While I take issue with the one sentence in the article that suggests SSRIs are a crutch, otherwise I agree with a lot here. I’m not fond of de-normalizing needing life saving medication, but that’s my personal pet peeve, so it stood out to me.
I wonder if part of the reason for our collective ennui is rooted in the fact that we’re throwing off a lot of our old institutions–for good reasons, that is. A lot of them are toxic, and only fit for the few and privileged. But an upside to them was that it pre-defined the meaning of life for a whole lot of people. People born into religion could just accept that following it was their goal in life; gender roles outlined women’s and men’s roles; caste systems made it obvious where you would live and what you would do with your time.
The upside of rejecting these is that we now have far more freedom to chose what we want to do with our lives, but that also means we chose our own motivations. And a lot of our cultural narratives still assume as fact that these institutions exist and are there to guide us, which just isn’t really true anymore.
I feel like a lot of this is just growing pains, and that it will pass with time, but maybe that’s just me being an optimist. I’ve never personally had any problems with choosing my own way, so perhaps it’s easier for me to read into the upsides here.
I think Catherine Shannon needs to read more Nietzsche.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann
She might want to read more Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, too, if she isn’t at all familiar with existentialist philosophy. Given that she doesn’t mention that philosophers has been trying to find answers to the question of finding or making one’s life meaningful when there is no inherent meaning or purpose to be found for a least 150 years, she probably isn’t.
This “numbing out” seems like an embrace of the wrong kind of nihilism, a quest for escape for the fact that each of us is free and has both the right and the responsibility to determine for ourselves the meaning of our own lives since neither church, state, nor capital have answers that are suitable for anybody but the richest and most powerful among us.
If people are numbing out, I think it’s because they can’t accept that nothing is true, everything is permissible, and do what thou wilt was always the whole of the law.
In her defense, I have always avoided Nietzsche because I found him bloviated, smug, and self congratulatory, as I do most philosophers. That said, I should seek out some summaries of him and the others you mentioned, because clearly I do have some interest in the core of their ideas and writings, even if I need the prose distilled a bit.
LOL, yeah I think this is what I was trying to convey up above. It’s just more acceptable to admit it these days than it was when pearl clutching was more common.
If that’s what you think of Nietzsche, you won’t enjoy reading Martin Heidegger even if you can put aside the fact that he was a Nazi.
I hadn’t mentioned Max Stirner, but he was a contemporary of Marx and Engels and something of a proto-existentialist himself. I’ve slogged through translations of his major work, The Unique and Its Property (sometimes called The Ego and His Own instead), but I’ve found it far more difficult a read than Nietzsche. Both are probably best read in their original German, but I can barely make sense of Rammstein lyrics without a translation. 
I thought Jacob Blumenfeld did a good job of summarizing Stirner in his essay All Things are Nothing to Me: Stirner’s Communism, and in his longer book, also entitled All Things are Nothing to Me: the Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner.
Unfortunately, pearl-clutching is still all too common, and too many people are running away from their existential crises by embracing religions that presume to know the mind of a dead God or political ideologies that should have stayed dead. Ms. Shannon herself is evidently a practicing Catholic, and a lot of terminally online right-wing personalities seem to have embraced a sort of “traditional” Catholicism that rejects post-Vatican II reforms.
Ha you are probably right about Heidegger! I’ve heard of him, but I have so little patience for some writers these days. It’s not that I don’t have patience in general, but for some reason I guess it comes off as unreadable to me. I’ll check out the essays you linked; having the theories filtered and restated is probably the best way to go for me.
Unfortunately, pearl-clutching is still all too common, and too many people are running away from their existential crises by embracing religions that presume to know the mind of a dead God or political ideologies that should have stayed dead. Ms. Shannon herself is evidently a practicing Catholic, and a lot of terminally online right-wing personalities seem to have embraced a sort of “traditional” Catholicism that rejects post-Vatican II reforms.
I agree to an extent, but I do still think that it is far more common and acceptable to question our assumptions these days. Is it, of course, far from perfect, but that does not mean it is not miles better than it used to be. I am thankful for our small victories!
And don’t get me STARTED on the trad-cath movement. There is some overlap there with the ultra-right fundamentalist movements I keep an eye on (not as an adherent; it’s just something I watch), so they bleed into my feeds from time to time. There are a number of them that act as influencers and spend most of their days trying to convince women to stay at home and that they are super-very-not-unhappy in their double-plus-good unequal marriages. I don’t hold a grudge against anyone who is religious, but these particular folks are not right in the head.