I’ve been recording little instagram videos of myself, mostly to promote my various music projects, records coming out, shows coming up, that sort of thing. I’ll do or say something silly for about 30 seconds and then I’ll conclude with some announcement about the music. The other day, though, I recorded a video in which I talked seriously about how I am personally dealing with the shit-show that is these United States of America in January of 2026. With the insanity of this current administration–tanking the economy, decimating social services and humanitarian aid, defunding PBS, indiscriminately and illegally bombing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping heads of state from Venezuela, threatening to take over Greenland, conspiring to cover up for pedophiles by withholding the release of the Epstein files, and finally, terrorizing people who live in Blue cities by deploying the National Guard and Ice Agents, who have brutalized and murdered innocent civilians–it is easy to fall into despair. At any rate, I recorded a little video message to say out loud and publicly, essentially, the little piece of wisdom that’s on a refrigerator magnet on our Kitchen-Aid, that joy is a form of resistance. I listed the various ways I’m allowing myself the experience of joy, and I encouraged people to seek out joyful experiences in their own way, and I had a message of gratitude for folks who find themselves compelled to enter the fray through street protests, marches, vigils, and other acts of civil disobedience, and I urged them to please be careful.
I decided not to post the video.
First of all, who the hell am I? And from my place of privilege, in no serious danger from any direction on my life or liberty, and in no way making myself vulnerable in protest or any other kind of active disruption, what possible authority do I have to advise anyone about how to take care during these difficult times? As a teacher, I sometimes found myself comforting large groups of students dealing collectively with some difficulty or another, but that was another life ago. As a musician, a creative person, an entertainer, a writer, I appropriately no longer find myself in that position. So I shelved the video so as not to appear as a kind of performative, shoe-gazing, navel-gazing, pollyanna-seeming, rose-colored glasses-wearing white dude who is in absolutely zero danger.
It’s not that those of us in privilege, so long as we have empathy and compassion, don’t feel the stress and anxiety of the moment, and it’s not that we don’t need to talk about and take steps to alleviate our dread. It is not that we can’t have some kind of influence or impact. For me, it was a question of the medium with which I thought to express these ideas, and I came to the conclusion that an 90 second instagram reel was the wrong medium. Those things I wanted to say are still worthy of being said and may in fact help someone else along. So I decided to write this blog entry.
Joy is a form of resistance. In some ways, it is funny that this is actually a magnet on my refrigerator. It nevertheless proves to be true during trying times. It was true during the COVID 19 pandemic. It has been true through the most difficult times, personally, of my life. It was true during the first Trump administration, and it is true now, especially now. If my place is not to be an activist or an agitator, at least in the traditional way of protesting, marching, getting into “good trouble,” I can at least develop some strategies to prevent myself from slipping into depression and despair.
First of all, I haven’t had any alcohol in 15 days. I took a couple of sips of champagne on New Year’s Eve, but since then it has been coffee, water, seltzer, and non-alcoholic beer for me. It’s been more tempting than ever to anesthetize myself with booze, especially over the last week, but I have successfully resisted. There’s a certain amount of joy in being able to stop drinking, even if only for a month. There’s some joy in the realization that I’m getting better sleep (for the most part), having more vivid dreams, feeling more rested, having more energy, thinking with more clarity, feeling more productive.
Secondly, I am immersing myself in creative endeavors. I am playing a lot of drums and singing. I’m getting ready to perform some shows with my cover band SuperWave and also preparing a set of Here Comes Everybody music for the 20th anniversary record release party for our album Submarines. All that is pretty exciting and pretty joyful. And in that same music vein, as you probably know if you’ve visited the blog, I have for the last 88 days embarked on a monumental challenge of listening to every single record in my vinyl collection and writing a poem-like-thing about each artist, whether I listen to just one album of theirs or six. To date, in 88 days, I have written 69 poem-like-things and listened to 144 albums, a significant number of which were double record sets. Additionally, I have written a number of these “We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program” entries when I felt like diverging for a moment from the listening challenge. So I have found tremendous joy in my neglected record collection and in writing almost every day.
Thirdly, I have maintained a morning practice of sitting meditation for 76 consecutive days. For 20 minutes every morning I experience the joy of silence and of conscious breathing.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I have done my best to stay connected to my tight knit group of friends and loved ones. I see them as often as I can. I reach out to them intentionally as often as I can. I reflect with gratitude about their presence in my life, even when, or especially when, I can’t be with them. This fills me with joy. And finally, in January, when the weather allows (which is often these days) I get outside, walk the dogs, futz around in the yard, tinker with things, do some outdoor chores, and generally try to find a sense of awe in the ordinary: these gigantic oak trees, the variety of mushroom growing up through the grass, the leaves three feet deep in the flower beds, the warmth of the sun on a Winter’s day, these great big garden spiders and their miraculous webs outside our windows.
Find your joy and celebrate it and share it as often and as widely as you can. That’s the ticket.
Don’t get me wrong, please. I do not live in a perpetual state of bliss. I find myself angry sometimes, disappointed, visited by intense moments of melancholy or sadness, sometimes because of externals, like watching top government officials lie with impunity, but sometimes too just because I by no means feel I have arrived, that I am somehow living the perfect life. I’ve got stuff to work on, believe me, and that work grows exponentially more urgent with each passing year. Ultimately, the teachings of the stoics come to the forefront, that we cannot control external events. The only thing we have control over is the way that we think and the way that we act. We gotta try to live the following, from Meditations, perhaps by ignoring the Roman supremacist and sexist language right out of the gate. It was written, after all, in the year 180. I’ll leave you with this:
“Concentrate every minute like a Roman— like a man— on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can— if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”–Marcus Aurelius
michael jarmer 