Men and War and Consequence
Sunday 26th July 2026
Pretty generational summer we’re having, isn’t it? We’re back to pleasant temperatures, there’s a consistency to the warm days and cool nights that feels endless, and we’re only halfway through the summer. A full month to go.
I fear I’m not summermaxxing as much as I could be. I’m not closing down Palais or tearing up The Cause, I haven’t sunk bottles of crisp whites or sampled oysters by the dozen. I haven’t booked any flights or found myself on a beach.
For all my chat last time we checked in, my urge to date someone seriously dissipated as fast as it came on. Amidst a few weeks of failed chats with frankly quite awful men, I started leaning into the glow up. Realising that I have quietly been fulfilling my resolution from the beginning of the year to learn to enjoy my life and build something quite complete by myself, my summer has been one of simple pleasures in solitude and I don’t actually want anyone to come and interrupt it.
I’ve built a sanctuary of sorts, and each time I think about inviting a man into it, I just see all the ways he could ruin it. Where this ends I don’t actually know, as the climate crisis and onslaught of AI and my general disillusionment with the state of the world is pushing me towards wanting to live on a regenerative, circular commune for the rest of my life, trying to heal the planet and fully remove myself from a broken society.
Ok…maybe some social plans wouldn’t hurt.
Point of No Return
The Odyssey. The kind of film that makes you go “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore”. The original story, tale as old as time that we’re still living today. It may seem like we’ve evolved, but actually, we’ve been on this cyclical path to destruction of the social fabric of society since the dawn of time. Men, war, consequence.
I don’t think I have much of a place to add my two cents to the wealth of analysis out there already, so I’ll try to keep my thoughts brief. All I could really think throughout the back half of the film was how many more cautionary tales will we ignore?
For years, Nolan’s been laying out stories of men who tinker with the rules under the guise of the greater good, only to propel us into a new world, one that serves the few not the many. For years, we’ve nodded along and gravely noted the poignancy of the themes in today’s world. And still our world marches on into a dark future.
He points out that while Oppenheimer and technology set us on a complicated path, placing tools of mass destruction in the hands of careless men, it goes way back. Wayyyyy back. Odysseus’s fate was tied to a violation of something intangible, a code. Commandments. Civic decency and duty. Something we lost three thousand years ago, or at least Homer documented it then, violation of human rights and decency was happening long before that, I guess.
The difference? There was fear of consequence before. Odysseus’s carelessness for others and arrogance is met with the might of the gods. His journey takes everything he thought made him great from him, and he is left to bear the weight of what he’s done for the rest of his life, burying those who loved him along the way. There was a fuck around, find out code of ethics that kept people in check. But I wonder if Odysseus’s survival of it all changes that.
After him, you could fuck around, find out, and keep going relatively unscathed. You could defy a fate others thought you’d face. You could go home to your loving, dutiful wife a hero and pass the crown to your son who only knows your character from stories of your heroism.
Alongside it all, I’m reading Careless People - Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Meta exposé. As she documents the metamorphosis of Zuckerberg from disinterest to despot, I can’t help but think that we don’t have heroes today, we just have tech giants. Self-anointed kings who sit above world leaders, presiding over our world with no higher power to answer to. They fear nothing because they own everything. Try as we might, with our three-hour epic films, there will be no reckoning for them, and we will have to bear the consequences of their actions.
Israel has dropped the equivalent of six Hiroshimas on Gaza in under four years. Bezos said recently that in the case of droughts, water will be prioritised for data centres over humans. We have just fifty or so harvests left. The UK doesn’t have a stockpile or emergency plan for the food shortages that we will begin to experience in the coming year as the extreme heat will have dramatically affected this year’s crop yield. Day-to-day basic survival is going to become a luxury for so many, and there aren’t any gods that can rectify the actions of the people that have driven us here.
So how do we pull through? Watch the Odyssey, yes. Then learn from it. Watch Groundswell on Prime (ironic!!), and find hope, realising that a solution to healing the planet already exists, has done for years, we just need to apply it en masse. De-centre Chat GPT from your life, and reject AI slop in favour of great films like the Odyssey (the pig scene was done without effects???? She really…? Did that?!?!?!).
Have an Odyssean summer - take long, deep hits of lotus flower and go on loads of side quests! Channel your inner Charybdis on dance floors! Less Office Siren, more Siren in general! Bring back Xenia, which is to say, just be nicer (this mostly applies to phone thieves in London, please, just…be nice to strangers, don’t steal their stuff).
That was very “grab your girls wear your florals!!” wasn’t it. I dunno, I have no real advice. And while I tried to be all insightful above in my thoughts from the film, rest assured the biggest ‘take’ I have is that I’m mostly just really sad for Polyphemus ):