When the Going Gets Tough, Americans Go “Goblin Mode”

How to characterize the mood of the present when just as we thought we were slithering our way toward endemic after the Omicron wave, with all our best hopes about better days after the end of the Trump era dying an excruciatingly slow death, we were greeted by a brutal war in Ukraine?  Add nuclear annihilation to the list of existential threats along with catastrophic climate change and endless pandemic or just stop worrying and learn to love giving up?   

Somehow, aside from the solemn talking heads on cable news (where CNN turned their war coverage into a commercial just days into the conflict), the national disposition seems more inclined towards whining about gas prices than fretting about the threat to global democracy or climate apocalypse.  

In sum, it appears, Americans have had enough talk about sacrifice and all that.  Call it a legacy of the destruction of national norms under the previous management, but something seems to have changed even outside the loony circles of the trucker caravan right.  

Kari Paul of The Guardian took a stab at capturing the spirit of the times last week, opining that we were entering a new cultural moment: 

• At some point in the stretch of days between the start of the pandemic’s third year and the feared launch of world war three, a new phrase entered the zeitgeist, a mysterious harbinger of an age to come: people were going “goblin mode” . . . Goblin mode is not a permanent identity . . . but a frame of mind . . . Call it a vibe shift or a logical progression into nihilism after years of pandemic induced disappointment, but goblin mode is here to stay.

According to Paul, the shift to goblin mode is a move away from the “wistful ethos of making the best of what many people assumed would be only a few boring weeks” of pandemic life to an embrace of giving up and letting go.  Instead of trying to be their best selves, “as the pandemic wears on endlessly, and the chaos of current events worsens, people feel cheated by the system and have rejected such goals,” so they “jokingly called themselves goblins . . .  as the pandemic eliminated the need to keep up appearances.”

In the New York Magazine piece Paul cites, Allison P. Davis tries to capture the heart of the national vibe shift, citing interviews with fashionable observers who predict a return to sleaze, chaos, and “a more fragmented culture.” Davis goes on to suggest that:

• [T]he death drive has something to do with it. With the pandemic and climate change, our aesthetic and behavior are certainly shaped by a sense of doom. There’s a nihilism to the way people dress and party; our heels get higher the closer we inch to death. It’s why people are smoking again, so says the New York Times. “Oh, sure,” [consultant Sean] Monahan agrees, but not fully. “I think the interest in opulence and the interest in transgression are in some ways just pent-up frustrations from the pandemic where people are like, I want to have fun. Also, the 2010s were such a politicized decade that I think the desire people have to be less constrained by political considerations makes a lot of sense.” 

Perhaps so.  But as many Americans surrender to pandemic fatigue and move toward a chic nihilism, history rolls on and a new rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.  In the meantime, the party continues and, as Bloomberg playfully observed in recent days, even the diesel prices are going “goblin mode thanks to the Ukraine war.”  

What to make of all this?  

I turn to a great American poet who also observed “the pure products of America/ go crazy.”  There is “no one to witness and adjust,” as William Carlos Williams once wrote, “No one to drive the car.”