Missing the obvious hypothesis: people in the past had real problems, like living through a war (by fighting in it or having it fought where you were, not by seeing it on TV), or the Great Depression, or other real, actual threats to life and limb. Something happy was a counterbalance. Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living (for each one who can, many try and cannot finagle their way into that industry for lack of connections), you make it "dark and gritty" to cover up for the fact that you don't really know anything about real suffering.
I frankly feel kinda great in a crisis. The more serious, the better. All the dumbest parts of my brain shut down and I do what has to be done. Squeamishness, fear, anxiety, second-guessing, rumination—all shoved in a closet and the door slammed.
Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state.
If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having a body that's not broken and logically knowing how fast those things can change, I'd probably be really into extreme sports.
I have a very similar crisis reaction. Acute crisis bring out the best in me. Unfortunately conversely, long slow simmering ones without agency break me over time.
Anectdote: I was very into “extreme” sports as a kid and into adulthood. I eventually took up skydiving and had quite a bit of fun with it. Met a lot of old timers with a lot of jumps under their belt. An observation really struck me talking to them: the people at the top of “extreme” sports are not really adrenaline junkies, but control freaks.
If you're interested in reading more about this I highly recommend the book "Tribe" by Sebastian Junger - it goes into exactly what you say - why people sometimes feel better in a time of crisis.
The main reason is the temporary flattening of social hierarchies and true meritocracy where you are more valued for your skills than for your position in society.
A crisis is acute and inherently short-term. But despite mountains of marketing meant to make it a series of deadlines and checkpoints, climate change is a fundamentally continuous, long-term problem that grows a little more every day.
The Ukraine situation by contrast had the contours of a crisis, and so did COVID-19 in the beginning. And in both cases we in the "developed" world watched our leaders squabble and foible and generally reveal their total unpreparedness. I can see how that's depressing.
Almost everything in the news is either gonna trigger anxiety or nothing. Outrage, maybe. That's about it. Farther away from local news, the more true that is.
Luckily, keeping up with that stuff day-to-day or even week-to-week is pretty pointless, so easy to avoid.
The knowledge of all those problems just goes on the pile of shit that I can't possibly deal with, so just have to try not to think about, along with things like existential dread, the fact that my living the way I do (so, like a normal developed-world person) is probably indirectly causing misery for someone somewhere (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, like much good speculative fiction, not about a fictional place but rather our current world), my hunch that cosmic horror probably comes about as close to capturing the nature of our existence and place in the universe as anything does (if only metaphorically), all that and the rest of the unhelpful crap that's probably true and real but also not especially actionable short of "kill yourself, or else devote yourself body and soul monk-/batman-like to some cause all the time every day, probably to no real effect except personal satisfaction".
That's exactly the point of those news: to trigger the viewer. That's all they care about. Now that we pile up on those anxieties or whatever, not the news channel's problem.
I too like when crises time hits, when I have something I need to act upon and deal with. And I think that's a lot of it - WW2 people could do their part for the war effort, their enemy had a face, they could fight it, they could win. You can understand this at the simplest levels, everyone understands fighting.
I can't fight climate change, I can't fight COVID. I'm powerless against the specter of fascism. We have all these anxieties about what's happening, but no way we can do better. Frustrations and anger pile up but there's no catharsis. A lot of the time embracing the darkness in media is cathartic.
This resonates. I'm in a highly regulated industry and nothing makes my happier than a Sev 1 emergency where I can push all the mind numbing process to the side and actually FIX shit. Otherwise it's process, and review boards, and iterating on the change til someone is happy about some arbitrary documentation issue.
In a way, isn't that exactly what evolution prepared us for, as opposed to a life of overabundance afforded by work with no personal meaning?
Perhaps we're simply missing having and being able to overcome pressing challenges as much as we're missing physical activity, nights without light pollution, or contact with nature?
On the one hand, yeah, sure, on the other, that concern does nothing but hurt me. It's entirely pointless. You don't need to maintain a constant state of concern/anxiety to remember to work toward solutions to those sorts of things when possible.
And anyway, I only wrote that those kinds of things don't trigger that pleasant crisis-flow-state for me, not that I'm not worried about them.
I agree. My dad had to fight in WW2 at 17, got shot twice, almost lost a leg, had to leave their home with nothing. My mom spent a lot of nights in a bunker while bombs were falling, they had to watch for fighter planes shooting at them while working on the fields during the day. The generations that grew up in the west after WW2 have seen nothing in comparison.
I think people like the idea of overcoming suffering so these days they exaggerate a lot of things.
It’s not so much they were “real” problems, as they were acute problems. Acute problems - bad guy with gun - are easier to portray on screen than chronic problems. Anyone who thinks we don’t have real problems anymore and this is the end of history has their head in the sand. But it’s more difficult to visualize. How do you make a war flick out of climate change? How do you make an action thriller from wealth inequality? Even Covid, I mean I don’t know of any influential movies inspired by the Spanish Flu.
Some “dark and gritty” does suffer from a true lack of maturity on the point of the screenwriter - Zac Snyder does not have the writing talent to support his darkness without it seeming cheesy and silly - but a lot of it - Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight - very much does touch on the real suffering of the modern era: terrorism, surveillance, class divisions.
War breeds connection and community. Many of the greatest minds in the world came from these wars. Hemingway, St. Francis of Assisi, Konstantin Batyushkov, Whitman
are some who are top of mind for me today. What other great thinkers were breed in war environments?
or perhaps it's because the world is falling apart and we're on a solid trajectory to make it worse, and unlike a war, it's not something easy to bounce back from?
Let's be fair, humanity has been saying that everything is falling apart for centuries.
There's in the front page a post that's named: "A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore"¹ that shows registers from as early as 1894 of media saying "Nobody wants to work anymore".
Even the classic "Kids these days" can be tracked back to 624 BCE².
Socrates said too something along those lines: «The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.»
You are forgetting a very important thing: the ever-increasing power of misplaced technology - once upon a time ability for damage equaled to a rock or a stick, today...
The "great responsibility" that should have accompanied the "great power" is dwarfed. Wisdom should needingly¹ increase more than power - of course this is not how things go.
(¹I cannot find the term for the modality: not "deontically", not "absiologically"... The idea is "X, or you are in trouble".)
So, "in the times of yore, civilization was falling apart". Today, it is with boosted damages.
Well, we've never had microplastics inside literally everything before, and I'm not too thrilled about it, and forever chemicals aren't too flash either. We get a pass for asbestos because the earth made it (thanks for nothing, gaia), and radiation because it goes away, but we've really taken the cake for worst idea with these things.
It’s probably because car headlights and grilles become squintier and angrier every year. People drive too much and everywhere they look is angry car faces.
Is'a "good" idea: it implies a proposal of a model according to which people absorb acritically more and more, subliminally, iow process the input stimula less and less. The poster points an accusing finger against passivity.
People will always find a way to feel pity for themselves, that absolves them of personal responsibility, and maybe attract some sympathy. Depression and sadness as a form of entertainment is very old.
I wouldn't dare deny that many parts of the world are slowly approaching a tipping point, but even if the world was perfect, people will invent their own struggles. Seems like we instinctively crave challenges, and emotional challenges are the low hanging fruit.
While I think there is correlation here, I think a better arugment would be for the cyclical nature of art. When society goes one way art may go another. (or at times the same way, I doubt it's a 180 relationship)
> Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living
Hasn't this always been true? I can't imagine a time in history when plays/literature/music has been more accessible to the working class.
