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I added an update to this at Flick Filosopher:

The brilliant thinker Umair Haque, in his latest essay at Eudaimonia & Co, “Life Feels Terrible Right About Now — And It’s OK to Admit It,” [https://eand.co/life-feels-terrible-right-about-now-and-its-ok-to-admit-it-1c9858204c29] has this to say that feels relevant (emphasis mine):

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Maximizing misery. It seems to be what our society exists for at this point. Hey, can I exploit you, trick you, con you, get you in some way? Can I take your money? Can I take your self-esteem, your sense of meaning, your pride, can I crush your spirit, and replace it with heart-stopping dread and a feeling of being really, really small?

Demoralized.

That’s the feeling of a downwardly mobile society, and you can literally feel it everywhere. From the way that Zoomers seem to have gone numb, as a kind of defense mechanism. To the apathy and resignation that meets politics. ***To the way culture is one giant escapism now, instead of a search for meaning.*** You can see it in the incredibly grim economic statistics, which say crazy, crazy things like “billionaires got so much richer during the pandemic they could’ve ended world hunger several times over — but everyone else is getting poorer, at light speed.”

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This feels like a good explanation of why nostalgia seems to be so rampant now. Everything is awful, and doesn’t seem likely to get better, so looking forward won’t make us feel good. So all that’s left is looking back (and, by extension, looking back with rose-colored glasses).

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