Staying in the game

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Hi there,

Among many things I’m working on, and through this year, it’s a push to re-embrace the power that can come from an economy of words. So no long intro today prior to delving into what serves as a short reflection on 2025 and a gesture towards the years ahead.

First, a word from our partners at ErthSearch and then we will get into.

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OPINION

2025 was a challenging year for many and certainly for me. I don’t think I need to point to too many specifics: That a prominent MIT nuclear fusion scientist was recently murdered in his home, motive as of yet unknown, is but one example I have the immense displeasure of informing you about if you hadn’t already seen the news. An article in Nature led with a description of this as “a horror 'impossible to believe.'“ I needn’t say much more.

Many horrors beyond comprehension unfold both worldwide and locally around the clock. That is the unfortunate reality of an ever-increasingly connected world with 8 billion plus people on it, none of whom would have heard much news outside their village of some hundred or so people a few centuries ago. Add in the fact that covering such events and catalyzing moral indignation surrounding them is algorithmically much of what travels furthest on social media—as is well documented in “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World,” a book by Max Fisher—and an onslaught of exposure to incomprehensible horrors risks becoming the proverbial water in which we swim. Which is an environment that’s entirely antithetical to any true and good action. And that’s all to say nothing of it having been a challenging year to cover the climate, sustainability, and energy beat specifically, which are spaces replete with all their own pernicious dynamics and disinformation.

Against that backdrop, this, my final op-ed of the year, basically exists to say that things need not always be so. One of my favorite memes of all time crystallizes the idea:

There are powers and forces that thrive off of dislocation and division. “They” want, well, division, and distraction, magnified and refracted by powerful force multipliers, including but certainly not limited to social media and general socioeconomic upheaval, discord, and displacement (to say nothing of climate change!), to create anxiety and apathy. “They” want you out of the game, whether politically, socially, economically, or otherwise. I wrote about how Trump’s “flood the zone” tactics do just this and accomplish it quite well back in January in this year’s most-read Keep Cool piece. I wrote all that, and then still tumbled and spiraled into the same traps I can see but not always avoid endlessly this year. Over and over again.

That’s the thing. It’s hard!

Again, however, if nothing else, one of the most important things you can do is to stay in the game. To keep trying. As an individual, that means staying healthy, connected to community, and beyond that point, iteratively attuned to directing your powers to where they’re most fulfilling and positively generative, which is a vague but less economically-tinged way of saying productive. Perhaps you prefer “directed to maximum social good” or something similar. I trust you get the idea.

As a company or an organization, the dynamics aren’t too dissimilar; you have to have enough money to not die, and to iteratively and honestly refine what’s working and what isn’t to see whether you’re moving towards something that’s actually worth achieving, lest your work crater into extracting resources from others without even producing something of value.

At the individual and organizational levels, this often requires candid feedback from trusted people, which is hard to come by but all the more valuable for that reason. It does not necessarily equal persisting at all costs; sometimes it is important throw in the towel on a specific effort, a specific manifestation of resources directed towards certain goals. I wrote loads about my personal experiences working in places where that went disasterously awry earlier this year here. The point is not to persist in all manners and all manifestations dogmatically forever. But to persist in some capacity, built on accumulating foundations and layers of experience, feedback, and wisdom.

I’m increasingly loath to advise on the exact how of all this. What I will offer today is as follows. At one level, especially as it pertains to social media, the discourse, and creating space—especially some distance from the incessant drumbeat and cacophony of coverage of the incomprehensible horrors—it can definitely be worthwhile to simply opt out, at least for some time. Doing so is not an absence of action. It is an action in itself.

As per Žižek’s reading of the French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist Lacan:

In the spirit of that idea, I’ll leave things here. After one more news round-up coming your way on Monday, I’ll be offline reading, writing, and hanging out in the desert in Joshua Tree with friends, howling at the moon through the New Year. Hope you, too, can find some time to rest, recenter, let powerful ideas germinate within you, and then move toward the effective scene changes you want to shape in 2026 and beyond.

Go with grace,

— Nick