Lots of indicators suggest that we Americans are struggling. Twice as many should-be students are missing more than 10 percent of the school year than before the pandemic. Drug overdose deaths rose roughly three percent in 2023, after several years of double-digit increases; well more than 70,000 dead annually. In the first six weeks of 2024 there was 49 mass shootings, more than one a day, in which four or more victims were wounded by bullets or killed. Automobile fatalities are similarly at elevated levels, due in part to distracted driving and simmering post-COVID road rage. According to the New York Times, if the U.S. had made as much progress reducing vehicle crashes as other high-income countries over the past two decades about 25,000 fewer Americans would die every year.
Not all of us are doing poorly. A solid swath carefully convey their kids in electric cars to good quality schools on their way to decent-paying jobs they enjoy. But there’s an unmistakable swell of anger, depression, and despair afoot, darker emotions fanned, or taken advantage of, by politicians and social media influencers.
There are myriad reasons for the widespread sense of doom. Whatever the official inflation rate, everything feels more expensive. Many families can’t afford a meal out, other than ones that come in a plastic basket or wrapped in paper. Forget about even road trip vacations, unless they involve camping, assuming a site can be secured. We don’t share common causes, whether it be to deal with embedded prejudices, climate change, or how to manage our borders. We barely even share common facts about these challenges. Our attention span is flagging, deeply eroded by a cascade of irresistible seconds-long videos. Even our brains may be changing, with higher levels of biochemically induced anxiety, ADHD, and despondency.
Some historians theorize that what’s happening reflects broad generational cycles. In The Fourth Turning Is Here Neil Howe proposes a recurring scheme of societal rise and subsequent disintegration based on a “wealth pump,” whereby elites get richer and ever more entrenched. Inequality, if left unchecked, shatters the system, like a social big bang, with the need to rebuild from the ground up. Such, he asserts, is the situation in America, where oligarchy has become sufficiently extreme that a huge redistribution of power needs to occur.
Catastrophe followed by rebirth is a religious trope, deeply embedded in our collective psyche, and a sign of the periodic reality of disaster. The scriptural flood is an act of recreation, the world restored on somewhat altered terms. An apocalypse will usher in Christ’s second coming. Hinduism has Kali, the Goddess of Destruction and Dissolution.
The tang of demise is reinforced by the near biblical age of our national leadership, with individuals who are largely within a decade and a half of their deaths. President Biden is 81, Trump 77, the average age of a U.S. Senator 64, in a country where the expected lifespan is 79. No matter who we elect this November someone, probably more than one, is going to pass.
Religion and science agree that things must die so that other things can live. But not everything that expires merits mourning. Kali, perhaps acting through a myriad of empirical means, destroys ignorance. Buddhists aspire to ego-death, the “great-death,” ending unconscious quests to understand the sense-of-self as a thing, instead of a process. Destruction of ego and ignorance would go a long way towards a society reborn from despair.
Depression, personal and perhaps societal, can be triggered by the sense that bad things just won’t change, that the present condition is forever. This is a delusion. Things always change. Nothing remains static. Time makes sure of that. No doubt circumstances can get worse, but they can also get better, or at least different.
San Franciscans are well familiar with the power of terrible transformation. In 1894, 12 years before the Great Earthquake, A. Page Brown, who designed the Ferry Building, declared that disaster was just what San Francisco needed to become a world class metropolis. “Phoenix-like,” he wrote, “there would arise, perhaps, a city which would eclipse any American seaport.” And it did.
Democracy is the belief that the world will get better. A lack of confidence in egalitarianism feeds on our sense of doom. Yet it’s exactly the representative system that enables us to create the structures we live in, which in turn shape us. No one is fully powerless. Kids need help getting to school, addicts require the same to get straight, and we all should pay better attention, to the road, to one another, to what’s around us. We can be helpers or helped, it doesn’t really matter, so long as we forgive one another for our roles, respect our fellow citizens, and fight the curiously attractive pull of catastrophe.