We are at war, which no one wants. Today was the funeral for the 168 girls and teachers killed at Minab girls school. With all our technology, they still choose to bomb schools, hospitals and apartment blocks. No one voted for this war, here or in the US. The Pentagon has stated there was no threat from Iran. This is an illegal war.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but I’d bet it all that the orange monster didn’t win the election – Elon rigged it, while here we got a trojan horse of a Labour party run by the same billionaire backers and a certain country that seems intent on destroying the entire world. I hesitate posting this link, and writing the name of this country because for the first time in my life (lived in both the US and UK) I feel scared to say the truth out loud. If there is one thing I’ve learned from the Epstein files slow release is that these people don’t care about killing people. They like it. They will kill their own people in their own countries, because it’s no longer about countries, and they will gladly kill as many of our military as they need to, in order to increase their power.
I keep thinking about this: about why billionaires would want MORE … more power, more money. How can you want more when you have more than you can even conceive of. To put it all into perspective, the entire global military expenditure in 2024 was $2.7 trillion and the total billionaire net worth in 2026 was over £16 trillion, which is a neat explanation of why democracy can’t function under capitalism.
The system is broken we are seeing humanity short-circuit with this insane wealth. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. There are no good billionaires. We have produced the worst examples of what humans are capable of. It's kind of a marvel just how much the Orange Shit Stain is a perfect picture of all the seven deadly sins rolled into one: pride, greed lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. He wears them like a badge of honour as uses the presidency to personally enrich himself, with latest estimates of his profiteering at $4 billion.
And what do these men do with all of their wealth? When they could afford to end world hunger (a mere $300 billion at the higher estimate) … they traffic, torture and rape women and children, and then they eat them.
There are a lot of theories about why they would release the Epstein files and who benefits ... and who knows. But I know how reading them has affected me: almost complete mental shut down, a sensation of inner terror, that nothing I do or say matters because nothing matters, that the world is an evil and awful place. It is a frozen, horrified inertia. Becoming aware of one terrifying and soul destroying tidbit after another keeps us stuck in fight, flight or freeze. Which, for me anyway is becoming a familiar state.
It's well known that our phones not only hijack our amygdala but have the effect of constantly engaging our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain. It's almost impossible to be creative, to feel in flow, or connect with a sense of something deeper when we are in this state. I have really struggled with new designs for the past few weeks, losing focus and then losing confidence, until I give up and then beat myself up for not doing more. It has taken me about three days to actually publish this blog. I am second guessing my life away.
So what the fuck can we do?
I think for one, and as much as possible, we can stop feeding the monster.
Delete chat GPT for a start. Never mind the fact that AI has not been developed to make your life easier. It is first and foremost as a surveillance tool. It doesn’t help you as a human to outsource your own creative discovery, or your thinking. Don’t buy the hype. We are not performance machines that need to constantly enhance our own productivity. Without permission, LLMs have scanned and stolen all of our creative work to regurgitate it back to us in an obsequious, manipulative way that makes us feel we have a friend, a helper. It is the biggest theft in history and who is it profiting? Artists are not being protected. There are even now signs the government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft. Enriching billionaires further with our art, the one pursuit that is truly human, and then having it mansplained back to us? Fuck that.
Go looking. Get bored. Think until your head hurts. Unless you’re a bioengineer or maybe a solicitor, there is nothing that any chatbot can tell you that will be more valuable than you doing the work of discovery.
And if that’s not enough, get this: the amount of data centres for AI that are currently being proposed for the UK would DOUBLE our electricity use. That is INSANE. And that’s not even talking about the amount of clean water they use.
This is not inevitable if we don’t want it to be. We don’t have to opt in.
There are over 8 billion people on the planet and roughly 3,000 billionaires. There are more of us than them.
We don’t have to buy into the world they are creating out of the world they are destroying in the process. It’s time to untangle ourselves from their webs, to return to the things that make us truly content. Not 'happy', because happy is an emotion that comes in bursts, the light that balances the inevitiable grief and and sadness that we all must feel. Happy was never supposed to be how we went about our lives 24-7. It is another marketing construct, a way to sell you shit. At its most basic level marketing works on pain points: pointing out to you what might be wrong with you or making you unhappy and then selling you something to solve it.
But what if you felt whole as you are? Because it’s all a lie. No one is happy all the time. Nothing you can buy will make you happy. And there is literal proof of this. Just look at Elon in his sad, lonely little life desperate for attention.
We have reached the end of the road with this model of capitalism. The rich can barely get any richer without the rest of the world starving. We have taken from this planet more than it can give. We have to reassess what we want for ourselves and our children, and find a new way forwards. We don’t need any more stuff (I say as someone running a product business.)
What we need is time away from our screens, time to sit outside and look at a tree, to be with the people we love without distractions, to feel we have enough without being constantly sold to.
And I write this knowing I am complicit. I hate being part of the system. I sell and advertise on META, you are reading this over Shopify. And the idea of chucking it all in and growing my own veg is really, really beginning to appeal. But yes, of course, I realise that is such a privileged position – and no I can’t actually afford to, right now anyway. So, how do we quit the system we are reliant on?
There are glimmers of hope: Hannah Spencer's win and her brilliant speech which highlighted how we are all working harder for less while the monster grows fat beyond recognition. There needs to be transparency about who is funding these voting polls, because time and time again we're told Reform is ahead only to find that it isn't. And if you add up Labour voters and Green voters, that's 66% of the vote. There will always be 20% of any population who are mean-spirited, bigoted or plain thick and easily influenced. But if we unite against them they don't stand a chance.
We can all keep going with little acts of resistance, with whatever we can manage. Maybe it’s protesting, writing to your MP, or simply not listening to the lies coming out of the BBC. Maybe it’s going for a long walk when you should be working, or calling a friend you’ve lost touch with because they are no longer online. (Or like one of my brilliant customers, calling out twats on her work Teams by simply responding with ‘wanker’). Maybe it’s not buying fast fashion, or it's planting a tree, or doing yoga, or writing or painting.
Maybe it’s simply not looking at your own face in the mirror scouring it for faults. Maybe it's learning to love your face because it’s YOUR face, and there isn’t another one anywhere. Or trusting yourself, listening to your inner voice when it tells you you need to rest, or cry.
I went around all last week feeling dreadful, and it wasn’t until I went to my gorgeous friend Andrea’s yoga class (she modelled the Women Count collection for me) that I finally slowed down my racing mind and realised how incredibly sad I was about all the things I had read in the news, not how shocked or horrified, but just how sad I was. How dreadfully sad. I needed to process that emotion. You can’t just see these things happening to children, to vulnerable women and girls and then get angry and get energised. You have to feel the feelings, or they catch up with you. It’s ok to cry about children you’ve never met. It makes us fucking human to care. When the world’s richest man says the 'fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy' you know we have reached the end game.
We have to find a way through this without becoming monsters ourselves, we have to try to find a way to fight without losing our compassion. Social media is fed by outrage, it keeps us scrolling because our brains are wired for fear. We have become the apex preditors this way, but we have agency if we group together. We can create the world we want. But we have to fight and that means we have to look after ourselves.
Practice self care like it is your vocation.
We all know the advice: turn off your notifications, get outside. Ration your intake of news, social media, wherever you get your updates on what is happening.
I still look at Twitter because I follow so many journalists and people I trust with news that isn’t curated by the billionaires, even though the feed still is. But it’s terrible for my mental health. I picture it like going into a very crowded networking event, where strangers can grab you by the shoulders to shout their facts at you, and sometimes those facts are horrific, and before you can get your head around what they’ve said, someone else shoves a photo in your face, of something even more horrific. This is not a room any of us would ever choose to go in, and yet we do it to ourselves. I think so many of us are experiencing survivor’s guilt, and feel that we need to at least bear witness, to be informed. And I’m speaking to myself when I say that this is true to a point … but we cannot shoulder the world’s grief, no one can. So monitor yourself like you would your child’s hours spent watching tv (or maybe horror films).
The Buddhist principle of Do no harm – there is already so much suffering in life, do not add to the suffering of others – also refers to your own inward thoughts. It is so important to love and protect yourself. I truly believe that learning to love yourself might be life’s most important work.
And think how insanely powerful we would be as women if we all agreed to do that.
We have the ability to create life. We produce menstrual blood with magical healing properties which we have been taught to be ashamed of, to find dirty. Our breast milk reacts to our babies’ immune systems symbiotically giving them just what they need. We are the miraculous, unexplainable, incredible sex. How the fuck have we let men control the planet?
The entire system is stacked against us. As if you need an example, but the only person in prison for men raping children (although it's probably not even her) is a woman. She should be there of course, but so should all the men in the photographs and videos and incriminating emails (HELLO, YOU CAN SEE EXACTLY WHO THEY ARE). (I recommend watching the Martha Stewart documentary too.) It has really shocked me how blatantly the lives of the victims have been completely disregarded, as people discuss who may or not be in the files, not just by the police, but by the media, as if they are just expendable. Just look at Prince Andrew, WTAF. Endless screaming into the abyss.
I write this on the 5th anniversary of Sarah Everard's murder by a serving police officer. A Grazia article tells us that since then 600 women in the UK have died at the hands of men since. Nothing is changing no matter how much is promised or how much we repeat the stats. As it says on Welsh Women's Aid website (a charity I am so happy to support) 'It is estimated that around 3 million women across the UK experience rape, domestic violence, forced marriage, stalking, sexual exploitation, trafficking and other forms of violence every year. This is the equivalent to the population of Wales.'
We need a reckoning.
But as Mary Beard puts it. ‘We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women aren’t perceived to be fully within the structures of power, isn’t it power that we need to redefine rather than women?’
I wish I had answers. We have to get organised. We have to support each other and find a way to steer this ship in another direction.
Anyone know how to steer a ship?
I'd love to hear your thoughts, your ideas, your examples of daily resistance.
And now I am going to force myself to publish this, despite the doubts.
Sarah xx
