lives lived small

Life often frowns upon me, which is how I explain my great misfortune of having had to engage in countless Luigi Mangione debates over the past month. I've tangled with my barber and my grandmother, sparred with my friend's mom over holiday party glazed ham, and dueled with bartenders who can barely see me through eyes glazed with contempt. We've wrangled about whether murder is ever justifiable, whether Brian Thompson was more of a cold-blooded killer than the man who pulled the trigger, and most of all - what could have compelled a granite-jawed scion of Baltimore high society to (allegedly) descend unto a path typically reserved for those who don't make valedictorian. I find it conspicuous that very few of these arguments have seen someone my age on the other side. By and large - at least within my milieu - the young are on the same page.

The facts back this up. They poll anything these days, so it was little surprise to see Emerson come out with a survey asking whether Mangione's actions were acceptable less than two weeks after he painted Midtown red. More surprising were the divides it revealed. When it comes to healthcare CEO wetwork, Americans are not particularly split along gender or partisan lines, but we are remarkably polarized by age. 13% of Americans aged 40-49 deemed the shooting acceptable, 8% aged 50-59 said the same. That number for 18-29 year-olds? 41%. That isn't everyone, of course, but it's a remarkably high number of people willing to endorse first-degree murder. To paraphrase Charles Dickens (and Bill DeBlasio): this is a tale of two cities, and one wants the other dead.

Much has been written about Gen Z's nihilism and how it permeates our sense of humor and vernacular. Too much, you could say, because none of it is particularly complicated or interesting. We have grown up on a planet rapidly incinerating, watched our "democratically elected" leaders pursue wars for profit while plunging us into financial crisis after crisis, and upon entering adulthood, sank slowly into an economy firmly clenched in the hands of unrepentant oligarchs and monopolists. The institutions and systems ostensibly designed to form a freer, fairer world - the idealistic post-war society our grandparents still believe in - have revealed themselves as either inherently impotent, complicit, or as nimble as the container ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal. After all that, detachment is inevitable, and you have to imagine the aging ruling class is delighted. When the alternative is anger, unrest, a nation of Mangiones - a generation satisfied with ironic dissociation and hedonism starts to feel borderline self-suppressive.

But if Luigi Mangione and his engraved bullets are proof of anything, it's that this streak of relatively mild nihilism may not hold for long. Because if Mangione is useful for something (other than kicking off the next class revolution), it's as an avatar for understanding millions of Americans growing dangerously aloof, isolating from others and themselves, and increasingly vindictive towards a world that feels more exclusionary and predetermined by the day.

The best place to understand this slow descent is not where many would first expect, but it reveals all the same. In a world now largely empty of third places, many seek out community online, and much of contemporary discourse now occurs beneath infinitely repeating loops of Alison Roman apology videos and Lionel Messi bodyguard highlight compilations. The digital tableaus painted by the comment sections beneath TikToks, Instagram Reels, and the barren wasteland that is YouTube Shorts (if there is one realm on Earth where God has closed his eyes, it is here) might be crude and juvenile, but they hold truth too.

Dismiss these comment sections as inane at your own risk. They are where our nation gathers and debates, Socratic seminars of brainrot and lazy meme-making, and they offer the clearest indication of what the youth of today think, what they consume, what they disdain, and who they aspire to be. And the trends are worrying. Everywhere you look, there is rejection. The kids are spurning alcohol consumption and cigarettes (weird behavior but actively trying to be less cool isn't necessarily deserving of condemnation), but they don't stop there. They decry solo travel as wanton risk-taking, condemn going to office hours as 'tryhard' behavior, bemoan sexual promiscuity any time a woman dares wear a crop top (or, honestly, leave the house), and so on. Even more interesting are the few trends that these videos and comments do embrace - returns to traditional living defined by heteronormative gender roles, home renovations where art deco and prewar flairs are deleted for sterile, conformist replacements, and lives proudly devoid of curiosity or ambition.

It would be easy to categorize this generational regression as further evidence of youth susceptible to the siren song of conservatism. And it would be even easier, using the same data, to rationalize this phenomenon as the natural consequence of recent surges in misogyny, racism, and homophobia facilitated by virulent, hyper-popular Internet presences like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, who have built their followings demagoguing ideologies of rejection (and straight up rape culture). So too must be considered atrophied social skills in the vicious wake of COVID. But those explanations are too reductive, just as it's too simplistic to say that Mangione shot his ghost gun because his back hurt. There's a more universal current swirling these waters of rejection.

Here's what I assert - young people don't just feel checked out anymore, we feel checked out and angry. More importantly, none of this disgruntlement feels fleeting or fixable anymore; it has the nauseating air of permanence. And why shouldn't it? In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, up to 26 million Americans braved a pandemic to march in what remains the largest protest movement in U.S. history. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act - the legislative outcome of this widespread rage, already reduced and diminished by the time it emerged from the House Judiciary Committee - never even received a vote in the Senate. For many, these protests were a rare moment of earnestness, and they were repaid with fetid inaction. That's humiliating in its own way, and it lingers.

Or take this most recent election, in which we were told time and again by geriatric Democratic leaders like President Biden that the stakes had never been higher, and that Trump posed an 'existential threat' (he does, of course). And yet, in the nearly two months since Trump's landslide victory, Biden's most consequential action has been to pardon his son. That's not how you act when you have two months remaining to mitigate what you called a 'genuine danger.' But it is how you act when you want to confirm suspicions that this is merely a game for those with the most power, that both parties are equally hollow and disingenuous, and that it doesn't matter who you vote for because either way, they'll forget you.

When faced with such overwhelming evidence that the world has concretized into a snarling, unchangeable beast only to be endured because conquest is no longer an option, there are two choices. You can express anger, as Mangione has and surely more will in the years to come. Or you can recede like floodwaters after a storm, carrying debris and ruination with you, deep within. To be clear, these aren't mutually exclusive. Once again, Mangione is useful - here, as an illustration of how initial retreat can smooth a path for anger to travel later. As the New York Times reported:

"[Mangione] frequently expressed alarm over the world’s increasing reliance on smartphones and social media. During his trip to Asia, he lashed out at the 'modern Japanese urban environment,' claiming that sex toys, automated restaurants and a more general lack of 'natural human interaction' were responsible for falling birthrates and a dearth of human connection."

Mangione's retreat was acidic and acerbic, sure, but it was defined by rejection all the same. Angry at a healthcare system that had left him debilitated by pain and furious at a myriad of other sources we do not yet know, he rejected a world that felt parasitic and incomprehensible and ran from it. For the next seven months, his life would grow smaller and smaller, as he, alone by choice, spurned all contact and made his existence as negligible as possible. Then, one day, he returned and everything came crashing down.

Mangione is one of the few entities not rejected online (which is ironic, considering how harmful he deemed social media). And while his remarkable good looks hardly hurt, anyone who thinks his acclaim is rooted primarily in aesthetics (looking at you, Vanessa Friedman) is missing the point, probably on purpose. He is adored not only because he dared to target a leader of one of the most vile, self-enriching industries darkening our society today, but because he dared to defy the stasis of nihilistic rejection. The question is not whether he was right or wrong. It's how many others he has shaken loose.