Reading the headlines, one thing that stands out is how everything is framed as a crisis. We have a dating crisis, a masculinity crisis, a creativity crisis in marketing, an identity crisis in Hollywood, and even a matcha crisis. It has gotten out of control. In 2026 alone, we’ve already had enough crises for a lifetime. Same for the overuse of “profoundly depressing”:
Or:
Maybe not representative but this is profoundly depressing
— David A. Simon (@david__simon) October 17, 2026
Or regarding AI and math, progress at solving math problems has become a cause for mourning. Recent headlines about the recent AI breakthroughs in math include “Why A.I. Has This Mathematician in Tears”, “Mathematicians in mourning as AI cracks their lives’ work”, “I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep”, and “‘I’m Really Terrified’: A Mathematician Grapples With AI’s Recent Breakthroughs”.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask, but how about we save such language for actual tragedies or crises? A parent dying of cancer: yes, that is profoundly depressing. 9/11? Yes, that was a crisis, and also profoundly depressing. But the supposed injustice of AI making short work of a mathematician’s research program, or a bad job market? Not so much. Maybe these things are disheartening or disappointing, but surely they do not rise to the level of “profoundly depressing,” at least not how I understand those words. The phrase increasingly seems to mean “something I don’t like.”
But as discussed in How the Mainstream Media Came to Sound like Zero Hedge/InfoWars, this choice of language is not so much about the seriousness of story itself. Few would equate the loss of a math job with something like a fatal car accident or a world war. Rather, it signifies the helplessness people feel. It’s as though we’re running out of adjectives to describe the current upheaval, from AI to social change. At the same time, our concerns get drowned out by everything else going on in the news, and when combined with an increasingly out-of-touch leadership, people reach for stronger language to make their grievances heard, and to convey what they imagine to be the most pressing issue on their mind at that moment. For some people, this is AI risk; for others, matcha shortages. So, everything becomes a “crisis” or “profoundly depressing,” even when those descriptions are inaccurate or exaggerated.
Framing things in the most dire or negative language also helps boost engagement, such as “likes” and “shares.” If it works for the media, it works for individuals too. This is why “doomscrolling” is a thing: it’s not so much that society is going to hell, although it may feel that way, but that reading social media can leave you convinced it is. Incidentally, this is common among the highly educated—the so-called “smart left/right.” Normies generally do not have particularly strong opinions about AI risk, falling fertility rates, or the obsolescence of mathematicians, but among the highly educated, these are major causes for concern. There are echoes of the 2016–2020 period, when everything was framed as racism. Now everything is framed as a crisis or as depressing, but with a key distinction: the sentiment is shared across the aisle. It’s not just a left-wing thing. Many on the right are also skeptical of AI and data centers, or have low opinions of politicians and the media, especially after efforts to suppress debate or dissent about Covid restrictions on social media.
A recurring theme is the oscillation between extreme optimism and pessimism, even among the same pundits or publications. Center-left outlets like The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Washington Post have to reconcile American ingenuity with the problems downstream of it. Headlines praising AI-fueled economic growth are juxtaposed with concerns over whether the boom could go wrong, why most Americans don’t feel it, college students who can’t read books, AI cheating on campus, and shrinking attention spans.
Neoliberal-leaning techno-optimists such as Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, or Richard Hanania, whose tweets regularly go viral, have to juggle this apparent contradiction of optimism with pessimism. Signs of society getting better—strong U.S. GDP growth, technological innovation in Silicon Valley, and a wealthier middle class—are juxtaposed with political dysfunction and concerns about shortened attention spans and a mental health crisis linked to social media. So you will see viral headlines about dysfunction and alleged corruption in the Trump administration alongside optimistic headlines about the economy or AI. “We” cannot make up our minds whether society has crossed the point of no return or our best days are ahead of us.
For example, Richard Hanania’s The Culture War We Need is subtitled “Fight those who preach misery,” yet just six days later he published Choose Mediocrity and Stagnation. Vote Democrat in Texas. In Stop Talking about AI Job Loss and Take Productivity Seriously, he assures readers: “Regardless of how AI progresses, there will always be work.” Noah Smith swings between optimism and pessimism in much the same way. In Ten things that are going right in America, he writes, “Health is improving. Violence is falling. Americans are starting to use technology more responsibly.” But in America’s political economy is pretty bleak right now, he doubts how much reasoned argument can accomplish amid populism, tribalism, and social media shouting. Matt Yglesias shows the same tension. In Will A.I. take your job? Mine? Everyone’s?, he expresses “extreme optimism about the ability of technology to make human toil unnecessary,” yet The narrow path to saving the republic warns that “the future of American democracy has been hanging in the balance the past few years.”
To make this clear, this is not a partisan issue. We’re going on 10 years now in which more than half the country are consistently dissatisfied with the sitting executive. Is it too much to ask to have a president that is actually liked?
Go down the list, and confidence remains low across the board. Congress’s approval ratings remain low. The same goes for confidence in major institutions, trust in the media, and ratings of religious leaders’ honesty and ethics. We had a president whose handlers repeatedly downplayed his cognitive decline. The current administration is a revolving door of appointees too incompetent to even cover up the corruption they’re accused of (pro tip: it’s generally not a good idea to tell someone in writing to delete incriminating writing). It’s a race to the bottom, and every time we think we’ve hit it, it’s like, “Hold my beer.” It’s not just a “left vs. right” thing; irrespective of politics, people agree that society is veering in the wrong direction. There is a bipartisan sense that leaders have lost their moral authority, trading stewardship for social media engagement and sound bites. You see it on message boards and in comment sections, where grievances are aired about the “state of things” in America today—from the economy to Iran or AI—with little hope that it will ever get better.
Some of this is the disillusionment that comes with age, rather than evidence that today is exceptionally bad. Idealism gives way to the realization that every era disappoints. Consider that in the ’60s, instead of the Iran war and wokeness, there were the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. “AI risk” has joined nuclear war as the latest thing to be scared about. Every election cycle is “the most consequential ever.” Moreover, presidential approval ratings are a poor proxy for legacy or policy success: Clinton and Reagan were popular, yet their legacies are now clouded by laissez-faire policies that cost manufacturing jobs and may have planted the seeds of the 2008 crisis. Each decade brings with it challenges, but also unmet expectations. As Joan Didion wrote in “Goodbye to All That,” first published in 1967 and included in her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
In the ’60s, being a rock and roll star was the quintessential dream job; now it’s being a “social media influencer” or working in tech or finance. Yes, “elite overproduction” is a thing, but acclaim has always been scarce. Think how many now-forgotten bands tried to emulate the Beatles or the Doors. Or how many authors tried to copy Tom Wolfe. To Hanania’s point, things have gotten better by many metrics, but they seem worse when we look at what we don’t have or compare ourselves to others instead of taking a more panoramic view.
Of course, these grievances are not without merit. Today’s prospective employees are put through a seemingly endless gauntlet of screening and interviews, only to be rejected even after receiving glowing feedback. Applicants are expected to be overqualified, with tons of experience and credentials for even the most mundane jobs. You need 10 years experience and 2 degrees to wait tables. This is how you end up with the situation alluded to in the tweet at the start of this article, where qualified applicants send hundreds of résumés and don’t get an interview, let alone a job. It’s out of control. The same goes for higher education, where thousands of highly qualified applicants are vying for spots at the same handful of top schools. Washington, by contrast, competence is punished. In AI and elsewhere, technology is racing ahead, while Congress can scarcely bring itself to care affordability and other persistent problems. It’s like, why can’t “we” hold Washington to the same standard the private sector holds its own employees to?
Then there is the “gerontocracy”—to borrow again from Hanania—which is out of control. He has written about how the interests of the aged have come to dominate policy in posts such as Gerontocracy Versus Western Civilization, How Populism Enables Gerontocracy, and Critical Age Theory. The 119th U.S. Congress remains dominated by older lawmakers. The arc of policy is to keep home prices inflated and limit market declines through aggressive monetary and fiscal intervention, as we saw in 2008 and 2020—heaven forbid homes become affordable for a change. Then there were the Covid lockdowns, which punished young and healthy people even though they faced the lowest risk of dying. Young people’s concerns about affordability or the job market are dismissed, while suggestions like the “firm handshake” are so unhelpful or tone-deaf that they have become memes in their own right. It can all feel like a cruel joke.
It’s little wonder people feel society is going in the wrong direction, or that elites are deaf to their concerns. Problems like affordability or the epidemic of unemployed men need more than just bromides or empty reassurances. Maybe we need to stop treating government as a retirement home. You shouldn’t need to send out 100 applications to get an interview. But at the same time, perhaps we could discuss what needs fixing without making every problem sound like the end of the world or existential despair. Otherwise, we risk creating crisis fatigue when actual problems arise. When even an electric Porsche is an “automotive existential crisis” or an AI-generated local “news” site is “existentially depressing,” maybe we need to reevaluate whether we’re really just disappointed.