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Dear James,
I am one of the luckiest people to fall victim to DOGE. I am a military veteran and 20-year federal employee who was able to take advantage of a buyout and early retirement. I have a husband with a military pension who was not pushed out of his federal job. This allowed us to buy our dream retirement home, where I spend my days reading novels and hanging out with my dog.
And yet: I feel lost and pointless. Ungrateful. Some days I can’t get out of pajamas. I’m struggling to navigate the opportunities of my new life while witnessing the horrors unfolding in the United States and the world. How do I get past this ennui, and acknowledge the big while appreciating the small?
Dear Reader,
Stay in your pajamas.
In fact, stay in bed. Don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. And get that dog up there with you. Feel that lovely dog weight, dog density, as your dog settles and downshifts, grows heavy with unconsciousness, and makes the profound noises, the groans of contentment and secret multi-voweled suspirations, of a dog entering its sleep world. Let the dog be your teacher; let the dog be your guide. Deep-breathing animal equanimity, that’s the ticket.
I think you might be suffering from some version of survivor’s guilt. No doubt many of your colleagues had their jobs indiscriminately minced by the same whizzing DOGE machine that gifted you this painless early retirement. Meanwhile, the country you have served so well, for so long, is apparently separating into coagulated lumps of volcanic matter. And here you are in your nice house with your novels and your unscripted afternoons.
All the more reason, in my view, for you to let yourself off the hook. You don’t sound ungrateful to me—quite the opposite—and you are certainly not pointless. The shape of your new life is not going to reveal itself unless you give it some space, which is going to require from you a degree of gentleness, both with yourself and with your circumstances. There are, as you know, a hundred things you can do, a hundred places where you are needed, a hundred places indeed where it would be impossible for you to be superfluous. But you’ll get to that.
Right now I think you should deepen your relationship with idleness—which has a political value, let’s not forget. A state of honoring your whims; smelling the roses; reading books; not being driven, harried, jabbed, guilted, digitally overwhelmed: At this phase in the culture, that’s not self-care; that’s revolution.
Collectively, we’re heading into a sticky time, aren’t we? The harbingers are everywhere. I was walking to the liquor store with my son the other day, crossing a large, downward-sloping expanse of a parking lot, when a hectic jogger veered into our path, flailed past us, and almost collided with the brick wall of a T.J. Maxx before self-correcting and zigzagging away. “Reality’s breaking down, Dad,” my son observed. “That guy was like an NPC with a glitch.” (He had to explain to me what an NPC is: a nonplayer character in a video game—in other words, a character generated and controlled by the game itself.)
What I’m saying is: In the now-imminent uproar, we’re going to need all the elements. We’re going to need sane ones, and we’re going to need mad ones, and leaders and loose cannons and daredevils and bureaucrats and the driven and the opportunistic, but we’re also going to need some people who know how to savor the textures of existence. We’re going to need you, in your pajamas, with a book in your hand and your dog by your side.
Making a thoughtful cup of tea,
James
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