Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Reasonbyparable's avatar

You have so perfectly and elegantly articulated this Gen Zers feelings of ennui. With the whole created world at my fingertips (accessing a massive democratized pool of art), I find so little. It seems as if people are so tired of the deafening “black and white” of political/online discourse that cultural output has just become mere beige sludge to pacify us and distract us. I want to believe!!! Love your work!!!!

Expand full comment
Tina's avatar

I loved this article! I really appreciate that it breaks down why I hate so much modern fiction. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with moral values and a belief system of some kind. So often, those are the things that do give meaning to our lives. And people in the world move through the world with cause and effect.

It feels like these days the goal is to excuse anything anyone has ever done by removing the blame from them and placing it on some other abstract, faceless being or concept. Something that can have -ist or -ism at the back, thereby removing the human from human behavior. Bring back villains. Even if they’re sympathetic villains they can still be villains. They can still be wrong. They can still be evil. Killmonger was a sympathetic-ish villain. We understood his motivation and his thought process. Yet at no time was his desire for mass genocide made out to be right or ok. He was still a villain. In seeking to break down the complexity of people to a minute level, all they’ve really done is remove the complexity altogether. Because sometimes people do evil, awful things just because they want to. Full stop.

Grey morality has come to mean disappearance of morality, and since life imitates art imitates life, it’s having a deleterious effect of everyone and everything. It’s removed our humanity and made us out to be no better than animals, who move based on instinct and feeling. It’s removed the concept of will or agency, while claiming to return both. “Nothing means anything and we’re all just out here passively surviving and being buffeted around by external, invisible forces.” I can’t think of a worse way to live, and I’ve gotten pretty sick and tired of reading about it/watching it.

Expand full comment
42 more comments...

No posts