Nico Rivera

Features Editor

We are living in absurd times. We’re living not just in absurd times, but in ahistorical times. What does this mean? To define “absurdity,” I’ll use Sartre (a bit cliché, I know), who understands absurdity to be a conflict between our natural human search for meaning and a world that lacks meaning. Connecting this definition to the idea of “ahistoricity,” what I mean is that I think it’s increasingly difficult to locate ourselves in history, especially if we try to conceive of what the future looks like. If we look back through the decades, there are pretty easily identifiable eras or epochs that we can use as points of reference to study the flow of history. The Cold War, marked by the developing conflict between the U.S. and western powers against the USSR and its material/ideological allies, and pretty neatly marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. There’s the post-Cold War era, which is interrupted by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This period doesn’t necessarily end with 9/11, but the American domestic political sphere is completely transformed, cutting off political life to the times before the attacks. In the days following the attacks, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks.” It should be noted that these observations are all from the Western/American perspective, this speaks nothing about the historical experiences of the global South. In any case, history starts to speed up.

The post-9/11 era marked by the Tea Party and Obama’s rise to the presidency is, from the perspective of many Americans, thrown upside down by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. No doubt, many in the public had viewed the Bush administration and their warmongering in Iraq as ridiculous and illogical, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that 2016 was another push forward into this fog of absurdity. History keeps speeding up. We’re not even in the post-2016 era anymore, and I don’t know if it’s even appropriate to call this era post-Covid. Covid definitely played a part in making public life get “weirder,” there’s no doubt about that. Millions of people died, employees were forced to go back to work in unsafe environments, people’s brains got cooked being at home and consuming content online. On this point about employees going back to work, I think this is one crucial point where people begin to feel the breakdown of any supposed “social contract.” The needs of the market and the economy came first, plague be damned.

The genocide in Gaza functioned in this way as well. Any attempts by Western powers at legitimizing themselves were viciously destroyed by a televised, multi-year massacre. Victims of imperialism throughout the 20th century were well-aware of this “norms-based system” facade, but I think it was a particularly potent event for young people living in the U.S. and in other countries complicit with and actively aiding the genocide. This abandonment of any attempt at legitimacy through a system of norms was explicitly brought up by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Karney at Davos 2026, who essentially admitted this had just been a pretense for Western powers for decades now. I haven’t even touched on the “cul-de-sac” moment we’re in in the cultural realm. (Remakes, live-action versions, Y2K, “reheated nachos,” etc.) Regardless, how do we approach this moment? I won’t try to tackle large-scale social projects, but I think for personal sanity we have to engage with our humanity. Spend time with your friends, play an instrument, do meaningful, *real* things. Don’t doomscroll. I’ll drop a phrase from Terence Mckenna here. “I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder, and finally, it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about it.”