Keep Your Revolution, I Want a Rebirth
Spring is here and I finally finished my madness pyramid!
Hi friends!
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 Charmaine Ashpole 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, Ian Simbotin, 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:
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 less in common with a cloud than a warehouse.
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
