It was the week before the election in New York City, and the vibes were acrid. It hadn’t rained in 32 days. There was a fascist rally at Madison Square Garden mere weeks before Mariah Carey’s annual Christmas show. Everyone was acting more insane than usual and seemed to be ambiently mad at one another; even Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum folded under the pressure, abruptly breaking up. On the subway, a man told me unprompted that my shoes (normal boots) were indicative of the failings of women in general. It’s true that all American elections are unhappy in their own way, but this one has felt particularly miserable, what with the naked and gleeful encroaching authoritarianism, the open threats of postelection violence, the ongoing American-backed war on Gaza, the lack of a coherent or even mutually agreed-upon reality, and Joe Biden chomping on the leg of a baby dressed as a chicken.
Personally, I had been unintentionally dissociated for months, trapped in a deep fog that allowed me to avoid all of my feelings and accidentally wander into traffic sometimes, which is a maladaptive coping mechanism I picked up as a child, not to brag. I knew that this was not the most healthy or civically responsible way to handle the otherwise stifling existential doom that lay over the country like a thick blanket as we all waited to see whether the stupidest version of autocracy would come to pass (again). I wondered how other New Yorkers were coping. What were they doing to stave off not only totalitarianism but also their own death drive? I decided to spend the final days before November 5 asking New Yorkers about their private anxieties and accordant strategies, running around the city After Hours style and calling up anyone who would talk to me, which turned out to be a truly random sampling as nobody actually liked talking about this.
In This Issue
Election Fright
I got on the subway and asked the woman sitting next to me how she was feeling. “I’m not going through anxiety,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We’re fucked either way. I will not be sober on Election Night.” She paused for a moment, looking thoughtful. “I’m never sober.” A man carrying a mysteriously huge cardboard box told me he was “not really into politics” and his only immediate concern was “getting off the train”; a youngish guy scrolling TikTok said he was “not anxious about the election — what’s gonna happen is gonna happen” and that he was “burned out” on politics. I switched train cars because at this point everyone was looking at me like I was FBI.
One car over, a young woman from Mexico told me she wasn’t able to vote but politely said she would “rather not talk about it in a public setting.” The man next to her nodded vigorously. “That’s the story right there. I’m terrified of the election. All these people saying the election is stolen? Depending on who wins, everybody is gonna go crazy and try to kill each other. You ever seen Civil War? It’s gonna be like that.” The two strangers began amiably chatting about the Yankees.
I called up Professor Kate Sweeny, an expert on “waiting anxiety” — the feeling that arises when you await a biopsy result, for example. Was it better, in this sort of liminal scenario, to attempt to be optimistic or pessimistic or to cultivate some perfect combination of both? Unfortunately, she said, it was that last one. “Right now, I am managing to do the thing that I recommend to people, which is maintain optimism until the 11th hour and then let that pessimism come in to provide some protective buffer if things don’t go as well as you hope,” she said, describing a level of mental control I have never experienced. Rebecca Solnit, the author of Hope in the Dark, a book about “optimism in an era of seeming defeat and cultural pessimism,” did not have time for conversations about assuaging anxiety; she was too busy knocking on doors in Nevada and Arizona. “We are very often encouraged to address our feelings without addressing what gives rise to those feelings — to have therapy about the house being on fire, as it were, without addressing that we can participate in putting out the fire,” Solnit said. “I’ve started calling this ‘upper-middle-class peasant fatalism.’ People seem to think that things we are deciding in the present have already been decided or are inevitable.” She quoted Terminator 2: “No fate but what we make.” Sweeny also recommended taking as much action as possible — voting, canvassing, organizing locally — then, when time allows, going into a flow state by doing something that mentally removes you from our earthly plane. I asked her how that was different from dissociation, and she said that it didn’t really matter at this point: “You just need to find something that shuts your brain down.”
Joseph S. Biehl of the Gotham Philosophical Society suggested we all try picking up a goddamn book once in a while (paraphrase mine). He recommended reading the works of Samir Chopra, Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt as well as Plato’s The Republic, which managed to predict basically the entire downfall of democracy — that annoying way it tends to devolve into tyranny — 2,500 years ago. Biehl also pointed to another philosopher, Robert B. Talisse, who argues for “trying to develop and sustain civic friendship. To really try to talk to people, listen to people, go bowling with people who aren’t necessarily in your immediate circle.”
Sorry to Talisse, but instead I had dinner at the Brooklyn apartment of my immediate circle of friends: J., a yoga teacher who is training to be a therapist, and his boyfriend, L. They directed me to a YouTube video L. watches regularly called “A Chinese Farmer Story,” in which a Zen farmer refuses to assign qualitative meaning to the random events of his life. The next morning, I watched this video many times, absorbing its lessons about material detachment and why you don’t need to get upset if your proverbial horses run away. It inspired me to call my own zen farmer, G., an organizer and activist who works upstate and has been arrested several times this past year protesting on behalf of Gaza. They see Election Week as “any other week during this genocide,” and as such, they don’t plan on voting in the presidential election, only locally, as well as continuing to organize within their community. “In a trans body, I don’t often feel safe,” they said. “So the anxiety some people are feeling for the first time right now, this threat of ‘You won’t have rights’ — that experience is not new to me. It’s just going to be like, ‘Do you want to get fucked this way, or do you want to get fucked that way?’”
The next day, I headed to a doctor’s appointment to figure out why my body had been slowly turning on me for decades, at which they drained eight vials of blood from both of my hands (I have bad arm veins) and told me in no uncertain terms to rest and drink water. Instead, I went to the strip club Pumps with several of my similarly stressed-out queer female friends. It was almost entirely empty; the strippers kept climbing down off the pole to scroll through their phones. I asked one of them how she had been feeling all week. “I’m fucked up. I keep getting into fights with everyone. I’ve gotten into three arguments this week. I’m just, like, angry,” she said. The stakes were high for her bodily autonomy; she had voted for Harris. She had ultimately decided not to work on Election Night, even though we agreed that the vibes could be interesting and the financial outcome potentially lucrative.
The bartender on duty told me that most Pumps patrons “don’t give a fuck” about the election and that she “hadn’t noticed any difference” in the clientele, or its enthusiasm for the storied Brooklyn establishment, nor had she heard anyone airing particularly deranged political views. “If somebody talks to the girls about politics, we shut it down,” she said. “But you can always tell when somebody is a Trump voter just by looking at them.” I looked around and had to agree with her. A man sitting near me told me he was “not feeling any stress about anything at all”; his friend shared that he had “a divergent view of elections.” I asked what that view was. “I don’t think anything we do matters,” he said, smiling weirdly. A ball game played on the TV as we spoke, and I asked the bartender if she would tune the TV to election coverage on the night of. “No,” she said. “We don’t want to incite riots at Pumps.”
On the drive home, my friends remarked that they all felt temporarily calmed by Pumps, like they’d been hypnotized. “Everything just melted away,” said P. “Everyone was nice to me. The music was pretty good. The lighting was nice. It does actually just feel good when people smile at you.” We wondered if going to the strip club, metaphorically but also literally, could perhaps solve the entire country’s problems and if, accordingly, we should go more often. “I would come here multiple times a week if I could afford it,” said C.
The next morning, I turned to God. I wanted to hear how some of New York’s most respected spiritual leaders were tending to their distressed communities at this moment: the Reverend Canon Eva Suarez of the Upper West Side’s Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, Rabbi Stephanie Kolin of Park Slope’s Congregation Beth Elohim, and Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid of Harlem’s Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood. “It’s been an interesting time to be a priest because it’s like everyone’s nerves are outside their skin,” said Suarez. “A lot of people’s distress comes from the fact that they’re engaging with this alone and not with a community.” She also recommends, of course, turning to prayer: “One of the greatest gifts of Scripture is that there’s a lot of anger and pain and screaming ‘Why, God?’ in it.” I screamed that later, before talking to Kolin, who spoke of cultivating your inner Noah’s ark. “We can build inside of ourselves this refuge that we can return to and that can keep us steady even when the storm is intense,” she said. Abdur-Rashid spoke at length about how, for his working-class African Americancongregation, thinking solely about presidential elections every four years “is not realistic.” He’s more interested in supporting Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five, a member of his congregation who was recently elected to City Council. When congregants do come to Abdur-Rashid with their election anxieties, he tells them what he always does: “We have a saying in Islam: ‘Almighty Allah knows best.’ We know there’s good and bad, and we are going to have to maintain the faith regardless. You really can’t predict what’s going to happen.”
But you can try. I asked astrologer Chani Nicholas what the cosmos were foretelling. “We’re going to be engaged in some kind of battle until about April,” she said, coughing. She had a chest cold. “I don’t know what that looks like in terms of what could actually happen in the election, but astrologically, things get very tense beginning November 3.” I asked about the respective charts of Trump and Harris. “Kamala Harris has a Gemini rising, and Trump has a Gemini sun,” said Nicholas. “Right now, Jupiter is going through Gemini, which is a very helpful planet. So, in a lot of ways, both Trump and Harris are being helped by the planet that brings about expansion and opportunity and luck.” I cursed the stars. Nicholas admitted that she does “not feel hopeful astrologically. When I look at 2025, it gives me pause in a lot of ways. We need to work on our ability to find solutions to our most pressing problems, like, right now. If we keep ignoring them, it’s not going to be cute.”
I walked down the street to my local bodega, where my questions unleashed a spontaneous roundtable discussion. One customer spoke passionately about how badly he wanted Harris to win. “We wouldn’t be here without women. Can we give the ladies a chance, please? How is a female not strong enough when multiple babies come out of their uterus?” He performed a startlingly graphic interpretation of the human birth process. His friend was decidedly more pessimistic and less theatrical. “America is not gonna give her a chance,” he said. “America has to be effed all the way up before it straightens out. They’re not just gonna let a woman go in.” The first guy took a sudden rhetorical turn. “The government is gonna choose who they wanna choose anyway,” he said. The bodega owner, who told me separately that he was “confused” by his fellow Yemeni Americans who were supporting Trump when the former president had “stood against them” in the recent past, furrowed his brow. “That’s not true,” he said. The feminist conspiracy theorist looked at us both. “You don’t think meteorologists have control of the weather?” “No,” we both confirmed.
Suddenly, it was Halloween. I needed to talk to an actual politician. I called my councilmember, Chi Ossé. “I’m stressed as fuck,” he said. I asked him how he felt about the constituents who were still unsure about Harris. “I never see my vote as a complete stamp of approval on everything an elected official does,” he said. “I am disgusted and horrified at the genocide that is taking place in Gaza, but truly, I believe things can get worse under Trump.” He stressed that the local races are “equally as important,” and accordingly, he’d be working all weekend, bringing poll workers coffee and snacks, knocking on doors in Hudson, casually running the marathon on Sunday, then going to the Bed-Stuy bar Singers on Election Night, where 20 percent of the tab will go to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. “I’m dressed up as Santa Claus right now,” he informed me at the end of our conversation. “It’s very Mariah Carey.” I asked for his Mariah recommendation for the current moment. “‘Caution’ is a great one. And then also ‘GTFO,’ on that album, in terms of how I feel about this election.” His final words of wisdom for his district? “Don’t fuck it up.”
Considering the statistically high likelihood of things getting fucked up, I consulted my friends Viviana Olen and Matt Harkins of the THNK1994 Museum — the premier event planners of New York, who maintain a strong sense of whimsy even in the bleakest of situations — for their tips on how to throw an Election Night event that could carry on even as the country free-falls into abject chaos. “Get a weighted cloak,” said Viviana, noting that there was one currently for sale on TikTok for some reason. “No overhead lighting,” she added, and she proposed a soothing meal of bone broth, an assortment of teas, Diet Coke, and “bowls of Zyn.” I asked about serving alcohol, and both strongly discouraged it. To set overall vibes, they suggested putting Cher’s song “Ooga Boo” from the 2016 children’s show Home: Adventures With Tip & Oh “on loop.” “Just try to make it a nice evening,” concluded Viviana. “It’s the first night of your sobriety.”
Alison Roman advised making a heavy, involved meal and drinking wine. “I incidentally just published a chili recipe, which, if you make it the long way, will take you three and a half hours,” she said. Was it better to get drunk and eat chili or soberly sit under a cloak and drink tea? I asked my friend Dr. Danny Luger, an esteemed cardiologist whom I treat as if he were my personal on-call physician. He said that “people are smoking, drinking, and eating. We’re seeing spikes in blood pressure related to election anxiety.” He plans to smoke three packs of cigarettes in a row on the night of the election, but in a professional capacity, he “can’t support toxic-substance use to cope.” Instead he recommends doing anything that gets the heart rate up, like going for a run or “lashing yourself.”
So I took a brisk walk to the polls, where everybody inside was sweating but vividly happy. As I cast my early ballot, a poll worker announced the presence of a first-time voter and the whole gym broke into raucous applause. All week long, I had been secretly crying (in a professional way) during some of my deeper, sadder phone calls; in the gym, I cried thinking about how we might not fuck it up. Outside, I stood 100 feet away per federal law and asked voters how they were feeling. “I’ve not been super-pumped. I voted for Kamala because that was what I felt like I needed to do,” said one young woman. “But I loved the vibe in there. The first-time-voter applause? It’s good to remember that it is important and it’s a privilege.”
The youngest voters I know, S. and O., are high-school students, one of whom will turn 18 just a few days before the election. She can’t wait to vote. Everyone they know who’s eligible is voting for Harris, but they aren’t talking about it much at school; other than a few irony-pilled kids who think the “election is a meme,” it’s just a given. Both reject the popular notions that their generation will single-handedly save the world or is inherently nihilistic and “on TikTok”; instead, they’re plagued by larger questions, like, Will they ever be able to make enough money to have a house or raise a family? Or, Will the world be inhabitable by the time they’re old enough to do so? “I feel like we’ve been cooked since the industrial revolution,” said S.
That was my cue to call up the oldest voter I know, June Squibb, a spiritual New Yorker and my personal guru. Squibb, an actress who is still starring in films at the age of 94, was eating a Werther’s Original candy in her Los Angeles apartment. She was cheerfully willing to share her thoughts on what it had been like living through more elections than most people on earth. “My first election that I voted in was when Eisenhower was running, and I voted for Eisenhower,” she said, sucking on the candy. “I can remember being terribly upset when the second Bush got elected. And we did live through it. I can remember the Second World War, and I was in grade school for most of it; my father was in the Navy and gone. I can remember that very well, though. And that was frightening.”
She admitted to being “very nervous” about the election — “It’s a scary, scary time” — but she was keeping informed, reading the papers, and trying to wrap her mind around why anyone would ever vote Trump. “I simply want to know why they’re making that decision. I found out a lot, not so much from television but more from reading articles. And I think we have to start doing that.” I asked if informing herself helped her feel calm. “God, no,” she said. For that, she turns to sudoku and Law & Order: SVU; she’s also planning her upcoming 95th birthday party. “I think the only thing you can say is, ‘It will pass,’” she said. “I’m not saying it would be easy. I would never play it down. It could be pretty horrible, but I think that we know it will pass.” In the meantime, on Election Night, she said, “if I can get some orange soda pop in here, that will do it for me.”
More on the 2024 election
- Trump Claims Nonexistent Youth-Vote Landslide
- Trump Sues Iowa Pollster Who Annoyed Him
- Kamala Harris Can Aim for Governor or President — But Not Both
