“Hold My Beer,” Said the Global Famine
From the Shoulder of the Highway, Where the Bus Is on Fire
Let’s say you’re a cloud engineer. Or a content strategist. Or a professional of any stripe, squinting into the AI horizon, wondering if your job’s going to survive the year. You scroll LinkedIn. You scan headlines. You fret.
Then you glance to your left and notice the entire food system jackknifing onto the highway, 18 wheels ablaze, hauling corn syrup and aquifer depletion straight toward your flaming bus of a career.
It’s comical, like an aside from a certain Charles Stross novel where a prisoner of war in Hiroshima complains about his cold miso soup as the Enola Gay prepares to drop the atomic bomb. That breakfast shouldn’t matter—but it does, because it’s the last normal thing to enjoy before everything changes.
Fretting about whether one’s career track is viable while a global famine is leaning out the window going “hold my beer” is what passes for comedy now. And the punchline is this: creative work is toast. Technical work is next. When both get deprecated, what pays the mortgage? What still counts?
It feels like we’re Joseph, staring down seven lean years, except there’s no Pharaoh to convince, let alone seven fat years to prepare. Just as a LinkedIn feed full of AI hustle posts and lifestyle coaches telling you to pivot.
So let’s talk about the truck: the food and water crises that are accelerating under the radar while the tech world trains its cameras on the bus fire.
In the U.S. alone, farmers are facing record droughts across the Plains. Aquifers like the Ogallala are being pumped faster than they can recharge. Extreme heat is reducing crop yields, stressing livestock, and making agricultural labor deadly. Meanwhile, corporate consolidation has left us with a brittle supply chain—just-in-time delivery for the very thing that can’t wait.
Globally, the UN warns that water scarcity and shifting weather patterns will force millions into food insecurity within the decade. Fertile land is drying up, fisheries are collapsing, and the crops that do survive are often grown for fuel or profit, not for feeding people.
And yet, most of us are being told to upskill in prompt engineering.
There’s a difference between a disruption and a collapse. The former gets you tech headlines. The latter gets you ration lines. The world is increasingly optimized for the short term—algorithmic gains, investor returns, content cycles. But our survival depends on slow, boring, infrastructural care: topsoil health, seed diversity, equitable distribution, cold storage.
That’s not speculative fiction. That’s the truck on fire.
In the animated film Flow, there’s a scene where a lemur—a minor character—frantically collects objects into a basket while a flood is sweeping the world away. The lemur doesn’t fight the water. Doesn’t save the system. Just grabs what seems to matter, instinctively, absurdly, without strategy. That lemur became a symbol for me: of creative survival, of archiving what algorithms don’t understand, of refusing to forget.
Maybe that’s what’s left to us. Archive meaning. Crack jokes while everything burns. And if we’re lucky, signal someone else on the shoulder of the highway who’s also watching it all go up in flames and thinking, “Yeah. I see it too.”
Sidebar: The Patron Saints of Witnessing the Inevitable
Sometimes resistance isn’t about winning. It’s about witnessing, about style, about refusing to be flattened into silence. These figures won’t save the world—but they remind us what it means to be human while it falls apart.
That Lemur with the Basket — salvaging the emotional detritus of a drowning world. Doesn’t fight the flood, just hoards what matters.
Wile E. Coyote — knows the boulder’s coming. Holds up a parasol anyway. Not out of hope, but principle. A tragicomic flair for timing and performance.
Joseph sans Pharaoh — sees the famine, builds the granary anyway. No backing, no budget, just a notebook and a warning no one wants to hear.
They are the patron saints of scale mismatch, of gestures too small to matter but too sacred to abandon.
They do not win.
But they do not look away.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
Postscript: Joseph Without Pharaoh
Nations are already arming.
Not just as a flex, not just for show, but as part of a quiet, coordinated repositioning. Alliances shift. Borders harden. Nationalist and authoritarian parties gain ground in liberal democracies—not by surprise, but by design. It’s as if they’re being given a head start. Not on solving anything, but on controlling what’s left. On deciding who gets to eat, who gets to move, who gets to speak when the climate tightens its grip and the systems start to crack.
The gunning-up is preemptive. Not for defense, but for dominion. Not to weather the storm, but to shape the aftermath.
What comes after the truck hits?
Famine and thirst are never just about hunger. They are about pressure. Scarcity pushes people from the land. Water vanishes, and so do the boundaries. People move. People clash. Borders harden. Nations arm.
The usual mayhem follows: displacement, xenophobia, militarized panic dressed up as policy. Governments fall. Extremists rise. Crops wither, and truth along with them. It won’t look like systems failure—it’ll look like neighbors turning on each other, cities locking their gates, and journalists struggling to name what’s really happening before their feeds go dark.
Joseph, in this century, has no Pharaoh. No court. No grain silos. Just a flare in hand, and a half-built sentence in his throat. He can’t stop the famine. But he can still bear witness.
And maybe, that’s what we do now: witness each other. Tend the archive. Pass the seeds. Speak plainly.
Even as the truck burns on.
Even as the breakfast cools.
Even as the sky splits open again.