Why I'm Pivoting to Sanity

Farewell to crazycore.

me after throwing my phone down a well.

Today, I‘m excited to share that after a year and a half of writing about how insane everything is, I am pivoting to sanity. Like a great white shark that swims forever, I must stay ahead of the zeitgeist or I will die. And based on my recent analysis of the vibes, insanity has reached such critical mass that it is now officially over. Insane behavior is washed. Being an absolute fucking lunatic is passé. Unhingement has hit rock bottom. We can only go up from here.

Everything? Nuts. The news? So foul I could die. The comments? Reading them is self-harm. And yet, I can’t help myself from clicking “view all,” like a hungry demon fed by random people’s clout chasing and heinous opinions has somehow possessed my free will.

My demon makes me read the comments, so I don’t need to conduct a formal ethnography to verifiably say that “the culture” is now merging with “the darkness” at an accelerated rate. It’s not just the massacres, or the bombs, or the extreme natural disasters, or whose life has inherent value still being a debate. It’s also less than a month until the U.S. presidential election, so it’s Kamala’s Glock, and Ron Desantis screening his calls, and Elon Musk jumping like a homeschooled kid on Donald Trump’s stage.

It’s baby hippo hysteria and baby oil hoarding. It’s waiting for the Diddy list. It’s the porn industry vs. Project 2025. It’s all my haters becoming my waiters when I sit down at the table of success. It’s fact-checking being a reason not to appear on 60 Minutes because “the truth” exists at the bottom of a rabbit hole. And since no one can agree on what’s true anymore, it’s making sure to thank Beyoncé, just in case.

If we zoom out and look at the whole scope of human history, from when that one little sea creature found its way to land, grew its little feet, and somehow evolved into the hungry content goblins who dominate this age, now is not even close to being the most difficult time to be alive. But it is, without a doubt, the most deranged.

As promised when the idea of the future was still exciting, the internet has connected the world. It has also disconnected us from ourselves and from our planet. It has disconnected us from nurturing community with each other, and now tech companies are making “friendship-focused apps” and launching AI companions to solve the “loneliness epidemic” as if our emotional worlds are just uncharted B2C space.

Algorithms have done us so dirty that crazycore is our culture’s dominant trend. And that means nothing is cooler than sanity — the last frontier of counterculture — when everything else has been swallowed up by big tech.

There was a time when I thought simply writing about crazycore might help. When we left our pandemic bat caves and started breathing freely next to each other again — a touch of Covid still perfuming the air — the vast majority of us decided our best way forward was to suppress what we’d seen and felt. Anyone who’s consulted even a TikTok therapist knows that acknowledging and talking about our feelings is the first step to better mental health. And so, I thought, maybe if we can share a laugh about how far we’ve journeyed from what we used to consider the status quo, it might help curb the uptick in road rage through a butterfly effect.

Unfortunately, as I have learned since, cackling about the matrix does nothing to extract you from it. As Ghandi is misquoted as saying, “be the change you wish to see in the world,” and so, to use the language of the age, I must “manifest” the level of sanity I’d like to see. If the first step is acknowledgement, the next is breaking free.

these two win this week’s Distinction in Unhingement.

I participated in crazycore long before it was mainstream. I dissociated in marketing meetings a decade ago while colleagues pontificated about creating authenticity. And because the jobs have been on their way out since I entered the workforce as an unpaid intern, rather than risk telling my boss that planning to manufacture the ineffable is certifiable, I left my body.

These days, to keep my job, I need to keep up with Gen Z. My brain is rotten and trained to game algorithms, but when I’m off the clock, no one is holding a gun to my head forcing me to deepen my addiction to dopamine. I get to choose how I spend my free time. I get to choose how I express myself and how I love and how I nurture my spirit. I get to choose how I relate to the world and to my community.

I know that there are evil systems and a lot of intersecting forces at play. The horrors are real (believe me, I recently redownloaded Hinge), but abject hopelessness is not what I want to participate in when there is so much at stake.

This past weekend, with the anniversary of October 7 approaching and the realities of the climate crisis looping on my phone, crazycore once again threatened to overtake me. And so, I decided to revisit Peace Is Every Step, a book from the great Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh.

“We are victims of our own telephone,” he wrote in 1991, when telephones were still plugged into the wall, not handheld portals to the world’s pain.

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet. We have caused a lot of damage to the Earth. Now is the time for us to take good care of her,” he wrote decades before meteorologists were tracking hurricanes that made them cry on live TV.

“Are you frightened of solitude — the emptiness and loneliness you may find when you face yourself alone?” He asked before we had constant companionship in the form of screens.

I know that the change I wish to see in the world begins from within. The change I wish to see is not going to magically come from better apps or better pills or social media disappearing or demagogues suddenly deciding they’re over World War III. It comes from exploring and healing my own inner world, facing my own shadows, hangups, and fears. It comes from vulnerability. It comes from intentional practice that leads to action, not ingesting upsetting vertical videos until I feel powerless and want to shriek.

For over a year now, my broken heart has grieved and watched the world fight about who has a right to exist. I have mourned with my people. I have mourned for Palestine. I have mourned for all of us watching and for our collective despair and grief.

Despite what I see when my demon makes me read the comments, I still believe in a world that honors our shared humanity, where violence isn’t celebrated like a cruel, zero-sum game. I actually come from a legacy of being too stubborn to think there is any other way.

What I used to think was delusion, I now realize is faith. I have faith that our hyperconnected world is not irreversibly polarized or numb and that there are still pathways toward change. I have faith that one day compassion or optimism won’t feel radical. I have faith that there are other people out there who, like me, feel the world as much as we see it. I have faith enough of us want to know a world where instead of waging war, we actively wage peace.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️

Liz