Air Raids and Applebee's
and doomscrolling under a doomin' sun, and what do we do with all the fear and uncertainty and absurdity and helplessness
This is not a post about Ukraine. My take on Ukraine is Aaron Sibarium’s take on Ukraine:
Not only is there no shame in admitting it, it’s actually the graceful thing to do. I understand the temptation to take a stance. Having a critique of the chaos unfolding on your phone screen is a means of seizing some solid ground to stand upon. It takes only seconds for war planes and missiles caught on camera halfway around the world to become images flashing before our eyes. Cityscapes glowing with fire, flames obscured by smoke. Tanks and troops and crowds of protestors. Civilians cowering in subway systems. A ceaseless stream of dystopian imagery rushing into… your cozy little apartment overlooking peaceful streets. Your fridge is full and your heat is running and maybe your gas bill will be a little higher next month but the fact is you’re safe and sound and completely powerless to do anything about what’s happening in Ukraine.
And maybe it’s this juxtaposition — of doomsday imagery with banal bourgeois existence — that explains the intensity of the temptation to say something, anything, about the chaos. We’re railing against our sense of helplessness, one tweet at a time:
As bizarre as McCord’s tweet is, all she’s done is take a universal temptation to its absolute logical extreme. When the world goes to shit (while on the couch we sit… should I write the rest of this post like McCord’s poem?) we all want to pretend there’s something we can do, or could’ve done, to stop the madness. But what’s happening in Ukraine right now is — for the vast, vast majority of us — completely out of reach. Bad things are happening and there’s nothing we can do.
But it’s not just that there’s nothing we can do. It’s that we don’t even know what’s really happening. We can catch terrifying glimpses, listen to world leaders give speeches, read articles written by experts, scroll through endless fragments of thought tweeted out by friends and colleagues and strangers. But even today, as we drown in a tsunami of information, we can’t pull back the curtain on those who call the shots. Putin and Biden and the select few who have influence over them… we can form more educated guesses about why they’ve made their decisions, but, ultimately, we’re still just guessing. It doesn’t matter how well informed we are, our takes are probably, in the grand scheme of things, pretty damn ill-informed. That drives us crazy, because we can see, in increasingly intimate detail, the immediate effects of the decisions we want so desperately to understand. And it’s far too easy to stoke each other up into a frenzy by venting our anxieties about their long-term effects.
But we just don’t know. Even if we did, most of us wouldn’t be able to do anything useful with the knowledge. It’s infuriating. The frustration and anxiety find a partial outlet on social media, but the release isn’t very satisfying, so we carry around all this pent up emotion and we do our best to carry on with our conspicuously comfortable lives.
A lot of Americans are experiencing the chaos in Ukraine — in spite of all its real, material consequences for real, flesh-and-blood human beings — only as another disturbing event on a screen, the latest development in a dystopian plot that, so far, exists mostly in our minds, and is pretty detached from the reality of the world we enter when we step outside our apartments. Perhaps nothing captures the dystopian vibe as perfectly as this 18-second video:
Air raid sirens ringing out as an authoritarian leader attacks. A media establishment with a perverse incentive structure that encourages alarmist coverage of the conflict and a business model that somehow managed to produce a video even more dystopian than the already-dystopian footage of the air raid sirens. The only thing worse than a missile attack is a missile attack with a Zac Brown Band soundtrack brought to you by Applebee’s.
So what do we do with all the fear, uncertainty, absurdity, and helplessness?
I don’t know. But all this reminds me of Mad Men’s depiction of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The characters of Mad Men couldn’t doomscroll, but they could huddle around radios and televisions, and they could rile each other up with ill-informed takes or fragments of anxious thoughts, and they could worry endlessly about nuclear apocalypse from their cozy office building on Madison Avenue. In the Season 2 finale, Meditations in an Emergency, Don and Roger are alone in Roger’s office:
Roger: “Kennedy’s daring them to bomb us. Right when I got a second chance.”
Don: “We don’t know what’s really going on. You know that.”
And sure, Don is right, but to just leave it at that is a little nihilistic for my taste. Don’s response to the crisis is not exactly to bury his head in the sand, but to not concern himself too much with what he can’t control. And that’s healthy to an extent, except events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or, in our case, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, should evoke in us a bit more concern than they seem to evoke in Don. The question is not how we can become less concerned — it’s how we should manage the concern we have.
In the same episode, Pete and Peggy give us two other models of how we might manage our concern. When they have this conversation, the viewer knows that Pete and Peggy have had sex before, and that Pete is married to a woman named Trudy, and that Peggy had a baby at the end of Season 1 that she refused to raise:
Pete seeks for relief from his anxieties about nuclear holocaust in the arms of a woman he thinks he loves. But Peggy isn’t who he thinks she is, and she doesn’t seem to love him back, and in any case, she’s seeking a different sort of relief from her own anxieties. All season, the priest at her family’s church has been trying to coax Peggy back to her Catholic faith. By the end of the season, Father Gill makes his own apocalyptic pitch to Peggy: the world could end at any second, and you could go to hell. She fends off his pressure in the moment by telling him she can’t believe that God would be so cruel, but still, his argument had an effect on her. At the end of the finale we see Peggy making the sign of the cross as she goes to sleep. So Pete seeks relief in earthly love, and Peggy in the divine.
But these responses to the crisis are each as dissatisfying as Don’s lack thereof. Pete makes a desperate and delusional plea to a woman he barely knows and he disregards entirely the consequences of his actions on the wife he already has. Peggy, for fear of eternal torment, seeks to restore her relationship with God, but instead of confessing to a priest, she confesses to Pete, and in so doing, pointlessly causes him pain.
What they both got right, however, is that they responded to a crisis they were helpless to solve with serious introspection. Their respective introspections ultimately led them astray, but they at least gave themselves a chance at a useful response. A useful response, I think, is one that transforms the psychological power of a world-historical crisis into something good. The fear, uncertainty, absurdity, helplessness… all the emotions churned up by the crisis cannot be channeled into any meaningful action concerning the crisis itself. But as Pete and Peggy show us, they can be channeled elsewhere. The question is where.
The answer is different for all of us, but at a certain level of abstraction, it’s something like: channel all that emotional energy into making your little place on Earth a little bit better in whatever limited ways you can. Introspect. Meditate on your habits and relationships. Do what you can to treat the people and places that you interact with everyday better. We often don’t feel the immediate effects of our immorality, and that can make us grow complacent with bad behavior. But in a crisis like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’re reminded of the obvious reality that actions have consequences, and bad actions have bad consequences.
The bad consequences of a crisis can be so overwhelming that we’re tempted to give into their gravitational pull by doomscrolling endlessly and to lash out at their ugliness with tweets and Tik Toks and Instagram stories. But doomscrolling is morbid and publicly vocalizing our anxieties is counterproductive:
In other words… we’re tempted to respond to the disastrously bad actions of world leaders with bad actions of our own — actions trivial in comparison to the crisis we’re reacting to, but not altogether harmless.
Dystopia isn’t created overnight. And when part of the dystopia we’re living in is the social media ecosystem through which we experience crises, our presence within that ecosystem matters. Sending out an exasperated tweet is contributing to the dystopian vibe. Doomscrolling yourself into a morbid state of mind only drags those around you down into the same mental muck.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t pay attention to crises, or that we shouldn’t educate ourselves or form opinions or have conversations about them. We should do all of those things. Just don’t morbidly fixate on the chaos. And don’t contribute to it. Instead, try to channel the flood of emotions into motivation to become a better person in your limited sphere of influence.
A doomsday toast. Wednesday night I went out for drinks with my friend Aaron and his girlfriend Ari. After a few drinks Aaron got a notification about the Russian invasion. We talked about it for a bit, and then he went to buy another round of shots, and we agreed not to talk about it anymore after he got back. He got back, we all clinked glasses, and I gave the toast:
“To us three.”
It felt like the right thing to say. The world was going to shit, and we were all nervous about it, and I figured, well, at least we’ve got each other, and here we are drinking, so let’s drink to us.
Aaron, though, was a little hesitant. He drank to it, but he told me later that it didn’t feel right for us to sit here drinking happily while Putin was firing missiles into Ukraine. And I think he was right. My toast was a bit off the mark, too much like Don Draper’s seeming lack of concern about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Too much, also, like the lyrics of “Doomin’ Sun,” by Bachelor:
And I tan easy in the doomin’ sun
You say at least it’s warm, at least we’re young
We’re all fangs rooted in a demon’s head
And now we’re sinking in, the sky is red
I might as well have been saying yeah, the sun is doomin’ and the sky is red, but hey, at least it’s warm, at least we’re young. There’s a certain sort of beauty in that, but at its core it’s a nihilistic attitude. Being on social media in times of crisis can feel like being a fang rooted in a demon’s head. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok… these are the demons that mediate our experience of the world, and if the sky is red, it’s redder seen through their filter.
But we’re not doomed to “sink in” passively. If we can’t stop the chaos, we can at least refrain from contributing to it. And perhaps, in our own spheres of influence, we can even give life to a vibe that’s a little less dystopian.