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Entering the who-cares era
Unintentionally, I ended up being out of the country when both the election and inauguration happened. On election night, I was in Seoul at my parents’ during my annual visit. I was working remotely in our dining room when, as lunchtime approached, it became apparent that Trump was headed for re-election and unlike in 2020, there wouldn’t be a treasure trove of mail-in ballots to save the Democrats.
And just this past weekend, I was in Toronto to visit friends during my triennial border crossing to renew my work visa. I was waiting in CBP’s secondary inspection room when I caught a glimpse of the inauguration luncheon, where Amy Klobuchar made welcoming remarks and cracked some jokes about serving Idaho potatoes or something.
Given how oddly disconnected I, like so many others, have felt towards an event that was once billed as the-end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it back in 2016, my physical removal felt fitting. When I arrived in Toronto on Friday night, I was in line for a late-night shawarma when from the TV, I heard that the inauguration would be the coldest in forty years. It reminded me of the first and only inauguration I attended, back in 2009, when my friends and I went out to the National Mall before sunrise to stake out a spot to see Obama get sworn in. That was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. When Obama finally spoke at around noon, I was cursing him out: ‘Who does this motherfucker think he is?!’ Still, I was so happy to have been there, numbed extremities and all.
In a recent review of Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square, Chloe Pingeon describes the play as a period piece and recalls seeing “some notes online today about how young people call everything ‘slop’ because they're in a panic that they’ve missed the last echelons of cool.”1 I was off in my own little world during that particular period, but as the years have gone by, I’ve realized I do have some nostalgia for that era, roughly late 2019 to 2021. For instance, of all my time-specific playlists, I listen to ones from back then the most.2 It’s not pure longing for the past, because I don’t listen as much to the ones from the years before then. My brother Ted once told me that he also deeply misses that time.
I’ve often thought about why I have such vivid memories of that phase of my life. At first glance, it seems to have been a downer of a time. Obviously, COVID was a catastrophe on all levels. Politically, Biden hardly promised anything new or inspiring. Personally, I was either unemployed or barely employed, and living in an apartment more befitting someone who was ten years younger than I was.
Still, there was the feeling that things could be different, at least compared to now. COVID, for all the horrors it inflicted, did bring many people together against a common challenge and when life began to finally resume normally, there was a sense that we’d all overcome something historic. In terms of politics and culture, this was also around the time when the emotional overdrive of Trump resistance culture was starting to sputter out, so you could be mischievous, maybe even a little Trumpy, after years of rigid liberal watchdogging. Yet Trump was also seemingly spent as a political force, so all that playing at subversion could be done within the safety of the return of normalcy.
My friend April recently sent me a snippet from The Financial Times in which a “top banker” said it was a “new dawn” because he could say “retard” and “pussy” without retribution.3 When the bankers in their Gucci loafers are doing it, you know it’s over.
Aesthetic or ideological conservatism could’ve once passed for counter-culturalism during an era when some white girls could get excommunicated for selling mahjong. But now, Elon Musk just did a sieg heil on national TV and everybody is powerless to do anything about it. The right-wingers have won everything, at least for the time being. This should be a time of utter triumphalism for the MAGAs, the conservatives, the anti-wokes, whatever you want to call them. But I get the sense that they’re actually deeply confused and even terrified as they’d prefer to be low-stakes transgressors by being eternally aggrieved at some omnipotent blue hair or girlboss wokescold who stopped being relevant after around 2019.
Once you’ve owned everyone you’ve ever wanted to epically own, what’s next? How many natural disasters can you blame on DEI before you start sounding like someone who says tornadoes are God’s punishment for masturbation? The H1B infighting is a preview of what’s to come. The worst thing for Trump supporters it that there is no next Trump, and there never will be. We’ve seen his pathetic imitators; they just don’t have it.
And what about the other side? I highly recommend listening to this Champagne Sharks episode4 on how Democrats and Republicans just embody different types of scams; the former operates an exclusive and byzantine scam, while the latter runs an inclusive and populist one. The episode presents an incisive and devastating autopsy of how social progressives squandered the biggest gifts to their cause, like Trump 2016 and George Floyd, to enrich themselves and/or pursue their own narrow and often petty agendas. And in electoral politics, Democrats have thoroughly disqualified themselves via Biden dementia denialism, not to mention offering little alternative on Israel-Palestine from Republicans and quickly forgetting about the whole Trump=Hitler thing once he won the election.
Maybe leftism can re-emerge from the boot of liberalism? But Bernie is (even more) ancient now and there is no clear successor. I still listen to Chapo Trap House out of habit and loyalty, but often, it’s a sad affair, reminding me of that wonderful-if-silly time when we thought that the power of podcasts and social media could bring about real political change. I’ve seen some pieces in which the writers pin their hopes on AOC. I suspect by the time she’s allowed to run, AOC will essentially just be a regular Democrat, but with Millennialist self-care ideals baked into her platform.
So we’re left with liberals who can’t be trusted, wokes who’ve been discredited, leftists who’ve been decapitated, and MAGAs whose ideology of perpetual grievance is undercut when given power. With nowhere to turn to, what’s next? Find a common enemy to rally against? China’s a prime candidate. But look at this Red Note thing. People have become so disillusioned with America that they’re enchanted by China, the least lovable nation in the gookosphere that America’s been warring with (either militarily or economically) for more than a century. So now, both Red Note and TikTok will be the unAmerican apps.
The messaging about social media is so confusing. On one hand, it’s the domain of the embarrassingly anti-intellectual, attention-hungry, vain, stupid, trollish… Yet on the other hand, social media can also supposedly propel people to the presidency and shape an entire generation’s opinion on geopolitical issues. So what does it mean to advocate for people to go off social media? To pursue enlightenment or to abdicate from de facto public life? The uncomfortable truth is that these days, you can’t have one without the other.
I just read an intriguing analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence by BookNotes, where she laments relating too much to Newland Archer and his non-committal rebellion against social convention.5 Many of us have a deep fear that despite all our talk about living big and exciting lives, we’ll one day look back at all the choices we’ve made and see that at almost every single fork in the road, we chose the option to smother such a life. Not because we didn’t know what we were doing, but rather, the exact opposite.
That’s another reason I recall that late 2019-2021 period with such fondness, because it was one of the times I got closest to something of an unconventional life. In early 2020, I was fired from my job. My honour-roll self, fired twice in a span of three-and-a-half years. I was actually sort of starting to wear it like a badge of pride, though the work visa troubles were a headache. I remember having to immediately buy a plane ticket to Montreal to re-enter the US on a tourist visa, unsure if I’d be allowed back in because at my previous job, an incompetent immigration attorney had messed up my work visa application. Not being able to return to the US would be a major headache, especially since I probably then couldn’t keep lying to my parents that I was still working at the place I’d gotten fired from back in 2018.
But I was able to return and spent most of the lockdown living off my savings, and I wrote more than I’d ever done before. Very few have seen those writings, but those years in retrospect were a necessary break from public writing as my cultural tastes and outlook evolved. And unlike the first time I was fired, I wasn’t horrified by the idea of having to leave the country. I had six months on the tourist visa. If I didn’t find a job and had to make a whole new life, so be it.
I don’t miss seeing my bank account dwindle and I like the peace of mind that my job brings now. But I do miss rolling out of bed with nothing much else to do but read and write. By late summer, with my tourist visa running out, I had to find employment again and did so (albeit part-time work). Problem was that there were still heavy restrictions on US-Canada flights, so I couldn’t get a work visa. Then I learned that they were giving out work visas at land border crossings. Problem was that I couldn’t drive.
But one day, I was looking at an online map of Buffalo and saw that the bridge to Canada was really close to the city! I could just fly there, take a cab to the Peace Bridge, and just cross by foot. It was a roundabout plan and as I walked along that empty bridge, I had this dream-like sensation that I would helplessly lose balance and fall off into the water. When I re-entered into the US, I ran and spun and ran on the sidewalk like Frances Halladay, with David Bowie’s Modern Love playing in my head.
In 2022, I got the (full-time) job I have now, so I finally came clean to my parents. They laughed at me, saying they’d kind of known all along.
From Dimes Square to Hangover Square, I read Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel this past summer as I wanted to read a novel set in London to match my travels there. Set during the leadup to World War II, the protagonist, George Harvey Bone, is an alcoholic with an undiagnosed mental illness. He drifts by in London, forever hopelessly chasing Netta Longdon, an aspiring actress who has a greater talent for using people than as a thespian. All she does is use him for money (what little he has), to alleviate her boredom, and later on, for his random connection to a big-time theatre producer.
‘I know I’m a fool. I know you don’t care a damn about me. But if you agree to come out with me, can’t you even be civil? You just treat me like dirt—as though I’d done something wrong. I haven’t done you any harm, Netta. The only harm I’ve done is being in love with you…’ His voice began to break, and tears came into his eyes as he went on… ‘What’s wrong with that? You’re civil to other people. Why can’t you be civil to me? Oh, Netta, do be kind to me. I can’t go on unless you’re kind to me.’
He is portrayed not as an indefatigable romantic, but as shallow and pitiful for being so obsessed with the beautiful Netta who has nothing else going for her:
Netta Longdon thought of everything in a curiously dull, brutish way, and for the most part acted upon instinct. She was completely, indeed sinisterly, devoid fo all those qualities which her face and body externally proclaimed her to have—pensiveness, grace, warmth, agility, beauty.
I haven’t read enough 20th century English novels to say for certain, but the English do seem to have a fixation on that interwar period, with Brideshead Revisited and The Remains of the Day as two other prime examples. If so, is it because it was the period right before a cataclysmic event that led to its decline and we have a natural tendency to forever replay and analyze the moments of our failures, much like how an athlete will forever be haunted by a missed penalty, a dropped baton, a botched landing? If so, is that why I and others are fixated on particular time periods as well?
Dimes Square’s coterie of social climbers, poser artists, and gossips wonder if they’re living through the “dumbest time in human history.” Hangover Square’s similarly sordid characters (by the end, they’re much worse) must be thinking the same, though “darkest time” would be a more appropriate description. If we look back at now as merely the dumbest time, we’ll have gotten off pretty lucky.
Trump’s meme coin is the absolute most perfect symbol of this new era, isn’t it? In Toronto, my friend Filip told me about an observation he and other co-workers had made regarding the unreliability of young employees who’d been hired after COVID. Some of these employees would not show up on their first day, quit on a whim, or go MIA after collecting their first paycheck. I also recently read a Reddit thread in which a guy bemoaned how his younger brother viewed going to school and getting a well-paying job as a sucker’s game, instead preferring to sink all his efforts into get-rich-quick schemes. Sometimes, I talk to Gen Z friends who tell me about wanting to find meaningful careers and I’m suddenly time-warped back to 2005. I thought Gen Z were all giver-uppers and hustlers.
Since I’m an idiot who bet on a Kamala victory, maybe nobody should listen to any predictions of mine for a while. But let me put some skin in the game again, just to add some stakes to this piece (for all I know, all my thoughts laid forth here will be proven to be laughably wrong soon, but at the very least, I’ll have a time capsule of how I was feeling at this moment). I’m going to guess that with few greater causes that people feel like they can meaningfully devote themselves to, everybody will turn more inward. Not so coincidentally, expressions of human emotions and memories will presumably be one of the later holdouts against the creep of AI, so we will all double down on hyper-focusing on the self as a virtue.
I’m feeling this pull as well. In a few months, I’ll have been on Substack for two years. Time has flown by. I stand by everything I’ve written here, but when I look back at some of my earlier cultural commentary pieces, I do wonder if I’ve exhausted the topic for now. Why not try something a little new, at least from time to time? I’m an emotionally reticent person, both in real life and in my writing. I don’t like sharing a lot of my personal experiences, mainly out of a fear that they’re repulsive or worthless. But at this point, who cares? As our semi-new President says: Have fun!
Top 10, in no particular order, from those playlists: Los Angeles by The Midnight, September Drive by Plastic Girl In Closet, What You Want by My Bloody Valentine, Sugar by Mass of the Fermenting Dregs, A Real Hero by College & Electric Youth, Ribs by Lorde, Save Your Tears by The Weeknd, Bedside by Yuragi, Yes I’m Changing by Tame Impala, It’s Gonna Be Okay, Baby by MUNA
Is corporate American going MAGA? | The Financial Times
"I suspect by the time she’s allowed to run, AOC will essentially just be a regular Democrat, but with Millennialist self-care ideals baked into her platform."
Is this not already true?
Very interesting piece - I've been noticing much of what you discussed at play in real life as well; a kind of boredom and malaise from the right and/or dirtbag left as much of the provocation and transgression of the covid years becomes explicitly state sanctioned. Counter culture arguably kind of did become conservative in that era - there wasn't really a good leftist alternative of "transgression" and there still isn't, but now the right isn't heterodox either. Your prediction of increasing interiority seems likely to me, although maybe a bit depressing, if people are forced into interiority because there are no viable / actionable alternatives. Everything is slop, maybe?