Where the Revolution Went
Sitting in Berlin and feeling nothing. That’s what I keep coming back to. I came here half-expecting to absorb something through the walls—that residual charge a city carries when it’s been the stage for enough history. Revolution, resistance, the particular electricity of people deciding that enough was enough. I walked around expecting to feel it and found concrete, traffic, a corner shop. Same empty chest I brought with me on the train.
What I’ve finally worked out is what’s actually missing. Not a cause—there are plenty of those. What’s missing is a reason to fight. A real one. The kind history keeps distributing to other generations like the supply is inexhaustible.
Look back far enough and the pattern is everywhere: people finding something worth pushing against. Oppression, injustice, a state that had crossed a line everyone agreed was a line. It didn’t just give them something to do—it gave them a reason to exist, a way to be larger than themselves, a guarantee that someone would write their name down eventually. You don’t get remembered for going along.
And now? There’s no shortage of fires. Surveillance. Corporate capture of everything. Animal cruelty on an industrial scale. The slow, comfortable hollowing-out of things that once meant something. Every one of these is real. Every one of them should be enough. But there’s no shared enemy, no obvious face to pin it to, and without that the anger disperses. It becomes ambient. It becomes weather.
So instead we fight ourselves. I include myself in this without hesitation. We’re so free—genuinely, almost obscenely free by historical standards—that we’ve started turning inward for the resistance we can’t find outward. We drink. We cut. We purge. We find ways to feel something by making the body the battlefield, because the actual battlefields are either invisible or too diffuse to locate. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway.
The more embarrassing version—the one I recognize most—is the displacement. Slaying undead in World of Warcraft instead of thinking for five minutes about what the supply chains behind my phone actually look like. Getting genuinely upset about some brand mascot getting redesigned while the exploitation running the global economy hums along unbothered. I’m not exempting myself from any of this. I’m describing my Tuesday.
The trust collapse doesn’t help. PETA has been caught killing the animals it claims to protect. Major charity organizations have been exposed misappropriating donations enough times that it barely registers anymore. The institutions that should be channeling outrage have made outrage itself feel stupid. That’s not an accident—it’s more useful, to certain people, if you direct your energy at nothing.
What I’m genuinely afraid of is staying in this holding pattern. Waging little proxy wars against things that don’t deserve it, or against people I actually love, because I can’t locate the real target. The energy has to go somewhere; that’s the logic. Get up. Turn off whatever’s numbing you. Point yourself at something that’s actually wrong. But I’m aware that I’m writing this in Berlin of all places, the city that should feel like a live wire, and I still feel nothing. Maybe that’s the most honest thing I’ve put here.