It feels like we’re drowning in nostalgia. Like we’re stuck in a high chair in a moldy corner of a greasy diner with blinding LEDs raining down on us. A hellscape of sensory overload. You’ve outgrown the high chair, but your parents keep you away from the adults’ table and won’t stop reading you the menu. And yet, you kind of like it. This is essentially our modern culture industry at work.

Hollywood force-feeds you endless sequels and reboots to flood you with nostalgia, alongside a steady drip of dopamine hits — a “Cocomelonization” of media, if you will. “Kidults” is now a leading toy-buying demographic, and Lego and Pokémon are continuously geared towards full-ass adults. And to be frank, I can’t really tell if the increasingly negative music landscape is a cause or effect of all of this.

Basically, everything tries to tell you that aging is bad and death is scary — that leaving Neverland is a nightmare. It’s “party girls don’t get hurt” till you die!

This relentless drumbeat of anti-aging feels is a large part of what writer Derek Thompson calls the “cult of the enhanced self,” where optimization is the new virtue and fitness is a marker of status. Thompson explains how some of the people who are the best at capturing and holding our attention, like Bryan Johnson, do not so much worry about living well, but just not dying. Ironically, this obsession with death seems to suck so much life out of us.

How are you supposed to look forward in your life when you’re constantly bombarding yourself with nostalgia and playing the optimization game to freeze your biological clock against the tick of your chronological one?

We all know housing is expensive in the U.S., but this also goes for most of the Anglosphere (UK, Australia, Canada). In fact, housing shortages are so bad and have such gnarly, downstream effects on our lives that the people at Works in Progress coined this notion as the "Housing Theory of Everything". This is the idea that housing shortages are the root cause of many of the Western world's worst crises — inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.

While these structural forces are at work, our social environment is also becoming less.. alive, in odd ways. Adam Mastroianni went viral last year for describing how our age is undergoing a "decline of deviance", in which teens, compared to prior generations, are doing less of all sorts of ‘vices’: drinking, smoking, fighting, and sex. He theorizes that as we’re able to live longer and healthier lives, we feel like there’s more at stake, so we want to increasingly play it safe. In our efforts to avoid risk, we escape to adolescent-like behavior.

What seems to make this worse is that we have a record number of under-35s living with parents (roughly 1 in 3) in the U.S. This is what I would dub with the technical term “no bueno.”

So we have involuntary, structural forces (housing shortages = you can’t afford to leave your parents and move on) tangling up with cultural shifts (optimize your health, looksmaxx to the moon, avoid risk) that make us feel like major milestones in life (such as marriage and giving birth) are more like burdens than opportunities.

Is that what Drake meant when he said “more life”???

I feel like our language is regressing on top of this. Internet-speak keeps flattening the lexicon back to elementary speech. Sure, you’re in a relationship and want to do your little baby-talk thing — that’s your business! But it’s a creeping sensation of claustrophobia to feel the walls of rudimentary internet language (“smol”; “delulu”; “rizz”) closing in around you. Slap those cuffs on me, too, because I’m also guilty.

In many ways, our politics are running their own version of this by rewarding infantile “vice-signalling”.

What a strange paradox we have here: we live under a gerontocracy whose members refuse to age offstage, even as the culture around them worships the aesthetics of youth. It’s so rough out there that Ezra Klein has floated the possibility that we may undergo a resurgence of virtue as a counter reaction to today’s trends.

Bob Dylan, now 85, put the alternative more beautifully than anyone. Asked what's best about being 80, he said you finally "outlive the clocks that have been chasing you." There's a freedom, he said, in letting go of the lie that anything was ever under your control. You stop chasing the parade, you become a kind of deposed king, harder to program, no longer rushing to become anything at all.

The strangest thing about all of this, to me, is that in the wake of our vain pursuits of optimization, we are increasingly forgoing the surest form of immortality: having kids.

Instead, we manufacture immortality through the body, nostalgia, and social signals, as our traditional frameworks for handling death, like religion, lineage, community, gradually recede from the foreground of our lives.

“The rebirth you’re looking for is in the death you’re avoiding.”

We keep forgetting that Peter Pan is a tragedy. He can't grow up, and because nothing in Neverland ever ends, nothing in Neverland ever means anything.

Musician Jason Isbell wrote (emphasis my own) “If we were vampires and death was a joke. We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke. Laugh at all the lovers and their plans. I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand. Maybe time running out is a gift.”

It may actually benefit us to be grounded in our mortality; after all, it’s the envy of the gods. “They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again."

The product designer Steyn Viljoen argues that this was the real flaw in King Louis XIV’s construction of Versailles — the lack of feeling and soul:

“Beautifully designed products without soul, are just that: representational garden art. In all of our history, we’ve never had more money to design beautiful, functional and usable products. The bar is higher than ever, yet, they’ve never been more boring and devoid of soul. What’s missing is a deeper sense of beauty and wholeness, an intentionality to make people feel something specific. We need to ask ourselves: What is it that we want people to feel when they use our products? Whatever that is, intentional or not, the depth of that emotion is going to grow and blossom from what we, the builders, feel first. King Louis felt a deep sense of pride, envy and a hunger for dominance and that’s what he imprinted on Versailles. Yes, when people visit Versailles, they are in awe of its scale and the engineering that powered the fountains, but rarely would anyone say they feel whole or alive.”

In the science-fiction series Dune, on the desert planet of Arrakis, when you die, your water belongs to the tribe. Your body is literally drained so your people can live on. Putting aside the morbid element, this sort of life-death symbiosis really contrasts with what we’re seeing today: people with a hole shaped like meaning and connection filling it with everything except meaning and connection.

Even the Romans had some grasp of this. They were adamant about each new generation learning about their forefathers’ accomplishments going, often going as far back as ten generations. And I don’t even know my great-grandfather’s name!

There's a famous Latin epitaph that goes: viator, quod tu es, ego fui; quod nunc sum, et tu eris. Meaning: Traveller, what you are, I was; what I am now, you too will be. A beautiful, inevitable sequence.

The point is to accommodate death in your life so that you live well among others, like your loved ones, not to optimize alone in monk mode. As they say, you don't climb Everest for the oxygen, you climb it for the view.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
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