Turning the Tide
This is Opposite of Nihilism. Think “Modern Love”, but the subject is how we keep believing in humanity and a world of possibility when nihilism beckons and the future feels increasingly foreclosed
by Adam Zemel
This newsletter was born on Inauguration Day on a drive to Boston from Washington D.C., where I had just celebrated my nephew’s second birthday. I was glad to get out before the noontime transfer of power. I listened to movie podcasts and avoided the news. On the New Jersey Turnpike I hopped on the phone with a friend. We discussed our shared sense of beckoning nihilism. Moving backwards. We agreed that hope seems falser now. This time feels worse. Maybe that’s just how it feels when you hit the back half of your 30s, we speculated, which passed for a bright side.
Somewhere near the Connecticut-Massachusetts state line I exhausted the movie podcasts and chose to subject myself to politics. I selected a podcast from the never-Trumpers at the Bulwark. These former Republicans set fire to their careers and spent three presidential cycles articulating the threat posed by Donald Trump and proclaiming a civic obligation to support the Democratic ticket. Even they were struggling with the impulse to let cynicism yield to nihilism: “Make the case to believe in something,” host Tim Miller pleaded. Bulwark co-Founder Bill Kristol replied, “Trump wants you to believe that none of it matters…Authoritarians want to make everyone a nihilist. Because then it’s all up for grabs.”
Sliding into meaninglessness can feel so tempting these days. Believing things might turn a corner feels like opting-in to a foolish heartache over humanity’s collective capacity for self-sabotage.
I spent the rest of that drive imagining a newsletter that might be able to push back on the forces of nihilism. Because it’s not just Trumpism. It’s our economic security, eroded by technological transformation, corporate consolidation, and unfettered greed; our sense of shared identity as Americans, worn down over decades of increasingly fractured and profit-motivated information distribution; our attention, commodified and degraded by a hoodie and quarter-zip cartel of venture capitalists and digital technology companies; our laws and rights, stacked in favor of the powerful at every opportunity by our highest courts.
The forces behind these and associated trends work to convince us the chaos and friction of our era cannot be anything other than a punishment for charting an alternative path. They present themselves as inevitable so that we lose the will to imagine differently. They would prefer we abandon individuality, consider ourselves nothing more than units in a market, bits in an algorithm, subjects in a neo-feudal politics. They want us to give up living to exist in an unending again-ness of their design.
We ought to refuse to make that easy. In this, of all things, they can only succeed if we decide to let them. If we allow nihilism to rise like a flood. Instead, we must turn this tide. We must have the courage to stand for this broader, messier, more beautiful truth. There is a complicated, painful, brilliant vastness beyond life’s transactional dimensions. Whatever it is in this world that chafes at your open wounds, that tore them open in the first place, that makes you wish with childish insistence things should be somehow different than what they are–all of this must become our strength. Our capacity to feel is our capacity to grow.
This is what they most want to kill in us: our love for the world as it could be. On this single front in the fight, we won’t give even an inch. There’s a better world for all of us out there and we will never stop building it. I am launching this newsletter to honor that conviction. To know I’m doing something to turn the tide, if only inside my own heart. Please, join me.
Opposite of Nihilism will feature a different contributor each week covering the topic in the name. So what will you be reading if you subscribe? Think “Modern Love”, but the title/theme/subject is how to celebrate humanity and believe in a world of possibility at a time when nihilism beckons and the future feels increasingly foreclosed.
Here’s what to expect: short personal essays, brief meditations, art criticism, and more. Although this newsletter is in one sense politically motivated, our mission is not to provide political punditry or news analysis. (Our submission guidelines go into greater detail about how political writing fits into O/o/N’s scope of interest.)
Instead, Opposite of Nihilism will bolster, champion, and examine the parts of life that precede politics, that fundamentally inform how we think about ourselves and the world and our positioning in it. The way to resist nihilism is to nourish the human resources necessary for sustaining a long-term movement to build the world as it could be:
Belief. We shouldn’t fake optimism, and we cannot conjure hope when it is in rare supply. But we can hold on to what we believe.
Passion. Passion is that force of feeling which makes us feel most alive. Passion channels our vitality and creativity out into the world, where it is needed.
Laughter. Laughing at the absurd is a way of telling the truth. Laughing at the powerful is a way of claiming power. We deserve to laugh.
Love. Love abides.
Adam Zemel is the founder and editor of Opposite of Nihilism. He has an MFA in fiction from UCRiverside Palm Desert, and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, and elsewhere.
Coming soon
Next week:
Notes from the trenches of the Reagan era art-punk scene. What we might learn from a post-boomer/pre-x micro-generation’s legacy of resistance? From writer Lisa Loop.
Later this month:
A meditation on the surreality of getting young kids ready for bed while worrying about the fate of American democracy
Thoughts on observing Trump 2.0 at a distance from an American living abroad
To-do list
Forward this newsletter! I’d like to grow our audience for and build a community people are excited to write for.
If you’re not already, please subscribe to Opposite of Nihilism! Each week you will receive a new post in your inbox meant to bolster your spirit and provoke interesting thinking.
Submit to be published, or encourage a writer you know to do the same! Read our submission guidelines here.
Editor’s note
Thank you for reading Opposite of Nihilism’s inaugural post! I appreciate the support. I’m setting two goals here at the beginning: get to 1000 subscribers, and make it to the end of the calendar year without skipping a week. Let’s see where this goes -az