Hello, I’ll be your guide. My name is Nat Murphy and I’m putting together a little project. Or getting it started anyway. I’m not sure what it’s gonna end up looking like in six months (hopefully not an error page at least), but I do have a pretty good idea about what type of content I want on here, as well as the type of person I want making it. Namely, my still yet-to-be-met friends and family trying to survive the apocalypse together saying and doing whatever they feel they need to (I’m an editor, not a cop). Take this “letter from the editor” as a general mission statement, manifesto, or mumbled apology. Idk, all three work I think.

Seriously, we are in a transition period whether you like it or not. Actually there are series of very critical, major, and most likely extremely fucking catastrophic transitions underway at this very moment, most of which will take decades at the very least to shake out. And as a gentle reminder, transitions mean that the shit that is or was shall be no longer – and when you are talking about things on the scale of the changes afoot (ecosystems, world economic and political systems, water cycles (eek!), etc, etc) – then yeah, it’s apocalypse time, baby!

GenPox.com Do’s & Don’ts

But as far as this website, GenPox.com, goes: I would like this to become a platform for various voices from the end of the world, simple as. My voice being just one among many. At least that’s the plan. I’ll be running a column where I just basically express my thoughts about our world – what’s going on with it, where it seems to be going, where it should be going, etc, etc, etc. And by “our world” I mean literally fucking anything that has to do with humans and even just Life in general – physical world, nature, society, art, culture, etc, etc, etc. I’ll be calling my column “The Beautiful and the Doomed”, which, for those of you who don’t know, is a reference to the sequel to the Great Gatsby. I think. I’ll also be making a little “show” or some-such purely out of Final Fantasy game screenshots taken from my phone called UnQuesting Fire; and if from time to time I get a snuchus in my tuchus to do something else, I’ll do that, too. But honestly I mostly just want to collect, hone, and amplify other voices. It just sounds more enjoyable to me than doing a whole bunch of crap by myself, simple as.

Okay, but before I get too far ahead, I want to lay down some of my basic assumptions about Life etc and how they will affect the content of this site. For example, just like I wouldn’t debate whether the sun is out at noon on a cloudless day, I won’t be debating whether or not we are in the midst of an apocalypse. Of course we are. Here’s a few things to keep in mind before you think about “yeah, but…”-ing me:

• A societal collapse IS an apocalypse for that society. An ecosystem collapse IS an apocalypse for the living creatures that kind of depend on a stable ecosystem for, well, living. Apply this to the whole planet and, well, you should get the point by now. I hope.
• Ecosystems do not crash all at once. Including social ones, like empires for example. And they don’t collapse cleanly.

That aside, here are a few more things that I take for granted that I would like you to keep in mind as you navigate this site:

• We are all broken. Every single person alive today, no exceptions. There is no way to be truly “okay” on a dying planet. Seriously, in order to function even at a basic level we all have to bracket out and ignore so much of what is happening around us to the point that being or just seeming “okay” is itself a trauma response. Add to that all the things that you can point to and say with absolute certainty is broken behavior both in yourself and others you should have no trouble accepting it. We are all of us broken and we need to treat each other accordingly – meaning that dammit you’ve gotta be kind.
• The society that broke the world shouldn’t be defended – anything good about it is in spite of it and not because of it. The society that broke the world and then continued to break the world once it was apparent what was happening is not good. Even if you grew up in it and everything that you take for granted as “normal” comes from that society. This damn society broke you and literally everyone and everything you love (including the fucking planet) – you should not be okay with it, let alone ever defend it. You aren’t a dupe or a failure or an idiot for not realizing it sooner or for falling for it in the first place. You didn’t “fall for it” ffs, you were raised in it, just like everyone else – the “dammit you’ve gotta be kind” principle applies to yourself, too btw. The only real mistake you can make once you realize the true nature of the society you live in is to take your well-deserved anger out on the wrong target – and this includes yourself (and others of course, the rise of fascism all over the world feeds on this anger and directs it against those who are weakest and most vulnerable. It is an ideology for cowards and ignorant fools. If you’re a fascist you’re either one or the other, but usually both. Don´t be like them. And that means don’t be a fascist even to yourself either. Seriously, you don’t deserve it, you deserve a chance to heal so give it to yourself fr.).
• One of the (many) incredibly crappy things about the society that broke the world is how anti-Human and anti-Life it is. This is one of its key features and as a result it forces us to be far less than what we can and should be, and to accept things as normal or natural or inevitable that really aren’t okay at all.

My Hopes For GenPox.com

Okay, so what? Well, what I ultimately want with this site is to provide a platform for different voices from people who are just trying to survive the apocalypse with as much of their humanity intact as possible. All those roses growing in concrete out there – and while there is a lot of concrete out there, there are still in spite of it all many many many beautiful people out there doing wonderful things in pretty much every area you can imagine and a whole crap-ton that you cannot. But to me the rose growing in concrete is not a story about triumph over adversity, it is a lament that the world that humans have created for ourselves is so hostile to Life and makes it so hard for such a huge portion of the population to even exist that we have to applaud when we see any signs of Life at all. Humans are not supposed to live like that. We are supposed to make life better for each other – this is not wishful thinking, it is a principle that should guide your behavior and the policies that you support. Honestly, if it’s not your starting point then you will never ever end up there by accident, no matter what you want to call “progress”. Sorry to be blunt, but this is important: we are social animals. We need each other at an instinctual level, and at least to me there is no reason why we cannot express that need in ways that benefit all of us instead of allowing the worst of us to manipulate and twist basic human needs to make the world worse for everyone. And by the way if you think this is hyperbole: we’re talking about the people who broke the planet and still don’t care enough to change their destructive behaviors let alone try to fix what they broke.

Anyway, what I’m trying to do here is to collect as many roses growing concrete as I can, and see if we can’t strengthen and heal each other by putting our roots together. This is a place where we can commiserate with each other about what it’s like living at the end of the world that you grew up in and took for granted would always kinda be there. It can be traumatic sometimes – just existing these days, and sometimes it’s helpful to talk about these things. But this is also a place to express the beauty that people still find and still create in this world despite all the shit, and there is a lot of fucking shit, these days. And despite all the shit piles accumulating here, there, and seemingly freakin everywhere, there is still beauty, still joys, still wonderful art being made, still personal triumphs happening, still beautiful friendships being forged and story-book romances blossoming on a daily basis. And all of us are still simply human beings trying not to become another tragic statistic in a world with too many sharp edges and too many monsters that were born to be your brothers and sisters. Ngl it’s bleak out there at times. But safety in numbers has been how humans made it this far… and if we make it any further, it is the only way that I see it having a chance to happen at all. The only way that it can even somewhat barely be worth all the loss that we are just at the beginning of.

What Kind Of Humans Do We Want To Go Out Like?

Anyway, before I start bleakening up the place too much, a bit more about my take on humanity and how it’s gonna guide at least my contribution to this site as well as how I look for other contributors: one thing that I take for granted as a basic truth about humanity is that you just ain’t special. (Wait just a sec, I know this sounds bleak and I said I wasn’t gonna do that, but this ain’t bleak. It’s actually quite beautiful if you let it be.) For the record, this applies to me, your family, your heroes, even celebrities – believe it or not. This applies to everyone and it is absolutely not a bad thing. Okay, before I go any further, I just wanted to tell you that of course you are special to the close people in your life – that’s how human beings are supposed to be special, and not in the sense of some unique blessing for all the universe. Accept that every aspect of your personality, every desire you have, every single thought that pops into your head is shared by many, many others. What you have and how you have it exists (like everything else in this world) on a range or continuum – you could plot them all on a graph if you had enough information and were unapologetically nerdy enough. And that’s great, to me. It means that despite however “weird” any of your aspects may seem, you are not alone. Even if something about you is on the ass-end of the range of expected human behaviors or traits, 1%, .1%, heck even .01% of the population is still a pretty gd large number of people. You aren’t alone – you are just separated from your peers.

And so, one of the reasons I wanted to do this, and one of the main things I want to get out of it is to connect people to their people. To gather perspectives and voices from a diverse range of people to talk about whatever they feel needs to be talked about. Like all the very fucking human things that so many of us feel like we have to amputate from ourselves because no one else will get them. I’m here to tell you that: hell yeah they will! Even if it’s not easily monetizable. In fact, please, please, please, for the sake of all that you hold dear in this world, nurture the parts of you that are unmonetizable. Shrug off life as a “consumer” and re-enter the world of human relationships. Find your people. You’ve got to be the Bee Girl from the No Rain video – find the people who just get you and you get them. Start Bee-Girling life, I doubt you’ll regret it. Seriously.

Sorry But Not Caring About The Things You Oughta Doesn’t Make You Carefree

Which brings me to another little quark of mine: I hate cynicism and nihilism. There is no “truth” to either of these tendencies, there is only the resignation that comes with handing over the core of your beliefs and even your own fucking imagination to the people in power – the people who broke the world. They love when people throw up their hands and say “what does this matter? Nothing matters.” or “That’s just the way it is. That’s the way the world works. That’s life.”

Wrong on all accounts.

Seriously, folks, it’s the end of the fucking world – if you can’t bring yourself to care about anything enough to want to do something about it at this point, then at least shut the entire fuck up about it. I don’t care that you don’t care. And accept that I am definitely not alone in this. The voices of defeat and resignation have been too loud for too long, and so I am just trying to add a bit to the voices on the other side. The side that values Life; that loves humanity; the side that is tired of hearing about how they shouldn’t care about anything but themselves. On behalf of all those people, my people: shut the hell up already. 

There Ain’t No Grammar Police In Utopia

Before I wrap this letter up, a few words about grammar: I love it, but I hate the idea that the worst, most un-interesting dialect of English (or any other language) is “proper” in any way whatsoever. It ain’t. No such thing. I will be attempting to edit the language usage on here to reflect the many spoken dialects that give a language its beauty, and not forcing everything to adhere to ridiculous bourgeois standards. I’m not being pretentious here, btw, bourgeois english is what you have accepted as proper. You were lied to, get past it. And once you do, then maybe you can finally start enjoying one of the best parts of being human – the beauty of language in all of its messy-bitchedness. Stop trying to tame it and just love it. Honestly, you’ll never hear any better advice, and as a bonus it applies to basically everything that has to do with Life – human or otherwise.

How We Choogle

As to advertising and subscription type stuff: as far as advertising goes, I honestly don’t see it ever happening here. I hate advertising. And I don’t just mean because ads are beyond fucking annoying. Obviously I hate them for that reason, everyone hates them for that reason – and last I checked I’m still part of everyone. No, I also hate them because they are the lifeblood of capitalism – the disease that is literally killing our planet as we speak. So yeah, not a fan. And so nah, I don’t see ads popping up here any time soon. However, (full disclosure time:) I would like to make at least part of a living doing this, as well as making sure that any other contributors can, too. Hey, we all gotta make a living somehow, right? But I’m also not a fan of paywalls as a thing, so there would never be any “extra content” for subscribers. It’s just that if you find value in the site and it’s something you want to see around for a while then throw a bit of money this way. I’m gonna experiment with different ways to accomplish this, but probably stuff along the lines of monthly subscriptions, one time idk donations/payments, and probably some kind of tipping mechanism for individual contributors in case we run into scenarios where someone’s like “man, this doomer guy is a real drag and I don’t want to encourage his bullshit, but this person over here seems cool and I like their shit.” Idk, it’s possible. Anyway, we will start out with just the tipping for individual contributors until I get all the bureaucratic nonsense for the site as a whole worked out. So I’m gonna jeb you all for a moment and say “please clap” for anyone whose time and effort you appreciate and would like to see more from. Thanks.

Anyway, I’m gonna leave off here with just one last bit of messaging: I hope to expand this site and to keep adding friends and collaborators along the way. And so, this site will be going through changes over the next few months until it finds its own rhythms and best ways of existing while holding on for dear life and riding its clinamen as it swerves endlessly through the void. The apocalypse is going to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We simply are not going to experience it the same – and that’s okay. This is our strength: our diversity in starting points, in experiences, in ways of seeing the world and interacting with it; but also our unity in our love of Life, our love of Humanity, and our hope for the future. If you are down with these things, too, then you are most welcome here and I hope you stick around for a while.

Thanks For Comin & I Hope You Enjoy The Ride

As said above, for myself I’m planning on my own little column and fun-sized show, but I do hope to populate this site with a bunch of other people’s cool as heck stuff (hopefully in the near and then continuous future. But best laid plans of mice and men kinda stuff happens, so we’ll see.). Either way, even if this site ends up being the least visited roadside attraction in cyberspace I’ll probably still be here screaming and laughing and ugly-crying into the void anyway. Pathetic? Maybe, but friends I’m tellin ya that at some point in order to survive this apocalypse you just gotta stop caring about stuff like that. Honey, we are all Generation Apocalypse whether we want to be or not. Our only real choice is whether or not we want to try to make sure there is an “after” that’s worth surviving the collapse for, and – maybe, just fucking maybe – how we can start living for that, too. A bit at a time, but together at least. I hope.