The World Is Not Ending

During the pandemic, it kind of felt like the world was ending. And then most of us came out fine: some with new careers and hobbies and businesses, some having lost, but most just fine. I can't help but think that despite the normalcy of the lives we have returned to, maybe the world as we knew it did end because the way I've been feeling since hasn't felt the same.

Burned out and numb. Buoyant and alive. Overwhelmed and not enough. How about all of the above?

Everything is beautiful, everything is terrible

Well, here’s the incident that seemingly incited it all. One creator posted a clip of herself dressed as Marie Antoinette hosting a pre-Met event, mouthing the words to an audio clip from the 2006 Sofia Coppola film of Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette saying “Let them eat cake”. (The creator later said in an apology video that she chose the audio because it was trending, and didn’t think too deeply about its context. She also noted earnestly that she wasn’t actually invited to the Met, that she was not “like them” whilst living in a New York City apartment with rent at 17k a month.)

The saying is well attributed as Marie Antoinette’s response to being told that the French people were starving and had not even bread to eat, demonstrating how out of touch she was about the world around her while she lived in excess and comfort. The people’s response? They stormed the castle, convicted her of treason, and hung her at the guillotine. Tale as old as the French Revolution.

And the soundbite lives on, over 200 years later.

Thing is, Marie Antoinette probably never even said it—just like a host of other famous “they said”s throughout history. Some historians attribute the quote to an earlier Austrian princess also called Marie. Others think she never said it at all as it would be highly uncharacteristic for someone who accounts say was actually polite, charitable, and empathic. (Not that you can’t also be out of touch.)

Fact: The first documented appearance of the quote comes up in a book written 24 years before the French Revolution. Sofia Coppola addresses this: in the movie, which I enjoyed so much I even wrote a poem about it, it’s immediately followed by: “That’s such nonsense. I would never say that.”

But you know, people love de-contextualizing things. So here we are, rage-baited by the propaganda machine. (And I get it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what’s true. It matters how we feel.)

So many feelings, and some facts

I’ve been feeling conflicted about all of this, for a few reasons:

1. The irony of people setting montages to the soundtrack of a movie made for entertainment with a very heavy theme of entertainment being used to control people.

2. The irony that so much of how this spread was on TikTok, an app is facing a ban in the U.S. (latest news: Biden signed the bill, TikTok sued), an app that is built for entertainment, and an app that is now at the centre of politically charged discourse around censorship.

3. The fact that the rich and famous are such a central cog of the Met machine because it’s the people that tune in to see them. And now the people are angry.

4. The fact that it’s not just a lavish party, nor even a fundraiser. It’s specifically a fundraiser for fashion. Why does fashion even need a fundraiser? Well, I found this out while doing research for this post: the Costume Institute is the only one of the Met’s curatorial departments that has to fund itself, apparently due to the fact that fashion isn’t taken seriously enough in the museum circuit to garner funding otherwise. And what does the funding do? It preserves historically significant cultural artifacts and supports and enables public access.

5. Tickets are an astounding $75,000 a pop but if the aim is to preserve cultural artifacts and “all of the money from ticket sales goes to the Costume Institute” and the only people who are buying tickets are rich and have plenty more where that came from and they are off-setting costs for everyone else to attend for free, why should they pay less? They could be donating just as much, more, or nothing at all to other causes that have nothing to do with the $75,000 they spent on a Met Gala ticket.

6. I found out a week before that the Met dress code was based on a short story, The Garden of Time, by J. G. Ballard. Having not read it at the time but getting a basic rundown of the plot, it actually didn't occur to me that the story was about class, as was pointed out as ammo in the "see, dystopia!!!" narrative that followed the Met. My first take was that it was thematically about the inevitability of death (the mob) despite our attachment to material pleasures (the flowers). The way things turned out it's kind of poetic.

7. The fact that if it wasn’t all a spectacle, it would be called boring, a sign of another “apocalypse” in the long line of industries waiting to die. Truly, I graduated during a recession and the world has been in a constant state of ending since.

8. Are we all conveniently forgetting the ending of The Hunger Games?

9. The fact that all this effort put into blocking celebrities for what they don’t say continues to demonstrate how much we look to them for things they aren’t really in the business of. And are we really prepared for when our favourite actor has opposing political beliefs, or even simply, uninformed beliefs? What if we only want activism when it fits our activism? Name another job where people willingly volunteer information that might result in a major pay decrease and public backlash.

10. Having read Anna Wintour’s biography by Amy Odell, I bet that Anna knows exactly what she’s doing. If she wanted to focus on the clothes and throw a gala in which there was no parade of celebrities, she would. But she doesn’t because she knows what brings in the eyeballs.

11. The fact that the facts feel moot in light of continuous conflict and genocide.

12. The fact that I feel the most when the terrible and tragic things are fed to me under the guise of entertainment and art rather than news. The fact that as I’m writing this, I realize I used to read the newspaper. Then came the digital revolution. I haven’t picked up a newspaper in probably over a decade. I don’t read news on the internet. I watch it. And I don’t watch the news. I watch the world, condensed and filtered via an algorithm.

Anyway, whatever. People online are mad about rich people. What’s that got to do with me? I swiped away.

Then a few days ago, while on Youtube, this video popped up in my algorithm.

The tortured people’s department

As the proclamation of dystopia continued, set to the tune of Hollywood A-lister Jennifer Lawrence as face of the rebellion Katniss Everdeen, I kept swiping. In between, I’m fed clips of Taylor Swift’s new leg of her sparkling Eras Tour with a brand new set featuring another leg of irony: many of Taylor’s new songs on The Tortured Poets Department are about the difficult relationship she has with her fans and the press. She’s singing and dancing while depressed, calling out wine moms and people named Hannah and Sarah in her lyrics, and crying at the gym then following that by acknowledging a common criticism that she still acts like a teenager. “Everything’s coming out teenage petulance.” Yeah, so what? It’s her angriest album yet. And she performs it with a grin in Roomba-like fashion. (IYKYK.)

Say what you want about Taylor Swift (as everyone is doing nowadays) but this again is another reason why she’s the biggest pop star right now. She is somehow able to crystallize a feeling and turn it into entertainment, a giant swathe of empathy and resurfaced haunts buffed into Richter scale enthusiasm.

And the feeling she’s crystallizing right now is feeling everything at once. Not just generic heartbreak anthems but the specificity of feelings you’ve probably never even talked about with anyone else.

Every other pop star? Great singer, sure. Distinct style, yep. “It” factor, in spades. Point of view, maybe. But no one else is doing it quite like Taylor. No one else inspires that same breadth of feeling, whether we’re talking a 3 hour marathon show (okay, what is with the broad sweeping claims of opinion as fact? “No one wants a 3 hour show”, “No one buys books”) or an almost two-decades long career as a chart-topper. We have been taken to our quill-pen lows and our glitter-gel highs through a catalog of over 200 songs covering every feeling imaginable. My personal favourite is the one where she sings about feeling like a ghost because everyone else has moved on and you’re still right where they left you.

Here she is, making two grown men sing and cry for two very different reasons: one is a Love Story to the self (Richie from The Bear in season 2’s “Forks”), the other because he remembers All Too Well a past lover (“Ken” as a Fall Guy).

And therein lies the apocalypse.

Because despite all the spectacle, or because of it, I’m pretty sure my cognitive function is declining.

My threshold for burning out is so low because of this ongoing, never-ending breadth of feeling zooming around in my peripheral life. I mean, it’s not my life (trying did not get me Eras Tour tickets so instead I’m going to see five middle-aged men in concert in October), but these peripherals have inserted themselves into my life as content. Even something as supposedly leisurely as listening to music is now rife with criticism, commentary, callouts, leaving me feeling caught between pleasure and the panic of not knowing where I truly stand, if I have to stand anywhere at all or if I can just melt in a puddle here on my couch looking at pretty things on my phone.

So I feel burned out and stop answering emails. I took weeks to recover from moving recently even after we were done, because of the cognitive load of falling behind and trying to catch up. I took multiple online tests to see if what I was feeling met any criteria for something that would explain it all. Turns out, nope. It’s just a noisy world out there. I turned off all my notifications, stopped posting to social media—because every action and response invites a continuous stream of more back in. It never ends.

I used to call it noise, as if it was something trying to divert my attention away from the real thing, from life.

But I’ve recently started to feel a shift. For better or for worse, this noise is the new pulse of the world. And totally disconnecting from it is now like disconnecting from reality and avoiding the truth.

There used to be a clearer distinction between real life and online life—and not too long ago, it was very obvious and absolute. I used to have to make the conscious effort to dial into the internet, and then wait—minutes for a single website to load, or for my designated one hour turn in my multiple-sibling household. Well, technology fulfilled my wishes, yay! Now I don’t have to wait. I have the entire world at my literal fingertips.

That can feel jarring, it can be exhausting, we can feel like we are losing ourselves and everything is crumbling into a hyper, memed dystopia. We see the entire spectrum of the world we are living in, even the meta (Meta?) version of it where we see that other people are not seeing—or acknowledging—the world we see.

It’s a mind bender. It’s maddening to the point of rage-inducing. It’s sometimes heartbreaking. But is it really dystopia?

The end?

She developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification.

This is a passage from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I saved it on my camera roll after reading it recently because something about it struck me as very related to this whole idea of the invention of dystopia as a way to deal with trauma and crisis, to give our worlds a sense of narrative and our selves a sense of being.

Dystopia isn’t just bad things happening. It implies a linear concept of time; that there was a better time before and then there was major calamity that changed everything and now we’re living post “the end”. It’s the specific word we are choosing to use right now to describe our perceived sense of the world.

But zoom out just a little and realize: Dystopian things have always happened. I’m pretty sure rich people have always been out of touch. Their out of touch-ness just hasn’t always been on constant display. We haven’t until very recently felt like we were a part of it, that we could do something about it.

In the grand scheme of things, we are for the most part doing better as a collective civilization than we ever have. Fewer people dying from war, more medicine, access to education, gender equality if not in practice then at least by law in more constitutions than ever before. The future is happening now. When people talk about “our” generation having it the worst, what they really mean is “the worst out of the last four-ish generations, discounting every other generation of human that came before”. We might even be closer to utopia than dystopia.

And yet, there is an active genocide happening right now.

And yet, it doesn’t feel like we’re doing all that great.

The world ends when we feel it, not when the facts tell us.

We feel more because more people have access to technology and media, because we have the ability, awareness, and capacity to feel.

If anything, the world isn’t ending because of what’s different about what’s happening now, despite how different things feel. (Have we ever gone 100 years in our entire history without some sort of genocide? It’s terrible, but it’s kind of humanity’s business as usual.)

The dystopia is that we are still the same, despite our assertion that we are better, more advanced, shinier and wiser than people and societies of the past.

The world has always been both a lovely and terrible place full of greatness and tragedy, the poets’ specialty above all.

What we haven’t been is this available, open, and connected: being able to hear from anyone and everyone for the first time and not just the powerful and the intimate.

When have we ever really listened to a 34 year old unmarried, childlessfree woman to the extent that she is literally the most listened to person on the entire planet? When have we ever even heard from someone living on the opposite side of this planet, with no proof of importance and nothing other than a phone? When have we ever been able to donate directly to a family in a war zone? How would we have known?

How dare I “look on the bright side”, “find the silver lining”? Kourtney Kardashian’s “Kim, there’s people that are dying” soundbite plays in my head. See, I’m even using entertainment to process my thoughts and feelings—caught between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all, an endless cycle of despair, joy, rage, uncertainty. Between wanting to do more and feeling like doing nothing. I see irony and hypocrisy everywhere, myself very much included. We can’t even make up our minds about what’s “in”: our most prominent trends are often at total odds with each other. The only trend we can agree on is nostalgia, less trend and more: we just miss how things used to be. And in fact, we have always been nostalgic down to every generation who inevitably thinks of the next, what the heck happened.

But out of nowhere my breath stops, my gut turns, something shatters, another thing blooms.

Feelings are hard—but they’re here to stay and maybe even make us better. Not stronger, faster, bigger; just better.

Feel it or not, this right now could be utopia. Because beware of prisons disguised as paradises, as evidenced by: Fairfield County (Stepford Wives), Victory (Don’t Worry Darling), the Garden of Eden (the Bible), every single totalitarian politician and cult leader who thinks they’re the world’s saviour, and their “promised land”. Utopia might not be perfect and shiny and new. It is probably not singular. The best version humans will allow ourselves to become is one where we are alive and aware and as we wade through the mess of feelings we have the privilege to feel, finding some way to get to a truth that can no longer come from numbing out. I don’t think we can be better than that. Any better, and we become machine.

What do we do? We don’t stop trying. We don’t stop learning. We don’t stop making art. Or, if you’re like me, we finally consider making art for the first time. And amidst it all, I guess we keep doing laundry and taxes.