We Have NOTHING in Common
(I mean, ‘Nothing’ is what we actually have in common)
I. The Spectrum of Anti-Sociality
As a human with an intense sense of shame and an often crippling sense of self-awareness, I’ve become obsessed with the rate at which Americans are becoming more and more anti-social. I’m not sure when this process started. I know I started aggressively clocking it after we crawled, feral, out of our quarantine holes.
To that end, here is a random list of things I’ve observed in the past month:
A man on the subway watching a YouTube video on his phone at full volume, apparently unbothered by—or perhaps entirely unaware of—the thirty other people in the car.
A group of teenagers filming a TikTok in the middle of a grocery store aisle, blocking traffic and treating the visible irritation of other shoppers as either an inconvenience to them or as a source of content.
Multiple interactions in retail settings where customers and employees had bizarre stare-offs with no ability to casually interact. No one was rude exactly, not hostile, just absent, as if the transaction were happening to someone else.
A woman storming into a restaurant to scream at the staff because a city-owned parking meter wouldn’t accept her validated ticket—something they had no control over. When they tried to explain this, she got louder. Eventually, she walked onto the sidewalk and yelled at a captive audience waiting in line for a neighboring restaurant about how she had been scammed.
A man berating a teenage CVS employee at the register over a coupon policy. His voice seemed to be rising in volume from the discovered pleasure of having a captive audience for his anger.
A driver who, after being inadvertently cut off in a merge, raced ahead into oncoming traffic, slammed his brakes, and got out to scream at the woman behind him—blocking a major street at rush hour until a passerby (it’s me, I’m the passerby – being Shrek-shaped with cauliflower ear helps) told him to “quit being an antisocial freak” and get back in his fucking car.
A comment thread under a news story about deportations in which the dominant emotion wasn’t approval or disapproval but glee—the unmistakable pleasure of watching someone else’s world get destroyed.
These are not 1:1 situations. They range from the mildly annoying to the genuinely monstrous. Putting speakerphone guy and the deportation-glee people in the same list feels, on its face, absurd. One is a breach of etiquette. The other is a failure of basic human decency.
If that was your reaction, then you might really balk at my instinct to include an ICE agent saying, “woah, it’s like Call of Duty” after watching a person get shot on this list as well. But I want to argue that they share a root. These are all symptoms of the same rot.
What’s striking about these moments is not simply that they’re selfish. It’s that they’re unembarrassed. It’s as if ‘the gaze’ has been turned off as we have collectively transposed anonymous comment section behavior into the public sphere. There’s no flicker of recalibration when another person’s presence becomes undeniable. I took it for granted that we all know the feeling of being in a quasi-fugue state and then abruptly realizing you’re being perceived by others. I assumed that for everyone else this would always principally present itself as a potential source of shame. But now, if other people register it is as friction, obstacles, background noise, extras on the set, an audience. Or—when the cruelty sharpens—as entertainment.
In every case, what’s missing is the experience of other people (and the shared world you inhabit with them) as something that makes a claim on you. What I mean by ‘make a claim’ is the felt sense that you are in a place with other people, that their experience is real, that the space between you and them is not empty but constitutive—that you share a reality with one another and without it you are not fully yourself.
When that felt sense disappears, what you get isn’t evil. Not at first. What you get is a kind of practical solipsism that initially appears as a lack of self-awareness, then like rudeness, then like indifference, then like cruelty, with no clear line between them. They’re points on a single continuum.
And the name of that continuum is nihilism.
II. Solipsism, Lived
To understand what’s happening, it helps to pause on a word that sounds abstract but names something deeply familiar: solipsism.
The term itself is a portmanteau of the Latin words solus and ipse, meaning alone and self respectively. It was coined by Giulio Clemente Scotti in a satirical polemic aimed at his fellow Jesuits entitled Monarchia Solipsorum (The Monarchy of the Solipsists), published in 1645. The term was used to describe them as being so arrogant and egotistical that they acted as if only their interests and perspectives existed. The meaning of the term evolved from this form of egoism into a more precise philosophical category by the time Kant used it explicitly in his 1798 Anthropology where he defines it as essentially the coincidence of moral and logical egoism.
In philosophy, solipsism is usually introduced as a skeptical thought experiment. René Descartes famously asked what he could know with certainty. He doubted his senses, his own clarity of thought, and stripped away the world until only one thing remains: the self as a thinking thing. If you’re someone who finds his subsequent arguments for the external world unconvincing and are left believing that the only thing you can know for sure is that you exist? That’s solipsism.
Almost nobody who has actually gone through the motions of thinking deeply about philosophical questions actually believes this position intellectually. The irony is that solipsism doesn’t need to be believed to be lived. In fact, I’d argue that all of the examples that started this essay are of people that I’m choosing to class as living solipsists.
Lived solipsism isn’t the conviction that other people aren’t real. It’s the practical inability to experience anything as real unless it passes through you first—your mood, your feed, your identity, your interest. The world doesn’t disappear. It just becomes hazy, unreal, B-roll for your ‘main character energy.’ Other people exist, but only as background characters in your story, friction points in your movement, or content in your feed.
That is the soil our shared cultural nihilism grows in.
III. Nihilism Under Pressure
When I say nihilism, I don’t mean that the guy on the subway watching YouTube on blast has read Emil Cioran and concluded that life is meaningless. Almost nobody arrives at nihilism through philosophical argument—and the teenagers that say they did can usually be ‘talked’ out of it by a simple threat of kicking them in the balls (it will be a guy - and he will turn into a Kantian immediately upon being threatened with the crotch uppercut). They arrive at their nihilistic posture the way you arrive at a dialect—by absorbing the patterns of everyone around you until you can’t hear them as patterns anymore.
For our purposes, think of nihilism as the condition where the ‘why?’ of existence has lost its gravity. It is the state in which our highest values atrophy and cease to matter, leaving us with all of the momentum of modern life but no sense of direction.
Traditionally, we think of this as happening via a slow fade—an exhaustion where the response is withdrawal. We go numb, do what’s required, and nothing more. But when you’ve been promised agency, control, and meaning your whole life, that feeling can become more than an ambient mood. It curdles into resentment for what you feel the world owes you. Eventually, it becomes a “will to nothingness.”
If you’re a Nietzsche head, you’re already thinking of the line from Book III of On the Genealogy of Morals:
...this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material... this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death... all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness... but it is and remains a will! And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will at all.
When the capacity to will meaningfully—to build, to orient, to bind oneself to something that unfolds over time—collapses, the will does not simply shut down. It turns. It seeks an object that can still register force. If it cannot affirm, it will negate. If it cannot create, it will punish.
This is the missing link between indifference and cruelty. Nihilism almost never stops at the absence of will; it shows its true face when it curdles into aggression. It prefers catastrophe to impotence. It prefers mutual ruin to the humiliation of waiting. This is why contemporary political life increasingly organizes itself around punishment rather than construction. The point isn’t victory. The point is impact. Something must burn. Someone must pay.
IV. Spectacle as Substitute
The Super Bowl was just the other day, watched by nearly 130 million people. It is the last shared ritual in American life. To understand why it holds this power, you have to look at what it was designed to replace.
American football has always been more than just a game. It was truly developed in the late 19th century by Walter Camp and Theodore Roosevelt as a paramilitary substitute. They were terrified that the “peace” following the Civil War was rotting the American spirit. They viewed the burgeoning industrial world as a form of passive, weak nihilism—a “soft” life of desk jobs and Victorian manners. Football was the corrective. It was a technology of synchronized violence—literally war-games intended to ensure that the will didn’t atrophy in a world without a frontier.
As it shifted from a proxy for war to the most popular form of entertainment in America, it has become one of the most sophisticated technologies for consuming the experience of participation ever devised. The “active” part—the risk, the tactical discipline—has been outsourced to a handful of professionals. You pick a team. You say “we.” You feel rage, elation, devastation. But nothing is required of you. No exposure. No cost.
It is the “will to nothingness” mediated through a screen, allowing you to feel the heat of the fire without having to hold the match.
Politics has followed the same arc. It competes for the same psychological resource: the feeling of mattering without the risk of genuine participation. When genuine participatory structures collapse, spectacle rushes in to fill the vacuum with promises of hollow participation. The only thing missing is the bodily, answerable you who would have to show up and deal with consequences – and that missing you can only exist in a commons.
V. After the Death of God
The pull of spectacle as a substitution for agency in a shared reality is only possible in a world that has already lost the capacity to make ultimate claims on us. To understand how we got here, you have to go back to the moment that loss became unavoidable.
When Nietzsche announced the death of God, he was diagnosing the collapse of a world that could make compelling, final claims on us. The consequences of this are a kind of disorientation that has become universal:
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?
We are living in that cold now.
The disorientation he describes has ceased to be the special purview of those of us with chronic anxiety disorders. It seems to have become a descriptor of ordinary, everyday experience. Faced with the disappearance of ultimate guarantees, we have rushed to compensate. We have not become creators. We have become judges. Executioners. Accountants of punishment. In America, the Death of God did not produce silence. It produced noise, spectacle, and the increasingly explicit conviction that if no world can be made whole, then no one should be allowed to escape its wreckage.
VI. Where This Leaves Us
The temptation is to reach for repair—to ask what story could bring us back together. But that reflex misunderstands the nature of the loss. What has collapsed is not a particular narrative, but the condition that made narratives binding in the first place.
Nihilism fills the gap. Sometimes quietly, as withdrawal and indifference. Sometimes loudly, as cruelty and spectacle. In both cases, it offers the same bargain: safety for the self in exchange for abandonment of the shared world.
We have taken that bargain almost everywhere. As Americans, we don’t have a lot in common, but we do have nothing in common. To be clear, what we have in common is our commitment to Nothing. Our commitment to das Nichts.
The question that remains is not how to restore a world we no longer believe in, but whether there is a way of remaining in one another’s presence after belief has failed—without fleeing, without dominating, and without turning destruction into entertainment.
Excellent article. We need to explore the power of the rituals that still hold a meaning to us, if they exist. And by meaning i mean emotional and cognitive participation, not semantic blurbs.
hell yeah