 Abundance of optimism Every so often, the cultural zeitgeist changes within elite progressive circles: a “vibe shift.” In the 2000s, the “skeptic” movement was prominent, argues the tech journalist James O’Malley, centering humanist and rationalist ideas in contrast to fundamentalist Islam of al-Qaida and the conservative Christianity of the US presidency. Later, #metoo drove feminist ideas to the heart of political conversations, followed by “wokeness,” which emerged from US racial politics and the trans rights movement, which — O’Malley thinks — peaked around 2020. But “the vibes are once again shifting,” he says, with the election of Donald Trump demonstrating to left-wingers how unpopular some of the ideas they have espoused are. Now, the center-left is in flux and a new vibe is yet to take hold. But O’Malley thinks he knows what the next one will be: The abundance agenda, the idea that we can tackle the world’s problems, such as climate change, while also making people’s lives better. As with earlier vibes, it existed before now — the YIMBY movement, writers like Noah Smith and Matthew Yglesias calling for economic growth, cheap clean energy, and infrastructure development. But Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance will, O’Malley argues, act as a “totemic moment,” as the publication of The God Delusion or White Fragility were for earlier vibes, in bringing those ideas into the mainstream. The other long COVID Five years ago, Britain had just begun its first COVID-19 lockdown, and the British writer Helen Lewis has “been thinking about the lingering after-effects” of the pandemic: Not the health impacts per se, terrible though some of them are, but the psychological ones, of the isolation that it caused. “Covid might have been a respiratory disease,” she says, “but the pandemic era profoundly affected our brains.” You can see this in some celebrities. She names several British stars, previously “intelligent, curious, funny, irreverent.” One now appears on niche TV stations ranting about vaccines and Jewish mobs. Elon Musk’s transformation is, she thinks, another example. During COVID, people were forced to live much of their lives online, often hanging out with self-selected, like-minded groups, which “have a well-known tendency to drift towards the extremes.” Combine that with an attention economy that rewards provocative behavior but also puts vulnerable people in the way of angry backlashes, and allows troubled people to “shrug off any criticism as attacks on The Movement.” “My question is this,” she says: “how many people has this happened to?” It’s not just celebrities. Reflecting on it has made her more sympathetic to lockdown skeptics, because the downsides of lockdowns “were greater than I, or most liberals, acknowledged.” Dates and time “Three years ago, I was a 34-year-old who hadn’t had sex in fifteen years,” writes Alvaro de Menard. “Since then I’ve failed miserably at dating, then turned into a total manwhore, and eventually found someone really special to commit to.” He wishes that someone, years ago, had written a practical guide to dating: So now he has done it. “Why should you listen to me? Because… I’m just a weird nerd who (after fifteen years of celibacy) decided to make dating his autistic special interest and discovered that it’s actually not that difficult.” First, dating apps “are a numbers game and must be treated as such.” Swipe lots. “You will be rejected again and again and again,” and you must grow desensitized to it. The time you spend on apps is “a tax you pay for the possibility of sex and/or love.” Crucially, whether looking for love or sex, “self-improvement [and] honesty” are key: Admit what you’re looking for, and make yourself the best version of yourself you can be. “Your body is you. Hit the gym.” And finally, even if you do want a long-term relationship, start with casual dating: Doing it the other way is “like trying to run a marathon without doing any training first.” |
