"I am exhausted by "content", so much of which is vacuous. I am exhausted by the sense of keeping up when my own philosophy insists we all need to slow down. I am exhausted by the false sense of competition with peers I admire that algorithms create. I am exhausted by the meaningless and just how much attention it demands. I know I'm not the only one who is exhausted. I know so many of you are, just as everyone I know and love is. Keeping up is impossible, and yet there is nowhere to turn. We are witnesses to history, and yet, as ghosts will tell you, witnesses are history's victims, too."

I wrote that in December, for the launch of this new site which I hoped would provide a place of quiet introspection on the vast internet, and even provoke a bravery in me to step off the content-production treadmill. Yet, here I am, months later, still desperately trying to keep up so that all of you may find value in what I do, even when there is nothing I could say which would illuminate any better this interminable moment in history in which everything is coming apart.

I am as frightened as I am angry, for perhaps the first time in years. We are accelerating towards a point of absolute no return and I fear for the future. Each day, I think of the child in my belly and imagine them grown, far from home, thrust into the clutches of a dying world, and I wonder: What can I even begin to tell my child that will protect them when no words that pass through my lips serve to protect the children that live among the horrors of the present? Every stimuli feels like a vertiginous glimpse into a ragged future: The headlines bury me in a sickening despair that there is nothing I could build my child which would protect them from nuclear war. The astounding novel Demon Copperhead kept me up at night with anxious thoughts about how to protect my child from the crisis of substance abuse. And finding myself in an aquarium attached to the museum I was visiting, watching children interact with the living creatures through the camera app on their phone, I panicked about the simulated, corporately-owned infrastructure of our relational ecology which will fundamentally limit the political imagination of my child's generation.

Through all this wretched emotionality, I have to maintain a concrete understanding of world events—and I am only just holding onto reality. I am having to tune out certain stories and turn off notifications. Barring the few media institutions I trust to report the substance if not the structure, when I look at the media landscape I see the same panic bursting through the sentences of my peers as everyone scrambles to hold onto a semblance of what is knowable. And I'm not sure if it is helping. We are all rushing to comment and analyse and proffer judgement as independent thinkers, as little isolated islands of pain, in a time when I truly believe the best thing to be done is step back into the grasp of one another and attempt to find reason together.

"How are you?" I asked my dear friend a few days ago on the phone. And she laughed. And then she spoke, and she spoke for an hour and all of it made sense because she was honest about every single thing that did not. And then she asked me, and I laughed, and then I raged at the interminable senselessness of trying to hold a world together by oneself. For both of us, our emotional response to the world is embodied in certain maladies which stubbornly refuse to get better. And staring down the barrel of the gun of the 21st century, it is difficult to imagine a time in which we can heal. Trying to shoulder all that is impossible to shoulder is forcing us to our knees. And I said to her: "It's all too much figuratively because it is literally all too much. We're not meant to feel any of this alone." And yet that is how it feels because between the treadmill and the panic where is the time—let alone the place—to come together and feel together the impossibility of this moment? This is a singular moment of global breakdown—ecosystemic, climactic, political, economic, institutional. Breaking down is painful. What can I do with all this pain if I cannot share it? How can I make sense of any of this pain if I cannot locate it in you, too? It is not a pain that is mine alone; how can I know how to heal it if I cannot feel it in every body?

Confronted with the vastness of all this pain, and unable to reach through the screen and take hold of the many hands that grasp their own devices, I have resorted to neuroticism. I circle the drain of three ongoing situations in my own life over which I have no control, mimicking my relationship to the global sphere of events—but these ones, at least, are bound by time and space and narrative. For months, I have been repeating the same inane and meaningless anxieties because they are an easier target for my distress than everything in the world that simultaneously has hold of me and yet I cannot reach. It is like I have used my neuroticism as a shield of protection, hoping that if I kick up a verbal and emotional whirlwind around myself then the tendrils of world events will be unable to reach me. I have chosen to pretend to be an isolated island of stress rather than confront that I am an isolated island of pain. Anything to make sense of the senseless.

And it is all senseless—not just because of the utter meaningless and arbitrariness of the violence inflicted against the world, but because we cannot feel it in each other, and if I cannot feel it in you then I cannot feel it in me. I am experiencing the singularity of collapse through digital code and algorithms and this is making it harder and harder for me to locate the pain that is screaming for attention somewhere inside me. And yet, those of us for whom the crisis is still digitised are the lucky ones, because the crisis is a rainstorm of missiles elsewhere in the world, or a ravaging hurricane, or a drought. This crisis is an embodied crisis, blasting children into pieces and turning rivers into sand. Those of us who cannot yet locate this crisis in our bodies are fortunate because it means our suffering is not yet so acute that the entire future has bled out. But surely there has to be some other instance of feeling—a moment or a state between agony and anxiety. Surely there has to be some way to feel this in one another and through one another. Surely there is a way to feel the very collective nature of this global singularity so that even for a moment we do not feel alone with it?

Deep in the Amazon rainforest last year, we found ourselves listening in on a charged political debate in one of the remotest indigenous villages in Ecuador. The Presidential election was underway, and a corrupt Trump ally was making inroads with indigenous voters with his bare-face lies about his intention with the Amazon. That day, the Achuar people had gathered for a full day of discussion about the election, the candidates, and who they planned on voting for. Despite having only very basic Spanish, and not a single word of their native tongue, we understood as the hours went on that this debate was unlike anything we had ever seen before. Rather than approaching the day with fixed perspectives, each speaker—of which there were many—was offering their interpretation of political events and futures, and was therefore open to other people's interpretations. Time and time again, we watched people change their minds as the day went on when presented with new information and, as such, the dialogue was emergent rather than combative and static. It was the first act of collective sense-making—of information weaving—I had ever witnessed, and it took my breath away. These passionate orators and erudite leaders came to a better understanding of the world by being with one another. Together, they created a far more complex map of their world and their futures by integrating one another's perspectives, making room for the concerns and confidences of each community member rather than shying away out of fear that their understanding was wrong. The Achuar showed me, through their manner of discourse, that the world is constantly becoming, and we can never make sense of it by holding on tightly. We can only understand the complexities of reality by holding onto one another.

The ideas of that corrupt candidate were chased out of that small village deep in the Amazon. He won the election anyway—amazingly, despite Ecuador's vast territory and remote villages and many votes having to be flown in from within the forest, well over 90% of the votes were counted in less than four hours! I remember watching that percentage number tick up on a small tv screen mounted behind a bar on the other side of the country about one week later, as the patrons toasted their new President. I wondered what would happen to the friends we had made deep in the forest, the friends who had shown me how to make this senseless world make sense.

My friends in the Amazon may lose their home to chainsaws and bulldozers. And just as brick and mortar cannot provide the same shelter for them, neither can it shelter us from that loss, thousands of miles away where the nights vibrate with life. What happens over there is always happening over here, too. The leaders who attack foreign countries are the same which attack their own citizens, and the companies which drop bombs on schools are the same which monitor our children. The oil that is piped across the world fuels our cars and their warplanes. The water that cools data centres is being stolen for your a.i. prompt and their a.i. missile strike. The plastics poisoning our bodies are poisoning Earth's. Today's drought is tomorrow's food shortage.

We cannot make sense of this alone because none of it is just happening to us. It is happening to all of us, all the time, even those of us who are lucky because our children have not been mutilated and scarred and destroyed by weapons, for how long will we pretend that our own children are safe in such a world? In this singular moment of global unravelling, perhaps that is the only conclusion we can reach: We are all in danger. That feeling in your chest that threatens to crush your bones to dust, that's the fear and horror of billions of us. You cannot feel it alone, just like you cannot make sense of why any of this is happening alone. But we must feel it, for only by feeling it can we know what to do. The only solution to this interminable crisis, then, is each other: as much the trees and the water and the birds and the beasts as us fellow humans. The only way out is together.

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