I feel like I'm moving from the bread pill through the black pill to the grill pill. (If that sounds like complete gibberish to you, that just means you spend a healthy amount of time offline.)
What am I talking about? Political "pills" came about as a reference to the Matrix; the "red" pill woke you up to reality, while the "blue" pill meant staying asleep, as it were. The original use of these terms was by the far right, particularly in "incel" spaces, which is ironic, seeing as the film they referenced was written by two trans women.
That aside, the "pill" description of politics soon gained a life of its own, moved beyond the far right, and developed a dizzying array of other "pills".
The "bread pill" is used to signify either a commitment to Christianity or being "woken up" by Peter Kropotkin's "Conquest of Bread," a classic in anarchist literature. As a lifelong Christian and part of the libertarian, democratic wing of the radical left since the Bush years, I was "bread pilled" since before that was even imagined as a saying.
However, after years of seeing the failure of progressive and socialist politics, along with my own career compromises, I became more and more disillusioned, more and more hopeless. The failure to achieve social change and the seemingly doomed course of human civilization is enough to make one want to lay down, to give up. This is, roughly, the black pill.
But after the black pill, there is the "grill pill." The phrase originated with Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House, in the wake of the defeat of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. It can mean a number of things, but the essence is: removing oneself from politics (or supplementing political activism) with concrete, real, non-political things that make life worth living.
There are political notes in what Christman wrote; for one, rejecting the notion that the personal is always and endlessly political, that "silence is consent" is an impossible standard to follow in everyday life, that it’s possible to have and nurture relationships outside of politics, even with people who disagree with our politics. All this is important, but for me, it's less about this fact.
I've been actively involved in politics, as a professional and as an activist, since the War in Iraq. It became my whole life, my whole personality. As a writer, an organizer, an activist, and a professional political operative, politics became a core aspect of my identity. Even when I turned to diversions, I looked for the “political messages” and “social commentary” within them. My old childhood crushes with fantasy and science fiction and band and theater came crashing down, as I became a Very Serious Person, a funny but utterly committed socialist at a tender young age.
I never really developed hobbies. I never really developed much of a life or an identity outside of politics, either the grind of 60 hour campaign weeks or the Occupy protests or the writing and reading of political theory or the non-profit board meetings. It took up all my spare space.
So what, then, does the Grill Pill mean to me? It means (at this time, and always subject to change) an acceptance of the chaotic madness of our current time, and attempting to seek meaning elsewhere. It’s a resignation to the failure of progressive or radical politics, which seems pessimistic, but it’s also an embrace of the joy of life and trying to find something concrete, tangible, to take my time. The name itself comes from the notion of “just wanting to grill” and get beyond politics, but unfortunately, we’ll never be at a peaceful point of being “beyond politics”. We can only get beyond politics by choice.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve always loved music; maybe I can work on doing more music criticism, or even learning an instrument, to supplement my caterwauling at karaoke. I need to learn to cook and get past my phobias in the kitchen. The James Webb recently rekindled my almost forgotten love of astronomy. I’m a lousy painter when it comes to realism, but abstract works can be fun. And who knows? Maybe I can get better with practice. Maybe get back into writing and reading fiction again, poetry again. Woodworking sounds nice. Who knows, there’s a thousand hobbies.
And I doubt I’ll leave politics entirely behind, particularly from a work standpoint. I’m looking at some campaign work to round out the midterm; there’s a referendum I plan to work on next year. But to the extent I remain in politics as a professional, I think I’d rather work on single issue campaigns. The fight for drug law reform around cannabinoids and hallucinogens, for instance. It’s an important cause; it would materially improve people’s lives; and there’s enough money in it to make a bit of a living at it.
The point, though, is I’m getting burnt out. Twenty years of advocating for a libertarian and democratic socialism, or even just for progressive populist reforms, has left me feeling drained with little to show for it. I could wake up tomorrow and feel like I used to, but I know this is an unsustainable path.
This isn’t to say I’m fully abandoning the prospects of emancipatory social change, or that I might not pick up the banner again and storm the Bastille. But when or if I do, I need something more concrete than politics to anchor myself to. Which, one hopes, will lead to my being a better organizer than someone with no life outside the struggle.
Or at worst, I can learn to grill.