It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your husband brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice. Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers. Maybe you take it a step further: “Actually, flowers are really basic. Only unoriginal girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.”
If this goes on for long enough—even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—you will see them as a kind of joke. Flowers are now a bit. It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your “receptors for flowers” for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.
Entering the void
I’m deeply troubled by the fact that I see this happening at a massive scale, all around us. Except the problem is not a lack of bouquets, of course. It’s a lack of meaning.
Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.
“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it stood right in front of them.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is "cringe," leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for the foolish, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a joke.
A quick aside before we get into it: it’s taken me a long time to write this piece. This is partly because this whole phenomenon is, in a way, its own kind of absence. It’s been hard for me to identify what is going on and what is missing. I’ve had my own cycles of coping with it. I’ve been telling myself that I don’t care about people not caring. But obviously I do. So here goes.
A culture of chaos
The cultural forces that spawned this collective response have been quietly working their way into everything for decades—probably since the 1970s if I had to stick a pin in it. It reached new heights in the 1990s, but it took off exponentially since the mass adoption of the internet, social media, and the pandemic. We "boiling frogs" started to feel the water get really hot around 2015, I think, and it’s only gotten hotter and hotter since.
We’re so saturated in this environment that people are not only numbing out, they’re making a spectacle of it: from the “quiet quitting” trend to the entire “ironic” aesthetic of high-fashion brands. You know it’s bad when the corporations get on board. The detachment is so widespread that most companies don’t even have the genuine confidence to market their own products. Everything is delivered with a wink from one eye and an eye-roll from the other. We live in a mud puddle of memes, ironic hot takes, and self-conscious self-reference. David Foster Wallace called it exactly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1993:
“[…] The harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, schticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving. How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”?”
—David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
We swim in a sea of meaningless mush, and when you have to trudge through nothing but slop all day, every day, it gets harder and harder to not numb out. There’s so much and it just keeps coming. There’s lots to do. There’s lots to buy. The “content” never ends. Pop culture figures are constantly trending for trivial reasons; advertisements tell you what to wear and what to buy every second.
Meaningless distractions, all.
Thanks to the internet and our insatiably consumerist culture, it is finally possible to distract yourself for every waking minute of your life and barely even notice you’re doing it. When you mix all colors of paint together, you get black. Everything quickly becomes nothing.
What else? Well, there’s the ubiquity of explicit digital content which has drained everyone of their natural vitality. It’s been said many times before: everything is provocative and no one is genuinely moved. Social media and the fear of "cancel culture" got together to create a dull popular culture and celebrity elite. It stands for nothing and risks nothing, so there’s nothing to engage with. Culture is just kind of “there,” and no one really cares about it.
An unfortunate by-product of this is that there’s also very little to which we can aspire. The void at the top has allowed for polarizing figures to be taken seriously by both fans and critics alike. The blame is always being shifted around. People blame the opposite gender, the older generation, the younger generation, social media, or the pandemic.
Despair and loneliness abound. Many struggle with their mental health and feel they cannot cope without various substances or medications. People are lonely: they have fewer friends and live far from their families. Dating seems impossible. Many in the prime of their lives are struggling to meet even one potential partner who shares their values and vision for a relationship. Our phones have ruined our attention spans to the point where many can no longer read a book, let alone sit quietly with their thoughts. If you’re an intelligent, hardworking person, odds are the job you’ll have out of college will involve staring at a laptop screen in a state of heightened stress for decades.
To top it all off, we can’t have meaningful conversations about any of this because everyone runs their thoughts through a personal filter. People are policing their own thoughts before they even speak. I’m sure I’ve theoretically “offended” all sorts of people in the last paragraph alone. But the point stands: things are trending down. Something is deeply wrong. We all know it. We all feel it.
We think ironic detachment will protect us
The picture is bleak. It’s so sad it’s difficult to comprehend. How do you protect yourself in such a world?
You simply don’t allow yourself to experience it.
Think back to the flower metaphor. This is where we don’t receive flowers, but we cope. We look around the world, struggle to see the meaning in its chaos, and unconsciously tell ourselves that finding meaning isn’t that important. If I can’t pursue my own fulfillment, at least I can pursue my own pleasure. This is a somewhat reasonable reaction to the present circumstances. It feels straightforward—it’s binary, measurable, and everyone else is doing it. This is how the numbness starts.
Being ironically detached from life is endlessly glamorized in our culture. There’s a certain status in pretending nothing affects you and you don’t care. There is an appeal in being a critic and mocking others. Standing for nothing makes you impossible to pin down. You’re playing a game of hide-and-seek with life, and you’re hiding. It’s thrilling to find a good place to hide, to have people seeking you. But in our substance-filled escapism, our coy, sarcastic conversations, and our fleeting encounters, we should heed the words of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott:
“It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”
It is a disaster to not be found—a total disaster to not be able to connect with others because we were too preoccupied with ourselves. The whole reason for ironic detachment is to build a protective wall between oneself and the world. We think we’re building a wall, but we’re really hollowing ourselves out from the inside. Eventually, without really noticing it, there will be nothing left for the wall to defend. There will be no one to find.
The opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. When you take an ironic, negative, or numb attitude to everything, you stop looking for solutions, and when you stop looking for solutions, you lose all agency in your life.
Possible antidotes
We can’t keep going down the path we’re on, but we also can’t go back. We can’t put the internet back in the box or log off forever. Too much of our lives is irrevocably online, we’re all too self-aware, and a forced sense of sincerity often feels fake.
Rather than jump to an affected "sincerity," I’d like to start with basic honesty. It would be great if we started just telling the truth—to ourselves and each other. The truth is good. Not “our truth,” but the real truth that simply is. In other words: stop hiding and start seeking. Stop hiding from the sad truths and start seeking the transcendent truths that will address the sadness. When we flip the game, we can stop worrying about someone finding us and start seeking the truth in the world, in others, and in ourselves.
Next, I would advocate for embracing reality—our real lives, right now—and not clinging to an abstract idea of how our lives should be. Everything we see exclusively online does not really matter. Measuring the distance between our real lives and some ever-changing, impossible ideal will do nothing but break our spirit. Reality—the truth—is what counts.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive. Things are never so fundamentally broken that we cannot move just a bit closer toward our goals and try again to live up to our values. Goals and values are good to have. The bigger and more transcendent, the better.
Once we figure out those goals and values, we should take responsibility for them. Standing for something is hard because it means you are choosing one path over another. This is a risk. People will not always agree with you. We should take responsibility for our beliefs, but be prepared to calmly and rationally explain them. Criticize the world all you want, but do the hard work of building something better to take its place.
In this process, we’re bound to fail and make mistakes. This is also hard. Our culture simultaneously demands both perfection and apology, but is notoriously unforgiving. Everyone needs a little forgiveness from time to time. We need to remember that it is okay to make mistakes if we try to remedy them. It’s also okay to be seen trying. Don’t take the easy route of apathy. To shock yourself out of a numb state and restore your vitality, you will need to work hard and submit to something bigger than your own desires.
I started with flowers, so I’d like to end with them, too. We all know that life does not hand out bouquets. Flowers do not just appear in the world. The same is true for a life of meaning. Both are grown, over time, from the tiniest seeds. You have to cultivate meaning in your life. You need to do the hard work of tilling the soil and nurturing the seeds. No one can do it for you. Grow your own flowers and give them away to everyone you meet. The earth is not always fertile, and flowers eventually die, but there is still beauty in the gesture. There is still a point to it all.
