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 are familiar with the theory, having been dragged to such a corner by a midnight doomscroll.

It takes little scrutiny to notice the underpinnings of this thinking are varied, even as it remains unclear to what degree subscribers regard this death as literal or symbolic. For now, resolving these questions is somewhat immaterial—any adherence to viral Internet death cultism ought to leave the rest of us feeling apprehensive. In broad, pixelated daylight, chunks of humanity are becoming unmoored from the most basic tenets of cooperative stability: 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. A bit of rooting around one’s network (the IRL version) reveals most—the neighborhood kook, the checkout guy at Albertsons, 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 the impulse 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 far back this splitting goes is difficult to say, but the opaqueness should not discourage us from attempting to make some sense of it all.

Alas, it’s this probing that exposes the underlying irony we’re up against. 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 have come to recognize that its unfiltered multimedia onslaught gave way to a malaise clamped onto us like a pit bull. And the crux goes deeper still, as we’ve become hooked to these patterns of degradation, for one reason or another expecting salvation to emerge from the very same clickbaity, tribal, ad-festooned, AI-drivelling matrix that has us sick.

Given the undeniable seduction of the premise—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 convenience that no one noticed the bad juju wafting in with it.

Then again, convenience is a top American virtue. It has been for some time now. We were primed to snap up the digital equivalent to a Costco. All answers to human want and worry packaged into a one-stop shop. That there is any surprise the hallmarks of a necessarily inquisitive society—which include reading-for-pleasure as a pastime of the masses—are crumbling 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 might be right. Sitting down for a proper read promotes empathy—a conduit to perspective, nuance, and, ultimately, the capacity 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—fallout from the decreasing prevalence of nuance? Or is plummeting nuance the unavoidable consequence of relentless polemic exploiting the very digital comms architecture that first lured us from empathy’s foundational disciplines?  

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 they were hijacked by screens and algorithms. Like reading words printed in ink on paper. A simple antidote. Not the full fix, but a start.