Maybe Nihilism is the Real Enemy?

And if so, what non-oppressive things can be done about it? (Trigger warning: somewhat uplifting ending.)

When I was a teenager, my spiritual enemy was clear: conformity, dullness, the fact that so many people (it seemed to me) seemed to be asleep in their lives. I was a frustrated, pre-closeted, over-intelligent and lonely kid — I looked around at the cheerleaders and the football players, and I thought ugh. I didn’t rebel all that much, really, but I read books and listened to the music of rebellion. And the films: Heathers, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society. I wanted to escape the system, seize the day, make my life extraordinary — not to find, when it came time for me to die, that I had not lived.

These were the privileged, adolescent dreams of someone safe enough to dream them. I understand that. And yet I don’t want simply to dismiss them. They were right, in their way, and they reflected an emotional reality.

As I grew older, the enemy shifted a bit. It turned out, I learned, that the dull, enforced conformity of Reagan-era suburbia was just one face of the Machine, and and that others were more fearsome: oppression, racism, war-mongering, capitalistic greed, environmental devastation, and a conservative moralism which insisted upon imposing itself on everyone else. (In college, I also discovered irony, which I quickly applied to my earlier sincerity.) I protested the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War. In New York, went to RNC protests, WTO protests, I went to Occupy — eventually to Black Lives Matter as well. I worked as an LGBTQ activist for a decade.

I soon learned that the ‘enemy’ was more of a coalition than a hydra. There wasn’t just one big patriarchy or oligarchy — there were multiple factions, often competing with one another: corporatist plutocrats, the Christian Right, Tea Partiers (later to become MAGA nationalists), and some outright bigots. And, among them, of course, sincere conservatives and moderates who were perfectly fine people except insofar as they allied themselves with un-fine ones. Turned out, there were many vectors of oppression, some parallel and some intersecting.

Of course, the ‘enemy’ was never a group of people. It was a constellation of ideologies, emotions, ideas, qualities of human nature that we all possess: favoring the in-group over the out-group; religious fundamentalism; assuming that what is right for me is objectively right for everyone; all of the -isms (sex, race, etc.); or making decisions based on ignorance, prejudice, fear, rage and disgust. The enemy was within me and you, not a matter of us and them. And these aspects of human nature weren’t even enemies. After all, they had evolved over millennia for very good, articulable reasons, but now harmed more than they helped.

Now, in 2026, I wonder if the real enemy isn’t something else: nihilism.

Meg Cranston, Despair (1995)

Nihilism seems to be everywhere today: in online culture, in politics, in celebrity culture, and perhaps above all, in the high rates of hopelessness and meaninglessness reported by Gen-Z Americans. And a lot of it is grounded in reality: the death of the American economic dream (which is partly inevitable but is largely due to greed among the richest); the uncertainties of AI’s economic impacts, of climate disruption, and of the global rise in right-wing nationalism; and the decline in the kinds of shared beliefs, community, and culture that provided coherence and relationship to human beings for generations. It’s realistic to wonder and even despair about what lies ahead.

But the extent and expressions of this societal nihilism are still shocking when stared at directly. Extremely online culture, with its rapidly cascading TikTok videos and algorithmically amplified madness, makes a previous generation’s perceived excesses seem ridiculous. Can you believe Bruce Springsteen once complained about “57 Channels and Nothing On?” or that Andre Gregory, in My Dinner with Andre, warned that television was a tool of mass hypnosis? Meanwhile, the predominant culture of the ‘extremely online,’ nurtured by a generation of Reddit, 4Chan, and lesser-known spaces, prizes fractal ironies, multiplying infinitely in meaningless recursion. Everything is trolling; everything is for the lulz. Sincerity is cringe.

We saw this in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which the assassin seemed to believe everything and nothing at once. Was he a disaffected right-winger? A radicalized left-winger? Maybe just a gamer without any particular political ideology? This is someone who carved IYKYK-level in-jokes on bullets he fired at someone’s neck. And then the symetrically nihilistic response from the Right, instantly blaming a non-existent network of transgender Antifa terrorists — a ludicrous concatenation of lies that would be absurd if it weren’t also deadly. A man was murdered and all we got were memes.

But nihilism is not only somewhere else; it is not only ‘other’ to the cultural milieu of this newsletter and its presumptive readers. One of the core insights of philosopher John Vervaeke’s writing on the ‘meaning crisis’ is that the structures and values that provided meaning for the large majority of humanity — religious myths and ethics; traditional answers for what it means to lead a meaningful life (work, family, success) –— no longer hold sway for a majority of people in the West. There is a ‘religion-shaped hole’ at the center of our society — in part, for very good reasons, but a hole nonetheless.

And into that vacuum rush various pseudo-religions ranging from the terrible (ultra-nationalism) to the merely ridiculous (celebrity culture, extremely passionate fandoms) and everything in between (wellness culture, purity cultures). Young men, in a world without a previous generation’s clear gender roles and hierarchies, embrace retrograde masculinity in the ‘manosphere.’ In a world where trust in institutions seems to be at an all-time low, millions of Americans embrace conspiracy theories, from right-wing ones like QAnon to diagonalist-left-wing ones like anti-vaxx, Plandemic, and the nihilistic anti-scientism of the MAHA movement. In my own spiritual communities, one frequently finds tightly-held identities formed around being a light-worker, a psychonaut, a justice activist, a queer, or a member of a particular tribe. It’s not that these identities or activities are bad, but in our seemingly universal searches for meaning, community, and connection, they are often clung to constitutive of personhood itself, and defended with the zeal one would expect.

And of course, our politics is rife with nihilism, from the desperation and rage of young leftists to the desperation and rage of the MAGA right. I am not both-sidesing here; the left wants less oppression and particularism, the right wants more. But left and right are, in their ways, correct. From a radical-left point of view, liberals dickering around with hyper-capitalism, patriarchy, and neo-liberalism are utterly ineffectual; hope is already gone, the planet is already doomed, what’s needed now is radical action. And from a radical-right point of view, conservatives dickering around with the liberal project are likewise ineffectual; what’s needed is a far more radical undoing of liberalism itself and a return to ethnic and religious particularism. Arguably these ideologies are responses to nihilism, rather than nihilistic themselves, but I think at their core is a nihilistic despair that knows, deep down, that their respective projects are a lost cause.

Ironically, then, I find myself at the opposite pole from my youthful iconoclasm. Then, I wanted to tear down the bogus, shallow values of bourgeois America. Now, I almost miss those old meaning-forms of baseball and apple pie. (And, as a newish suburbanite myself, I experience them often and find them quaint rather than infuriating; I doubt my pseudo-punk sixteen year old self would agree.) To be sure, these forms still endure; the Super Bowl is still an American civic-religious holiday. And to be equally sure, they were always layered on top of American racism, classism, sexism, and the rest; it’s not like everyone had equal access to little leagues and cheerleading squads (and a lot of MAGA resentment is a response to more people gaining it).

But if nihilism is the crisis, then maybe reformed versions of these boring American forms of identity are better than the alternative.

I want to emphasize ‘reformed.’ Vervaeke is careful not prescribe a return to the Old Gods (he is well aware of their ethical shortcomings) but others are happy to do so – for example, Catholic conservatives like R.R. Reno (The Return of the Strong Gods) or, for that matter, J.D. Vance, whose spiritual memoir is like a case study of confronting contemporary nihilism and adopting conservative religion as a remedy. The same dynamic shows up in semi-ex-hedonists like Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, both of whom have lately embraced some form of Christianity in response to the meaning crisis.

This dynamic is troubling — terrifying, really, since in Reno’s formulation, after all, ‘strong gods’ means not only the God of traditional Catholicism but lower-case-g gods like fascism and nationalism — or, in his more polite phrasing, the bonds of family, culture, and country. These ideologies do deliver the goods: community, ethics, culture, meaning. But they replace too little meaning with too much: nationalism that is too thick with racism and the majority identity, religion that is too committed to dogma, supremacy, and universal applicability. If Reno’s conservative Catholic ideologues would keep to themselves, I wouldn’t mind as much, but since they want to destroy my family’s legal status and eventually its very existence, their structures of meaning become my problem.

The conservative cure may not be worse than the nihilist disease, but it is if you happen to be interested in self-actualization and also happen to be female, non-Christian, non-straight, or not in the ethno-nationalist majority.

As I wrote about in this post, I do not experience the meaning crisis myself. Personally, I derive plenty of meaning from my spiritual practices — Judaism, Buddhism, meditation, psychedelics, earth-based and otherwise — and in my family, queer tribes, friends, culture, politics, and work. But I’m well aware that opt-in, liberal religion (or post-religion) remains a rather boutique affair, and my other sources of meaning can have high bars to entry as well. My sources of meaning work well for hyper-educated people with the time and interest for such pursuits, but maybe not for most people.

Then again, in the extremely coastal, Buddhist-run café I’m sitting in right now (the meditation space is in the back), I wonder if I’m being too pessimistic. I have no idea what the many sweet-seeming hipsters around me are thinking or feeling at the moment, but I somehow doubt that it’s simply nihilism. This culture, whatever cliches it may embody (not least my delicious oatmilk latte), is thriving. It nourishes attention, human relationship, and a kind of community. By and large, it’s involved in resisting the authoritarian threat. And it is, of course, but one of many subcultures that have filled the religion-sized hole left by the decline in traditional religion, patriotism, gender roles, and communal structures. Maybe it’s not that complicated.

I know that niche cultures like this one are dwarfed, numerically speaking, by the various mass cultures that dominate American society. But hasn’t that always been the case? How culturally rich was the mass-culture past, really? Maybe my concerns about the meaning crisis is just nostalgia for a time that never was. After all, Andre Gregory was kvetching about the loss of meaning in 1981. And Allen Ginsberg in 1956. And Jeremiah in 600 BCE. Things do seem objectively worse now, but they have always seemed objectively worse.

In a way, that may be a kind of consolation.

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Thank you for reading and supporting Both/And.

I just scratched the surface of the “New Theists” advocating a return to traditional religion as a response to the meaning crisis. This article from Wayfare Magazine is a great introduction to the “four horsemen of the new theism,” who the writer lists as Ross Douthat, Paul Kingsnorth, David Bentley Hart, and Rod Dreher. I’ll have more to say about them in a future post.

I’ve been back writing at the Forward about matters of Jewish interest. Here’s this week’s article on the difference between Zionism in principle and Zionism in practice, and here’s a recent one on how the Center is now aping the Left in draining the word “genocide” of its legal and moral meaning.

I admit I’m now experiencing some Epstein Fatigue. Here’s Jay Kuo with an excellent update on the newest developments. And here’s Jules Evans with shocking stuff I hadn’t heard before about the British Royals’ involvement with Epstein. Blech.

Finally, I absolutely loved Erik Davis’s long essay on “pantheism and its discontents” which totally recontextualized Moby Dick for me and begins with the memorable lede “I am confused and demoralized and unnerved right now so I kind of want to hide under a rock, but I am pretty sure that the heavy vibes radiate all the way down to the mantle.” Don’t worry, after the lede, Davis leaves the misery behind and goes deep into the subject matter of the subtitle. Wow, that was a great read.

Anyone else ready for winter to end?