Every morning feels strange. It’s the same, but different. I wake up in a daze, check my phone, and immediately remember we are living inside something that doesn’t have a name but really should.
When I sit down at my computer, one tab flashes a calendar invite for a Zoom meeting about deliverables, like the country isn’t on fire. Another tells me measles is back, like a ghost from a world that used to care about public health. In the next, I read that a foreign student has been detained by ICE and had his visa revoked. His crime? Speaking at an anti-war protest.
Just when I think I’ve seen enough, another headline reminds me that the Trump administration is letting Idaho enforce an abortion ban so extreme that women with life-threatening pregnancies are being airlifted out of state because doctors are too afraid to treat them. Because saving a woman’s life could mean prison.
And just when I think I’ve maxed out my daily dose of dystopia, a news alert pops up. Half of the Department of Education has been eliminated.
And right on cue, an email arrives in my inbox, like a punchline to a joke no one’s laughing at.
“Hope this email finds you well.”
It doesn’t. None of them do.
If this feels familiar to you, it’s what some scholars are calling a “polycrisis.” Not just multiple crises happening at once, but interlocking, compounding crises that make each other worse. A political system collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. A public health system gutted by disinformation and misogynists who don’t care if women and children die. And for good measure, a climate crisis that makes every other crisis harder to survive. It goes beyond just “a lot of bad things happening at once” — it’s about how each crisis intensifies the others, making them more unmanageable together than they would be apart.
There’s no word for what it feels like to “circle up on Q1 goals” while unelected billionaires loot our government in broad daylight.
I’ve started calling it apocalypse admin. The surreal act of continuing to do small, ordinary tasks while the world around you unravels. Like updating a spreadsheet while wondering if we’ll still have free elections next year.
Do you feel this too? The splitting of your mind between what’s urgent in your inbox and what’s existential in the news? A total paralysis about what to do next? A deep sense of dread when your coworker asks what you did this weekend and all you want to say is “I cried”?
There’s a strange pressure to compartmentalize all of it. To smile on Zoom. To hit “reply all.” To keep producing like nothing is burning, even though it’s burning right under our feet.
If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. You are not broken for struggling to hold all of this at once. What’s broken is the world, and the lie that we’re supposed to pretend it’s not.
So what do we do about it?
What helps me is remembering that we are not the first people to live through something impossible. Although this feels unprecedented, others have lived through their own version of polycrisis before.
During the Blitz in London in the 1940s, when Nazis were dropping bombs every night, people still got up and went to work the next day. They were told to keep up their spirits, to keep living, even as the world fell apart around them. That’s where “Keep Calm and Carry On” comes from. Not as a cute mug slogan, but as a way to say, “We survive by moving forward together.”
During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s, queer communities faced a deadly virus, a collapsing healthcare system, and a government that refused to act, all while fighting daily violence, stigma, and discrimination. They built their own networks of care, created underground pharmacies to get life-saving meds, and organized in the streets to force the world to pay attention. They survived not because anyone saved them, but because they saved each other.
So maybe instead of focusing on what’s broken, we give ourselves credit for what we’re still holding together.
And maybe, years from now, people will look back and see not just a country under siege, but a generation of people. Women, queer folks, everyone whose rights were under attack. People who carried on with bravery and care for each other.
They’ll remember the people who snuck abortion pills across state lines to strangers they’d never meet. The ones who drove women to clinics hours away because no one else would. The organizers who knocked on doors and registered voters even when it felt pointless, even when they were terrified.
They’ll remember the teachers who refused to lie to their students even when the state told them to. The workers who formed unions when corporations abandoned them. The neighbors who shared food and money and rides when climate disasters hit, like the fires in Los Angeles earlier this year.
Carrying on doesn’t have to mean pretending everything is fine. Sometimes, it just means choosing to stay human in a system that wants us to go numb.
So if all you can do today is Venmo a friend who can’t make rent, or text someone you know is struggling, or order abortion pills for yourself or for someone else who might need them one day, that’s carrying on.
If all you can do is show up to vote, show up for a friend, show up for yourself, that is enough.
Even though it’s easy to feel helpless, every small act of care is a form of resistance.
And maybe, when this is all history, what people will remember is not how perfect we were. They’ll remember how we survived. How we tried. How we took care of each other when no one else would.
Because even though none of my emails are finding me well, I’m still here. And so are you.
And honestly, maybe that’s the bravest thing of all.
Liz Plank is an award-winning journalist and international bestselling author. Plank regularly appears on national and international television programs to provide a perspective on politics, gender issues, and reproductive rights, including The TODAY Show, The Daily Show, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, Fusion, Al-Jazeera America, and BBC World.
This piece originally appeared in Liz Plank’s substack Airplane Mode, which you can subscribe to here.
