From where I stand, I don’t think that the progressive counterpart to the market is the state. I think it should be culture, very broadly defined – culture where it encompasses the knowledge and practices of communities.

Amy Kapczynski in https://www.the-syllabus.com/ts-spotlight/post-neoliberal-moment/conversation/amy-kapczynski

And what’s wrong with the state as a progressive counterpart? Here’s one answer consistent with “communities” as an alternative:

Liberal forms of planning involve both the extension and the conscious self-limitation of the state’s responsibilities. Liberal planning redraws the boundary between the realm of political authority and the realm of free market activity without ever abolishing it. . . .The current tensions in the governance of capitalism may be best captured, not in terms of a struggle between competing hegemonic projects, but as a struggle internal to the state. This struggle consists of the political difficulties in managing the state’s impulse to mitigate the various crises of contemporary capitalism while affirming its liberal form. . .Capitalist states across the world are called to manage the consequences of the global economy’s entrenched tendency towards economic stagnation, financial instability, persistent underemployment and the accelerating climate crisis. . .Yet neither planning nor market-making offer a durable solution. The sources of crisis emanate from the mode of social interaction in civil society, not the administrative measures of the state. As long as commodity exchange constitutes the mode of socialisation in the economic realm, the state can at best palliate the socially destabilising tendencies of capitalist growth, not arrest them, no matter the scale of intervention.

Alexis Moraitis in https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205241303445 (my bolding)

A timely example of where the lack of actionable granularity matters is the level at which democracy and transformation are discussed in the face of the climate emergency. There is a patent asymmetry in many of these discussions: The climate emergency is manifestly empirical and context-dependent; democracy and transformation are left, too frequently but sometimes necessary, as abstractions. An example helps.

A point made about longer-term transformations in light of the climate emergency is: “Based on climate science, there is not enough time to first overhaul a critical mass of economies simultaneously according to socialist democratic planning and then to realise emission reductions” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2024.2434469 ). And yet, so what?

For others it is increasingly obvious that the realization of democratic processes outweigh the consequences: “We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences” (https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242756; my italics).

What’s missing in all of this is the adverbial property of what it means to act democratically (or in varied transformative ways). To answer that requires sensitivity to diverse contexts. Here but not there, to behave democratically means people choose leaders by these elections, pay these taxes, have these social protections, and more. Elsewhere the really-existing practices of “behaving democratically” can and do differ.

All of which means that without first differentiating the impacts of the climate emergency by location and time, it is next to impossible to identify, let alone differentiate, the consequences with respect to the disparate and different practices of acting democratically or transformationally.

I

Proposition. The expression, M&R (maintenance and repair), signals an already-established state/stage of infrastructure operations (e.g., “operations and maintenance” or “maintenance and repair,” for which there are official and unofficial procedures, routines and protocols).

M&R is a widely accepted, indeed formal, stage of infrastructure operations, and as such deserving of scholarly study with respect to enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructures. Indeed, M&R provides an officially-recognized period for and expectations about identifying and updating what are precursors to system disruption and failure and their prevention/avoidance strategies. Recurrent M&R is all about continuous building in of precursor resilience (e.g., using M&R for identifying obsolescent and now possibly hazardous software or other components). M&R moves closer to the center-stage of infrastructure operations, if only because of the common perception about infrastructures, i.e., “they’re invisible until they break, right?”

II

Implications. Start at the macro-level but with more granularity than conventionally assumed. A form of societal regulation occurs when critical infrastructures, like energy and water, prioritize systemwide reliability and safety as social values in real time. For our purposes here, these values are further differentiated and uniquely so within infrastructures.

Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation in infrastructures.” There is no reason to assume that compliance is the same baseline for, inter alios, the infrastructure’s micro-operators on the ground, including the eyes-and-ears field staff; the infrastructure’s headquarters’ compliance staff responsible for monitoring industry practices for meeting government mandates; the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for more and better enterprise risk management; and, last but never least, the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its real-time control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff— in the middle of all this, especially in their role of surmounting any stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols undermining real-time system reliability.

To put it another way, where reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must be expected that the social values reflected through these infrastructures differ by staff and their duties/responsibilities (e.g., responsibilities of control room operators necessarily go beyond their official duties). This in turn also holds for the the operational stage, “maintenance and repair.”

So what?

III

The above implies that M&R provides for increasing precursor resilience, which is best seen now as a differentiated process (resilience will look very different from the intra-infrastructural perspectives of enterprise risk management and real-time control room operations) and which takes place within a wider framework of social regulation not associated solely with the official regulator of record.

Note that infrastructures do convey and instantiate social values, but these values—particularly for systemwide reliability and safety—are not the command and control typically discussed in “infrastructure power”. In the latter, formal design is the starting point for eventual operations; in the former actual operations are the informal starting point for real-time redesign. Not only do actual implementation and operations fall short of initial designs, one major function of operations is to redesign in real time what are the inevitably incomplete or defective technologies of infrastructure designers and defective regulations of the regulator of record.

In this way, it’s better to see “maintenance and repair” as part and parcel of normal operations that follow from and modify formal infrastructure design. M&R’s focus on improving precursor resilience becomes one way of maintaining the infrastructure’s process reliability when older forms of high reliability are no longer to be achieved because of inter-infrastructural dependencies and vulnerabilities.

IV

These distinctions have major implications for reinterpreting “infrastructure resilience.” For example, noncompliance by an infrastructure’s control room may be a regulatory error for the regulator of record; the same noncompliance may reflect a (more) resilient infrastructure (or at least a more resilient control room if there) able to ensure system reliability when the task environment indicates the said regulation to be defective.

In fact for real-time operations, noncompliance is not an error, if following that regulation jeopardizes infrastructure reliability and safety now or in planning the next steps ahead. So too in the case of defective technologies. To put it another way, the criticality of time from discovery to correction of error reinforces a process of dispersed regulatory functions, where one of the regulatory functions of the infrastructure’s real-time operations is to catch and correct for error by the regulator of record and/or design errors by engineers under conditions of mandated reliability. In fact, the latter catching and correcting error are part and parcel of what we mean by a resilient infrastructure and its control room.

V

Finally, the M&R perspective presented here can help us rethink the formal design and planning processes for creating new infrastructures or majorly repurposing existing ones after a major emergency. As Paul Schulman argues “adaptive capacity [for emergency management] can be facilitated in part by planning and design processes that themselves create prior conditions, such as contacts among diversely skilled people in other infrastructures, robust communications systems and contingent resources in different locations, for restoration actions.” I interpret the passage to mean that the mentioned design and planning interventions pass the ‘‘reliability matters’’ test.

That is, the aim of maintaining or enhancing contact lists, communication systems and distributed inventories is to reduce the task volatility that emergency managers and infrastructure operators face, increase their options to respond more effectively, and/or enhance their maneuverability in responding to different, often unpredictable or uncontrollable, performance conditions. That is what we mean by resilience in aid of system reliability. (In case it needs saying, not all design and planning pass the test!)

---

My thanks to Paul Schulman and Antti Silvast for thinking through some points. Any errors that remain are due to my stubborness. Some material has appeared in earlier blog entries.

Not to worry, we’ll scale up later, soothes the techno-managerial elite. Later on, presses the happy-talk, we’ll relax assumptions and add realism. Anyway, we know how to reduce inequality (just give them money!), overpopulation (just don’t have babies!) and save the environment (just don’t cut down the trees!). So many of these just-do-this suffocate in their repetitive fat of “Well, this time is different,” “This time we really don’t have any other choice,” and “This time, you have to believe us, failure is not an option here and now.”

The chief problem with “start simple here and now” is that each scale/level is complex in its own right. The shoreline only looks smooth on the map. “Keep it simple” and “Break it down to essentials” only work, if they work at all, when context complexity is first admitted as helpful. “Which do you find to be simpler,” asks novelist and essayist, William Gass: “The radio that goes on when you turn a single knob, or the one that won’t work because the parts are all lined up on the floor?”

When I hear someone telling us “Keep it simple!” I immediately suspect they’ve lost the plot, like the actor playing Hamlet, who finished the bedroom scene with Gertrude but forgot to kill Polonius.

For many policy practitioners, incompleteness is the stuff of their working lives. At any point, problems remain to be addressed, obstacles surmounted, and goals attained, along with fires to put out, constraints to be lifted, objectives to be met, missions to be fulfilled, and crises to be faced. These policy and management worlds become one in terms of unwanted interruptions, and interruptions make for unfinished business. The only thing not interrupted are disasters, which is why they are so often described as “complete.”

Briefly put, issue incompleteness is the persistence of unfinished business for policymakers, politicians and policy analysts. Granted, interruptions can arise out of complexity and leave us with uncertainty and, of course, tasks do get done of sorts. A few things even turn out better than we could have hoped for. Fires are contained, problems handled, goals addressed, objectives recongized–work does get done. But–and this is the point–our policy worlds are recognizably incomplete and unfinished for all that.

This point has to be pushed further, though. All manner of granularities and context are involved when it comes to managing or coping ahead with the interruptions and unfinished business.

I

There is a sense in which each of our mental models of a complex policy and management issue always unfinished, if it matters to us. By way of example, Jean Cocteau, French litterateur, records the following interchange of composer, Darius Milhaud:

[Milhaud] shows his old housekeeper a very faithful painting of the great square at Aix.
You see, it’s the square at Aix.
Answer: ‘I don’t know.’
What? You don’t recognize the square at Aix?
‘No sir, because I’ve never seen it painted before.’

The rub isn’t how well the painting (or any representation for that matter) depicts that which it is a painting of, but rather that representations problematize recognition itself. Moving toward uncertainty (from the direction of certainty–we’ve seen the square–or from the direction of unstudied conditions–but never before as painted) means not only that we have a better appreciation of reality as contingent, provisional or messy. We also end up seeing how the incompletion of representation drives the very production of more representation.

Of the original Venus De Milo statue, Cocteau asks, “Suppose a farmer finds the arms. To whom do they belong? To the farmer or to the Venus de Milo?” Or to something or someone altogether different? To ask the latter question is to open up incompletion, where knowledge is unsettled and knowledgeable gives way to inexperience.

II

Is this sense of incompleteness at the micro level the felt part of an irreducible particularity of being, that sense we never body forth as representative or total? George Steiner recounts a childhood experience:

. . .if there are in this obscure province of one small county (diminished Austria) so many coats of arms, each unique, how many must there be in Europe, across the globe? I do not recall what grasp I had, if any, of large numbers. But I do remember that the word ‘millions’ came to me and left me unnerved. How was any human being to see, to master this plurality? Suddenly, it came to me, in some sort of exultant but also appalled revelation, that no inventory, no heraldic encyclopedia, no summa of fabled beasts, inscriptions, chivalric hallmarks, however compendious, could ever be complete.

But what is to be learned from a run of such individual experiences across more diverse people?

As I understand it, this diversity means no single or new representation could ever complete social reality or erase the initial condition that other recastings are both irresistibly forthcoming and inescapably required. Yes, the photograph recasts the way racing horses were portrayed compared to earlier paintings of them; no, the photograph is not the only or exhaustive way to portray racing horses. So for the policy and management worlds.

III

In those worlds, we have the techno-managerial elite still talking like this. “If people acted at the level of rationality presumed in standard economics textbooks, the world’s standard of living would be measurably higher,” assured Alan Greenspan, former chair of the US Federal Reserve.

So what if really-existing markets are one of the most diverse and hybridized of social institutions? So what’s wrong with believing that the answer to always-incomplete regulation must be always-incomplete markets?

Suspended somewhere between the always-incomplete pull of utopia and the never-good enough push from dystopia is more like the policy and management realism we–you and I–know and experience.

1. “Recalibrating politics: the Kennedy White House dinner for André Malraux (longer read)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2019/12/16/recalibrating-politics-the-kennedy-white-house-dinner-for-andre-malraux-longer-read/

2. “Spread the word: We need more Extreme Climate Resilience Desks for real-time infrastructure operations!” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/04/23/spread-the-word-we-need-more-extreme-climate-resilience-desks-for-real-time-infrastructure-operations/

3. “What the Thai BL series, “Bad Buddy,” has to tell us about societal reset” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2022/02/26/what-the-thai-bl-series-bad-buddy-has-to-tell-us-about-societal-reset-updated-2/

4. “Five most policy-relevant entries on pastoralists and pastoralisms” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/27/five-most-policy-relevant-entries-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralisms/

5. “How the structural analysis of narrative is relevant for recasting pastoralist development” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/06/how-the-structural-analysis-of-narratives-is-relevant-for-recasting-pastoralist-development/

I

What to do when there isn’t even a homeopathic whiff of “next steps ahead” in the policy-relevant document you are reading? Yes, it’s a radical critique that tells truth to power, yes it is a manfesto for change now; yes, it’s certain, straightforward and unwavering.

But, like all policy narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the big question remains: What happens next? Without provisional answers, endings are premature. “The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending,” in the words of Nobel poet, Joseph Brodsky.

II

“It is an interesting fact about the world we actually live in that no anthropologist, to my knowledge, has come back from a field trip with the following report: their concepts are so alien that it is impossible to describe their land tenure, their kinship system, their ritual… As far as I know there is no record of such a total admission of failure… It is success in explaining culture A in the language of culture B which is… really puzzling.”
Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist

Thomas Carlyle’s mock philosopher, Dr. Teufelsdröckh asks in Sartor Resartus: “Am I a botched mass of tailors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?” That is: patched together when it comes for purposes of understanding.

III

There is talk of revolution, whispers of reform,
and everything seems possible except departure from the norm.
Sean O’Brien (“If I May”)

But then again: Consider the same norm–e.g., even cobblers should be happy–but change the point of departure. For example, Japanese adult pornstar, Jin Narumiya, has announced he’s retiring as a porn actor:

Dear Always Supportive People

I am celebrating my 28th birthday today. I have been able to do my best in my activities because of the support of all of you. Thank you so much. As some of you may already know, I have retired from pornoactor. There are three reasons. The first is that as I continued my activities, I lost sight of my own meaning life. I was chased by mysterious pressure, and before I knew it, my mind was empty. I was able to do my best even though I was on the edge of my mentality because I had people who supported me and were looking forward to my work, but I reached my limit and made time to face myself for a while. During this time, I focused on getting in touch with nature, meditating, and recovering my empty mind. Who am I? What is happiness? I faced these questions seriously, and the answer I came up with was retirement. And to take on a new challenge.The second is at work. I saw the reality of working in pornoactor and not being able to expand my work. And all you can do is get naked and have sex. I’ve had people say that to me. This made me feel very frustrated. It also made me very sad. So I wanted to challenge myself in a new field and achieve results, and look back at those who made me feel frustrated. Third, I wanted to live my life in a way that I could love myself more. I want to do what I want to do and make those who are involved with me happy. And I want to create the best life possible.I have been supported by many people in my life. I am helpless on my own. I cannot do anything. So we need your support going forward. I will soon start a new journey. I would like to make this journey exciting together with all of you. Thank you for reading this far. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents for giving birth to me, everyone who has always supported me, and all my friends who support me behind the scenes.

“If it were possible, I would have such priest as should imitate Christ, charitable lawyers should love their neighbours as themselves, . . .noblemen live honestly, tradesmen leave lying and cozening, magistrates corruption, &c., but this is impossible, I must get such as I may.” Robert Burton from his The Anatomy of Melancholy.

IV

quin etiam refert nostris versibus ipsis
cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata;
. . .verum positura discrepitant res.
(Indeed in my own verses it is a matter of some moment what is placed next to what, and in what order;…truly the place in which each will be positioned determines the meaning.)
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

In other words, one answer to “What happens next?” is to juxtapose disparate quotes in order to extend the endings we have. There must be a sense in which such extensions are forced and since forced, any resonance (no guarantees) is compelling. This is a high-stakes wager that answers to “What happens next?” are alternative versions of what I would have thought instead.

---

For an example of recasting a complex policy issue through the juxtaposition of disparate quotes, see “The analogy, ‘we are at sea’, remade for the Anthropocene” in my When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene.

All you need to say is this: “Current conceptualizations of [x, y and z] are not theoretically equipped to unpack and examine their politics. This is because they have yet to grapple with the concept of power.”

1. Opportunity costs

The cost of the forgone alternative is core to graduate training in policy analysis. But there are huge problems with this concept. Start with a 1977 conversation between Nicholas Kaldor, the Cambridge economist, and his Colombian counterpart, Diego Pizano.

Kaldor asserts: “There is never a Pareto-optimal allocation of resources. There can never be one because the world is in a state of disequilibrium; new technologies keep appearing and it is not sensible to assume a timeless steady-state” (Pizano 2009, 51). Pizano counters by saying the concept of opportunity costs still made sense, even when market conditions are dynamic and unstable. But Kaldor insists,

Well, I would accept that there are some legitimate uses of the concept of opportunity cost and it is natural that in my battle against [General Equilibrium Systems] I have concentrated on the illegitimate ones. Economics can only be seen as a medium for the “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses” in the consideration of short run problems where the framework of social organization and the distribution of available resources can be treated as given as heritage of the past, and current decisions on future developments have no impact whatsoever. (Ibid, 52)

Consider the scorpion’s sting in the last clause. Even if one admitted uncertainty into the present as a function of the past, a dollar spent now on this option in light of that current alternative could still have no impact on the allocation of resources for a future that is ahead of us.

Why? Because markets generate resources and options, not just allocate pre-existing resources over pre-existing alternatives. “Economic theory went astray,” Kaldor added, “when theoreticians focused their attention on the allocative functions of markets to the exclusive of their creative functions, which are far more important since they serve as a instrument for transmitting economic changes” (Ibid, 52).

Source
Pizano, D. 2009. Conversations with Great Economists. New York: Jorge Pinto.

---

2. “If implemented as planned. . .”

How many times have we heard something like, “If implemented as planned…,” “If the right structures are in place…,” or “Given market-clearing prices…”? Just like that older version: “Monarchy is the best form of government, provided the monarch possesses virtue and wisdom.”

‘If implemented as planned’, when we know that is the assumption we cannot make. ‘If the right structures are in place.” when we know that “right” is unethical without specifying just what the structures are, often case by case. “Given market-clearing prices,” when we know not only that markets in the real world often do not clear (supply and demand do not equate at a single price) – and even when they do, their “efficiencies” can undermine the very markets that produce those prices.

Admit it: We could as well believe that the surest way to heat the house in winter is by striking a match under the thermometer outside.

So, what to do? What follows in points 3 – 7 is what to assume instead.

---

3. The questions that matter

Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers your asking:

• Under what conditions?
• With respect to what?
• As opposed to what?
• What is this a case of?
• What are you–and we–missing?

Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front of us?

---

4. Economics and high reliability

Economics is as important to contemporary policy analysis as are reliability and safety to contemporary public management. At their limits, not only are they in conflict, they are categorically different (i.e., they are not in a so-called trade-off).

Economics assumes substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure high reliability (which includes safety) assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services. There is a point at which high reliability and trade-offs are immiscible, like trying to mix oil and water.

One way of thinking about the nonfungibility of infrastructure high reliability is that it’s irrecuperable economically in real time. The safe and continuous provision of a critical service, even during (especially during) turbulent times, cannot be cashed out in dollars and cents and be paid to you instead of the service.

Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the markets transactions would be such you’d never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying.

---

5. Differences in assumptions that matter

When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be contextualized if we are to analyze and to manage case-by-granular case.

When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identification not only of emerging better practices across cases and modifiable in light of new cases, but also of greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.

What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that they “bring the system into the room” for purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.

When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled real-time activities in ways that better mimic, but can never reproduce, the coupled nature of the wider system environment.

When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes.

When we need more experimentation, we do not mean a trial-and-error learning where the next systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial destroying survival.

Where others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and only then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from the different standards.

---

6. Prediction isn’t what you think it is.

We are so used to the idea that predicting the future is more or less about accuracy that we forget how murky and unclear the present is. To paraphrase Turgot, the French Enlightenment philosopher and statesman, we have enough trouble predicting the present, let alone the future. Indeed, the future is not something up ahead or later on, but better understood as present prospection. As in: trying to predict the future is the current mess we’re in.

One implication is that to predict the future is to insist that the present messes can be managed differently. The notion that what will save us ahead has yet to be invented misses the more policy-relevant point that pulling out a good mess or forestalling a bad mess or taking on different messes today is also a way to change tomorrow. Think of it this way: The only place the future is more or less reliable is now, and only if we are managing our messes, now.

So what? Such is why a risk estimate must never be confused with being a prediction, i.e., if the risk is left unattended, failure is a matter of time. But is your failure scenario detailed enough to identify and detail conditions for cause and effect upon which prediction is founded? Without such a scenario, you cannot assume more uncertainty means more risk; it may mean only more uncertainty over your estimate of risk.

---

7. Social trust and distrust

Almost all discussions of really-existing policy and management are colored by considerations of societal trust and distrust.

But trust is a good example of how a social value is specified and differentiated by and through infrastructures. Broader discussions about “trust requires shared values” miss the fact that team situation awareness of systemwide reliability operators is much more about knowledge management, distributed cognition, and keeping a shared bubble of system understanding than it is about “trust” as a singularly important social value.

For that matter, distrust is as core as trust. One reason operators are reliable is that they actively distrust the future will be stable or reliable in the absence of the system’s vigilant real-time management. There has been much less discussion of the positive function of distrust as a social value. In contrast, “distrust” often takes the adjective, “polarizing.”

So too for the related “dread.” Widespread social dread–as in the societal dread that drives the reliability management of very hazardous infrastructures–is almost always taken to be negative. Here too, though, dread has a positive function.

Every day, nuclear plant explosions, airline crashes, financial meltdowns, massive water-supply collapse—and more—are avoided that would have happened had not operators and managers in these large systems prevented their occurrence.

Why? Because societal dread is so intense that these events must be precluded from happening on an active basis. (It might be better to say that we don’t know “societal dread” unless we observe how knowledgeable professionals operate and manage complex critical infrastructures.)

There is such fear of what would happen if large interconnected electricity, telecommunications, water, transportation, financial services and like did fail that it is better to manage them than not have them. We’ve structured our lives to depend on these systems, at least for right now.

All of us of course must wonder at the perversity of this. But that is the function of this dread, and distrust for that matter, isn’t it? Namely: to push us further in probing what it means to privilege social and individual reliability and safety over other values and desires. We are meant to ask: What would it look like in world where such reliability and safety are not so privileged?

For the answer to that question is altogether too evident: Most of the planet already lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask, precisely because the answer is that clear.

---

“Imagine being me,” I don’t say to the friend who has lost, over the 
past seven years, both parents, her only brother, a cousin, an uncle, a 
childhood crush, a newly discovered half sister and beloved family 
dog to a cruel array of accidents, crimes of passion, and 
unpronounceable afflictions too ghastly and protracted to fathom, 
“with all that ahead of me.”

(https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/04/07/consolation-suzanne-buffam/)