Because I could not stop for death, or start for life, or pause for Kierkegaard

Few trends are as hot right now as the triple elixir of anxiety, dread, and despair. Dress up all the other maladies in as many combinations as you want, derive as many causal and reactive multi factor tropes as you might dare, and still you fall short.

Anxiety has the market cornered on the well off enough demographic, the ones who know InterGenerational Regression for what it is and can smell the lime in the cart before any of the shovels scrape out the last bit and start flinging.

Dread is a cold, clammy snail shifting its slime ahead and back, making its way across an open plain, unable to go faster even as more shadows pass swooping overhead, and knowing full well that the journey does not reach a destination, just a termination.

Despair is this idea of you sitting somewhere over there, wanting and trying to understand, and me sitting over here, wanting and trying to be understood, and this moment where neither ever happens, even as a roughed-out approximation of human connection, isn’t a moment to be overcome, but the first temporal slice of an elongating unbridgeable gap

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{pause for station identification and the well-wrought prayers of all the sundry living saints)

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Every influencer left to wonder if this is all just good enough (and nothing more than good enough) for government work. Every shit poster left to wonder if there’s not more to the story about how suffering feeding on suffering makes this tired-out old world go round and down its wrecked and weary way.

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Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.