The Age of Unhingement™ Continues ...
Three years, 99 newsletters, and still no hinge in sight.
Hi friends!
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. 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.
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
Three years and eight days, to be 100% honest, but here at Unhingement HQ we believe in temporal fluidity.
99 is a number filled with portent. Congratulations! The hinges keep falling off, and somehow we keep going.