In Pursuit of Feeling Nothing
And feeling younger. Plus, early aughts nostalgia and 'reality shifters.'
Normally when I want to feel nothing, I obsessively control: I optimize my routines, become addicted to work, regulate what goes in my body. But last year, after nine months of the pandemic, I took an alternative route to escape—drugs. Normally apprehensive to swallow anything that will have an unpredictable outcome, here I was in the hospital compliantly accepting my nightcap of pills, because I was desperate to to numb out.
The pandemic has exacerbated and accelerated seemingly every trend, but few stand out more to me than our culture of nothingness. The prestige series of ten years ago have now been replaced with ambient television: shows with simple enough stories that we can follow along in the background while we scroll on other screens. “I know it’s bad,” my friend guiltily admits as we gab about Bling Empire on the phone, “but at the end of a long day I just want to chill.” At 13, I was that friend insisting on the documentary at Blockbuster while my friends…