Achievement Unlocked
Achievement Unlocked
300 Dispatches From Dystopia Subscribers!
This is a milestone post to celebrate 300 subscribers!
Dispatches From Dystopia crossed that venerable threshold late last night, and I’m over the moon about it. I started this publication about two years ago with a desire to share my writing, speak truths about the dystopia, and connect with others who share my love for individual autonomy and the human thriving it engenders.
Three hundred may seem like small beans to some, but to me it’s a great wealth. I’m so grateful for each and every one of you fine people, whether paid or free subscribers. Your comments, your email opens, and the little red hearts you leave on my posts often make my day.
To celebrate, I’m offering a 20% discount on paid subscriptions through May 7!
(NOTE: Paid subscriptions are a little different here than you might be used to. I run a very active productivity group for free-thinkers and anarchists called Extremists Being Awesome. We meet almost every day for deep focus, extreme fellowship, and getting stuff done. Membership in that group is what you get for upgrading, and the price reflects that. I would like to have a lower-priced tier for people who don’t want that much perk, but until Substack gives writers more control over subscription tiers, that’s how it will remain. And almost all of my posts will remain free to read. If you do want to contribute, you can always buy me a coffee.)
For those new to Dispatches, I’d like to use this post as a round-up of some of my favorite pieces I’ve published over the past couple years, so you can get better acquainted.
I wrote this one in the early days of the damnable inflation that has still not let up:
“You care more about the economy than you do about people!” they cry. “We can’t prioritize the economy over lives!”
Here’s the thing the lockdowners haven’t understood up to this point, but that they must come to grips with as reality comes crashing down: The economy is people. The economy is lives.
And here’s a story from my childhood about freedom and satire:
This one speaks of struggles in property management and clarifying the goodness at the core of your being:
One thing I’ve learned over years—practically a lifetime—of being an “extremist” is that trying to effect change in the outer world is a more or less futile proposition until you begin to effect change on an inner level.
Here’s a piece about how freedom might not be as unobtainable as it sometimes seems:
Dystopia is simply mass-disharmony growing from the sick soil of mass-delusion. We recognize this as the utter and undeniable state of things when we see dystopia in the fictive world. In 1984, Winston Smith begins to see a glimmer of the truth beyond the delusion—that the world is not good, that people are not truly happy or secure (neither Party members or proles), that the power structure is neither honest nor righteous, that Big Brother himself may be the biggest delusion of all. The more he pursues this glimmer of truth the brighter it shines. And yet, by the end, he gives in to delusion because it is ultimately easier than living—and perhaps dying—in truth when everyone and everything around him is slave to the delusion.
And finally, in case you fancy a bit of dystopian fiction with your lunch, here’s Chapter One of my novel-in-progress, Technate 2051.
Thank you all again for being here with me. Here’s to many more posts in the stack, more brilliant conversations, and more steps made toward the exit from dystopia.
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-Starr
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