nihilism

They’ll tell you, you need to be kind and forthright and aggressive and meditative and a free spirit and dependable and cautious and not be pushed around and live free or die and be helpful and put your own gas mask on first and be spiritual and religious and empirical and scientific and hate this and vault that and play to your talents and always

I was reading about “learned helplessness," a psychological condition that arises when one is not able to effect a change in one’s environment. It is characterized by “a drop in zest, decreasing clarity, withdrawal from connection, less self-knowledge, and a decrease in sense of self-worth.” To me, this is what it feels like to be on my seventh

Awash in a bleak mediascape, I had simply assumed that optimism had been long exiled to the realm of corny naivete, gone the way of “Live, Laugh, Loving” and #Girlbossing. So it came as a shock when my TikTok feed started filling up with posts about the “Indomitable Human Spirit.”

What does it mean to put one's foot down, though, when the other option is so terrifying? When the system doesn't give a shit whether your foot is down?

“For a very long period of time, our index of negativity in American news articles fluctuated around a stable average,” the UPenn economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a co-author on the paper, told me. But since the 1970s, negativity has gone haywire. “News coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially