I’m allowed to check out, and so are you.

For the days that are too much.

Last night, I had an intense therapy session as I go through this whole major-life-upheaval-trying-to-earn-a-living-on-my-own thing, which is charged with all kinds of anxieties and the ghosts of past traumas. It was the kind of therapy session where your forehead hurts after from all the crying.

Then, I texted a partner of mine1 to see if he wanted tacos.

He’s one of my favorite humans and has many excellent qualities, but neither mental health nor sobriety are among them. He’s in rehab, his second day in an intensive outpatient program where you go home every evening. And when my texts weren’t getting through to him, I followed a hunch, first to his place to make sure he hadn’t killed himself, then to the bar around the corner from his place.

There he sat, hunched over his second Manhattan.

So I put him to bed, then barely slept myself, and then woke up to a reverse commute and news that Brooklyn and Queens were underwater and more than 20 people had died.

I spent several hours waiting for a group text reply from a friend in Bushwick.

(This, of course, was after my Midwestern self Googled neighborhood maps to confirm, in fact, that Bushwick is on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.)

Rates of suicide, alcohol and drug use, and extreme weather events are all on the rise.

Which means that the odds that you or someone in your life is right now in this moment imperiled by them is also on the rise. Which means your stress is on the rise. Which means, no, you can’t do all the things today. Which means I can sit at my computer screen and space out a while.

And that’s fine.

In fact, it’s more than fine. Because each of these rises in peril for the average person can be at least partially attributed to market forces. Suicide and addiction are diseases of despair that increase in places where opportunity is made scarce by rising economic inequality.2 The increase in life-threatening weather events is driven by rising global temperatures that are in turn driven by a fossil-based economy.3

Has your productivity fallen recently? Yeah, of course it has. Does everything just feel harder? Of course it does. Because we are increasingly surrounded by the consequences of failed systems.

And you don’t have to grind yourself into the ground to prop them up anymore.

This is your permission slip — and mine — to just phone it in for a day.