May Is Unhingement Awareness Month

We're all unhinged. Are you aware?

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This week’s episode is brought to you by Unhingement Awareness Month. It’s May and we’re unhinged. Let’s stop blaming ourselves and start blaming “society.” 🧠

I’m keeping my voice notes free for the rest of this very special month. If you like my yapping or think I deserve a little treat, please consider upgrading to paid. Your support keeps me caffeinated.

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Hi friends!

Today we are kicking off the first ever Unhingement Awareness Month because promoting “mental health” now feels a bit twee. Like, everything is so fucking wild and we are addicted to watching it all go down on our demented little phone screens. If you haven’t at least mildly lost your mind at some point in the past four years, you’re either dumb or a bit of a sociopath, and I can’t trust you either way.

I think we're already aware of our “mental health,” since caring for it in our Age of Unhingement™️ is like trying to cultivate a verdant garden in soil watered with (original formula) Four Loko. And yet, the pressure to try, individually, remains.

We’ve been to therapy and used its language for both good and evil. We’ve made tripping balls in a clinical setting a trend. We’re into understanding and oversharing. We’ve unpacked so much from childhood that our inner children have nothing left to wear. But, my god, everyone is now more insane than ever. I hope somewhere in a lab a brilliant chemist is cooking up new pills.

There is also a real misunderstanding of what “mental health” even means. Is it a synonym for serious mental illness? An excuse for the most toxic workplace to launch a wellness initiative? A way to pathologize human emotions in a culture with no space for the messy reality of sorrow, loneliness, or grief?

It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly unhinged society. And that’s the one we live in. With billionaires building bunkers while we’re fleeced with inflation and everyone fighting with each other, and algorithms spreading the most extreme messages because nuance doesn’t engage.

This age is a paradox — we’re too connected and too isolated, overwhelmed with information and underwhelmed by everything because we have no fucking dopamine left. There is so much fear and a ceaseless, gnawing uncertainty. It’s hard to make plans when it always feels like the other shoe is about to drop. These are big limbo vibes (not the fun kind) and they’re not ending soon. So, the question, I guess, is what are we going to do?

It’s simple.

What we’re going to do is stop pretending that any of this is fine. And do our best to find a center to hold on to amidst so much chaos and change. We can predict or look back all we want, but to game out this murky future or stay attached to a romanticized past are both Unhingement doing its best work.

Over the month of May, I’m going to explore the most important themes of our evolving Unhingement and the trends emerging from its primordial ooze. And, honestly, I’ll try and raise awareness of how our individual behavior is contributing to the collective madness. This play is about us and we all have a role.

But first, to kick us off, I will answer a couple of key questions:

Unhingement is the dominant vibe of our current epoch — the Age of Unhingement™️ — and it puts a name to the crazy that has been a menace to us all since about 2016. Most notably, it is a spiritual crisis experienced in news cycles that began with the election of Donald Trump and found its true rhythm when COVID came for us all. But it is also reflected in the absurdity of pretty much anything that happens on social media, see: Barbra Streisand’s Ozempic comment this week.

Unhingement is the salt in the water of that boiling frog metaphor. The metaphor trotted out a zillion times to warn us of how it all just builds up slowly until you boil alive in a jacuzzi fueled by fascism? Something like that.

It’s also too many people assuming that a frog wouldn’t jump out of a gradually warming pot. Or that a frog submerged in boiling water would be able to jump out and somehow not boil alive? Despite our perfectly good typing fingers and tapping thumbs with unmitigated access to the “Boiling frog” Wikipedia page, the Unhingement encourages us to spread a totally false premise — captured in a screenshot — without thinking twice.

Unhingement Awareness allows us to remember that we can always shut off our screens. Which we still have free will over. Well, in theory.

You should be aware because we didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. We exist in the context of the madness in which we live and all that came before it. So we need something to call it. And when we have the language, we can at least try and make sense of what’s happening.

Dealing with this situation is a group project and shit is somehow getting weirder and more polarized. There doesn’t seem to be a bottom? But like, maybe there’s a way to be sane? I don’t really know, we’ve rebranded hope as delusion.

This video of the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel groups at a campus protest beautifully united, despite their differences, would increase that hope and/or delusion if their union wasn’t a “fuck Joe Biden” chant. The only other option is TIME cover boy and criminal who loves to nap, Donald J. Trump. 

And finally, you should be aware because ignorance is bliss, but sadly not available to some of us who need to overthink everything and have real feelings to feel, a blessing and a curse. If you’ve read this far, I’m going to assume you’re with me.

Happy Unhingement Awareness Month to one and all! Have a wonderful weekend. I’m going to attempt to read a book, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️

Liz