38: the present is flooded with the future
on precarity + lessons on monkeywrenching the apocalypse
It is necessary to live “at least a little bit in the future.” If I change a number in my personal budget, which tracks my income and expenses on a paycheck to paycheck basis, for this pay period, a monetary value two, three, maybe four paychecks down the line becomes less than zero. What I will need is what I need, not only because I live in the future, but because survival is about maintaining duration, which is why it is necessary to live a little bit in the future. This is also sometimes why surviving feels a little like waiting, or focusing on survival feels like waiting for catastrophe. Which is why we pit survival against revolution, calling the former passive and the latter active. This is a(n ideological) misnomer. Living in the future is the task of the survivalist and the revolutionary.
At the moment, the present is flooded with the future. Precarity, the state not simply of a lack of predictability, but of felt proximity to disaster and catastrophe; of a constant expenditure of energy in order to barely keep one’s head above water, increasingly becomes the defining characteristic of the terrain. It is an exhausting and exhausted form of life. A parody, a cruel caricature, not merely of life itself, but even of the life they claim is possible, which is the other side of this equation, the fleeting hope that one might “make it.” And in precarious life, this “making it” is transformed into simply being comfortable, of maybe having just enough to get by and not have to worry so much.
Precarious life can be very lonely. Many of us work to apprehend others—to constantly scrutinize our own deep-seated belief that the world and the many people in it are easily apprehensible, to do the labor of learning to apprehend them, and then that of registering them and then that of affirming them. But the precariousness of others is surprisingly difficult to apprehend. Hunger, worry, uncertainty. The seemingly solid edifice of someone’s home can feel like wet paper to those who live in it. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re apprehending, and reacting to, how close we ourselves actually are to losing everything.
Little has to happen for an increasing many to lose everything. Which is why I feel that precarity is teaching us urgency. The first lesson of living in the future is patience. Patience is a part of what makes the future present, gives me coherence. From here it is possible to see the urgency of one’s situation, which is to say: that the capacity to act swiftly will be—that is, is—necessary. And to act with urgency is to be able to apprehend, register, and affirm in order to act swiftly when it is needed. And to act swiftly is to be ready to, and to actually, act in ways other than the ways that are laid out for us. The crumbling world, as it has been gifted to us (or we, to it) comes with its own sense of time, which includes its own ethics re the way things should progress. But its apocalypse is our apocalypse, which is how we are able to know that, when and eventually how, we should act against the sense of time the old world engendered. This world’s time is a part of its rules, which is how we are learning to break them both.