I maintain a list entitled "most important forces in the world" and on this list is an item called reality fracture, the idea that we (for most definitions of "we" that you could come up with) don't inhabit the same psychological worlds.
This isn't the "people don't share the same values anymore" observation that has always been true as far as I can tell, reality fracture is people literally not understanding the reality of their next door neighbors. Even well-meaning people of good conscience are alien to each other. Even people you know you like, or used to like, are drifting. It's why you go to Thanksgiving and believing that your uncle has gone mad; your uncle, for his part, believes the same about you.
Anyway, this article has lots of things to say and I have lots of thoughts about it, but it did a good job making the idea vivid. And gross.
For pretty much my entire life, culturally iconic media — TV, movies, rock & roll, comic books, video games — were the only visible signs of a cohesive Americanness. I watched the same cartoons that my dad did, and those were the same shorts my grandfather saw in the theater, or at least the same characters he read in the comic strips. These were shared bonds across generations, something to talk about and relate to.
Today, there are no intergenerational cultural touchstones. Thus, there is a comically tragic sense in which the Baby Boomer lament about “the breakdown of consensus” and “divisiveness” really amounts to the disappearance of Bugs Bunny and Popeye from the airwaves, since they had already uprooted everything more meaningful.
And it's not just intergenerational -- that's the whole point of the fracture.
I have to remind my son that if he’s going to pretend to be Sgt. Slaughter or the Big O on the playground, he’s going to have to explain it to the other kids, and don’t expect them to understand if you pop open an invisible can of spinach and punch them in the face. But we quickly discovered the other kids, even the ones that drink from the poisoned faucet of 2020s pop culture, are in the same boat. They all have different streaming services and subscribe to different YouTube channels and, God forbid, TikTokers. Their only overlap is accidental moments of ‘virality’ that are quickly forgotten.
Nothing in common. No common ground to start from. Falling apart.
I just got back from a comedy show and it was bonkers to me how consensus reality, as portrayed by the performers, was not one I recognize. Comedy is a good barometer for what people think is real. It was disorienting and unsettling.
No takeaway. This is the current moment, I guess. You can imagine it accelerating, as we fork off into our own universes even more, each with our private art collections. Who knows where the world goes now.