On Passive Nihilism

I was sitting on my front porch reading the other day. It was late afternoon/early evening. A nondescript car buzzed past, did quick u-turn and came to an abrupt stop in front of a house across the street. A young man ran out of his car, dropped a small parcel on the door, took a photo, then buzzed off. Ten minutes later, another unmarked vehicle did the same. Package, photo, gone. Half an hour later an Amazon van screeched and lurched down our street stopping first at one side then the other. No fewer than three stops in one small town block. Including the house across the street which was now up to three deliveries in less than one hour.

I know there are any number of if not legitimate then at least plausible reasons why someone would rely heavily upon delivery services. Perhaps there are mobility issues. Perhaps it’s cheaper to get everything delivered than to pay for one’s own vehicle. Nothing I’ve seen on my street would obviously suggest any of these, but I’m sure there are scenarios. But it’s just as easy to imagine someone sitting on their couch, aimlessly scrolling on their phone for endless hours, and impulsively clicking and ordering along the way. Maybe Skip the Dishes shows up with some junk food and energy drinks to break the tedium of Instagram reels.

There is much that could be said about this trend. This mode of consumption and engaging with the world is isolating, potentially ruinous financially, and profoundly unhealthy (in every way). At least going to the mall makes you walk for a bit. In his recent book, A World Without God, Chris Palmer identifies this kind of consumption as symptom of “passive nihilism.” It’s not the passionate, frantic, despairing nihilism of Nietzsche—a nihilism that understood the stakes. Rather, 

It’s when people lose their emotional intensity for living. Every day is approached with resignation, emotional detachment, and psychological drift. 

In addition to the rise of delivery culture, Palmer points to the convenience store as a symbol of our cultural moment—a “sanctuary for the passive nihilist.”

[It provides] brief encounters, inexpensive distractions, and an abundance of immediate pleasures that inject the brain with dopamine with all the accuracy of a high-precision fuel injection system. They are usually a town’s busiest clinics for boredom, apathy, and coping. 

I see this kind of passive nihilism all around me. Whether it’s young people guzzling energy drinks and vaping alone with their devices in their rooms, or the “infobesity”—this neologism that describes the glut of often useless information that washes over us all every day, rendering us bloated and inert—being produced by a perpetually online culture, or binge-watching or the infinite scroll, or gaming marathons, or more sinister addictions, it all speaks to a culture that has kind of given up on meaning or that a human life might have some divinely ordained telos. It’s not that we’re hostile to God or meaning or purpose or any of these concepts. They just seem unreachable. Difficult. Too complicated. For other people. So we buy another $8 sugary drink, click on another reel, make another purchase that will show up on our doorstep within 24 hrs, drift off to the next shiny object. 

We were, I hope it is obvious to say, made for more than this. I think most of us know this in our bones. But knowing it and living into it are two very different things. Hope can be hard. And living in an environment that is algorithmically engineered to bring out the worst in us and keep us passively clicking and consuming does not make it any easier. We do not live in a culture conducive to human flourishing. To live well—to live genuinely human lives—requires imagination, resistance, discipline, resolve, engagement, deliberate human connection, turning off our devices, unplugging the machine, if only for a while, in order to start remembering who we are.  

And it requires faith, hope, and love—the same things that have always been the necessary ingredients for life as we were made to live it. It requires being trained in these things. Which is another way of saying it requires worship—worship of the God who made us, the God who designed the shape of our longings and who longs for us, the God who alone can strengthen what has atrophied, heal what has been broken, and infuse our days with a meaning that will outlive our misguided, fleeting impulses. The God who offers more.