Living Your Best Life in a Dystopian Nightmare

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

As the song goes, “Summer’s here and the time is right for dancin’ in the street.”

Protesting in the street? Maybe.
Collapsing from exhaustion in the street? Sure.
But, dancing? Not so much.

The calendar and I are in a bit of a stalemate lately. She keeps telling me that fun is supposed to be on the agenda now, and I’m consistently ghosting her and hoping she’ll get the message and leave me be.

My inbox is crammed with end-of-the-year announcements from our daughter’s school alongside theme park invitations and warm-weather clothing collection announcements, all reminding me that inside the heads of a sizable segment of America, it’s time to take a break from the arduous, exhausting everyday and throw oneself into the wild and carefree revelry of temporary freedom.

The problem on the surface, from what I can see, is that fascism doesn’t take a vacation.

Authoritarian regimes don’t concern themselves with beach days, theatre camps, museum trips, and National Park excursions, and right now, I’m finding it difficult to throw myself into distractions and delirium that all seem rather trivial given the circumstances.

Now, you’re likely a lot more emotionally mature and even-keeled than I am, but celebration isn’t something that’s coming naturally for me lately. Having spent the past decade tirelessly beating back a dystopian nightmare that in recent weeks appears more and more likely to become the status quo of our waking days, I’m feeling less than internally sunny, despite the weather’s efforts to the contrary.

And I suspect my misery is in pretty good company.

Based on the conversations I have with friends, the eavesdropping I do at the local coffeeshop, and the undeniable shit storm of my social media feed, there is a pervasive existential funk permeating America, and for good reason. People with fully functioning empathy, a basic understanding of History, and even a cursory level of situational awareness realize how perilous a place this nation currently is, and that tends to bring our inner Debbie Downers out in force.

Right now, living one’s best life in this fascist hellscape seems like a fruitless fight and a losing battle, but it is actually the bleeding, beating heart of the war we’re in.

Yes, it’s true fascism doesn’t take a vacation, but that’s because fascism despises joy. It is antithetical to peace. Its goal is to gradually squeeze and suffocate the lightness out of people so that they stop dreaming, stop planning, stop dancing. Its authors are inherently miserable people whose sole joy consists of replicating themselves by reproducing despondency.

When we allow ourselves to be drained of the simple pleasures of this life, we become complicit in those who desire our demise. The moment we lose the ability to look ahead or feel expectancy or sense possibility, we move from authoritarianism’s opposition to its collaborators. When our reservoirs of hope dry up, they have us right where they want us.

What that means is that it is not wasteful or reckless to indulge ourselves with the silly, the superficial, or the inconsequential; to dive headfirst into what appears on the surface to be pursuits that don’t transform the world, but actually do save the small one inside our heads and within the reach of our arms.

Given how dire things are, take a beach day and let the breeze off the water and relentlessness of the surf remind you that life has preceded you and will outlive you, so that you can relieve the pressure in your chest.
Make sure you get your daughter to theatre camp so she can revel in the kind of subversive, audacious, thrilling creativity that has always confounded fascists.
Take a museum trip so you can remember the greater story of diverse humanity you’re a part of, and not feel as alone as you often do.
Find yourself in a National Park so that, dwarfed by the staggering beauty, you remember what a precious treasure it is and why its preservation is worth fighting for.

Engaging in joyous, restorative activities isn’t a betrayal of our activism, or a dereliction of our duties as benders of the moral arc of the universe, or an abdication of our responsibilities to those under duress, or a denial of the gravity of the moments we find ourselves in.

Rest and pleasure form a hedge of protection around our humanity; they preserve the soft hearts that allow us to stay compassionate while enduring such cruelty, and they strengthen our bonds to one another and the planet. These things will not weaken our resistance but fortify us for the long haul that is defending freedom.

Living your best life in a dystopian nightmare isn’t giving it a foothold; it is the single greatest way to deny its power.

Keep dancing.