In an era where many people outsource experience to virtual purveyors, it’s easy to lose touch with the value of something real.
This is the second of a two-part essay. Click here to check out Part I.
Considering how hard ordinary life has become for so many people, it’s probably no coincidence that much of our daily entertainment diet has adopted a vocabulary about survival. Sometimes we’re checking out how a group of vacationers on a elite, sun drenched island are going to survive an inevitable bloodbath. Sometimes we’re just chillin’ with a team of government operatives rationalizing dirty deeds while struggling to figure out why their home life is so fraught. In other words, hard days have become good times.
We still have the occasional rom-com, and pop music still crafts its confections, but by and large we soothe ourselves with existential fictions that remind us our own lives could be worse. Those rough-road fictions also enable us to ask what we would do in similar situations. Would we be so level-headed? So resourceful? So brave?
Existentialism, of a sort, is back. Audiences are still Waiting for Godot on Broadway, and hit novels (if anything can be called that these days) ask us to confront why we work so hard for lost causes?
Following World War II it seemed like the only natural response for creative classes was either lighthearted optimism or middlebrow dramas about how to fit into the world. Where the first was a natural place for war-weary masses to kick up their feet, the second was a natural place for many of the same masses to wonder how the world could have survived such darkness, and what that might imply if we couldn’t count of a source of light.
In the mid-20th century, novelist Saul Bellow sank fecund roots into this soil, pursuing elusive meaning with a probing attention on the details of life. The painter Mark Rothko turned away from traditional, representational themes in favor of shape and color as if to declare that the rational world was not a reliable path toward substantive truth. The composer Steve Reich asked us to reconsider the whole idea of time and place through the ephemeral intangibility of structured sound.
Gradually, everything began to change. Then suddenly it seemed like it changed all at once. A surging economy on the heels of grinding sacrifice created complex tensions. Creative output skewed dramatically, with (for its time) daring new emotional expressions of daily joys and travails and equally daring explorations of ethics and morality and even reality itself. These trends simultaneously propelled fantastical, probably unrealistic alternatives to all too common malignancies, as well as new and profound considerations of the abyss. In fact, the very idea of existentialism as an acceptable subject for mainstream media took hold in a way that largely shaped our modern view of the world. Aesthetics, values, politics, intimate relationships: the existential explorations of mid-century artists made possible all of the modern and post-modern expressions that sizzle and sputter endlessly today.
Now it seems we’re all fighting everything and everyone all the time. Just getting by is a familiar condition for so many. Art always reflects what’s happening in culture. Right now we live in a violent one, and we’re surrounded by violent media reminding us of that reality on a daily basis. We live in a culture surrounded by constant adversarial considerations, and the storytelling of our days reflects this, both in fiction and in our daily transactions. Modern culture can’t figure out how to cultivate close relationships beyond the artificiality of curated projections as we endlessly scroll through social media feeds. The stories we consume these days are literally written in real-time by a million monkeys. Those monkeys, of course, are us.
The irony here is that while much of the creative world has seemingly abandoned existential themes as I mentioned in Part I last month, the aggregated pursuit of contemporary work and how people experience it is fundamentally existential. Existentialism is back because we seem locked in an endless pursuit of evidence to convince ourselves that we exist at all. We scroll to find something we will never find. We click, swipe, and share because those processes are easier than more substantive engagements with the real world. Fragile existence has even outsourced intelligence itself to artificial sources. We are all dumber as a result.
Most people are not sophisticated consumers of stories. Research also shows that a shocking number of people can’t watch a movie or TV show without a second screen in their hand. Accelerating fragmentation of our attention describes an existential void. Even well-crafted narratives, songs, or trending ideas in culture cannot compete with a relentless pull that over here on some other screen a person might find what they’re looking for. This, too, is ironic: when a person turns to that second screen, he or she enters a logic loop and the cycle starts again immediately. We devalue the details of what’s in front of us in favor of looking for some other quick-hit narrative shorthand. A signifier seems to be enough. Guy with a gun? It’s an action story. Buff bods at the nightclub? Sexy time. Toddlers and puppies? Oh, that’s cute. Once slapped with a blunt signifier, we’re jackrabbiting to something else, looking for an eternally elusive way to escape actual engagement. We exist without a tether to the ground.
When stories become little more than endless moments of “check this out!”, created without much refinement and consumed without much focus, they cease to have much value. This repetitive process commodifies us. Or, more accurately, this is a process where we commodify ourselves. Click, upload, share, move on: the process of cultural fermentation has skipped a step in favor of audience enabled carbonation. We fizz ferociously, but we don’t seem to amount to much, with endless content evaporating the moment we swipe our finger.
That leads me back to the matter of existentialism. Culture critics far more astute than I regard Bergman’s Seventh Seal as one of the modern ur-works of the genre. I’m not immune to the inevitable eye-roll here; for good reason there’s been plenty of satire and comedy based on what was intended to be a serious film. But in many ways, the fact that such seriousness has lapsed into little more than a visual punch line precisely amplifies the point. We do not live in introspective times. We do not easily commit to complex thoughts. In the movie, a character embodying the idea of Death confronts a knight returning from the Crusades. In the face of his own demise, the knight resolves to do one redeemable thing before he dies as a way to give his own life meaning. Faced with a similar choice —and in a sense, we all confront this choice— one has to wonder if many people might stop to give serious thought to the question. Do “good”? Do “bad”? Seems like the answer for many now is just “you do you”.
For creative classes, this decision should bear substantial weight. It certainly doesn’t mean we need to make dour theological movies to say something meaningful. I’m all for having a good time! But it does mean that if we’re going to live a life with any meaning at all, we must create it ourselves. We are charged with answering the question that faces the knight: what are we going to do? For me, I believe the answer must be something more substantial than superficial engagements, both on the creation side and the consumption side of the ledger.
Existentialism speaks to our current cultural moment. Through our collective actions of choosing only the most superficial engagements with the world, we are making a tacit decision that deeper, more profound meaning is not especially relevant. An interconnected culture that doesn’t really care about much if it requires any sort of effort or commitment does not have much of a future. In our endless search for something to prove we exist, we may have discovered that existence can only be proved through a willingness to make meaning rather than passively bump into it.
That’s why I generally prefer to spend my time with people who create rather than simply consume. I don’t care if it’s art, or scientific research, or vegetables in a garden: when I listen to someone who cares about his or her active engagement with the world, the world is suddenly made more real. I never get that feeling thumbing through endless images on my phone.