This was one of the songs I picked early on for my 2025 playlist. I'm not sure why, but it felt like it fit, and as the year dragged on, it became even more apt to describe the current American landscape. I don't think I've ever featured it...I think I've maybe written on a cover, but never the original. But it seems to strike the right note of...what's the word? Nostalgia? Sort of. Melancholy? A bit. Disillusionment? Bingo.
Life in 2025 was....weird. And yet, it was also strangely mundane. The images in the news and the descriptions of current events on podcasts were far removed from the everyday happenings of my perfectly curated community. The disparity was - and is - unsettling. Intellectually, I know these things are happening. I know there was a ridiculous (and extralegal) black ops-style raid on an apartment building in Chicago, where children were separated from the parents and zip-tied in the freezing cold. I know people are being kidnapped off the street, outside of churches and schools. Indiscriminately. To include US citizens. I know millions of people are going to be unable to afford health insurance next year. I know there was a totally pointless 43-day government shutdown. I know there's disturbing images and documents being released from the Epstein investigation, the implications of which are stomach-turning. And yet, despite the fragility of current circumstances, it feels as if we're just going to continue on forever in this Black Mirror version of reality.
I'm movin' past the feeling
Sometimes I can't believe it
I'm movin' past the feeling again
The term hypernormalisation was created by Alexei Yurchak to describe what life was like in the Soviet Union in the decade prior to the collapse. Everyone knew the system was failing but they couldn't imagine a society different from the one they had - they couldn't dream of a different alternative - so everyone just pretended everything was working as it should. Blatant corruption and abject poverty became the norm, and people just accepted it. This is a common reaction - in 1930s Germany, during the rise of Nazism, things didn't change much in the beginning. In his book, "They Thought They Were Free," Milton Sanford Mayer describes how incremental changes caught non-Nazi Germans unaware. A law here, a speech there - it was all very subtle. Until it wasn't. The idea - more like a naive hope - that ignoring a problem makes it go away is enticing. It requires a lot less work and individual courage. In reality, it just allows the problem to become more insidious. Mostly because at some point, they try to paint these ideas as reasonable. It's all semantics and window dressing. They twist definitions and make unrelated things synonymous. They co-opt pop culture and previously noble policy crusades for their own purposes. I don't think anyone would disagree with making America healthy again but when a distinguished cardiologist who made his fortune off peddling contemporary snake oil (Dr. Oz) tells the working class to throw out centuries of medical progress, that's just another grift.
At the tail end of 2024, I listened to the audiobook of "Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat." There's been this notable progression of really famous pagan and New Age spiritualists becoming born-again Christians. One of the most famous in recent history is Doreen Virtue, who made her fortune off creating tarot and oracle card decks, as well as dozens of books on New Age subjects. In 2017, she declared her previous New Age beliefs were "demonic" and started marketing herself as a fundamentalist Christian. Coincidentally (or maybe not), this was around the time that pagan practices and witchcraft/occult books became extremely popular and common (i.e., more competition in the market). "Conspirituality" explains how the COVID epidemic resulted in a lot of historically more liberal communities (like yoga, New Age, and alternative medicine) taking a hard right turn in recent years. Having floated in these spaces since the home computer became a thing, I've always noticed it but it never alarmed me as much as it has in recent years. Mostly because it doesn't make sense from my perspective. There is a difference between choosing to believe and participating in a belief system, and then there's throwing out critical thinking entirely. I'm not sure everyone knows where that line is. And I think, as a rule, we expect others we run into within the witchcraft/pagan community to be a little weird (in a good way) and, in an attempt to be welcoming and inclusive, we don't always notice when maybe the weirdness comes from someplace unhealthy.
There's one last disturbing trend I'd like to call attention to and I'll leave 2025 willingly. Trad wives. And it's not the aesthetic - the aesthetic is quite lovely, which is why it's so popular. It's the malignant undercurrent of misogyny fueling it. And even more infuriating - it's a lie! When you look at the most popular "trad wife" accounts, like Ballerina Farms or Nara Smith, these women are working mothers and (in many cases) the breadwinners for their family. The only difference between them and myself is they have a camera rolling while they do their chores (and they can hire a nanny to mind the children while they cook dinner from scratch). So, we have wealthy, Ivy-league educated business-women telling less privileged young girls to forego an education and a career while they themselves are building up their own safety net. And what naturally follows is a parade of articles of divorced single mothers in their late 30s saying they were wrong about the "trad wife life." It is just the most disgusting scam I've ever seen. I appreciate stay-at-home parents - my own career success has been possible due to having a stay-at-home parent - but this is not what these women are. They cosplay a cottage-core fantasy and peddle nonsense about feminine virtue and living a "soft life" while raking in millions from women who will never attain the level of financial freedom needed to acquire a homestead of their own. They are grifters, they are con-men, just like everyone else on TV.
"The Suburbs" came out in 2010 but I had never seen the music video until this year. The music video, which I thought was disturbing 2025, was probably even more so back then. The music video is made up of clips from the Spike Jonze short film inspired by the album, "Scenes from the Suburbs." The central focus is on a group of teenagers, having fun and doing normal teenager shenanigans. Then, the narrative pulls back and we realize they are in the middle of said suburban war. People are being taken from their homes in the middle of the night, there's gunfire and men in uniform around every corner, a barrier with barbed wire divides the neighborhood. In one scene, Black Hawk helicopter hovers over the city. And these kids are just....living through it. Until one of them is forced into the ranks of the soldiers. It ends with him beating up his friend for some reason. It's a metaphor for the angst of having to grow up....I think. I'm going to be honest - some of the images in this film from 15 years ago feel all to real now.
None of this is normal.
"The Suburbs" Music Video
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