Ten of Wands

I’m writing to you from the other side of Thanksgiving, appropriately one day late to highlight just how overwhelmed I am this time of year (and definitely not because I just couldn’t get myself to write something in time for yesterday).

It is officially 21 days until Christmas. That’s three weeks, motherfuckers. Three weeks. Ten minutes ago it was Thanksgiving. Yesterday I was paper mache-ing an Audrey 2 costume for my eldest.

This time of year is relentless, I say in my best approximation of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Come October 1st, the onslaught of the holiday season is upon us, an attack from all sides. When you have children (and you’ve set an outrageous precedent), you have no choice but to get into your fucking workshop and cook up some goddamn magic.

Unfortunately, this year, I have been radicalized by an unfortunately-timed viewing of a Netflix documentary. After Thanksgiving, Zack and I watched Buy Now, a documentary that will ruin your life, but that I still recommend with my whole chest. In a fun way, it’s Netflix being bitchy about other streaming companies (Amazon, Apple) — so there’s a kind of cunty feeling to the whole thing. Can you believe how evil these companies are? Netflix whispers to its viewers… Netflix, you can’t hide from us, we know what you did to the entertainment business. I say all of this with love, of course. I must continue to be employed by all of these companies, such is the devil’s deal I’ve made with capitalism.

Buy Now is about consumerism, about humanity’s entire lack of free will when it comes to our desire to keep hitting that “Buy Now” button. And unfortunately for Christmas, I’m viscerally concerned about my family’s contributions to Trash Island. I’ve always been “concerned” in quotation marks. Of course I care about my carbon footprint. Of course I care about the world I leave for my children and their children. At the same time, Capitalism (and its sneaky sales tactics like holidays) is quite good at lulling us into submission. Even if I never buy a single thing again, the world is still pretty much cooked because of Capitalism’s relentless pressure for companies to grow. You cannot grow a company if your product is well made. There are a finite number of customers. You have to create repeat customers. The only way to do that is to make shit that is destined to become trash.

Your fancy, expensive phone? It’s shiny trash in your pocket. They just released a new iPhone. Get ready for the one in your pocket to start draining its battery quicker and quicker until you’re forced to buy the new one. And then what happens to the one in your pocket? The one you paid hundreds of dollars for? Well, that one is trash now. Sorry, dolls. There’s no real way to fix it (you’ll learn in this documentary that you should definitely watch). 

The Company makes sure of that. 

Since I was six years old and learned about the Holocaust all at once (because I was shooting a movie in which one of my three lines of dialogue was “Heil Hitler”), I’ve been obsessed with writing about the banality of evil. In many ways, almost everything I write is about how individuals compromise their morality to fit in, how each of us is more capable of evil than we realize or want to admit.

This past week, I’ve been thinking about the banality of evil as it relates to capitalism and consumerism. Capitalism is the air we breathe, and we’re all complicit in its harms. I honestly believe that companies are, by design, sociopathic (except in order to be a sociopath, you have to be a person, and I refuse to submit to the idea that companies are people). A company under capitalism has only one aim — growth and profit. Companies use the labor of people to grow, and they use our humanity against us to make us buy. They wriggle into our subconscious with algorithms that understand who we think we are and who we'd like to be, what we’re most afraid of, our deepest insecurities. Our actions are not our own. How could they be? We are blithely unaware of the ways that the system is designed to exploit us. 

[I realize that I sound like a college freshman. I promise these ideas are not new to me, just that I’m finally investigating them instead of using denial to pretend they don't exist]

Millions of people work for The Company (any company, all of them), and each individual works within that company to provide for their family, to save for their retirement, to stave off homelessness, to protect against medical emergencies that could devastate them and their children. In America especially, we work at a pace that (by design) makes it difficult to stop and think about what we are doing, what we participate in, how we might do it better. Our phones have captured all of our free time, the time we might spend dreaming of a better world, unionizing, or even just, say, looking our kids in the eye so that they might be secure enough to save us in the future.

This is the state of mind I’m in three weeks from Christmas, the holiday I love the most, and the holiday that manipulates our nostalgia so we will overspend in the hopes that maybe this year’s Christmas will be the best one yet. Maybe this year's Christmas will help us forget the horrors of the world.

I want off the ride. 

I am in a Ten of Wands state of mind. The Ten of Wands is burnout. It’s the smoking countryside after the wildfire. I am exhausted, bone tired, and my heart hurts, if I’m being honest. My eldest child is ten, and there is less time left with her under my roof than there are years that I’ve known her. I have so little time left to instill whatever wisdom I might have.

In the past, I would drink this Ten of Wands feeling away. I’d put on a holiday sweater and drink a bottle of wine to get into the holiday spirit. And then I’d promise myself that one of my New Years resolutions would be to try to pare down, or something vague like that. New Years Resolutions are, unfortunately, also a capitalist trap, a way to encourage you to change your entire life overnight by, you guessed it, buying shit. 

This year, I’m taking a different approach. I’m going to be making some holiday gifts (because I really really really do love to give presents). I’ve also spoken to various family members about gift giving this year — we’re pulling way back. No adult needs more than one present. And frankly, I don’t need any. I’ve got everything I could possibly want, and if there’s something I really really want, that’s a fun feeling — I would like to hang onto that feeling of desire a little longer, thank you, it gives me something to look forward to.

As far as the children go, I’m trying my best to rein it in. My kids have way too much stuff. They love stuff. How could they not? They’re my children, and I love stuff. They also have a mother who loves to give presents. But this year, I’m researching where things are coming from. I’m going to shop as small as possible. I’m going to engage in other forms of magic. I’m not buying new costumes for fucking elves on fucking shelves. 

I’m leaning into witchiness, and trying to think about this holiday season as Yule instead of Christmas. Yule is a pagan holiday that was incorporated into Christmas (fun fact, most Christian holidays are just co-opted pagan holidays — Easter? That’s Ostara, a pagan celebration of spring and resurrection, symbolized by bunnies and eggs). Yule is the quiet death before the explosion of life in the spring. Yule is about coziness and family, warmth and hygge. Yule is not a gift giving holiday, but it is a holiday of rest and wintering. 

Yule is the darkest day of the year— the winter solstice. After Yule, each day is longer than the last. In tiny increments, the sun returns. This year, Yule falls on December 21. I’ll be celebrating with rest and carbs and a simmer pot on the stove. I’ll spend a little time outside, remembering that I’m just a tiny part of a larger thing I don’t fully understand, and that my burnout is often self-inflicted (a consequence of people pleasing, an inability to set boundaries, and workaholism). I can choose to slow down. I can choose to put my phone down. I can choose to be present, to say no, to buy only what I need. 

In the past, my environmental fears would lead to paralyzation. I’d get so overwhelmed by how much would have to change to save us, that inevitably I’d give up and just opt back in to fast fashion or buying sponges on the internet instead of walking to a store. This time, I’m embracing how little control I have. I don’t think that me buying less will save anyone except myself, and it’s not going to save me from climate change. Climate change is already here. Combatting climate change requires government regulation and a paradigm shift in consciousness from the entire world. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try for it, only that individuals have less of an impact than corporate green-washing would have us believe. 

And yet, if I buy less, I am freer. If I own less, I am lighter. If I throw away less, I feel less guilt. All of that is worth it. Sometimes you have to be confronted with the burned field in order to stop lighting the match.

There have been a few things that have really brought me comfort and inspired awe in this Ten of Wands moment, and I’d love to pass them along to you:

The Telepathy Tapes — this podcast is blowing my mind. It’s not depressing, it’s not political. It is awe-inspiring. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but I would love for you to listen to it and let me know what you think. 

Notes on Nothing: The Joy of Being Nobody by Anonymous. This book is gorgeous. I happen to know the anonymous author (and I’ll NEVER tell), and they are a beautiful soul who has written a really remarkable meditation on being a person. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Read it on Yule. You won’t be sorry. And you'll be supporting an independent press! Good on you!

And if you have any recommendations (for books, shows, ways to give gifts without selling your soul, ethical companies), please leave them in the comments!