Three years ago1, I hit send on the very first edition of Burn It All Down.

“I think it’s so cool how much crazier everything keeps getting,” I said back then. “It just feels like while we all hang in this extremely slow and expensive apocalypse, we need something to call it. So, welcome to the Age of Unhingement™!”

In Q1 of 2023, I was freelancing but functionally unemployed. I had way too much time to sit outside the Starbucks I called “my office” and ruminate on how insane I thought everything and everyone was. My faith in humanity was shot to hell. I was fantasizing about dropping out of “society” again. And so, I pursued the only other good option a mildly misanthropic, know-it-all seeker has: I started writing on Substack.

In that first dispatch, I shared my “little inventory of the current culture,” a list of bullet points that I re-read last week, on this newsletter’s actual anniversary. After a few indulgent cackles at my own prescient jokes, I decided it’s time to update that little inventory so we all know exactly where we’re at.

Diabetes medicine that makes you skinny is the only thing trendier than fascism.

My longtime readers know that I track the Ozempic-Fascism Paradigm year-over-year.

In 2024, I declared a new leader in the race, “Ozempic now trails fascism in relevancy.”

Last year, I was horrified to report, “despite GLP-1’s acquisition of Lizzo and many of you reading this, after fascism’s recent come up, there’s no longer even a contest.”

In 2026, a year in which the mushroom cloud of Unwellness Culture has met the mainstreaming of Nazism, the race is back on.

Honey, it’s neck and neck.

People are earnestly investing their energy in becoming LinkedIn influencers.

A few weeks after I started writing this newsletter, I signed a contract for the great, fun gig (with the kindest people) that still keeps me fed. I can’t remember the last time I looked at LinkedIn because goddess blessed me professionally when I answered her call to write about how insane everything is, but I assume, based on the sordid state of business affairs, that ChatGPT is getting a workout and it’s not going great over there.

The AI situation is already so out of hand that the tech titan supervillains themselves have signed an open letter telling their colleagues to slow it down.

I now think AI is both a nonsense bubble and a legitimate threat to the fabric of how we live. The supervillains are not slowing down shit. AI can have my job. I will move to the forest — you’re all invited.

Trump’s indictment was boring.

I would sell my left ovary to be bored by Donald Trump or watch him face literally any consequences.

See:

But I do love his ongoing feud with the Vatican.

The lunatic to life coach pipeline is shorter than ever.

No change here. We wish them the best.

Dalai Lama is a perv.

This declaration was based on the apology His Holiness posted on his website on April 10, 2023, after a video circulated that showed him kissing a young boy on the lips and asking him to "suck my tongue."

On February 8, 2026, after his name appeared in the Epstein email drop that gobbled the last dregs of cultural lucidity, His Holiness released a statement on X, insisting that he never met Jeffrey Epstein.

Doomsday clock is at 90 seconds — which I’m personally not too concerned about since I started doing the Lagree method, a barbaric form of pilates, and now understand how long that can be.

As of January, the Doomsday Clock is at 85 seconds to midnight. I’m not into Lagree anymore because I am now, once again, a yogi.

When I started writing Burn It All Down, Justin Trudeau was still prime minister of Canada. Now, he is wearing a backwards baseball cap at Coachella with his girlfriend Katy Perry, a pop star who “puts the ass in astronaut,” and according to Ruby Rose, is a sex offender.

Ms. Katy featured heavily in my favorite dispatch from year three, the first one I sent, actually. In it, I called her “a woman who brings the same energy as the Snapchat flower crown.” And, while I did declare that she is “so mid even gay men hate her,” she is undeniably a muse, not just to Justin, but to me, a lover of crazy.

Few events have bestowed material quite like the girlboss gang on Blue Origin. That week, my back was ruining my life and I was extremely high on muscle relaxers. The ideal mental state for me to fill my notes app with a bunch of crazy one liners.

Share

Year three almost did me in, but I wrote often, and was delighted to see this community grow. It wasn’t like year one, when my fledgling newsletter was linked in a New Yorker article, and so many of you found me at once. It wasn’t like year two, when a duo of agents told me they thought my book idea was a “mass market Trick Mirror,” and that I should transform myself into a TikTok star.

This was the year that I gave myself the time and space to hone my ideas and experiment with style and freak out as much as I wanted to. It was the year I got ditched by those agents. And the year I asked myself a million times where all of this was going but never stopped putting one foot in front of the other because, when I am able to quiet the noise, I don’t actually care and live for the journey.

This was the year when a very dramatic doctor with no empathy called and told me I had cancer. And then, a different, hot doctor (linked so you can call him if you ever get melanoma) said it wasn’t even as deep as a paper cut and took care of it beautifully.

It was between that first awful call and the removal of said cancer, after I signed a new contract to make more money for the gig that’s perfect for me, a new contract I negotiated for six months because I know my worth and always wear them down eventually, that I started to think, “Well, maybe this is enough.”

Maybe it’s enough that I get to be my own boss, make memes for a living, and have abundant energy left to write this newsletter that I love writing so much. Maybe it’s enough, in a world obsessed with “growth” and “scale,” to take a breath and appreciate what I built and all the cool things that have already happened without obsessing over what’s next. Maybe it’s enough that writing 99 newsletters has reshaped my inner world and taught me so much about who I am. Maybe this moment, with you reading this, and me having the courage to keep going despite all the uncertainty, is as enough as it gets.

Probably not tho.

I am notoriously an ambitious lunatic.

For my next and hundredth edition, I’m going to tell you guys the full tale of what led me to reclaim my life from the jaws of workaholism and start writing again. It’s dishier than you’re imagining. And properly unhinged.

If we’re going April to April, this was one of the hardest years of my life.

Come March, I was so distraught yet somehow fine that I resented my own resilience. When I started referring to my beautiful apartment in Los Angeles, the most peaceful home I’ve ever known, as the Den of Despair, I knew I needed to get the fuck out of there, and I’m so happy that I followed that impulse. A change of scenery was exactly what I needed, and I’m feeling much better.

This month in Brooklyn was good to me. My body now feels healthier than ever, and my spirit is, as always, massively jacked. As for my mind, I felt fully dead when I got here, so the fact that I am now half alive is a success. Considering the level of Unhingement we’re dealing with — globally and locally — two and a half out of three ain’t bad.

Unless I magically wake up tomorrow with a completely different level of energy, there is no way I will do and see everything that I intended to before I go back to LA on Friday. But I did and saw a lot and honored my current reality. I will think of my 10 AM yoga and bagel routine fondly for years to come — an exquisite toasted sesame slathered with butter and a coffee just hits so hard after an hour of Vinyasa. And spending time with my beloved friends, who I don’t get to see often enough, healed me as it always does. I also took a short trip-within-a-trip to Toronto last week and was gifted the magnificent vibes of the first truly warm spring day in Canada. Then, when I got back to NYC, it was bizarrely hot for April, and I got to see Bed-Stuy come alive in summer.

Yesterday we went back to winter.

I decided to stop resenting my resilience because clearly there is something very wrong with the weather.

This is not the time to be bitter about one’s own depth, inner strength, and proven ability to exit the Den of Despair. Someone has to keep it together for whatever the fuck is ahead. And after three years of chronicling the Age of Unhingement™, I can tell you with certainty: The only hinge we can find is the one we create within.

So, yes, there were too many lessons in year three, that’s for sure. But through it all, I kept going, kept writing, and felt some very old fears disappear. That blessin’ is forever, and its bounty is mine to share.

As always, thank you for being here. Three years down. Onwards and upwards into senior year!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Hi friends!

So, like, what are we gonna do? Because this man has got to go. He’s driving every tender-hearted creature AND the world economy to the brink. Declaring his intention to off an entire civilization in a social media post was a dramatic new low, even for him, and he needs to seek treatment for dementia far away from the nuclear codes.

“This president is unfit, unwell, and unhinged,” Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP, said on Tuesday, in an unprecedented statement calling to invoke the 25th Amendment. Since I’m already Dolezal-ing out hard in my new spiritual home, Bed-Stuy, it only makes sense that I join the NAACP … in calling for Donald Trump’s immediate removal from office.

We can’t keep living like this.

As previously discussed, I aspire to ignore the news: My spirit, my choice. I’m too fragile. The apocalyptic play-by-play threatens to eat the one crumb of sanity I have left. My precious sanity crumb only remains because I’m inhabiting fresh scenery, working West Coast hours on the East Coast, enabling the best morning routine of my life — coffee and writing crazy shit in my journal, followed by 10am yoga (a civilized hour), then a second coffee and an exquisite, giant bagel — and nobody bothering me before noon. Until Tuesday, when this man gassed up his puffy little Twitter fingers to put the world in fight or flight around 8am local time. Some of us had yet to sip our first coffee before reading the phrase “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Some of us like to start the day by catching up on a few Instagram stories and were not prepared to see a screenshot declaring a deadline for instant genocide. Some of us are more sensitive than others, but this level of darkness is not easily metabolized.

I personally have no control over Donald Trump’s behavior, so I try very hard not to let it infiltrate my psyche to the point of ruining my day. Sometimes I even succeed. But Tuesday’s declaration hit my defenses like a flaming sledgehammer, and it wasn’t until 8pm, when I finished work for the day, broke my streak of intentional weed sobriety, sucked back a much-needed entire joint on the stoop, and ate some extremely good Chinese food, that I returned to any semblance of feeling steady.

We are in a situation here. Those of us not directly in harm’s way in World War Trois are being psychologically terrorized by a reality TV villain who is executive producing the collapse of Western society. Bravo, Donald. You’ve bent reality far beyond TV. Here are all the Galactic Emmy Awards®. Now, can you set the planet free?

Just leaving this here for you, my beautiful friends:

I’m feeling quite reflective on BIAD’s Road to 100, and so, please indulge me in harking back to the last time this fucking guy did something so remarkably insane that it spurred me to write an entire rant dedicated to his evil ass here in the official annals of the Age of Unhingement™. I do think his PEACE 2025 brand activation from late last year, which led me to declare that I was moving to a convent with no WiFi, counts. But, if I’m being an absolute purist, the last time he made my head explode directly into your inbox was right before the election in 2024, when he took over the aux at one of his rallies for nearly 40 minutes and swayed like a madman to a bizarre playlist. At first, I was so over him that I didn’t even find it funny, but then I did (I’m only human), and then it got me thinking:

In 2016, Trump took over America’s aux and turned his horrible playlist up to 11. He has dominated American culture for the past eight years as we’ve all watched him sway and been forced to listen. He lost the last election, he staged a coup, was impeached twice, and has 34 felony convictions. All that and we remain powerless to pull the plug on him.

I shan’t add what’s happened since to that laundry list. No need to relive it on the precipice of what I pray will be a restorative weekend for all of us. But, at the time, I said, “If Trump gets another term, he has concepts of a plan to do enough horrendous shit that Satan himself must be inspired.” And now he is beefing so aggressively with the Vatican and its first American-born pontiff, who was basically elected to reign in this spiritual mess, that Pope Leo, while Trump is still president, reportedly may not even visit the US.

Pope Leo used his address on Easter Sunday to urge world leaders to choose peace. Two days later we all woke up and read Trump’s threat.

When revisiting my thoughts from 2024, I was struck by my own lucidity in realizing there would be nowhere to hide from a second Trump presidency. Knowing my homeland of Canada was too close for comfort, even before the annexation threats, “perhaps I can go live with that one Amazonian tribe, and use their Starlink to work remotely,” I said.

Well, here we are. 18 months later, Trump still has the aux and is now blasting his psychotic music worldwide. It just keeps getting louder and DJ Epstein’s Ghost showing up with his crate of vintage emails didn’t even helpfully shift the vibe.

I am still off TikTok and have no plans to relapse, but I obviously have a trusted friend who keeps me updated on the platform’s prolific psychics and their collective hallucinations. And, once again, they are announcing Trump’s imminent death. It is seductive to believe that the grim reaper sashaying his way to Washington will finally bring peace and quiet, but if the TikTok psychics held any water, we would be sedated for recreation, not survival, on a different timeline laugh-tracked by President Kamala Harris. That, unfortunately, is not our reality. In our reality, an entire civilization was threatened over a trade route, an 11th-hour deal was brokered by Pakistan, and it was just another day at the office.

We now live with a level of uncertainty and fear that was once unthinkable. Some days, I can put on my noise-canceling headphones and drown out the dissonance. Other days, I stare at the wall in despair and wonder if I’ll ever form a thick enough emotional callous to survive whatever is coming next. But, during weeks like this one, when it’s so clear how the actions of a powerful few threaten to end the rest of us, I know that if we want a better future, we have to find a way to stay present.

It’s not easy to sit with what’s happening, especially when it feels like the matrix we relied on for safety is glitching, but it has been glitching for years. Believe me, I write extensively on the topic as a way to process it. And while my writing practice hasn’t (yet) magically given me the ability to get the aux back from Trump as the nice men in white coats I’ve called wheel him out of office, it has taught me so much about the kind of person I want to be in a world that is openly embracing cruelty and violence.

So, today, I want to leave you with a simple reminder: We are all in this together and there are still good, like-minded people out there. You can also believe me on this, because I know who subscribes to my newsletter. It’s not a demographic so much as a type of person who, I’m assuming, isn’t a hateful sack of shit, but a kind and decent human being who can’t take this insanity anymore either.

And while we can’t get Trump to stop blasting his noise, I think it’s beautiful that we’re all here, having a kumbaya silent disco with one another.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Greetings from NYC where I am having the time of my middle-aged life. As an opinionated Jewish woman (Happy Passover) who loves to turn out a look, strut down the street, and have a great lunch, this city will always be a spiritual home for me. I intended to write to you guys a few days ago, but after going out every single night for a week, I felt like I was shot by a bazooka. Two good nights of sleep and one candlelit yoga class taught by a solemn Asian woman named Andromedon, and I am nearing a return to vitality.

Right before I left LA, I did wonder if I was losing what I’d recently regained of my mind by impulsively swapping my apartment for a month in Bed-Stuy. Shout out to my life protege, travel agent, and Chief Hat Officer, Ms. Alex, who told me that I would like the neighborhood and could just take Ubers if I didn’t want to walk 15 minutes to the train. Extremely accurate assessment. Both Bed-Stuy and I were horrifically gentrified over the past decade. And I’m thrilled to be here for longer than the originally intended two weeks. It seems I need all of week two to recover from week one (goodnight!) and I haven’t even made a dent in the growing list of things that I want to do and see. I also have the ongoing problem of every cell in my body thinking we’re on vacation as soon as I get on a plane, so I keep forgetting that I am supposed to be working remotely. Oopsies.

This trip was originally inspired by my friend Vicky — who I recently learned has called herself Victoria for over a decade — being the cutest pregnant woman alive and hosting a whole weekend of festivities. It was a beautiful mix of friends old and new and we celebrated heavily. The grand finale was a “Baby Party” on Sunday, at a bar in Chinatown, a better version of a “Baby Shower” that includes afternoon karaoke.

As we deal with the vibes of doomsday, we must seize every opportunity to have fun and feel OK, and that is easy to do when you are surrounded by love and celebrating the incubation of a perfect lil baby. And, after Sunday’s karaoke, during which I belted out both Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” and Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” experiencing a level of catharsis that transcends every form of therapy, I realized that what a doomsday bunker really needs is a karaoke machine.

Now, more than ever, we must get clear on what we can offer in a bunker society. Unless I am being paid to boss people around, I can’t plan anything (what’s everyone doing this weekend?), so I am not a prepper. If the stockpilers and garden bed builders and well diggers are right, imagining the worst-case scenario will keep them alive. But will they be living? No. And that’s where I come in. I look forward to going bunker to bunker and getting the party started with my karaoke machine while those who have a better grasp on material reality pay me with a ration of canned peas.

In the meantime, I’m already at home here in my borrowed neighborhood. I ate the best Jamaican patty I’ve encountered in recent memory, am writing to you from a coffee shop full of gay brand strategists talking shit about their friend groups, and found the good sandwich bodega. En route to Andromedon’s yoga class, an old woman hanging on her stoop saw me walking with my mat and said, “Oooh, you’re working out today.” Then she looked me up and down, approvingly, and said, “You look great.” Yesterday, a man pulled his Cadillac over to blow me two kisses, asked nothing in return, rolled up his window, and drove away. It means the world, as I attempt to get my ego off the ventilator it’s been on for the past few months, to have the support of the community.

It was on the way back from Andromedon’s yoga class that I first learned about Kristi Noem’s husband’s huge tits. I’m not paying attention to anything in the news because I love and respect myself. So, when my cousin Laura forwarded an Instagram post about the titties, I didn’t believe the photos were real … but they are … the man is snatched … I was forced to learn all about him and his fetish by decree of the Coalition of Cultural Madness … and now I’m reporting back.

Wait. What?

If, like me, you don’t pay attention to anything anymore because you’re trying not to have an aneurysm, it was through a Daily Mail exclusive on Tuesday morning that we came to see Bryon Noem’s gigantic rack swathed in a variety of light-colored Skims t-shirts:

Kristi Noem’s husband is today revealed as a secret cross-dresser who dons gigantic fake breasts and pink hotpants to chat with online fetish models.

While his wife has operated at the highest echelons of government, handling matters of national security in her recent role as Secretary of Homeland Security, Bryon Noem, 56, has been dressing up and paying adult entertainers to talk dirty.

The Daily Mail has reviewed hundreds of messages involving three women from the ‘bimbofication’ scene – where porn performers transform themselves into real-life Barbie dolls by pumping colossal amounts of saline into their breasts.

The article goes on to quote one of the porn stars he had a textual relationship with:

“His kink is for huge, huge ridiculous boobs,” she said.

The article also mentions the potential this had for political blackmail while his she-devil wife was running ICE (a possible adjunct fetish) and her alleged affair with a fellow character in the MAGAverse, Corey Lewandowski. No mention, though, of this stacked man’s most egregious act, which is obviously how he spells “Bryon.”

My favorite part of this story is how fake it seems. I mean, my first reaction was to fact-check the Instagram post because when I saw those balloons I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Must be AI,” a burly cattle rancher who personally knows the Noems told The New York Times.

But it is, indeed, “reality.”

Responding to interview requests on Tuesday, Bryon texted, “Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart.”

As for Kristi, her reps told The NY Post, “The family was blindsided by this, and they ask for privacy and prayers.”

Girl, we all need prayers and more privacy for your family after learning this much about what your husband likes.

Huge, Huge Ridiculous Boobs

One cam girl Bryon regularly talked to, stage name “Love,” told The Daily Beast that he would tell her he was stressed and that he donned his fake titties to relax. In my experience, having huge, huge ridiculous boobs is more taxing than relaxing. But I guess it is human nature to want what you don’t have?

While I take no offense to this man’s chest-centric proclivities — many more details of which “Love” reveals here — I am offended to learn that huge, huge ridiculous boobs are still associated with bimbos. Add it to the list of how feminism has taken us nowhere. Some of us have jugs and a mind, and our face is up here.

I think it’s a dirty shame that “conservative” women like Kristi Noem demonize drag queens and insist on stripping human rights and access to health care from the trans community while their husbands wave around hard-nipped melons and pop a hip in yoga pants for cam girls they’re paying. These people need to stop cosplaying “family values” and live their truth. No juicy rack stays hidden in this unhinged age.

In this ever-expanding universe that we call the reality of life, there are many freaky cults, but MAGA takes the cake.

It’s now April, which means that it’s officially Burn It All Down anniversary month! We are marking THREE WHOLE YEARS of me chronicling the Age of Unhingement™, and I am soooo close to 100 dispatches — wild and wonderful behavior on my part. To celebrate, I’m trying to hit that 100 by the end of the month. I actually sent this newsletter every single Thursday when I first started writing it because I had something to prove to myself back then. That energy faded years ago, as most of us are well aware, and I need to write three more of these bad boys in the next four weeks if I want to reach my self-imposed goal. Can she focus? WHILE SHE’S IN NYC? There’s only one way to find out and the stakes could not be lower. Wish me luck!

Stay hydrated. Stay safe. And if you’re losing it … try a karaoke.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

I’m not asking how anyone is doing right now. We are here and we are living and it is what it is and we are doing how we are doing. Thank you for spreading my last newsletter so widely — it brought me great joy to see my WWIII sanity tips resonate with the unhinged community at large.♡

I’m still thinking about an important reminder generously shared in the comments: Some of us need physical help to get out of the house. If we are overwhelmed by the world’s chaos and don’t know what to do, helping someone who needs our assistance to go for a walk or get in nature is a simple act that can change one person’s world, at least for an afternoon. In Charmaine’s words, “offer your arm and companionship.”

I’m also still thinking about a comment from my most loyal reply guy, , who correctly called me out for life coaching. But considering everything going down, I think it’s only fair that I actualize to the top of my own madness pyramid.

My OG Unhingement-heads know this hierarchy has been a work in progress for quite some time. Its first incarnation, released in 2023, was inspired by what I observed during the four-day Gaza ceasefire at the end of November that year:

As the old adage goes, opinions are like assholes (we all have one), but viewing every asshole’s opinion on the relative value of human life was not something I was mentally prepared for.

After reading too many Instagram comments, I achieved unprecedented heights of disbelief at the state of affairs and the conversation happening around it all, and managed to surpass Unhingement — the base level of collective madness we have all been participating in for years — to become fully deranged.

I released v1.1 the following January, adding “2024 U.S. Election” right under “Life Coaching Business,” and said:

There really are no touchstones for any of this: the treason, the criminal charges, the elder abuse (to be clear, we’re the ones being abused by the elders), Gen Z who are now eligible to vote and have a very different relationship to establishment politics that no one in the establishment understands, misinformation meeting generative AI, and the world order’s ongoing menty b just casually screaming in the background.

Joe Biden stood down that summer but we’re still being abused by the other elder. We need to make it stop and then administer EMDR to all of humanity.

Last year, I updated the hierarchy to v2. That version debuted a sleek redesign but was doing too much categorically. I got lost in the sauce adding everything from climate anxiety to Ozempic to bad veneers. But, at its core, that update was inspired by the normalization of people talking to (and bonding with) chatbots, especially as a type of unlicensed therapist. If bad advice is now so accessible, I thought, will the life coaches eventually go out of business?

It used to be that “those who can’t do, teach,” but being a teacher is actually a lot more work than talking into a front-facing camera, so the adage is now “those who can’t life, coach.” Until the bots fully take over. Once that happens, those who can’t life will be in the breadline with the rest of us who once could life or at least tried our very best.

We now know that the life coaches are not in danger of AI-prompted extinction; they’re prompting ChatGPT to create digital courses on living an analog lifestyle. And while WWIII was still fledgling back then, I called America’s Defense Department, since renamed the Department of War, “frat boys playing Risk as a drinking game,” which holds up if we change “frat boys” to “Armageddon bros.”

Ascension has, of course, given me a fresh perspective. So, today, after years of diligent tinkering, I am delighted to share the final version of my collective madness pyramid:

Share

I have now established that Unhingement is not the base of collective madness; it is the expression of collective madness, the framework through which we can chart the entire world going insane.

I mean, it is the Age of Unhingement™, so, duh.

The base of Unhingement is 2016 — the year Donald Trump won his first presidency and algorithms took over all of our social feeds — and the next level after that is obviously covid-19. Six years since lockdown began, and we have yet to find our way back to social or emotional lucidity. Most of us who didn’t experience loss directly have engaged in a silent agreement to dissociate if the pandemic is mentioned and/or liberally revise history. Conspiracies have rained down throughout the age but more recently flooded reality thanks to the emails of Jeffrey Epstein. And I think we know what’s unfolding with World War III.

It’s no wonder that after all my time spent studying these rancid happenings, living in a world devoid of spirit that’s blowing itself up over religion, I have summited Unhingement peak. But, for the record, I identify as a cult leader, not a life coach. I don’t want to make Instagram carousels about “my journey to being seen.” I want to dispatch womanifestos from my bunker and have a power-hungry number two do my bidding. Cults, with few exceptions, are led by men. And, if we want to dismantle patriarchy and all the interconnected systems upholding global destruction and cruelty, we must first dismantle those systems within our own heads. That’s why, although I still can’t believe any of you are looking to ME, I must accept my fate, rappel from the apex, and lead us to the dawn of a better way to be.

In 1981, French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard began Simulacra and Simulation with an allegory: A map that covers a territory so perfectly that the territory itself rots away, leaving only the map in its place. In 2026, the territory isn’t rotting because it no longer exists and a new map has been deepfaked.

Postmodern theorists like Baudrillard announced the death of reality before I was born, but I remember a world that felt realer. I remember a digital world that felt realer, when the internet still had a physical tether to a landline. One of the great illusions of the digital age is that connection exists in the ether. The global networks we rely on are actually physical — it’s not a mysterious pinging map that we communicate through, but a network of cables that runs along the territory, transversing the ocean floor. When you ask ChatGPT to do your homework for you, it has environmental impact. When you create a Google doc, it is stored in data centers that have more in common with a warehouse than a cloud.

Marshall McLuhan coined “global village” in the early 1960s to describe a world made smaller by instantaneous media consumption. “We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,” he wrote in Understanding Media, the book that popularized the term. He changed his tune the next decade, moving on from the “global village” to the “global theater,” and when I look at the current state of affairs, I see both. I see a boundless stage packed with people performing to the rafters for a willing audience looking to escape, and a global nervous system that has broken down completely with no hope for embrace.

“Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager” is a phrase the internet loves to use to describe the lack of community endemic to our age. But I don’t blame the lost and lonely bed rotters, I blame the predatory tech companies that reshaped our psyches to prioritize the politics of the global village, the convenience of an app, the potential of a better offer or a hotter date, and encouraged you to abandon the presence and care required to nurture connection to keep an endless scroll in your face.

It is a simulation that the way we live can be sustained.

That simulation is glitching in multiple ways.

Out on a walk one beautiful morning last week, I had Rebecca Solnit’s recent New York Times interview in my ear as I stopped at the bank. Something she said made me gasp so loudly that I spooked a man standing next to me at the ATM:

Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.

She cited Thich Nhat Hanh in her full response to a question that essentially asked who might save us from Trump, because Thich Nhat Hanh, before his death, said the next Buddha would be the collective. And unless the aliens show up ex machina, it’s looking like we’re going to have to save ourselves. Daunting news for anyone insane enough to assume that savior would be Daddy Newsom on a white horse, but right on time for those of us who hope radical social change looks less like a revolutionary fantasy and more like a spiritual rebirth that heals our planet and reshapes reality back to sane.

This was a long, dark, and scary winter for the world, for America, and for me personally. I descended into the underworld in January despite putting up a pretty good fight. I was dealing with cancer, which I now know is the underworld’s affliction of choice. I thought a lot about control this winter because I didn’t have much of it, and while I hate visiting the underworld, it does always leave me with fresh insight. This time, because I was in pain and needed a village that wasn’t undone by horrors unfolding on the global stage, it gave me perspective on how kindness and care, simple acts that are very much within our control, might unplug us from the mind-melting matrix we find ourselves in. It also left me with shocking levels of gratitude and joy to have a working arm and not feel like I am losing my mind.

As we welcome the renewal of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, I encourage everyone to stop trying to control other people — what they’re doing or not doing or posting or not. I like to believe that everyone is trying their best in these difficult times and we need to leave tyranny to the tyrants. Many things are deeply wrong in this world. Some people favor escape and denial because those are their only coping mechanisms. It drove me crazy during the pandemic because I don’t understand it. Some of us (uh, me) find it difficult to sit in rooms where nobody else seems to feel the gravity, but it is not our job to convince everyone else to join us where we are. It is our job to find each other. It is our job to figure out how we can increase care. It’s not going to end the war but change has to start somewhere and a new season is here.

This project was born in springtime and has always been about renewal. It was isolation and uncertainty that led me to start, but connection and hope have kept me writing these newsletters for nearly three years. I spent way too much time at home this winter and I am getting out of town. What was going to be a week in New York celebrating a very important friend having a baby turned into two weeks because there’s too much I want to do and see and then I found a friend of a friend who wanted to apartment swap with me on the same random start date and she really wanted to do a month and who am I to say no to that? Sometimes you have to make half a plan, post a couple Instagrams, and let fate do the rest.

I am ready for my rebirth and I wish you the very best.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

I’m working on a womanifesto right now, the kind that needs time to gestate because everything is so fucking nuts (understatement), and, honestly, after a long winter trapped in the skin cancer bell jar (metaphysically) and my apartment (physically) as I nursed myself back to health and watched everyone lose it over the news, I have about one million flaming hot takes. My brain feels like a tangled ball of yarn. ALSO, I recently regained the ability to actually read. Like, not just scan a page with my eyeballs, but read. What a revelation for my flaming hot takes. It must be from quitting TikTok at the end of last year. First, I stared at the wall. Then, I regained my literacy.

Untangling the yarn ball between my ears, after this latest escalation in World War III, was not on my agenda this week. So, when my dear friend, former colleague, and collaborator in matriarchal co-leadership, Jill, pitched the idea for this dispatch by saying she wanted “practical tips” on staying sane, I was thrilled. Like a radio station in 1993, I take requests, but only if you call me.

5 Practical Tips for Staying Sane During World War III

1. Stop Consuming Sorrow

Certain types are so deeply invested in media consumption martyrdom that they think ingesting a constant stream of abject despair means they are the righteous iPhone holders. Consuming the most violence and sorrow in the name of social justice does not put you on the “right side of history.” History is not a moral line that bifurcates the past; history is a narrative crafted to suit the needs of whoever is in power. You know who owns the platforms you’re destroying your mental health on? THE MAN. Get a fucking grip.

You will not feel well if you are overstuffed with bad news because there is no way to healthily digest these politics.

To be clear, I don’t suggest being uninformed or looking away from all that has recently been revealed, but I do suggest, at this juncture, we take inventory of what we’re consuming and see if there’s a way to expunge some of this terror. We are experiencing multiple disorienting crises, and one of them is the proliferation of brain-damaging, doom-casting, deepfaking technology.

We are not meant to consume this much sorrow or be this confused by reality. If consuming less content makes you feel like you’re not doing your part, consider actually doing something.

2. Get Into Crying

So, how do we process all the sorrow we’ve already consumed? I say it’s high time we let it all out as we wail like a troupe of Sicilian widows.

Put on your best black veil, sweetie. Normalcy died a long time ago. Now we’re going to grieve its passing.

I don’t want to be too prescriptive on how you let the sorrow out. If you’re more of a primal screamer, I can see that working. Or maybe you prefer to emote through interpretive dance. I just think we all need a cathartic hobby, and mine is crying. Whenever I need to. Mostly in the privacy of my own home, but after the past two months, I’m now open to showcasing my expert practice publicly.

Did you know that crying literally removes stress hormones from our bodies? Stress tears are full of cortisol. Crying also floods our brains with oxytocin and other nice chemicals that naturally boost mood and relieve pain (physical and emotional). Everyone wants the plush cheek collagen of a baby, but no one wants to reduce their wrinkle-forming stress by crying like one shamelessly.

3. Be Very Kind

One of my master theories on human behavior, in this demented individualistic “society,” is that the level of kindness and generosity someone exhibits externally is a direct reflection of how kind and forgiving their inner monologue is. No one needs to be doing the most right now. Instead of listening to the rudest voice in your head, please give the mic to one that’s more compassionate.

It’s time to accept that nobody is perfect: not you, not me, and definitely not the people performing the hardest on our social feeds. Expecting perfection, when we need to embrace humility and be grateful for safety if we have it, is a sure pathway to disappointment. Instead, let’s make being very kind to ourselves and others a habit.

Tell a stranger you like their hat. Don’t be a bitch on Slack. Smile at your neighbors when you’re out in the neighborhood. Send an old friend you haven’t talked to recently a warm and lovely text. Ask them to get coffee if they live in your city. Invite them over for dinner better yet.

Show up for your people. Let new ones in. We need to reshape our lives away from isolation. The tech villains aren’t changing their business models, but we can be there for each other again. In all of our unhinged imperfection.

4. Pay Your Sanity Tolls

Over these past few tumultuous years, while trying not to lose my mind and succeeding triumphantly, I have come to pay my “sanity tolls” regularly. Some of these “sanity tolls” are quite literal — $12 (including a generous tip) for a latte and croissant from my favorite coffee shop where I am always treated to excellent morning chit chat. That $12 is money well spent, because I am a very social writer who lives alone and works remotely. If I don’t start my day with human interaction, I perish by 2PM.

Exercise is another “sanity toll” that must be paid. You don’t even need to spend any money — walking is free and wonderful for mental stability. Almost too many studies have linked an increase in physical activity with a decrease in depression. Get off your ass. Spring is almost here. Let’s all, if we are physically well enough, move abundantly. Before I was forced to take a (torturous) break this winter, I was practicing yoga daily, and during a very difficult time last year, it saved me. Time heals all and I returned to my favorite yoga class last week. It was so glorious to be well enough to down dog with the other regulars that I wept in Savasana.

Caring for yourself is not the same as optimizing your body. The simple things that bring joy when times are tough have nothing to do with productivity. A thriving group chat is not the same as putting in the effort to leave your house and see your friends regularly. In this warring world that’s trying to trick us into becoming those recliner people in WALL-E, there are “sanity tolls” that need to be paid to nurture our humanity.

5. Create

Making things is fun. Having fun is important for sanity. Sharing the things you make connects you with like-minded people, and that builds community.

You don’t have to share your creations, though, if that feels like a barrier. But I encourage you to break the cycle of endless consumption by creating something from nothing. Not as a side hustle or an attempt at viral fame and fortune, but as a way to express yourself authentically with little to no expectation. Especially if you typically earn your living by selling your creativity in this collapsing media economy.

I get that not everyone wants to invite in, and commune with, the muse, so maybe your best approach is … gardening? If you start growing tomatoes, by the end of summer, water them right, and you can make a delicious vat of sauce that lasts you until 2027.

The world is on fire but there is solace to be found in making things and enjoying them together.

I hope you enjoyed my utmost practical tips on how to cling to your diminishing sanity. Take great care of yourselves, as best as you can, and if you have any of your own tips to add to the mix, I think we would all really love to read them:

Leave a comment

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Hi friends!

We now know that every generation gets the IKEA monkey it deserves.

In 2012, it was Darwin, a Japanese macaque wearing a shearling coat. Darwin was just a seven-month-old baby when spotted in the parking lot of an IKEA in Toronto. Those were simpler internet times, and from a few photos and a hashtag, Twitter parody accounts appeared, and a star was born. This “stylish yet illegal monkey,” as anointed by The Globe and Mail, became an instant meme and a global media darling. Trapped in a vestibule, gazing through a glass door in his most enduring image, he looked like a scared little kid waiting for his mom to pick him up from school.

Darwin had an overbearing mother he was indeed looking for, a lawyer named Yasmin Nakhuda. “I had no choice but to carry Darwin everywhere I went,” she told Mental Floss in 2017. “He would have anxiety fits if I kept him away from me.” That fateful day, Nakhuda, who previously tried to shop with him at IKEA and was asked to leave her monkey elsewhere, left Darwin in her car. He escaped his enclosure, unlocked the car door, and was eventually apprehended by animal services, but not before showing off his fabulous outerwear. His mother signed away her rights and then spent the next several years trying to win custody back.

Yasmin Nakhuda was a stage mom. She started a YouTube channel for Darwin and bought him a wardrobe that extended beyond tiny shearling coats. Right before Christmas in 2012, when Nakhuda and her husband, Sam, were denied the return of their monkey in court, it was noted that his Santa suit and New Year’s bowtie would go unworn. “Darwin is not a dog,” Sam said outside the courthouse in a plea to bring him home for Christmas. “He’s not a cat, he’s not a lizard. He’s 93 percent human DNA.”

Darwin never went home with the Nakhudas again. He moved to Stony Brook Farm, a primate sanctuary about an hour outside of Toronto, and on the tenth anniversary of his rise to fame, the sanctuary’s executive director told Buzzfeed that he’s doing well and is “allowed to behave like a monkey as opposed to a human baby.”

Forced to go no contact with Nakhuda, he healed from the early relational trauma of being snatched from his birth mother’s bosom and sold to a crazy lady. He now thrives alongside his very best friend, another monkey at the sanctuary named Maximus.

2026 has presented a second IKEA monkey, and his name is Punch. Like Darwin, Punch is a baby Japanese macaque with mommy issues. He was born just outside of Tokyo, at Ichikawa City Zoo, during a heatwave this past July, and immediately abandoned by his mother. In an attempt to soothe him and help him gain strength, his human caretakers gave him a stuffed orangutan from IKEA.

At the beginning of this year, Punch left the care of humans and joined the zoo’s “Monkey Mountain.” It was a brutal transition for the little guy. Without his mama to show him the ropes, he struggled to navigate the hierarchy of macaque social life. Viral videos show him searching for love from older monkeys, only to be swatted away or ignored. No real monkey love on offer, he clings to his stuffed orangutan and drags it with him everywhere he goes.

In one clip, he is attacked by the older monkeys when he attempts to socialize, and returns to his stuffed companion, hugging it with all his might. In another, he folds his tiny body into a cinderblock for protection and tries to pull the stuffed toy in behind him.

Unlike Darwin, who had his big day out and vanished from the spotlight to rehabilitate, Punch lives in a surveillance state. People flock to record him in his enclosure. Millions more are watching his every move from afar, emoting so deeply that the zoo put out a statement last week encouraging the extremely online community to focus on his progress and “support Punch’s efforts rather than feel sorry for him.” Good luck with that! Punch is a captive primate, abandoned by the natural order, left with only a lifeless simulacrum of connection. To people on their phones, he is relatable content. The reaction to his search for acceptance reveals an essential but buried truth — we’re all lonely monkeys aching to be loved and chosen. Most are just unwilling to admit it so openly until the internet serves up the right animal on which to project our collective baggage.

And this time around, because in the Age of Unhingement™ brands can’t let the broken masses get weird about anthropomorphizing a monkey without “joining the conversation,” IKEA jumped in with an Instagram post, captioned “We're ALL Punch's family now,” advertising Punch’s stuffed orangutan, which has since sold out. Prices are now soaring on the resale market.

The male unwellness epidemic is very loud and The New York Times is living.

I’m not reading about “Clavicular,” and an onslaught of profiles can’t make me, but here’s what I gleaned against my will: He exists and I can’t with it. I must now sanity mog1 the discourse.

The same goes for Jay Shetty, who, for reasons unknown to me, keeps getting attention. I guess a fake monk best known for befriending celebrities, clout chasing, and his smoldering gaze is the person to follow during the fall of Western manhood.

The star of the show, though, is obviously RFK Jr., who invited Kid Rock over to create a PSA that I’m sorry to say isn’t mere content but remarkable fine art. Loop it in the atrium at MoMA.

This is the aspirational “wellness” I’m looking for. Some women spend their life savings on high-tech forms of collagen-building self-flagellation, starve themselves back to their birth weight (vital muscle mass be damned), and remain terrifically smug about the whole ordeal, but I want to pump iron in jeans, ride a stationary bike in a sauna, and then get in my grotto, still wearing the jeans, like a leathery, lawless psycho.

My one and only note:

Suggesting that good health comes from a glass of whole milk gulped down in a jacuzzi is anti-Semitic propaganda.

If I could travel back in time and change the course of history, I would go to Germany, but I wouldn’t off Hitler; I’d land roughly 500 years earlier, seduce Johannes Gutenberg, and convince him to abort the printing press. That might be our best hope to fix the information situation we find ourselves in.

I don’t want to know about Polymarket. The only prediction market I crave info on is why my tarot cards have revealed the Two of Cups, the Lovers, and the Four of Wands over and over again for the past year. In Punch’s loveless economy, what’s their incentive to play me like that? I must investigate what’s in it for them. Journalism is better when it’s backed by my tarot cards.

I do, however, want to know that the palace staff had a nickname for the degenerate formerly known as “Prince Andrew” and that his nickname was “The Cunt.” I squealed a little squeal of delight when I received that tidbit from the algo.

Do I want to know if Trump really called into C-SPAN under a pseudonym to talk shit about Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries? Maybe! But they already said it wasn’t him, so I guess I’ll reserve the space for whatever he deigns to pollute my brain with on Tuesday night.

This battle — between knowing and not knowing, staying sane with strong informational boundaries or bingeing at a buffet of horrendous content — is one of the greatest we face as aching monkeys in this unhinged age.

It’s something that I think about a lot and have for many years.

This past summer, when BIAD BFF Amy Taylor was working on the latest issue of Nectarine Magazine and asked if I wanted to contribute, I was in the thick of working on a book proposal and writing about this very subject.

The theme of the issue is PERSPECTIVE — something we can all use more of — and this poem is my contribution:

Had I written poetry since I was a teenager? Absolutely not. But when I heard the theme, I immediately knew I wanted to write a reverse poem and it’s fun to just do shit.

You can buy your copy of Nectarine Magazine here! Look at the gorgeous cover:

Until next time, my loves! Know things, or don’t. And feel free to weigh in on which path you think is better.

Leave a comment

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

How we all doing? I know I am the words lady, but even I, the words lady, cannot adequately use human words to describe my recent mental state. So, in honor of my latest attempt to spiral up while mucking through a swamp of escalating depravity, we’re going good news first:

The Good News

My melanoma has been taken care of! Yay! I am so relieved!

I would not recommend having two surgeries in less than four weeks, but it was medically necessary and definitely did something to me. The extent of what it did I am still processing on account of my last brain cell taking medical leave, but I am so, so happy that my arm is now in the clear and everything is healing beautifully.

Hearing the word “cancer” was horrifying, but it broke a couple of very unhelpful loops I had going for quite some time. And, while none of this was easy for my mind, body, or spirit, there are worse things than having a 99.9% curable brush with your own fragility.

My greatest wish, which I couldn’t even share because I wanted it to come true so badly, was that the second surgery would give me nothing for my insanity blog. That wish, I am thrilled to say, was granted. My doctor was so quick and so kind, the sweet nurse fed me half a Valium in a little cup when I arrived, and it went perfectly. Even though it took two weeks for me to get back to a normal level of typing, here I am.

While I was recovering, I went back and read a few of my most recent newsletters and it seems that I left out two very unhinged details when I chronicled my shanking at the hands of an elderly man at Kaiser Permanente. That surgery was right where my bra sits, an area that they, in the construction business, would call a load bearing wall. It took three weeks before I could wear a real bra again, the longest I have gone without the assistance of underwire since I was 12.

But that’s not even the craziest omission.

After I was shanked, I put my useless cotton bralette back on and WALKED HOME ALONE. I now know that walking home alone with six fresh stitches in your back, even if it is just a ten minute straight shot down Sunset and you’re insane enough to think you’re OK, is wildly unacceptable behavior.

It took a week and a half for me to surrender to the reality of what was happening after I did that, but once I stopped trying to be OK it all got easier to deal with. So, here’s a downy-soft gentle reminder for those of us who strut through life refusing to be taken down: Being not OK is always an option and definitely less insane than walking home alone, tits askew, when you’re in shock after surgery.

Being not OK was old hat to me by the time I had my melanoma removed, so I knew what to expect and vowed to treat myself gently. I did get a little depressed when my arm hurt too much to write — they arrested Don Lemon and I didn’t get to make lemonade — but I got over it. I also briefly considered reviewing Melania, but realized that I might need a lobotomy after subjecting myself to that.

Two surgeries is my limit for this quarter.

The Bad News

Jeff Bezos could have used the Melania fake box office money to pay the journalists axed from The Washington Post, but we’re living in a confirmed pyramid scheme run by a bunch of pedophiles and sociopaths.

Because I’ve been trapped in my own personal hell for the past six weeks, I am very invested in improving my mental well-being and have yet to subject myself to combing through the millions of emails that are now public. But here is the link to Jmail, a working Gmail parody that lets you search, sort, and star what’s been released if that’s something you’d like to get into.

I don’t need to comb through the emails to feel the depth of what’s been revealed. I am a woman and I am disgusted alongside all other women who feel the pain of objectification and abuse on a sliding scale that begins with sexual harassment and ends with being sex trafficked and raped (while still a girl) by the most powerful men in the world. It seems preposterous that all of this would be out there with so little consequence until you consider that the global systems of justice are overseen by the same group of shameless, evil sociopaths protected in plain sight all these years.

The last I wrote about Epstein was a plea to center the victims:

This story is really about how powerful, soulless men can perpetrate this level of abuse and machination, globally, with little consequence.

And I am hoping with every fibre of my being that this is also a story about how the women who survived that abuse take those men down and see the justice they deserve at last.

Since then, Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice, while legally required to release all the files and redact the victims’ identities, released a version of the files that shielded Epstein’s associates, most notably Donald Trump, and revealed the names, addresses, and nude photographs of dozens of victims, including Jane Does. This morning, Bondi was questioned by the House Judiciary Committee. Every victim seated behind her raised their hand in confirmation when asked if her office refused to meet with them. Bondi didn’t even turn around to see their response.

Bondi and her team of miscreant patriarchal demons can redact the wrong things and reveal what should be concealed, but there has been a shift. These emails were squeezed out for public consumption. You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube again.

I felt the shift back in November, and I felt it again with the new release. This chaotic shift is worldwide and being met with varying levels of accountability. It’s both a conspiracy come true and a spiritual crisis that we’re now confronting globally. Epstein’s emails repeatedly mention the Dalai Lama. He, of course, has denied his involvement in a post on “X,” the platform owned by Elon Musk, who has deep ties to Epstein himself but denies ever visiting the island, which, if true, was due to logistical issues. That’s just so fucking him.

Any foundation, including our collective sense of reality, cannot survive this many cracks. And so, I think, now that we know what we know, we each get to pick one more conspiracy to believe wholeheartedly as a little garnish.

Mine is going to be the timing of Bad Bunny’s halftime show being way too convenient.

I want us to have nice things and moments of artful mass catharsis that deliver a powerful message of cultural protest. Bad Bunny is a phenomenal artist. Watching his performance was wildly moving. It felt like ingesting a beam of light in a buffet of darkness. I am a white lady writing a Substack post and I want to be clear that I am not saying representation is not essential or valid. But, this was a useful cultural release valve at a time when, and I do not say this figuratively, there are parts of America that are at war with ICE with plans for expansion. His performance dominated the news cycle so aggressively that I didn’t even know who won the game until Monday night. Also, that man dated a Kardashian. Donald Trump wins gold for his shameless, satanic self-mythologizing, but Kris Jenner and her brood run a tight race.

I’m having Barbie movie culture war flashbacks. Heavy is the head that wears the tin foil crown.

I am now nearly two months TikTok sober and have no plans to chase that dragon again. Unfortunately, I needed to fill the void with something else to look at. So, I re-downloaded the unique hybrid of LinkedIn and a psych ward that is the Substack app.

There is a lucrative corner of Substack that reads as if it was written by Patrick Bateman’s ravenous niece and I tend to avoid it by never engaging. But last week, one of the girlies decided to announce the launch of A Goop of One's Own — my name, not hers — a new vertical of her enterprise dedicated to the various things a gal might now do to maintain a certain level of aesthetic wellness. It set so many women off that I was forced to take it all in.

I live in Los Angeles, which is obviously the global epicenter of Unwellness Culture, so this kind of nonsense doesn’t do my head in. Mother Gwyneth’s vagina candle walked so perimenopause could run and I’ve been known to order her ghost kitchen’s chicken caesar wrap, a delicious, gluten-free creation that comes swaddled in an oddly textured casing of cassava root. I love it! And yet, as I read all of this ruckus, hagmaxxing, minus one chunk from my right arm, wondering why anyone would willingly go to the doctor so much, I couldn’t help but think I have been neglecting Unwellness Culture in my ongoing reportage. It is an important pillar of the Age of Unhingement™ and will be addressed accordingly going forward.

Peptides can fix a lot of things, but not your personality!

Anyhoo …

I’m so happy to be back and officially rounding the corner on 100 editions of Burn It All Down. If I get my shit together, I can hit that milestone around my third anniversary in April. I think that means you’ll be hearing from me a bit more frequently in the coming weeks.

I’ll let you decide what kind of news that is.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

A couple of days ago, I googled “Age of Unhingement” because I was trying to find what I said in the New Yorker and, yes, the Google AI search overviews are a menace to society, but, also, that machine nailed it. Go off.

So, if you’re new around here and wondering what I write about, please see above!

As anyone lucky enough to visit a social media app in 2026 can attest, the year 2016 was recently summoned from its shallow grave to haunt us. I understand the urge to look back as everything gets exponentially more … uh … yeah, and, holy shit, it’s been a decade since then, and we’re inventing new ways to mark time since it makes less and less sense, but the hive mind needs to take off its rose-colored clout goggles. True heads know — with Trump’s first election win and algorithms taking control of our feeds — 2016 was the dawn of the Age of Unhingement™.

I think 2010, a nice, round number, is a better year to pick if we must revisit the near-ish past sentimentally. We were in Obama’s first term and starting to come out of the Great Recession. The future was imperfect, but it felt like a fresh page to be written. 2010 was also an inflection point in social media reshaping reality; the front-facing iPhone camera was born, announced by Steve Jobs in June, and the first version of Instagram was released that October. We were connected through our phones, but we didn’t experience life through a screen; we weren’t taking or posting videos, and most of our uploading was still done on desktop long after we lived in the moment.

I have a soft spot for 2010, because the first week of that year, Blackberry in hand, I left Toronto, my hometown, and moved to New York City. I had just turned 24, and even though it was the dead of winter, I felt like someone unplugged my life and plugged it back into a socket with higher voltage. By day, I was in grad school, working on my Masters in Media Studies, reading and writing about ideas that titillated me intellectually. By night, I was taking a second graduate degree at Vodka Soda with Lime University.

At Vodka Soda with Lime University, I very quickly made a lot of friends who loved drinking as much as I did. Since we were all in grad school and had no money, we would go drink at open bar parties we found on a brilliant website, my open bar dot com, that told us where we could go drink for free. Then, we would see where the night took us. It was often the roof of the Standard hotel because we knew the bouncer and he always let us cut the line.

That summer was objectively the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.

By September, I had three friend groups going — two groups of party friends that overlapped, and a group of more wholesome girlfriends. We all intersected on “Fashion’s Night Out,” a bizarre scheme from Anna Wintour to get people shopping again because the economy had just crashed. I can’t imagine it worked, but it was very fun to go on a fashion-themed bar crawl in the Meatpacking District. Liquor companies were floating so much free booze around New York during those pre-influencer “tastemaker” days of digital culture that I honestly don’t know how any of us who lived and drank through it has a functioning liver.

On “Fashion’s Night Out,” while drinking in a random clothing store, one of my wholesome girlfriends was shocked to see that I was friendly with a ’90s supermodel. I knew her because we were both regulars at a weekly Monday DJ night at an Italian restaurant on Stanton Street where my best friend Vicky’s boyfriend, Fabrizio, was the bartender. And on that beautiful, messy night of fashion, not only did I have A TIME AND A HALF, I achieved the dream of the ‘00s and got asked to have my picture taken for a street style roundup.

I was young, I was having fun, and people wanted to take my picture. If I were insane, I would look back on that time and feel nostalgic. But I’m not insane anymore, so I can be honest with myself and with you — when I was in my 20s, I was terrified of life and constantly hungover.

I flew high during the summer of 2010, but five years later, when I was working a job I hated, burnt out, and still drinking that much, my life was much smaller and lonelier. I eventually fled New York in an act of self-preservation.

Little 24-year-old me had great ideas of what she might like to do with herself after grad school but didn’t yet know how one thing leads to the next. While I don’t want to go back and relive my 20s, I do wish I could let that version of me know that it would all work out. I spent a lot of time spiraling about my career prospects, which, in hindsight, makes sense. Nothing I ended up doing had been invented yet.

I have lived in America since 2010, but I wasn’t born here. I was born in Canada, a country that produces an outsize number of thinkers and artists who are able to lucidly comment on American insanity because we have the perfect observation deck, or, as Robin Williams once joked, “a really nice apartment over a meth lab.”

Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale when she was living in Berlin and finished it when she held an MFA Chair in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but I can’t imagine she could have written such an enduring work of speculative fiction if she hadn’t grown up in Ontario and Quebec, watching American dystopia unfold from a perch.

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney boldly delivered his honest assessment of our current geopolitical reality, he was in the pocket not only because the Davos boys’ club is his scene — he’s an economist and banker by trade used to addressing his fellow elites at forums and summits — but also because Canada does not have the geographical distance to buffer what’s unfolding in America. If the meth lab explodes the apartment goes with it.

Carney never held political office before he was elected last April. He was governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England. His perspective feels different from other world leaders because it is. Like all politicians, he is imperfect, but his willingness to plainly and eloquently end capitulation to Trump filled a vacuum in world leadership.

In the binary world of American politics, nostalgia crosses the aisle. The Democrats live frozen in time, comfortably tied to rules of conduct from less violent and lawless eras. The Trump-led Republicans openly try to make America “great again,” a phrase that has always been a dog whistle for white supremacy, the return of which went so unchecked that children are now snatched in broad daylight and resisters shot point blank.

My feed is full of good-hearted (white) Americans watching fascism unfold in horror, posting some version of “this isn’t America.” But it is. And it always was. America’s systemic racism against Black people, and the notion of “Manifest Destiny” that justified the brutal displacement of Native Americans, inspired Hitler and the Nazis who drew upon the Jim Crow laws of the American South to segregate Jews in the 1930s. Looking at the past through a Vaseline-smeared lens and ignoring America’s long history of enslavement, racial violence, and legal segregation is why we’re here again.

In 2016, America still had a Black president.

In 2026, the hoods are off and the masks are on.

Honesty is a strategy that directly combats insanity. We all crave it, we all need it, and it’s healing for everyone involved. It’s rare and magnetic in our bullshit-ridden world, and you don’t need to be standing on the world stage to implement it. We may no longer have cohesive truth, but honesty is not a group project, it’s a personal choice. The best place to start is actually in your own life.

The past is gone and it’s not coming back to save us.

The present holds no solace and we all want to escape it.

The next trend is working toward a better future and making it contagious.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Hi! I’m Liz and this is Burn It All Down, the internet’s foremost source for whatever I feel like saying.

Today’s newsletter is the third part of an accidental series. In 2024, I announced my pivot to sanity. In 2025, I suggested we should all just go insane. But, like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our zeitgeist. Mere weeks into 2026 and insanity must be swiftly abandoned before we lose all good that remains.

Second pivot to sanity is now underway …

♫ do do do do do do do ♫

What a brutal start to January. The “new year, new me” mass psychosis didn’t even get a full week to have its way with us before new levels of state-sponsored murder and violence made everyone insane.

Classically, I would say more about that, but hearing the word “cancer” changed the aperture on my worries and the murder cells are still on my arm. Then, three days after I flew back to LA from Australia (a country that is an appropriate distance from Donald Trump), I rocked up to an unrelated doctor’s appointment clearly marked, “General Surgery,” oat latte in hand, as if I was getting my bangs trimmed and not having surgery that would knock me on my ass for two weeks.

I can’t think globally when, locally, I was so recently shanked in the back by a 95-year-old man.

I already can’t with this year, which is fine, because suddenly, like so many white women who spend too much time on the internet, I follow the Chinese zodiac. Despite what my algo thinks, Lunar New Year begins on February 17. By then, I will be done surgically shedding my skin. I’ll bid farewell to the Year of the Snake and be ready to receive the Year of the Horse as it gallops on in. If that doesn’t take, Western astrology offers us a third fresh start, the equinox at the beginning of Aries season on March 20 (the dawn of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and fall for my beloved Aussie readers). If neither of those take, we’ll have to wait, but on the evening of 9/11/26, Rosh Hashanah will usher us into 5787.

We’ve got options! And in the meantime, while I wait around to have another surgery this month, I will be tranquilized.

I video chat with my psychiatrist twice a year so I can keep microdosing business meth, and as luck would have it, we had an appointment scheduled a few days after my shanking. I told him all about my dermatology disasters and he told me that I had come to the right guy and then wrote me a generous Xanax prescription. The three-hour nap I had the next day under my heated blanket healed me enough to go on.

Midway through last week, unable to clear my noisy head with a nice “Jack Black,” which is what I call a very long power walk around my neighborhood because I often cross paths with Jack Black who is out doing the same thing in a full tie-dye outfit, I decided I’d like to be put into a coma until my next surgery is done and the good doctor tells me my melanoma has been disposed of.

I’ve read Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s trash fiction masterpiece, at least five times since I was a teenager. The Swiss “sleep cure” clinic that aging showgirl Jennifer North checks herself into, where they drug you unconscious until you’re ready to be roused, skinny and refreshed, has a special place in my heart. Valley of the Dolls is a campy-ass artifact of the 1960s, but the dream of going to sleep and waking up cured from what ails you is timeless.

A Swiss clinic is not in my budget, but I am no hero. Twice last week, when spiraling hours began, I took a tranquilizer and made myself a sandwich in the style of Stevie Nicks, who, in 2014, recounted the highs and lows of the eight years she spent on Klonopin. Her words are forever with me:

I was on Klonopin. It’s a tranquilizer. You’re tranquil. I stayed home in a really beautiful house, watched a lot of TV, and ordered from Jerry’s deli.

The way I optimistically underestimated every single phase of this surgery needs to be studied. I got the stitches out on Friday and literally had a yoga class booked for Saturday. When the very kind nurse told me to give it another week (at least) because the incision is still healing, I had to click cancel in the ClassPass app and come to terms with my insanity.

Because I recently had too much time to commune with my wounded inner child, I can confidently tell you that underestimating the horrors ahead is a lifelong theme for me. My optimism is immortal, even when I assume, in the pit of despair after another disastrous gap between reality and my hopeful expectations, that it has finally perished in an act of mercy. I still think better days are coming despite all accrued evidence. It’s not a bad way to be; it gets me pretty far. But delusion is not a viable coping mechanism with everything going on.

These are hard times and they keep getting harder.

Evil motherfuckers reign, a shattered mirror passes for reality, the planet is melting, people are dying, we all have our own shit to deal with, no one knows what to do, and the ones who claim to are monetizing a brand online. We wonder, after a new version of normalcy has been eviscerated again:

What’s the right way to react?

How can we resist?

Where are we headed?

Will any of this get fixed?

Solving the world’s problems is not the job of everyone with a phone. A good first step toward sanity is admitting that you have no control.

I don’t claim to have the answers. I’m not a politician (lmao) or a community organizer or a dude pontificating on CNN. I’m just a broad with a blog who feels cultural shifts and knows from voluminous personal experience that nothing will change until we stop spinning out and take our power back. We have a lot of proof now that wanting things to be different and complaining about it on the internet is not a viable pathway to social progress. In fact, all of our posting has become a hindrance.

There is a psychological phenomenon, a byproduct of social reality, that has been widely studied and repeatedly proven: Telling someone your goals makes following through on them less likely to happen. When you want to achieve something, anything, there are steps that need to be taken and work that needs to get done. Ideally, you’re not satisfied until the necessary work is complete. But, when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, your brain gets a flood of those nice, happy chemicals we all adore, and then, because you’re already satisfied with yourself, and recognized as a doer in your community, you’re less motivated to follow through on what you just declared publicly.

A 2009 study, led by a psychologist who devoted his entire career to this phenomenon, found that when the goals we publicize are directly related to our sense of identity (hello, personal brand) the outcomes are even worse.

Constantly publicizing our political grievances and the rush we get when people engage is keeping us frozen. Our brains get tricked into thinking that a goal was achieved and they stop investing energy in an endgame. The hit from views and likes is potent and instant. Change takes time.

I’m not saying that we need to stop posting. We need to share information and experience communal catharsis which still very much happens online. But we have to figure something out, at some point … right?

So, toward sanity we shall sail, even if we must (again) find new ways to navigate against these never-ending headwinds. If we all just go insane then we forfeit our minds, our hearts, and our beautiful spirits to the darkness. The darkness doesn’t deserve us and we can’t let the fascists, the bastards, and the [insert your own ongoing personal catastrophe here] win.

I’m not going down without a fight. I can’t help that I’m like this!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Today we begin in gratitude:

Thank you to everyone who reached out after my last dispatch. I really appreciate your support and especially loved the melanoma stories with happy endings.

And thank you, , for sharing my end of year screed with the esteemed community and for calling this newsletter “funny, cathartic soul-manna.” Foster’s newsletter/radio show is a delightful, irregularly sent digital bacchanalia that he’s now threatening to send weekly. It’s very entertaining, full of correct opinions, and handcrafted by a madman. I have a feeling, my wonderful readers, that it might just be up your alley. Go read/listen to Foster’s latest and show him some love.

I’m not feeling my best, and that means everyone should be like Foster and compliment me beautifully. Writers notoriously need two things: money so we don’t die penniless in a hovel, especially now that a decent hovel is, like, $2,500 a month, and constant compliments for our fragile egos. Substack has cornered the market on the paywall, helping writers monetize easily, which is great, but I think they’re limiting us. What we really need, especially in these dark days of world war winter, is a complimentwall.

Think about it: Compliments are free for you and priceless for me. Tell me how great I am and you get to keep reading. I love compliments and I want the option to brazenly fish for more. I realize that Substack is an independent media/AI slop pyramid scheme with venture capitalists at the top, so they need to make money above all else and will never go for my brilliant complimentwall UX addition, but it would be a hit.

I guess this will have to suffice for now:

Leave a comment

I left Los Angeles on December 22 and landed in Brisbane, Australia on December 24. Somewhere over the Pacific — perhaps during the missing December 23 — I deleted TikTok and haven’t looked at it since. I now feel like my brain went through a car wash and all its microplastics have been rinsed off.

Aside from prying myself from TikTok’s talons, I didn’t intend to go on a digital detox. But when my brother and nephew picked me up from the airport and whisked me straight to a town called Sunshine Beach in Noosa, on the coast in Queensland, where I was so warmly greeted and given the nicest guest bedroom in the house by one of the all-time great hostesses, Christine, who is technically my brother’s mother-in-law but is actually my dear friend and the best person to eat Coffin Bay oysters and drink a cold Chablis with, I was transported to a different dimension where looking at my phone held no appeal.

It also helped that my nephew and niece are two of the most entertaining human beings to ever exist. In case you’ve wondered, yes, I have fulfilled the prophecy of being a fun and free-spirited Aunty. My nephew, Oscar, is eight, and like all great Lenkinski men before him, he never, ever stops talking when presented with a listening ear or willing partner in conversation. He is one of my favorite people to talk to and we had a blast shooting the shit. My niece, Helena (the baby), is sweet and sassy and just turned three. I have long thought that three is the perfect age for a human being and she upholds my hypothesis. She might be the funniest of us all. There is a physicality and joy to her comedy that evokes the world’s daintiest Jack Black. Before I left, I told my brother, Lee, and sister-in-law, Emma, that I hope they don’t traumatize her badly enough, but if they do, she has star quality and a bright future in comedy.

So, the cure to phone addiction is actually pretty simple:1

1. Find out you have melanoma.

2. Fly to a different hemisphere less than a week later.

3. Delete TikTok on the plane.

4. Stay at Christine’s house in Sunshine Beach.

5. The ocean.

6. Have two little clowns performing for you constantly.

7. A deep need to pretend your other life, the melanoma life, doesn’t exist.

8. Constant fun activities where you know someone else will be capturing content.

9. Oh, and, definitely take a week off work (at least).

37 minutes average screen time, by golly, it works!

I entered 2026 feeling very refreshed, if a little jet lagged, when I landed back in LA, having lived one less day in 2025 than everyone else, a small victory against a cunt of a year. But 2025 is still lingering for me, because yesterday, I had to return to Kaiser Permanente. If you read my last newsletter, you know that my hit list at the moment is just Kaiser Permanente written nine times.

Before I even found out about the melanoma, I had an appointment booked to surgically deal with the other gross skin thing on my back that sent me to the dermatologist in the first place. I almost cancelled it, but decided not to in an effort to have everything taken care of so I can move on with my life. My strategy was to just be real breezy about the whole thing, so I didn’t bring anyone with me, got a coffee, and walked to my appointment. I honestly felt fine about it, but they had to take my blood pressure three times before it was normal, and the nurse told me that my heart rate was too high.

When they took me back to an exam room to meet the doctor, he was about 90 years old. I’m rewatching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt right now because Titus Andromedon is one of my favorite sitcom characters and I need him, and this doctor looked exactly like a sight gag from an episode I watched the night before that involved a puppet playing an ancient grandmother.

I wasn’t thrilled to see the ancient doctor, or that he was wearing a ski jacket indoors, but I still felt fine. My nervous system, however, was betraying me. He took my pulse and said it was too high for him to do the procedure. Their solution? Leave me alone, laying down, in a very cold (no ski jacket was offered), dark, silent hospital room. When the nurse came back to check on me, even though I had implemented some of my best yogic breathing, it was higher. Anyone whose nerves run, uh, a little hotter than most can tell you that the solution to anxiety is not whatever they were trying. The nurse offered me a bottle of water. What I really needed at that point was a Xanax and a trip to the Temple Grandin hug machine.

A few minutes later, after the nurse distracted me by talking about her hot flashes, my pulse was low enough that they said they could do it, which was hard to believe since I felt so much worse. I considered leaving but knew that meant I was just putting it off. A different nurse took me into a different room and got everything setup. She said the doctor was very fast and told me to listen to the barely audible music if I got nervous. I asked her to talk to me since that would probably work better, but when the doctor came in and started working, the first thing she asked me was, “How’s your 2026 going so far?”

How was I supposed to answer that?

As soon as he started, I could tell that my back wasn’t frozen enough. I told the ancient doctor that I could feel it three times and he ignored me three times. It wasn’t until I literally screamed that he listened and then I still felt him stitching me up. The good news is, since it was never really frozen, it never got more painful and I feel surprisingly fine today.

Perhaps, based on that whole episode with my heart rate, he thought I was hysterical. But the thing about hysteria is that you need to have a uterus to suffer from it and the uterus is a magical, powerful creator of life and also an organ of torture and turmoil for every single human being who possesses one. I promise you a hysterical woman has a higher pain tolerance than any man you can find.

When Kaiser called me earlier to tick a number off a spreadsheet make sure I’m alive, I told the man on the phone that I feel physically fine but unleashed a way more graphic version of what I just told you and he seemed rightly horrified and said it would be relayed to the department’s director. I haven’t decided if I’m going to report a formal grievance because now that it has entered the Annals of Unhingement, I don’t want to think about this ever again. It’s not like I can sue him, he did a good job. I mean, I could literally feel that he knew what he was doing. But I also don’t think elderly doctors who don’t listen should be cutting people open without sufficient anesthetic.

So … everything … still insane! Which leads me to our official theme of the year:

2026: We’ll Try & Fix?

I am very excited about this year’s theme, because after 12 months of “We’ll See What Happens,” during which we saw it all and didn’t really know what to do about it, this year we’re going to start looking for some solutions. I also like that it rhymes — it feels satisfying, and we deserve that.

“2026: We’ll Try & Fix?” includes a heavy question mark. I want to be very clear that no one should be bearing the weight of THIS world on their tired shoulders. All we can do is our best, and I don’t know if our best will be enough, but what I do know is that none of us want to spend another twelve months watching the world self-immolate on our demented little phone screens feeling this frightened, angry, and powerless.

Lots more to come because I’m excited to explore this theme as we move through what I’m sure will be another year of many notable moments. Even though we’re in January, and it feels wrong not to set goals for the new year, I’m giving myself the grace to just not. After yesterday’s heart rate incident and World War I surgery, it’s clear that I’m in the trenches and the only thing I need to fix at the moment is myself.

When I got home from Kaiser, I considered whether Moleania, my melanoma, and I can continue to coexist since I’m not sure I can ever go to the doctor again. But that’s not an OK train of thought, so I’m going to call the good doctor’s office and find out which White Lotus mom pills I can take before my surgery.

2026: We’ll Try & Fix?

Take care of yourselves, stay away from Kaiser Permanente, and more soon because I’m doing fuck all right now.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

I was planning a very different recap for this year, but things took a pretty dramatic and horrifying turn last week. I’m not even talking about the anti-Semitic mass shooting in Australia, where I’m headed tomorrow to spend the holidays with my Jewish brother and Australian mishpocha in Queensland. Or the horrific murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, that happened in the city I live in and shocked the industry I work in.

On Tuesday, I found out that I have melanoma. So … now there’s also that.

Before you start worrying too hard about me, my murder freckle is stage 0 and is literally the most treatable form of cancer there is. Stage 0 melanoma has a 99.9% survival rate after removal and removing it is all you need to do. I have been assured by two different doctors that this poses no threat to my health once it’s taken care of. So, based on my experience this past week, I’m going to assume that the tragic 0.1% jumped off a bridge after talking to a dermatologist at Kaiser Permanente.

This mole seemed nefarious as soon as it appeared on my arm a few years ago. It was admittedly so irregular looking that multiple friends and family members begged me to get it checked. Over Labor Day weekend, my cousin Snacky was in town and upon meeting my dear friend Amy at a pool party — with my irregular mole on full display — they bonded over how worried they both were about it. You would think that level of loving concern and bullying would have sent me to the dermatologist, but no, I waited until another gross skin thing was too painful to be ignored.

I’m self-employed, which means that I have to buy my own health insurance, and since I am generally in great health and never go to the doctor if I can avoid it, I am a member of a cheap HMO called Kaiser Permanente. And the thing about Kaiser Permanente is that their approach to health care is a user experience that involves answering questions in an app to make an appointment to talk to a random doctor on the phone who will tell you to go to Urgent Care where you will be triaged by a nurse who will take your blood pressure (it will be shockingly high due to heart-pounding anxiety) and then a doctor will eventually appear to decide whether you get “preventative care” or should be taken out back to be shot and put out of your misery.

When I told the random phone doctor that I needed to see a dermatologist for my gross skin thing she told me that I needed to go to Urgent Care and that dermatology wouldn’t accept a referral because they only deal with mole checks and skin cancer. So, I used the irregular mole as my way in and she got me a referral. I did go to Urgent Care where they sort of helped me, but it was a cortisone shot from the dermatologist I scammed my way into a week later that healed me. When I showed her my mole she said it needed a biopsy and then told me that there was a good chance that it was cancer, but even if it was, it wouldn’t harm me. So, I took deep breaths as she marked it up, took a photo of it so a surgeon would know where exactly it was on my body, then shaved a chunk out of my arm.

I went home and only had a minor panic attack. Not too bad, all things considered. But I got it together, drank some water, and met my friend for lunch. After that, I was pretty zen about all of it and surprisingly didn’t spiral into researching the worst case scenario.

So, when the doctor called and told me that it was melanoma and then immediately, instead of reassuring me that I would be OK, said the removal was pretty invasive and would leave a massive scar on my arm, I was in shock and wanted to talk about options and asked if a plastic surgeon could close it. She told me that it’s cancer, not a cosmetic issue, and that I should really want the surgical oncologist to do the procedure. Her bedside (phoneside?) manner poured gasoline on the anxious hellfire that was my mind hearing the word “cancer,” so I just asked if she could book the removal with the best surgeon on the team as soon as possible and she said she would be in touch.

I missed the doctor’s call the next day, which was really for the best. When I didn’t answer, she sent me a message in the app with two options for the surgery — a trip to Kaiser’s butcher shop as previously discussed and another option which would leave a smaller scar but would be a multi-day affair and require me going home with an open wound, potentially more than once, so a lab could process the margins overnight. Both terrible options were available at the end of February.

I was sitting outside the Silver Lake Gelson’s, eating some sad bitch soup, under an umbrella because I am Morticia Addams now, when I read the doctor’s message in the app and just knew there had to be a better way.

There obviously is a better way and there’s one doctor in California who specializes in it and his office is in Pasadena which is about a 20-30 minute drive from where I live. He only removes melanoma, does it less invasively, and double checks everything is gone in the lab himself before he stitches you up properly that same day because he has done a million prestigious fellowships and is also trained in plastic and reconstructive surgery. When I found him, I called his office immediately and spoke to the kindest receptionist who could hear my panic and offered to squeeze me in for a rare consult on Friday before the holidays. The catch was that I needed to get my biopsy from Kaiser before the doctor could see me.

When I called Kaiser to ask for my biopsy results, the woman on the phone said it would take at least five business days to process my request. I was so out of my mind that I asked her:

“Do you realize that you work in a factory that treats human beings like animals?”

And I am telling you exactly what I said not because I’m proud of misdirecting my anger at that woman — I was horrified to hear that line fly out of my mouth — but because it worked so effectively that I had the biopsy results in my inbox a mere three hours later. Feel free to make it your own and use it as needed.

I saw the good doctor on Friday and he came into the room with the intention of convincing me that everything would be OK, told me all about his very impressive education and research background, said that my murder freckle isn’t even as deep as a paper cut, and then capped it all off by saying it’s the most common cancer in women 28-35. I love that demo for me.

He assured me that he would do his best to make my scar look as good as possible but that he couldn’t make it invisible. I told him that I don’t care if I have a scar after the prospect of a cleaving on Kaiser’s butcher block. He told me that I had the right attitude. If he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, I would have proposed on the spot.

Last week was my most productive week of the year. I found out I had melanoma on Tuesday, hit a huge pre-holiday work deadline and transcended insurance company bureaucracy on Wednesday, signed a new contract with a big raise I’ve been negotiating for months on Thursday, and got this surgery booked for the end of January with a doctor who I really trust on Friday. Nothing fires up my engines quite like disaster. My life had been so peaceful and I couldn’t get anything done.

I wanted to share all of this because it’s appropriately unhinged and also because it’s now my duty as town crier and village yenta to encourage everyone to go get their weird moles checked. Especially my fellow Ashkenazi Jews — the good doctor told me that we have a higher risk than the general population — as if we needed even one more crumb of tsuris to bear.

And now I know THE melanoma guy, so hit me up if you need his number and we’ll get it taken care of for you. He’s not as expensive as you think, because in America’s fucked up healthcare system, when you don’t go through insurance you often get a better rate. I’m very grateful that I have the means to pay it.

I’m going to go on my trip and try not to think about all of this. Then, I’m aiming for a calm and cozy start to the year until I deal with the removal of it all at the end of next month.

This year has humbled me. But that’s OK — it’s good to be humble. I know I’m not alone in ending 2025 a little worse for wear. This was the Year of the Snake in the Chinese zodiac and it seems I am exiting its transformative torture chamber by having a layer of skin surgically removed. Feels a little too on the nose, but it is what it is.

I’ll check in with you guys when I’m back and settled in. I think I have the theme for next year so I shall reveal it to you then.

Thank you for all of your support in 2025. It’s time to roll the credits on this godforsaken year.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Oxford has announced rage bait as their Word of the Year and Burn It All Down has officially selected giving up as ours.

Three contenders were shortlisted — giving up, kill me now, and you cannot be fucking serious — that reflect our collective feelings and experiences over 2025.

I was already leaning toward giving up due to recent circumstances that we’ll get to shortly, and then, over Thanksgiving, a friend, who is objectively successful in an impossible industry and is currently in the midst of a job shift, told me she relayed my I’m giving up mantra to her therapist, who loved it and said it was wise. I wasn’t surprised, because right now, if you can pay your bills, there are bigger things to crash out about than the state of your “career.”

So, if you’re also feeling like shit about the work you do in, uh, any industry that was never easy to make it in but has now been made exponentially worse by end-stage tech villainry, corporate psychosis, capitulation to fascism, malignant stupidity, and AI licking its chops to replace the last vestiges of decently funded human expression and inquiry, I invite you to join me in giving up during this much-needed holiday season. Let’s free ourselves from the bondage of trying, the shackles of caring, and the shapeshifting terror of what the future might hold.

It’s time to let go and let giving up wrap itself around you, tuck you in gently, and seal the deal with a little forehead kiss goodnight.

Share

No one gives up in a vacuum, and my journey to giving up began on November 5, 2024, the dark and demented eve of my thirty-ninth birthday, which happened to be the very same night that Donald Trump was reelected (allegedly). Or, maybe it began that July, when I met the literary agents I fondly called “the book sharks” on one of the most harrowing and memorable Zooms of my life. But election night was when my journey to giving up really began to accelerate.

I was in Toronto visiting my family and about to go to dinner when I got an email full of notes on the new pages of my book proposal that I sent to the sharks about a week prior. The baby shark loved my marketing plan but hated my sample chapter — entitled “AI Can Have My Job, Just Let Me Live” — an airtight argument as to why AI is now better suited to make social media content than a tired millennial woman. My thesis was that social platforms are no longer a place for human beings. Her top-line feedback was that she wasn’t sure offering AI my job was the best way for me to present myself, that my perspective on my own creativity being mangled by algorithms didn’t feel original enough to her, and that I should really be focused on building a TikTok following.

A year later, it tickles me that the hot social media take du jour is “having no followers is cool.” I mean, duh, having a social media following has always been grotesque, but it helps to have one if you’re trying to get an agent or sell anything in this mediated world that’s built on algorithmic mind control. While I, more than anyone, fantasize about a different version of reality in which “brand strategists” don’t chase clout and career opportunities by making optimized vertical videos forecasting “chronically offline” as the trend to watch for next year, that’s the world we actually live in. Like, put your phone down then?

Anyhoo …

I left for dinner and suppressed my rage with vodka and olive juice. Then, a few hours later, with a swiftness I don’t think any of us were expecting, a dark cloud descended over MSNBC, and it was pretty clear Trump was about to reclaim the presidency. So, I bought a pack of my favorite childhood cigarettes and enjoyed some eerily warm Canadian weather while I chain smoked alone in the backyard and had a big think about everything.

I’ve been saying that AI can have my dumb job for years. I even said it in an early newsletter of mine back in 2023. It’s my truth and it’s more relevant than ever. My sample chapter wasn’t a zeitgeisty extrapolation on AI or how algorithms are impacting culture; it was rooted in my own life experience. I was only getting notes on a book proposal because I started writing regularly back in 2023 in an effort to reclaim my creativity from the brain-rotting work I do for money. But in the context of election night, I knew that the Age of Unhingement™ was about to get a lot worse. If I was going to write a book on how to deal with it, and contend with various shark-like opinions on my work in progress, I had to figure out exactly what my message was and how I wanted to share it.

I was heading to New York at the end of the week, so I wrote the baby shark back and asked if she wanted to meet in person to discuss. We met in a conference room that was painted black and had a banquette full of pillows with Lizzo’s face printed on them. It was a lovely meeting, really, we talked for an hour about my greater Unhingement philosophy, and when I told her a bunch of stories from my career, she asked me, with the awe of a Gen Z whippersnapper, how I’ve done so many things.

“I’m older than I look,” I told her.

Then, I flew back to LA, and didn’t touch my book proposal for the next seven months because I was too busy doing my job job, writing this newsletter, and trying not to end up in an insane asylum during this godforsaken year in which I never found the extra energy to experiment with yapping into a ring light about dystopian cultural trends, let alone confront all my weird feelings about posting the end result. So, in an effort to not overwhelm myself completely and actually get anything done, I decided I would deal with the TikTok of it all after I finished rewriting my book proposal. And after a moderate menty b, commemorated here for eternity or until Substack goes under, I did finish a new draft eventually.

I sent it to the baby shark in mid-September, knowing it probably wouldn’t land because I didn’t write it for her, I wrote it for me. In the many months that I spent thinking about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it as the world repeatedly set itself on fire, I realized that my message was deeply spiritual. I also realized that I needed help to develop my ideas further (still do) and knew that she couldn’t offer me that.

When, a couple weeks after I sent my draft over, she asked to get on a call, I sensed what was coming. She told me that while my proposal made her laugh out loud she had no idea how she could possibly sell it.

“Is laughter not a selling point?” I asked. She said no. And while that’s just one baby sharquita’s opinion, if true, yet another nail in the publishing industry’s coffin.

She didn’t have the balls to straight up say that a well-followed miniature horse has a much better chance of selling a nonfiction book than a writer without a sizable platform, but the subtext was there when she had no feedback to offer me that made any sense.

Editing your own writing as much as I do is a special kind of derangement, so I was a little desperado for notes and pressed her on what she thought I needed to fix. She told me she worried that what I write about is too timely for how long it takes to publish a book. I had actually worked pretty hard to address that, I thought, so I asked her if she could give me an example of what gave her pause.

“You mentioned Israel and Palestine in the Politics of Posting section and I don’t know how relevant that will be in a few years.”

I told her I loved her optimism and hoped that she was right.

I needed to end the call before I said something too real, so I thanked her for all of her help and wished her great luck in her career. Then, I ditched work for the afternoon and went to see One Battle After Another, which was a perfect decision. Seeing Leo smoke that roach in his bathrobe made me feel less alone.

Before it made me nuts, having the book sharks interested in my work was so exciting. The head shark that I originally sent my proposal to is brilliant and powerful and his feedback was encouraging and constructive and spot on. I took everything he said seriously and it made me a much better writer. Once I had his initial take, though, I had to swim along to baby girlie who couldn’t give me a workable note to save her life. But it’s OK. I learned a lot from the whole process, more than I bargained for, and it was a fabulous walkabout for my ego at a time when I really needed that.

And, in wonderful news, after telling you guys this story, I finally have something good to say about turning 40. When I was a younger broad, I was definitely not grounded enough in who I am to take an agent’s opinions with a grain of salt, honor my own energy, and allow myself the time to figure out what I actually wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I’m too old and evolved to abandon myself now. That’s extremely fucking cool.

Two months into giving up and I’m already having fun scheming about what’s next. That’s the beauty of giving up — it’s a seasonal treat and not forever. And it’s very useful for us creative, ambitious lunatics who sometimes fly too close to the sun or lose our minds for a quarter and then need a beat to get it together.

Giving up, in spiritual terms, is actually just surrender.

I’m not giving up on writing a book or on getting my ideas out there. I’m just exploring other formats that might feel less like banging my head against the wall because no one reads anymore and I’m done writing so much in isolation. My job job is remote and mostly me pitching ideas and making things alone. This newsletter is my sweet baby that I love so much — this is her 88th edition — but I also write it alone. If I’m going to work on other projects and hustle them around town because I’m canonically unhinged and can’t chill forever, I really want to collaborate with my brilliant and hilarious friends who are just as fed up with the state of affairs as I am.

Old gals just wanna have fun and creativity blossoms in collaboration.

Speaking of blossoming in collaboration …

These two nailed the hard launch on social last week in a way that has entered them into consideration for a Lifetime Achievement in Unhingement.

The above photo was first posted by the former prime minister of Japan, I will save my commentary on Ms. Katy’s fashion. And then, as if heaven sent, we got an entire carousel from the trip, including this pic:

More on these psychos soon because I’m planning to give 2025 the in-depth recap it deserves and JUSTY PERDEAU had an exceptional showing this year — both together and alone. I ship. I ship. I ship.

2025: Let’s make it out alive.

Until next time!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Hi friends!

I’m back. Thank you for your angelic patience and continued support for this newsletter that, if you can believe it, is still written by a human lady who needed a break and not a chatbot optimized to bait the sheeple. That was directed at my paid subscribers only — the rest of you can read this whenever I send it and be grateful for the opportunity!

But seriously, my job job, the one that keeps me in the aspirational lifestyle I’m accustomed to, has been way more creatively demanding lately, and I was so exhausted after I wrote my last dispatch that my boss (I’m the boss) said to stop writing extracurricularly until I felt a bit fresher. Then, I turned 40, which, for a Peter Pangela like me, as I told anyone who would listen, was like staring down the barrel of a gun.

Of course, there was a full-ass supermoon on my birthday. I had a very fun party with my beloved friends here in LA and got so many presents and nice wishes sent my way that I felt like a sultan. For a week, I kept all of my flower deliveries clumped together on my dining room table in a magnificent funeral arrangement for the dregs of my youth because I am dramatic. It was a great birthday and I was loved and celebrated and I have nothing enlightened to say about turning 40 — the new decade was a real shock to my system and I don’t like this descent into midlife because I like being young and wild and free. Thank goddess I have the cheek collagen of a woman who has smoked much less of everything and the wisdom to know that my prime has only just begun.

Age has also given me the wisdom to know that if we want to live in a better world and resist the dystopian boot-on-face future that the sex offenders and AI-loving madmen running ruining the world and milking our brain cells for billions of dollars want us to think is inevitable, we must begin by reclaiming our humanity wherever and whenever we can. The current pace of the internet is disgusting and the discourse is getting worse. Not sure how that’s even possible. If you need a reminder to take a deep breath and honor your own energy instead of trying to whip up a post on the takebait du jour like a gladiator entering the Colosseum of Clicks or the Forum of Front-facing Cameras, here it is:

Take a break!

Participating in the degradation of what’s left of culture is a choice! And so is burning yourself out completely to keep up with it. Speed and reactivity are rewarded with engagement but they’re not actually what makes for good, enduring work or a well-rounded life.

Put that in your vape and vape it.

Anyway, I’m feeling much better and more rested, and now I’m ready to unleash some timeless opinionation in this opinery.

If you have a rich offline life and missed the cacophony of deafening uproar over a few recent headlines — great. I’m not linking to them here. You do you and keep raising the vibe as the rest of us demean ourselves by ingesting the internet.

Social media didn’t invent sensational headlines, but it did elevate the art of treating readers like a bunch of slack-jawed fish. Back when the Age of Unhingement™ began, we mostly baited our hooks for clicks. I say “we” because, in 2016, I famously did a short stint as a “trends editor” at a political news startup where my entire job was to write headlines and photoshop thumbnail pics with strategically cut-off tweets that would get people clicking on Facebook. I’m a bit twisted and love writing one line of copy, so I was great at it.

The primary goal was to make people curious enough to click for more info — known in the business of mass manipulation as employing the curiosity gap — by withholding the right nugget of information. The secondary goal was to get people to share the story, and that was best accomplished by a declarative headline that they would agree with and want to virtue signal to their friends. There was some ragebait involved — we wrote about Amy Schumer a lot that summer for no good reason other than she made people so mad in the comments — but, above every other form of engagement, it really was about clicks.

That year, algorithmic feeds replaced linear timelines on both Instagram and Twitter and then, shortly thereafter, Trump was elected for the first time. That combo ushered in a new era of emotional manipulation in both politics and media, and because the haggard remains of legacy outlets need content that will resonate with a dwindling audience, they’ve been increasingly tied to what works on social media ever since.

But social media platforms, now more than ever, are fucked. And AI has also entered the chat. What works best these days seems to be shameless ragebait, also known as taking a provocative, hardline stance that is rooted in nonsense, delights a minority, and pisses everyone else off. It encourages engagement not only in the form of clicks, comments, and shares, but in motivating other writers and creators to respond with their own timely take on the take.

A trend-based onslaught of hot takes after an article goes viral is nothing new on social media or the internet-at-large, but increasingly provocative opinions being published in, like, The New York Times, as a form of engagement farming that I call takebait, now fuels the growing takes-for-profit cottage industry populated by independent writers and creators trying to survive media collapse. We’ve entered an even more depraved era of media manipulation that builds off of everything that preceded it: The thirst for views and traffic is still there, the rage is still being weaponized, and now the bait is being dangled not just for reader engagement or angry retweets, but to encourage creators and writers to opine on TikTok and Substack so they can grow their following, make a buck, and send a little traffic back in the meantime.

I don’t have any answers on how to fix this or lessen the appeal of taking the bait (as a consumer whose emotions are being exploited or a creator hoping to monetize in this economy). What I do know is that the one thing any of us opinionistas who regularly sling takes on the internet can ask ourselves is: Why am I so horny to post about this nonsense? And if the answer is that rent is due, then do what you gotta do. But also, watching this cycle repeatedly unfold makes me want to log off indefinitely. Society is crumbling in tandem with the media ecosystem, and if this all continues its trajectory, by Q4 next year, this newsletter will be about my vegetable garden, and I will be xeroxing it and sending it to you all via mule.

So, we made it to November of 2025. We’re finally rounding the corner on this godforsaken year, and here comes Jeffrey Epstein, emailing from beyond the grave, making us all wonder if Trump fellated Bill Clinton or if the Bubba in question was perhaps Ghislaine Maxwell’s horse? New levels, same devils here in hell on Earth!

Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother and the man who emailed the question that inspired some truly cackle-worthy TikToks, told The Advocate that it was a joke. I say believe whatever you need to believe to get through the news cycle because more Epstein survivors are coming forward to tell their stories, the files are ostensibly making their way to us even with Trump calling it a hoax, and he’s now literally calling for lawmakers to be hung as his latest distraction from what we all know.

All week I have been thinking about how the REAL, ACTUAL story that needs to be told is the one that focuses on the courageous women who, as girls, survived being trafficked into an international sex ring under the guise of being helped by a man so well-connected that his correspondences transcend partisan and global politics. And how, in our nasty, mediated world, the abuse and trauma these women endured has turned into a political circus of finger-pointing and misinformation and speculation about whether the sitting president gave Bill Clinton a blowjob.

Don’t you DARE drag Monica Lewinsky into this, she has been through enough.

Being a woman in a patriarchal culture is to be reminded that you inherently have less value as a human being. Women are not piggies or baby factories or ruiners of places or objects to be ogled, bought, sold, fondled, fucked, and cast aside.

Women are people.

And so, the only opinion that matters right now is one that I hope we can all agree on: No matter what unfolds when these files are released, or how crazy it all gets, we need to remember the victims first.

Yes, this is a story that begs to become gossip because it drops more names than two narcissists at lunch in Hollywood. But this story is really about how powerful, soulless men can perpetrate this level of abuse and machination, globally, with little consequence.

And I am hoping with every fibre of my being that this is also a story about how the women who survived that abuse take those men down and see the justice they deserve at last.

For an entire year, I have been meaning to get matches printed to spread the BIAD gospel IRL and I finally did it! And if you see me in the wild this holiday season, I just might bless you with some.

Stay strong out there, my friends! We’re in the homestretch now and nothing needs to get done until 2026. Consider this your signed permission slip.

See you sooner than last time!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

BOO.

Did I scare you, friends? Sorry. I know you’re already dealing with a lot. I, for one, had to crawl out of my coffin to send this. Someone get Stephen King on a rewrite because these vibes ain’t IT. Too many tricks and not enough treats makes for one dead bitch.

Halloween always reminds me that there really are two types of people in this world of ours, those of us who find consciousness frightening enough as it is, and another differently deranged group who have the constitution to willingly terrify themselves with horror movies. Shrieking at what I see on a screen does nothing good for me, and when I do see the rare horror movie, I cover my eyes for huge chunks because there are so many things that I simply do not need to ingest visually. But these days, it feels like I have no choice but to concede. You don’t need to press play on a slasher movie to see masked men do horrible shit, and if you’re into gore, then great, enjoy a man getting shot in the neck from multiple angles you never consented to see.

The breadth of content the horror franchise known as “reality” is serving up this season is way too much for me.

Looking for a ghost story? Well, here in Los Angeles, we have Waymos driving themselves around the city. A steering wheel that turns itself with no one in the driver’s seat is undeniably ghostly. I have seen one acceptable use of this technology — two teenage boys ripping a massive joint in the backseat while they flew past me at a red light. But this week, a Waymo in San Francisco, the city most haunted by the poltergeist of uncanny tech, killed a beloved bodega cat, which obviously has devastated the community. That feline tragedy came mere days after the Waymo co-CEO told a tech conference that society was ready to accept a human death at the hands of these weird fucking robotaxis.

We’re still in the first act, lady. I think that’s TBD.

If you’d prefer to sit on the edge of your seat and watch the next outbreak of a devastating plague, because the last one didn’t get ya good enough, then allow me to introduce you to the truckload of diseased monkeys that escaped a crash on an interstate highway in Mississippi. It was originally reported that the monkeys were aggressive and infected with hepatitis C, herpes, and (trigger warning) Covid, but Tulane University, where the monkeys came from, later said they were free of disease. That story doesn’t match what the driver told cops at the scene of the accident, where a few of the monkeys were found and destroyed and another few escaped to a wooded area and haven’t since been seen.

Who knows what to believe? Maybe this story is actually a psychological thriller about our collective lack of media literacy. That’s the real viral threat we’re facing, honestly.

If the darkness you crave is zombie-adjacent, the contingent of people who are willing to outsource their brain to ChatGPT just grows by the day, and these machines aren’t just feasting on unlicensed written work in an affront to human thought and creativity, they’re also feasting on our brains. A recent study out of MIT found that people who used an LLM to write an essay didn’t retain ... anything. That feels like a good omen for the future of critical thinking in what is passing for “society.”

And what exactly is passing for “society”?

Here in America, the government is trying to incite the purge by starving its citizens willingly. I keep waiting for Mike Johnson’s head to spin 360 degrees while he’s gaslighting the nation. And with the way Mitch McConnell is falling on camera, it seems they’re continuing their reverse Midsommar campaign where instead of old people letting go when they’re past their prime, they just keep going indefinitely.

Speaking of old people allegedly at death’s door but showing no promising signs of getting weaker, we already know that Donald Trump’s presidency is generational horror comedy; he’s Gladys from Weapons for soulless people who don’t understand that he’s not a campy villain, but an aspiring dictator.

Don’t worry, though, more bot farms are literally being built as we speak, a cursed supernatural thriller to further haunt public opinion. And if you want to get out your bullhorn and scream about any of this? Be careful, sweetie. The government is trying to mark you as a terrorist so you better keep your mouth shut like Emily Blunt and John Krasinski.

That’s just a small taste of the horrors we’re dealing with collectively, but when it comes to my work life, torture porn seems to be the dominant subgenre. You see, there’s no lack of people writing about how fucked up social media is or how addicted we all are to it, or studies coming out about how it’s destroying our psyches. But I’m chained to its pipe in a dingy basement, enduring the torture of keeping up with internet culture and platform trends, professionally.

When your livelihood is shackled to gaming these algorithms, and you do it well in this world of endless content on little screens, you have no choice but to keep rotting your brain past the point where you can focus on an episode of TV.

I am grateful to be employed and that I literally get paid to make memes, but I also have elaborate fantasies of a benevolent entity rescuing me. Someone better show up in Act III with a pair of bolt cutters so I can stop scrolling through barbed wire and finally be set free.

Even better if it’s this kind police officer who recently attended a Zoom court hearing with no pants on, a glorious throwback to the nightmare of 2020.

Have fun this weekend, my goblins and ghouls! I think it’s safe to eat whatever anyone gives you this year, no one has cash for razorblades in this economy.

And if you can’t decide which scary movie to watch tonight, I suggest staring at MSNBC. As for me, the only news I need is these lovebird divas hard launching in Paris:

ROMANTIC COMEDY, honey, now THAT’S the genre for me.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

New around here? Then allow me to introduce myself: I’m Liz, I think everything is insane, and this is Burn It All Down, where I live out my lifelong dream of blogging the apocalypse.

This episode is brought to you by nothing. Embrace the void.

This week ate just a little bit of my brain and died.

And these vibes? I’m handling them well. I definitely have the mental capacity to stay present, and haven’t been thinking about joining a convent to spiritually bypass the next decade or so of life on this planet.

Just kidding! I totally have.

Moving to a convent with no WiFi is my new five-month plan, unless 3I/ATLAS isn’t a comet and is actually the aliens coming to save us, a hot tip I got from a crazy lady on TikTok who telepathically downloads messages from the aliens, edits them on her iPad, gets the aliens to approve her iPad drafts, and then delivers the messages while she wears a necklace on her forehead. I will miss TikTok so much when it becomes a White House propaganda arm. No social media app has ever paired better with weed.

Things kind of are what they are right now, and what they are is extremely weird. It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it … is literally what Prince Andrew emailed to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011. And now, I am emailing those words to you:

We cannot let that labia-necked fucker drag us down further while he romps around our planet (like he owns the joint) on a twisted Rumspringa for elderly demagogues way overdue for karmic justice. We need to find a way to surrender to the unknown timeline of the aliens beaming us up, because that, it seems, is currently our best shot at collectively rising above.

Share

Let’s rack it back to Monday, the day Donald Trump achieved peace in the Middle East, in his words, ”for the first time anyone can remember,” in 3000 years. According to this orange man, in the long march of time since the Assyrians conquered the ancient kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, he is the first to bring peace at last.

You know that I — after taking a few days to gather the pieces of my exploded head and tenderly glue them back together — have things to say. But first, as someone who watches the news unfold from the safety of my bubble, let me be clear: I was deeply moved seeing the hostages return home, and, after two years of unfathomable death, destruction, and cruelty in Gaza, I am deeply relieved that the bombing has stopped and that the living will be fed. But, considering the war that Trump is trying to incite back home with his drunken, white nationalist henchmen, who’s buying his peacemaker shtick?

I famously support world peace like I’m trying to win a beauty pageant. I hope Donald Trump brings it about so he can win a Nobel Prize posthumously in 2026. I hope he ends the war in Ukraine next and then every single other war happening right now, of which there are many, I just googled it, and “ongoing armed conflicts” has a Wikipedia page. I also googled “Qataris” earlier, so I’m not pretending to be an expert in the political frenemy dynamics of the Middle East.

But here in America, the government has been shutdown for weeks and the Pentagon has now blocked reporters from its offices. So, I’m also not pretending that any of this is altruistic.

Watching Donald Trump broker peace is like seeing the Big Bad Wolf dressed as grandma. And when you get in bed with the Big Bad Wolf, you’re going to get eaten. An unfortunate truth that many of his supporters are realizing about a year too late to save us from Nazism being mainstreamed in America.

Those of us who possess the ability known as “thinking” have been losing our minds en masse for what feels like forever because Trump’s success relies on people not using their heads.

“Smart people don’t like me,” he recently told a room full of supporters, the oratorical equivalent of wearing an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt that has arrows pointed in every direction (including right at him). I think certain smart people do like him, the ones driven to dominate by hoarding wealth and power above anything else. An argument could be made, though, that those “smart” people, devoid of emotional intelligence, are not as smart as they think they are, just successful at operating within a brutal, patriarchal system of oppression that is currently having its death rattle before total collapse.

Emotional intelligence is supremely undervalued and too rarely nurtured in our derelict culture, where narcissism and technology created by diagnosable psychopaths reign supreme, but if you can understand your own inner world and extend that same energy outward, you’ll never have to purchase a cursed chatbot amulet to finally have a friend.

“Thinking” and “feeling” are two very human activities that stand in direct opposition to state-sanctioned violence and the AI-first agenda that is being pushed down our throats. I have always liked thinking, personally, and have no intention of outsourcing my ability to do it, even if ChatGPT is trained to glaze me into self-satisfied psychosis. And after many years of therapy, and giving up binge drinking during the pandemic, I’m into feeling now, too. It’s not easy to stay soft in hard times, but I’m one of the all-time great contrarians, so I’m not letting this campaign of hatred harden me. If America is going to be run like a hoodless KKK rally, then come over here, my child, and let me wash those feet for you before I leave for the nunnery.

Many are saying that this year has felt like being awake during surgery, but to me, it has felt like a bad trail mix of emotions — only nuts. When it began, I felt angry, but that fire has faded, and now, I just feel sad. I’m sad that so many are suffering while the world is being run like a real estate deal closed at a PEACE 2025 brand activation. I’m sad that hope is the mood of a bygone era. I’m sad that the news has been weaponized as a form of psychological torture even worse than before. I’m sad that on some days, none of this feels real to me, and that I have wondered more than once this week, like a deranged MAGA conspiracy theorist, if this peacemaking spectacle is another diversion from the Epstein files.

None of us can control what that orange man does, change the lack of consequences he has faced, or forget how that brought us here. But we can be human enough to keep caring, smart enough to question what’s happening, and brave enough to resist by maintaining our humanity for the long haul, because, I’m sorry to report, that’s the haul we’re on right now.

Trump doesn’t think he’s getting into heaven, he told reporters on his way to the Middle East, but if his scot-free life is any precedent, he probably fucking will if heaven exists. The rest of us, when that day comes, deserve to have at least a sliver of our sanity left.

Looking away from the news and toward the light right now is a radical act.

And if that light is coming from the aliens aboard 3I/ATLAS, then perfect, see you on the spacecraft.

This week’s Distinction in Unhingement goes to my favorite power couple: Canada’s first bisexual prime minister, Mr. Justin Trudeau, and yacht-owning songstress, Ms. Katy Perry. I’m calling it now — these two are soulmates. They’re going to get married and have the most insane wedding.

When Ms. Katy returned from space, she told us she felt super connected to love, and now she is showing us just what she meant. There is so much to love about their love, but I am especially taken by Justin, shirtless, still wearing his jeans to smooch his girlie atop her yacht.

I also love that this recent romantic romp hit the same week that Canada’s current prime minister, Mark Carney, who is getting the job done and is not a perfect energetic match for Katy Perry, was at the PEACE 2025 brand activation where Trump complimented him publicly then referred to him as “president.” Carney very diplomatically handled that by setting up a one-liner:

So, yeah, that’s where we’re at now. Trump’s no longer trying to annex Canada and Justin Trudeau is unemployed and wearing the bottom half of a Canadian tuxedo atop Katy Perry’s yacht.

Can’t wait to see what’s next!

Every year, at some point during Q4, I lose my ambition and decide to stop working. That vibe has entered my spirit at least a month earlier than usual this year. I know we haven’t even done Halloween, but shit’s been spooky for months, and time is behaving lawlessly, so I’m about to put everything off until I can’t. I think we should all start packing it up as if it’s the holidays. 2026 will be here before we know it — circle that ass back to me then.

Does that mean I’ll write this newsletter less? No, my sweet friends. I’m putting off everything else so I can focus on the backlog of insanity that’s just waiting to be dispatched.

As always, thanks for reading! And please take great care of yourselves.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

If you’re new around here, I’m Liz, and this is Burn It All Down, the internet’s foremost source for whatever I feel like saying. In 2023, I named these unhinged times the Age of Unhingement™ and then answered a mysterious calling to write about how completely fucking insane everything is. Back then, the cultural insanity was immense, and yet so relatively twee it could have played a ukulele.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Tylenol.

In my two and a half years of writing this newsletter, there was only one time I seriously considered never sending it again, and it was long before most of us met.

In 2023, at the end of September, I was losing my mind, for a variety of reasons that we can’t get into right now because we’ll be here for hours, but know that my mental health was bad enough that I tried to quit a freelance job by sending my boss a sublimely unhinged voice note via Slack. My boss, in a desperate attempt to make me stay because I was leading a team on an unruly project and was somehow still delivering the deliverables from the throes of insanity, and also because he’s a pretty decent guy (we still work together on other things), and I think he could tell that I was in the midst of losing my mind, told me I needed to think about it for a week before he would let me resign, which I didn’t like, but didn’t have the energy to fight.

A few days later, October 7 happened. The next week, I was allowed to resign. And then, a few days after that, during a very sleepless night, I decided to better educate myself on the history of anti-Semitism in Europe, which is obviously not a viable treatment for a Jew in the throes of insomnia, but is, in fact, a great way to trigger one’s epigenetic IBS.

When I look back at that October, all I see is darkness.

My Jewish community runs deep, and I was getting a lot of calls from friends who wanted to talk things out. One called to tell me that a friend of hers, a classic Instagram story revolutionary who is not involved in any offline activism, berated her in a DM for not speaking out against Israel within 48 hours of October 7, when so many of us were just trying to process what had happened, not make public statements. Another called me to ask, with genuine curiosity, why I thought it was wrong that Israel had cut off the water in Gaza, and so I explained that cutting off a basic human need (and right) to a population that is under occupation just doesn’t sit right with international law or with me.

I thought my head might explode from reconciling so many different points of view. I eventually had to stop answering the calls. And then there was social media, the atmosphere of which was more politically strident and sorrowful than ever before, a wild development considering we had all just lived through the pandemic.

There was no way that I, a Jew who wants to burn everything down, could keep writing this newsletter, with its one unifying theme, HOW INSANE EVERYTHING IS, and one clear mission, to keep it authentic to me, without addressing October 7. I felt like a bit of a fool for not realizing that, if I was going to talk about how insane everything is, I’d eventually have to address the Middle East.

I was scared to speak out about what was happening, not because I wasn’t clear on my own beliefs. I was very clear and they haven’t changed, but they exist in the middle of two algorithm-aided extremes. In that moment, when everyone on social media was tearing each other to shreds, I didn’t want anyone coming for me, because I had already lost my mind that fall and wanted a shot at getting it back before year’s end.

I seriously considered abandoning this newsletter, but the thought of giving up my new, little happy place on this cursed fucking internet made me, a very sad bitch at the time, even sadder. So, when I felt ready, I sat down and wrote a few honest words and sent them into the ether.

No one ended up coming for me, but a few friends reached out to tell me that my words made them cry. Me too, because I wrote them all with tears in my eyes. Revisiting them this morning made me cry again. I ended that email with a promise that I would get back to roasting unhinged nonsense as soon as the horrors abated, but they never did, they just kept getting worse.

Last week, I celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, with my family in Toronto. We’re on 5786 in Jew years now, and I’m giving you permission to appropriate our culture if you’re over this year and can’t wait until January for a new one. It’s never been weirder to be a Jew in my lifetime, so if you’re interested in affiliating yourself with us, and you’re not one of the Christian Zionists hoping we’ll all go back to Israel so the rapture can happen, then sure, why not? Time isn’t real, so come along to 5786 and join us in it.

After Rosh Hashanah, us Jews entered the Days of Awe, also known as the Days of Repentance. I prefer awe over repentance since a reclamation of wonder suits me better than stewing in remorse, but either way, the ten days leading up to Yom Kippur are traditionally spent reflecting on the past year and repairing any harm we may have caused. We are trying not to end up in God’s bad book, because he’s keeping tabs and taking names, kind of like an omnipresent Regina George or Santa if he was macabre.

The goal is to get in God’s good book, called the Book of Life. If you are perfect, your name automatically goes in and you are granted another year of being your beautiful self on this wretched Earth. The Book of Death is the bad book. In it, the names of the wicked are immediately written. The rest of us have those ten days to sort our shit out before cloud daddy puts pen to paper and inscribes our fate. I have, since my early life as a childhood absurdist, loved this book allegory because it’s so petty and relatable to me, a writer, whose notebooks have historically been well-used, judgmental, and insane.

I know that atoning in a Substack screed is not traditionally how Jews mark Yom Kippur and try to get in the good book, but I am far from a traditionalist. I’ve never been one for fasting on this day, as is religious custom. In fact, more than once, my bubie and I — she’ll be 95 in January, I just saw her last week — snuck out of synagogue together, walked across the street to her house, and secretly ate giant pieces of challah toast washed down with half a pot of coffee each.

But I think that the yearly tradition of reflection and amends is both helpful and necessary, especially when we have this much to repair collectively.

So, I must now atone, and what I need to atone for is that I have been hoarding my thoughts on Israel. Though I’ve been very vocal in person, I haven’t written about it in depth in quite some time here in my newsletter. This has been a fucked-up year, and there was always something to say that was easier and funnier.

A lot of Jews see Israel as an escape plan that prevents another Holocaust from happening, and supporting the country, no questions asked, as a binary: You’re either with us or against us. But I’ve never seen the world in black and white. I know our history (don’t forget that both of my paternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, my grandmother by sewing in a factory at Auschwitz while nearly starving to death). I still mourn the massacre that did actually happen on October 7, despite what people are saying on X. I know that People Love Dead Jews, because that’s the title of a book both my dad and my dear friend Andrew Greenwald have read and recommended to me, but I’ve been sleeping OK lately, so it’s not currently on my reading list.

I also know that everything I just told you is not an excuse to allow history to repeat itself. We say never forget, but ignoring mass death, suffering, and starvation is selective memory if we think it’s OK because it’s not happening to us.

Israel is not above criticism because it’s a mythical safety net for the Jewish diaspora. It is a country, much like America, that has multiple revisionist versions of history, but unlike America, it is a tiny piece of land where different groups of people, including Jews, have lived and fought each other since antiquity. That tiny piece of land has a story so ancient and bloody that every time I’ve been to the Old City in Jerusalem I have felt the centuries of pain in every quarter.

In my nearly four decades of being a Jew, I have experienced anti-Semitism before, but never so boldly as since October 7. A sleeping bear woke up that day and was thrilled for the opportunity to leave its cave. Read the comments on any viral post, pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll see something along the lines of “Hitler was right.” Those comments often get many thousands of likes.

This isn’t a problem relegated to the online world. At the end of October in 2023, I went to a workshop at a prominent art gallery in Downtown Los Angeles where the artist running the afternoon’s activities asked us to introduce ourselves and share one thing we love and one thing we hate. A woman wearing clown makeup (it was Halloween weekend) boldly told the entire group that she hates Zionist Jews. The first word was delivered as a throwaway, not a disclaimer, if that would even make it any better.

I sat there in disbelief.

Declaring you hated Jews to a room full of ostensibly progressive people at an art gallery in California no longer elicited any response. I didn’t say anything myself. I was in shock and had thought the afternoon would be an escape.

Almost all my of Jewish friends and family members have a story of experiencing blatant anti-Semitism in the past two years. Over the weekend, one of my dearest friends, who lives here in Los Angeles, told me that a woman physically distanced herself from him at a wedding reception in Europe and brought up dead babies when she found out that he was Israeli. In that moment, he was also in shock and didn’t know what to say.

But I do. I have the words now. I have been thinking constantly about how I feel and occasionally writing about it for two years, and while my beliefs have not changed, they have crystalized. I no longer share them in fear.

This is not the time for any of us to let fear silence us. Free speech only dies if we acquiesce to the threats and allow the hateful comments that come with this dehumanizing version of politics we’ve accepted as the norm to prevent those of us who speak from the heart to say what we think and feel.

I believe in the sanctity of human life. I don’t believe in the supremacy of one group of people over another. I cry my eyes out when I see hostages leaving Gaza looking like Holocaust victims and when I see a dead Palestinian child being held by their weeping father. I can call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide and still pray for the remaining hostages to return home safely.

I can have these beliefs without needing to atone for my personal failure to solve thousands of years of conflict in the Middle East. If the rumors are true, that solution will come, instantaneously like the rapture, when every celebrity finally speaks out on their social media.

I’m also not atoning for what the Israeli government has or hasn’t done (the hostage families are still out protesting). People are not their governments and I’m not even Israeli, so that’s on Netanyahu and his fundamentalist Orthodox cronies to reconcile with their very different version of God who seems to have misplaced his burn book.

From where I stand, neither Israelis or Palestinians are homogenous, evil groups of people. Palestine deserves to be free and we all have a right to live in safety. I see how we got here from every possible angle and still refuse to fall into the cynicism and fear that fuels endless violence and takes us further from peace.

Feel free to tell on yourself in my comments if you disagree, I need some fresh material for next week:

Leave a comment

Now, before I let you go, I have a few more quick atonements.

I’m sorry that I was on my Canadian hiatus during the Charlie Kirk memorial. Watching clips of a Nazi rally seemingly produced by The Righteous Gemstones made me consider staying put in Toronto and sending for my things, but ultimately I want to spend the winter in California.

I’m also sorry for not discussing Kimmel. That situation was top-tier Unhingement, but I needed my hiatus badly and the time has now passed. A great reminder, though, that in America’s capitalist hellscape, where everything is ultimately about money, boycotts work.

Finally, I’m sorry that I can’t seem to send this newsletter with any discernible cadence. More structure might be nice for all of us, but whimsy and surprise do have value, I think. Especially when it comes to emails, because who wants to deal with those? That said, I have a lot of ideas for what I’d like to do with this baby of mine now that she has grown. More to come on that.

My newsletter is still, after all this time, my happy place on this cursed fucking internet. I am eternally grateful to the past version of me who misplaced her mind yet somehow found the courage to keep writing, and I am eternally grateful to all of you who were there in the early days, supporting me as I very publicly faced a lot of fear.

To a better, sweeter year for all and an immediate ceasefire. ❤️

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

Me again! How are we … doing?

So many new faces here from the live I did with earlier this week. Welcome! For a newsletter writing gal like me, what could be better than a massive influx of nice Australian ladies joining my email list? I’m so happy! Please never leave me.

Now, allow me to properly (re)introduce myself:

Hi! I’m Liz. I’ve worked as a social media strategist and content creator for nearly 15 years, and that means I speak from personal and professional experience when I say that mainlining the internet has made a lot of us direly unhinged.

In 2023, after I emerged from my pandemic bat cave, being outside felt like visiting an open air insane asylum, and I needed something to call our world-gone-mad-screen-addicted-content-goblin zeitgeist. So, I coined this era the Age of Unhingement™, and then I started writing this Substack as an act of catharsis.

Now, I’ve written 80+ dispatches on cultural madness and my various attempts to transcend it. I’m also working on a book; think good thoughts for me because I am trying to sell it. I still earn my living as a freelance meme auteur and by crafting TikTok videos to engage Gen Z. That can’t be good for a brain on the verge of turning 40.

I guess, since this is a newsletter about how insane everything is, that I must address the elephant that stank up internet this past week — the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But I’m not diving into it too deeply, because the last time I tried to make sense of an assassination and the ensuing reaction on social media, tapping into the darkness gave me a migraine that wouldn’t go away for the better part of two weeks.

I just revisited that piece, and in it I wrote:

“This was murder with a social rollout and I fear it won’t be the last.”

Murder with a social rollout is exactly what we all just witnessed again, except this time, the rollout had a multi-pronged approach. It involved user-generated content in the form of a crowd holding up their phones, unknowingly about to capture the gory moment a man was shot and killed. There was an influencer campaign led by Donald Trump, who broke the news of Kirk’s death in a Truth Social post. And about a kajillion organic impressions earned when too many people, of every political persuasion and level of thirst for violence, thought it necessary, for various reasons, to post a dramatic response.

Once again, the shooter inscribed his shell casings, knowing the messages would be deciphered by the extremely online. Two of his references came directly from meme culture, including “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this,” from a meme that is apparently furry-related, and “If you read this you are gay LMAO,” which isn’t a traceable meme so much as the mark of someone experiencing brain rot.

Sometimes, I hate being right.

But I also had to share all of that to maintain my cred because what I’m about to tell you is either Unhingement malpractice or #goals as we would have said in, like, 2013.

On Wednesday, after I talked to Sarah, I immediately got swept into one of those work days that makes me feel like a fucking octopus because I needed all eight tentacles to respond to Slacks and DMs and emails and engage on two different Instagrams, while working on my phone and computer simultaneously. Around 1pm, I took a break and popped out to get a turkey sandwich because I hadn’t eaten yet that day and I deserved a nice lunch.

I have all the breaking news alerts turned off on my phone for the most obvious reason — it’s 2025. But when I sat down to eat my sandwich, my friend Ricky called me with the news that I had yet to hear anything about. Here’s a rough transcript of our conversation:

Ricky: I can’t believe they shot Charlie Kirk.

Me: Who?

Ricky: The right wing influencer. They shot him on a college campus.

Me: Oh no. That doesn’t sound good.

Share

💻 📱 HERE’S A MEMESPLAINER FOR MY BELOVED BOOMER COMMUNITY 📱💻

That beautiful woman is Keke Palmer, a remarkable entertainer and one of the sharpest and most delightful characters the internet has ever known. In 2019, she took a lie detector test for the Vanity Fair YouTube page during which she was asked if Dick Cheney was a better VP than True Jackson, a character she played as a teenager on a Nickelodeon sitcom called True Jackson, VP. Then, they showed her a photo of him and she didn’t know who that man was. You can watch the full moment here.

That moment quickly became a meme for a few great reasons — oblivious to Dick Cheney, no lies detected, and the immaculate delivery of her truthful response.

Anyhoo …

I am about as versed in the characters of “the manosphere” as the men of “the manosphere” are versed in the female orgasm. And I don’t actually care if I sound ridiculous. Until Wednesday afternoon, I had no idea who Charlie Kirk was, and there’s no way I could have picked him out of a white guy lineup.

Keeping up with the horrors just to be in the know is not my chosen homework assignment. I don’t care to pontificate on what to do about these men and their fanboys and their podcasts when plenty of other, more serious people regularly go off on all that. And I definitely don’t want to drink up any manosphere content. Not here in the all-consuming hellscape that patriarchy has bestowed upon us. Even “liberal” cable news pushed a Civil War narrative for ratings instead of considering that two conservative factions of angry, entitled men, who have built a movement around hatred and regression, not hope for equality or progress, might turn on each other in an act of public, political violence.

I can’t get caught up in that nonsense when I need to stay pure in my own heart to energetically anchor in the resurgence of the divine feminine goddess. And saying that better not get me flagged by Pentagon AI when it does its sweep for the great Etsy Witch Trials coming to a phone screen near you in 2026.

For those who have a different algo than me, Jezebel, the feminist blog that I had no idea still existed, had a few witches on Etsy hex Charlie Kirk and then wrote all about it a couple of days before he was shot. Nothing to see there now because they had to put up a disclaimer saying that the article, on the recommendation of their lawyers, was taken down. Fair enough, queens. But just for fun, in these trying times, I think they should give us a new offering and post the transcript of the conversation that they had with legal.

On Friday morning, I was standing in my kitchen, making toast and catching up on my Substack paperwork, when I saw this delightful screed:

There was another very long comment from the same lady before it, about American fascism, that had less to do with me and more to do with her needing to vent, and I, of all people, get that. But when I saw that comment above, it really pissed me off. Even though September is traditionally vendetta season, I stayed strong and didn’t respond because I have been instructed by goddess to stay in the open-hearted vibration of love. I am, however, allowing myself the small indulgence of letting it out right here, right now. And then I will return to being both enlightened and pure.

I actually like that she got her dictionary out to come for me, so it isn’t being called “solipsistically callous” that grinds my gears.

And it isn’t even that her cunty little question about the name of this platform has already been publicly addressed. I guess she didn’t read the hilarious post I wrote in the wake of the fires here in LA that chronicled the saga forever known as Gategate. I sent it while I was still completely out of my mind. Living through the fires was traumatizing and I thought we all needed a laugh. One of my core beliefs is that we can’t let our spirits get burnt to a crisp, especially when terrible things happen, like fire destroying the city we live in.

That’s why, what I really can’t take is her demonization of fun. Yes, I like fun, I’m great at having it, and think we need more of it wherever we can get it. If that’s now a crime: Arrest me, officer. I plead no contest.

A lot of us fun-loving people are actually tortured individuals who learned how to lighten bad moods and shift the energy of a room to survive. We have a real role in times like these since the best of us are emotional alchemists who know how to transmute darkness into light.

I think we can all agree that most of us can do more to engage in social change, that our efforts must be collaborative, and that we need to do this sustainably because there is so much that needs to be fixed. Thank you, kindly, to my troll because her misplaced anger reminded me of The Social Change Map.

Now, I am sharing it with you so that we can all pick a role and get comfortable with the idea of inhabiting it. Or go wild and pick a few! I’m a storyteller and a healer, and when needed, always a willing and compassionate caregiver. You will notice that humorless internet troll is not one of the options for how we can come together and work toward a better future.

I’ve written to you a lot lately, but, in true me fashion, I’m now going to dip out for a couple of weeks. I’m headed to Toronto next weekend to do a little Rosh Hashanah with my mishpocha and take a break from work, so you shan’t be hearing from me again until I return and settle back in. Can’t wait to share the view on all of this from the great nation of Canada, or as my dad calls it, “the apartment above the convenience store.”

Stay strong, stay sane-ish, and keep doing your best to stay in the open-hearted vibration of love with only tiny breaks for pettiness.

Until next time!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

I had the time of my life yapping on the Substack app this morning. Thank you so, so, so much for the invite, ! And thank you so, so, so much to everyone who joined us live. I loved seeing your names pop up. Special shout out to my “Unhinged Aunt Sandi” and who talked up her Old Man Summer hat in the comments and already prompted two inquiries about buying one.

I know I really dropped the ball on the hats this summer (oopsies!), but if you still want one, leave me a comment and I will try to arrange a super limited run.

Leave a comment

ANYHOO …

Sarah and I covered a lot, including: Old Man Summer, the state of politics on social media, and how insane it was when women on TikTok became obsessed with that anglerfish who swam into the sun and then perished.

Here are the links to the posts we discussed:

And here’s the infamous New Yorker piece in which I said: “If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there.”

I said that in November of 2023, by the way. How far we’ve journeyed from the hinge since. OY FUCKING VEY.

When I started writing about the Age of Unhingement™, it launched a whole new era of me putting myself out there and I was nervous that everyone would think I had finally lost it. Instead, every single time I do something new, I am blown away by the support of this community. You will never know just how much love and support you actually have if you don’t let people show you.

I need to descend back into my writing bunker in the next couple of days and will have more for you guys next week. But since I’m emailing you today, I obviously have to say:

Gen Z vs. Nepalese corruption.

September 9, 2025.

Stay sane-ish out there!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

I will be going LIVE on ye olde Substack app this Wednesday at 10am PT/ 1pm ET with my sister in Kali-like rage, best-selling authoress and fabulous queen of collapse, !

Join us if you can. I truly cannot wait for this chat. And if you guys don’t have the Substack app — this is the only good reason to put it on your phone because you’ll need it to watch us live. But I will also try and send the recording to your ye olde email inboxes once it’s done.

Hi friends!

Well, we made it through the summer of 2025. Back when it was just beginning, I declared this an Old Man Summer, and I was correct, in the sense that old men terrorized us geopolitically throughout the entirety of it.

This was another weird one, but here we are, still breathing, and I love that for us.

Summer is a season, duh, but it’s just as much a vibe. And here in Southern California, where that vibe lives eternal, sunny weather is not a seasonal yardstick that any of us can go by. September is the hottest month of the year, October is not much better, and though the days get shorter and we pretend we need to buy new sweaters, I’ve had perfect beach days in late December. None of that matters, though, because I’m calling it now. On Tuesday, I woke up with a burst of energy and started taking care of business in a way that I haven’t been able to pretty much all year. I’m ready for the great wheel of time to turn and reveal what’s next, baby.

New fucking seasonnnnnn! Let’s fucking gooooooo!

**SHE STARTLES THE CROWD AS SHE BLOWS AN AIR HORN**

That said, if you need to live out the golden promise of summer until it officially ends on September 22, please do. If you are one of my beloved Southern Hemisphere readers, and you’ve been in winter this whole time, then good news for you, this is the last you’ll have to hear about American summer from me. And if this summer fucked you up for any reason, any reason at all, and you’d like me to come to your house with Tommy Lee Jones to erase the past few months from memory so you can head into fall feeling refreshed and ready to live through what I’m sure will be a thrilling Q4, just say the word. I’ll be there with bells on.

Share

The beginning of summer did not find me this well. As some of you may recall, I was in so much pain from my back pulling an uno reverse that I had to find god. I spent my Memorial Day weekend on a last minute, solo journey to Desert Hot Springs, a desperate attempt to soak my way back to health. It helped a little. And Danielle, the woman managing “Miracle Manor,” the insane, rose quartz-filled, renovated ‘50s motel I stayed at because my usual spot was booked, gave me life with her takes on the aliens coming to save us, and also informed me that the spring water there is full of lithium, insisted that I drink as much of it as I could, and then filled a couple of bottles and sent me home with more.

I had neglected to make any real plans for the summer since I had spent so many weeks just trying to get through the day without completely losing it. Then came the ICE raids here in Los Angeles, and me crashing out when I realized I had to actually finish writing my book proposal because I told an agent that I would.

And then there was (is) the hanging specter of war all over the planet and genocide and famine in Gaza. Not to mention the political situation here in America that just keeps spiraling into the lower rings of hell. If I look at it too closely for too long I run the risk of spending my days lying in bed just like Brian Wilson did.1 May his memory be a blessing.

It was all a lot.

July rolled around, and I had to video chat my psychiatrist to get a refill of my business meth. After we talked about that, he asked me if there was anything else he could help me with. I mentioned to him that I had been feeling very sad, so he did his screening for what I assume was either depression or Victorian-style hysteria, and after he finished, told me he had nothing to offer since I had no discernible disorder other than being “an empathic free spirit.” It turns out, even though this is not an easy time to feel deeply, they don’t make a pill to fix the affliction of being me. “Please text me if it gets worse or you can’t get out of bed,” he said with genuine kindness but no reference to Brian Wilson.

I laughed to myself for days thinking about “empathic free spirit” as a clinical diagnosis, and then, I got my shit together. If there’s one thing an empathic free spirit like me can do, it’s forge my own intuitive path toward wellness. So I made a vow to take great care of my body every single day not out of obligation or punishment but out of love and kindness. I did a lot of gentle yoga, the type that is less of a workout and more of a practice. I put myself on a weed diet, and stopped numbing my brain to the extreme, but allowed myself a few hits of the vape if I wanted them because I’m not a fucking monk. I went on a long walk almost every single day. I spent a lot of quality time with my girlies here in LA. And to my great joy, three of my very best friends who live in New York, Toronto, and Berlin, came to visit me. I didn’t even know that was happening until they all showed up on separate trips in July.

By the end of the month, I felt so much better. And then, I rocked up to a karaoke night in honor of my friend Ally’s birthday, during which every single person in attendance behaved as if we had signed a contract to go all-in on the collective, shameless pursuit of fun. That night was such a blast that it rewired my brain and reminded me there are few things more healing than having an absolutely uproarious time with my fellow free spirits.

Subscribe now

Last year, when I recapped the season, I said that it felt like we were “all under construction,” and I know that resonated because a whole bunch of you commented and replied to tell me that it did. But it stretches back further than that, I think.

I’ll just speak for myself this time, but if the summer of 2024 was construction season, 2023 helped me draw the blueprint because I got so burnt out from taking on too much work that I promised myself I would never, ever do that again. The summer of 2022 was, of course, the demolition. I got covid for the first and only time and it knocked me on my ass right when my job disappeared. I spent the whole summer trying to feel slightly normal but it wasn’t until November that I made any headway.

I’m beyond thrilled to report that construction is now complete. The summer of 2025 is ending with a ribbon cutting ceremony, because in August, I sat down and really started rewriting my book proposal. Even though work was kind of busy and there were a lot of days when I had to toggle back and forth between pitching brain rot TikTok ideas and writing my womanifesto on how social media made everything crazy, by some miracle, I didn’t lose my mind. I also took breaks and didn’t burn myself out and now I have a 26,000 word draft (!!!) that needs a major edit, but should be ready in the next couple of weeks to make its way into the world.

I knew I’d get it done after I told you all that I would. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a liar, and I lived in my integrity this whole summer. I had to. It was time. When people didn’t like it or acted out of pocket, which people are sometimes known to do, I had my boundaries and guarded them like a goalie. And once I realized that there was no magic pill to save me from myself, I took accountability and healed my body. I have a great yoga practice going now. I haven’t been this limber or pain free since my back exploded at the end of 2019.

Mine was not a photogenic summer that looks good on the grid, but I’d have to be a pretty miserable person to see the past couple of months as anything but a victory.

Life is not a photo dump and my life is not a transactional fuckfest based on trading mentions and tags and likes. My life is not a movie I’m casting or a one woman show I put on so other people can see the right fragments and get the right ideas about who I am. I want my life to feel good to me, and if it looks good to you peeking in from the outside, that’s just an added bonus, because every day that I’m alive and having this beautiful and nasty and transcendently fun and deeply sad experience of being human is one more day that I get to indulge in the other practice I’ve taken up this summer: Not giving a fuck anymore and coming by it honestly.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve touched on the many reasons why I started writing this newsletter, but I have yet to reveal its truest origin story: The five-month-long journey I took around Southeast Asia in 2015.

In the spring of 2015, I was out of my mind and perpetually hungover from drinking, like, 17 wines every single night. I hated my job and was willing to sell most of my possessions because I guess I needed to shed my skin like a cute, little snake. So I left my life in New York, where I had lived for nearly six years, and flew to Bangkok on a one way ticket. All, really, because I was extremely freaked out about turning 30, which now that I’ve lived through the past decade, feels delightfully, existentially quaint.

While on that trip, I had a long list of people back home who were invested in the drama of the journey for obvious reasons. And so, after a few weeks of traveling around Thailand, I wrote everyone an email update, and got so many replies and forwards to people who wanted to get on the list that I started a newsletter on Tiny Letter (RIP)2 and called it, “E-Pray Liz.”

When I started writing on Substack, my first subscribers were imported from that “E-Pray Liz” list. I have no idea who reads this anymore, but I hope that some of you who got roped in without your consent are still here.

My dear friend Jessie, a BIAD BFF, suggested earlier this summer that I should revisit the crazy-ass dispatches I sent. But I was hesitant, until I was cleaning out a drawer a few weeks ago, and found the waterproof digital camera that I took on the trip. When I saw these pics of my 30th birthday celebration on a random Mekong River island in Laos, I knew it had to be done:

Stay tuned for a very special series in honor of the TENTH ANNIVERSARY of that fucking trip! I need to dig up the newsletters since Tiny Letter is now defunct, but I think there are at least five or six of them. They were nuts. Can’t wait to reflect. And I must say, I am turning 40 in a couple of months, and while I have been having a bit of a panic about how to celebrate the occasion because I waited so long to plan and want to invite literally everyone I know, not once have I considered blowing up my entire life. I think that’s what they call massive personal growth.

Until next time!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

In very exciting news (for me), I’ve summoned almost 20,000 words from my first draft, the archives of this newsletter, and the great beyond, let them flow through my lil typing fingers into a google doc, and I’m now so so so so close to finishing a new draft of my book proposal that I can’t fucking believe it. If you’re having a huge crash out about something, remind yourself, this too shall pass, and then allow it to provide great fodder for your blog. A win is a win.

I have known for years that freaking out is part of my process. It’s not usually as protracted an experience as what I was crying about at the beginning of this summer, but the freak out potential is always there, ready to ruin at least one good day and probably the next while I recover from visiting a hell of my own creation and ask myself important questions like, “Who invented the concept of productivity, anyway?”1

And then, once I’m done with my freak out, if I procrastinated for quite some time, and in this case it was about, oh, half a year, I have to avoid getting trapped in what I like to call, “the enchanted forest of ideas,” which is where organizing the ten million ideas I came up with while I procrastinated the work that overwhelmed me is too overwhelming, so I just come up with more ideas and then follow them back to grandma’s house instead of finishing what I started.

Having too many ideas is a bit of a champagne problem, I get that. It’s my blessing, yes, but also my curse. This whole process with my book proposal taught me a valuable lesson in dealing with myself, though, because once I figured out how to contain and contextualize my ideas, I realized there was space for them all. Structure, what a cure!

I told you all of that for two reasons:

1. After seeing Weapons at the end of last week, I had an idea (make it stop) that is too transcendently ridiculous not to share even though I’m now procrastinating by writing this. Oh well!

2. Today, we will be revisiting an old form of this newsletter, one that I loved but got bored of for literally no good reason other than I HAD TOO MANY OTHER IDEAS. At some point during our last weird summer (not this one, the one before), I started counting down the top five moments in cultural madness like the host of a demented hit parade. And now I’d like to do that again …

So, without further ado, the Burn It All Down Hot 5™ is back and we’re counting down the biggest hits in crazy shit!

Share

At number 5, we have: legends never care

Denzel Washington is ostensibly on a press tour to promote his latest film, but what he’s really doing, I think, is teaching a masterclass in straight-shooting.

Take this exchange he had with Complex, in which he was asked if he’s scared of cancel culture while sitting next to a mostly silent and very bemused Spike Lee:

Denzel: What does that mean, to be canceled?

Interviewer: It means you lose public support.

Denzel: Who cares? What made public support so important to begin with?

Interviewer: I guess because followers now are currency.

Denzel: I don’t care who’s following who. You can’t lead and follow at the same time, and you can’t follow and lead at the same time. I don’t follow anybody. I follow the heavenly spirit. I follow god, I don’t follow man. I have faith in god. I have hope in man, but look around, it ain’t working out so well. You can’t be canceled if you haven’t signed up. Don’t sign up.

His press tours are always a good time, but this one minted him a prophet in the Age of Unhingement™, officially decreed by the Order of the Rotten Brain after our new Prophet Washington talked to Sports Illustrated and coined the perfect word to describe the yappy masses who have no material experience and too many opinions they can’t stop spouting: “We live in a world of opinionaires. That’s what I call ‘em, opinionaires.”

He was calling out the talking heads who talk a lot of shit about sports even though they’re old and out of shape and have never played the game, but opinionaires are everywhere. And in my opinion (I’m an opinionista, not an opinionaire), they must be stopped. I am passionate about this because I have a Substack (no shit), and even though I keep deleting the app, it always finds its way back on my phone like a digital cucaracha. When I fall prey to clicking a random link on there, more often than not, after one to three paragraphs, I yell “who cares,” then I have to flush my phone down the toilet and go for a walk around the block.

It’s getting expensive.

At number 4, we have: no one drinks anymore

A recent poll found that nearly half of Americans are now abstaining from alcohol, the lowest number of drinkers reported in 90 years. Correct. We have moved on to a cocktail of prescription drugs.

At number 3, we have: too far gone

Nothing says “2025” quite like researchers using AI to test whether social media’s cataclysmic impact on politics can be reversed. And to, like, no one’s surprise, the answer is no. They tried six different models to see if there was a way to save us from the licking flames of political hell, and none of them worked, not even throwing it back to a chronological feed.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Petter Törnberg, one of the social scientists behind the study from the University of Amsterdam, confirmed a few of my long-held suspicions:

• Social media is skewing how we view other people’s politics. As Törnberg said, “People seem a little bit crazier than they really are.” And that’s because the triggering content posted by camera-ready reactionaries and the awful news that gets turned into sharable, provocative Instagram graphics is what gets our attention. When we repost that content based on emotion, it not only spreads the information, it shapes the structure of our networks and how we are perceived. We love to blame algorithms for everything, but we also need to pay our respects to their partners in crime: human beings.

• Politics were reshaped by the politicians who are better at capturing our attention on social media. Shall we get our Ouija board out and summon the ghost of Neil Postman?

• AI is going to make everything worse. No shit. It already has. And since media literacy is about as common as a chill news day, AI can create misinformation specifically engineered to polarize and engage and most users will be unable to spot what’s fake.

Even though the study has yet to be peer reviewed, I’m thrilled to have some data on all of this, as vibes scholarship is still not considered a valid form of research.2 As I said at the end of 2023, “The hatred and misguided fervency happening on social media amidst so much loss and turmoil makes a case for trashing the whole apparatus.”

I was talking about people losing their shit over a Zara ad, but it stands as an evergreen statement.

The opinionaires, of course, have a lot to say about this, but I think ingesting the constant opining posted on the thing that is fueling the opinions is making us more insane. We are past the point of return and should start dreaming up what’s next. A global network of tin cans and string, perhaps?

I know, I know, who has the energy to build instead of sulk? But, if we get a good group of us together under a full moon, we can smoke some peyote, lick a couple of toads, do a technopagan ritual, and ask the great spirit of technology (the holy ghost in the machine) what should be next. Because, my god, what was meant to connect us and encourage self-expression, including the kind of political dialogue that strengthens democracy, has turned into something so very unholy. And we can’t trust any of the sociopathic dorks who got us here to get us on a better path. In the immortal words of Prophet Washington, “I have hope in man, but look around, it ain’t working out so well.”

At number 2, we have: tell him, daddy

Speaking of hope and men, Daddy California is back where he belongs, looking great in the spotlight while taunting Donald Trump. One crazy thing about Gavin Newsom is that he has a bit of a Gotham City vibe (the hair is giving the smooth half of Two Face), but he is also extremely Californian — it’s like he was created in a lab to give press conferences that soothe the liberal, coastal elites.

Daddy might be willing to fight fire with fire while ICE stands outside for no reason, but I have a hard time believing he is the next president of this country. There’s a better chance of aliens landing and appointing themselves our new leaders than America returning to any form of political status quo. Daddy is very much the status quo. And his Trump trolling shitposting won’t beat the inventor of the form. Please see above.

At number 1, we have: I totally get it now

At the end of last week, I did something very unusual for a little scaredy baby like me, I went to see a horror movie. My dear friend Amy invited me to see Weapons, said she would get my ticket, and since I will pretty much do anything with anyone I enjoy spending time with if they take care of the logistics, how could I say no?

I spent a solid 20 mins of the movie covering my eyes to avoid seeing gore or another jump scare (I shrieked at least twice), but I was thoroughly entertained, loved the movie, and left with a new obsession — the demented diva who gave life to everyone in the audience while taking it from those onscreen, Aunt Gladys.

The next day, while discussing Weapons in one chat, the topic of Trump meeting with Putin was brought up in another, to which I responded, “Sorry, the only villain I’m willing to discuss today is Gladys.”

And then, after so many years of not understanding what people see in Trump, it hit me — he is THEIR Aunt Gladys, a reprehensible, ailing villain whose dominant color is orange.

If you haven’t seen Weapons yet, and intend to, this is your warning to stop scrolling and come back to read this once you’ve seen it because I’m about to spoil the ending.

And if you haven’t seen it and don’t intend to, scroll on to feel culturally relevant without subjecting yourself to any jump scares or instantly iconic clown witch ladies who will haunt you after for better or worse!

Weapons is about the mystery of a group of missing children, who ran out of their houses at the exact same time, moved by an unseen force in the middle of the night. We don’t meet Aunt Gladys until the second half of the movie, but she steals every scene she’s in and was the one who stole the children, duh. She did some bad magic with twigs and water and objects and locks of hair, lured them to her house, and kept them in the basement so she could ingest their youthful life force and heal her old, sick body.

The similarities between Gladys and Trump are many: the wrong shade of foundation, mind control, late-stage illness, shame about baldness, bad wigs, constant chaos, and disrespect of the gays. Gladys took the town by surprise and had to use witchcraft, but voters knew what they were getting into when they re-elected Trump; they chose to support his evil ass, follow him blindly, and do his violent bidding as he drains the life force from the rest of us.

I’ve tried to make sense of Trump supporters for so long, but I had it all wrong until I met and fell in love with Gladys. I totally get it now: His supporters love him not in spite of how heinous he is, but because of it. He’s their beloved villain. And that’s why we’re stuck living in the abject horror of politics meeting reality television.

Trump isn’t a campy villain doing dark magic to control a town and live longer, he’s a sitting president, with cankles even the life force of 17 children couldn’t cure, who has an aversion to any constraint on what he sees as his limitless power.

The news this summer has brought enough horror to send us all over the edge. So, just like when I watched Weapons in the theater, I shield my eyes when I need to and give myself permission to dip out if I get too scared. I don’t see that as avoiding reality, I see it as self-preservation when platforms profit off of us being enraged, frozen, and motivated by fear.

What’s left of our sanity is worth protecting because the jump scares and gory scenes will always be there. And I, for one, need to make it to Halloween to appreciate the millions of Aunt Gladys clones set to haunt us with their wig-forward terror.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz