Universalizing Personal Experience into Cultural Critique

Personal solutions to the meaning crisis are not objective truths.

I’ve been wanting to write about this tweet for months:

Now it’s finally time, not just because of the seasonally appropriate pumpkin-carving reference, but because it could change the world, if only 100 million Americans would appreciate it.

The first thing to note is that

rayne fisher-quann

is not some rando on the internet. Her Substack is much bigger than this one, and has a whole lot of brilliant writing on it that you should read. She’s a perceptive, young critic and memoirist. Her tweet from October 19, 2024, is mildly internet-famous.

Why do I love it? Because to me, it expresses my primary frustration with, well, almost every non-pluralistic political and cultural idea: the universalizing of subjective experience. Fisher-Quann (facetiously) ponders a philosophical reflection on the decline of pumpkin carving in America, and then realizes that, oh right, this is just her subjective experience, in this case as someone who is no longer a kid and doesn’t have kids of her own. The decline in pumpkin carving is not something happening to society; it’s something happening to her.

Now let’s contrast Fisher-Quann with Vice President J.D. Vance.