In some corners of the Internet it is said we all died in 2020—that we have been living in hell ever since.  Perhaps you became acquainted with this theory after a late-night doomscroll dragged you to such a corner for a look. 

With just a little scrutiny it becomes clear the underpinnings of this thinking are varied, even as it remains unclear to which degree subscribers regard this death as literal or symbolic.  Ultimately, resolving these is somewhat immaterial. However seldom a buy-in, any promotion of this particular existential chatter ought to leave the rest of us feeling uneasy.  Chunks of humanity are becoming unmoored from the most basic principle of cooperative function: we are alive, all of us, all together, and there is meaning to this.  

Though it is not uncommon to feel things have been “off” for some time now.  No need to dredge the comment section of a Facebook post or that of a backwater Reddit thread to verify this claim. Some rooting around one’s network (as in the IRL version) reveals most—the neighborhood kook, the checkout guy at the grocery store, your mom—would agree.  There is a deep thirst for “normalcy” that purportedly no longer exists and might never again, if we are to trust “normalcy” ever existed in the first place.  Even so, perception is reality.  

Despite instinct to do so, pinning this sense on any particular event or year is a gross oversimplification.  The seismic activities of 2020 were not the isolated beginnings of anything, rather moments (albeit dizzyingly conspicuous ones) in an accelerating fissure of plates. How wide and far back this splitting extends is difficult to say.  Perhaps it’s turtles all the way down, back to when we banged rocks together and hunted with raw oaken clubs, and to think otherwise is the hubris of those positioned at the unfurling tip of history. Be that as it may, the opaqueness of a point of origin should not discourage us from attempting to make some sense of it all.

This search discloses a sticky wicket. Children of the digital age—or whatever we should call these years and those of us growing up alongside them—are conditioned to believe the answers to these questions and all others can be unearthed online. At the very least, we are conditioned to wring the Internet rag first and foremost, even as most of us sense the Internet and its sundry media onslaught were a significant, if not the primary, source of malaise spawning from 2020 (and beyond). To take this crux a notch deeper, we’re hooked, expecting remedy from the very same clickbaity, tribal, ad-festooned, AI-drivelling matrix that has us sick, no better than hoping to kick heroin at a rehab that distributes clean needles to patients with a hankering for one. 

Given the undeniable attractiveness of the proposition—one only need to reach into a pant pocket to cure all boredom; to quench any thirst of curiosity; to have any desire of the material world delivered to a doorstep within hours; to have an artificial mind take on the burden of thinking for you, writing for you, talking to you, and even loving you—it is unsurprising we became so glazed over by the convenience that no one bothered to notice the bad juju wafting in with it.  Then again, convenience is a top American virtue; it has been for some time now.  We were amply primed to snap up the digital equivalent to a Costco: all solutions to eons of human need and worry bundled into a one-stop package.  

In this haste for state-of-the-art convenience, we handed over the tiller to a pack of scorned incels rebranded as “tech bros,” what with their compounding material successes and conspicuous interests in jiu jitsu and spear throwing.  With just a dash of cynicism, one views these men not as luminaries but as camouflaged misanthropes who, growing up, extracted so little value from the whimsies of a tangible world as to be more than willing to throw babies out with the bathwater. With this mindset they’ve approached the “problem” as if equipped to do so with a gigantic Etch-a-Sketch: shake up everything when it no longer pleases the beholder, erasing all traces of what was.  (These days, slick algorithms make up the spearhead of this overhaul, having snatched primacy from the very smartphone vessels that smuggled them into our homes beginning around 2012.)

What remains, if nothing else, is irony. The deluge of “content” these algorithms deliver drives our minds not to a more enlightened place but into a more primitive one.  When genuine, productive tidbits are sandwiched as a matter of design between unyielding dollops of rage, fear, apathy, and condescension, the brain becomes possessed by its reptilian sector.  Fight or flight and the lesser-mentioned freeze from the safety of a couch cushion.  This can’t be healthy.  That there is any surprise the hallmarks of an advanced humanity—which include reading-for-pleasure as a pastime of the masses—are deemed less worthy to survive the hologram melee is a wonder.  Some estimates show a forty percent drop in reading for pleasure rates across the last two decades; in 2023, just half of Americans read a single book.  

So if it appears to you intolerance is becoming chronic, you would be right.  Sitting down for a proper read promotes empathy; empathy is a conduit to developing perspective, which can yield nuance; nuance paves the way for compromise.  Is today’s ideological landscape not a textbook chicken-or-the-egg scenario?  Is a widening gap in core principles (AKA, the so-called politics of identity) the result of a decreasing prevalence of nuanced individuals?  Or is plummeting nuance the natural result of unending polemic thought leaders, politicos, spokespeople, anarchists, lobbyists, influencers, and consumer goods salespeople exploiting the very digital comms architecture that induced a snowballing departure from the base compounds of empathy in the first place?  

We believe to reclaim some “normalcy,” to convince people we have yet to kick the bucket and are not yet living in hell, is to look back to the very best rituals of life before it was hijacked by screens. Like reading words printed in ink on paper.  A simple antidote. Not the full fix, but a start.