Now Seems Like a Bad Time to Die

Is America in its third act, or is the movie over?

There’s never really a great time to die. Even the most perfectly timed departures — like croaking after your favorite NFL team wins the Super Bowl or keeling over seconds after completing a marathon (ideally, after the finish line) — are still, by nature, pretty inconvenient. Death, as it turns out, is a major bummer.

But some times are worse than others. And right now? This feels like a particularly bad time to assume room temperature.

Not because the world is so beautiful and inspiring that it would be a shame to leave it. No, quite the opposite. It’s a bad time to die because America is in such a profound, historic state of disarray that if you walk out now, you’ll never get to see how it all turns out. You’ll miss the ending — or whatever twist the writers are planning for season 249 of this increasingly unstable American experiment.

It’s like falling asleep five minutes before the end of a movie you’ve watched for two and a half hours. In every RomCom, there’s a moment at the end of the second act where you think there’s no way this couple can possibly end up together, but they always do.

But America is not a movie, and there is no guarantee of a happy ending. In this version, the film is called “Democracy,” and the popcorn is on fire.

For almost 250 years, Americans have taken comfort in a kind of unspoken narrative arc: that no matter how stupid things get, no matter how Anthony Wieners (“Anthonys Wiener?”) get exposed or how many wars we accidentally start, eventually the center holds. The institutions primarily work. The country lurches forward.

In the late 1960s, Joan Didion famously observed that the center was not holding in American culture. Today, you get a similar feeling: that the center isn’t holding so much as melting. (And we desperately need Didion, who died in 2021, around to document it.)

We’re in a moment where truth has become optional, where a significant chunk of the population is openly rooting against the concept of objective reality. Kids aren’t learning the basics of government, English, or math. Half the country thinks we’re in the middle of a fascist takeover. The other half thinks we’re living through a communist coup. And a third half thinks AI will turn us all into slobbering zombies by next Tuesday. (It will take at least a year for this to happen.)

It’s chaos. Presidential candidates are standing trial between campaign rallies. Making fun of your wheelchair-bound political opponents and then lying about it is enough to make you a party leader. TikTok has replaced books. Reality is curated by algorithms, edited by partisans, and delivered via energy drink-sodden influencers.

So if you’re someone who’s spent a lifetime watching, absorbing, and occasionally yelling about America — if you’ve followed every twist and turn of this grand and often idiotic national soap opera — you want to know how the story ends. Or at least whether the country dies before you do.

That especially goes for people who spent their lives working to ensure America served as a functioning democracy. Recently, former GOP congresswoman (and sometimes Donald Trump target of derision) Mia Love passed away of brain cancer, writing an optimistic piece for the Free Press before she left. In 2015, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away without ever seeing whether his lifetime of work supporting freedom and democracy could withstand the Donald Trump era.

Maybe you’ve spent years tracking the decline of civic virtue like it’s a slowly unraveling sweater, or you’ve wasted entire afternoons doomscrolling through culture war nonsense about testicle tanning and whether green M&Ms make you sufficiently horny. You’ve invested. You’ve cared. You’ve argued with people you haven’t spoken to on Facebook since Bill Cosby was best known as a comedian.

And now, just as the action is really heating up, you’re going to… what? Check out?

Now?

It feels wrong. You’d at least like to know which dystopia we end up with. Do we find our footing again, somehow? Or do we quietly fade into a lesser empire, remembered mostly for our contributions to obesity and memes?

These are things a person wants to see. We’ve come too far to be cut off now.

Of course, this may be the problem. Maybe the actual illness is the expectation that history has an ending, that America is a show with a satisfying conclusion in store. That we’ll wake up one day and everything will make sense.

But America has never made that kind of promise. The country isn’t a narrative. It’s a process — messy, loud, occasionally inspiring, and often deeply stupid. It’s a noisy family road trip that never ends and where nobody ever gets to pick the music.

Still, you want to know where it’s all heading.

You want to see whether Gen Z saves us or maintains the White House as a full-time cruelty factory. You want to know if AI becomes a tool for enlightenment or just a faster way to spread catfishing and conspiracy theories. You want to see whether this Great Unraveling leads to some kind of new social contract or just more yelling, forever.

You want to know if we finally get a functioning Congress again — one that doesn’t harbor pedophiles or public hand job enthusiasts or enemies of the gazpacho police. You want to know if the average voter ever cares again. Or if caring itself becomes quaint, like using a fax machine or telling people to take a “chill pill.”

More than anything, you want to know if it was all worth it — the caring, the arguing, the occasional glimmers of hope. You want to see if the country that once landed on the moon can manage, say, a functioning primary ballot.

It’s not that death would rob you of more years. It would rob you of the answers. And that, somehow, feels worse.

Because if the country does collapse — if the Constitution finally gives up and leaves us a Post-it note saying “Good luck” — you want to be there for it. You want to make one last bitter joke. You want to update your running list of “Signs of the Apocalypse” with a final, satisfying entry.

But if we somehow, miraculously, pull it together — if America climbs out of the mess, dusts itself off, and remembers what it’s doing — you want to see that, too.

You want to be able to say: “Huh. Didn’t see that coming.”

And then, maybe, you’d be okay heading out.

But not now.

Not when it’s just getting weird.

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