Just a hunch.
A lot of my friends are walking around like emotional zombies these days in the wake of the shocking 2024 election. Scads of social media posts are advising folks to find joy in everyday things, to recognize the good in their lives, to care for themselves physically and mentally, to essentially grasp at straws to stay sane in a crazy world.
It’s all the same advice we’d give to someone who’s experienced the death of a loved one, who’s been fired, whose car has been stolen, or who’s been dumped by a longtime romantic partner. We’re grieving right now as we look forward to the next four years of the Trump Reign, an era in which the re-hired Leader of the Free World now controls every single facet of the federal government. The once-and-future President of the United States will get to remake this holy land in accordance with whatever kingdom he imagines for it.
It’s no wonder so many of us are in need of psychological and emotional healing.
My hunch is this: many of us — maybe too many of us — are going to bury ourselves in fantasy worlds, preferring them to a coming real world that’s way too scary.
Take a quick look at this week’s New York Times fiction bestseller lists. Of the 30 titles therein, fully 15 are either SciFi fantasy or romance novels, genres that traditionally and by definition have nothing to do with the world revealed by the front page of the selfsame newspaper.
Of course, not that many people read the front page of the NYT anymore. The Pew Research Center tells us that fully 86 percent of Americans get their news from their smartphones or other internet-access devices.
Hell, millions of us have been running like thieves away from hard journalism and the cold reality as described by the old news media for decades now. In 2024, we subsist on a diet of clickbaits, misinformation, fabrication, hyperbole, Russian/Chinese/Iranian pranking, scary fairy tales, and other perversions of reality. Once upon a time, Walter Cronkite told us “That’s the way it is.” Now our screens scream “CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE WHAT THOSE EVIL FASCIST/COMMIE/TRANS/RACIST/ABORTION-PEDDLING/AMERICAN TALIBAN-ISTS ARE PLANNING TO DO TO US?!?!”
Trying to keep up with the day’s news now has become…, well, trying. It’s exhausting being bombarded with apocalyptic visions every time we attempt to be well-informed. The Trump Takeover, Redux may or may not spell the end of American Democracy although it’s a safe bet he’d be thrilled if it results in the end of the American Democratic Party. Our constitutional system may survive his malign machinations from now through January 2029 but few of us who voted for Kamala Harris would be willing to bet this is going to be a recognizably Free Country at the end of his sequel term.
Just watch. Those New York Times fiction bestseller lists, hardcover and paperback, as well as the lineup of top premium TV dramas as seen on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney, Hulu, HBO Max, and all the other streaming services over the next few years will become even more awash in escapist fantasy and romance. Otherwise rational adults already have been gobbling up everything from the Harry Potter series back in the early years of the 21st Century to Sarah J. Maas, Colleen Hoover, The Penguin on TV, and all those Marvel Universe blockbusters on the big screen.
Now that the real world has become excruciatingly unpalatable for some 50 percent of us, a huge swath of the populace is going to disappear in some unreal world of their choice.
That may help us survive with our sanity intact but this just might be the wrong time for us to check out from reality.
[…] to react to it. As if we’ve experienced the death of a spouse, we’ve drawn inward. I warned about this almost immediately after the election. Everybody I talk to…, well, doesn’t want to talk […]