Everyone is numbing out

The dark side of ironic detachment and possible antidotes for our apathetic world

It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your boyfriend brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice. Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers. Maybe you take it a step further: “Actually, flowers are really basic and lame. Only basic girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.”

If this goes on for long enough—even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—you will see them as a kind of joke. Flowers are now a bit. It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your “receptors for flowers” for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.

Entering the void

I’m deeply troubled by the fact that I see this happening at a massive scale, all around us. Except the problem is not a lack of bouquets, of course. It’s a lack of meaning.

Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (c. 1851).

“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.

A quick aside before we get into it: it’s taken me a long time to write this piece. This is partly because this whole phenomenon is, in a way, its own kind of absence. It’s been hard for me to identify what is going on and what is missing. I’ve had my own cycles of coping with it. I’ve been telling myself that I don’t care about people not caring. But obviously I do. So here goes.

A culture of chaos

The cultural forces that spawned this collective response have been quietly working their way into everything for decades—probably since the 1970s if I had to stick a pin in it. It reached new heights in the 1990s, but it took off exponentially since the mass adoption of the internet, social media, and the pandemic. We boiling frogs started to feel the water get really hot around 2015, I think, and it’s only gotten hotter and hotter since.

We’re so saturated in this environment that people are not only numbing out, they’re kind of making a spectacle of it: from TikTok’s “quiet quitting” trend to Vetements entire “ironic” aesthetic. You know it’s bad when the corporations get on board. The detachment is so widespread that most companies don’t even have the genuine confidence to market their own products. Everything is delivered with a wink from one eye and an eye-roll from the other. We live in a mud puddle of memes, ironic hot takes, and self-conscious self-reference. David Foster Wallace called it exactly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1993:

“[…] The harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, schticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving. How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”?

—David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, link to full pdf)

Rest in Peace David Foster Wallace, you would have loved Barbie. We swim in a wretched sea of meaningless mush, and when you have to trudge through nothing but slop all day, every day, it gets harder and harder to not numb out. I really cannot emphasize it enough: there’s so much and it just keeps coming. There’s lots to do. There’s lots to buy. The “content” never ends. Baby Gronk rizzed up Livvy! Wait—you’ve never had vegan tacos there?! Haley Bieber got a manicure! You should get an Apple Watch!

Meaningless distractions, all.

Thanks to the internet and our insatiably consumerist culture, it is finally possible to distract yourself for every waking minute of your life and barely even notice you’re doing it. When you mix all colors of paint together, you get black. Everything quickly becomes nothing.

What else? Well, there’s the ubiquity of pornography which has zapped everyone of their sex drive. It’s been said many times before: everything is sexy and no one is horny. Social media and the fear of cancel culture got together to create the most utterly dull popular culture and celebrity elite to ever exist. It stands for nothing, it risks nothing, so there’s nothing to engage with. Culture is just kind of “there,” and no one really cares about it.

An unfortunate by-product of this is that there’s also very little to which we can aspire. Life is not a meritocracy, and the void at the top has allowed for figures like Andrew Tate to be taken seriously by both fans and critics alike. The blame is always being shifted around. Men think women are the problem. Women think men are the problem. The boomers think it’s the millennials. The millennials think it’s the boomers. It’s social media. No it’s the pandemic. No it’s [your pet theory here].

Death and loneliness abound. Everyone is constantly joking about killing themselves while Canada rolls out a “humane” service to do just that (MAID). People are struggling: most people simply cannot cope without substances like marijuana, alcohol, drugs, and SSRIs. People are lonely: they have fewer friends and live far from their families. Dating seems impossible. Men and women in the prime of their lives are struggling to meet even one potential partner who shares their values and vision for a relationship. Oh, and our phones—Gen Z averages an unfathomable 9 hours of screen time per day—have ruined our attention spans to the point where we can no longer read a book, let alone sit quietly with nothing but our thoughts. If you’re an intelligent, hardworking person, odds are the job you’ll have out of college, and for the next 40-50 years, will involve 10+ hours a day of staring at a laptop screen in a state of heightened stress.

To top it all off, we can’t have meaningful conversations about any of this stuff because everyone runs their thoughts through their own kind of personal HR filter. People are self-reporting their thought crimes to themselves. I’m literally doing that right now. I’m sure I’ve theoretically “offended” all sorts of people in the last paragraph alone. Catherine, when you talked about the jobs you forgot to say that it mainly applies to privileged folks! Well, you got me there. The point stands: things are trending down. Something is deeply wrong. We all know it. We all feel it.

We think ironic detachment will protect us

The picture is bleak. It’s so sad it’s difficult to comprehend. How do you protect yourself in such a world?

You simply don’t allow yourself to experience it.

Think back to the flower metaphor. This is where we don’t receive flowers, but we cope. Same thing here. We look around the world, struggle to see the meaning in its chaos, and unconsciously tell ourselves that finding meaning isn’t that important. If I can’t pursue my own fulfillment, at least I can pursue my own pleasure. This is a somewhat reasonable reaction to the present circumstances. It feels straightforward enough—it’s binary, measurable, and everyone else is doing it. This is how the numbness starts.

And perhaps this route is even better—maybe even cool. Being ironically detached from life is endlessly glamorized in our culture. There’s a certain status in pretending nothing affects you and you don’t care. Cue photo montage of a strung-out Kate Moss staring listlessly into the middle distance.

Taking the ironic detachment route is also easy. It’s easy to laugh at other people, mock them, throw your head back, be a critic. Standing for nothing has the obvious appeal of making you impossible to pin down. There’s something very chic about smoking a cigarette outside a bar and being all like whatever. You’re playing a game of hide-and-seek with life, and you’re hiding. It’s thrilling to find a good place to hide, to have people seeking you. But in our drug-fueled debauchery, our coy, sarcastic conversations, and perhaps most of all in our fleeting, romantic encounters, we should heed the words of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott:

“It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”

It is a disaster not to be found, a total disaster to not be able to connect with others because we were too preoccupied with ourselves. The whole reason for ironic detachment is to build a protective wall between oneself and the world. We think we’re building a wall, but we’re really hollowing ourselves out from the inside. Eventually, without really noticing it, there will be nothing left for the wall to defend. There will be no one to find.

It’s not hard to see where the pervasive numbness comes in from here, as a sort of sinister phase two. The opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. I hope it’s obvious why this is a problem, but maybe you’re still thinking so what. To put it succinctly: when you take an ironic, negative, or numb attitude to everything, you are by definition not on the line for solutions, and when you stop looking for solutions, you lose all agency and will in your life.

Possible antidotes

We can’t keep going down the path we’re on, but we also can’t go back. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give full-throated endorsement for Post-Post-Irony, or David-Foster-Wallacian New Sincerity, as he does in the essay I quoted earlier (though I do think cringe sincerity is preferable to total apathy). We’re too far gone from the early 90s. We can’t put the internet back in the box or log off forever. Too much of our lives is irrevocably online, we’re all too self-aware, and a saccharine glaze of sincerity is too affected to feel real. Besides, we’ve all been cornered by the guy at the bar with a well-worn paperback in his pocket who locks eyes with you and whispers, “But how are you, really?” as if it’s a profound question. I would hate to subject anyone to such an encounter.

Rather than jump to sincerity, I’d like to start with basic honesty. It would be great if we started just telling the truth—to ourselves and each other. The truth is good. (I mean the truth, by the way. Not “our truth.” The truth, the real truth, does not have to market itself as “authentic,” like an influencer does, it simply is.) In other words: stop hiding and start seeking. Stop hiding from the sad truths and start seeking the transcendent truths that will address the sadness. When we flip the game of hide-and-seek, we can stop worrying about someone finding us, and start seeking the truth in the world, in others, and in ourselves.

With honesty as the foundation, I would advocate next for embracing reality—our real lives, right now—and not clinging to an abstract idea of how our lives should be. In other words: everything that we see exclusively online does not really matter. The broader culture’s idea of “a perfect life” changes every couple years. Measuring the distance between our real lives and some ever-changing, impossible ideal will do nothing but break our spirit. Besides, I have never met a person who has a dream life in reality. And reality—the truth—is what counts.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive. Things are never so fundamentally broken that we cannot move just a bit closer towards our goals and try again and again to live up to our values. Goals and values are good to have. The bigger and more transcendent the better, I say.

Once we figure out all that stuff—the big goals, the transcendent values—we should take responsibility for them. Standing for something is hard because what you’re implicitly saying is, “I don’t necessarily stand for all those other things over there.” This is a risk. People will not always agree with you. By saying “I believe in God,” for example, you’re also saying “I am not an atheist.” Atheists might think you’re stupid. (This begs the question, “And?”) We should take responsibility for our beliefs, but be prepared to calmly and rationally explain them. Criticize the world all you want, but do the hard work of building something better to take its place.

In this process, the process of seeking and telling the truth, having values and goals, and taking a stand for something, we’re bound to fail, to fall short, and to make mistakes. This is also hard. Our culture simultaneously demands both perfection and apology, but is notoriously unforgiving. Everyone needs a little forgiveness from time to time. We need to remember that it is okay to make mistakes if we try to remedy them. It’s also okay to be seen trying. Don’t take the easy route, which is always harder and more costly in the end. To shock yourself out of a numb state, to restore your life force and vitality, you will need to work hard and to submit to something bigger than your own desires.

I started with flowers, so I’d like to end with them, too. We all know that life does not hand out bouquets. Flowers do not just appear in the world. The same is true for a life of meaning. Both are grown, over time, from the tiniest seeds. You have to cultivate meaning in your life. You need to do the hard work of tilling the soil and nurturing the seeds. No one can do it for you. Grow your own flowers and give them away to everyone you meet. You’re right: the earth is not very fertile, people are not always grateful, flowers eventually die. But do you still see the point of it all? Do you see the beauty of the gesture?