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This is part 1 for a study on current society. Given that you found my little corner of the internet, you must have been wading for a while, and have heard of the terms of multiple coloured pills: Red pills, blue pills, and even black pills, and possibly more. I am here to argue that these pills and their main philosophy standpoint are all coping strategies of grief. Not on a personal level of grief, but on a civilizational level.
The pills mentioned above are usually pitted against each other for forming in and out groups, basic tribal breakdowns, and us vs them mentality. Originally taken from the matrix, the blue pill represents the business as usual approach, wake up and none of this realization happened, and just continue living as normal. The red pill is jumping in feet first into the deep end and seeing how far the bottom goes. The black pill is the representation of death of hope, hitting the bottom, the complete nihilistic view of the world, where we are all dead already might as well get on with it. In smaller circles there is the white pill, where there is abundant hope seen in what can occur. I argue that all of these, oft pitted against each other are different ways of expressing the grief we experience as a whole.
What we are grieving? It's not marked by a funeral, a sudden event, or even an "ah ha" moment, but the slow collapse of meaning, purpose and belonging. More specifically, we mourn 5 key things that make us "human". Kin and community, shared reality, purposeful work, sovereignty and future. Each one of these would be difficult, but all 5 at once, no wonder movements such as lie flat, act your wage, and other do the minimum required to survive are tearing across the internet and pulled into front page news as derogatory articles against them, calling them lazy, entitled or "quiet quitters".
The death of kin and community. Why is it that one of the most popular games of the last decade is Stardew Valley, a game about farming plants without a tractor, and literally watching grass grow? It is not for the farming, but for interacting with others, that are real, unique, and can have a relationship with, where your decisions matter. Giving someone garbage from the lake will make them mad, but giving them home grown goods, a good conversation, or even in some cases a pine cone, something is gained, up to and including marriage and children. We have lost this. The ability to be with family, to have a local support system that does not charge you to interact with it. Shared community rituals, not just parties, but actual rituals, like tree lighting, firefighter day, Terry Fox Runs, etc. Churches also provided this, with the sense that life was nested inside something greater than the self, something greater than us all. It has been hacked out too, and now isolation is now the default. Families move away for work, neighbours are strangers, connections are all algorithmic. The church is dying. We grieve the loss of belonging. We do not belong here.
The death of shared reality. Truth was once what was discussed, fought over, believed in, and disputed, but it was at least common ground. Now, everyone lives in their own little world of half truths, lies and deceptions, specifically curated for them and their small group in their echo chamber. Language itself is politicized, we no longer have The Truth to stand on as a starting point. We grieve the loss of orientation within any meeting we have.
The death of purposeful work. Again with Stardew Valley, the game is about taking care of your farm, something tangible. All work used to be some form of building, tending, repairing or helping. Be it a farm, a craft, a thing, or others, and you were doing it because it is what you could do, not what you have to do. Nowadays, bullshit jobs are the norm, I personally make studies that go in a filing cabinet never to be read unless the building burns down or someone blows up and the paper survives to play the blame game. We now also have endless emails all trying to talk that the file in the folder in the cabinet in the basement is the most important thing in the world. Even those that manage to escape the easily labelled bullshit jobs end up creating commodified content, not stuff they want to make, but stuff they can make a lot of and sell. Dignity is dead, replaced with metrics and goals. We grieve the loss of meaningful labour.
The death of sovereignty. On his way out of office, American president Eisenhower stated we "must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex". Well, those funded by the military industry now include the likes of Texas Instruments, NVidia, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, formerly known as a viable company. The Hobbsian Leviathan is real, all consuming and all powerful. What Hobbes did not mention (or I missed in the summary) is that the Leviathan is also made of the same people, who gave up a piece of their freedom for security from the government, now see their freedom tied to the government, as they are the governed. This forces the government to seek enemies and behave as a living entity, subject to the same natural law as before, where might makes right, and without peace humans live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death,” and what life they have is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, just up one level in complexity. The entire western world has sold off its freedom from security, but the thing it was sold to, the corpo-state, now sees to pull power over other domains by grasping for more individual freedoms to power itself against the others. War is not so much at the end of a gun, but through the propaganda and memes spread by each participant. Our time, attention and very thoughts are harvested and monetized to feed the beast, all while the beast does not force obedience, it seduces it. We grieve the loss of agency.
The death of the future. Let us turn our attention to the Jetsons, a 1960's view of the future, based off of their time. Originally sold as futurism, it is now very heavy into retrofuturism, a future that will never be. Why? Not just the lack of jetpacks, but the fact that the dream of progress is dead. What was once the corpo-state's entire reason to take more power, is now gone. Technology has roughly stalled out for the last 20 years. Nothing seems to be changing. Sure, some things get a bit faster, but the washing machine still spins, the phone still is in your pocket and rings. The only change is the lack of peace, and of belonging. All that remains is fear, debt, and distraction, along with the default of death and taxes. More people see the death of the world than that of the current system. We grieve the loss of direction, not because we wanted flying cars, but because we wanted hope.
Grief is the shadow that has its roots in all of the outrage, apathy, hustle culture and spiritual bypassing seen throughout the world. These are all ways of venting the pent up energy of grief, as the easy days are gone, and we mourn this. From outrage, we see the rage against injustice, but also the ability to mean something. Many people want their 15 minutes of fame, but have no direction to pour it, so it is over petty things as they cannot believe anything seriously if they are to be taken serious.
From apathy, we see the numbness of too much loss, doomscrolling as mourning. It lingers like smoke from a fire after the flames of outrage die down.
From hustle culture, we see the death of being enough, we now need to strive to fill our days, nay our very minds to keep us from thinking about what has occurred. To keep going, to try and eke out a living. Productivity itself becomes denial of the truth.
From spiritual bypassing, emotions are simplified into vibes, every sentence has a hidden asterisk * and there is as season for everything becomes a coping mechanism to avoid despair. It is not the absense of grounded faith, it is faith without any bones, so it does not have a leg to stand on.
Stack on top of this the ease of monetizing systems that avoid, suppress, or commercialize this. Doomscrolling? An ad every 4 will do. Thinking too hard, here is a cat video, followed by an ad. Enjoy your digital circus, just remember that bread is not provided any more due to cut backs.
After all this, what is left? Burn away these surface level sores and all that is unmanaged grief. Grief. The outpouring of sorrow, of deep mental anguish, with a synonym found in regret. It is the "if onlys" the "I could have" "I should have" in a negative inward focus of reconciling emotion with the outside events. And as of right now, there are a lot of events to grieve over.
We are left with nostalgia for the past, a sense of loss, and just an ideology hollowed of all meaning, except for I'm tired, but I have to keep running. There is no end now, there is no hope, this is the "Good Friday/Holy Saturday" of our time. A period of waiting, mourning and now what. Why are we here? Why are YOU here? Really. You made it this far, why are you grieving? What are you grieving?
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