Fumbling for the light switch

How can you focus on building something new while everythng else is falling down around you?

First, a little joy nugget: Today is Doug’s half-birthday, his last as a fiftysomething, and he celebrated the other night with old friends who are also peeking up at 60 with hunched shoulders. Discussions included (but were not limited to) retirement goals, funerals, cleaning out a childhood home, looking after stalled or disabled children, love after marriage, life after love, and yoga after spine surgery.

Sure, some of the chat got a little dark, but we all leapt at the rare chance to share our biggest fears and frustrations with people at a similar stage of life. Because one of the best ways to keep the lights on is to confide in people you’ve known since Whitesnake was a thing. And then go get a massive $6 doughnut with your name on it.

Now, an acknowledgment: This is our third week without a podcast. There has been some life intrusion, of course—some travel, some Spring Break, some elderly parents with long-term flu. But like anyone else who spends their time providing services, making things, teaching, or really doing most kinds of work, we feel a bit flummoxed about how to proceed. The things that felt so vital and necessary before the conniving dipshits took over seem like background noise while institutions teeter and mere suspicion of wrongdoing is now enough to warrant deportation and torture, without even a whiff of due process.

We talk a lot about whom we want to schedule as podcast guests, but we're also so alarmed by the triumph of over-entitled mediocrity that our middle-aged concerns often feel trivial by comparison. And some of the topics we could cover, like navigating Medicaid and your parents' finances for long-term care, might not even be accurate between the day we record and the day we post because those systems are now controlled by the worst people in the world. *

* Although it’s not as if their predecessors were all that great. Do you feel the heat of our baleful gaze, United Healthcare and Aetna?

But we have to keep the lights on. Eventually, we will have ground or punched or drilled our way out of this, and we'll have to create a new way of living. And if we focus solely on restoring all these cultural things, work processes, products, services, and ways of being together, we won't have the energy or time to be thoughtful about fixing a lot of the things that were very, very wrong in December 2024.

One day, we’ll have to Rebuild Better and put our shoulders into universal healthcare, a financial system built on value (not debt and a punitive credit system), term limits everywhere, un-gerrymandering, and fair taxation. And then protect it against lunatic billionaires and Russian agents and anyone who happens to be both.

Whatever you’re doing must still be done, even if you have to adjust how you do it. And we want to talk about that. Are you at a crossroads in your work? Have you made a decision about how to dig in and change things? Tell us your story in the comments! Then tell us if you knew that Whitesnake is still touring.