Mo State: The Global Hangover When Progress Runs on Empty

“Mo State” and the Quiet Art of Running Out of Everything

From the vantage point of a cramped café in Lisbon—where the Wi-Fi password is still “Brexit2020,” presumably because nobody has had the emotional bandwidth to change it—the phrase “mo state” has begun popping up on stock-ticker chyrons, Indian WhatsApp uncle groups, and, most ominously, German PowerPoint decks titled “Strategic Resilience 2025.” At first glance it looks like a typo for Missouri, the American state best known for exporting both Mark Twain and statistically improbable tornadoes. But “mo state” is actually shorthand for “momentum state,” the condition in which a system has exhausted its forward propulsion yet remains heroically committed to pretending everything is fine. Picture a Tesla on autopilot seconds after the battery icon flatlines, still indicating “0 %—but think positive!”

Globally, mo state has become the dominant operating system. China’s post-zero-COVID rebound turned out to be as flimsy as a Shanghai condo façade; Europe is discovering that Russian gas is rather hard to replace with sternly worded resolutions; and the United Kingdom—well, the less said about the UK the better, except that its entire economic model now appears to be “keep calm and carry on inflating.” Even the Swiss, historically the world’s most reliable hedge against chaos, recently had to explain why Credit Suisse imploded faster than a Toblerone in a glovebox. Their answer, delivered with the grim cheer of a man informing you your fondue pot is actually made of asbestos, was essentially: “We too have entered mo state.”

The implications ripple outward like an oil slick wearing a smiley-face sticker. Supply chains, once taut as a violin string, now sag like yesterday’s bungee cord. The Red Sea’s latest hobby—targeting container ships with discount drones—means European supermarkets may soon ration cucumbers, prompting Mediterranean housewives to relive wartime trauma they previously only knew from black-and-white nonna stories. Meanwhile, semiconductor shortages have slowed everything from PlayStation 5 deliveries to guided missile production, proving that whether you’re a 14-year-old gamer in Jakarta or a general in Pyongyang, mo state unites us all in disappointment.

Central banks, those high priests of monetary necromancy, keep raising interest rates in the hope that if borrowing becomes expensive enough, inflation will simply die of embarrassment. The result is a synchronized global mortgage tantrum: from Auckland to Austin, thirty-somethings who once bragged about their open-plan kitchens now hold dinner parties where the main course is schadenfreude and the wine box is labeled “At Least We Still Have Roofs.” In South Korea, the government has begun offering newlyweds free housing—an act of generosity undercut by the fact that nobody can afford the wedding in the first place.

Perhaps the most poetic demonstration of mo state is climate policy. Every COP summit ends with declarations so ambitious they require a new color on the temperature map, yet emissions rise like a soufflé baked by someone who skimmed the recipe. Delegates fly home in planes fueled by the very substances they just vowed to abolish, congratulating themselves on reaching “net-zero by 2050, assuming gravity cooperates.” It’s the geopolitical equivalent of promising to quit smoking next Tuesday while standing in a fireworks factory with a lit match.

And still, the show lumbers on. Markets rally on rumors of rumors; TikTok economists declare soft landings from beanbag chairs; oligarchs purchase citizenships the way normal people collect stamps. The planet’s population has never been better informed about its own decline, nor more adept at turning that knowledge into content. We scroll, we doom, we post a meme of a melting glacier captioned “mood,” then order next-day delivery of yoga pants stitched in a Bangladeshi factory currently underwater—mo state in three acts.

So what happens when the momentum finally, undeniably stops? History suggests humans will do what we always do: rebrand the crisis, monetize the coping mechanisms, and write a self-congratulatory white paper titled “Lessons Learned.” Until then, enjoy the glide. After all, mo state may be the first truly universal experience—less a bug in civilization’s code than its final feature update.