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Hello world. It’s Dec 2024 and things are fully on fire. As they always have been, but perhaps more under the blindingly obvious late-stage extractive capitalism that is the incoming Trump/Musk administration. Folks are nervous, and angry. Starbucks and Amazon workers are on strike and may they be successful in the face of billionaires who don’t care. 

So here’s where I sit, and it’s something I’ve been saying for years: if they (meaning, the exploitative forces that want our labor for their profit, the corporations and the people that own them) can keep us inside, isolated, depressed, and consuming online, they just win. They win all our attention and effort and time and money. They suck out our health, our art, our human spirit. They try to convince us we are nothing without them. They steal our work, grind it to bits, and sell it back to us as added value. It’s pretty damn bleak.

To unpack that a bit, I’m going to dig into each bold word. 

Inside

We used to live outside more. The industrial revolution fully drove people into factories, and there have been horrid working conditions since the invention of work-for-other’s-profit, but between the effort to stay warm enough in winter and cool enough in summer, we were outside a LOT up till the advent of electric air conditioning in 1901. By 1910, theaters were using “we have air conditioning!” as a selling point to get people to come to the movies in the summer. By 1950, an air conditioner was a status symbol of wealth. By 1980, air conditioning in the US was becoming a middle-class standard. I didn’t live with air conditioning till 1995. Now, to my continuing astonishment and occasional dismay, but also ability to sleep at night and function in the day in summer, we have multiple AC units. (My workplace in a brick building built in 1894 has very poor AC, and that’s why it’s closed due to heat for a week or so each summer. It can get up to 90F at my desk on the hottest days, even with the fans.)

In parallel, starting in the late 1970s, the idea that people -children especially, but also teens and adults- would just be outside as a matter of course started shifting. Books prior to the 1980s describe a life where school-age children and teens leave the house in the morning and have their own lives till dinner. Trixie Belden was my steady companion throughout the 1980s and even though she lived in White Plains, which is fully a suburb of New York City, she and her 6 friends spent most of their time outside, hanging out and solving crimes. All the picture books that were not about how to navigate a social setting were set outside. Other than eating and sleeping and chores, life was outside. Adults had gardens and picnic tables and patios and stoops, kids had fields and streams and empty lots and sidewalks.

What shifted? The 1980s combined a “moral panic” over the drop-off among teens in religious affiliation and attendance with the sudden awareness that sometimes children get hurt and not all adults are actually good people, mixed with the looming threat of nuclear annihilation and the AIDS epidemic that fed right into the worst parts of homophobia and racism. It was like a door slamming shut. 1985 was the summer of “why don’t you and your friends hang out at the pool [20 feet from the apartment door in the housing complex, a luxury beyond my earlier imagination] instead of going off in the canyon?” It was the summer of “You don’t need to bike over, my mom can come pick you up.” It was the summer of “The 6 of us are walking together from Kerry’s to the 6:30 movies, we will be back at 9:30, and I will call you from Kerry’s by 10 if I’m going to spend the night there.” All my life, for 14 years, I had been mostly outdoors, hanging out with other people mostly but not exclusively my own age, sorting out how to keep ourselves and each other comfortable, physically and emotionally. It was as though communal trust in the effort put in to raise us to be mostly thoughtful and usually responsible young people was just…gone. We were more closely supervised than we had been since kindergarten. It was weird.

[Sidebar: This was not, lest you project into it, my mother suddenly being aware of her daughter being a teenager and restricting my agency. I grew up with the best sex ed and social / situational awareness I know of, and if I was at camp, which I was for 2 weeks each summer as a camper and youth counselor, and one week each winter, I still lived largely outdoors with 100+ other kids my age and masses of time to wander in the woods.]

College was in the woods again, (because any small liberal arts college in New England is in the woods by default), but the societal die was cast. I still recall with disgust and mild outrage an ad I saw in the 1990s in which various (mostly white iirc) children talk about walking outside home from school instead of taking the bus, or going outside to the park alone, and never coming home, and ends with a young black boy inside his house saying “I came right home and here I am” and leans back to play a video game with his mom. Hoooly crap, the implied racism that Black children do not belong outside, are not safe outside, on top of the regular old fear-mongering!! Yikes! But we live in this US, where on Dec 22, 2024, a mom was arrested because her 10 year old went for a walk down the street. Because we human beings, especially young people with more limited buying power, who don’t have the excuse of going to a job to make money or a store to spend money, do not belong outside, according to the extractive efforts of the corporate machine. So yeah, they (the forces that want to control every facet of human life) want us inside, in neat little boxes with IP addresses. Which leads to the next thing: isolation.

Isolated

When we live(d) outside, we had much more chance for casual or intentional interaction with friends and neighbors, or to have different spaces that fostered different conversations with family and household members. Think about your experiences of being casually or purposefully outside, or movies you’ve seen set before 1980. People sit around outside in the cool of the evening, or they move purposefully around outside in the cold of the day. There’s a generally populated “background noise” that helps everyone feel connected, held in a web of community, like it or not, that helps everyone regulate their emotions and interactions a bit more. 

It’s a mammal thing; we primates are, in the broadest sense, a herd animal, and having other primates around doing regular things like sitting around or chatting idly or doing work is reassuring on a deep level, because it lets us know there’s no jaguars around ready to pounce. You might not like your neighbor, but you’ll say hello in a civil way, and when you’re all out shoveling the snow, you chat about how bad it used to be, because if your neighbor who’s kind of retentive about their monocrop of lawn isn’t worried about jaguars, it’s a good bet you can relax too. On our own, in our little boxes, it gets easier and easier to think “what if there’s a jaguar out there that wants to eat me?” and then you get people so damn afraid they shoot people for knocking on the door.

Being isolated messes us humans up. I’m not talking about the natural variance of being by nature more content in oneself and needing plenty of alone-time to recharge vs thriving on social interaction and needing plenty of different types of engagement to recharge, I’m talking about a steady breakdown of our ability to connect with other humans as human. This time of year the archetype is Scrooge, so cut off from those around him he needs supernatural intervention to fix his fate before it’s too late. And, to the point of this essay, he represents an extractive corporate interest that is surely killing Tiny Tim by underpaying Bob Cratchet. Which is pretty depressing.

Depressed and consuming online

Being separated from the natural world outside contributes to depression. We know this. So does being cut off from other humans whose company would help us self-regulate and would help us recharge our emotional and mental reserves through stimulating useful chemical production in our brains. (There’s a lot of research on this; one starting place is Last Child in the Woods.)

When we are depressed, which I always connect in my mind to oppressed, we’re not acting or doing what’s in our best interest as art-making apes. Instead of telling stories and thinking out new ways to decorate ourselves and our surroundings, or even just making sure we can sleep safe and have enough to eat, everything is exponentially more difficult, because our circumstances are rough or our particular brain-chemical-making ability kinda suck, or hey, both!. Which makes us naturally want any way out of that space, any way to grab a spark, a shred, a moment, of feeling better. Enter, the dopamine hit of seeing a funny thing or buying something we think will give us more dopamine in the future. Because it’s being marketed to us as a dopamine-delivery item. Which is generally much more in the best interest of the company doing the marketing than in the interest of the depressed and isolated person stuck in their box with the IP address and the shipping address.

Layer in the whole COVID pandemic and the way 2020 slammed the door on even the other inside spaces we had left, the cafes and conventions and game stores and friends’ homes, and hell yeah, I’ve been doing more shopping online as a safety precaution. Even as we keep up to date with vaccines and follow mask mandates and do constant risk assessment years later to try to safely reconnect, that online shopping impulse is now a one-two-three punch of dopamine, convenience, and public health consciousness that’s sometimes tough to untangle from the marketing. Also several smaller local stores closed, but damn, I miss chatting with the paint guy at the hardware store for no reason. And walking to the bakery for the weekly coffee meet-up has become a lot more complicated, but worth it.

What to do

Play games. Connecting around play is so extremely human, so very primate, so absolutely mammalian, it’s in our DNA. We can’t not. We’ll play with other mammals if we get the slightest excuse or invitation — cats and dogs are really good at inviting us to play! Play with friends at home, play with strangers at the library. Play games you have had for years, that you love, that you somehow don’t play because there’s all these new ones. Play games because it makes you talk to people, or even just type to people, and think about the world a little differently for a while. 

When it’s safe, gather and talk about anything. About games, about the weather, about the state of the world, about what you’d do if you won the billion dollar jackpot (but you know better than to buy a ticket, because the house always wins). Remember what makes us human is making art, alone and together, and not what a billionaire wants to box us into as a consumer. Fighting the machine of late-stage extractive capitalism is not a thing we can do alone, but together  — together we have a chance. That’s our strength and our resilience; we band together and we make art and we play games.

And you know what I think? I think it terrifies the massive corporations. If we remember we can just play games together instead of fear each other; if we can use roleplaying to try on other ways of being and see glimpses of each other’s points of view and practice empathy; if we expand our curiosity about the world and history and other people, and think a lot about different ways of solving problems, we become unhooked from their profit margin driven existence, and start living our own lives again. 

If we can imagine a better world, we can make it. One game, one connection, at a time.