Even the Lights Going Out Became Normal

I walked out of Digger thinking about how easily human beings become accustomed to catastrophe. Not because we necessarily accept what's happening around us, but because survival eventually requires us to continue living through it. The lights go out, people adjust, and the world carries on. What once would have constituted an emergency becomes another ordinary interruption. And somewhere along the way, we stop asking why these things keep happening and begin organizing our lives around the expectation that they will happen again.

That's what disturbed me most about the film. Not simply the absurdity of a billionaire playing God with the fate of humanity, but the revelation that we were watching a performance about a catastrophe that had already happened. An actor was portraying a man whose decisions had helped destroy millions of lives, and the people telling that story were themselves living in the aftermath. They continued performing, rehearsing, creating, and worrying about the ordinary circumstances of their existence. The power kept going out, and nobody seemed particularly surprised anymore. Something that should have been terrifying had become routine. It was such a small detail within a much larger story, but I couldn't stop thinking about it.

We are already living through our own versions of this. Every day, another disaster, another conflict, another revelation about the extraordinary amount of damage human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another. We wake up, look at our phones, absorb another piece of horrifying information, and somehow find the strength to continue with our responsibilities. Children still have to be raised. Bills still have to be paid. People still have to eat, work, love, and find reasons to wake up tomorrow. There is something beautiful about that determination, but there is also something deeply troubling about how effectively our ability to endure suffering can be exploited.

We've become so accustomed to praising resilience that we rarely stop to question why people are constantly being forced to demonstrate it.

And while ordinary people are expected to adapt, the wealthiest individuals on the planet continue accumulating resources and influence at a scale that would have been unimaginable to most generations before us. Billionaires have become cultural personalities, technological prophets, and self-appointed architects of humanity's future. They speak about colonizing other planets, artificial intelligence, and extending human civilization while the world beneath their feet struggles with problems we already possess the knowledge and resources to address. Somehow, we're supposed to be impressed by the ambition of men who dream of escaping the very planet their industries continue helping to exhaust.

I don't believe every billionaire is personally responsible for every catastrophe, and I don't need to believe that to recognize the larger problem. Wealth has become so concentrated that a relatively small number of people can influence circumstances affecting billions. The consequences of their decisions rarely fall equally upon the people making them. Ordinary families inherit the costs, whether through environmental destruction, economic instability, exploitation, or the slow deterioration of the places they call home. The powerful announce their next great vision, and the rest of us are left figuring out how to survive the last one.

We've done too much damage to this planet, to one another, and to generations that haven't even been born yet. What frightens me is not simply the greed itself, but how easily we've learned to live alongside it. How much destruction must become ordinary before we acknowledge that something is profoundly wrong with our direction?

My recent trip to New Orleans brought some of these questions closer to the surface. There are places where history refuses to remain buried, where the architecture, water, music, and people remind you that the present was built upon generations of suffering, resistance, survival, and creation. New Orleans is one of those places. I felt a connection to my people, to the ancestors, and to histories that existed long before I arrived. I thought about the water, the boats, the human beings brought across oceans in chains, and the generations who created entire worlds of culture and meaning under circumstances they never chose. The beauty of the city doesn't erase its history, just as its history doesn't diminish the extraordinary life that continues there.

And I don't want to romanticize that suffering. We have a habit of celebrating what people managed to build out of terrible circumstances without spending nearly enough time confronting the circumstances themselves. We admire survival, but sometimes that admiration becomes an excuse to avoid examining the violence, neglect, and systems of power that made survival such an extraordinary accomplishment in the first place. People should not have to suffer unimaginably for their humanity to be recognized. There is nothing noble about preventable destruction simply because somebody manages to create something beautiful afterward.

I found myself feeling connected to the past while becoming increasingly concerned about the future. That contradiction has been following me through my creative work. The closer I get to understanding the history of the people who came before me, the more I question what we're preparing to leave behind for those who come after us. We inherit stories, traditions, wounds, languages, and entire systems of belief from people whose names we may never know. But we also inherit the consequences of decisions made by people who possessed enough influence to change the course of history. Some of those consequences take generations to reveal themselves, and others arrive while the people responsible are still alive to deny accountability.

That's where Digger, New Orleans, and Blackwater begin speaking to one another.

I've been exploring these ideas through my music, particularly Blackwater and the larger world of Good Mourning, Babylon. Blackwater and Good Mourning, Babylon remain forthcoming. Water, inheritance, empire, destruction, memory, and the journey toward something beyond the circumstances we were born into. These aren't simply concepts that sound compelling when placed alongside music or cinematic imagery. They're questions I've been carrying through my own life, my travels, my writing, and the process of trying to understand my place in a world that often seems determined to repeat its worst mistakes.

Water can carry people toward freedom or become part of the machinery that denies it. It can sustain entire civilizations and erase the structures those civilizations believed would stand forever. It holds histories of migration, displacement, commerce, violence, and survival. Sometimes I think about how much of human history has traveled across water, how many people never reached the other side, and how many of us are still living with the consequences of those journeys. When I think about Blackwater, I think about all of it. The movement of people, the weight of inheritance, and the terrible distance between what humanity is capable of accomplishing and what we continue choosing to do to one another.

I see my work as both a warning and a record. A warning about where we're heading and a record of what we've already allowed to happen. I want future generations to know that not everybody was comfortable with the direction we were moving. That people recognized the danger, questioned the people responsible, and tried to preserve some evidence of what it felt like to be alive during these times. Through writing, music, photography, and film, I've been attempting to document my own understanding of the world, knowing that my understanding will continue changing as I experience more of it.

And I think about the responsibility that comes with that. Art can reveal terrible things, but it can also become another spectacle we consume before returning to the very routines that allow those things to continue. We can watch a film about environmental collapse, applaud the performances, admire the cinematography, discuss its symbolism, and then return to a society that increasingly resembles the nightmare we just paid to experience. I include myself in that contradiction. I walked out of Digger deeply moved by what I had witnessed, and then I reached for my phone to write about it on a platform operating within the same systems of wealth, technology, and influence I spend so much time questioning.

That's the uncomfortable reality of being alive right now. There is no clean separation between the world we're criticizing and the systems we depend upon to survive within it. Even the act of warning people can become content, another passing moment in an endless stream of information competing for our attention. How many warnings must scientists, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and ordinary people deliver before those warnings become something more than another conversation? How much evidence do we need before acknowledging that awareness means very little without responsibility?

Still, I refuse to believe that our ability to create is meaningless simply because it cannot solve everything.

What moved me about the final revelation in Digger was that people were still telling stories. After the catastrophe, after the consequences, after the world had become something its predecessors might barely recognize, artists were still gathering to perform. They were preserving a memory of what happened, interpreting the decisions that brought them there, and finding ways to communicate their history to one another. Even in a diminished world, the human impulse to create had survived.

I don't believe art alone will rescue humanity from greed, and I don't believe a song can reverse environmental destruction or a film can restore the lives lost to somebody else's ambition. But art can preserve memory. It can challenge the official narrative, question authority, and remind people that history is never exclusively the property of those powerful enough to influence how it's written. Sometimes art is an act of resistance. Sometimes it's a confession. Sometimes it's simply proof that somebody was paying attention when the world began looking away.

And maybe that's why I continue writing, making music, taking photographs, and documenting the places I travel through. Not because I believe my work will somehow save the world, but because I refuse to surrender my ability to witness it. I have children who will inherit a world shaped by decisions being made today. So will millions of others. They deserve more than endless explanations about why things couldn't have been different. They deserve to know that some of us understood what was happening, that we cared enough to question it, and that we believed their future was worth defending.

I don't want to become so consumed by the darkness of this world that I forget the humanity still existing within it. I saw that humanity in New Orleans, just as I've encountered it in countless other places throughout my life. In ordinary conversations, in music, in the persistence of communities, and in people who continue showing compassion despite having every reason to become indifferent. The same human beings capable of extraordinary destruction are also capable of extraordinary love. That contradiction is something I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to understand.

But love for humanity also demands that we stop pretending every catastrophe is inevitable. Not every disaster is an unavoidable act of nature. Not every consequence arrives without warning. And not every powerful person deserves to be remembered as a visionary simply because they possessed enough money to turn their ambitions into reality.

I don't know how much time we have to correct the damage we've already done, or how much more destruction we'll normalize before we decide we've had enough. I do know that history will eventually have something to say about this period of human civilization, just as it has something to say about every generation that came before us.

And when that history is written, I want there to be a record that some of us were paying attention.

Because the world doesn't have to end all at once for something essential to disappear.

Sometimes the lights simply go out, everybody adjusts, and life carries on.

Until one day, nobody remembers what it felt like when they stayed on.