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we are all just waiting for Godot.

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what is going on????

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see other blue posts below for more reasons why we are the lost generation...

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Why are we dying?

two suicide notes:

"Imagine a happy group of morons who are engaged in work. They are carrying bricks in an open field. As soon as they have stacked all the bricks at one end of the field, they proceed to transport them to the opposite end. This continues without stop and every day of every year they are busy doing the same thing. One day one of the morons stops long enough to ask himself what he is doing. He wonders what purpose there is in carrying the bricks. And from that instant on he is not quite as content with his occupation as he had been before.
I am the moron who wonders why he is carrying the bricks."

"I’m sorry, Mom.
I’ve written this note several times in my head over the past ten years, and this version finally feels right. I now believe that hope is nothing more than delayed disappointment. I’m tired. I realize that I don’t deserve to think this way because, on paper, I have a great life. I’m fortunate. I eat good food. I travel. I live in a great city. However, all of this seems trivial to me. It’s a first-world problem, I know. But I often feel alone while in a room full of my best friends. I’ve felt absolutely nothing during what should have been the happiest and darkest times in my life. No single conversation or situation has led me to do this."

we are dying bc there is nothing else for us. reality is so bleak. what is there in this modern landscape but the monotonous on-and-on of a futile necessity? Like Larkin says in his Aubade, "Work has to be done" (49).

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An existential archaeology dig: where our angst comes from these days, why it's here and what we can do about it.
Article by LiveReal Agents Kevin, Grace and Thomas
Meaning in life can be a tricky thing.

Some folks are bugged about "the point of it all." Others aren't. Those who aren't often seem baffled by those who are. The "unbugged" often seem to view the "bugged" as wrestling with an unnecessary problem with an obvious solution which, for some inexplicable reason, just doesn't occur to them. "The answer is simply X!" is often the sentiment. That "X" varies widely, depending on who you're talking to.

Meanwhile, the "have-nots" - those with no satisfying answer to the "what's the point?" question - rarely consider a "poverty of meaning" to be a problem. They often blame a thousand other problems instead of their underlying cause.

A third group dismisses the meaning in life question entirely. This is usually either because they think they're already solved it, or they're convinced it's hopelessly unsolvable and not even worth trying. Sometimes they think the entire issue is nonsensical to start with. Whatever the reasoning, they ignore or abandon the entire project altogether and just try to enjoy their dinner.

Life is good these days, depending on how you define and measure it.

Some say we're living in the best society that's ever existed.

We point to smart phones, air-conditioning, hands-free paper-towel dispensers and other conveniences to confirm that we have it really, really good now - or at least better we used to. The presumption is that these kinds of things, in the final analysis, really matter.

Yet different measures speak otherwise. Addictions are up. ¹ Suicides are up. ² Anxiety is up. ³ Depression is up. ⁴ Rates of happiness are down. ⁵ Antianxiety and antidepressant medications are up. ⁶ Pills that claim to help you do things like sleep ⁷ and have sex ⁸ and pay attention ⁹ are up. Deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide are now at highest level since record-keeping began. ¹⁰ There appears to be an epidemic of loneliness, ¹¹ a sexual recession, ¹² a breakdown of trust. ¹³ We could go on.

But statistics fail to capture something profoundly personal in all this.

We can get a more vivid sense of the raw human experience of it from two letters. The first:

Imagine a happy group of morons who are engaged in work. They are carrying bricks in an open field. As soon as they have stacked all the bricks at one end of the field, they proceed to transport them to the opposite end. This continues without stop and every day of every year they are busy doing the same thing. One day one of the morons stops long enough to ask himself what he is doing. He wonders what purpose there is in carrying the bricks. And from that instant on he is not quite as content with his occupation as he had been before.
I am the moron who wonders why he is carrying the bricks. ¹⁴

Here is the second (which has been reworded in phrasing, but not in meaning, to avoid focusing attention on any particular individual.)

I'm sorry, Mom.
I've written this note several times in my head over the past ten years, and this version finally feels right. I now believe that hope is nothing more than delayed disappointment. I'm tired. I realize that I don't deserve to think this way because, on paper, I have a great life. I'm fortunate. I eat good food. I travel. I live in a great city. However, all of this seems trivial to me. It's a first-world problem, I know. But I often feel alone while in a room full of my best friends. I've felt absolutely nothing during what should have been the happiest and darkest times in my life. No single conversation or situation has led me to do this.

These letters, as you might guess, were suicide notes.

There seems to be a general vibe in the air these days.

Call it "angst." Or "alienation." A view of life as a hard road that leads nowhere. A view of life as a relentless struggle that ends up as a dirt nap in your best suit or dress. Birth, then blaring hype surrounding a hollow pocket of nothing, then death. A struggle for status-symbols and the appearance of success while knowing it's phony to the bone and all the way through. A pointless parade of poses engineered to convince others and ourselves that we really do matter, really we do, resulting in a glorification of superficiality. An underlying confusion about what the heck is really going on that metastasizes into hopelessness. A frenzy of activity surrounding a hysterical obsession with inconsequential nonsense. Sleepwalking through life, going through the motions, pretending it's leading somewhere, hoping maybe there's some point to it all. And what is the point? "There isn't one" is often the answer we hear. There is no point, we don't know anything, and nothing matters. Now, go enjoy yourself.

Or, in a word: meaninglessness.

Ernest Becker said that the primary job of a society to its members is to convey a sense of meaning. He described the functioning society as a vehicle for heroism that affirms that our lives matter, which helps us persevere through the brutal realities of life and death. And "matter," not in a "Great job holding that pencil! You're awesome! Here's a trophy!" kind of way, but in a "this genuinely makes the painful struggles of life truly worth it " kind of way.

If Becker is right, or anywhere close, then modern society might be failing in its primary responsibility, even while excelling at everything else.

Meaninglessness doesn't show up as a belief in nothing, but as an obsession with a thousand different things.

It doesn't show its face openly and announce itself: "Hello! I'm nihilism!" Rather, it's an absence of something - or, a presence of nothing. Meaninglessness rarely takes the form of folks describing themselves as nihilists. It looks more like pleasant distractions that soon transform into bigger diversions which eventually morph into consuming obsessions. These obsessions are momentary, disconnected, unanchored, and unimportant. What is important is their job, which is to keep us distracted. They congeal into a steady, unceasing undercurrent, ferrying our attention from one immediate pleasure to the next, one distraction to another, with no larger direction or end in sight. All the while, there's a sense that somewhere, something vital has gone wrong or missing.

Meaninglessness is an invisible, intangible, underlying but well-hidden culprit behind many of our ailments: the addictions, suicides, general unhappiness, and so on. While it's hard to capture with mathematical precision, at least some of our malaise seems rooted in the lack of a good answer to the "what's the point?" question. Maybe quite a lot.

It's not that modern life offers no "answers" here.

Quite the opposite: it offers thousands of answers, relentlessly, chaotically, with trumpets blaring and lights flashing. And most of those, we often discover, are existential junk-food - cotton candy and cream puffs of the soul.

This leads to a sense that, despite thousands of conveniences, a dominant feature of modern life is a profound lack of vision. (At least for some folks.) "Life" is: eat, sleep, work, repeat, and eventually die. And that's it. Within this, most of the modern world seems designed more to strip-mine our souls than help us flourish. We often find ourselves surrounded by things that have been deliberately engineered to be addictive, bred solely to consume as much of our time and vitality as possible. Our natural instincts get studied, cultivated, harvested, and eventually channeled toward things that create profit or power for others - that sometimes give us what we think we want, but leave us feeling emptier. People become a process.

Not that we aren't also encouraged to "live life to the fullest," at least as a slogan. But we often define that "fullest life" in the most cosmetic terms. We often describe "The American Dream" as a house, literally, as if the goal of life was a pile of paint and wood. Nothing against houses, of course, but it's an entirely different thing to define that as The Goal, the ultimate end, the point of it all. Doing this implicitly defines us as no more than mammals with nests. The tacit message in much of this is, "Be satisfied with idle pleasures and creature comforts. And if you aren't, then there's probably something wrong with your brain chemistry, and here's a pill for that." All of which transforms genuine spiritual longing into a disease.

There's something much bigger going on here. How are we simultaneously better and worse off? Why are we more materially prosperous than we've ever been, yet less happy? Does Dorian Gray capture our entire age - brilliant, beautiful and glamorous on the outside, rotting away on the inside? How are we more connected than we've ever been, supposedly, yet suffering through an "epidemic" of loneliness?

In short, how did we get here?

We could line up several usual suspects pretty easily.

For example, distractions have become weaponized. Much of our waking life is spent surrounded by blinking, interrupting, faux-alarming things, all clamoring for us to pay in our most valuable currency, our attention. This whole scene of spell-casting seem to be corroding our minds as well as our relationships.

Another suspect in the lineup is simply anything that drains you of meaning. Heroin makes everything meaningless that isn't heroin. Plenty of other things have the same effect, but are just more subtle about it.

Another is a certain style of thinking that's as flawed as it is popular. We can call it "toxic reductionism" or "nothing-but"-ism. It's the perspective that we humans are "nothing but" brain chemicals or atoms or bags of genes, for example. It's flawed not because it's entirely false, but because it's incomplete, overly applied and misleading. Yes, atoms, genes, and brain chemicals are part of us. But that simply doesn't tell the whole story. These words, for example, that you're reading right now, could be described as "nothing but" a bunch of marks on a white page, or a mere jumble of pixels, or "nothing but" letters. But they also mean something, otherwise you probably wouldn't be reading them right now. "Reading" isn't some bizarre, imaginary superstition. Yet when we talk about ourselves, we often insist we're the equivalent of "nothing but" letters, and "reading" doesn't actually exist.

Yet another is our work. Farmers, for example, create tangible products they can easily take pride in. But today, there are fewer farmers, in more ways than one. Instead, we're often cast as assembly line workers, telemarketers, financial analysts, etc. This can all be necessary, important, and ennobling work, of course. Or it can also reduce us to tiny cogs performing some minor function in an impersonal, lumbering, colossal machine that doesn't know or care about us except to replace us when we get squeaky. Even farms have become more industrialized and dehumanized.

These are just a few possible causes of disenchantment that lie within arm's reach. But in some ways, we're still scratching at the surface.

If we dig deeper and follow the trail of clues, we find that they lead us into deeper waters.

Meaninglessness on a widespread scale seems to be a modern phenomenon, as many thinkers (Becker, Frankl, Weber, May and others) have noted.

Yet on a smaller scale, it's nothing new under the sun. Kierkegaard often gets credited as the first existentialist, yet asking "what's the point?" could take us back to Hamlet, or further to the Bhagavad Gita (Arjuna dropping his bow on the battlefield: "I will not fight") or Ecclesiastes ("all is vanity.") But if the problem itself is thousands of years old, why is it so much more widespread today?

Let's try to get a Big Picture, ten-thousand foot view.

Maybe we're actually living through "The Death of God."

Maybe we're experiencing, right now, what Nietzsche was warning us about.

To be clear, as we've covered here: "God is dead" doesn't mean that a bearded sky-Santa dropped a toaster in his celestial hot tub. When Nietzsche first popularized the phrase a century and a half or so ago, he wasn't simply declaring that "atheism is right!" It was an observation about us. We don't believe the way we used to. It's something both religious authorities and social scientists agree on, whether they reference a decline in religious activity ¹⁵, a rise in "Nones," ¹⁶ or a "Post-Christian Society."

Major religions used to act as immune systems against toxic nihilism - at least when they were competent and doing their job. They offered generally clear answers that generally kept angst lurking outside the city walls. Sometimes they would shove that medicine down your throat, of course, whether you wanted it or not. But that medicine, despite its side effects, was at least partly effective in that respect.

Religions define an ethos and a mythos - how to live and why - that most folks understood and at least tried, on good days, to live up to. Dissolving a mythos and ethos translates into an erosion of common, agreed-upon frames of reference, which then leads to everyone being on different pages about everything and not agreeing on anything. (Then add social media to the mix, so everyone who disagrees can get in each others' faces about it. Good times.)

This all seems to be part of what Walter Truett Anderson meant when he said "we do not comprehend what a stunning - and yet still incomplete - upheaval of thought has occurred in the recent historical past." ¹⁷ This "upheaval of thought" has washed through not only society, but entire intellectual disciplines like a tsunami. This movement seems to have shifted the landscape in several ways: an abandonment of tradition ("we used to do it the old way, now let's try it this new way"), a change in authority ("we used to trust X; now we trust Y"), and a fragmentation of a whole into parts ("X used to all fit together into one whole; now none of it fits together,") to name a few.

The "change in authority" has been from religion to science.

Science, over the past few hundred years, has been gaining ground as "the authority to trust," even on important personal matters. This transition has been highly visible in some ways and invisible in others.

Meanwhile, (to paint with some very broad brush strokes) philosophy and theology, with notable exceptions, often seem to have been busy neutering themselves and rendering themselves irrelevant. Theology has often backpedaled into one of two directions (as described by thinkers like Ross Douthat, Daniel Mahoney, Karen Armstrong, and others.) One side offers a soft, feel-good buffet of platitudes encouraging folks to do things like be nice to each other. The other takes harder, more fundamentalist stances that, among other things, easily alienate outsiders. Modern academic philosophy, in the meantime, seems miles away from the battlefield, wandering the countryside, lost in a haze of word analysis.

Science, meanwhile, faced with big shoes to fill, morphs into scientism with disconcerting ease. It often then addresses the Big Questions of life using methods that work well for physics, chemistry and math. And when it tackles the "meaning" question in this way, unsurprisingly, it often finds no answer. Which is why many authorities today give us the answer that "there is no point."

Of course, this analysis paints with a broad brush, perhaps unfairly. But this predicament doesn't call for endless nuance.

Because the effects of all this are dramatic.

If "The Death of God" defines as mere animals - intelligent animals, to be sure, but just critters nonetheless - this limits our scope and hope for happiness, quite literally, to creature comforts.

And what are "creature comforts"? Well, the usual suspects: wealth, fame, status, security, pleasures, power, and basic variations of these. These are ambitions we all share, to some degree, with squirrels, armadillos, platypuses, and various other critters, as evolutionary psychologists remind us (though usually more politely.) They're the pleasures often tasked with outweighing the pains life serves us.

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these, arguably. And they often seem to work well enough, at least when we're young and naïve. But the trouble comes when they just aren't enough.

And we often discover, sooner or later, that they aren't.

Pleasures age, and sometimes not well.

Fame, for example, usually seems like a good thing only to those who don't have it. Crowds are fickle, and basing your happiness on fickle things seems like a flawed strategy from the start. As we live and experience more, pleasures often wear thin, lose their punch, and sometimes expire completely. Especially when they're framed by our looming mortality - when the skull grins at the banquet - they hollow out and reveal themselves to be utterly empty. It's a simple dynamic: things are fun at first. But then we get used to them. Then we get tired of them. And when things just aren't as fun as they used to be, we're left dissatisfied, and looking for something more.

And if there is no "something more" - if there are no newer, higher pleasures to move on to, life can become profoundly dissatisfying. If there's no vision of life beyond creature comforts, and creature comforts aren't enough to sustain us through the pains life deals us, then we can easily find ourselves out of answers. We aren't so easily amused anymore, and all life seems to offer is idle amusements. We can try desperately to recapture the old magic - the Romantic solution, the fuel of youth-obsession in the no-longer-young - but even this route often leads to a dead-end and starts to seem silly. Even "higher" endeavors - art, and the pursuit of knowledge, for example - can become either an expression or glorification of the same old creature comforts, or some kind of ancillary, inconsequential pursuit that seemed amusing a while ago, but isn't anymore.

This all sets us up for an existential hamster wheel. 1) A creature comfort fails to fulfill us. 2) We realize we want something more. 3) We decide the reason why we aren't fulfilled is because we just don't have enough creature comforts. 4) We decide to search for more, newer, better creature comforts. 5) Return to Step 1.

This frantic cycle feeds and reinforces itself. When this quest for creature comforts takes center stage and becomes the prime directive, we set ourselves on a track for either 1) various addictions as a frantic thirst for "more," or 2) a hopeless resignation that idle amusements are all we can hope for. Those can seem like our only two options.

Psychology, at this point, sometimes offers us a few other options.

These days, psychology is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. While many heroic individuals in the field do heroic work, struggling to solve seemingly impossible problems in seemingly impossible circumstances, the field itself isn't exactly famous for mathematical rigor.

Some might diagnose childhood traumas as the problem, and recommend years of expensive therapy. Others might say the problem is self-esteem, and a big dose of flattery should help. Others might declare that the problem is any number of various disorders that are really real, they insist, and not just made-up categories for things they don't really understand, and aren't just loading folks down with new piles of things to worry about. Some say we should just talk to ourselves more skillfully. Others might diagnose that the problem is brain chemistry, and can be fixed with the right pills.

Laser-like precision here, this isn't.

All of this, to be fair, can, and has, helped some folks, in some ways, sometimes. And yet the real problem, at least in some cases, might also be something entirely different. The core problem, at least for some, might be that each of us is trapped in the body of a dying animal, has a due date for a dirt nap, is on death row without a prison cell.

And that bugs us.

Angst, in other words, makes us unsettled. Distractions from that unsettledness are temporary, at best, and sometimes make it worse. Idle pleasures don't seem to satisfy us for long, yet that's all that modern life often seems to offer us. Life is short, but at least water-skiing squirrel videos help us pass the time.

All of it can make things start to look a bit absurd.

Which brings us to the existentialists.

The existential philosophers often step in here, and they at least understand the problem, which is a step up in most cases. They even offer solutions. But those solutions are usually some variation of this: "life itself is meaningless, but you can make it meaningful." In Frankl's words: "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life: and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life..."

Or to rephrase slightly:

You: "What is the meaning of life?"
Life: "What's the meaning of you?"

This summary doesn't represent the entirely of the matter (especially Frankl and others, who had plenty more to say about all this.) But this form is what seems to have become hugely popular recently. And for good reasons: after all, it's interesting, it's challenging without shoving answers down your throat, it leaves you plenty of room to have fun and do what you want, and most importantly, it usually doesn't offend anyone.

On the surface, this answer seems fine for some.

But underneath, it suffers from some serious flaws.

One key problem is that it places the burden of the task entirely on the shoulders of the individual. It basically ducks the question, hot-potato style, and says, "no, you answer it." Which for many, is a welcome change: instead of having some prepackaged, shrink-wrapped answer forced onto you, it gives you a say. Which seems empowering, and feels good, at least at first.

But the implication is that the task is easy. It frames the problem by radically oversimplifying it. It redefines meaning as solely finding something to get you out of bed in the morning. The answer to the meaning of life, then, becomes simple: "Get a hobby." In other words, "Just find something that you enjoy, and do it. What's the problem?"

"The problem" is that this places a crushing strain on our "hobbies" and our "enjoyments." Whatever we use to answer this question - our pleasures, our work, our children, a cause of some sort - is being tasked with the burden of being The Answer, as being "the point of it all." Which is a huge burden that they don't seem designed to carry.

Again, this approach works fine sometimes, for some folks, for a while.

Yet that arrangement can also throw things out of whack.

Asking certain people or situations to serve as The Answer - as the planetary atmosphere that defends us against the cold vacuum of emptiness of outer space - can sometimes, in strange ways, thrust the whole lot of it into a room full of funhouse mirrors. It suddenly becomes easy to lose a sense of proportion. Which can translate into, for example, someone attacking a Little League coach for not playing a child enough, or a teacher for giving an "B." If your job means everything, what happens if you lose it? If pleasures are the point, what happens when they lose the thrill?

Even if certain things and people in our lives actually are perfect in their own ways, when we cast them in the role of "The Answer" to our struggles against the relentless trials of life, then we're passing this burden on to them. And in doing this, maybe we're assigning them roles they can't fill, and were never supposed to. Maybe a job is just a job, a pleasure is just a pleasure, a cause is just a cause. It's not that, and also the point of it all. Pretending otherwise might drive us crazy.

All of this underscores how the existentialist solution might severely underestimate the difficulty of the task. The task of finding answers that hold up against the trials and challenges of life isn't quite the cake walk it's often made out to be.

This all leads us to a strange predicament.

All too often, the individual today, confronting the raw horror of life, has been stripped of the spiritual, intellectual and emotional tools to defend against it, and stands vulnerable. Science, religion, psychology, theology, philosophy and art often fail to provide us the kind of answer we need. More often, they clip our wings and then tell us to fly.

But they do offer us other things instead. Entertainment offers us mild distractions from it. Jobs can keep us too busy to think about it. Vacations and weekends offer temporary escapes from it. Alcohol offers take the edge off it. Harder stuff can lead to crippling, costly ways to try to bury it. Science and technology can help us suffer through it a bit more comfortably, like rescuing us from the stress of actually using our hands to grab towels, for example.

But none of these really solve the problem at the core. They blunt it, numb us to it, maybe help us forget about it for a while. But they don't solve it.

So, is there a way out of this predicament?

Is a credible answer to the meaning question really possible, without flinching from the brutal realities of old age, sickness, death, and the limits of human knowledge?

Several routes do seem possible. (Whether we'll take them or not is a different matter.) If we've worked ourselves into certain problems, we should be able to work ourselves out of them.

A witty slogan or clever new rallying cry isn't the solution here. Meaning isn't a problem that can be solved by mere information. It's not like a math problem that can be solved by peeking at the answer in the back of the book. We have to show our work. The answer here isn't a mere piece of data that can be passed around and shared. It's deeply personal. It's more like learning to dance. It's not a mechanical problem where all inquiries converge on a single, universally accessible solution.

But this doesn't mean we each have to do it entirely alone, starting from scratch, or reinvent the wheel. Learning to dance is personal, too, but there are plenty of dance teachers.

If older solutions to the meaning problem have been deconstructed, leaving a nihilistic vacuum, maybe we can throw that corrosive acid back in the other direction, toward deconstructing meaninglessness itself. There's a great deal we could explore further here.

Commonsense answers can also lie in the direction of strengthening our emotional, intellectual, and existential defenses by our own efforts. This entails reversing our natural, default state of denial: deliberately taking a full, open-eyed, unflinching view of all the toughest experiences life can subject us to, and seeking out anything and everything we can that can help us overcome them. In other words, setting out on a philosophical expedition to slay existential dragons.

Mapping our way out of our current morass might also require some rethinking of our earlier assumptions.

If we've wandered off course, retracing our steps can help us find the trail again.

One wrong turn may well have been categorically rejecting all forms of spirituality. Many folks have gone full-atheist, soft-atheist, or apatheist, having decided that spirituality is typically a fruitless exploration of either insanity or boredom. But that might be throwing a lot of babies out with a lot of bathwater. There's a huge amount of misunderstanding, bias, and just bad communication in these areas - toxic side effects of the information age. But sane, lunacy-free, no-nonsense approaches that embrace legitimate reason, science, and common sense are out there. The tricky part is seeking them out.

This can all become something like a personal quest each one of us can undertake. The search for meaning itself can become a meaningful enterprise. For anyone who lacks a satisfying answer to the "what's the point?" question, a conscious, active, deliberate search for it isn't a terrible idea.

By design, life seems geared to offer us an endless supply of tepid pleasures, lukewarm amusements and existential consolation prizes. They don't fulfill us as much as they numb us to our lack of fulfillment. Reaching beyond them - for something that casts our personal life story within a greater context - isn't easy.

The challenge is to reach anyway.

Making our own life itself into a work of art is no small task. There's no shortage of drama in the world. Perhaps part of a great but worthy struggle should be finding our place in it, where we can offer our allegiance to, what role we might fill perfectly, even if that requires some digging. As Dostoyevsky said: "Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man."

The treasure we seek in this "quest" is a game worth playing, a fight worth fighting, a mission worth sacrificing for.

We all struggle, suffer, and die, but the trick lies in who or what is worth struggling, suffering and dying for.

It's a quest each of us is engaged in, already. The only question is how much of ourselves we put into it.

And who knows? We might look back one day, and wish we had given it no less than everything.

If you liked this, check out:
Why Soft Nihilism Is So Popular These Days So, What is "The Meaning of Life"? 10 Existential Riddles Life Asks Each Of Us How a Few Basic Assumptions Can Render Life Meaninglessde Meaninglessness as a Matter of Perspective (or Lack Thereof) 15 Games of Life, and the One Most Worth Playing The Philosophy of DeadPool: Nihilism Verses Spandex
If you enjoyed this, consider getting our Free Newsletter or even joining. Because battling meaninglessness isn't a spectator sport. Not yet, anyway.

References

1 https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/nationwide-trends
Also: "My argument is that the U.S. is suffering an epidemic of addiction, and that these addictions are leaving a rising portion of American society unhappy and a rising number clinically depressed."
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/addiction-and-unhappiness-in-america/

2 The suicide rate has increased more than 30 percent in half of U.S. states since 1999.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6722a1.htm?s_cid=mm6722a1_w
also
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/24/smartphone-teen-suicide-mental-health-depression

3 https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/for-80-years-young-americans-have-been-getting-more-anxious-and-depressed.html

4 https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/02/20/most-u-s-teens-see-anxiety-and-depression-as-a-major-problem-among-their-peers/
also
https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/for-80-years-young-americans-have-been-getting-more-anxious-and-depressed.html

5 Rates of happiness are down:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/21/americans-are-unhappiest-theyve-ever-been-un-report-finds-an-epidemic-addictions-could-be-blame/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.76d5a61c6789

6 Antianxiety and antidepressant medications are up: U.S. Antidepressant Use Jumps 65% in 15 Years, from 7.7% in 199-2002 to 12/7% in 2011-2015.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db283.htm
Antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the U.S.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/07/09/antidepressants/
also
https://www.anxietycentre.com/anxiety-statistics-information.shtml

7 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db127.htm

8 https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-erectile-dysfunction-drugs-market
and
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/viagra-number-of-prescriptions-for-erectile-dysfunction-drugs-rises-by-more-than-a-quarter-10372318.html

9 One study found that ADHD diagnois rates increased 30 percent in eight years. The percent of very young children (ages two to five) who were diagnose with ADHD increased by over 50 percent between 2007/2008 and 2011/2012.
https://fee.org/articles/the-adhd-overdiagnosis-epidemic-is-a-schooling-problem-not-a-child-one/

10 https://news.yahoo.com/u-deaths-alcohol-drugs-suicide-050104684.html

11 https://www.cigna.com/newsroom/news-releases/2018/new-cigna-study-reveals-loneliness-at-epidemic-levels-in-america
This is happening even among teenagers:
https://nypost.com/2019/03/26/an-epidemic-of-teenage-loneliness/

12 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/happiness-recession-causing-sex-depression`/586405/
and
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/

13.Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000)

14 Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, New York, HarperCollins, 1980), 419.

15 https://religionnews.com/2014/01/27/great-decline-religion-united-states-one-graph/

16 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americans-now-say-theyre-spiritual-but-not-religious/

17 Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1990), xii.

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An exploration of modern meaninglessness, angst, emptiness, purposelessness: where it comes from, why it's here, and what we can do about it.

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This conversation reminds me of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." The book explores the veils we use to conceal both life and death. The main character is an unpleasant lawyer whose whole life is spent in unpleasant, never ending, brutal, unfair pursuit of money and position which he never really gets. He neglects his wife and children all for his job. He ends up dying from an old injury that he never addressed. The injury was suffered when he was spending his money on trying to make a mediocre, depressing living space seem like a grand and luxurious place of his dreams. He hits his side pretty hard and for the following several years until his death, it hurts and hurts and gets worse but he ignores it until he dies.

His whole life, he is simultaneously ignoring life and the death inside him. Even on his deathbed he struggles with living and dying, not wanting to hold on to either really and not knowing how to think of them or which one to pick. It is only after Ivan accepts the concept of death as a real part of life that he finally dies.

We like Ivan are full of pain but we ignore it and ignore life at the same time. We distract ourselves from death but since death is a part of life we end up distracting ourselves from life aswell.

This is what was happening in Godot. Estragon and Vladimir are in a constant state of looking for distraction just like us. They avoid both life and death in their meaningless endeavors. The play is only surreal bc thier lives are made surreal by their own choices and necessity.

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"Some say we’re living in the best society that’s ever existed.

We point to smart phones, air-conditioning, hands-free paper-towel dispensers and other conveniences to confirm that we have it really, really good now – or at least better we used to. The presumption is that these kinds of things, in the final analysis, really matter.

Yet different measures speak otherwise. Addictions are up.¹ Suicides are up.² Anxiety is up.³ Depression is up.⁴ Rates of happiness are down.⁵ Antianxiety and antidepressant medications are up.⁶ Pills that claim to help you do things like sleep⁷ and have sex⁸ and pay attention⁹ are up. Deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide are now at highest level since record-keeping began.¹⁰ There appears to be an epidemic of loneliness,¹¹ a sexual recession,¹² a breakdown of trust.¹³ We could go on." -The Origins of Modern Meaninglessness, Live Real

We arent really living, we are just getting by and obviously it isnt enough. We distract ourselves from dying and so also distract ourselves from living. Obviously it is a horrible existence.

In "Waiting for Godot," Estragon and Vladimir talked about hanging themselves every night. No wonder. This is the life they are living too.

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An existential archaeology dig: where our angst comes from these days, why it's here and what we can do about it.
Article by LiveReal Agents Kevin, Grace and Thomas
Meaning in life can be a tricky thing.

Some folks are bugged about "the point of it all." Others aren't. Those who aren't often seem baffled by those who are. The "unbugged" often seem to view the "bugged" as wrestling with an unnecessary problem with an obvious solution which, for some inexplicable reason, just doesn't occur to them. "The answer is simply X!" is often the sentiment. That "X" varies widely, depending on who you're talking to.

Meanwhile, the "have-nots" - those with no satisfying answer to the "what's the point?" question - rarely consider a "poverty of meaning" to be a problem. They often blame a thousand other problems instead of their underlying cause.

A third group dismisses the meaning in life question entirely. This is usually either because they think they're already solved it, or they're convinced it's hopelessly unsolvable and not even worth trying. Sometimes they think the entire issue is nonsensical to start with. Whatever the reasoning, they ignore or abandon the entire project altogether and just try to enjoy their dinner.

Life is good these days, depending on how you define and measure it.

Some say we're living in the best society that's ever existed.

We point to smart phones, air-conditioning, hands-free paper-towel dispensers and other conveniences to confirm that we have it really, really good now - or at least better we used to. The presumption is that these kinds of things, in the final analysis, really matter.

Yet different measures speak otherwise. Addictions are up. ¹ Suicides are up. ² Anxiety is up. ³ Depression is up. ⁴ Rates of happiness are down. ⁵ Antianxiety and antidepressant medications are up. ⁶ Pills that claim to help you do things like sleep ⁷ and have sex ⁸ and pay attention ⁹ are up. Deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide are now at highest level since record-keeping began. ¹⁰ There appears to be an epidemic of loneliness, ¹¹ a sexual recession, ¹² a breakdown of trust. ¹³ We could go on.

But statistics fail to capture something profoundly personal in all this.

We can get a more vivid sense of the raw human experience of it from two letters. The first:

Imagine a happy group of morons who are engaged in work. They are carrying bricks in an open field. As soon as they have stacked all the bricks at one end of the field, they proceed to transport them to the opposite end. This continues without stop and every day of every year they are busy doing the same thing. One day one of the morons stops long enough to ask himself what he is doing. He wonders what purpose there is in carrying the bricks. And from that instant on he is not quite as content with his occupation as he had been before.
I am the moron who wonders why he is carrying the bricks. ¹⁴

Here is the second (which has been reworded in phrasing, but not in meaning, to avoid focusing attention on any particular individual.)

I'm sorry, Mom.
I've written this note several times in my head over the past ten years, and this version finally feels right. I now believe that hope is nothing more than delayed disappointment. I'm tired. I realize that I don't deserve to think this way because, on paper, I have a great life. I'm fortunate. I eat good food. I travel. I live in a great city. However, all of this seems trivial to me. It's a first-world problem, I know. But I often feel alone while in a room full of my best friends. I've felt absolutely nothing during what should have been the happiest and darkest times in my life. No single conversation or situation has led me to do this.

These letters, as you might guess, were suicide notes.

There seems to be a general vibe in the air these days.

Call it "angst." Or "alienation." A view of life as a hard road that leads nowhere. A view of life as a relentless struggle that ends up as a dirt nap in your best suit or dress. Birth, then blaring hype surrounding a hollow pocket of nothing, then death. A struggle for status-symbols and the appearance of success while knowing it's phony to the bone and all the way through. A pointless parade of poses engineered to convince others and ourselves that we really do matter, really we do, resulting in a glorification of superficiality. An underlying confusion about what the heck is really going on that metastasizes into hopelessness. A frenzy of activity surrounding a hysterical obsession with inconsequential nonsense. Sleepwalking through life, going through the motions, pretending it's leading somewhere, hoping maybe there's some point to it all. And what is the point? "There isn't one" is often the answer we hear. There is no point, we don't know anything, and nothing matters. Now, go enjoy yourself.

Or, in a word: meaninglessness.

Ernest Becker said that the primary job of a society to its members is to convey a sense of meaning. He described the functioning society as a vehicle for heroism that affirms that our lives matter, which helps us persevere through the brutal realities of life and death. And "matter," not in a "Great job holding that pencil! You're awesome! Here's a trophy!" kind of way, but in a "this genuinely makes the painful struggles of life truly worth it " kind of way.

If Becker is right, or anywhere close, then modern society might be failing in its primary responsibility, even while excelling at everything else.

Meaninglessness doesn't show up as a belief in nothing, but as an obsession with a thousand different things.

It doesn't show its face openly and announce itself: "Hello! I'm nihilism!" Rather, it's an absence of something - or, a presence of nothing. Meaninglessness rarely takes the form of folks describing themselves as nihilists. It looks more like pleasant distractions that soon transform into bigger diversions which eventually morph into consuming obsessions. These obsessions are momentary, disconnected, unanchored, and unimportant. What is important is their job, which is to keep us distracted. They congeal into a steady, unceasing undercurrent, ferrying our attention from one immediate pleasure to the next, one distraction to another, with no larger direction or end in sight. All the while, there's a sense that somewhere, something vital has gone wrong or missing.

Meaninglessness is an invisible, intangible, underlying but well-hidden culprit behind many of our ailments: the addictions, suicides, general unhappiness, and so on. While it's hard to capture with mathematical precision, at least some of our malaise seems rooted in the lack of a good answer to the "what's the point?" question. Maybe quite a lot.

It's not that modern life offers no "answers" here.

Quite the opposite: it offers thousands of answers, relentlessly, chaotically, with trumpets blaring and lights flashing. And most of those, we often discover, are existential junk-food - cotton candy and cream puffs of the soul.

This leads to a sense that, despite thousands of conveniences, a dominant feature of modern life is a profound lack of vision. (At least for some folks.) "Life" is: eat, sleep, work, repeat, and eventually die. And that's it. Within this, most of the modern world seems designed more to strip-mine our souls than help us flourish. We often find ourselves surrounded by things that have been deliberately engineered to be addictive, bred solely to consume as much of our time and vitality as possible. Our natural instincts get studied, cultivated, harvested, and eventually channeled toward things that create profit or power for others - that sometimes give us what we think we want, but leave us feeling emptier. People become a process.

Not that we aren't also encouraged to "live life to the fullest," at least as a slogan. But we often define that "fullest life" in the most cosmetic terms. We often describe "The American Dream" as a house, literally, as if the goal of life was a pile of paint and wood. Nothing against houses, of course, but it's an entirely different thing to define that as The Goal, the ultimate end, the point of it all. Doing this implicitly defines us as no more than mammals with nests. The tacit message in much of this is, "Be satisfied with idle pleasures and creature comforts. And if you aren't, then there's probably something wrong with your brain chemistry, and here's a pill for that." All of which transforms genuine spiritual longing into a disease.

There's something much bigger going on here. How are we simultaneously better and worse off? Why are we more materially prosperous than we've ever been, yet less happy? Does Dorian Gray capture our entire age - brilliant, beautiful and glamorous on the outside, rotting away on the inside? How are we more connected than we've ever been, supposedly, yet suffering through an "epidemic" of loneliness?

In short, how did we get here?

We could line up several usual suspects pretty easily.

For example, distractions have become weaponized. Much of our waking life is spent surrounded by blinking, interrupting, faux-alarming things, all clamoring for us to pay in our most valuable currency, our attention. This whole scene of spell-casting seem to be corroding our minds as well as our relationships.

Another suspect in the lineup is simply anything that drains you of meaning. Heroin makes everything meaningless that isn't heroin. Plenty of other things have the same effect, but are just more subtle about it.

Another is a certain style of thinking that's as flawed as it is popular. We can call it "toxic reductionism" or "nothing-but"-ism. It's the perspective that we humans are "nothing but" brain chemicals or atoms or bags of genes, for example. It's flawed not because it's entirely false, but because it's incomplete, overly applied and misleading. Yes, atoms, genes, and brain chemicals are part of us. But that simply doesn't tell the whole story. These words, for example, that you're reading right now, could be described as "nothing but" a bunch of marks on a white page, or a mere jumble of pixels, or "nothing but" letters. But they also mean something, otherwise you probably wouldn't be reading them right now. "Reading" isn't some bizarre, imaginary superstition. Yet when we talk about ourselves, we often insist we're the equivalent of "nothing but" letters, and "reading" doesn't actually exist.

Yet another is our work. Farmers, for example, create tangible products they can easily take pride in. But today, there are fewer farmers, in more ways than one. Instead, we're often cast as assembly line workers, telemarketers, financial analysts, etc. This can all be necessary, important, and ennobling work, of course. Or it can also reduce us to tiny cogs performing some minor function in an impersonal, lumbering, colossal machine that doesn't know or care about us except to replace us when we get squeaky. Even farms have become more industrialized and dehumanized.

These are just a few possible causes of disenchantment that lie within arm's reach. But in some ways, we're still scratching at the surface.

If we dig deeper and follow the trail of clues, we find that they lead us into deeper waters.

Meaninglessness on a widespread scale seems to be a modern phenomenon, as many thinkers (Becker, Frankl, Weber, May and others) have noted.

Yet on a smaller scale, it's nothing new under the sun. Kierkegaard often gets credited as the first existentialist, yet asking "what's the point?" could take us back to Hamlet, or further to the Bhagavad Gita (Arjuna dropping his bow on the battlefield: "I will not fight") or Ecclesiastes ("all is vanity.") But if the problem itself is thousands of years old, why is it so much more widespread today?

Let's try to get a Big Picture, ten-thousand foot view.

Maybe we're actually living through "The Death of God."

Maybe we're experiencing, right now, what Nietzsche was warning us about.

To be clear, as we've covered here: "God is dead" doesn't mean that a bearded sky-Santa dropped a toaster in his celestial hot tub. When Nietzsche first popularized the phrase a century and a half or so ago, he wasn't simply declaring that "atheism is right!" It was an observation about us. We don't believe the way we used to. It's something both religious authorities and social scientists agree on, whether they reference a decline in religious activity ¹⁵, a rise in "Nones," ¹⁶ or a "Post-Christian Society."

Major religions used to act as immune systems against toxic nihilism - at least when they were competent and doing their job. They offered generally clear answers that generally kept angst lurking outside the city walls. Sometimes they would shove that medicine down your throat, of course, whether you wanted it or not. But that medicine, despite its side effects, was at least partly effective in that respect.

Religions define an ethos and a mythos - how to live and why - that most folks understood and at least tried, on good days, to live up to. Dissolving a mythos and ethos translates into an erosion of common, agreed-upon frames of reference, which then leads to everyone being on different pages about everything and not agreeing on anything. (Then add social media to the mix, so everyone who disagrees can get in each others' faces about it. Good times.)

This all seems to be part of what Walter Truett Anderson meant when he said "we do not comprehend what a stunning - and yet still incomplete - upheaval of thought has occurred in the recent historical past." ¹⁷ This "upheaval of thought" has washed through not only society, but entire intellectual disciplines like a tsunami. This movement seems to have shifted the landscape in several ways: an abandonment of tradition ("we used to do it the old way, now let's try it this new way"), a change in authority ("we used to trust X; now we trust Y"), and a fragmentation of a whole into parts ("X used to all fit together into one whole; now none of it fits together,") to name a few.

The "change in authority" has been from religion to science.

Science, over the past few hundred years, has been gaining ground as "the authority to trust," even on important personal matters. This transition has been highly visible in some ways and invisible in others.

Meanwhile, (to paint with some very broad brush strokes) philosophy and theology, with notable exceptions, often seem to have been busy neutering themselves and rendering themselves irrelevant. Theology has often backpedaled into one of two directions (as described by thinkers like Ross Douthat, Daniel Mahoney, Karen Armstrong, and others.) One side offers a soft, feel-good buffet of platitudes encouraging folks to do things like be nice to each other. The other takes harder, more fundamentalist stances that, among other things, easily alienate outsiders. Modern academic philosophy, in the meantime, seems miles away from the battlefield, wandering the countryside, lost in a haze of word analysis.

Science, meanwhile, faced with big shoes to fill, morphs into scientism with disconcerting ease. It often then addresses the Big Questions of life using methods that work well for physics, chemistry and math. And when it tackles the "meaning" question in this way, unsurprisingly, it often finds no answer. Which is why many authorities today give us the answer that "there is no point."

Of course, this analysis paints with a broad brush, perhaps unfairly. But this predicament doesn't call for endless nuance.

Because the effects of all this are dramatic.

If "The Death of God" defines as mere animals - intelligent animals, to be sure, but just critters nonetheless - this limits our scope and hope for happiness, quite literally, to creature comforts.

And what are "creature comforts"? Well, the usual suspects: wealth, fame, status, security, pleasures, power, and basic variations of these. These are ambitions we all share, to some degree, with squirrels, armadillos, platypuses, and various other critters, as evolutionary psychologists remind us (though usually more politely.) They're the pleasures often tasked with outweighing the pains life serves us.

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these, arguably. And they often seem to work well enough, at least when we're young and naïve. But the trouble comes when they just aren't enough.

And we often discover, sooner or later, that they aren't.

Pleasures age, and sometimes not well.

Fame, for example, usually seems like a good thing only to those who don't have it. Crowds are fickle, and basing your happiness on fickle things seems like a flawed strategy from the start. As we live and experience more, pleasures often wear thin, lose their punch, and sometimes expire completely. Especially when they're framed by our looming mortality - when the skull grins at the banquet - they hollow out and reveal themselves to be utterly empty. It's a simple dynamic: things are fun at first. But then we get used to them. Then we get tired of them. And when things just aren't as fun as they used to be, we're left dissatisfied, and looking for something more.

And if there is no "something more" - if there are no newer, higher pleasures to move on to, life can become profoundly dissatisfying. If there's no vision of life beyond creature comforts, and creature comforts aren't enough to sustain us through the pains life deals us, then we can easily find ourselves out of answers. We aren't so easily amused anymore, and all life seems to offer is idle amusements. We can try desperately to recapture the old magic - the Romantic solution, the fuel of youth-obsession in the no-longer-young - but even this route often leads to a dead-end and starts to seem silly. Even "higher" endeavors - art, and the pursuit of knowledge, for example - can become either an expression or glorification of the same old creature comforts, or some kind of ancillary, inconsequential pursuit that seemed amusing a while ago, but isn't anymore.

This all sets us up for an existential hamster wheel. 1) A creature comfort fails to fulfill us. 2) We realize we want something more. 3) We decide the reason why we aren't fulfilled is because we just don't have enough creature comforts. 4) We decide to search for more, newer, better creature comforts. 5) Return to Step 1.

This frantic cycle feeds and reinforces itself. When this quest for creature comforts takes center stage and becomes the prime directive, we set ourselves on a track for either 1) various addictions as a frantic thirst for "more," or 2) a hopeless resignation that idle amusements are all we can hope for. Those can seem like our only two options.

Psychology, at this point, sometimes offers us a few other options.

These days, psychology is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. While many heroic individuals in the field do heroic work, struggling to solve seemingly impossible problems in seemingly impossible circumstances, the field itself isn't exactly famous for mathematical rigor.

Some might diagnose childhood traumas as the problem, and recommend years of expensive therapy. Others might say the problem is self-esteem, and a big dose of flattery should help. Others might declare that the problem is any number of various disorders that are really real, they insist, and not just made-up categories for things they don't really understand, and aren't just loading folks down with new piles of things to worry about. Some say we should just talk to ourselves more skillfully. Others might diagnose that the problem is brain chemistry, and can be fixed with the right pills.

Laser-like precision here, this isn't.

All of this, to be fair, can, and has, helped some folks, in some ways, sometimes. And yet the real problem, at least in some cases, might also be something entirely different. The core problem, at least for some, might be that each of us is trapped in the body of a dying animal, has a due date for a dirt nap, is on death row without a prison cell.

And that bugs us.

Angst, in other words, makes us unsettled. Distractions from that unsettledness are temporary, at best, and sometimes make it worse. Idle pleasures don't seem to satisfy us for long, yet that's all that modern life often seems to offer us. Life is short, but at least water-skiing squirrel videos help us pass the time.

All of it can make things start to look a bit absurd.

Which brings us to the existentialists.

The existential philosophers often step in here, and they at least understand the problem, which is a step up in most cases. They even offer solutions. But those solutions are usually some variation of this: "life itself is meaningless, but you can make it meaningful." In Frankl's words: "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life: and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life..."

Or to rephrase slightly:

You: "What is the meaning of life?"
Life: "What's the meaning of you?"

This summary doesn't represent the entirely of the matter (especially Frankl and others, who had plenty more to say about all this.) But this form is what seems to have become hugely popular recently. And for good reasons: after all, it's interesting, it's challenging without shoving answers down your throat, it leaves you plenty of room to have fun and do what you want, and most importantly, it usually doesn't offend anyone.

On the surface, this answer seems fine for some.

But underneath, it suffers from some serious flaws.

One key problem is that it places the burden of the task entirely on the shoulders of the individual. It basically ducks the question, hot-potato style, and says, "no, you answer it." Which for many, is a welcome change: instead of having some prepackaged, shrink-wrapped answer forced onto you, it gives you a say. Which seems empowering, and feels good, at least at first.

But the implication is that the task is easy. It frames the problem by radically oversimplifying it. It redefines meaning as solely finding something to get you out of bed in the morning. The answer to the meaning of life, then, becomes simple: "Get a hobby." In other words, "Just find something that you enjoy, and do it. What's the problem?"

"The problem" is that this places a crushing strain on our "hobbies" and our "enjoyments." Whatever we use to answer this question - our pleasures, our work, our children, a cause of some sort - is being tasked with the burden of being The Answer, as being "the point of it all." Which is a huge burden that they don't seem designed to carry.

Again, this approach works fine sometimes, for some folks, for a while.

Yet that arrangement can also throw things out of whack.

Asking certain people or situations to serve as The Answer - as the planetary atmosphere that defends us against the cold vacuum of emptiness of outer space - can sometimes, in strange ways, thrust the whole lot of it into a room full of funhouse mirrors. It suddenly becomes easy to lose a sense of proportion. Which can translate into, for example, someone attacking a Little League coach for not playing a child enough, or a teacher for giving an "B." If your job means everything, what happens if you lose it? If pleasures are the point, what happens when they lose the thrill?

Even if certain things and people in our lives actually are perfect in their own ways, when we cast them in the role of "The Answer" to our struggles against the relentless trials of life, then we're passing this burden on to them. And in doing this, maybe we're assigning them roles they can't fill, and were never supposed to. Maybe a job is just a job, a pleasure is just a pleasure, a cause is just a cause. It's not that, and also the point of it all. Pretending otherwise might drive us crazy.

All of this underscores how the existentialist solution might severely underestimate the difficulty of the task. The task of finding answers that hold up against the trials and challenges of life isn't quite the cake walk it's often made out to be.

This all leads us to a strange predicament.

All too often, the individual today, confronting the raw horror of life, has been stripped of the spiritual, intellectual and emotional tools to defend against it, and stands vulnerable. Science, religion, psychology, theology, philosophy and art often fail to provide us the kind of answer we need. More often, they clip our wings and then tell us to fly.

But they do offer us other things instead. Entertainment offers us mild distractions from it. Jobs can keep us too busy to think about it. Vacations and weekends offer temporary escapes from it. Alcohol offers take the edge off it. Harder stuff can lead to crippling, costly ways to try to bury it. Science and technology can help us suffer through it a bit more comfortably, like rescuing us from the stress of actually using our hands to grab towels, for example.

But none of these really solve the problem at the core. They blunt it, numb us to it, maybe help us forget about it for a while. But they don't solve it.

So, is there a way out of this predicament?

Is a credible answer to the meaning question really possible, without flinching from the brutal realities of old age, sickness, death, and the limits of human knowledge?

Several routes do seem possible. (Whether we'll take them or not is a different matter.) If we've worked ourselves into certain problems, we should be able to work ourselves out of them.

A witty slogan or clever new rallying cry isn't the solution here. Meaning isn't a problem that can be solved by mere information. It's not like a math problem that can be solved by peeking at the answer in the back of the book. We have to show our work. The answer here isn't a mere piece of data that can be passed around and shared. It's deeply personal. It's more like learning to dance. It's not a mechanical problem where all inquiries converge on a single, universally accessible solution.

But this doesn't mean we each have to do it entirely alone, starting from scratch, or reinvent the wheel. Learning to dance is personal, too, but there are plenty of dance teachers.

If older solutions to the meaning problem have been deconstructed, leaving a nihilistic vacuum, maybe we can throw that corrosive acid back in the other direction, toward deconstructing meaninglessness itself. There's a great deal we could explore further here.

Commonsense answers can also lie in the direction of strengthening our emotional, intellectual, and existential defenses by our own efforts. This entails reversing our natural, default state of denial: deliberately taking a full, open-eyed, unflinching view of all the toughest experiences life can subject us to, and seeking out anything and everything we can that can help us overcome them. In other words, setting out on a philosophical expedition to slay existential dragons.

Mapping our way out of our current morass might also require some rethinking of our earlier assumptions.

If we've wandered off course, retracing our steps can help us find the trail again.

One wrong turn may well have been categorically rejecting all forms of spirituality. Many folks have gone full-atheist, soft-atheist, or apatheist, having decided that spirituality is typically a fruitless exploration of either insanity or boredom. But that might be throwing a lot of babies out with a lot of bathwater. There's a huge amount of misunderstanding, bias, and just bad communication in these areas - toxic side effects of the information age. But sane, lunacy-free, no-nonsense approaches that embrace legitimate reason, science, and common sense are out there. The tricky part is seeking them out.

This can all become something like a personal quest each one of us can undertake. The search for meaning itself can become a meaningful enterprise. For anyone who lacks a satisfying answer to the "what's the point?" question, a conscious, active, deliberate search for it isn't a terrible idea.

By design, life seems geared to offer us an endless supply of tepid pleasures, lukewarm amusements and existential consolation prizes. They don't fulfill us as much as they numb us to our lack of fulfillment. Reaching beyond them - for something that casts our personal life story within a greater context - isn't easy.

The challenge is to reach anyway.

Making our own life itself into a work of art is no small task. There's no shortage of drama in the world. Perhaps part of a great but worthy struggle should be finding our place in it, where we can offer our allegiance to, what role we might fill perfectly, even if that requires some digging. As Dostoyevsky said: "Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man."

The treasure we seek in this "quest" is a game worth playing, a fight worth fighting, a mission worth sacrificing for.

We all struggle, suffer, and die, but the trick lies in who or what is worth struggling, suffering and dying for.

It's a quest each of us is engaged in, already. The only question is how much of ourselves we put into it.

And who knows? We might look back one day, and wish we had given it no less than everything.

If you liked this, check out:
Why Soft Nihilism Is So Popular These Days So, What is "The Meaning of Life"? 10 Existential Riddles Life Asks Each Of Us How a Few Basic Assumptions Can Render Life Meaninglessde Meaninglessness as a Matter of Perspective (or Lack Thereof) 15 Games of Life, and the One Most Worth Playing The Philosophy of DeadPool: Nihilism Verses Spandex
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References

1 https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/nationwide-trends
Also: "My argument is that the U.S. is suffering an epidemic of addiction, and that these addictions are leaving a rising portion of American society unhappy and a rising number clinically depressed."
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/addiction-and-unhappiness-in-america/

2 The suicide rate has increased more than 30 percent in half of U.S. states since 1999.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6722a1.htm?s_cid=mm6722a1_w
also
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/24/smartphone-teen-suicide-mental-health-depression

3 https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/for-80-years-young-americans-have-been-getting-more-anxious-and-depressed.html

4 https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/02/20/most-u-s-teens-see-anxiety-and-depression-as-a-major-problem-among-their-peers/
also
https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/for-80-years-young-americans-have-been-getting-more-anxious-and-depressed.html

5 Rates of happiness are down:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/21/americans-are-unhappiest-theyve-ever-been-un-report-finds-an-epidemic-addictions-could-be-blame/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.76d5a61c6789

6 Antianxiety and antidepressant medications are up: U.S. Antidepressant Use Jumps 65% in 15 Years, from 7.7% in 199-2002 to 12/7% in 2011-2015.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db283.htm
Antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the U.S.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/07/09/antidepressants/
also
https://www.anxietycentre.com/anxiety-statistics-information.shtml

7 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db127.htm

8 https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-erectile-dysfunction-drugs-market
and
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/viagra-number-of-prescriptions-for-erectile-dysfunction-drugs-rises-by-more-than-a-quarter-10372318.html

9 One study found that ADHD diagnois rates increased 30 percent in eight years. The percent of very young children (ages two to five) who were diagnose with ADHD increased by over 50 percent between 2007/2008 and 2011/2012.
https://fee.org/articles/the-adhd-overdiagnosis-epidemic-is-a-schooling-problem-not-a-child-one/

10 https://news.yahoo.com/u-deaths-alcohol-drugs-suicide-050104684.html

11 https://www.cigna.com/newsroom/news-releases/2018/new-cigna-study-reveals-loneliness-at-epidemic-levels-in-america
This is happening even among teenagers:
https://nypost.com/2019/03/26/an-epidemic-of-teenage-loneliness/

12 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/happiness-recession-causing-sex-depression`/586405/
and
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/

13.Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000)

14 Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, New York, HarperCollins, 1980), 419.

15 https://religionnews.com/2014/01/27/great-decline-religion-united-states-one-graph/

16 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americans-now-say-theyre-spiritual-but-not-religious/

17 Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1990), xii.

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An exploration of modern meaninglessness, angst, emptiness, purposelessness: where it comes from, why it's here, and what we can do about it.

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"From 2011 to 2022, over half a million lives (539,810) were lost to suicide, with 2022 showing the highest number of deaths on record. Within this period, the adjusted suicide rate increased by 16%." -Heather Saunders and Nirmita Panchal, A Look at the Latest Suicide Data and Change Over the Last Decade, 2023

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From 2011 to 2022, over half a million lives (539,810) were lost to suicide, with 2022 showing the highest number of deaths on record. Within this period, the adjusted suicide rate increased by 16%. Recognizing the mounting mental health crisis and demand for accessible crisis care, the federal government introduced a new crisis number, 988, available nationwide in July 2022. This easy to remember three-digit number connects callers who are suicidal or experiencing a mental health emergency to a crisis counselor at one of 200+ local crisis call centers. There, they may access crisis counseling, resources, referrals, and connections to other crisis services. Though suicide deaths slowed in 2019 and 2020, they began to increase again in 2021 and 2022, but the cause of this recent rise in suicides is unclear.

Key takeaways from an analysis of aggregate provisional data from 2022 and CDC WONDER data from 2011 to 2021, which represents the most recent and comprehensive data available before the mid-2022 launch of 988, include the following:

CDC's provisional data for 2022 show a record high of 49,369 suicide deaths, coming after modest declines in 2019 and 2020.

In 2022, provisional data indicates the highest number of gun-related suicides on record; increases in firearm suicides are driving the increases in overall suicide deaths in recent years.

Suicide death rates in 2021 were highest among American Indian and Alaska Native people, males, and people who live in rural areas.

Suicide deaths are increasing fastest among people of color, younger people, and those who live in rural areas with many groups seeing increases of 30% or more from 2011 to 2021.

Suicide death rates varied considerably by state in 2021, as did the rate of change between 2011 and 2021.

Provisional CDC data show that the number of suicide deaths in 2022 is the highest recorded, exceeding the next closest year (2018) by over 1,000 deaths (Figure 1). When adjusted for population growth and age, the suicide rate has risen by 16% from 2011 to 2022, moving from 12.3 to 14.4 deaths per 100,000 individuals. Looking back further to 1999, there is a substantial 37% increase from a rate of 10.57 per 100,000. Notably, while 2022 had the highest recorded number of suicide deaths, its rate is similar to 2018 (14.5 in 2022 vs. 14.2 in 2018 per 100,000) but higher than the rate in 2020-the year before suicide deaths began to climb again. Increases in the number of suicide deaths follow high levels of mental health symptoms during COVID, rising financial stressors, and longstanding difficulty accessing needed mental health care-particularly for some populations. Total suicide numbers may be undercounted, as some research suggests that suicides may be misclassified as drug overdose deaths since it can be difficult to determine whether drug overdoses are intentional.

Provisional data from 2022 show the highest number of firearm-related suicides on record, driving the overall increases in suicide deaths to record levels. Firearm-related suicides have been increasing in recent years. In 2021, firearm-related suicides increased by 8% from 2020 and went up another 3% in 2022, while deaths from other suicide methods remained more stable (Figure 2). Firearm-related suicides are now the most common method of suicide, accounting for 55% of all suicide fatalities in both 2021 and 2022. The availability of guns (measured indirectly by the number of gun laws in a state) is linked to firearm suicide rates - with states with fewer gun laws having higher rates. Suicide deaths accounted for more than half (55%) of all deaths involving a firearm in 2021.

Suicide death rates in 2021 were highest among American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people, males, and people who live in rural areas. As of 2021, AIAN people had the highest suicide death rate at 28.1 per 100,000 people, one and a half times higher than the rate for White people (17.4 per 100,000 people). Suicide death rates for Black, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander people were at least half the rate of White people. Females are more likely to report mental illness and are more likely to attempt suicide, but male suicide death rates are four times higher (22.8 versus 5.7 per 100,000). Non-metropolitan areas have a higher suicide rate (20.2 per 100,000) than metro areas (13.6 per 100,000). There are similar suicide rates across adult age groups in 2021 (Figure 3). Because younger people are less likely to die of other causes, suicides are the second leading cause of death in adults under the age of 45, accounting for 16% of deaths in people 18-25 and 9% of deaths in people 26-44 in 2020.

Suicide deaths are increasing fastest among people of color, younger individuals, and people who live in rural areas. Between 2011 and 2021, suicide death rates increased substantially among people of color, with the highest increase among AIAN people (70% increase, from 16.5 to 28.1 per 100,000), followed by Black (58% increase, from 5.5 to 8.7 per 100,000), and Hispanic (39% increase, 5.7 to 7.9 per 100,000) people (Figure 3). Other studies show a particularly large increase in suicide deaths among Black youth and adolescents. Underdiagnosis of mental health conditions, structural barriers to care, stereotypes and discrimination associated with poor mental health, racism and discrimination, and disparities in the use of mental health services may all contribute to rising suicide rates among people of color. Among adolescents, emergency department visits for suicide attempts have increased in recent years, primarily driven by females. And a KFF/CNN survey found that roughly half of parents said the pandemic had a negative impact on their child's mental health, including 17% who said it had a "major negative impact." In rural areas, suicide death rates increased significantly, possibly due to acute shortages of mental health workers in these areas. The suicide death rate also increased in adolescents (48% increase, from 4.4 to 6.5 per 100,000) and young adults (39% increase, from 13.0 to 18.1 per 100,000) between 2011 and 2021 (Figure 3).

Suicide death rates varied substantially by state in 2021, as did the rate of change from 2011 to 2021. Suicide death rates by state range from a low of 6.21 per 100,000 population in Washington, D.C. to a high of 32.34 in Wyoming, with a median death rate of 15.3 per 100,000 in 2021 (Figure 4). The suicide rate may vary by state due to factors such as demographics, firearm availability (involved in over half of suicides), mental health status, and access to mental health services. Between 2011 and 2021, suicide death rates increased by 25% or more in 12 states, with the largest increases in Alaska (54% increase, from 20.0 to 30.8 per 100,000), South Dakota (48% increase, from 15.7 to 23.4 per 100,000), Nebraska (43% increase, from 10.5 to 15.0 per 100,000), and Montana (42% increase, from 22.5 to 32.0 per 100,000).

While the exact cause for the rise in suicides in recent years is unknown, it may reflect, in part, increasing stressors and longstanding unmet mental health needs-challenges that coincide with 988's launch. In its first year, 988 improved answer rates and reduced wait times while handling nearly 5 million contacts due to surging demand; however, its influence on overall suicide rates, particularly among people of color or other vulnerable populations, is yet to be seen. Since its introduction in July 2022, 988 has received almost 5 million contacts, including almost 1 million from the Veteran's Crisis Line. While early nationwide metrics look positive, disparities in state performance and questions about long-term funding for state call centers and crisis infrastructure persist. Current publicly available data on 988 gives only a partial view of its implementation and possible access challenges. Analysis of more comprehensive 988 metrics, coupled with future data on suicide attempts and deaths may help shed light on the impact of 988 and related crisis services in addressing escalating suicide deaths.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
This work was supported in part by Well Being Trust. KFF maintains full editorial control over all of its policy analysis, polling, and journalism activities.

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A Look at the Latest Suicide Data and Change Over the Last Decade | KFF

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CDC's provisional data for 2022 show a record high of 49,369 suicide deaths, coming after modest declines in 2019 and 2020. In 2022, provisional data indicates the highest number of gun-related suicides on record; increases in firearm suicides are driving the increases in overall suicide deaths in recent years.

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"One in every eleven adults younger then 45 takes antidepressants daily, as does one in five older adults. Antianxiety and antipsychotic drugs are also common." -Kathleen Stassen Berger, The Developing Person Through the Life Span, p. 496.

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It is interesting how much more dismal people become after great tragedies. The 1900s feels full of this kind of thinking. It is so different from the flowery Romantics and rebellious, stern Victorians. It is like seeing existence at a distance, like youre not really in it, but you despise it even still (because you must despise something so awful).

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"Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now," -Philip Larkin, Aubade, 1977, lines 4-5

Death is the real reality. Even when the world is dark and unrecognizable, there is still death. It exists in and under everything, not matter how distant we try to make ourselves. This waking life we live is really just a whole diversion and distraction from what really must happen in the future--from really is happening now.

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"Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

They sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house." -Philip Larkin, Aubade, 1977, lines 41-50

We cannot escape death. It is our doom our destiny. We just go about life trying to forget about it or trying to pretend that it isn't there. We spend our time doing silly things like going to work, but really does it matter? Everyone is living the same life. Everyone is just going about their days, their life, until they finally die. There really is no difference between a postman and a doctor. They are both just working people. And even in the face of death, life just goes on--it must. After the doctor visits the sick and the dying and the dead, the postman will come around too, both just living because they have to.

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Maybe Lucky is really Lucky? He doesnt have to wait around and waste his life like Estragon and Vladimir. He has a purpose. Maybe if he didnt work he would already be dead by frailty and not being used, not being alive. We already saw how Pozzo's bags were the things really helping him stay up. He in a way is supported by the weight of his slavery. Estragon and Vladimir are a different kind of slave, and they too are driven on in their own ridiculous purpose.

There is also the obvious implication of Lucky not being Lucky at all. His name could be pure irony--a Lucky slave.

However, the whole meaning of the play is about death and buying time till you get there. We live our lives in distraction until we finally pass. Lucky has something that continuously passes the time. He is continuously busy with something. Estragon and Vladimir cannot say that. They are continuously looking for entertainment, distraction, something to pass the time. They cry out with joy once they find something. In this context, Lucky is indeed Lucky.

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It is interesting how after Vladimir puts on Lucky's hat he begins to think too. His speeches are long and intuitive and powerful.

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"Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I awake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in that what truth will there be? He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. I cant go on! What have I said?" -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952, Act II, Vladimir.

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"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952, Act II, Pozzo

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"We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?" -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952, Act II, Estragon

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Annie Donahoe Clifton holds son Bobby Clifton in 1945. (Courtesy Bobby Clifton)

Bobby Clifton never thought of his mother as someone who lived through a pandemic.

Even as the novel coronavirus brought the world to a halt - as it became clear that he, like Annie Donahoe Clifton, would witness a globally catastrophic outbreak of disease - he failed to draw the parallel. It took an emailed suggestion from his niece before Clifton, 75, entered his bedroom, opened the cedar chest at the foot of his bed and paged through the faded letters, exchanged in 1918 between his mother and her brother, then fighting overseas in World War I.

Preserved in paper, he found a teenager troubled by the shutdown of movie theaters, businesses and schools.

"Brother, Norfolk is some dull now," wrote 16-year-old Annie Clifton on Oct. 21, 1918. "All of the moving pictures and theatres are closed on account of the Spanish flu. ... I'm not working now [and] school ... had to close, too."

Boston refused to close schools during the 1918 flu. Then children began to die.

Bobby Clifton was struck by the similarities. It was late March, and schools, restaurants and shops were just starting to shut down all around his home in Virginia Beach, where he'd been spending a quiet retirement with his wife, Linda Clifton, until the virus hit. Everything had become so uncertain - and now, standing in his bedroom, he gripped the letter a little bit harder.

He hadn't known society shut down in 1918. He hadn't ever thought about it. And he'd never asked his mother, who died of dementia in 1986 without once broaching the pandemic with her son. Annie-of-the-letter spoke to Bobby Clifton in a much younger voice, not the matriarch he knew. But it felt, he said, like his mother was guiding him through the crisis.

"It makes you think, 'Okay, we're not the only ones,'" said Valerie Fisher, the niece who recommended he look for the letters.

Americans throughout the country are making identical discoveries. They are climbing attic stairs, descending into dusty basements and flipping through folders in old filing cabinets to seek words of everyday wisdom from ancestors who have suffered through something like this before.

For "My Great Aunt Vi ... the biggest - and happiest - news of the day was that schools were closing," wrote a woman in Seattle who unearthed a relative's 1918 diary entries.

"I'm sure Aunt Becky would be flabbergasted to know people are still interested in her letters," concluded an Iowa woman who spoke to a local newspaper about her family's collection of correspondence from the time.

Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic

"I discovered a letter inside the family Bible," wrote a man in Texas. "The historic world-wide pandemic now seems personal to me."

A hidden trove of documents like these await discovery throughout the nation, historians said. The global flu pandemic of 1918 killed 675,000 Americans and infected at least a quarter of the population, including President Woodrow Wilson (just as he was trying to negotiate an end to World War I). If you weren't sick yourself, said University of Puget Sound history professor Nancy Bristow, you knew someone who was.

And everyone in America, Bristow said, was writing letters: "There was no other way to be in touch."

Many family records have lain untouched for a century, Bristow said, or were fobbed off on local historical societies or museums decades ago. She learned how poorly collated these letters and diary entries can be when she crisscrossed the country conducting research for her 2012 book, "American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic."

Inspired by gaps in her family lore - Bristow's working-class great grandparents died of the flu in Philadelphia, leaving behind only their names and a photo - she hoped to construct an experiential account of the pandemic built around the voices of ordinary people as preserved in their private scribblings.

It was good for me, she said, that "families hold on to stuff."

The 1918 outbreak killed 50 million people worldwide but was overshadowed by World War I and World War II. The first comprehensive account of the disease, published in 1976, dubbed it " America's Forgotten Pandemic."

In this excerpt from a 2010 documentary, Americans share what it was like to live through the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million worldwide. (Video: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)

The flu can kill tens of millions of people. In 1918, that's exactly what it did.

E. Thomas Ewing, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, is glad it's forgotten no longer. When Ewing taught his classes in the world before the coronavirus, he always skipped the pandemic. "After World War I and the peace treaty and the Russian Revolution and decolonization and women's suffrage, there just wasn't time," he said. Now he has published several articles about the illness (including some in this paper), with more in the works.

He recently embarked on a personal search, too, seeking documents about the pandemic privations of his great-grandfather, who was a student at Princeton in 1918.

"Now that families are finding these materials, I think it will really help," Ewing said. "Reading them, you empathize with what people were going through in 1918, and that helps you empathize with what others are going through now."

That was why Valerie Fisher decided to email her Uncle Bobby and remind him of Annie Clifton's 1918 letter.

Fisher was extremely close with Annie Clifton, the grandmother whom she called "Gammy." When Annie Clifton got sick with dementia just after Fisher graduated high school, she spent the early years of adulthood nursing her grandmother through a slow decline.

After Annie Clifton died, her carefully preserved collection of family mementos - including the letters between her and her brother - passed to Bobby Clifton, ultimately destined for the bedroom cedar chest where he keeps everything important. By that time, Fisher had already read every letter several times.

The Oct. 21 message lingered in her memory. She knew the letter reached Annie Clifton's brother, Arthur M. Donahoe, roughly a week after he died in battle. It was returned to Annie Clifton unopened.

When she found a copy in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, an umpteenth rereading brought different emotions: for one thing, a bit of comic relief. Fisher, who is 66, had never thought of her grandmother as a teenager.

But 16-year-old Annie Clifton burst forth, gossipy and irrepressible: "Do you know Mildred Jones?" Annie asked her brother in the letter. "She is 14 years old and she was married last Friday to Johnnie Montgomery I mean it is some couple too every body is laughing at them."

Some portions of the letter were less lighthearted. Annie Clifton told her brother that "Papa" had the flu - he recovered, according to Bobby Clifton - and that it sometimes felt like "nearly everybody had got the flu over here." She hoped Arthur wasn't sick, Annie Clifton continued, and she hoped conditions in Norfolk would improve soon.

She might be able to return to her job at a knitting mill as early as next week, she reported. She closed by telling Arthur Donahoe she loved him and asked him to write back soon.

Instead she would mourn his death.

After emailing Bobby Clifton to ask him to search for the original, Fisher also sent copies to her son, her daughter, her three granddaughters and a long list of friends. She thought it might help.

It reminds her of Ecclesiastes 1:9: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." It reminds her of her Gammy's kindness. It reminds her of what lies ahead.

Or as her grandmother wrote 102 years ago: "It is getting better now. Anyway I hope so."
Read more Retropolis: Comfort from a 102-year-old who has lived through a flu pandemic, the Depression and WWII Trump 'didn't know people died from the flu.' It killed his grandfather. A Marine's mysterious death in World War I's final days still haunts his family

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'It is getting better now': Family letters from the deadly 1918 flu pandemic

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As Americans suffer through the worst pandemic in a century, Bobby Clifton went in search of his mother's missive about the 1918 flu and found it deeply moving.

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Compare your generation with the Lost Generation...

My generation did not go to war. The majority of us live off of our parent's resources and hard work and are very pampered because of it. My generation is caught up in a lot of stuff that does not matter. We cannot barely fathom what it means to be truly sacrificial and to work hard, let alone war. we did have our own pandemic with Covid-19 that can most definitely be compared to the N1H1 virus in 1918. There was a letter I remember form that time of a girl being sick of the quarantine and being determined to rebel and have her Halloween party anyway. In some ways my generation is lost. The politics are horrific, everything is terribly expensive, the job market is horrendous. It seems and most definitely feels impossible to get started in the world and actually do something and go somewhere and be someone. Both today and then there is this overwhelming feeling of being hopelessly stuck.

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"Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse." -Gerard Manley Hopkins, I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day, 1885, lines 12-14

I also am "the lost"

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Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics) book by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Buy a cheap copy of Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics) book by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Dazzling in its prosodic innovations, such as the ’sprung rhythm he pioneered, and wide-ranging in its complexity and metaphysical interest. The Penguin Classics... Free Shipping on all orders over $15.

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"Lot 99" gets its title from the lot "at the sale" (3) where Grace's father's collection was "together in a heap" (3). I can imagine Grace looking at the lot at the sale and looking over every item. I can imagine how strange it must have been to see such ancient things misplaced in a cluttered pile as if they weren't important. It is very moving to think about how other people must have seen the lot. These items were treasures to Grace's father enough for them to be purchased and arranged together in their own room and they were important enough to Aunt Lizzie for her to continue to cherish them to her own death. People passing by would know nothing of this and probably saw them as Grace saw them as a girl--creepy junk. Maybe that is why "Lot 99" starts with her childhood. Maybe the strangeness of their new position in a pile reminded her of her childish feelings towards it and the continuing strange events that the artifacts witnessed unfold. It is also no wonder why the story drifted to her relationship with her brothers and Lionel's marriage--they also carried that same strangeness. All the events of her life, her girlhood, her young adult life, her brothers, her aunt, the library and the house, were piled together in a foreign spot, cluttered at her feet, strewn on the ground like dead leaves, all before her in one instant.

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"Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?" -Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, 1862, lines 522-523

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"But there came none;
It never saw the sun" -Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, 1862, lines 285-286

The fruits of Earth's pleasures. 없어.

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a little history/back ground on goblins from Guy Worthey's "Goblin Lore" 2019. https://guyworthey.net/2019/08/05/goblin-lore/.

"So, initially, goblins were probably small humanoids, benign in intent. But they evolved to became small humanoids, mischievous or dangerous in intent. They had magical powers, or perhaps were purely spiritual beings with the ability to wear a solid form upon occasion. I should also note that many cultures (every culture?) have small humanoids as part of their mythical lore. The label “goblin” is often attached to some of these. E.g., the Japanese, South Korean, Chinese, Indian, or Bangladeshi “goblins,” perhaps because translators need some word or other to represent vaguely similar creatures."

"By the 1800s, goblins had settled into being evil. (In Dickens’s story, the goblins scare a Scroogelike grave digger into making merry at Christmas, so they’re only halfway evil, or severely morally challenged.) They remained humanoid, but they could be any size. In all the examples that I can find, goblins wore hats. Note that, in the 1800s, everybody wore hats. It is tempting to conclude that goblins were used as allegorical representations of elements of real society."

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In all the examples I can find, goblins wore hats.

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"'You have much gold upon your head,'
They answered all together:
'Buy from us with a golden curl.'
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl" -Christina Rossetti, Goblin, Market, 1862, lines 123-127

She sells herself for pleasure. She gives her own self up for the fruit.

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"Day after day, night after nihgt,
Laura kept watch in vain
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
'Come buy, come buy;'" -Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, 1862, lines 269-273

It is fun and nice the first time, but what after? Earth's pleasures only go so far and can only do so much. Like the goblins, they come and they go, they are not reliable and they will eat you up inside and destroy.

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"But Laura loitered still among the rushes / And said the bank was steep." -Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, 1862, lines 226-227

Is this just an excuse or is this the start of Laura being incapable or unwilling to follow any more her honest, religious life. Is he saying she wishes to lag behind because of the big hill which she cannot climb quickly, or is she saying that being good and prudent and virtuous and controlled are too hard and are tiring to her anymore?

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"'Have done with sorrow'" -Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, 1862, line 169

A if not the pivotal line in the poem. Refraining from buying the goblins' fruit is seen as sorrow to all those that do buy. this is a representation of how being self-controlled and chaste and righteous is often seen the same way. People see Christians wither in general or those who practice it so closely and fervently as Rossetti as creating sorrow for themselves and holding themselves back from goodness. However, Rossetti, and in the poem Lizzie, knows what true goodness is. It is not sorrow to refrain from the goblins' fruits but sorrow to give in to it. As Lizzie recalls to Laura's mind, one "Jeanie, / ...met them in the moonlight, / Took their gifts both choice and many" (147-149) and how she "dwindled and grew grey; / Then fell with the first snow" (156-157). Like with life and religion, it is sorrow to reject the truth and the true, honest, righteous, chaste way of living--it is death to give in to the pleasures of this world.

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since we are finally looking at Robert Browning and mental illness...

"Bubbled walls of cinder brown
Smooth as smooth could be,
We are the ones who paint this town,
City of Atrocity.
Take us out and shoot us please,
Deliver us from this.
This horrid game of pretending
Whole and cleanliness.

She sits and cries for her pups
Dead from system wrongs.
She sits and cries and there she rots
Within pale system walls.
Save her babies, save herself,
If only she could be
Strong enough to face the world,
The mirror, and be free.

It's a game we all do play,
The bubbles in the walls--
Listening the day away,
Crying pitiful calls.
We are the ones who build this place,
The bricks and mortar, we.
We are the babes of earth's mistakes,
The doomed to die canaries.

Hear our cries, we wish you could,
But these walls they do ensnare.
These halls still hold the footsteps of
All who've ever walked there.
The trees outside they form defense
Protecting the outer world,
Saving all who walk about
From our insane fold.

O, bless the people who do trod
In stupid, blissful harmony!
Bless the young, but not the old
Who drove us to insanity.
Bless the road and bless the wheels
Of wagons that carried us here!
Bless the straps that bound us down!
Bless the absent tears!

Bless it all that pushed us forward
To one day be free!
And curse the day that we were born,
The mad, the lonely, We."

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Arnold's "The Buried Life" and current American culture...

With social media, there are several masks that we may hide behind. We have more masks than we have ever had in any point in history. We can edit photos to make us look exactly as we wish. We take photos at a certain angle to give an impression of doing something we are not or having something we do not. We can show specific parts of ourselves and hide the rest. All the reality and depth and messiness about who we really are is hidden away as some plague. In lines 64-66, Arnold writes, "And long we try in vain to speak and act / Our hidden self, and what we say and do / Is eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!" We try to make ourselves seem "eloquent" and "well," but it is all a lie.

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Emily Clarkson shares "Instagram versus reality" posts to remind her followers not to believe everything they see on social media.

Clarkson shows her followers how certain poses, filters, and photo-editing apps can make people look totally different in their photos.

"If people were told that what they are aspiring to is unobtainable, it might help them to make more peace within their bodies," Clarkson told Insider.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

As you scroll through Instagram posts, you believe you're looking at a glimpse into friends and celebrities' actual lives. It's natural to assume the pictures people put on their profiles are what they look like as they walk around every day, but that's often not the case.

Photo-editing software continues to advance, allowing people to totally transform how they look in pictures. But influencers like Emily Clarkson are trying to help people understand that photos on Instagram aren't always what they seem.

Emily Clarkson's 'Instagram versus reality' posts show how filters and poses can alter the way people look in photos

Clarkson, 26, is based in London. She's had a social-media presence since 2016, and she posts fitness and body-positive content for her over 100,000 followers.

Her posts often focus on how people can manipulate their photos to present an altered reality.

She told Insider that she was already struggling with her body image before she got on social media.

"Truthfully, I think the damage that was done to me in terms of my body image and mental health happened before the days of social media, or at least it ran concurrently," Clarkson said.

"The way that the media spoke about women; how the female body was portrayed; the size zero culture; and the days of photoshopping in magazines took its toll," she added. "By the time I started on social media, I was already insecure."

But social media ended up being her outlet. Using her own platforms gave Clarkson the opportunity to take control of the narrative, and she felt empowered to share authentic photos on her page.

In 2016, she started posting " Instagram versus reality" photos, showing her followers how certain poses and makeup can make pictures look vastly different.

"At the beginning, it was a bit tongue in cheek in response to perfect images of supermodels or the Kardashians, but as time has gone on, it's been something I have done in a bid to help women falling down the comparison traps," Clarkson said of her posts.

And as photo editing has advanced, so have Clarkson's cautionary posts.

Today, Clarkson focuses on making her followers aware of the dramatic effects photo editing can have on a picture

Clarkson still shows her followers how certain poses and makeup alter reality, but she mostly focuses on making her followers aware of the dramatic effects photo editing can have on a picture. "I just really want to show women that all they see online isn't real," she told Insider.

Clarkson makes a point of showing her followers that even seemingly harmless filters that exist within the Instagram app can be dangerous.

"The problem with filters, to my mind, is that there is such an array of them and they all do different things," she said. "At the softer end of the spectrum, there is the 'Paris' filter," she gave as an example. The filter is built into Instagram's story function.

"I think that although this might be considered insubstantial and comparatively harmless, it's actually doing a great amount of damage," Clarkson said. "It totally smooths out a person's skin, so that as we are both creating and consuming content, we are doing so without seeing any real skin texture."

"When we go to look at our own reflection at the end of the day, we may not like our pores, lines, and spots," she said. "The beautiful things that make us humans, we don't recognize anymore."

Clarkson is also concerned about apps like FaceTune, FaceApp, and Photable, where people can drastically change their appearance. People can make themselves look thinner, get rid of blemishes, and even make it look like they have abs using the apps.

Clarkson thinks awareness of photo-editing tactics is even more important since people have been spending so much time at home in 2020

"We are spending so much time online, and really, there isn't anyone policing it all," Clarkson said. "Particularly in the current climate, many of us are seeing much more of our friends online than in real life."

"If they are only providing a certain image of themselves, it's not a surprise if we then end up comparing ourselves and finding that we can't match up," she said. "We have access to anyone. We are consuming more content than we realize, and we have no way of telling what is even real."

In Clarkson's opinion, having a better awareness of the falsities that are presented on social media can help people's mental health.

"There are young women all over the world who are trying to alter their bodies, whether through diet or surgery, in order to look like the women they see on the internet," Clarkson said. "If women were told that what they are aspiring to is unobtainable, it might help them to make more peace within their bodies."

The most rewarding part of Clarkson's work is the positive relationship she has with her followers

Clarkson told Insider that her work has allowed her to feel better about herself.

"I've just been able to make a career out of being myself, and in turn, I've been able to celebrate not conforming to the pressures that might otherwise be on me in this space," Clarkson said. "I no longer feel I have to be a certain size or look a certain way in order to live."

But the most rewarding part of her work is the positive relationship she has with her followers. "I do try to share content that is just me, and if it makes anyone feel better about themselves, that's all I could hope for," she told Insider.

"Honestly, nothing matches hearing from parents telling me that they are now better aware of what their children are going through," Clarkson said.

Clarkson's biggest piece of advice to people as they use social media is to not compare themselves to others, despite the negative messages they might see online.

"Comparison is the thief of joy," she said. "We've grown up surrounded by such negative self-talk. It's no wonder, really, that we all struggle to like our own bodies."

"Taking time to make some peace with yourself and learning that you are a little miracle and that no one has the right to make you feel less than that is vital," she added. "Follow people that inspire you and be kind to yourself."

You can follow Clarkson on Instagram here.

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An influencer's side-by-side photos show how easy it is to make misleading Instagram photos

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Emily Clarkson shares "Instagram versus reality" photos to show how filters, poses, and editing apps can alter the way people look in pictures.

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Arnold's "The Buried Life" reminds me of Shelley's "To A Sky-Lark." There is a similar theme of longing. In "The Buried Life," there is longing to be loved and be known, to not be "buried." In "To A Sky-Lark," there is longing to know beauty and to be known as an author in regards to one's efforts being recognized and known and remembered.

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In Arnold's "The Buried Life," what structural device helps understand the meaning more deeply?

"I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll." (3)

Every sentence in the first stanza is multiple lines long. The thought flows and continues. However, with line 3, the sentence is one line, creating an end stop. This is abrupt, which makes the reader more aware of what is being said. It highlights and emphasizes the sadness. It also is representative of Arnold's feelings. The sadness has taken over him. There is no relief, we see no movement out of it. We must sit in the sadness as he does.

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From Matthew Arnold's "The Buried Life," what lie or short passage resonates with you the most and why?

"Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul." (1-11)

I too feel that nameless sadness. I feel there is something inside me that is unreachable, untouched by a few simple words. It seems to come from no where and pervade me. Perhaps all artists feel this. I also resonate with the jesting and smiling. Humor is a very powerful and special thing and I rely on it a lot. However, it cannot cure me. Like Arnold, the sadness is still there. I long also for someone to really know me, and love me. I feel as if that is also my cure, my one need. I, like Arnold, long for someone to finally know my "inmost soul."

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In Matthew Arnold's "The Buried Life," what is the main theme...

from class: "how can an individual live a full and enjoyable life in a modern, industrial society"

what I think: "The Buried Life" challenges the true self and its concealment. It challenges the masks we live behind. Additionally, there is a connection to love. Arnold himself writes honestly, drawing directly from his own life. He was experiencing some kind of struggle with love--not being loved, not being seen by his lover, not being able to really be himself around her. Ultimately, there is the desire to see and to be seen--to love fully and to be fully loved, including the deepest, truest parts of ourselves.

~ "But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves" (59-60)

~ "Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul." (9-11)

~ "Only--but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again." (77-85)

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"I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll./Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,/We know, we know that we can smile!/But there's a something in this breast,/To which thy light words bring no rest,/And thy gay smiles no anodyne." -Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life, 1852, lines 3-8

Expressing a deep sadness that is not easily cured. his own sadness.

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"The Eurasian skylark (Alauda arvensis) is a passerine bird in the lark family, Alaudidae. It is a widespread species found across Europe and the Palearctic with introduced populations in Australia, New Zealand and on the Hawaiian Islands. It is a bird of open farmland and heath, known for the song of the male, which is delivered in hovering flight from heights of 50 to 100 metres (160 to 330 ft)."
...
"In the UK, Eurasian skylark numbers have declined over the last 30 years[when?], as determined by the Common Bird Census started in the early 1960s by the British Trust for Ornithology. As of 2017, they were estimated to have declined across the UK by 4-10% over the last 10 years, and by 6-28% over the last 22-25 years.[25] The RSPB have shown that this large decline is mainly due to changes in farming practices and only partly due to pesticides." -Eurasian skylark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_skylark.

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The peaceful protests in response to Alton Sterling:
"On the night of July 5, more than 100 demonstrators in Baton Rouge shouted "no justice, no peace", set off fireworks, and blocked an intersection to protest Sterling's death.[30] Flowers and messages were left at the place of his death. The police cleared a crowd of about 200 people as organizers announced they would regroup in front of City Hall.[31]

On July 6, Black Lives Matter held a candlelight vigil in Baton Rouge, with chants of "We love Baton Rouge", and calling for justice.[32]

Speaking shortly after the shootings of Sterling and Philando Castile, President Barack Obama did not comment on the specific incidents. Obama called upon the U.S. to "do better". He also said "Americans should feel outraged at episodes of police brutality since they're rooted in long-simmering racial discord."[33][34]

On July 7, a protest was held in Dallas, Texas, relating to this shooting of Sterling and Castile on July 6. At the end of the peaceful protest, Micah Xavier Johnson opened fire in an ambush, killing five police officers and wounding eleven others including two civilians. Johnson was then cornered in a defensible location in El Centro College Building B, and hours later, July 8, he was killed by a robot-delivered bomb.

Also, on July 7, the FBI's New Orleans field office issued a warning about "threats to law enforcement and potential threats to the safety of the general public", stemming from the death of Sterling.[35]

Following the shootings of Sterling, Castile, and Dallas police officers, the Bahamian government issued a travel advisory. Bahamian citizens were told to use caution when traveling to the U.S. due to racial tensions. They specifically advised that young men use "extreme caution" when interacting with police, to be non-confrontational and cooperative.[36][37] Similar advisories were issued by the governments of United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, days later.[38][39]

On July 8, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent issued a statement strongly condemning Sterling and Castile's killings. Human rights expert Ricardo A. Sunga III, the current Chair of the United Nations panel, stated that the killings demonstrate "a high level of structural and institutional racism". Adding that "The United States is far from recognizing the same rights for all its citizens. Existing measures to address racist crimes motivated by prejudice are insufficient and have failed to stop the killings."[40]

On July 9, a protest in Baton Rouge turned violent, with one police officer having several teeth knocked out and eight firearms (including three rifles, three shotguns, and two pistols) being confiscated. The New Black Panther Party members were also present.[41] Police arrested 102 people.[42]

On July 10, between 30 and 40 people were also arrested including African-American Muslim activist Blair Imani.[43]

Professor Peniel E. Joseph, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, said that "the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile evoke the past spectacle of lynching and that for change to happen, Americans must confront the pain of black history".[44]

On July 11, a home in Baton Rouge was raided in connection with a pawn shop burglary in which seven or eight guns and ammunition were stolen. Three people were arrested during the raid, one of whom said the group was planning on using the stolen firearms to shoot police officers at protests.[45]

On July 13, local organizing groups and the American Civil Liberties Union's Louisiana branch, filed a lawsuit against the Baton Rouge Police Department for violating the First Amendment rights of demonstrators. They claim they were protesting peacefully against Sterling's death.[46]

On July 17, Gavin Eugene Long shot and killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge. Long was killed at the scene during a shootout with responding officers. The shooting has been linked to the nationwide tension over race and policing, with the event happening days after Sterling's death in the same city." -Killing of Alton Sterling: Aftermath and Reactions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alton_Sterling.

It seems that there is still the pattern of people talking about justice, but none being found. Was there justice for Sterling? Somewhat. What did BLM do about it? the organization held a candlelight protest and the movement shot up their own city. When will people's words match their actions? When will a desire for violence and killing to stop actually result in violence and killing stopping? When will these huge organizations stop hiding their intentions and actually get out into these streets and neighborhoods and provide real support for real betterment and real change? When will the money go to schools and churches and youth programs and education programs and rehabilitation centers and mental health facilities and community safety organizations and homeless shelters and foodbanks instead of candles and wrongful death settlements and merchandizing?

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The impact:
"Black Lives Matter allows for more people to become aware of the issue at hand and take part in working to solve the issue by no longer tolerating the unjust aspects of everyday culture. In addition to this, there are many measurable societal advancements and achievements made by the Black Lives Matter movement. One such achievement came with the filling and winning of a lawsuit against Baton Rouge Police in response to the shooting of Alton Sterling. Ninety- two Black Lives Matter members won $100,000 as a result of the “aggressive and unconstitutional tactics” used by the police7 . This victory for Black Lives Matter demonstrates the effectiveness of the organization to fight for justice and create societal change. Through the examination of cases like this and the ability of the organization to draw public attention, it can be seen that Black Lives Matter is actively working to peacefully improve the lives of African Americans in America." -Devin Iorio, The True Impact of Black Lives Matter
https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=fypapers.

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The money:
"In 2021, the foundation released its own report, not a mandatory federal tax filing but a voluntary accounting of its funds, in which it said that it raised $90 million in 2020, with the average donation being $30.64. At that time, the group said that it spent $8.4 million on operating expenses while disbursing $21.7 million in grants to about 30 organizations and to 11 Black Lives Matter chapters around the country.

On the tax form, the foundation said that for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021, it received contributions and grants totaling $76.9 million, with total expenditures of $37.7 million. Those expenses included grants of $500,000 each to Black Lives Matter groups in Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and elsewhere." -Nicholas Kulish, After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html.

There is lots of money coming in and lots of money going out. But what has that money done to provide genuine change? Can it be said that the millions of dollars left to the organization are justified in the change that it has brought?

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How many people today are doing the same thing? How many people are speaking reform and freedom and equity but are just in the game for the money? Did the BLM organization actually help solve problems with racial inequity or did they sit back and collect bills while black communities swarmed their own streets and destroyed their own communities?

The dark side of the organization:
"My talk was entirely about BLM, a subject I have written a book about and speak publicly about often. In my talk, I detailed how the architects of BLM had been recruited by committed Marxists more than a decade before they founded the organization and then trained for a decade on Marxism-Leninism and the practical arts of community organizing. One name I did mention (11 times!) in my talk, which Chait attended and took notes on, was that of Eric Mann, the former Weather Underground terrorist who mentored BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors. As I said in Miami:

By the time she and Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi founded BLM after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013—or at least that’s the story—Cullors had already had more than a decade of this type of revolutionary programming. And that’s Cullors. Garza was not trained by a former terrorist but by someone arguably worse—a scholar of the thought of Antonio Gramsci.

It was the following year, in 2014, that BLM’s founders created the revolutionary network it is today, during the riots it helped provoke after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The rise in crime and lawlessness between 2014 and the present has been dubbed “the Ferguson effect.”" -Mike Gonzalez, The Truth About Black Lives Matter
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/the-truth-about-black-lives-matter.

The organization itself is built upon ideologies that are not for the betterment of people or the nation as a whole.

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Did former President Donald Trump's behavior lead to Black Lives Matter, the 2020 riots, and the fraught racial and sexual politics upending American society? That's a far-fetched theory that can't withstand the barest scrutiny, yet one of the leading voices in today's leftist media advances it as an explanation for the present moment.

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"Day 1 of being a girl and I have already cried 3 times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldnt afford, and then uh when someone asked me how I was I said 'Im fine' when I wasnt fine. so...howd I do ladies? Good? Girl Power!" -Dylan Mulvaney, Day 1 of being a girl

According to Dylan Mulvaney, being a girl means being super emotional, irresponsible, bad with money, obsessed with material beauty, and flippant.  aka a pretty, stupid, entertaining object.

https://www.tiktok.com/@dylanmulvaney/video/7074309597984623918?lang=en.

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"Teach my half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The would should listen then--as I am listening now."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Sky-Lark, 1820, lines 101-105

Once again Percy is expressing a desire to be listened to. He longs to know what the Sky-Lark knows so that he too can write as beautifully and effortlessly--he too can "Pourest [his] full heart/In profuse strains of unpremeditated art" (4-5). He thinks that if only he could know more beauty and write of more beauty or perhaps more beautifully "Then [the] world should listen" (105).

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"We look before and after,
And pine for what is not--
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught--
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Sky-Lark, 1820, lines 86-95

We are miserly creatures, especially in comparison to the Sky-Lark, but it is only through our low estate that we can ever really appreciate the beauty of the Sky-Lark.

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"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be though my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, 1819, lines 57-70

What every author wants, to be heard and to bring some kind of change, to impact people. I also get the sense that maybe Shelley is unsatisfied with his life and his work and he longs for his writing to get recognition or just some kind of success. Not a monetary success, but again the kind of success that every author is looking for, the impacting of people. This connects back to lines 53-54 where Shelley talks about being hurt by this life and longing to be made free, to be bound away by the wind like leaves and clouds and waves. And also lines 13-14 where the wind is seen as a preserver. The wind could preserve Shelley's words if only it would pick them up and spread them around like the seeds to bloom.

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"Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;/Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!" -Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, 1819, lines 13-14

The wind is a destroyer as it shakes and blows about dead leaves and it is a preserver as it brings along spring and the growth of seeds into new life

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"Oh! life me as a wave, a  leaf, a cloud!/I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" -Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, 1819, lines 53-54

Shelley longs to be free like the wind with the wind like he was when he was a child. As an adult, he is hurt by life, by its hardships and responsibilities, by its thorns. He long sfor the relief of such freedom as the wind has and can give.

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How do these texts from the 1700s about race and gender make you think of specific events or debates in our world today?

There is a sense in today's world that woman are simply objects objects of beauty or frivolity. We have essentially come full circle to exactly where we started. Women still have rights and privileges like men, but for some reason cannot escape the beauty standards and objectification. With the LGBTQIA+ movement, anyone can be a woman if they dress up pretty and wear makeup and pitch their voce higher. Any man can decide to be a women by simply being pretty. Immature characteristics like being obnoxious or petty or acting stupid and only caring about fashion are also attributed as women characteristics and are also taken on by these men who want to be women. We have completely dissolved what a women is. She is no longer a person, she is not even a concept, she has been entirely reduced to a mere flippant, unfounded, undefined feeling. Women cannot even speak up against the erasure they are facing from these mentally ill men without being labeled as homophobic and ignorant and hateful. Why are we once again giving men and their feelings all precedence over the autonomy of women?

"I don’t think “gender-neutral” language is neutral at all, and it’s divisive. Women have fought to be called “women,” not “babes” or “dolls.” We’ve pointed out how women are objectified, and we’ve asked for respect for our whole selves. That respect for the wholeness of being a woman and our dignity are stripped away by this “gender-neutral” language.

We’re supposed to be “pregnant people” or “birthing people” or “people with uteruses.” This is objectification on a massive scale, as women are reduced to sexless people with certain body parts or specific functions. It’s appalling." -Donna Yee on Pamela Paul's "The Other War Against Women", New York Times column

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"And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,/And be like him, and he will then love me." -William Blake, The Little Black Boy, 1789

Its sad that the little boy thinks that there is a moment when he will finally be loved, as if the other boy cannot or refuses to love him as he is. there is also the romantic theme of children in their innocence. The little boy doesnt see the division between him and the other boy in the same way that the rest of the world sees it. instead of being filled with hatred for the europeans he is filled with the desire for God (which is connected to nature in this poem as well) and the desire for the boy to love him and for him to be able to stroke his hair. despite all the emotions that i could feel reading this poem, i feel calm and peace and almost a sense of joy.

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"At your meals you rise up, and pressing your hands to your bosoms, you lift up your eyes to God, and say 'O Lord! Bless the food which thou hast given us!' A part of that food among most of you, is sweetened with brothers' blood. 'Lord! Bless the food which thou hast given us?' O blasphemy! Did God give food mingled with the blood of the murdered? Will God bless the food which is polluted with the blood of his own innocent children?" -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Slave Trade, 1796

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"Can a man possess a right to commit actual and virtual murder? To shorten and prevent existence?" -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Slave Trade, 1796

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"If this trade had never existed, no one human being would have been less comfortably clothed, housed, or nourished." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Slave Trade, 1796

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"Whence arise our miseries? Whence arise our vices? From imaginary wants. No man is wicked without temptation; no man is wretched without a cause. But if each among us confined his wishes to the actual necessaries and real comforts of life, we should preclude all the causes of complaint and all the motives to iniquity..." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Slave Trade 1796 first paragraph

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“30th.—After I had got to shore, and escaped drowning, instead of being thankful to God for my deliverance, having first vomited, with the great quantity of salt water which had got into my stomach, and recovering myself a little, I ran about the shore wringing my hands and beating my head and face, exclaiming at my misery, and crying out, ‘I was undone, undone!’ till, tired and faint, I was forced to lie down on the ground to repose, but durst not sleep for fear of being devoured.” -Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe

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"You lie like a base born knave!" -Cervantes, Don Quixote, Don Quixote