GAME OVER

Today I watched a video about life in Japan. The video was fascinating in and of itself, but what really got me was the comments. Here's a small but representative sample:

Everyone knows where to go, but no one knows why.

When I was younger, we were poor, but after years and years of hard work, I am no longer young.

It aint just Japan, it's everywhere. The marketing narrative has died. Nobody anywhere trusts their government, nobody trusts the media, nobody thinks they will ever own a house. People have just given up. When you take hope away there is nothing left.

Have you ever played Monopoly? There is a stage when your opponent has bought whole streets and built houses and hotels. You have not fun playing because you know you can not win anymore, but have to finish a game.

These sentiments struck me not only for the anguish implicit in the words, but for the fact they are indeed representative -- not of Japan, but as the one commenter pointed out, "everywhere" else.

One hardly needs to be a genius of renown to grasp that life is hard -- a bitch, if you like the word -- and always has been. Indeed, life in much of the world today is significantly easier than it has ever been in the history of the human species, and people are still miserable as all hell, which says a lot about us, or at least about "self-awareness," the thing which supposedly differentiates us from "lesser animals" and machines. The ability to think deeply, and to experience complex emotions, is as much a curse as a blessing if not moreso. But it seems to me that the misery referred to in these comments (and hundreds of others I have seen like them, posted from every corner of the globe) is more the rule than the exception nowadays, and this phenomenon is something new in my half-century of lifetime. As someone who experienced the Cold War, 9/11, the Great Recession, Covid, and all the rest of it, the fact that such cries of existential despair are commonplace is striking, because being 53 years of age, I well-remember the 1990s and the enormous optimism that drove them. If we view the 90s as one of those "long decades," then we can say they began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ended with the Twin Towers crashing down, and while they had their share of downs -- including a recession and a war -- what strikes me about them now is that we have never enjoyed a similar period since. The last 24 years have been a time of perpetual conflict, political division, and growing disparity of wealth; inflation and prices rise continuously but wages stagnate; ownership of property (once at the very core of American identity) is beginning to evaporate as a concept; extremes have become the norm and normalcy is now the extreme. Suicide rates have skyrocketed, everyone is on drugs of some kind, and loneliness is epidemic. As I pointed out recently in this very blog, we are increasingly faced with a choice between rainbow-colored neo-Marxism on the one side and a type of soft Fascism on the other. And all the while, millions toil in mindless jobs for low pay and then come home to cramped, overpriced apartments and order Door Dash while they Netflix without -- most definitely without -- the accompanying chill.

Some of you may remember that I devoted an entire blog to the subject of loneliness a few months ago. I was regarding it then as a thing-in-itself, but now I see that it is merely a component in a much larger problem grown epidemic -- pandemic? -- in this world, which is this: the world we knew is dying, but there is nothing to replace it. Our grandfathers worked for 30 years for the same company, got their gold watch, and retired on pensions that were as reliable as the tides, however modest they migh have been. The main desire of the ordinary person was to marry, own a home and die in bed surrounded by grandchildren. Nowadays all of these things seem out of reach, impossible. People shuffle from employer to employer like migratory birds, marriage is visibly dying as an institution, home ownership is a fantasy, and birth rates have plummetted in every First World nation.
Events have moved with nihilistic force, and in the wake of his social and societial nihilism uncountable millions drift in a gray void of hopelessness, numbing themselves with "content" and swiping fruitlessly on soulless dating applications. I can no longer watch YouTube (where I have a channel) without seeing advertisements for "AI girlfriends," a concept which ought to be amusing but is actually both terrifying and pitiful at the same time.

In the 90s, what struck me even as they unfolded was the idea that "we had won" -- "we" meaning humanity itself. The threat of nuclear annihilation had passed, democracy was everywhere on the march, and the economy was generally booming. The optimism I referred to was paper money, so to speak, but it was paper money backed by the gold of real-world events. There was a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction, of course, best articulated by the Grunge music of that era, but even this seemed to me a healthy thing -- a rejection of superficiality, materialism and status-seeking for its own sake. This music didn't say, "You shouldn't be happy with this" but rather "Why aren't I happy with this?" which is a distinction with a difference.

9/11 changed all that. 9/11 knocked us violently off our course and we never found it again. Never in all these 24 years have I experienced any real optimism or hope from people taken in the main. Yes, they have their moments of triumph, their personal successes, their vicarious political victories, but the trend is always in the same direction -- down. Boomers just want to die still owning their homes. Gen Xers stare down the barrel of the back half of our lives with no job security and no savings and a dollar that buys less every year. Millennials were sold on "hustle culture" that was nothing but a massive psy-op to turn them into donkeys for the billionaires and corporations they were brought up to worship. And Xennials, the first generation totally raised by the internet, now face being the first generation to be made redundant by their own technology: literally rendered surplus to requirements by the AI that is already taking their jobs away and doing their thinking for them.

What I see in the anguish of the comments I read every day is the anguish of humans who have lost touch with humanity's most important element -- hope. As the gentleman said, when you take away hope there is nothing left. Only the dull grind of existence. And existence is not enough. People, however unrealistically or foolishly, want to be happy. Whether they can ever achieve this state is an open question and often a loaded one, but the point is that the hope that they might someday be happy is often all they have to keep them going. Life, after all, really is a bitch, just as Langston Hughes said it was; and the fantasy of someday happiness is an anodyne for the pain of dealing with that bitch. Take the hope away and the whole rainy gray Monday morning slog through shit traffic to work for an asshole boss at a job you hate for trash pay, knowing all the while there's nobody waiting for you at the coffin-sized apartement you call home, and that life offers absolutely nothing but more of the same at best...becomes intolerable. Humans are almost supernatural in their ability to withstand punishment and pain, but this ability fades when there is no prospect of it ending and no point for it in the first place. We were taught as children that hard work would yield rewards, but for most of us, all we get is hard work; the rewards remain elusive, and indeed, as the years creep by, the promise of the reward itself is openly being reneged upon. "You will own nothing and be happy" is the unofficial slogan of the WEF, their vision for our collective future. Well, it seems they were half right.