Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at [email protected].
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Dear James,
The world has so many haters. How do we deal with this as a collective?
Dear Reader,
Are we a collective? I suppose we are. Doesn’t feel like it right now—which of course is the point of your question.
Hate, for me, comes in two main varieties.
There’s elemental hate—dead-eyed, steady, implacable hate—which I tend to think has a demonic origin, because it runs counter to creation. It’s infernally reductive, stripping the life out of everything: the hater and the hated, equally dehumanized. Thankfully this kind of hate is fairly rare. When you meet it, run.
Then there’s spazzy, jazzy, freewheeling, comes-in-ragged-blasts hate—the kind that most of us are familiar with. Day-to-day hate, petty hate. It shakes our brains, shakes our systems, is almost frivolous in the randomness of its objects: this driver, that YouTuber, those people in line at the pharmacy. This kind of hate is becoming more prevalent, because it has everything to do with our current state of psychic atomization and distance from one another. It’s love going backward, badly disrupted connective energy looking for a home.
What do we do about it? God knows. Name it. Recognize it when it rises up—and detach. Throw our smartphones away. Unplug our egos. Get off Amazon Prime. Stop listening to big-mouth podcasts. Breathe deeply. Be nicer to our weird neighbors. Be nicer to our weird selves. How’s that?
Exhaling peaceful platitudes,
James
Dear James,
I’m exasperated by the overuse of the word existential—the trendy term everyone seems to be using to fill speeches and published articles. Also: consequential. I would have expected The Atlantic to refrain. Sigh.
Dear Reader,
Words I overuse: cosmic, vibe, flaming (or fiery), wild, harrowing, psychic. The reason for this is that I live in a wild and flaming cosmos, and my psyche is harrowed by its vibes. Similarly, existential and consequential are having a moment because we live in existential, consequential times. On this—to use Auden’s line—what instruments we have agree.
(Also: We have no good synonyms for existential. Believe me, I’ve looked.)
Doing shots of language,
James
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