Friends, colleagues, slaves, lend me your eyes. This is the tale of trans-systemic abandonment.
The comforting myth of capitalist economy collapses here and now: that merit, intelligence, effort, or reason offer safety. They do not. We live under late-stage border regimes where legality no longer guarantees stability, and procedure itself becomes a technology of control.
This condition does not stop at the state. It is mirrored across institutions, cultural economies, and so-called communities. Informal hierarchies replace rule of law. Proximity to power substitutes legitimacy. Fear is disguised as responsibility. Silence is framed as strategy. Those who insist on clarity, rights, and coherence are marked as disruptive.
Care becomes a liability.
Ethics become inefficiency.
Relation becomes extractable.
The recent public unravellings make this unmistakable. These were not isolated crimes; they were systemic accommodations. Entire futures were traded for access, status, and continuity of power. What collapses in their wake is not only trust, but the credibility of institutions that claim to safeguard the future while actively hollowing it out.
This is why so many experience a loss of future; not as metaphor, but as lived condition. When systems demand endurance without horizon, survival replaces imagination. Planning becomes impossible. Time is weaponised. The future is deferred indefinitely, then quietly withdrawn.
Women, migrants, carers, and those who refuse extractive modes of existence absorb this violence somatically—through illness, breathlessness, exhaustion, depression, and the slow internalisation of being treated as provisional.
Trans-systemic abandonment names the condition in which multiple systems—state, market, culture, community—withdraw support simultaneously while continuing to demand compliance, productivity, gratitude, and emotional regulation. It is abandonment without exit. Exposure without recognition.
I refuse to interpret this as personal failure.
I refuse to moralise resilience in the face of structural harm.
I refuse the lie that safety can be earned by becoming quieter, smaller, or more compliant and grateful.
What is required now is not better adaptation to broken systems, but the courage to withdraw our bodies, labour, care, and creativity from structures that cannot hold them without destruction.
This is a call to stop confusing endurance with virtue.
To stop mistaking abandonment for inadequacy.
To insist that a future cannot be built on managed despair.
When even the most resourced among us can be rendered disposable, the problem is not who we are.
The problem is the systems of evaluation that dehumanise us.