I’ve spent the better part of this year living inside two Aldous Huxley novels.
Not literally, of course. But as I’ve been developing my next book, I keep returning to Brave New World and Island—two visions of humanity’s future that Huxley wrote thirty years apart. The first is the dystopia everyone knows by reputation. The second, which someone turned me onto just last year, is his final novel, an attempt to offer an antidote. Together they’ve become a kind of lens for me, a way of seeing what we’re becoming and what we might still choose to be.
One phrase from Brave New World has lodged itself in my thinking and won’t let go. The World State’s motto: Ending is better than mending.
Why repair what’s broken when you can discard it? Why wrestle with suffering when you can anesthetize it? Why invest in healing when replacement is more efficient?
It’s the ideology of extraction. The philosophy of disposable people. And as the holidays approach, I find myself noticing how thoroughly we’ve adopted it as our own.
In case you have not read Island (and I highly recommend it). Huxley’s utopia also falls to the temptations of extraction. The book closes as dramatically as BNW (if you recall that ending?). Huxley leaves us thinking in both worlds.
The small communities that sustain us—the ones built on showing up, on mutual care, on presence as its own gift—are falling apart also. Not to invading armies or corporate takeovers, but to something quieter. More intimate.
They’re falling to political discourse that treats difference as betrayal. To division that seeps into dinner tables and group chats and Sunday gatherings. To the slow, corrosive choice—made one conversation at a time—to end rather than mend.
I watch friendships dissolve over headlines. Families fracture over votes. Communities that took decades to weave come undone in a single season of anger.
Ending is better than mending was supposed to be the motto of a dystopia. Somehow it became ours.
The algorithms accelerate it. They feed us outrage and starve us of nuance. They reward the hot take, the righteous unfollowing, the decisive cut. They make ending feel powerful and mending feel naive.
Exhaustion does the rest. It’s easier to walk away than to stay in the room with someone who sees the world differently. Easier to protect yourself than to extend yourself. Easier to be right than to be in relationship.
I understand this. I’ve felt it. The holidays have a way of amplifying every fracture, every silence, every wound we’ve been too tired to tend.
But here’s what haunts me: if we can’t protect the communities we already have, how will we ever build new ones?
Years ago I encountered a small nonprofit in San Diego called Reboot. They work with veterans leaving military service, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of résumés and job placement, they walk people back into themselves. They guide them through childhood memories, pre-service identities, buried emotions—the parts of themselves they’d tucked away to survive the structure.
It’s the opposite of boot camp. Boot camp asks: Who must you become for the system? Reboot asks: Who were you before the system—and who might you become now?
For the first time, many of these sailors and soldiers are given permission to soften. To grieve. To remember that they are more than their rank, their role, their reflexes.
I think about Reboot often. What would our country look like if every veteran had access to that kind of unburdening? What if we treated emotional reintegration as seriously as we treat warfighting?
And then the question gets bigger: What about the rest of us? We’ve all been shaped by systems that taught us to harden. To sort people into categories. To end what’s complicated rather than stay with it. What would it mean for a whole society to reboot? To practice repair as seriously as we practice self-protection? To mend ourselves so we might have something left to offer each other?
In Island, Huxley imagined Pala—a small community that built its culture around human flourishing rather than efficiency. Children learned emotional awareness. Families shared the labor of care. No one was left to bear their burdens alone.
The small Palas among us face the same threat. Not from outside forces, but from our own unwillingness to stay in the room. Our own fatigue. Our own quiet adoption of the dystopian motto we were supposed to reject.
So as the holidays approach, I ask you:
What if mending is better than ending?
What if the relationship that feels impossible is actually just unfinished? What if the silence is an invitation rather than a wall? What if staying—awkward, uncomfortable, uncertain—is the most countercultural thing we can do in an age that rewards the clean break?
I’m not suggesting we tolerate abuse or abandon our boundaries. Some endings are necessary. But I wonder how many of our endings aren’t really about safety. They’re about exhaustion. About algorithms whispering that this person is too far gone, too different, too much work. About the seductive efficiency of cutting ties instead of tending them.
Human beings can not be measured by cheap algorithms. We are gardens—each one slow, each one singular, each one deserving of the patient tending that growth requires.
This holiday season, I hope you find the courage to mend something. A conversation. A connection. A bridge you thought was burned. Maybe even something inside yourself that’s been waiting for permission to soften.
It might fail. It might be hard. But the trying itself is a kind of resistance—a refusal to let ending is better than mending have the final word.
Robert Rasmussen is the author of Better Places and the forthcoming Room to Be Human. He writes at betterplaces.blog.
Better Places 