The Rise of Dissociation Music

Despair, too, because of how accessible escape is becoming in a world that requires more rigorous close looking, every day. And, of course, escapism is a supply-and-demand business. As the world requires more of the people in it, it also offers more opportunities to turn away.

Where we struggle to imagine a future beyond the contemporary shitshow, nihilism leads the retreat inwards; in art as in politics. “What good is a flourishing poetry market,” Watts asked, “If what we read in poetry books renders us more confused, less appreciative of nuance, less able to engage with ideas, more indignant about the things that annoy

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the pandemic has merely accelerated a years-long descent into negation and sensory deprivation, a “desire for nothingness” that embodies the exhaustion of optimism and the embrace of nihilism.