Building Coherence
Staying intact when everything is begging you to dissociate.
The veneer is gone.
We’re locked in and dissociating at the same time. Dragging ourselves forward while processing hyper-surveillance, state-sponsored murder, systemic pedophilia, and a quiet unraveling of meaning as technology eats the world. All of it ripping at the scaffolding we’ve built around our inner lives—creating a loop of fragmentation, exhaustion, and compliance.
However, inside this continued heft—I’m housed, employed, objectively healthy, an American citizen not afraid to walk outside, and for the moment, not under direct siege. My privilege has given me a renewed responsibility to examine my place in our ecosystem and what’s powering it.
Coherence is what I’m working toward. The feeling that the world is still comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. That we can meet what’s happening as something we shape, not chaos we endure. Coherence isn’t opting out or turning away. It’s staying lucid long enough to choose how to act.
The biggest step I’ve taken: scrolling less.
We cannot out-scroll authoritarianism.
We cannot out-react systems designed to drain us.
I've been slowing down and studying the structures upholding these systems. To make the present stop feeling so random, personal, or uniquely catastrophic.
Here's what I've been exploring and why it’s been helpful:
1. Understanding long patterns of geopolitical power
The Predictive History YouTube channel, led by Beijing-based educator and writer Jiang Xueqin, has been a boon. I first came across him when he correctly predicted the U.S. attack on Iran a year before it happened.
His work isn’t about reacting to the news. He unpacks long arcs of empire. The entanglement of religion, capital, and power. How societies justify violence through myth and moral language. Why moments like this feel shocking even when they are structurally familiar. Slowly listening to his videos has helped me see the infrastructure beneath the chaos, how fear is mobilized, how moral narratives are weaponized, how power consolidates over time. That context hasn’t made things feel better. But it has made them legible. And legibility reduces panic. I’d start with his Secret History series.
2. Understanding the architecture of global disorder
Ray Dalio's "Big Cycle" framework has been another anchor. Dalio is a global macro investor and the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund firm—not my usual reading list. However, I've always prioritized having a working understanding of things beyond my fixed zone of expertise, and right now, understanding how economic power shapes political reality feels essential.
His work maps the recurring patterns of how global orders rise, peak, and collapse. Not as abstract theory, but as a structural reading of history that makes the present feel less random. According to Dalio, we're in what he calls Stage 6: a period of great disorder where international rules lose their enforceability and raw power dynamics take over. What's useful about his framing is the escalation pattern. Before outright military conflict, there's typically about a decade of economic, technological, and capital wars where rival powers test each other's limits. That's the phase we're in. Understanding this hasn’t made the uncertainty easier to sit with, but it's given me a framework for metabolizing what’s happening without being consumed by it.
I’d start with his essay post on X and then consider getting his book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order.
3. Looking at the narrative machine that protects the police
I’ve been reading Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis. He explores how journalism and language manufacture consent for state violence. How outrage is funneled into reforms that expand the power and budgets of the very agencies causing harm. How cosmetic fixes like body cameras function less as accountability than as surveillance, repackaged as progress.
In the context of ICE raids, disappearances, and the criminalization of survival, this book explains why so many people can watch state violence unfold and still struggle to name it. The narrative infrastructure has already done its job. His recent interview on Democracy Now was super insightful.
4. Staying present without being consumed
To offset all of this, to stay in touch with what is still alive, I’ve been re-reading No Mud, No Lotus by Thích Nhất Hạnh. This book is not about bypassing suffering or being spiritually polite. It’s about learning how to be present with pain without becoming consumed by it. What it actually teaches is that suffering and joy aren't opposites. They're composting each other all the time. Revisiting that reframe has reenergized my meditation practice.
5. Jumping
I keep a Bellicon trampoline in my house and bounce on it between things: doing dishes, after hearing something hard, post a longer than usual zoom. In the gaps between tasks. My trampoline is a forcing function. It moves what needs to move. A somatic offset for the weight of whatever I’m carrying.
6. Checking on people
Isolation is part of the strategy. Voice notes, emoji blasts, phone calls, dinners, walks, sleepovers. I’m doing all of it.
7. Naming what I’m feeling
The distrust, the rage, the anxiety, the numbness.
Right now, nothing needs to go unsaid.
🧡🍊
I love professor Jiang Xueqin! His videos are definitely helpful in trying to find some understanding of where we are.
I also got a mini trampoline a few months back and you’ve inspired me to bring it back into my routine. Thank you for all the synchronicities!
Erica, thank you for writing this. Your clarity about the difference between coherence and comfort really resonated, especially the idea that coherence isn’t about numbing out or pretending things aren’t falling apart, but about finding ways to stay present and engaged enough to act meaningfully.
The way you break down how narrative, economic cycles, and emotional/somatic practices all intersect feels both honest and generous. I appreciate the tangible resources you share, especially the reminder that scrolling and constant reaction aren’t resistance, and that understanding the deeper architectures at play can actually reduce panic and help metabolize fear.
Your point about “we cannot out-scroll authoritarianism” is a needed reality check. And the list of how you’re staying intact, jumping on a trampoline, re-reading Thích Nhất Hạnh, voice notes with friends, grounds this in real life. It’s easy to forget that presence and connection are forms of resistance too.
Thanks for making legibility its own kind of care here.