Pale Horse Economics
It doesn’t come with horsemen,
doesn’t come with trumpets,
doesn’t arrive announced
with any ceremony worth the dread.
It comes with a letter from the bank on a Tuesday,
a number you thought was safe,
a phone call to a friend who doesn’t pick up.
It comes with the particular arithmetic
of choosing between the medication and the heating bill,
and calling that a normal kind of week.
It comes with teaching children how to want less
in a language that sounds like wisdom
but is really just the vocabulary of defeat.
His grandfather survived a war and called America the promised land,
meant it like a man who’d seen the alternative up close and raw.
His father bought a house at twenty-six on one income,
a pension, a union card,
something solid underneath the law.
He’s thirty-four with two degrees and four jobs spread across three apps,
something they call flexibility and freedom—
which is just the word that people with security use
for the condition of the people
they’ve economically deleted from the system.
The famine isn’t empty shelves,
skeletal and biblical,
something you can point to on the news.
It’s the slow subtraction of the future from the present
till the present is the only thing you’ve got left not to lose.
It’s the math that doesn’t work
regardless of how many times you run it in the dark.
It’s the distance between where you started
and where you’re standing,
getting longer,
while the runway gets shorter,
gets dark.
She works the morning shift
and then the afternoon
and then the online course
that’s supposed to change the trajectory of this.
She hasn’t slept a full eight hours since 2019.
Her body is conducting a very quiet,
very urgent,
mutiny she can’t dismiss.
They say she just needs to work smarter,
hustle harder,
find her passion,
monetize the thing she loves
before the loving kills it dead.
She found her passion.
It was writing.
Now she writes content for a brand that sells supplements
and calls the compromise a way to get ahead.
There’s a word for what he’s doing.
Several words.
Survivor. Scrapper. Resilient. Self-made.
In the modern sense that means
abandoned
and still standing.
There’s a record the culture tells about the ones who make it out
that quietly omits the ones who didn’t
and the specific ways the landing
broke them into versions of themselves
that still get up
and still punch in
and still perform the whole performance of okay.
Because the alternative to the performance is the truth,
and the truth doesn’t pay,
and the truth won’t get the kids to school today.
And the famine takes the options first before it takes the food.
Takes the margin. Takes the cushion. Takes the month you had in savings. Takes the mood.
Takes the version of yourself that thought the future
was a place worth planning toward
with any confidence or hope.
Till you’re living in a smaller present
with a shorter rope.
Pale horse economics, baby.
Nobody’s riding in on anything to save you
from the spreadsheet or the rate.
Pale horse economics,
and the famine’s wearing khakis,
has a LinkedIn profile,
a mandate from the shareholders,
and a date
with everything you thought was permanent—
the pension, the position,
the particular illusion of the stable middle ground.
The new apocalypse is quarterly.
And it comes around.
And it comes around.
And it comes around.
Here’s what famine actually is
in the twenty-first century,
dressed in its civilian clothes,
carrying a clipboard:
The slow erosion of the possible
until the possible is just the probable
and then the probable is just the narrow corridor.
It’s watching the generation before you
age into the safety net they built
while explaining to your generation
why the net is now a floor
they can’t lower.
It’s being told that you’re not hungry,
you’re just spending wrong—
have you tried,
have you considered,
have you thought about
avocado toast
a little lower.
It’s the quiet desperation William Thoreau named
that now has a podcast
and a subreddit
and seventeen browser tabs of coping.
It’s the dream deferred that Langston asked about—
still deferring,
still festering,
still waiting,
still hoping.
It’s every generation promised more than the one before
and every generation quietly receiving
the bill
for the party
they weren’t invited to
but are expected
to keep
believing in
Comes around
without a sound.