Long Night of December

By Cliff Potts, CSO, Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

December has a way of stripping things down to what remains when the noise falls away. The calendar insists on holidays, on cheer, on rituals of continuity, but the body and the mind know better. They know when something has broken that cannot be rehearsed back into place. This December has been a long night—not dramatic, not theatrical, just long. Long in the way that hours stretch when sleep doesn’t come cleanly and mornings arrive without resolution.

I have spent much of this year watching systems fail in slow motion. Not collapse—collapse is honest—but fail by continuing to operate while no longer serving the purpose they claim. Social systems. Economic systems. Digital systems. Even personal systems: routines built for a life that no longer exists. There is a peculiar exhaustion that comes from recognizing that something is broken while still being expected to participate in it as if it were not.

The internet once promised something very different. I remember the early 1990s, when the idea was not scale but connection; not virality but voice. It was supposed to be a commons—a place where individuals could publish, speak, build, learn, and collaborate without needing permission from gatekeepers. That promise has not simply faded; it has been actively inverted. What we have now are platforms designed to extract attention, flatten nuance, reward conflict, and punish depth. Participation is framed as opportunity, but the returns are asymmetrical to the point of absurdity.

I have invested real labor into these systems. Thought. Writing. Structure. Planning. Dozens upon dozens of threads, arcs, scheduled posts—work done in good faith. The returns have been minimal, not because the work lacks substance, but because substance is no longer what the systems are built to distribute. These platforms are not broken accidentally; they are functioning exactly as designed. The mistake is assuming they still exist to serve the people using them.

There is a strange psychological toll that comes from this realization. It is not disappointment so much as erosion. You begin to question the value of effort itself. You begin to feel foolish for caring. And yet, walking away entirely feels like discarding a record of thought, as if the work itself might vanish if it is not continually fed into the machine. That tension—between refusing to be exploited and refusing to erase oneself—has defined much of this season.

At the same time, life does not pause to accommodate reflection. Practical realities continue: limited resources, constrained options, responsibilities that cannot be postponed. There is no romance in this. There is just management—of energy, of money, of time, of attention. Every decision carries opportunity cost, and lately the margin for error feels thin.

What has made this December different—what has made it a long night rather than merely a difficult season—is grief.

Everything changed when the woman I loved died. That sentence is factual, not rhetorical. She was not simply a partner; she was orientation. She knew the language, the places, the rhythms of daily life. She handled logistics I did not have to think about because trust made them invisible. She was emotional ballast and practical intelligence at once. When she died, I did not just lose a person. I lost infrastructure.

Since then, there has been no one to quietly catch the things that fall through the cracks. No one to notice what needs doing before it becomes urgent. No one to translate the world on my behalf. People speak casually about resilience, about adaptation, about moving forward. They rarely talk about the cost of having to rebuild an internal operating system while continuing to function.

Grief is not a single feeling. It is a field condition. It alters perception, stamina, and tolerance for nonsense. It sharpens some truths while making others unbearable. It also strips away patience for systems—digital or otherwise—that demand energy without offering anything resembling care or reciprocity in return.

In that context, pulling back from noise is not withdrawal; it is triage. Choosing not to perform constant engagement is not bitterness; it is role clarity. I am not obligated to bleed attention into platforms that offer nothing but friction in exchange. I am allowed to stop. I am allowed to be inconsistent. I am allowed to place markers when I choose and to be silent when I do not.

This is not a manifesto. It is not a resignation letter. It is simply a record of where things stand, written in a moment when honesty feels more important than optimism. There may be other essays later—more analytical ones, more historical ones—about how we arrived here, about the cultural and technological incentives that elevated cruelty, triviality, and performative outrage. Those can wait. This one is about the night itself.

Because the truth is uncomplicated, even if it is heavy.

I still grieve.
I am still heartbroken.
I still cry over the loss of the woman I love.

And that is how it should end.

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