Notes from the edge of civilization: April 12, 2026
Everyone loves the bad guy; virtue signaling becomes virtue spending; the dominoes are starting to fall.
According to Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist and author, Americans are showing a growing willingness to identify with villains.
He points to examples like Oscar winner One Battle After Another and stage experiments like Luigi: The Musical, both tapping into an appetite to treat wrongdoing as something to understand — even excuse — rather than condemn. The crime hasn’t changed but the framing has.
In an opinion piece in The Hill, Alpert argues this is what happens when trust in institutions collapses. The system feels so rigged that the rebel starts to look like the only honest character left. Big, unfixable problems — healthcare, inequality, bureaucracy — get distilled into something simpler: a CEO, a billionaire, a public figure. Anger finds a face, moral lines blur, and “they had it coming” slips in through the side door.
The result is a culture that doesn’t openly endorse wrongdoing but keeps finding better reasons to understand it — until that understanding starts to feel a lot like permission.
Civilization doesn’t collapse because people forget right from wrong. But, it does begin to wobble when people default to excusing why wrong might be justified. Eventually, we land at wrong is right.
By all accounts, it seems Americans are cutting back everywhere, eating fewer dinners out, delaying big purchases, and pulling back on things like gym memberships. But $22 smoothies? Inexplicably, people are still lining up for these frosty treats.
According to two marketing professionals who wrote an opinion on the website The Conversation, this behavior isn’t a contradiction. It’s actually coping.
When people feel locked out of big decisions like housing, healthcare, insurance, and property taxes, they look for control in smaller ones. The professors call it “compensatory consumption.” Everyone else calls it splurging on a $22 drink to feel like you still have some personal agency.
What makes this moment different is the branding. Smoothies from Erewhon, the ultra-premium, certified organic grocery chain based in Los Angeles, aren’t just indulgences; they’re moral statements that signal you’re someone who cares about real ingredients, sustainability, and wellness.
Slurping one isn’t just a splurge, it’s a form of healing. Or so people think.
Plus, thanks to the magic of social media, you can turn it into a performative act that everyone can see — hashtags and all. Spending too much money on a designer handbag in these times might raise eyebrows, but downing a superfood smoothie signals how virtuous and disciplined you are.
Let’s call it what it is: economic theater. People feel worse, spend more carefully, but justify certain things more cleverly. So that $22 smoothie is all about buying a small, photogenic sense of control for social street cred, while everything else quietly slips out of reach.
Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow… nor your pension.
Nothing says “don’t worry, everything’s fine” like quietly skipping pension payments to “preserve liquidity.” The United States Postal Service has announced it will temporarily stop making employer contributions to the Federal Employees Retirement System — a move framed as routine cash conservation during a “severe financial crisis.”
Roughly $200 million every two weeks will now stay in USPS coffers, freeing up about $2.5 billion this fiscal year. Employees still contribute. Retirees are told there’s no “immediate” risk. And everyone is encouraged to focus on the word temporary, as if that word has a flawless track record in government finance.
(That word is almost as good as the Fed’s use of the word 'transitory’ for inflation.)
The logic is straightforward: better to keep the mail moving today than fully fund tomorrow’s obligations. Which is another way of saying the future just got repriced.
Pensions are only as solid as the cash flow behind them. And when liquidity gets tight, even the most “well-funded” systems start looking… flexible. Perhaps even fungible.
Maybe USPS retirees will be given the option of getting their pensions paid in ‘forever’ stamps.
