How do we keep getting out of bed in the morning

Fascism is ascendant and we have run out of butter.

It seemed for a while that things were maybe going to start getting a little bit better, maybe, just a little, not enough and with a great pile of caveats, but it seemed, for a bit, that we were going to start creeping slowly towards something a little bit better and now, don't we all feel like such chumps for having even that tiny shred of hope?

Things are, instead, going to get so much worse, and if I want to have breakfast I need to go to the shop and get some butter.

It's cold and grey, that bleak, unrelenting London grey, and how am I supposed to summon the energy to go to the Tesco Metro that's basically on my front door step for butter when this is the world I live in?

How did we get here?

I'm just kidding, what a dumb question. (We got here after decades of failure to mete out consequences to fascists – I can't in good conscience recommend that you listen to Rachel Maddow's Ultra because we all need to be taking care of our mental health, but if you think this struggle is young, just a teen, just a baby, you are wrong.)

I'm looking for a job right now. I have no money so I need to find a job so I can pay next month's rent. I have to spend hours looking for jobs. I think about how I should find a decent copywriting gig because they pay well enough that I could work part time and still manage to write a decent amount of book each week.

So I look for copywriting work and I apply for a few things but there's not much out there and the search is cluttered with AI training jobs. So maybe I need an admin job which will need to be full time because they pay won't be good. And it takes a lot of trawling and how am I supposed to summon the energy to trawl through job listings when the world is so wrong, so blatantly incorrect.

And it's still dumb to ask how we got here. (We got here after decades of the deregulation of Wall Street left the whole world economically unstable, and I know that the US economy is doing well right now but the gap between wages and the cost of living is still untenably high, and you can't make up for successive recessions and the slow death of the middle class with a couple of years of economic growth. Money troubles often lead to the rise of the far right, not because the right has better economic policies – they demonstrably do not – but because when people are under long term financial strain they become tired and afraid and angry and when you're tired, afraid, and angry, you're easy to manipulate.)

I don't have any money so I need to sell a book. I need to sell a book but it's only half finished and fiction publishing really prefers a completed manuscript, but I can't afford to write it because I have to spend all my time trying to find a job, so I need to sell it half done so I can have the time to finish writing it. I email my agent to this effect and feel physically ill for hours afterwards. I'm too demanding, I know I'm too demanding, who do I think I am? Do I think that just because I have four published books and countless hours of produced audio drama someone should buy my next novel on proposal?

So I need to keep writing the book while I try to find a way to sell it unfinished and while I try to find a job, but where am I supposed to get the energy to write a novel – a frivolous, fun, sexy novel at that – when we're facing a minimum of four years of fascist oligarchy in the most powerful nation on earth?

There's no point talking in how we got here. (It became taboo to express doubts in the system of politics, even in a country where the political system is nakedly absurd, like did you know that different counties have different voting machines and therefore different levels of accuracy? So if you live in one place you have a 1 in 20 chance of your vote being thrown out, and if you live in the next county over it drops to 1 in 100? And I can't in good conscience recommend you listen to the You're Wrong About episode on the 2000 election, it will not be good for your state of mind right now, but if you want to know just how fucked up the US is, it's very. And yet it became so taboo to talk about how fucked up the system is, no one was willing to deal with the Republican efforts to use it to subvert democracy.)

I'm playing around with Canva because I need to get better at social media again so I can promote my books properly because no one else is going to do it and I need to make a goddamned living somehow. I need to be posting more on Instagram and Tiktok, I need to cultivate a relatable, relaxed online presence but then I also need to be able to make some decent, shareable book-related assets so I can do something other than just saying do you remember I write books from time to time. But the book promo stuff has to be the minority because no one likes it, so you have to intersperse it with other things, but what am I supposed to put on the internet in a world like this?

We know this, of course, it's been ridiculous for ages, here is today's fit, here is a photo from my holiday in Italy, here is a funny meme, here is the same graphic about the ongoing horrors everyone is sharing, here is a puppy, please buy my book, and god I miss the days when instagram was just latte art.

But I have to be better at being online, it's part of my job and I'm letting myself down, my friend tells me I'm hot and successful and that I should say this more often. I've done so many cool things, I've made it, I should be more comfortable asking for recognition, but what is there to say except that the blood chills in my veins when I think about how little hope there is now for Gaza.

(And we got here because there is a media crisis that we don't know how to solve. It's not unprecedented – there was a media crisis after the invention of the printing press too. Suddenly anyone could make a newspaper and spread it around with anything they wanted in it and misinformation was rife. But people need reliable information so eventually there were checks in place, accreditation and the like, this establishing the difference between a paper of record and a local rag. But people don't seem to want reliable information now, people seem to want straight up lies and I don't know how we counter that.)

I think a lot about a random tumblr post I saw once where someone talked about their Finnish coworker saying that Americans are "like that" because they've never seen their grandma's tits. They have a weird, puritanical streak that views human bodies as inherently sexual and therefore inherently shameful, and am I going to have to leave out sex scenes and queer people to publish books in the US when the Project 2025 porn ban comes into being? We only just got some real gay stuff in into Marvel, like literally the dying gasps of the MCU and we finally get some same sex kissing and is that over now?

Americans are "like that" because the puritans never died, they just became evangelicals. Americans are "like that" because they're so afraid of government control that they have instead ceded control to corporations. Americans are "like that" because they are taught history in a way that casts them as the heroes in every scenario. Americans are "like that" because they believe they're the best and more powerful nation in the world and that they are entitled to that power.

Britain believed that too, and look how that went.

Why have we all accepted it for so long? That the US is the most powerful nation in the world. That the global economy is irrevocably tied to the American economy. A stock exchange is, at a base level, deranged – if you have a business that is just yours, you have responsibilities to your staff and your customers and as long as you make enough money to keep running you're a success. If you have a business that is publicly traded your first responsibility is to your stock holders and what they need from your business is for it to always be more valuable today than it was yesterday. Insane. Then you add to that a stock market that is centred in a country this politically unstable? What are we doing?

I saw a post about a small factory full of workers who voted for Trump and who now won't get Christmas bonuses. That money will instead be used to import as many of the parts the business relies on to make whatever it is they make as possible before Trump's tariffs come into play and push the prices up so high the company may no longer be viable.

We've landed on democracy as a political system because we know how badly other systems work. We spent centuries freeing ourselves from monarchies, we look in horror on military dictatorships, democracy is the best we've got. But democracy needs for people to understand what tariffs are and how they will be impacted by them, and who has the time or the energy for that?

But I need to wash my hair. I need to make myself something to eat for lunch. I need to make myself presentable because I have theatre tickets for tonight. I'm going to see Dr. Strangelove so I'm excited to see how much psychic damage I take from watching that this week of all weeks.

I am filled with dread and despair. I am already grieving the people who will not survive Trump's second term. I am distraught at what this means for Ukraine, and for Palestine. I am terrified about more economic privation, about an impending halt to the already too slow progress we were making on climate change.

(Not that it matters, but we got here because of racism and sexism and homophobia and all the bigotry that props up the patriarchy, we got here because patriarchy is not the goal, it is a means to an end, and the end in question is control over where wealth and power are distributed, and we got here because more people than we thought want to be here, more people than we thought want fascism because they believe that under fascism they will have power and they want power more than they want freedom.)

I need to write a newsletter because we can't just be novelists anymore, we have to be on our grind, it's the gig economy and that means having a newsletter and a podcast and fascism might be ascendant but that doesn't mean you can fail at your allotted task of filling the world with content.

I'm not sleeping well. I recite plays in my head to try and fall asleep but my mind interrupts itself with run on sentences full of panic and heartbreak.

It doesn't matter how we got here. It will matter, it will matter fifty years from now when we're trying to avoid getting here again but no one remembers how it happened, and surely it won't happen again, society has evolved, hasn't it, we're civil now. What matters is that we're civil.

Everything is temporary, this too will pass, but that's not the problem. The problem is what it costs in the meantime.

I don't know how we get out. I don't know how long it will take to get out.

I don't know how long we're all going to have to keep buying butter when this is the world we live in.

But I guess that's it, isn't it? You wake up and this is the world you live in and you buy butter. And you keep doing your silly little job because you still need to keep paying your silly little rent to keep living in this horrifying world.

Fascism is ascendant. Don't forget to like and subscribe.