Denial

     I think that our world is in denial. I don’t mean a world, I mean the world. I’ll be specifically referring to the United States, since that’s where I’ve lived for my entire life, but I suspect this is an issue that stretches worldwide, across the developed world at least. I also won’t be naming any particular examples, because I don’t think this is an issue I can convince anyone is real. Maybe someday I’ll find someone with the right terminology to explain, but for now I’ll just describe what I see as best I can. 

     I think the best place to start is in 2021, when we thought the pandemic was going to end but it actually wouldn’t officially end for another year. I distinctly remember a conversation with my mother where she insisted that after the pandemic was over, we’d go back to normal and everyone would forget all about Covid-19. I said that wouldn’t happen. We’d seen our world stop being real for an entire year, we couldn’t go back because every minute spent walking in that world would be spent waiting for it to collapse. I didn’t mention this to her, I just said I didn’t think we could go back. She disagreed. Three years on, I think that it’s safe to say that I’m right. We keep trying to go back, but nobody wants to go and every attempt is met with pushback. I think that if our leaders had made any attempt to make it feel like things were changing, we’d be able to accept this new world. But they’re not. They’re pretending that it’s still 2019, not 2024. 

      Somewhere along the way, the denial of our world’s death in 2020 became the bedrock of other, deeper denials. Chief among them the denial of a plague I don’t think anyone but me is noticing. I can’t point to anything in specific, but I get a strong sense that many people, regardless of political or religious affiliation, no longer believe that our world is real. It’s not a new thing, conspiracies have a history going back to the beginning of time practically, but we didn’t live in a world where social media was owned by people who were complicit, or even actively peddling them. This goes a little bit deeper. It goes to a world that’s seen our leaders deny that covid’s still a threat, people push for a world where obvious cons were peddled as a new way to form a reality, and where AI is making it possible for anyone to make an image depicting anything they want. Even those who don’t think the way that I do are being tormented by a sense that something isn’t right. Physics is still there, but the world they see in the media doesn’t quite match with what they see on the internet, and at this point everyone knows that could be either because the media is lying to them or because they’ve somehow ended up in an bubble of some sort. Unless you have a degree in media literacy, it’s impossible to tell, even if you know that someone is lying to you. You could go to the most trusted news source you can think of and still not be certain that someone isn’t pulling strings somewhere between where the news enters the machine and when it reaches your eyes. It’s a wonderful environment if you want to convince everyone to hate one another. 

     I don’t think it matters if physics falls apart or not. Even if you aren’t an Infinitelist, you can tell that reality is crumbling and the people who are supposed to protect us are either too weak to do anything or to insulated from consequence to care. I don’t think anyone is in denial of that. What I think they are denying is that our old world didn’t stop being real overnight. It was real because it gave us what we wanted, most of the time at least. It might not have given all of us grand mansions, but it gave us a nice place to live. It was good enough, and that’s all most of us wanted. Then it stopped being good enough, and it’s clear that it will never be good enough again. I keep seeing people pushing for a world based more on what’s real, but what they keep missing is that our old world wasn’t based on reality at all, but it was still enough to keep us happy. That’s what we need to keep in mind. Our new world might just be enough for us, but even if it isn’t run by despots, it’ll never quite be a real place.