March '24 Myths & Recs

Sleep deprivation, Kim Petras, the Anthropocene, and more

Welcome to this month’s Myths & Recs, a short-form post where I share what I’ve been digesting, and nuggets of insight or information I think will be relevant to my readers. This time these are sneak-peeks at some upcoming posts.

Let’s dive in.

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First off, some mini myth-busting:

We can’t just stop working: with some help from another anarchist writer, I hope to show that work, as we currently understand it, is not just destructive but unnecessary. I think most people agree that spending the majority of our lives at work is not ideal. But most also see it as a necessary sacrifice. How else are we to pay the bills? But even without bills in the picture, if we imagine a world freed from money, most people still assume we’d divvy up the things that need doing in a way that replicates our current wage-labor economy. Even without bills to pay we’d still have jobs to do. That’s precisely the myth I aim to bust in an upcoming post on work — or more specifically, anti-work.

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Things I’m listening to:

• Feed the Beast by German artist Kim Petras, on her debut studio album — an anthemic dance track that I read as referring to the “beasts” of both passion and capital; it makes me think about the ways erotic energy is leashed to the profit motive, and how the prospect of unleashing it still scares the powers that be. Love is notoriously disobedient, irrational, inefficient. Most of all, it’s a delicious, delightful waste of time. Can’t put a price on love!

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I can stay up, I’ll sleep when I’m dead: you most certainly will, since you’ll die a lot quicker if you don’t sleep now. Take it from someone who made bad sleep decisions in college and is still paying the price ten years later. More fundamentally though, sleep deprivation is a social justice and public health issue. Work is the main culprit, along with our “human glue trap” technology, but we can still rest. It’ll take a paradigm shift, it’ll take seeing ourselves and our bodies differently, but if the Maroons could do it during slavery surely we can do it during wage labor.

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• When I'm In Your Arms by British soul singer Cleo Sol — a hypnotic ballad for lovers wanting to find safety in each others’ arms. I especially love her line, “Make me feel something new, something old,” because she gets at the timelessness of ecstatic encounters. For new partners in their honeymoon phase, or for old lovers looking to rekindle their flame, you need to nurture space where time slows down, where the adventure of the unknown meets the comfort of home.

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The genocide in Gaza is a war between cultures: turns out the “war” in Gaza, along with so many other wars, is actually about oil. The complicated ideological justifications are bunk. This isn’t about religion, or Israel’s right to defend itself, or even simply islamophobia. All those are factors of course, but the material fact is that massive oil reserves in Palestine provide all the incentive needed for the American empire to make its stand. Our planet will not survive the oil wars if they keep going like this. Biden already greenlighted the Alaskan Willow project; the thawing Arctic in Russia’s backyard will be next. Either we stop this now, or our planet’s growing fever will stop it for us, by killing us off in the billions.

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• Hope by Fat Freddy’s Drop — an achingly beautiful piece that portrays hope not as rosy optimism, but as a melodic march, a set-jaw determination that “Hope for a generation” lies “Just beyond my reach / Not beyond my sight”. A somber horn and thrumming bass carry the conviction that we’re “Not gonna let them keep me / Not gonna let them tell me no” and that music is “a thing I do to get me through”.

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Things I’m reading:

• A introduction to tipping points by

  Jason Anthony
  from Field Guide to the Anthropocene, at once essential and terrifying. What I keep coming back to is how much we already know: we have everything we need, in terms of ideas, technology, and practices, to help our planet heal. We don’t need to wait; we can start now. In fact, many already have.

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