December 17, 2025
The Future Arrives Already Rehearsed
My son got his driver’s license last month. He’s a good driver but every time he takes the keys, my stomach ties itself into a knot. It’s the usual parental fear of accidents and something deeper, the world he’s driving into.
We’re raising two teenagers who are smarter and more aware than we ever were at their age. We’re middle class, comfortable by any reasonable measure. But that comfort feels thinner than it used to. This week, I’ve been watching the news trying to connect the dots between the headlines and that knot in my stomach.
We’re rehearsing a future that none of us want to see. We’re practicing how to live with less, how to trust less, how to expect less.
Rehearsing Insecurity
Take the economy. A new NPR poll this week found that President Trump’s economic approval has hit a new low of 36%. The poll reveals a quiet, devastating reality: for 70% of Americans, expenses now match or exceed their income every month. That includes 77% of Black families and 78% of Latino families .
This is a recession in the old sense and a practice of insecurity. We are all, in our own ways, learning the job of being financially insecure. The job description includes mastering the art of the payment plan, choosing which bill to delay, and deciding whether a trip to the doctor is worth the risk of medical debt. We’re adapting. But what does this constant adaptation evolve into? It evolves into a society where debt is normal, savings are a luxury, and the social contract is replaced by a collection of individual survival plans.
This is what the philosopher Charles W. Mills called an “epistemology of ignorance” or a situation where the reality of struggle is actively ignored by those in power. When the President calls the affordability crisis a “hoax,” he’s being dishonest, disingenuous, and reinforcing a pattern where the lived experience of millions is dismissed in favor of a narrative that serves the powerful. The powerful are responding perfectly to the incentives we offer. It’s a complex responsive process where our individual adaptations like taking on debt and working multiple jobs reproduce the very insecurity we’re trying to escape.
A Repetitive Exercise of Harm
This rehearsal is economic, physical, and psychological.
This week, a CNN investigation revealed that Americans have lost over a quarter of a billion dollars this year to crypto ATM scams. Many of them targeting the elderly inside familiar convenience stores like Circle K. The company makes millions renting space to these machines while employees are told, “It’s not our machine, it’s not our problem.”
Think about that pattern. A trusted space becomes a site of extraction. A corporation profits from the vulnerability it hosts. Law enforcement is overwhelmed. Victims are isolated. Each scam is an individual tragedy, but together they’re rehearsing a future where trust is a liability and public spaces are fraught with risk. We’re learning to be suspicious, to be vigilant, and to protect ourselves because we can’t rely on institutions to do it for us.
This same repetitive exercise of harm is playing out on a global scale. The President announced a “TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE” of Venezuela, an act a sitting US Congressman called “unquestionably an act of war.” This is an act that will directly harm millions of ordinary Venezuelans and justified by narratives of terrorism and drug smuggling for which the state has offered very little public evidence in support. We’re rehearsing a future where military force replaces diplomacy and the suffering of civilians is considered acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of national interest.
Two Rehearsals, Two Vastly Different Futures
Look at the two mass shootings that dominated the news this week.
In Sydney, Australia, a father-and-son team inspired by ISIS killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach. It was the nation’s worst mass shooting in nearly three decades. The response was immediate. The surviving attacker was charged with murder and terrorism and the nation began a conversation about doubling down on its already-strict gun control laws.
In Providence, Rhode Island, a gunman opened fire in a Brown University classroom. Five days later, the shooter is still at large. The response has been a manhunt, enhanced surveillance photos, and police patrols at local schools. There has been no significant national conversation about policy change.
Australia spent the past 30 years rehearsing a response to mass violence that centers collective safety and policy action. America spent the past 30 years rehearsing a response that centers individual vigilance, normalized fear, and political gridlock.
Interrupt Practice
So what do we do? The practice ecology of After Repair, developed by the tfp Collective, offers a way forward. Some harms are irreparable. We cannot simply “fix” them. But we can interrupt the practice. Domination persists through repetition, not inevitability.
Anything that must be reproduced can be interrupted.
This interruption doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. It can be small, local, and relational.
Interrupting Economic Precarity: When the “job” is to survive the month and the only “solution” offered is debt, we can create alternatives. Mutual aid networks, community food co-ops, and time banks aren’t charity. They’re acts of solidarity that interrupts rehearsal for a future of individual financial struggle. They’re practical commitments to mutual flourishing.
Interrupting Institutional Betrayal: The Circle K employee who warns a customer about a scam is interrupting the harmful pattern of betrayal. The neighbors who create a network to help their elderly residents with technology are interrupting the harmful pattern of betrayal. They are asserting that our responsibility to each other is greater than a corporation’s profit motive.
Interrupting Violence: The courageous human at Bondi Beach who wrestled a rifle from an attacker was an interrupter. But we can’t rely on individuals. We can build community defense networks, practice de-escalation, and demand policies that make violence more difficult, not easier. We can refuse to accept that living in fear is the price of freedom.
That knot in my stomach won’t go away overnight. The world my son is driving in is the one we have all helped create through our daily practice. But the future is always unfinished. It’s being trained right now in the present. We can choose to stop practicing for a future of isolation and insecurity and start rehearsing for a future where we are responsible for each other.
It starts by noticing and then, together, choosing to interrupt.