Category Archives: Nihilism

Alex is a 22-year-old social media manager for a startup. Six months ago, while standing in a crowded No. 3 express train on the way to work, he had a panic attack.

I was staring at my phone, trying to simultaneously respond to a Slack message from my boss but also scrolling through Instagram and texting a friend when I thought I was going to die, says Alex (who didnt wish to use his last name because he doesnt want to be known as the depressed guy at work). I literally thought I was being crushed under what felt like a mountain of work, overwhelmed, and messages were coming at me from everywhere, and I just wanted to die.

Its a common feeling for Becky, a 20-year-old college student. Im anxious all the time, she says. What about? Being in school. Feeling pressure to have a social life. Politics. My friend is studying abroad in Spain and I read a story on Twitter about someone who got their kidney stolen in Spain. The coronavirus. Everyone I know has cancer.

The young are more anxious than ever. Young people and for that matter, old people everyone is anxious. Everyone has too much to do. The U.S. is the most overworked nation in the world.

But the specific strains of depression, anxiety and nihilism are unique to Generation Z, the cohort born between 1996 and 2016, many of whom are now graduating college and entering the workforce for the first time. It even shows up on TikTok, that platform favored by the youth, where a new genre of videos are about making yourself feel better: I woke up depressed, heres what I did, is a popular class of content. Its used as a way to bond with others on the same medication: Yo, where my Citalopram girls at? asked juliakempner08 in one video.

Studies show that depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide are increasingly more common in this cohort than ones before. A 2019 study showed undergraduate students of the Gen Z cohort had double the rates of those issues than others.

There is of course the argument that this generation is more likely to be open about mental health issues than others, meaning that everyones always been anxious, they just talk more about it. But it doesnt account for, argues Psychology Today, the increased suicide rates.

Greg Lukianoff is the co-author, with Jonathan Haidt of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. There has been a dramatic surge in anxiety, and depression among young people over the last 10 years versus the 15 before that. Because of changes in medical trends and cultural taboos, its hard to compare depression and anxiety reports from much earlier than that meaningfully. To the extent teen suicide rates are a proxy for teen distress, we do know that the suicide rates for older teens peaked in 1991, and were very near those peaks now, he says.

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For Lukianoff (and Haidt) the big factor is tech and the preponderance of social media, which he says takes high school-style bullying into the real world and beyond. When I tell people to imagine the worst of junior high school 24 hours a day forever, it rightfully gives people a shudder.

After his panic attack, Alex the social media manager went to his mom, who took him to a therapist, and was diagnosed with depression. He was prescribed medication, and has since taken to 30 minutes of meditation a day. Hes also perhaps most importantly gone off all (personal) social media. Its ironic since my entire existence depends on it, but I had to. A whole group of us have.

Its what Lukianoff has observed as well: Social media allows people to gather together in like-minded groups, and this includes people who are more depressed or anxious finding each other. Research into real-world social groups shows that depression can spread among people in a social relationship; if much of the peer group is anxious and depressed, you are more likely to be, as well.

Plus, it creates feelings of FOMO, stress and therefore, sadness. Becky says she spends much of her time at night refreshing. I refresh and see what other people are doing. Its a way of checking in. Do I look as good? Whats she wearing? Can I afford it? How does she have friends?

Jessica, a 20-year-old student at Pace University says she hears about people counting posts. I havent posted in two months. Do people think Ive done nothing?

There are a few historical shadows under which millennials grew up that have little to no significance for Gen Z, also contributing, potentially to a different way of looking at the world. Most millennials were young children during the 9/11 terror attacks. Millennials came of age, and many entered the workforce, during a recession. They helped elect the first black president in history. Technological evolution was fast and rollicky during their adolescence and young adulthood.

For Gen Z, all of that is table stakes. Most havent known an America that isnt at war, and they unlike every generation before them, were born into, almost, a social media age.

Sunny, a 22-year-old employee in corporate finance, says it started for her in college as well, where her peer group sat around burnishing their LinkedIn profiles. Social media, she says, feels like a constant status update how high is your status?

And it continues on into the workforce as well. I would say my anxiety has changed, she says. The college anxiety was about academia. College had a blank dream of a job I was chasing. Now I want a dream career. There is a lot of pressure of constant next steps. Ive been working for like a month, but Im already thinking of what happens next. Its nonstop. Sometimes I cant breathe.

More:

The saddest generation: Why Gen Z is the most anxious generation ever - Digiday

Last December, the Weeknd returned with a vengeance. After laying low for a couple of years following the release of My Dear Melancholy, Abel Tesfaye was suddenly everywhere at once. He debuted a new lookostentatious sunglasses, crimson suit, equally bloody noseand performed new singles on late-night TV. Meanwhile, he could be seen getting into fights with Adam Sandler while playing a caricature of himself in the Safdie Brothers acclaimed thriller Uncut Gems. A new record was clearly on the way, but details remained scarce until February, when the singer finally detailed his next full-length, After Hours.

Clocking in at 14 tracks, the Weeknds fourth album bridges the two overarching eras that define his career to date: his early period as a shadowy, Cocteau Twins-sampling crooner, and his subsequent pivot to arena-ready (though no less profane) pop star. The collaborators on After Hours reflect this mix, with radio staples like Max Martin and Metro Boomin alongside Tame Impalas Kevin Parker and Uncut Gems score composer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never). And of course, it wouldnt be the Weeknd if he wasnt singing about drugs and lust. Lets dive in.

Uncut Gems may be one of the keys to understanding After Hours. Set in 2012, the film blends the fictional narrative of jeweler and gambler Howard Ratner (Sandler) with various real-life occurrences, one of which is the Weeknds ascent to stardom. Tesfaye (as himself) is a prospective client who comes to blows with Howard over a bathroom rendezvous with his mistress. Blinded by his uncontrollable desire for high stakes, Howard struggles with himself throughout the movie. In a way, the Weeknd portrays a similar character on After Hours. The album tracks the deterioration of a relationship from beginning to end, with Tesfaye vacillating between flashy arrogance and pathetic, drug-addled self-pitying.

The Uncut Gems part also directly led to the studio sessions between Tesfaye and Daniel Lopatin, which yielded four or five amazing tracks, according to director Josh Safdie. On the three After Hours tracks where Lopatin appears, his influence is palpable: His twinkling synths and ever-evolving textures lend depth to the productions.

After Hours retains many of the characteristics of past Weeknd albums, in large part thanks to its cast of collaborators. Longtime Weeknd producer Illangelo returns, as does Max Martin, who helped Tesfaye hit No. 1 in 2015 with Cant Feel My Face. Martin dominates the back half of the album with catchy cuts like Blinding Lights and In Your Eyes. Metro Boomin, who had a cut on Starboy, links up with Illangelo for a captivating mid-album run that includes Escape From LA, lead single Heartless, and drug ode Faith. This is the first Weeknd album with no credited features, but there are a couple new friends lurking in the shadows; Kevin Parker co-wrote and produced Repeat After Me (Interlude), alongside Lopatin and Tesfaye.

The tropes and production choices of the 1980s play a massive part on After Hours. Songs like Blinding Lights and Save Your Tears evoke synth-pop artists like Flock of Seagulls, and In Your Eyes features saxophone solos and horn arrangements so gaudy theyd make Duran Duran blush. Even songs that dont take direct influence from the period, like Alone Again or the UK-garage-inflected Too Late, play with the synth arpeggios and pulsating atmospherics of synthwave, the microgenre that cribs from quintessentially-80s movie soundtracks.

For fans who look to the Weeknd for toxic bars about getting high and having sex, After Hours certainly wont disappoint. The usual references to pills and lines are scattered throughout, but nowhere is Tesfayes fixation more apparent than on Faith, where he uses his drug dependency as a device to discuss his newfound nihilism and drops in an R.E.M. reference along the way. Near the end of the album, the allure of addiction falls away to reveal sadness; on After Hours and album closer Until I Bleed Out, he finally recognizes how his actions have destroyed his relationship and left him with nothing.

Its been almost a decade since the Weeknd broke through with House of Balloons, and while hes reflected on his career in past records, After Hours finds him navel-gazing just a little more. On Snowchild, he revisits his come-up in wintry Toronto and boasts about how far hes come, putting himself in the pantheon with JAY-Z and Eminem in one breath, and vowing to reject the excesses of fame in the next. Heartless is an unsettled rumination on how massive success hasnt fixed all his problems. Tesfaye might be singing about the same shit as always, but were supposed to believe that hes evolved since his days spent courting glass table girls.

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6 Takeaways From the Weeknds New Album, After Hours - Pitchfork

Imagine having a more embarrassing response to the COVID-19 pandemic than even new-age guru Marianne Williamson.

Its easy if you try.

Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot uploaded a video to social media this week featuring herself and a handful of A-list celebrities singing John Lennon's Imagine, also known as one of the worst songs of the 20th century.

The three-minute Instagram video, which is meant to raise spirits as the world reels from the coronavirus outbreak, begins with the actress, who is herself in quarantine, saying she is feeling a bit philosophical.

This virus has infected the entire world. Everyone. Doesnt matter who you are, where youre from. Were all in this together, Gadot says.

She continues, explaining that she saw a powerful and pure video recently of a quarantined trumpet player in Italy performing Imagine for his quarantined neighbors. We must have different definitions of the word "pure," because forcing people who have nowhere else to go to listen to a trumpet performance of Imagine sounds an awful lot like a hate crime.

Gadots video then turns into a wide-awake nightmare as it immediately turns into a montage of over-earnest celebrities singing a terrible song poorly.

Imagine theres no heaven, Gadot intones.

That is a comforting thing to say to people on ventilators, fighting to stay alive.

Its easy if you try, actress Kristen Wiig adds in a completely different key and tempo.

Actor Henry Cavill then adds, No hell below us.

You get the picture.

The video also stars Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, James Marsden, Sarah Silverman, Amy Adams, Sia, Pedro Pascal, Jamie Dornan, Zoe Kravitz, Chris O'Dowd, Leslie Odom Jr., Eddie Benjamin, Ashley Benson, Lynda Carter, Jimmy Fallon, Will Ferrell, Norah Jones, Kaia Gerber, Cara Delevingne, Annie Mumolo, Labrinth, and Maya Rudolph. It is the worst thing you will see all week.

Truly, the cruelest trick the devil ever played was convincing rich and famous people that Imagine is a good and meaningful song and not an abject embarrassment.

With everything else that is going on with the coronavirus outbreak, it is crazy that these celebrities chose to use their voices and influence to sing Lennons bland paean to nihilism rather than educate their followers on, say, guidelines for avoiding infection and death. You know something useful?

Gadots video is like the string quartet scene from Titanic, except the musicians are terrible and they're playing the atheist's I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke for some reason.

I mean, seriously, Imagine? What was Its a Small World After All taken that day?

Messages of hope are great and much needed in times of distress. But if one is to present such a message, one must stick the landing. Getting your friends together to recite the worst song written by the worst Beatle is the opposite of sticking the landing. Talk about situations where the supposed cure is possibly worse than the disease itself.

Anyway, if you are looking for a message of hope and comfort amid the coronavirus pandemic, I recommend you seek it from someone of both taste and talent:

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Hollywood A-listers band together to torture the quarantined - Washington Examiner

I work in a neighborhood building above a chocolate shop that usually smells so good it evokes a predictable wave of nostalgia even patriotism, I guess.

It's an all-American street, with no less than three different places to grab a cup of coffee. Most days, there are kids on skateboards doing tricks in the parking lot behind the bank. Toddlers stop and stare every time the bright-red fire truck cranks up its sirens and lumbers out of its cave to save the day.

That's the kind of street where I work. Youve seen it a thousand times.

But now, the candy shop is closed. It's scentless. No kids on skateboards. There's still coffee to be had, but the coffee shop patrons grab their drinks and make their way back onto the empty sidewalks, using their elbows or the knuckles to open the door.

All of this is new and surreal. At the same time, all of this is also strangely familiar.

You see, I've seen all this before. I wrote this.

Nearly 10 years ago, I published a novel that garnered a bit of notoriety. It featured zombies and viral pandemics, and so the story was riddled with empty and ravaged cities. Zombies were particularly fashionable back then.

In the screenplay version of my story, written by the late George Romero himself, the opening scene shows sidewalks empty of people, littered with unread newspapers, headlines caught in the eddies of the whistling breeze.

George often reminded me that every story was derivative. If youre telling a story about a pandemic, and my novel was exactly that, certain signifiers must be present.

In our current pandemic, these signifiers are rearing their eerie heads. Of course most are absent. We certainly aren't and will not be anywhere near burning cars. There are no gangs of bandits on motorcycles. There are no broken windows. But there are uncollected newspapers, piling up at the entrance to the office building where I've been virtually meeting with patients through the wonders of sterile technology.

Lately, people keep asking me about my book. People seem to think I might have a particular angle on the psychology surrounding our current pandemic. After all, they remind me, I spent a lot of time imagining a world where this sort of thing could happen. I even feel a little guilty. I wrote an entire novel that indulged in a kind of salacious, infectious foreboding.

In fact, I have lots of angles. My first is that I'd much prefer all of this to have remained in the movies. We watch these disaster films in part so we can leave the theater and revel in the normalcy of the off-screen world.

My second angle is that we are not in a disaster movie. What we see in the movies is a lot worse, a whole lot worse, than the unsettling emptiness on the street where I work. That's important to remember. Film scholars have noted that we tend to over-interpret familiar cinematic images when we encounter these images outside of the movies.

Thats the trap of our current predicament, and therein lies the most important lesson from my novel, indeed from all novels and movies and stories that feature the eerie and unnatural trappings of apocalyptic landscapes: We are not in an apocalypse. We are in the midst of a public health crisis that will without question end, and life will go back to normal.

This is not to say that things won't be pretty strange for a while. This is going to be tough. But this isn't about zombies. This is about the cautionary tale of the zombie trope.

My book featured characters who grew bored and frustrated with one another. Ennui was at least as dangerous as the pandemic itself. This very ennui, the lonely, one-note chords that empty streets and closed shops play in our pattern-prone brains, is the sentiment we have to guard most stringently against.

This ain't no zombie novel, but the zombie novels can teach us a thing or two. In the zombie stories, the humans nearly always end up fighting. That's the trap, and we know better.

We tend to defend ourselves by adopting the attributes of our enemies. This is problematic, because a virus literally has no attributes. It doesn't think or feel or love. The cautionary themes of every zombie film feature these tropes. Exactly when we need each other most, we start acting like zombies. And this is not the time for microbial nihilism.

Now, I must apologize. As a psychiatrist, I am going to offer clichs. Clichs are clichs, after all, because they are true. Oddly enough, we tend to ignore clichs when things get weird. I am arguing, therefore, that these clichs are currently especially important.

Play music. Tell stories. Go for a walk. Check in on your neighbor and tip your hat to a stranger. These gestures, so boring, so ordinary, are to my mind right now extraordinarily important. They preserve normalcy even as we hunker down for what looks like a long and unfamiliar haul.

We do not, as a rule, tolerate uncertainty with grace. Current research suggests that in the face of uncertainty, we generalize we decide that everything is foggy and out of focus. But there are constants of humanity, and we need to keep these in mind.We need to live in the moment even as we plan for the future. We need to keep up with routines as best we can. We need to sing and to play.

We got this. It's going to be hard, but we got this. This ain't no zombie novel, but the zombie novels can teach us a thing or two. In the zombie stories, the humans nearly always end up fighting. That's the trap and we know better.

Let's stick together, and we'll get through it.

Dr. Steve Schlozman isan assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist.

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This Is No Zombie Apocalypse Novel, Author Says But We Can Learn From Them - WBUR

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nicholas Stern, one of the most prominent global experts on the climate crisis, has urged Boris Johnson to resist calls to postpone vital United Nations climate talks this year, despite the coronavirus outbreak.

Ministers and officials have privately discussed the possibility of postponing the COP26 talks scheduled for Glasgow this November, but no decision has yet been taken. Travel bans and the shutdown imposed in many countries because of the virus have resulted in canceled meetings and officials working remotely.

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Stern believes any move to postpone the talks would put an end to any hope of making real progress. At the moment we must just get on with the preparation, he said. This is such an urgent challenge and there is so much to do, and so much valuable work that is being done, that we cant afford to lose the momentum.

At COP26 the 26th conference of the parties countries are supposed to come up with more stringent plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions, because current plans under the Paris Agreement are inadequate. The U.K. was hoping to bring many countries to the table with pledges to hit net zero carbon by 2050, a target that the U.K. has already enshrined in law.

Stern said work had become more difficult because of the virus, but not impossible. Postponing the summit now would effectively put the brakes on at a time when acceleration is needed, he said, and if needs be then a postponement could be discussed after the summer, depending on the situation then.

Stern is backed by other former high-ranking diplomats. Yvo de Boer, a former chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), who led talks in Copenhagen in 2009 that ended in acrimony, said it was vital to keep working towards a November COP26. If it is going to be canceled, that should only be done at the last possible minute in October, he said.

One former high-ranking official who helped put together the Paris Agreement said: Canceling now might look like the U.K. was grasping too soon for a way out of an important meeting.

Some NGOs and developing country experts also view talk of postponement as counterproductive. Mohamed Adow, the director of Power Shift Africa and a close observer of the talks for many years, said: We would rather not see it canceled until we know more about the spread of the virus. Canceling it immediately might mean action on climate change gets ignored this year and people on the frontlines in poorer countries cant afford that.

Janine Felson, the deputy chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: We cannot afford to lose any momentum. We should all focus our energies on ensuring that we can support each other through this trying time and continue to push for ambition.

But some experts contacted by the Guardian believe postponing the talks would provide more time for diplomacy. John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace U.K., has written to Alok Sharma, the business secretary and president of COP26, urging him to delay.

He said: Postponement is very different to cancellation. It would be the same president, the same venue, the same two countries co-hosting, so all you are doing is having a slight delay. The U.K. got off to a slow start [in launching its strategy for hosting COP26] so postponement would give more time for the work that is needed.

One key issue is that the U.S. presidential election is due to take place a week before COP26 begins. Donald Trump is strongly opposed to the Paris Agreement and his withdrawal from it will take effect the day after the election. A new president, if there is one, could be more amenable to climate action but would not take office until January, so a postponement could allow the U.S. to participate.

Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute in the U.S., said: One distinct advantage of delay until spring 2021 is the growing prospect that U.S. voters will turn Trumps climate nihilism out of office in favor of Joe Bidens robust climate ambition, infusing global negotiations with far greater importance and momentum.

Some pre-COP meetings are already in doubt. The UNFCCC has canceled all meetings for the next month but a decision will have to be taken soon on an intermediate meeting set for Bonn in June. Italy is due to co-host COP26 with the U.K. but its plans have been thrown into disarray by the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.K. government has said there are no plans for a change. A spokesperson said: We continue to work towards hosting the event in Glasgow in November, which is eight months away. Given this is an evolving situation we are keeping the situation under careful review.

The UNFCCC also said there was no immediate move to postpone the talks. Any decision would have to be taken by the COP Bureau, made up of elected representatives from various countries, and would also involve the Chilean government, which technically will preside over the process until the U.K. officially takes on the presidency in November.

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Will the pandemic derail the global climate talks? - Grist

Mark Stanley in Run

RUN Directed by Scott Graham Certificate 12a

THE Aberdeenshire town of Fraserburgh is the setting for this moving and well-cast drama.

A port, it has a long association with trawler fishing and processing the catches. It is depicted as a place of hard employment and few thrills.

This setting provides a backdrop to a family hewn from the granite, suggesting the environment breeds a certain dourness coupled with hardiness and stoicism in the men and women who live there.

Finnie (Mark Stanley) has grown up in the town and once got his kicks as a boy racer, screaming his souped-up car along the dark roads, slamming it round corners, and finding a sense of escape from the long nights through revving engines.

Now the father of two and tied to a fish processing production line, the cheap thrills of the past have gone but not been replaced.

Partner Katie (Amy Manson) sees he needs geeing up she buys herself a party frock and him a new shirt, but his response is theres nowhere to go and what is the point.

He looks, perhaps enviously, at his teenage boy (Anders Hayward), who is now behind a wheel himself and zipping into curves while playing loud bassy music.

The drama unfolds after an argument at home sees Finnie steal his sons car and take it for a spin, picking up his sons pregnant girlfriend Kelly (Marli Siu) en route. Cue some soul searching at high speeds, like a version of Fast and Furious for psychoanalysts.

Mark Stanley is fantastic: it seems extraordinary he is the same actor who starred in a release last week called Sulphur and White, in which he plays a City banker. The character here is the complete opposite and he has done both with real conviction. Stanleys downplayed approach makes it completely believable, his end-of-the-world sensibility haunts each scene. He is backed by a wonderful cast.

There is a theme of Bruce Springsteen lyrics running through the story Finnie is a fan and that he relates to the Blue Collar Blues Springsteen sings about is another clever trick in bringing this moving story alive.

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Hitting the nihilism on the head - Camden New Journal newspapers website

Photo: South_agency/Getty Images

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On any given weeknight at the Bushwick tiki bar Happyfun Hideaway, there are dozens of Tecateslurping, margarita-sipping young Brooklynites. When the weather takes a warm turn, that number doubles as droves of drinkers show up in the backyard, Telfar bags in hand. On Wednesday night, however, despite the onset of spring weather, the crowd had thinned, as people across New York began to grapple with the question of how to navigate life in the middle of a pandemic.

At 9 p.m., six young people sat inside: one man, blasted and teetering upon his stool, two men eating each others faces, and three more chatting in a grimy corner.

In the last hour, Trump had mandated a travel ban, the NBA season was canceled, and Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive for the virus, but the mood among the Gen-Zers at the bar remained light. The kissing couple was soon replaced by another heavy-petting duo. I went to the grocery store today, purred one of them. The bartender said, I think people are scared, but its overblown. Theres an arc to everything.

On the patio, conversation between college students returned to coronavirus every few sentences. The thing is, young people shouldnt travel. As a young person you should stay away from traveling and large crowds, a young woman studying at Pratt argued. Her Kurt Cobainlooking companion retorted, But Ive never had the money to go to L.A., talking about cheap airline tickets. The conversation lulled, briefly, before he added,Each cigarette you roll is a work of art.

They drifted from conversations about moving apartments back to the viruss impact on their graduations, from breakup drama to information theyve gathered about the virus (I dont think my sister made that up. She works in politics).

The boy joked about video-chatting into his class at NYU, telling the professor he tested positive in order to get out of class, and made snarky comments about a neighborhood DJ: Im glad the coronavirus has derailed his career.

A couple of young women on the patio displayed similar nonchalance. One shook my hand, then immediately lit a cigarette, putting her fingers to her lips without pausing to apply hand sanitizer. Asked whether or not they felt any hesitation going out for drinks, they chimed together, Oh! No! No! Not at all! Have they done any prepping? God no. Last I checked theres plenty of toilet paper on the shelves. When I asked if they would consider canceling their weekend plans, they said no. Im still on Resident Advisor [an online electronic music community]like, Whats up?!

Its chilling. Its something you cant really avoid, even if it was as deadly as some people think it is, said another Pratt student to her friend, a blonde-bobbed NYU grad. I use the subway every day, so Im fucked either way Now that I need to take care of today, Im just like Why would I think about the future?

For members of my generation, the COVID-19 pandemic is our first major crisis, and its hard to see my peers corona-nihilism outside of the major political and historical events that have happened during our lifetimes. We are an age group (18 to 23) that, for the most part, doesnt remember 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis. We dont know the existential dread of impending war or impending bankruptcy. The 2016 election was a crisis, but it was also one we were able to tangibly react to, through student activism and renewed interest in policy.

Texting with nearly a dozen friends my age, living in places from Alabama to Los Angeles to New York, I asked if they were worried about the virus. For the most part, they are worried, but mostly about marginalized communities and health-care workers and the possibility of becoming walking death traps for the elderly. As for themselves, one friend in New Haven said, Self-isolation for a month is a lot in a college students life. Also, on a less serious level, Ive had to cancel a bunch of dates.

Knowing they arent the primary target of the virus, they tweet things along the lines of The way boomers are feeling about coronavirus is the way millennials and gen z folks feel about climate change all the time, and make coronavirus memes. One is a drinking guide to online lectures; another reads, Well Id rather be dead in [insert name of a shitty college town], then alive in my hometown. They make TikToks, one to the tune of Thats Amore: When the class moves online, and the boomers all die, thats corona!

As tasteless as these conversations might seem to older folks, its also difficult to imagine my generation not reacting this way. Born into a dying world, ultraconscious of the overheating planet, our nihilism makes sense. But then, this prideful sense of invincibility may well just be characteristic of anyone that age. Per Didion, [O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before. In this case, its true for Gen-Z, corona is a coming-of-age crisis, the likes of which we havent seen before, and its hard to know whether or not to have a Wednesday night tiki drink.

This morning, a college sophomore texted me, If I havent died yet from my Juul or the nasty ass bar I work in, I think Ill survive the coronavirus.

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Drinking Beer in Bushwick Amid a Pandemic - The Cut

Disclaimer: AlterNet does not endorse candidates but I personally support Sen. Bernie Sanders. The opinions expressed here are my own.

Monday evening saw a brief outrage cycle on social media when a clip of Joe Biden ostensibly telling MSNBCs Lawrence ODonnell that he would veto even a gradual approach to Medicare for All went viral.

Joe Biden just said he would veto Medicare-for-All because it would delay healthcare coverage.

His own healthcare plan leaves 10 million people uninsured.pic.twitter.com/mpW6Z58miB

jordan (@JordanUhl) March 10, 2020

joe biden just said even if the democrats pass a m4a proposal through the house and senate, he doesnt know if hed sign it into law citing cost

hasanabi (@hasanthehun) March 10, 2020

Others parsed Bidens answer and came up with a different interpretation.

Okay, youve seen that viral tweet about how Biden said hed veto Medicare for All. Thats clearly NOT what he said. He says what his opposition is based on, says he agrees with it in principle and goes out of his way not to say hed veto it. Watch and decide. pic.twitter.com/hcqnnsnIqy

Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 10, 2020

It is certainly not news that Joe Biden opposes Medicare for All, and, as many people pointed out, a Democratic Congress would never send a major piece of legislation to a Democratic president who would veto it. The White House coordinates with Congressional leaders throughout the legislative process.

But what made this kerfuffle especially pointless is that Democratic primary voters have narrowed a once-large field to two candidates who oppose killing the filibuster if Democrats hold the House and win control of the White House and Senate in November. Theres certainly ideological space between Sen. Bernie Sanders and Biden, but both are committed institutionalists with deeply flawed theories of how to overcome Republicans central belief that Democratic leadership is inherently illegitimate and the relentless obstruction that flows from that view.

Biden believes that he can work with moderate Democrats, which is probably true, but he also says Republicans fever will break if Donald Trump is dealt a decisive defeat. According to Biden, they will come to rue their refusal to take governing seriously and be willing to cut deals across the aisle. Hes gotten things done on a bipartisan basis in the past, and he promises that he can restore some measure of the comity that made our legislature more or less functional for much of his career.

Sanders promises that he will build a large, transpartisan movement of working people that will transcend partisanship and ideology, and bring so much pressure to bear on lawmakers that moderate Democrats and at least some Republicans will have no choice but to support his transformational agenda. (He also favors a backdoor mechanism for working around the filibuster: getting a Senate parliamentarian in place who would assent to passing complex legislation through the budget reconciliation process. This would be widely perceived as illegitimate and leave the filibuster in place for the next Republican majority to kill outright.)

Both of these theories share the same fundamental problems. We live in a heavily polarized society thats divided by culture as much as by politics, and the right has built a sprawling media network that keeps its consumers cocooned in an alternative set of facts. Geographic sorting and gerrymandering have resulted in a huge number of uncompetitive districts where Republicans rightly fear for their jobs if they wander even a small distance from conservative orthodoxy. They fear that demographic shifts will reduce them to a rump party of the South, and believe they have no other means of maintaining power other than by undermining American democracy. And rightly or wrongly, moderate Dems face deeply entrenched conventional wisdom that moving too far to the left will cost them their seat.

Most politicians first concern is being re-elected, and neither Bidens collegiality nor Sanderss mass movement is going to change that equation. Killing veto-pointsby getting rid of the filibuster and somehow addressing the Republican takeover of the federal judiciarymight.

According to NBC, the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America is putting pressure on the last two major Democratic candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, to call for eliminatingthe 60-vote thresholdto pass legislation in the Senate. Perhaps one or both candidates will reconsider their position. If not, there isnt much point in debating the merits of their health care plans or proposals to combat climate change or anything else that cant be accomplished through executive action.

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Continued here:

Democrats respond to Republican nihilism by narrowing their field down to two tradition-bound institutionalists - AlterNet

If you were on social media at the beginning of 2020, the year started as profoundly pessimistic. Instead of a Jetsons-style chrome-coated future of flying cars, we have the COVID-19 pandemic, memes of a third World War and, to top it all off, a continent on fire because of human-induced climate change. And on the internet, all of it was meme-d.

In short, we are beginning a new decade all too aware of our fragility, not only as individuals, but as a species. And yet, we have been here before.

By the middle of the 20th century, humanity had been through two world wars that had unleashed the power of science in a search for ever more efficient ways of exterminating each other. This rapid descent into the possibility of species-ending thermonuclear death prompted the philosopher Karl Jaspers to ask in his 1961 work, The Future of Mankind, how humanity should deal with humanitys ability to end, well, humanity.

But as Rahm Emanuel, one-time mayor of Chicago and former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, once said: You never want a good crisis to go to waste. Looking around the world, we have an existential crisis.

Read more: Explainer: what are memes?

Humanity, Jaspers observes, is in a unique situation; we are at the dawn of the thermonuclear age. He says that it is an entirely novel scenario for humans to not only to be aware of their mortality but to also be alert to the likely ending of their existence as a species through nuclear war. He argues given this bleak reality:

a prerequisite of everything else, is to think: to look around; to observe what is going on; to visualize the possibilities, the consequences of events and actions; to clarify the situation in the directions that emerge.

We can do this by using our rationality and reason even if, as Jaspers concedes, we cannot plum the ultimate depths. But reason gives us clarity as we experience the calamity of events caused and carried out by humans.

But you might ask: how can you trust reason if its reason that gave us the ability to annihilate ourselves in the first place? Jaspers offers at least two responses.

First, we are easily distracted. Instead of dealing with these ultimate questions, we tend to become preoccupied with other concerns such as economic prosperity.

Second, there is a distinction within how we reason between intellectual thought and rational thought.

Intellectual thought, according to Jaspers, is concerned with the production of the mechanistic parts of our existence where we pool our resources to get things done. (This is similar to an amalgamation of philosopher Hannah Arendts idea of labour and work aspect of life that was outlined in her 1958 work, The Human Condition.)

The activities that fall under intellectual thought would include the production of resources that sustain us (like agriculture) and the construction of structure like roads and buildings that live beyond the person who constructed them. These are necessary activities, but the thought processes behind them thinking largely of our own individual survival cannot lead to solving failures in collective action or the species-level existential crisis we now face.

Jaspers describes rational thought as thinking that must be done by the individual by choice, resolve and action but that creates a common spirit. (Here again, there is a similarity to Arendts concept of action.)

What we need is this category of rational thought not only to reason as individuals, but ultimately, act as a collective in everyday decisions. The recent climate strikes would be an example of that kind of creation of a common spirit. This movement was carried out by individuals who each individually concluded that action must be taken.

Neither hopelessness nor confidence can be proven by rational knowledge. The arguments for despair, deducing inevitabilities from total knowledge, are inadequate, as are the arguments trusting in the victory of common sense. Despair and confidence are moods, not insights. We call them pessimism and optimism. Neither one is open to persuasion; each finds infinite arguments and overlooks the counterarguments. - Karl Jaspers, 1961.

Jaspers is not providing a panacea on the proper response to the realization that our self-destruction is not only possible but likely.

Instead, hes asking us to take radical ownership over the fact that if the world does end or convulses through terrible near-death experiences, we need only look, take a selfie and realize who is to blame. Jaspers demands that each of us has a responsibility to use our rational thought and then act.

It seems clear, however, that, despite the nihilism and pessimism of the memes that erupted over the internet this year, people understand the direness of the situation.

Nihilism requires a deep trauma of belief, meaning nihilists need to start in a state of idealism which is then ground out of them by experience. However, the deep belief is still inherently part of them, and it is that constant juxtaposition that fuels their idealistic resentment and reaction to the objective world around them.

We are reacting like stereotypical teenagers in an era where leadership has come from actual teenagers like Greta Thunberg and Autumn Peltier. Jaspers advice might contain precisely the wisdom thats required for adults to grow into our maturity. We have taken the first step by recognizing our predicament, but we need to go from wise-guy cynicism of meme culture to earnest action.

Link:

COVID-19, climate crisis, conflicts: Meme-ing our way through the 'apocalypse' - The Conversation CA

captionSamantha Morton played Alpha on The Walking Dead.sourceJace Downs/AMC

Samantha Mortons character, Alpha, has lived according to the motto, We are the end of the world, on AMCs apocalyptic zombie series, The Walking Dead.

Currently, that motto may hit a little too close to home as people practice social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

But Morton is much more positive about the state of our world, despite her characters nihilism.

I dont feel were at the end of the world at all, Morton told Insider when asked about any parallel between her characters outlook on life and reality.

My feelings are the world is constantly changing and we have to adapt and change with it, she continued. If, as a society, we need to learn new habits and new behaviors to prosper whether its to do with the environment or to do with love or respecting other cultures we just have to adapt and survive. I dont think its the end of the world at all.

Mortons character was killed off TWD Sunday. In a nod to the comics, Negan infiltrated the Whisperers, gained their trust, and when the timing was right, took her out. Morton told Insider she knew exactly how she would be killed off since joining the series as the leader of the Whisperers on season nine.

Now, with Alpha out of the picture, its looking less like the Whisperers will be able to bring their end of the world agenda to life.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC. You can follow along with our Walking Dead coverage here.

Original post:

The Walking Dead star says the coronavirus pandemic isnt the end of the world. We have to adapt and survive. - Business Insider