Journalist and writer Luke O’Neil has spent the last seven years covering the United States’ precipitous material and political decline in his newsletter, Welcome to Hell World. For that reason, it would be easy to brand him a doomsayer. But the term is derisive and implies unwarranted panic. O’Neil isn’t a doomsayer, he’s a describer. His work does not exaggerate contemporary miseries. Capitalism really is frying the planet, trans rights really are under attack, the nation’s capital really is under armed military occupation, establishment media really refers to New York City Mayor Eric Adams handing out cash-filled envelopes to reporters as “a bold departure from political norms” while lambasting Zohran Mamdani for his rent-stabilized apartment. The list goes on (ICE raids, the unceasing death in Gaza, etc).
Everything is as bad as O’Neil says it is. But do we deserve it? And is there any chance at redemption, or even at snatching a glimmer of happiness from financialized despair?
O’Neil explores these questions, and others, in his latest collection of short stories and poetry titled We Had It Coming and Other Fictions, which publishes on November 4th and is currently available for preorder here.
Our editor, Matt Wolfbridge, interviewed O’Neil via email about the book, our moment’s deluge of nightmares, as well as where and how beauty can still be found amidst a world that feels designed to expunge it.
Their conversation is below and has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity:
Typebar: Hi Luke. Your book engages with all the simultaneous crises we face (climate collapse, mass wealth inequality, authoritarianism, etc). In that way, it reminded me of a book I read back in February, Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. In our interview with him, we asked if he considered his book “omni-crisis” literature. That is to say, literature engaging with the ongoing crisis of all systems. I’m curious, how would you categorize We Had It Coming? Is this omni-crisis literature?
O’Neil: What other subject is there anymore right? I think it would be hard not to notice the onslaught of overlapping catastrophes going on around us at this point even if you tried. And believe me people do still try. And then, once you’ve noticed them, or have been pummeled by one or two of them personally, even harder not to have it all creep into, if not completely subsume, everything you might write. This collection, like A Creature Wanting Form from 2023, is sort of a fictionalized variation of what I did with my previous two non-fiction books, and in the newsletter Welcome to Hell World, which is a more journalistic endeavor. In all of those I reported on predatory healthcare nightmares, climate disasters, mass shootings, police violence, war, civil rights and carceral abuses, homelessness and hunger, etc. All the hits.
I have always had a very hard time personally, but especially the last year or two, thinking about anything besides what a nightmare we’ve built for ourselves. “How does a person live? Is there a correct way?” One of the characters in the book asks.
Typebar: To me, the deep pain of mourning pervades the entire book. I feel like every short, every poem, somehow is tied to mourning and particularly mourning of things that are still here but will be gone sooner than we like to admit. I’m curious how you managed to complete a project so emotionally taxing — and perhaps difficult to sell hah hah hah
O’Neil: Despite what I just said there is so much beauty in the world. Not to sound corny. There is so much love. But it’s a precious thing and so easily lost. Especially when some motherfucker is determined to steal it away from you. So many of them out there too. Living in America is like waking up in the supermarket from the Mist every morning. What new horrific bloodsucker at the window is this?
Most are not, but a few of the pieces in here, which will be obvious to people who have followed my whole deal for a while, are largely biographical. I have lost a couple of friends in the last year or two, like many of us have, to addiction, to suicide, including one to the latter this past year that really shook me. On top of that I’m starting to get to the age where everyone’s parents are dying, and more than that, your peers also just start to die more routinely and it’s not as big a deal you know? It is but you follow me. When people in their forties or fifties die it’s still tragic but it’s less earth-shattering than at any other point in your life previously. Death as a matter of course. I am pretty sure that’s only going to continue to get worse and worse if I am afforded the privilege of another couple decades!
Chief among the losses though, and this sort of infests the book in a number of places, was not just losing my long estranged but suddenly newly reunited biological father a few years back, but also having to have to make the decision to let him die. Here’s your father back just in time to watch him waste away in a coma. Good luck!
I didn’t ask for that shit.
“Shaking the doctor’s hand like a salesman we were closing a deal with,” I wrote.
I know it’s a cliche, the sad dad guy, but man it fucked me up so bad having to go through that. Wondering if he was still alive down in there somewhere screaming to be set free.
My loving mother and dad (my step father who raised me) are getting old now too, as are my beloved in-laws. I can feel it all cresting on the horizon.
And that’s not to mention the orgy of death and destruction going on all around us everywhere else and in Gaza in particular every second of the day.
So how did I manage? Well I don’t know if I did yet. I’ve mostly been coping by drinking and smoking too much, another theme that isn’t exactly subtle in the book. And not in a funny haha gotta have my drink! way. A way that has become a bit dark. Like, hm, someone ought to look into this.
Also by telling myself the lie that maybe the things I write could make some sort of change. A small one, of course, I’m not an asshole, but still something.
My readers write to me often to tell me about how this or that piece helped them or made them feel less alone or put something they had been feeling into words that they could not find and if that’s all I ever get out of this then that’s something too.
Typebar: I think that’s a good point. It’s very easy to get caught up in misery and of course the pain shouldn’t be avoided and we should be clear minded about what we face. But, to you, where is the humor still found? Where is beauty found? To me the scene where the author is talking to his friend outside for hours–those moments I think are very beautiful and they still exist if you’re lucky enough to have even one solid relationship with a person. And I think that’s part of what makes AI so horrifying, they want to replace that with a chatbot that gives children advice on ending their own lives.
O’Neil: Unfortunately these motherfuckers are still often very funny. Trump just the other day admitting he’s afraid he won’t get into Heaven is funny. All these losers crying about advertisements for jeans and chain restaurant logos every single day of their lives is still funny. The real life harm they can cause on the other end of the joke isn’t funny but still.
And all of my friends are funny. I try to make people laugh, in real life, and online, as much as possible. I don’t take great pleasure in bumming everyone out, even though I often do, I prefer to make people laugh. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. You cannot make an “AI” or computer laugh. Fuck “AI.” It is a little piece of Hell on Earth. The solitary level.
I find beauty in friendship and family and nature more than anything else. We’ve fucked up the world pretty good by now but not all of it. We’ve fucked up most of our ability to connect with humans but not completely. Touch grass has become a boring cliche lately but the message behind it stands. Touch sand ideally if you can. Or just go look at the ocean.
Typebar: One of the lines that stuck with me most came on page 207, “do you remember how it felt when we still thought we had a chance?” Maybe I’m showing my own baggage here but for me this book in some ways feels like the release of a long-held-in wail of agony post-Sanders movement. I feel like we never really got a chance to mourn, right? He won Nevada, then COVID happened, then Super Tuesday happened, then the movement was gone. Totally erased from existence but with the onset of the pandemic, everyone had their lives to worry about. I feel like the movement never really got its due in terms of an obituary or funeral rites (whatever those would’ve looked like). We Had It Coming almost felt like a spiritual mourning of a movement that held so much promise and elevated us so high yet materially generated little more than a handful of podcasting careers and aloof think pieces in The Atlantic.
O’Neil: I don’t know that I was thinking about that moment in particular for that piece but that’s certainly a fair reading. I did write a piece once about the last day I felt hope. It was at a Bernie/The Strokes event in New Hampshire about a month before Covid. Things were gonna be different!
Of course they ultimately were not. And in fact became so much worse than even the cynical among us might have expected.
But you are right to note a heavy sense of mourning throughout the book, not only for the things we are currently in the process of losing, be it the stability of the climate itself, or democracy, such as it is, but also the loss of all the things we could have but are prevented from attaining. Things really and truly do not have to be like this. They are being made to be like this.
Nevertheless you still have to hold out hope that there’s a chance we can still win, otherwise what’s the point of going on?
Then again maybe we don’t deserve a better world? Collectively speaking I mean. Especially as Americans. Maybe the title is apt.
I also just want to point out real quick that the book isn’t as miserable a slog as we’re making it seem here! It’s really rather funny too. No one would want to read about this kind of shit for 300 pages if it weren’t also funny.
Typebar: So…DO we have it coming?
O’Neil: That is the question isn’t it? Unfortunately I have a lot of Massachusetts Irish Catholic brain damage so it’s something I have thought about every second of my life and I still don’t know. I guess it really depends on what your definition of “we” and “it” are. But you know I can’t give it all away in an interview. People will have to read the book to find out. Or just turn on the news. Or try to live for five seconds in this place we’ve built for ourselves.
Typebar: Another topic I touched on with Ron Currie Jr. was anti-natalism. I’m sure you’re aware the concept is having something of a moment culturally (as is the opposing philosophy). There are moments in We Had It Coming that seem to make a pretty strong case in favor of anti-natalism, for example:
I know it’s not a big deal when a baby cries! I’m not fucking stupid. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how it never asked for this. It never asked to be wrenched out of oblivion into this. To be dropped on a changing table at the shitty community pool where the scuba divers train and the dozens of children get yelled at for not swimming fast enough as I bob back and forth for twenty to thirty minutes a day depending on how hungover I am. For some reason the screaming at the beginning of life that we all do – the first thing any of us ever does is cry out for a mother we don’t have the words for yet – made me think about men dying in trenches screaming for their own mothers and I wondered if any of all this was worth it.
Where on the spectrum of anti-natalism vs. natalism do you think We Had it Coming belongs?
O’Neil: Sounds like I gotta look into this guy Ron Currie Jr. fella! I haven’t really thought about either of those too much as political philosophies per se. It seems to me that both could lead pretty quickly to some dark places. We know how talking about birth rates and such goes hand in hand with fascism. Maybe leaning too heavily in the other direction could backfire and end up devaluing human life? If it’s all just suffering anyway what does it matter then if I cause a person suffering? That sort of thing.
I believe in the value of every human life very much and I think everyone should have as many or as few babies as they want and for those babies to grow up in a world where they have everything they need to thrive and be happy. I’ve always personally struggled with the idea of being responsible myself for creating one though. I don’t want to be responsible in any way for anyone else’s suffering if I can help it, and sometimes we cannot, but especially not my own hypothetical kid. I can barely handle having a wife that I worry about this much. The anxiety of parenting seems like it would crush me. Fortunately, or tragically, depending on how you look at it, I’ll never have to find out at this point.
Typebar: Let’s talk literature. What were your literary inspirations for this collection? All of the microfiction was making me think “Grungy Joy Williams” hah hah.
O’Neil: I’ll take that as a compliment! I still have the same DNA of influence in me from when I was young that I talked about a lot for the last book. The stuff that made me want to become a writer in the first place. Virginia Woolf certainly. There’s also a lot of Barthelme in there. I feel like a lot of my characters are sort of wandering around through the absurd with a concussion. This time around I was reading a lot of James Tate and the poems of Ray Carver. I don’t know if it shows up in the writing but I turned to Louise Gluck’s collected poems while writing a decent amount. I was really bowled over by the work of Samanta Schweblin. Also, perhaps randomly, I still haven’t been able to shake Norm Macdonald’s memoir. His affected plain-speaking shtick got my ass. Mostly though I was influenced by music for this one. David Berman and Jason Molina in particular.
“How long can a world go on under such a subtle god?” is a lyric hanging over most of the pieces in here.
Typebar: A lot of people talk about “making community” now — that’s kind of been the contemporary lefty verbiage of choice, as you note in the book. Yet part of the insidiousness of modern capitalism is the commercial relationships have decayed into openly hostile ones as precarity soars. There’s a whole short about this in the book — the one with the argument about whether to open a door for a person in need. This kind of thing isn’t new. I remember in the 90s my parents would panic over whatever flavor of the minute thing was on the news — flashing your brights was a secret trigger for a gang initiation and some cartel guy would follow you home and cut your head off. The crazy type of shit bored and terrified suburbanites dream up because deep down I think we all know our gains are kind of ill-gotten and built off immense suffering. But now, that kind of “if you see a blue Toyota pickup at Target it means you’re about to be trafficked” thing is everywhere — on every app on, on every city’s subreddit, all the way up to figures with massive reach and influence. Community making seems impossible in this context; the copper wire has been stripped from society and the whole concept of “society” seems defeated. It’s just you and your parasocial influencers until the floods and then it’s just billionaires in bunkers. I once read a comment on a newsletter where someone remarked the only reason a stranger has to approach you is if they want to rob you or kill you. What a terrifying world to live in. How can community even begin to be made here?
O’Neil: A lot of these questions are hard for me to answer because they concern things that my characters in the book are wrestling with, like many of us in the real world as well, and while some of them have an answer of their own, a lot of them do not, which is where I find myself in a lot of these cases. I don’t fucking know, man.
There’s a line in one of the pieces, about Family Feud, which I weirdly watch a lot of, where I write Steve often says they don’t tell him ahead of time what the answers are, but he damn well knows what they are not. And all of this, everything we are doing right is not the answer. That doesn’t mean I know how to fix any of it. There’s another piece about going to a protest and feeling fulfilled to be out in the world around other people. A protest is not going to make any sort of immediate change but it beats sitting around on our phones all day.
I happened to have just been away in Maine for a little get together my college friends and their families all do every year on the beach, and wifi was kind of bad so I couldn’t post or read much, and it was just the most nourishing and sincere time. It made me remember I’m happy to be alive.
Less phones more real life is kind of a boring cliche answer but I think it’s a start. I’m not personally going to do it but it’s a good idea all the same.
Typebar: This work is fixated on death in a way I appreciate — discussing the terror of a sudden ending. I very much am terrified of a sudden death. How could you not be? Imagine existence suddenly disappearing. Why wouldn’t you want to know ahead of time so you can get things in order and (attempt to) organize proper final thoughts; to say goodbye to yourself. I mean it would be awful to have your final thoughts be “oh sh-!” right?
O’Neil: Well neither one is ideal! I think I live in that pre-death anxiety all the time, and it’s a very uncomfortable place to be. The constant awareness. The looming. If you forced me to choose I would take the two minute warning so to speak as opposed to the whistle suddenly blowing out of nowhere, but it all amounts to the same in the end doesn’t it? Not for the ones we leave behind, no, but for each of us, the protagonist of reality.
Typebar: And lastly, we love asking everyone we interview about typewriters. Have you ever written on one before? Do you have a favorite model or models?
O’Neil: I am just old enough to have been around for the switchover from typewriters to desktop computers when I was in high school so yes I used them when I was a kid but it’s been so long now that it doesn’t even seem real anymore.
We Had It Coming and Other Fictions will release on November 4th 2025. You can preorder it here.
