I am surely in the toils.

I think I found my new favorite comic of all time

If existence is meaningless, create your own purpose and meaning.

this is everything I ever needed, and I had no idea until now.

So what occurs to me is that Baby Boomers/Gen X and Millennials/Gen Z (the cutoffs are a little arbitrary, but bear with me) both grew up in the shadow of extinction, but have had qualitatively different experiences of it.

For the Boomers, the big fear was a sudden, violent catastrophe; nuclear war. US and Soviet ships start shooting at each other off the coast of Cuba; someone, somewhere in the huge and ponderous Cold War military apparatus, mistakes a meteor for an incoming ICBM, and just like that, your world is over. You're always just one bad day away from death on an unimaginable scale.

This fear has never really gone away (and certainly it's had something of a revival, recently), but it went into remission after the end of the Cold War. For Millennials, the overwhelming fear isn't of a sudden catastrophe, it's of a death by a million cuts; global warming. A slow decay growing faster; a downward spiral as everything you love and value crumbles and rots and turns to garbage around you.

When what you fear is a sudden catastrophe, normalcy--"business as usual", abstracting maybe a few reforms of the political systems--becomes a refuge. It could all be gone in a flash, but at least it's here now. It's real, it's solid. You can live in it, while it's standing.

When what you fear is a slow rot, "business as usual" becomes part of the horror. You're not escaping anything; you notice things getting worse around you with every passing summer; even worse, you are--however infinitesimally--assisting in your own demise; slowly and thoughtlessly, you are weaving the rope that will be used to hang you. Normalcy becomes your executioner.

great insights. makes me realize why Gen X has always felt so fucked:

we got both types of existential crises - instant death loomed over childhood, then slow rot through social, economic, and environmental decay crept in during our formative years

I try my best to be hopeful, but a lifetime of living in the shadow of all manner of human-driven doom wears one down

Ah, another beautiful day. Let’s check out what’s going on in global news this mor-

Image description: Refurb, a brown cat, with her mouth open. The caption reads “sustained screaming” in all caps.

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3am is a fun time. either (a) everyone hates you and life is meaningless, or (b) you're the most creative/ hilarious/insightful person on the planet. sometimes both

(a) is why never make important life decisions after [bedtime] is important life advice

also (b) is sometimes why

America is a hard place to live right now.

[Image description: A tweet by user Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle (@DrDoyleSays), dated 24 July 2022 at 10:00 PM.]

The irony of the numbing and avoidance symptoms of trauma is that they’re not about NOT caring-- they’re about having cared so much, for so long, that our nervous system couldn’t sustain it. It’s how you get enormously passionate people who now essentially feel dead inside.

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same, existential shark. same