Like many Americans, I watched the reality dating show “Love is Blind” when it came out earlier this year. I’m not a fan—the entire conceit makes me depressed—but I do find it a fascinating sort of pulse-taking of the American climate. We are in a moment of deep delusion, and that isn’t unusual. What makes it different is that we’re trying very, very hard to get back to a certain moment in time when it felt like being deluded was kind of ok. We are desperate to get back there—circa 2015—when watching makeup tutorials on YouTube and fully buying into the idea of the girlboss empire didn’t feel so insulting.
What’s it called when you’re no longer asleep but you also don’t want to fully wake up? Whatever it is, that’s where we are. I can’t blame us, really—since the pandemic, a lot of us have had to really, for the first time, reckon with the fact that life will never be the same again, not just in the arena of public health but everywhere. It’s no longer acceptable to consume mindlessly without any thought of the consequences. It’s too late to harbor the delusion that if we all just pitched in and did our bit, we could prevent global warming. It’s too late to ignore genocide. It’s too late to go back to living our shallow American lives without any thought to how our very ability to pull the veil over the rest of the world’s suffering is in part responsible for that suffering. I remember going to a lecture in 2010 where the panelists talked about the fact that in order to have the privileges we have in the West, other countries must remain impoverished. I remember thinking, “that’s interesting,” and conveniently pushing it to the very back of my mind.
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