When the Smoke Clears: The Cultural Impact of the LA Fires

Friday, January 10, 2025.

In The White Album, Joan Didion writes, “The question of self-pity was moot. I had decided to live without it.”

It’s the kind of stripped-bare wisdom that feels hauntingly appropriate when we talk about the LA fires.

These aren’t just natural disasters; they’re existential assaults on the myths we tell ourselves about control, safety, and permanence.

They don’t just burn the land—they burn through our illusions, leaving us to sift through the ashes of a scorched reality.

The Cultural Unraveling: A City’s Fragile Myths

Los Angeles has always been a city of contradictions: glitter and grime, ambition and despair, sprawling affluence alongside the brutal calculus of survival.

Some of our greatest writers emerged in Los Angeles; Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion, John Fante and James Elroy, to name but a few. Like the fires, they purified our American contradictions down to raw truths.

Their prose reflects what Didion called the “shifting phantasmagoria” of our lived experience.

But in a city where identity is so often tied to image, what happens when the image is smoke-blackened and lost?

For the wealthy, the fires are an inconvenience— perhaps just another chapter in their “resilience” narrative.

For others, they’re a gut punch, displacing lives already precariously balanced.

The fires burn through more than the Hollywood Hills; they expose the cultural fissures of a city that markets itself as aspirational, even as it hides the despair lurking in the shadows. In the quiet horror of a disaster, those shadows grow long and undeniable.

Mental Health: What the Flames Leave Behind

For those who watch their homes burn, the trauma isn’t just physical. It’s psychic. The fires erode not just belongings but the sense of safety and order that sustains our day-to-day lives.

As a marriage and family therapist, I see how disasters like these unmoor people from their emotional anchors.

It’s not just the loss of a home—it’s the loss of the stories that home held. It’s the jagged feeling of being untethered and placeless, of wondering what it means to rebuild when the ground itself feels hostile.

The fires act like accelerants for underlying mental health struggles. Anxiety spirals. Depression deepens. Families, already stretched thin, find themselves snapping under the pressure.

Arguments that might have smoldered in calmer times now rage unchecked, mirroring the flames outside.

Children are especially vulnerable.

They don’t yet have the words for what they’re feeling, but their small worlds have been turned upside down.

The smell of smoke in the air becomes an invisible monster that keeps them awake at night. For teenagers, the existential questions the fires provoke—Why here? Why us?—can become almost unbearable.

And what of the adults, who are supposed to have the answers but, in the face of such destruction, have none?

A Reckoning with Loss

Didion once described fire as “a mysterious thing,” writing of its paradoxical role as both destroyer and purifier.

But what happens when the destruction feels endless and the purification never comes? We like to tell ourselves that disasters bring communities together, that they reveal our shared humanity. But sometimes, they reveal only how thin those bonds really are.

In therapy, I often talk about the importance of confronting loss head-on. The fires demand a similar reckoning—not just with what has been lost but with the vulnerability we all share.

Disasters like these have a way of peeling back the veneer, leaving raw nerves exposed. What do we do with that rawness?

Do we rebuild as though nothing happened, or do we allow ourselves to truly feel the weight of the placelessness and impermanence of what’s gone?

The Long Shadow of Smoke

Even as the flames die down, the psychological smoke will linger.

There will be rage, remorse, and resentment. There will be impermanence, and great suffering in high places.

For weeks, months, even years, people will carry the scars of this disaster in their minds and hearts.

Relationships strained by evacuation orders and insurance battles may never fully recover. Communities, already fractured by inequality, might find themselves more divided than ever.

Yet, in that darkness, there is also a chance for something better.

Not in the way of platitudes about resilience or “coming back stronger,” but in the quiet, painful work of acknowledging our fragility. The fires don’t just destroy; they reveal. They reveal what we hold dear, what we neglect, and what we’re willing—or unwilling—to fight for.

Stories in the Ashes

Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But the fires rewrite our stories, whether we’re ready or not.

They force us to ask hard questions: What does it mean to belong to a place that feels increasingly inhospitable?

How do we make meaning in the face of destruction?

We may not get to choose what burns. But, as always, we do get to decide what rises from the ashes.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.