Ep. 16 – Reviving the podcast after personal collapse | This is the End

*Episode Description*:

(This podcast was formerly titled THIS IS THE END: POP CULTURE & COLLAPSE.)

Well, it’s been… a while. In this, the first new episode in over two years, I share a bit of the personal story behind why this podcast has been dormant for so long and how it relates to what I call “personal collapse.” But just as with societal collapse, personal collapses don’t necessarily have to be a permanent end state.

I also share why I’ve decided to give the show a new title. Going forward it will no longer be called “This is the End: Pop Culture & Collapse.” The new title is “Strange Days, Here We Come: Pop Culture, Dystopia & Collapse,” and a slightly broader focus to include discussions of dystopian stories in addition to collapse-related ones. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of collapse-related material. 🙂

Even if you are not interested in, or familiar with, concepts surrounding societal collapse, if you are a caregiver or know someone who is, you might find this episode interesting as it goes into how the individualized burdens of caregiving can result in a “personal collapse.”

A shoutout to the r/CaregiverSupport subreddit on Reddit. They know what I am talking about.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CaregiverSupport/

Here’s to new beginnings. Strange days, here we come.

*Episode Transcript*

Note: This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors or inaccuracies. For the most accurate information, please listen to the audio.

00:00

Hello, I am The Pop Mythologist, and this is the end of This Is The End. Actually, no, it’s not. It’s a continuation, but it is the end of my use of that title. And I’ll get to that in a second. But first, I want to share just a little bit about why the podcast had been dormant for so long. 

I think the last episode was way back in early 2023. So it’s been over two years now, in fact, already. It’s crazy. And not that I owe anyone an explanation as to why the podcast had been inactive, obviously, but just because, well, I think the matter of why this podcast had been inactive for so long is actually very relevant to the topic of this podcast, or at least part of the topic. 

And that is, of course, collapse. Collapse broadly defined, as I’ve been careful to point out in the early episodes. And in that definition of collapse, I include both individual level or personal collapse, in addition to what is usually meant when people talk about collapse, which is societal collapse or institutional collapse. 

You’ll notice the absence of any intro music today. And that is, of course, deliberate. It’s to signify that this will be something different. It’ll be a different kind of space. So why the lengthy absence? 

Well, it’s not because I didn’t want to record and make podcast episodes, very much enjoy doing so. And it’s a natural extension of my creativity. And so there’s never really a time when I don’t want to podcast. 

But increasingly, my personal life became overwhelming or difficult to… logistically manage while still including personal creative activity. And so I’ve never approached the subject that I’m about to talk about, but I choose to do so now because it is very relevant, I think. 

 02:22 

So let’s talk a bit about personal collapse. And don’t worry for those of you who are here for the pop culture element, I’ll get to that part again soon. Personal collapse can of course take on different manifestations and include many different facets. 

Often these different facets are intertwining and feed into each other and amplify each other in various ways. In my case, around the time when I found it no longer reasonably feasible to maintain an active podcast while managing the other parts of my life. 

 03:04

Around this time, my family caregiving responsibilities intensified. So I have been in the role of a caregiver for a family member, specifically my mom, and that started actually way back in 2017 when she was first diagnosed with stage 4 thyroid cancer. 

And I don’t want to get too much into the whole lengthy story about the cancer itself for various reasons, but also just because it would make this episode too long. But pretty much as soon as I found out, I immediately shifted a lot of my time, attention, and energy into helping her in various ways. 

I was living in Chicago at the time, great city. I really love it a lot. But then I immediately flew out to South Korea, where she was living at the time, to help with the business of making many trips to hospitals, doctors, for appointments, tests of all sorts, consultations and treatments and all that. 

Fast forward to when, on my insistence, she moved back to the US. And I say moved back because she had actually immigrated to the US many years ago with my father, lived here for many years, became a naturalized citizen. 

And then at a certain point, decided to move back to Korea. Anyway, yeah, she came back to the US on my insistence. And I continued living in Chicago for a while. And actually, she initially came to Chicago. 

For various reasons, she decided that Chicago wasn’t right for her, which I agreed with. And so she moved back to Southern California, where she had spent most of her years while living in the States. 

And at first, I tried this arrangement where I was traveling back and forth between Chicago and L.A. County and staying with her for a while, helping her again go to doctor appointments, treatments, and things of that sort. 

 05:31

And eventually, that became unsustainable. And so I made the difficult decision to move back entirely to Southern California myself. I was born there and grew up there. And so it was my home in a manner of speaking, though for many reasons, I kind of preferred Chicago at that stage in my life. 

But nevertheless, family came first for me. And so I moved back. Again, skipping past details that aren’t immediately relevant here. Even after I moved back to California, at first I tried having my own place and essentially commuting back and forth between my place and her place and providing care and assistance that way. 

But as the severity of her condition increased and as my caregiving duties also increased, that also became unsustainable. And so there came a point when, in fact, at one point in the apartment where I was living, my landlord joked that I was the best because I paid rent but I was never there. 

 06:46

And I was like, yeah, that’s a good point. Thanks for reminding me. And it figures that you as a landlord would say that because, of course, with me and my biases, landlords occupy the archetype in my mind of a sort of parasitic figure that tries to get as much as it can while doing as little as possible. 

And okay, sure, not everyone. But many, arguably, and certainly increasingly so the more corporate the landlord entity is. Anyway, I’m getting off track there. So it is a collapse relevant topic, but I won’t go too much into landlords right this second. 

 07:37

So that became unsustainable and I decided to just move in with my mom to take care of her. And I had hoped that that would be a… Or that’s what I told myself. I told myself that this would be a temporary arrangement. 

But time passed and again, my caregiving duties intensified. And… You know, the caregiving experience doesn’t exist on its own in some kind of vacuum. None of our life situations or experiences ever do, right? 

They always exist in relation to other aspects of our lives and other things that are going on in our lives. And, you know, so this was all going on during the pandemic. Like all this, these different stages occurred still during the pandemic, in that even just on its own was extremely challenging in all kinds of ways. 

 08:38

But then you bring in the financial challenges of basically having to help a family member, not just logistically, not just in terms of physical care, but financially, or at least to a degree, and just overall managing their life affairs because maybe they’re unable to or because language is a barrier, as in this case, or just all kinds of different reasons. So very challenging, but then I was having to work at the same time as many people in caregiving situations experience, you don’t have the luxury of giving up work. 

 09:20

Or, I mean, there are also situations in which people don’t have the luxury of giving up their work, but they still have to just because maybe for whatever reason, it becomes impossible to work while giving care at the same time, especially in those really intense situations when a person requires constant monitoring and care. 

But I was able to work, continue working, and I had to again financially, but it wasn’t easy. It was extremely difficult, given that I was combining work with caregiving, and both of these activities primarily occurred at home, so I was just stuck at home all the time, isolated, and not to go too much into the nitty gritty of all that, but that presented its own array of challenges, and it took its toll increasingly over time on my mental health and just overall well-being. 

 10:20

Anyway, so the podcast, despite the fact that it was something I really enjoy doing, which is important when you’re going through stressful periods, is to maintain activities that you enjoy doing, hobbies, interests, all that kind of thing. 

As caregivers know, there are times when it becomes increasingly difficult, and at times just impossible. And that became the case around 2023 when I was just burning out profoundly. I had periodically already had intermittent periods of burnout, but it was just kind of of stacking on top of each other and just each time would get worse. 

 11:01

And so it wasn’t a conscious decision, but I just naturally found myself not making new episodes just by the time I finished work and caregiving duties and just everything else, I just didn’t seem to have the time or energy or even the motivation anymore, because we know, we know there’s, there’s tons of research on this among the symptoms of burnout, it’s just diminishing motivation and interest in things you previously enjoyed and even things you may have been intensely passionate about, you know, you just, all I can think about is just wanting to sleep, for example, or just wanting an idle moment when you can literally do nothing and just like sit there and turn off your brain. And as I was going through this caregiving journey, I really felt like an intersection of personal and societal collapse, which is something that I talked about in the very first episode of this podcast. 

 12:04

And one thing I’ll just quickly throw in here, it’s something that I can actually talk about on and on for hours very passionately. And I won’t do so right now, maybe in a future episode where hopefully I have something that I can draw on from film or television or literature to use as a starting point. 

But the experience of caregiving, I suppose in some ways just in general anywhere, but especially in the United States for all kinds of cultural, societal, and political reasons. Caregivers, and in here I mean not professional caregivers necessarily, although that might be included, but really just like family caregivers, caregivers who are doing so essentially for free most of the time. 

They are in the position of doing tremendously important but also tremendously difficult work. And it is work. And you cannot truly know the truth of that statement unless you have been there. And those who have been there, shout out to the caregiver support community on Reddit. 

 13:24

It’s one of the few, few places that you could call social media that I even sometimes still go to on an as needed basis. I pretty much never at all use things like Facebook or meta or whatever it’s called, or Twitter or X or whatever it’s called. 

But there are a handful of select communities on Reddit that I occasionally do check, not nearly as much as I used to, because I do find Reddit on the whole to just be, I won’t go into it. But as people who are active on the Caregiver Support subreddit, no, you truly cannot understand the experience of family caregiving, non-professional caregiving, unless you have been there. 

 14:19

And some kinds of care aspects are universal, including professional ones, so people who are nursing, for example, but they’re paid for it. It’s difficult work, but you’re paid for it. And most or many caregivers don’t get any kind of compensation. 

And not only that, they are, in most cases, left without any kind of societal or structural support. So they’re have to fend for themselves, as so many of us are in so many ways in this society. And that…  in many many ways adds to intensifies and compounds the difficulty and sometimes the abject misery in which not only are you having to sacrifice so many aspects of your life but you’re doing so without any help or support and often exceeding the resources that are at your disposal and so that’s its own thing right again i actually do want to really go into detail about that in a future episode i would like to devote an entire episode possibly a couple to that topic alone in a less personal way and more from a standpoint of cultural and societal criticism so i just spent like the last 15 minutes or so talking about my personal caregiving experience but that’s actually just one component it’s a major component but it’s one component typically when i talk about personal collapse i usually mean when people in their personal lives are experiencing multiple dimensions of their lives shrinking or caving in on themselves or into each other or some fundamental aspect of their lives such as their health so let’s say you get really sick and then that in turn causes like all the other aspects of their lives like their career or their social lives to collapse and so in this case as well the caregiving was a major dimension but it didn’t exist by itself and as usually happens when people face adversities in different aspects of their lives at the same time they start to feed into each other and amplify each other and it causes the proverbial vicious cycle and sure enough that is indeed what happened with me as well I don’t want to go into those other aspects here, 

 16:59

but I mentioned that just because I think it’s also important to mention when you’re talking about personal collapses or just life adversities in general that they have a tendency to overlap and compound each other and it just creates like I said this vicious cycle so that’s all I’m gonna say about that for now but I mention it because it is an extremely important factor in the burnout, endless mounting exhaustion and like I said often misery that many and increasingly more caregivers for demographic reasons are experiencing and will continue to experience. 

And yes this is related to collapse in various ways culturally, societally, economically and to a degree politically as well. And if it isn’t clear why, then I hope to make it clear in a future episode, I will make it clear. 

 18:03

Now, I’ve been talking about this for maybe longer than I would like, so I’m just gonna cut to the chase here. So yeah, that was basically why I just fell off the podcasting. And for a while, it was fine just because the immediate urgency of the million things that I always had to do, you know, the never ending to do list that just kept getting longer, never got shorter, no matter how hard I tried to make it shorter. 

But, you know, before I knew it, two years had passed. And so then what has led to this attempt to revive it? Well, a lot of things. But basically, I think the time just feels ripe now to at least attempt a revival of the podcast and make it active again, however sporadically. 

And obviously, from the perspective of building an audience and things like that, it’s good to have, it’s good to regularly put out episodes and boost your podcasts and rankings and whatnot. But at this point, that’s not really my focus or priority. 

 19:10

And so I figured it’s better to do episodes infrequently rather than never. And it just so happens that for a whole bunch of intersecting reasons at this point in time, I find myself suddenly galvanized with an intense motivation and desire to get this thing going again.

So here we are. But I also wanted to not reboot the podcast because this isn’t a reboot, but I wanted to give it a different title. And that’s because I think, you know, I’m the type of person who agonizes over titles and puts a lot of thought into it. 

I’m sure many creators do. And There are reasons I chose that title, This is the End Before, not just because it’s an obvious reference to a work of pop culture, a movie, but I could play around with that phrase in different ways, use it to sign off each episode, and also because I believe in the cyclical nature of history and that the endings of things are necessary transitions before the next thing. 

 20:21

The next thing might be better, it might be worse, but in any event endings are not in themselves a negative thing, and often they can be a good thing, but because of the topic of the podcast combined with that title, This is the End, it often did kind of feel negative or it may have struck some listeners that way, and that was never really how I meant it. 

I mean sure there was a touch of darkness deliberately in that title. but it wasn’t intended as fatalistic even though i do consider myself collapse aware. Okay so i wanted a new title and that new title going forward will be strange days here we come and i chose that title again i had a few different ideas. 

 21:13

And this being not just a collapse podcast but a pop culture podcast i wanted the title to playfully. Make a reference to something in pop culture ideally even multiple things in pop culture if possible which this title does and so of course there is the 1995 dystopian science fiction film strange days directed by Catherine Bigelow. 

With Ralph Fiennes Angela Bassett Juliette Lewis. Actually i think i may very well devote an episode talking about that film and i would like to bring back my very good friend and colleague Jess Kroll hopefully to talk about that film anyway the title is partly reference to that movie not because i’m such a humongous fan of it necessarily but just because.

It’s a well it’s a topically relevant dystopian film. And also because the use of that those two words strange days let me then make a reference to another work of pop culture which is the 1987 album by the smiths strange ways here we come and i can’t think of any way that that album itself is relevant. 

 22:29

To the topic of collapse of all this we really stretch in which case you know just about anything could be said to be indirectly related to collapse in some way, but i am a fan of the smiths. I know that more see in recent years has become an increasingly. 

Shall we say just problematic figure. in some ways, but I was very much a fan of the younger Morrisey, who was less the cranky old guy that he is now and much more of the thoughtful, idealistic, yet melancholic patron soul of awkward, shy, and depressed young people everywhere, right? 

And that was certainly why I was such a big fan of the band and of him in particular when I was in high school. Anyways, that title I read was partly a reference to something I can’t remember, but it was partly also Morrisey saying, kind of like throwing up his arms to the heavens and saying, all right, fine, what next? 

Bring it on. Or what are you planning for me next? What new, shitty, crappy, difficult experience are you going to throw at me next? And I know that that is a feeling that many can… closely relate to in these strange days of ours. 

Also just that idle strange days here we come obviously evokes the sense that we’re moving towards uncharted territory. Maybe not uncharted historically from a global perspective but if you’re living in the U.S. 

 24:19

for instance then certainly uncharted in certain ways and even globally if we’re talking about collapse while there are certainly repeating elements that we have seen before there are aspects of what we’re seeing now that are unprecedented. 

A case can be made that we’re certainly seeing a uniquely globalized interlinked digitized exponentially increasing manifestation of collapse that we have not seen in past more localized collapses of systems, institutions, even entire societies or nations or empires. 

 25:08

So I like this title. I like that it refers to multiple works of pop culture which is always fun to do and that it’s also very relevant to the topics of this podcast. Pop culture in relation to collapse and dystopia, so I thought I’d include that additional word in the subtitle. 

Pop culture dystopian collapse because those two concepts are obviously very related. Dystopia is of course the broader term because you can have collapse within dystopia. Dystopia is inclusive of the idea of collapse and that’s also often the case conversely. 

You can also have dystopian conditions in a collapse, but not necessarily always the case. Again, referring back to the previous title, this is the end, the collapse of certain things, such as an empire, let’s say, can be an opportunity at least, if not a guarantee of something at least slightly better coming next. 

 26:17

And so officially, This is the End is now Strange Days, here we come. The podcast will mostly remain the same, and it’s just a slight rebranding, or basically just a retitling, and this episode is basically just an expression of my renewed commitment to do this, and a sort of a much more personal sharing, right? 

Because that’s not something I really did in any of the previous episodes, deliberately. But in this case, it felt like a good way to ease back into it. And this is the very first episode I’ve ever done, just pressing record and just talking into the mic. 

I usually always, with all the other episodes, there was a preparation process. I would think about what work I was going to discuss or maybe who I was going to invite or bring on. If it was an interview, obviously, with my journalist background and even the current work that I do, I always prepare with well thought out questions. 

I do whatever background research is related to that person or their work. Obviously, watch or read whatever work is going to be discussed and just take some notes and things like that. But today, this episode was just literally me needing to do something. 

In some ways, just a commitment and pledge to myself for myself. It just happens to take the form of an actual episode because that can serve as a bridge or re-entry back into the usual format. And so I think that really just about does it. 

 28:07

And if you’re listening to this, thank you for listening to it. Recording this has admittedly been uncomfortable for me. It’s not the usual format of this podcast and it’s not really the thing that I really want to focus on doing right now. 

I think there are many awesome podcasts out there that are more slice of life or personal or just talking about the creator’s own life and what may be going on in it. But it’s not currently my thing and therefore this was in some ways the easiest episode to do ever. 

Just press play and just talk. Whatever comes out comes out. But it’s certainly uncomfortable and so I thank you for listening. listening. And if you are new, then welcome. But if you are a previous listener from all the older episodes, then thanks for still being interested and for listening again. 

 29:07

And so with that, I’m going to sign off here, but I look forward to whatever may lie ahead with this podcast, whether I succeed or fail in my ambitions with it, the ideas that I have for it, and just see it as a process and see what comes out of it. 

So thanks for being here. I’ll talk to you again soon. And strange days, here we come.