The Future Is Something You Figure Out -Phil's Friday Thoughts

Lets end on a positive note

I took my kids to see Project Hail Mary the other week. And I’ve been thinking about it constantly since.

Not the science or the alien or even the ending, which I won’t spoil even though OMG you mentioned the alien, Phil. HE WAS IN THE TRAILER! SHUT UP <3. What I’ve been thinking about is how it felt to sit in a theater and watch a movie that believed the future was worth showing up for.

We’ve spent years marinating in doom. It’s literally my job to put on my adult sized floaties and wade in this kiddie pool of shit and corruption. Entertainment got dark because the world got dark and we told ourselves that dark meant honest. Gritty reboots. Prestige misery. Every dystopia confirming what we already suspected right? That things are bad, getting worse, and they’re probably unfixable. After a while you stop noticing what that does to you.

But then last summer, Superman walked onto a screen and he was kind. Unironically, unapologetically kind. Some on the internet called it cringe or woke or whatever. The movie made $618 million and a lot of people loved it. It wasn’t the most amazing thing that was ever made BUT it turns out people weren’t cringing. They were starving. I WAS STARVING.

Project Hail Mary takes that energy and launches it into deep space. A middle school science teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship, finds out he is the planet’s last hope, and he befriends an alien engineer. It’s a story about problem-solving and friendship and cooperation across every possible barrier and about choosing sacrifice over self-preservation not because you’re a superhero but because you’re someone who gives a damn.

Ryan Gosling said something on the Kelces’ podcast that I keep coming back to and have been incorrectly quoting over and over. He said he was grateful to make a story for his kids that reminds people what we’re capable of as human beings. In another interview he talked about wanting his kids and their generation to understand that the future isn’t something to fear, it’s just something to figure out.

That line has been living in my head.

Because here’s the thing yall… I spend every day in the news. War. Corruption. A government that can’t pay the people who keep airports safe and has killed Americans in the street. Suspicious oil trades minutes before presidential posts. Congressional leaders who’d rather go on vacation than vote on a war. I cover this stuff because it matters, because ignoring it is not an option.

But covering and even monitoring the darkness five days a week will hollow you out if you let it convince you that darkness is all there is. And I think a lot of people, maybe even most people that are aware of whats happening, are in that place right now. Doom-scrolling until their thumb hurts and then wondering why they feel hopeless.

Project Hail Mary was this month’s antidote for me and I swear they aren’t paying me to say this, but it might be for you too. Not because it ignores problems. The entire plot is a problem. The sun is dying & the whole planet is at stake, BUT the movie’s answer isn’t cynicism or surrender. It’s a guy with a whiteboard and a weird alien friend saying okay, let’s figure this out.

That’s the energy I want to bring to everything I do. It’s honestly what I think new progressive populism looks like in practice. Not pretending things are fine. Not wallowing in how broken they are. Looking at a problem and saying: what do we actually do about this?

And the answer is often if not almost always local.

Your school board is making decisions right now about what your kids are allowed to read. Your city council is voting on housing and policing and water. Your state legislature, and I’m saying this as someone whose wife is running a Hail Mary run for Georgia State House, is where the policies that actually touch your daily life get written. These races get decided by hundreds of votes sometimes. Not thousands. Hundreds.

The midterms are in November. Every seat in the House. A third of the Senate. Governors. State legislatures. School boards. Attorneys general. The people who decide whether your state expands Medicaid or bans books or protects your vote, they’re all on the ballot. And most of the shitty politicians win because nobody shows up to stop them.

You want to be Ryland Grace? You don’t need a spaceship. You need to know who your state rep is. You need to show up to a city council meeting once. You need to knock on doors for a candidate you believe in, or run yourself, or at minimum vote in every single election that has your name on a ballot. Especially the ones nobody talks about.

That’s how you figure out the future. Not by waiting for a hero, but by being the person who shows up.

I know that sounds cringey to some. I know it sounds like the kind of thing people make fun of on the internet. Embrace the cringe. Superman made $600+ million being sincere. Project Hail Mary had the biggest box office debut this year and people love it (It’s not just me). People are telling us what they want. They want to believe we can fix things. Be part of the reason they believe.

The news will be here Monday. The darkness isn’t going anywhere. But neither are we.

Love yo faces

Philip DeFranco