up do we realize how ridiculous our circumstances are. 

Another important thing about David Lynch is the fact that his filmography has deeply impacted the cinema of today. If you’re interested at all in how art is made and the influences present in modern cinema, then you have to contend with the imprint he left on cinema history and the countless filmmakers he has inspired, even if his work has never been to everyone’s taste or yours. In just the past few years, there are plenty of examples of films adored by many whose directors have cited Lynch as inspiration. The Substance, Longlegs, A Different Man, Queer, Titane, the films of Robert Eggers, that TV show Severance everyone is talking about right now, etc. You could honestly name most horror/thriller adjacent media from the past 15 years or so, or any drama that gets a little weird at some point, and find that Lynch inspired something in the work. His films might not be for you, but there is someone out there who took his ideas and expanded upon or translated them in a way that you likely did find value in. The things we put out in the world and the decisions we make, for better or for worse, ripple across time and future generations in ways unexpected and unprecedented. 

The realities of being alive contain murky depths. As I’ve run errands and gone on my daily walks the past couple of weeks, my go to album has been the 1971 classic: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. If I were to describe the mood of the album, it would be one of perpetual confusion and bewilderment. With song titles such as “What’s Happening Brother” and the title track “What’s Going On”, Marvin Gaye is earnestly asking the question: just what the hell is happening? But while this question is earnest, it is not one of inquiry. 

Marvin Gaye knows that the year is 1971, and that America is continuing to needlessly send people to both kill and be killed in the Vietnam War. Over the entire album he sings: “War is hell, when will it end?”; “There’s far too many of you dying.”; “Bills pile up sky high, send that boy off to die.” Marvin Gaye knows that the year is 1971 and the climate crisis has begun, asking, “where did all the blue skies go?” on “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Marvin Gaye knows that the year is 1971, and so many people are being killed. “Trigger happy policing. Panic is spreading, God knows where we’re heading,” he sings on “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” See, Marvin Gaye is not ignorant, but he is dumbfounded. He finds himself overwhelmed at the fact that everything going on keeps happening. It is less that he is unaware of the events transpiring, but rather he cannot fathom that it is allowed to continue. That no one has somehow stopped it. Why haven’t we reversed course? What’s going on?

It’s been over 50 years now since What’s Going On was released. I find myself listening to it while buying overpriced groceries and worrying about the circumstances of my world just as much as he does when he sings on “Save the Children,” “who really cares to save a world in despair?” I’m far from a pessimist, but I admit that there’s no evidence to suggest that human beings are going to become kinder to each other this year. That the masses will finally recognize their fellow stranger and begin to work together. If anything it seems more likely that, with our constant exposure online to all of the most intense moments happening, that the bar for what we can tolerate from each other is only going to get lower as we grow more exhausted and overwhelmed with information.¹ 2025 is set up to be just as trying of a year as the previous, and while cities burn many spend their time online screaming at each other over things completely inconsequential. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t ever participated in this, I very much have and deeply regret it. It seems futile to ask or expect of other people, but recently I have not been able to stop thinking about how our actions and language impact each other, and how important it is to build a practice that fights against unnecessary cruelty. When I look at the internet, and the way people talk to each other about every single thing, I think about what even just witnessing that does to the soul. The normalization of that behavior in your brain because you’ve been forced to see it so often. The level of defensiveness, and fear of vulnerability, that we’ve all developed in the way we speak and think because we focus on the person who will interpret us with hostility. The way we ourselves interpret others with hostility. There is no world where annoying opinions shared online from a strangers should warrant the level of vitriol that is amassed these days, certainly not while real cruelty is happening systemically from the most powerful people in the world.

On the other side of the spectrum, many great artists have chosen to illuminate the world in uncertain times with great clarity, and asked us to look at it. To understand what is happening, even if it is difficult or inconvenient or overwhelming or will cause you to weep profusely. I’ve always hated the argument for escapism, the idea that things are so uniquely bad now that we must turn away and stick our noses in slop to survive. It was in the rise of fascism and the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War that some of the most notable science fiction stories were written. 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse-Five, and so many other books have explored the nature of our problematic power structures and the crimes of the 20th century. They were all written in the midst of a chaotic and changing world in its own right. 

While the times we live in have things about it that are unprecedented, the uniqueness is not that things are ablaze. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler was also written in a world on fire. The book is a 1993 speculative fiction novel set in a post apocalyptic Earth heavily affected by climate change and inequality. The book begins in 2024, and depicts California burning. It is hard not to see Butler’s speculation as clairvoyance given what has happened in Los Angeles recently along with the overall state of the world. “Apocalypse”, in its original Greek, means an uncovering, a revelation. It is sometimes devastating and destructive to learn the truth, to see the world for what it is because its dark corners have been exposed by bright flames. 

But in those flames where things are destroyed is also a realm of possibility if we can manage to seize it. We do not get anywhere by avoiding the truth, both when it is clear and illuminated or when it is murky and difficult to parse. There is great value in experiencing and lingering in both realities, as artists new and old have shown us. The lingering part of it to me is important. To quote RaMell Ross, director of last year’s Nickel Boys—a brilliant film about perspective, truth, and confronting devastating historical realities—“people should digest work, not simply encounter it.” The issue with this is that it takes time, time that it doesn’t feel like we have as “the last decade to save the world” from the climate crisis seems to be slipping away. Meanwhile, the opposing side doesn’t need time. It is much quicker and easier to spread misinformation and hate compared to the time it takes to come to accurate conclusions about the world and build genuine connections with other people. 

On top of this, our lives as people living in the West are directly involved in the carnage. The circumstances of my life and many others are such that we live within the borders of American empire. We don’t want our bodies to participate in creating climate catastrophe. We do not want our money to contribute to war and genocide. Yet they do. The least we can do as this happens is try to do something that matters with however much time we have, but this is a difficult battle to fight. As the world requires more of each of us due to how dire things get, that means that there are only ever more opportunities to turn away. 

It is in this context that I really wonder about the utility of the art that we make, and how we can ensure that it has real usefulness for those who engage with it. Before I started writing this essay that you’re reading now, I was working on—and had actually completed—an entirely different essay that I had intended to publish in January. Once January and the latest events of our current circumstances arrived however, it quickly became clear just how irrelevant and frankly meaningless the essay was. It truly felt pretentious and egotistical to think that the topic I was writing about at the time deserved even a second of attention when the time someone could spend reading it could be pointed towards the far more important things happening in the world. Adorno’s maxim says: “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” the idea being that to make art that ignores the structural circumstances of cruelty it is made under is a profound human failure. It feels that this statement is being directly addressed to me now, to all of us living through this moment.² What should we as writers or artists decide to make in the face of this current reality, a reality that has been ongoing for so long and feels like its getting worse? I hope that this essay is even remotely useful; I hope that whatever we decide to make is worthwhile.

There is a moment in the game 1000xRESIST where a mother and father sit together, reflecting on their participation in the Hong Kong protests of 2019, an actual historical event used as a key point in the timeline of this fictional story. “I regret leaving,” the mother says. “What was the point? Fighting for freedom… It was a mistake. All it did was expedite the end. Brought their fist down harder. Faster.” She perceives all the bad things, the brutal police violence that took place in response, as an inevitable and doomed outcome no matter the millions rising up against the injustice. The father disagrees:

I can’t say for certain that every action we take will work, but I think it means something to try. The power of our ideas, art, movements, and choices are not a zero sum game. These artists’ work, both the ones that treaded in murkiness and those who shined a light on the world, have continued to reverberate throughout history. We are either still talking about these pieces of art today, or are talking about art that was inspired by them, thus continuing their legacy. The world comes to us in a tremendously complex tangle, and we have been using art and culture as a language to better understand ourselves and our realities time and time again as the Earth has continued to spin. We and the generations to come will continue to talk about what happened, and how people felt about what has transpired. Things are bad right now, and are very likely to get worse, but no matter what happens to us we will leave behind art. That art will be remembered by those who come after. That art will be used to help the people of the future think about their present times and the circumstances they find themselves in, and they can find both solace and motivation in knowing that they are not alone in history in having to deal with a world on fire. Perhaps through all of this, we will eventually find a way to put out the flames.

1  There’s a great piece that came out recently from writer Janus Rose titled “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism” that makes a very strong case for why it is often futile to keep doomscrolling or arguing with people online, and the limits of social media activism.

2  In particular, I cannot stop thinking about Mahmoud Khalil’s wrongful and heinous detainment and imprisonment by ICE after exercising his right to protest, something that feels increasingly difficult to imagine not being the most important thing worth caring about.