Laughter In Dark Times

Along these lines, one recalls, too, Arendt’s warning in the prologue to The Human Condition: “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it w

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In Chalmers’s vision, we would, as Arendt feared, be trapped in a situation wherein we would encounter nothing but ourselves and those things some of us have made. And it would be altogether likely that we would do so while swaths of our common world increasingly became inhospitable to human life. If so, the burden will fall, as it always does, on ... See more

#1: ON SURREALISM

Why does lunacy and irreverence feel so resonant right now? One of the principles of surrealism is an expression of the absurd in order to question power and I’ve similarly noticed Gen Z quietly raging against the madness of the world with content that is surreal, weird and oft-uncomfortable.

“The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern,’” Rosa writes, “is the idea, the hope and the desire, that we can make the modern world controllable.” “Yet,” he quickly adds, “it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, ... See more

If the times we live in could be defined by a single feeling, it might be a sense of disorientation. Trying to make sense of reality right now is like being lost in the woods.

Gallows humor is also a kind of hope. If we can still laugh, we can still hope. Not with a “things are going to be OK” kind of hope. But with a no-matter-how-terrible-things-are-they’re-somehow-still-OK kind of hope. That kind of hope requires a deep laugh, not a cheap laugh. The cheap, dismissive, don’t-go-there-just-keep-it-lite laughs are actual

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