The Bleakness Of 2020
Part 1 — What The Hell Is Going On
“And I know none of this will matter in the long run, but I know a song is still a song around no-one” — Fiona Apple
If you consider yourself left of Liberal, this week’s election has probably failed to provide any kind of relief or respite. Like me, any schadenfreude at victory over an explicitly evil enemy has likely flown away when you realize the banal evil coming to replace him. If you are my age, you have already experienced the Obama years, and you know that war will continue and worsen, climate change will go unchecked, and people will continue to be hungry, unhoused, and sick. Evil will continue to go unpunished. The brutality that Western democracies exported through their global wars on drugs, communism and terror will continue to be turned against their populace.
Maybe you are someone like me with a lot of ideas but poor follow-through, a sense that you are creative but no masterpiece to show for it, and a handful of DSM categorizations, you may be feeling a personal bleakness turning a corner. Aches that used to be occasional are now chronic. People that you caught up with in the surprising initial moments of the pandemic have once again drifted away, as everyone is busy. Employment involves stringing together contracts where you are either completely uninspired and bored or overworked and strained to burnout. Worst, all of the things that you promised yourself you would change have continued, in one way or another. No ultimatum or new habit or “this time I’m going to write for an hour every morning and do two pushups every night” is going to set in. Accountability to one’s self is probably where it is going to be, for a while. Things are not going to change much for you personally, in the near future. Maybe you, like me are starting to wonder if you have the potential to accomplish more than a pedestrian life of subsistence and minor hedonism.
The worst part about things is a sense of the lack of a future which Mark Fisher describes in his work Capitalist Realism. There is a sense that the apocalypse is coming at all times, but the other shoe never drops. Things just get worse, and we adapt to things being worse. If you live in The Middle East, North Africa, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Nagorno Karabakh, the Donbas, Lebanon, or any number of places… If you are a BIPOC marching with Black Lives Matter, are trying to become a refugee in the United States, or if you are an indigenous person trying to assert your right over the land: you are already probably experiencing several tropes of the apocalypse. Meanwhile, if you are like me, you worry about these things, feel guilty for the comfort you have, but also worry and worry and worry about the slow stagnation that has settled over your days. Fisher describes:
The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate.
I would argue that this feeling of an ongoing, undefeatable catastrophe is the exact sensation one has when the nominally left party in the largest democracy of the world begins punching left, planning how to compromise with their former nemesis, and taking foreign policy advice from the architect of the Iraq War.
The term that keeps rushing through my mind as daylight savings time sets in is “bleak.” I’m pretty sure I picked it up from a podcast I listen to, but it’s become stuck in my mind like a canker. Instead of any apocalypse, things are just going to keep getting more bleak. Covid will not find a vaccine, so you won’t even have concerts or partying as a way to deal with the overwhelming bleakness. The coral reefs are done for. Everyone has a feeling deep in their bones that a major economic collapse is coming, and everyone knows that it will result in the banks and major industries being bailed out again, while another segment of the population becomes permanently impoverished.
One thing is certain, things can certainly get worse
What can you say? What can you do? One thing you can do is to joke about it, and be the smartest guy complaining about it. Fisher quotes Nietzsche and describes:
an age (with) a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, I and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
Our cultural scene fits this description. As I write this, a chill creeps up my spine as I wonder “who the hell am I to talk about this?” I’m privileged, lucky, white, cis. Not the person to speak about this at all.” Things are much worse for other people. I’m literally a white male podcaster. However I would argue this nervousness is part of what makes everything so bleak. In addition to feeling unhappy, I feel I need to keep in touch with what I should be angry about. I am told via 17 instagram stories that by being silent about something, I am complicit in it. I am encouraged to do the work to recognize the myriad ways in which racism has shaped my worldview. I’m certainly no expert or policy maker. Am I being a stereotypical leftist dudebro if I don’t cheer the success of Biden over the evil Donald Trump?
And the laws continue to get passed. The wealthy continue to passively hoover up every last dime by privatizing more and more of the commons. Awareness of issues increases as things get worse, and everyone feels more individually responsible for the ways they contribute to these systemic issues. When you try to take this awareness to political action, there is always someone polished and unscrupulous ready to co-opt it. It’s all just fucking bleak.
How did we get here? Is this new? I’ll meditate on this in part two.
