#158: Do we “live in hell”?
Good morning!
I’ve noticed that proclaiming ourselves to be “living in hell” has become a common reflex for young people to make light of everything going on (including, at one point, me), but I don’t think it’s signaling what they want it to signal. Today’s newsletter is about that.
Cynicism as a personality
I started describing the world as a “hellscape” around 2017. And I can understand why: I was about a year into working as a full-time writer, Trump had just been inaugurated, and the pop culture sphere I was tasked with covering was suddenly very interested in politics (and so was I). If I’d cared before, this was different. This was rabid. This was the birth of the modern culture wars, i.e., the time to pick a side and make the side your personality. For the terminally online media class, refrains like “we live in hell” or “America is a dumpster fire” became a shorthand for associating with the left. To publicly proclaim one’s hope lost was, weirdly, a kind of intellectual flex, like hating the popular kids, or listening to the band before everyone else.
As a willing participant, I obviously didn’t see it that way, at least not consciously. But a couple years ago, the entire posture soured for me. I started to wonder if it was actively making things worse. Of course, it’s more popular than ever, which is part of what grates, but there’s something more vexing about it than that. First and foremost, the people constantly saying that “we live in hell” are largely living comfortable lives. (I count myself among them.) That’s not to say that many people aren’t surviving hellish conditions today—say, factory workers, or war refugees, or poverty-stricken Americans navigating the slightest health crisis—but they’re not typically the ones claiming we live in hell. For those who are claiming it, that “we” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
That might be the most frustrating aspect of the doomsday posture: that it suggests we’re all equal victims of modern failures. I obviously understand the impulse to frame it this way, but I think it’s useful to reckon with the difference between knowing bad things are happening to other people and experiencing those things first-hand. For the luckiest among us, to suffer today’s “hellscape” is mostly to be aware of others’ suffering: to read an onslaught of bad or stupid news. Then, to have no ability to change it, or to sense your own complacency in the system that created it. For the less lucky, however, nothing is solved by logging off (if they’re logging on at all). I think that distinction matters more than most rage-posters are willing to acknowledge. Who, exactly, is in hell?
This equivalency isn’t always made in bad faith. I do think most of us are worse off living with today’s extreme wage inequality, under constant surveillance, governed by corporate interests, alienated from one another by technology, metabolizing an exhaustingly recursive media discourse that is far better at producing profit than progress…I could keep listing things forever! It’s depressing and getting worse. In that sense we are “in it together.” This is a particularly useful framing for organizing purposes (unionizing, boycotting, advocacy, etc). But I don’t think that’s what people are trying to invoke when they say “we live in hell.” Actually, I think the sentiment is about doing nothing at all. About waving it all away in the name of nihilism.
I used to like that about it, unfortunately. I think I appreciated that it signaled a knowing wariness, at a time when knowing what was going on seemed to coexist, morally, with doing something about it. I struggle with this, still. But this brand of cynicism no longer feels high-minded to me. Instead, it feels narrow, avoidant, complacent. Less a political statement than a trendy way to disengage.
Here’s a short list of news items that have recently prompted Twitter users to reply with “we live in hell”: LED light bulbs don’t work as well as incandescents; people handing out free masks outside a hospital were shooed away by security; Adam Brody auditioned for the Guardians of the Galaxy role that was eventually given to Chris Pratt; dry and hot weather conditions are expected, including fire weather concerns; the MTA launches Metro Cards featuring images of rappers. I understand how each story, to varying degrees, suggests something hellish about modern life. I get that people are being cheeky. I just wonder what end this hyperbole serves.
I don’t want to be hyperbolic myself, but there are costs to this kind of language. In “The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday,” published in Harpers this past April, the journalist Kyle Paoletta wrote about the impact of the apocalyptic climate reporting of the 2010s. He argues that, instead of hastening change, the dismal outlook of journalists like David Wallace-Wells, who famously described the “human carnage” of an unrealistic 11- or 12-degree spike, actually just made people feel hopeless and powerless. Of course, the intention was to spark conversation, and it did do that. But, Paoletta argues, “What gets left out entirely are the costs of catastrophism—not just politically or socially but psychologically.” He also warns against rosy reporting, or any message that attempts to manipulate its audience into action. In the end, he suggests something more sober than either approach: for journalists to “take a break from narratives” and reconnect with reality.
I think a lot of us could use this advice. The internet—an unprecedented medium funneling ungodly amounts of information into our brains at any given time—is less connected to our offline experiences than we’re often led to believe. To learn of hellish things is not to live in hell. Everything isn’t fine, of course. Things are bad for a lot of people, and I don’t want to understate how tangibly present some of those conditions are. In some ways, for all of us. But to continually suggest the world is irreversibly fucked is no more delusional than blind optimism. Most immediately, it’s just annoying. But more critically, as a leftist dog-whistle, it erodes the possibility of fostering a shared path forward.
My favorite thing I read last week was “Who Was Barbie?” a roundup of nine short essays on the movie for N+1. An extremely satisfying read if you’ve found most of the hot takes circulating to be a little mind-numbing. Last Friday’s 15 things also included my experience at goat yoga (lol), a fancy-seeming dinner recipe that’s so good and so easy, a genius going-out policy, and more. The rec of the week was the best kitchen containers for dry goods.
Hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley
Cover image care of Fred de Noyelle for Getty