On the Advent of the (not)Apocalypse

Welcome to 2025: everything's a little fucked up; everything's very beautiful

The first sunrise of 2025, Marshy Point. I’m especially proud of this photograph. Credit: Matt Ruppert

Every year at this time, when I sit to write, I notice a specific truth: we celebrate the passing of time during an awful season. We’ve so little light and it’s harder, in its way, to notice the good. And yet we do.

— —

For a few personal reasons, maybe 2024 sucked a little bit, but never apocalyptic. My beloved little baby man Amon (a cat) got sick and died too-quickly-and-too-slowly in June. Absence creates loneliness of a different kind. We miss him above our heads, between our backs, on our laps, sniffing flowers, mewling to find us in the house. We miss his open and earnest eyes, his constant capacity for joy. We miss the way he held up his arms to get lifted. We miss his vampiric smile (that never faded, even at the end). He passed before the summer garden filled, but he still laid in the flowers the hour before his death. Our garden is in ruin; it’s winter.

Jess lost 3 months to a bout of bronchitis, though she managed to find some joy throughout. Always resilient and ever-locomotive, her briefly dimming spark may have been the hardest part of 2024. I still live in hope that the bronchitis continues to stay away.

My certification request was denied and I need to feverishly take a course and the exam before the window expires or I’ll likely never get certified. This feels existential, but truthfully, I find it hard to imagine myself doing the work I’m doing much longer anyway. I identify less and less with my career.

My parents finalized their divorce and failed to make any plans for their futures at a time when their country has all but determined that the only future for the poor elderly is to die in poverty. And so they will be our burden for longer than not, my brothers and I, as they were their parents before them. We love them and will not let them fall away, but to know you must parent your parents is a diamond-sharp reality.

But my god, my world was also beautiful. Jess and I celebrated our 15^th wedding anniversary, and we passed this year with many dinner dates and shows and cuddles and reasons to smile. Joe (brother) and Beth (cousin-sister) passed their 40^th birthdays, a sweet milestone to celebrate together. As noted above, my parents finally divorced, and I find joy in how they are trying to learn how to be again. Bella (my other cat, who is older than Amon by 3 years), plays every day and medicine has blessedly stopped her seizures for now. We attended dozens of concerts this year, many of them brimming with revelation. I read nearly 100 novels. I edited 1000s of photos, a few of which I’m quite proud. I listened to thousands of hours of music. I visited friends fairly often, though I wish it was more. We paid off all of our credit cards and hope to save in earnest (though spending most of them fixing my car).

On the balance, though 2024 gave me much to grieve, that grief was balanced by reasons to walk through it.

— —

For a few more global reasons, ours is a decidedly fractured world, but so too it is a beautiful and lacquered one. How we consume information - short videos, brief articles, notifications, contentious headlines, propaganda masquerading as truth, disinformation, misinformation - governs our sense of what is real.

“Touch grass”, as the adage goes.

We have become consumptive things, defined less by what we do. We encounter more information in the first hour of being on our phones than most people encountered in a full week in the 1950s, with much of that information containing partial truths or active misinformation. These partial truths and the misinformation reinforce our biases and strengthen our defenses against competing dissonance by design, developed by algorithms meant to show us what (and how) we like. And what we like best is to be right.

That search for rightness comes from the collective’s half-baked understandings of science (and statistics) and truth and fact. So much of the information we consume purports to come from research - and much of it really does, to be honest! - but willfully misrepresents it. Scientists do not traffic in truth, but in information that appears to suggest a certain truth at this time. This is reflected in the articles written by scientists, within which they use words like “suggest” and “possible” and “may indicate” and “further research needed” instead of phrases like “children getting stupider, say scientists.” Statisticians, on the other hand, navigate narratives. Anytime an article or video reports on societal trends, there is likely an undergirding narrative (sidebar: I use “article” intentionally in this way here, as many of our news briefs are now developed using AI and aggregate info, not writers), and any information must be taken at arm’s length. I cannot tell you how often I hear influencers use cherry picked data in their videos that now thousands to hundreds of thousands of people believe are true; that doesn’t even begin to account for the things they just make up.

Truth itself has come into division, even moreso this past year. AI, in all its glory, has entered the mainstream in all the wrong ways (though it is quite useful outside the mainstream); as already mentioned, it’s used for writing, but also for inventing photos, artwork, and videos, thereby creating a world within which once-trustworthy sources of information are much less so. A simple photograph may not be real. The person you see on the screen may not exist. In some ways, this is good (beyond the scope of this mini-essay); in most public ways, this is decidedly bad.

You see, I believe that truth - distinct from fact - is governed by belonging. That-which-is-true is determined not so much by that-which-is-factual, but rather the things the collective determines to be true. This is reflected by that bidirectional quality of religious and political institutions, wherein they provide truths for their collective in-group (good) but set the table for the in-group to deny other groups’ truths. Most groups have significantly more overlap in truth values than not, regardless of our flippant tendencies to dismiss members of certain groups (ask MAGA folks to find good in antifa folks, or likewise). In general, we all want the same things.

And I think that’s the driving idea moving forward.

We all want the same things.

We all want.

Want.

That’s the driver for a lived life. I do not mean want in a “we must always yearn” or “we must always be moving forward” kind of way, but instead a “everything is miraculous and we must SEARCH” kind of way.

We must be driven by a beautiful wanting.

May this new year find you well.