I believe the world is experiencing a deep sense of unhappiness. I often find myself suspicious of those who seem genuinely joyful. There’s a prevailing malaise among people today, perhaps fueled by how quickly someone can go from being celebrated to being canceled, fired, divorced, or doxxed. There seems to be a movement aimed at bringing everyone down from their perceived pedestals, regardless of how secure they might feel. Having tenur was once a solid position, no more. Any of us could wake up tomorrow and find the night has been busy, and now life, as you knew it, is gone. As Winston Churchill quiped, "A lie will get halfway around the world before the truth ever gets its pants on."
This uncertainty breeds sadness, as people grapple with what tomorrow might bring, often reflecting on their younger, more innocent selves. Would you want the things you said at 18 to jeopardize your career a decade later? Certainly not.
Many yearn for a return to “normal,” though it’s unclear what that truly means. They seem to wish for a time before COVID, BLM, Antifa, the debates around transgender sports, Trump, and the modern iteration of racism.
I argue that the bliss many recall was perhaps a form of ignorance, unaware of the larger issues looming on the horizon.
They long for a time before the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, before cities in America burned, and before Donald Trump announced his candidacy. Politics felt different—more generic—before Trump entered the scene.
We were blissfully naive in 2019, just as we were on September 10, 2001, just before a world-altering tragedy unfolded. Our innocence was shattered that day, turning children into adults almost instantaneously. Consider how the internet looked back in 1996, as seen in McDonald's original webpage. It reflects the mindset of the average person in 2001, who faced unimaginable events just a few years later. 1996 was the "original" school shooting in Columbine, Colorado. The news of broke our eardrums, what followed has been copycats seeing some value in attacking the indefensible institutions. No teacher wore a firearm before 1996. No CCTV camera systems watched us. It was our "bliss".
The original 1996 webpage from McDonald's exposes just how innocent we were as a society. It's almost embarrassing to see where our minds were at in this unity, before social media defined us, before we needed to be "liked" en masse. Before a single event froze our mental assets, our individual breadbaskets of sanity into our current life's algorithms.
We were a society of youth and innocence. The evolution of the internet around us has been startling, and it’s almost unsettling to see how much it has changed our understanding of the world. The current MCDonald's webpage stands as a huge example. If there’s one takeaway from this, it’s that the internet has matured too rapidly and has often fostered anger and division. We only recognized what true “bliss” was once our world was irrevocably altered on that fateful day. We were last happy in early 1996, before the modern digital age overtook us.