“I Can’t Figure It All Out Tonight”
On Business As (Un)Usual in Times of Collapse
For the past decade — since founding the free “addiction recovery media empire” Since Right Now — I’ve been moving with increasing velocity toward a professional singularity: only doing work that supports the greater good. It started as a whisper of discomfort, a subtle but persistent cognitive itch, and has evolved into something more like a moral and ethical GPS recalculating my career path with each compromised project I decline (Fine! Or, if need be, accept. I’m tryna pay bills!). The trajectory is clear: I’m simultaneously narrowing my professional focus while expanding my definition of what constitutes “meaningful work” — work that actually betters lives instead of merely optimizing the machinery that extracts from them.
There’s a moment in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything (1989) — the film that launched a thousand boombox memes — when Lloyd Dobler delivers his raw, stumbling manifesto at a dinner table surrounded by Reagan-era American Dream adherents with their beige personalities and off-the-shelf politics. When asked about his future plans, he doesn't reach for the safety of socially acceptable ambition but instead offers this:
“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that."
I keep thinking about this scene lately — watching our collective performance of normalcy while authoritarianism doesn’t so much creep as scurry across our institutions. We’re all Lloyd Dobler now, sitting awkwardly at the dinner table of late-stage capitalism, trying to articulate why everything feels wrong while everyone else passes the mashed potatoes (and/or gas and/or their pipe of choice).
The Shrinking List
Martin Niemöller’s famous confession — you know the one about “First they came for ...” — has become something of a progressive liturgy, repeated with solemn nods at every new rights restriction. What’s becoming increasingly apparent is that the list is shorter than many of us (particularly those cushioned by whiteness², wealth² cisheteronormativity², or suburban distance²) imagined. The groups being “come for” aren’t theoretical future targets; they’re real-time casualties of a system that’s dropping its pretense of inclusivity like a snake shedding its (orange) skin.
The gap between when they come for “them" and when they come for “us" is collapsing. Turns out privilege isn't immunity — it's just a slightly longer fuse. And, as the meme goes, the road to fascism is paved with people telling you to stop overreacting — right up until the moment they're scrambling to explain why this particular implementation of authoritarian control is actually quite reasonable and necessary.
It’s like sitting at a dinner table in a room actively engulfed in flames, politely discussing career trajectories while pretending the wallpaper isn’t peeling from the heat.
Cosplaying Normalcy
Meanwhile, we’re all cosplaying normalcy with increasing desperation. We schedule dentist appointments six months out. We plan vacations for next summer. We contribute to retirement accounts that assume both our survival and the survival of financial systems. We attend meetings about Q3 projections while the projections for democracy itself look increasingly uncertain.
This isn’t mere denial — though there’s plenty of that — it’s also a form of resistance. Holding onto routine becomes a radical act when routine itself is threatened. The small decisions to continue living as though tomorrow will resemble today is both a delusion and a declaration: I refuse to surrender the ordinary.
What compounds this performance is a particularly modern form of decision paralysis — not the paradox of choice that comes from too many options, but the paralysis of triage without authority. We're witnessing a society-wide version of the bystander effect, where everyone assumes someone else must be in charge of responding to the multiple overlapping emergencies. It's like sitting at a dinner table in a room actively engulfed in flames, politely discussing career trajectories while pretending the wallpaper isn't peeling from the heat. We're all Lloyd Dobler now, except instead of boomboxes we're holding protest signs that slowly dissolve into the thickening smoke. The exits might be marked, but we're still passing appetizers and debating whether Kendrick's halftime show or Jane Fonda's SAG speech was the more effective call to arms (and, more importantly, for whom) — without actually arming ourselves with anything beyond hot takes.
So we default to what we know: business as usual, with the occasional nervous glance toward the growing flames, murmuring “This is fine" while everything most definitely is not. Meanwhile, the guardians of respectability — the fathers of our collective Dianes — continue expecting coherent five-year plans from a generation watching their streaming queues fill with dystopian fiction that feels increasingly like documentary.
The Dobler Dilemma
Which brings us back to Lloyd. What made his dinner speech revolutionary wasn’t just his rejection of soulless commerce (though there’s that), but his raw willingness to “say anything” — to name the contradiction everyone else was politely (willfully?) ignoring.
We find ourselves in a collective Dobler Dilemma: keep passing the potatoes in silence or stand up and say the uncomfortable thing, knowing it might not change minds but at least it breaks the spell of performed normalcy.
Or perhaps it's less a Dilemma and more a Dobler Effect³ — where the perceived pitch of crisis shifts depending on your relative position to its source. The warning sounds different when you're standing in its path versus watching from what feels like a safe distance — until suddenly the wavelengths compress for everyone simultaneously, and that distant siren becomes tomorrow's doorbell.
The question isn’t whether to speak up — that’s become moral imperative in a moment when silence equals complicity. The question is what to say when the cost of saying anything rises daily, when each word carries more weight because there may be fewer people left speaking.
We’re all spending time with the things we love while watching those things transform under systems that value neither love nor things that can’t be monetized.
And yet — facing the enormity of collapse, there’s something enviably straightforward about Lloyd’s ultimate response to the pressure of articulating a life philosophy on command. When backed into a conversational corner about his future plans, he delivers perhaps his most honest line of all: “I don’t know, I can’t figure it all out tonight, sir. I’m just kinda hanging with your daughter.”
There’s a lesson in that casual deflection — not as abdication, but as a refusal to perform comprehensive solutions to systemic problems during dessert. Sometimes naming the paralysis itself — the impossibility of solving everything in one dinner conversation — is its own form of truth-telling.
Business As (Un)Usual
So we continue — attending the meetings, buying the groceries, doing the laundry, posting the content — living business as unusual while trying to inject meaning and resistance into spaces designed for compliance. We’re all trying to spend time with the things we love while watching those things transform under systems that value neither love nor things that can’t be monetized.
Perhaps instead of Lloyd’s famous boombox moment, what we need to remember is his dinner table declaration — that sometimes naming the wrongness out loud, even awkwardly, even when it makes everyone uncomfortable, is the first step toward refusing it.
What would it look like if we all stopped pretending? If we interrupted our Zoom (or Meet or Teams or Webex or …) calls to say, “I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed... especially when basic rights are being processed, bought, and sold by the highest bidders"?
At minimum, it would break the spell. At maximum, it might help us understand we’re not alone in our unease — that beneath the performance of business as usual, most of us are feeling the ground shift.
The dinner guests thought Lloyd was naïve. History proved them wrong. The ones who see the wrongness and name it aren’t the fools at the table — they’re the ones who might just save it.
So keep spending time with what you love. Keep living as though tomorrow matters. But don’t mistake your performance of normalcy for acceptance of the abnormal. Say anything — especially the uncomfortable truth. The list of those who can speak freely is shrinking daily, and your moment at the microphone may be briefer than you think.⁴
FOOTNOTES
John Cusack is a founding member of Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Presenting.
See: Doppler effect
You could start by not being an asshole and saying something in the comments. I mean, you’re already on stage and you’ve got the mic.
I know, I know — Starbucks bad. Most of my coffee is consumed at home and/or from local, independent shops. Don’t come at me.
Your coffee donation keeps this armchair agitator caffeinated and conspiring while Starbucks⁵ remains available without a prescription.
From Left:
Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack¹) holding an Error Dome “Disobey” poster, Diane Court (Ione Skye), James Court (John Mahoney). All in the KC Green’s “This is fine.” dog’s burning room. / Mashup: the Error Dome
