Quoth Hunkered: With people getting sent to foreign prisons and the economy in freefall and martial law coming down in the next few weeks, should I bother to keep writing or just hunker down for the inevitable fall?

Oof, I feel you, friend. If we’ve ever been doubtful about the usefulness of writing for distracted people more eager to speak (or post) than read, it sure doesn’t help that society is unraveling like a cheap sock.

You know, feeling like these guys.

This would be a perfect time to bullshit you about how artists are the experimental conscience of humanity, the bannermen of our greater natures, but let’s get serious. If the power goes out for sixteen hours, people will be too busy slitting each other’s throats for toilet paper to read your stories about elves. Or mine about disaffected Gen Xers seeing ghosts.

If you’re like me, doing this to entertain others and addicted to their reactions, it’s even worse to realize that we’re besieged by assholes. As crazy illegal shit goes on all around us with mostly shrugs (or worse, nods) from our neighbors, it’s hard to feel like they’re worth entertaining.

I’m not writing this shit for the kind of people who cheer when tens of thousands of people lose their jobs, let’s put it that way.

So it’s tempting to take all of our toys and go home, which is literally something I think about every single day. I’d be there already if I could imagine a place where I have even a chance of immunity from dumbasses…but I can’t because there isn’t. I could be walking beneath an azure sky on the warm beaches of Bali, and some dumbfuck in a MAGA helmet would parachute down to ask if it was hot enough for me.

If there’s one thing that’s pretty clear, it’s that centuries of writing about better ways to think and care and live don’t seem to be making a huge difference to the population at large. We tell ourselves the same lessons over and over, but somehow when the chips are down, we revert to the limbic system instead of the frontal lobe. The Lord of the Flies goes from an object lesson to a handbook.

Wait, wait, stop tying the noose. I’m going somewhere with this.

When we begin as writers, it’s often with a fantasy of a wide and appreciative audience, of altering the programmable ROM of our civilization, of being told by readers (the more the better) that we changed their lives.

That’s not how it works. You reach one reader at a time, and that reader may be crouched under a bed with a flashlight while a drunk rages on the other side of a thin wall, and they may never be able to tell you that your story mattered.

You’re not a brand or a platform or a broadcast tower. You’re a secret agent dropped behind enemy lines, sending out a warbling shortwave signal to other collaborators. You’re inspiring scattered saboteurs that it’s worth being decent when nobody else is.

We write to find our kind, and we shouldn’t be surprised when there aren’t a lot of us.

So my answer to the question of where to find hope as a writer in these times is to stop needing hope—to stop imagining outcomes you can’t control. If you write one story that reaches one person, that’s still better than the fuck-all you’d be doing otherwise.

Someone needs your elves. But not me—please don’t send me that.