Everyone I Know in America is Miserable
Die Erschöpfung des Möglichen
America is in crisis. Everyone knows it, but few know it the way I know it.
Like most warm-blooded Americans, the first thing I do when I wake up is check my phone. Unlike most warm-blooded Americans, I don’t live in the United States. I live on the precise opposite side of the world, a place where street vendors’ loudspeakers double as daily alarm clocks, ushering in daylight and summoning me for a cà phê sữa đá. Each morning is a short window where I get to chat with loved ones back home. Over the past year, I’ve watched as those conversations have changed drastically in character.
I’ve lived in enough places to know what distance does to a relationship. I’ve maintained long-distance connections across the U.S. for decades, same when I lived in Europe, and now from a city on the other side of the planet where the air smells like rain, exhaust, and something frying in oil at seven in the morning. Distance flattens things, it introduces lag, creating scattered, kaleidoscopic conversations that never finish before another one starts. But this is different.
The mood has gone somber, the warm blood has run cold, the conversations that were once ranting and vibrant, sometimes spanning paragraphs, have all become bleak, short, lifeless words. The words are there, the spirit behind them is dead, as if they’ve been written by soon-to-be-stiff corpses just going through the motions. Everyone speaks like they’re conserving something. A word here. A word there. Fine. Tired. You know how it is. Yes, I do know how it is—and that’s what frightens me.
What is this terrible depression that’s sunk everyone I know across the vast North American landscape? Well, I don’t know everything and won’t pretend to, but I do think to understand it, you have to first understand the dream that’s been lost.
America was built on (stolen) land, law, and violence. But more than these, it was built on a story, a myth so total that to be American has always been to have absorbed it before you were old enough to question anything. The story always said that, no matter what happens, as long as you’re an American, things always get better. Times might be tough, but as long as you have a blue passport and can claim the star-spangled red-white-and-blue as your national flag, you’re going to be alright. Your national identity would see you through. Your children will have more than you. Science will solve what politics cannot. The future is a place worth getting to.
Things didn’t always get better for everyone. A lot of people were left out of the “things get better” story entirely, as centuries of slavery can attest, but America has always shrewdly included enough people in the story to keep it from falling apart. The story of directionality was never equal, but it was always framed as a matter of historical physics, upward unconditionally, a truth so obvious that even to question it would make you feel a bit insane. If you did question it, like I often did, you were met with scorn. “You should be grateful you live in the greatest country on earth.”
The philosophical term for this is teleology, the belief that history has a direction, that it’s moving toward something. And, despite its stubborn refusal to admit this fact, no civilization in modern history has been more teleological than the United States. Not even the great European imperial projects, which at least had great tragedy built into their cultural histories, complete with ruins and wars, pocked landscapes from fallen bombs, and centuries of dynastic collapses to somewhat keep their hubris in check. America has none of that ballast. Never did. America has always been frontier, and the frontier was infinite, and infinity can only move in two directions—upward and onward.
Cracks formed in the American story over time. The Iraq War had already spent much of the smug, post-Cold War certainty that American power glided through history with grace, always in the right direction, moral arc bending toward justice. Another pointless war that nobody asked for, nor could they figure out why it was happening.
This, by itself, wasn’t enough. America has never felt guilt for its senseless wars. It’s always managed to compartmentalize them as “mistakes” that are “in the past,” always recentering itself as the protagonist and certified “good guy” in its own story. I feel this denial acutely every single day, whenever I speak to an elderly Vietnamese and know they lived through The American War. 1
They’re always kinder to me than I could’ve ever imagined, in ways that even the best of words would inevitably fail to accurately convey. Our eyes and gestures communicate what our words do not, what words never could, an intense mixture of feelings that’s impossible to describe. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t fighting back tears as I type this. When our eyes meet, I see nothing but humanity in its purest form, goodness, and kindness, and I’m conflicted about whether or not I deserve any of it. 2
It becomes downright insulting when I look for English-language books on Vietnamese culture and have to sift through countless war memoirs told by American veterans talking about how hard it was on them. Americans will drop bombs on your country then spend the next fifty years writing books about how much it hurt them.
Iraq felt like a bad sequel to this, in a long series of bad sequels, each yet another nightmarishly pointless belligerence like the last. Then came the next crisis. Money, houses. This one hit America where she hurts most—the consumer ethos.
The 2008 financial crisis cracked at the foundation of homeownership, long a component of Manifest Destiny chopped, screwed, and remixed as The American Dream. Homeownership has long been the most material form of the dream, as America’s legal structure since its inception has been built on property ownership, not personal well-being. Like a wobbly Jenga tower, you remove this block, and the whole foundation becomes unstable. If sequential pointless wars eroded America’s belief that it was just, neoliberal capitalism eroded America’s belief in its future.
What I’m hearing in those flat, bloodless messages, what we’re all hearing in those flat, bloodless messages, what I hear every morning from across an ocean, cuts deeper than garden-variety unhappiness. It’s not just burnout either, though the burnout is real. It’s not pure political anxiety, though that too. It’s a unique desolation of people who were handed the map to the promised land at birth, who oriented their entire lives around getting there, and once they arrived, found the map was forged.
This is by no means the first time a civilization has awoken to find its map to paradise was counterfeit. History is polka-dotted with societies that built themselves around the teleological story of their own future necessary paradise. Surely, this has happened before. The comparison everyone reaches for is Rome. It’s too easy, but also too distant and lacking. Western Rome decayed over centuries and then all at once, but even then, those who were living inside it often had no idea what was happening. The rulers changed, but most people went on about their lives as usual.
Consider Weimar Germany. Not the cabaret aesthetic, nor the lurid shorthand it's become—the actual experience of daily life in a society whose organizing myth had just been annihilated. Imperial Germany had built its identity around a story of civilizational destiny, Kultur with a capital K, the idea that German history was moving somewhere worthy of the suffering it demanded. It’s easy to feel like your suffering is worth something when it produces Bach and Kant.
Then came the Great War.
1918 was much more than the loss of a war. It invalidated the German story retroactively and made all the suffering suddenly pointless, unmoored from any destination. What followed wasn't immediate fascism. It was a decade of what we might now recognize: hypervigilance, poverty, creative explosion alongside mass despair, people oscillating between frantic sensation-seeking and total withdrawal, a culture simultaneously producing its greatest art and losing its ability to hold itself together politically. Walter Benjamin, sitting in the middle of it, didn't try to rebuild the myth. He did something stranger and more honest—he started cataloguing the ruins.
The Arcades Project, his unfinished masterwork, is essentially a man trying to construct meaning from fragments in a society that had stopped producing coherent wholes. He never finished it and died fleeing the mustached fascism that the newfound German meaninglessness ushered in. But the method—fragment, catalogue, sketch the pieces without forcing false resolution—is one of the few honest intellectual responses to a collapsed teleology that anyone has ever produced.
Or go further east, and further back, and you’ll find a parallel almost nobody draws.
Song Dynasty China, roughly the 10th through 13th centuries, was the most technologically advanced society on earth. They had moveable type, gunpowder, paper currency, proto-capitalism—by most metrics of the progress story, they were winning. Rapid economic growth created large cities, entertainment districts, and a money economy. This didn’t destroy values, but it shifted daily life toward consumption and away from older aristocratic or ritual ideals.
Sound familiar?
Poets noticed the mismatch between classical moral language and lived urban experience. The dominant emotional register of their entire literary culture was elegant, refined, incurable melancholy. The ci poets (Su Shi, Li Qingzhao, Ouyang Xiu) wrote obsessively about impermanence, the gap between what was hoped and what received, and beauty that was sharpest precisely because it was already dimming.
This was a civilization at its peak producing art organized around the acknowledgment that peaks are temporary. They had no illusions of permanent paradises. The result was some of the most precise and durable aesthetic work in human history screaming out of the emotional paralysis of societal decay.
The West doesn’t have this. The West, and America most acutely, never developed an aesthetic or philosophical tradition for living without the forward-myth because it never had to. There was always a new frontier, market, or war to win, a new technology to believe in, a new great white hype. America has never developed a language for how to live once paradise is attained; it’s never evolved a way of life that could be stationary. It’s not in our lexicon, a skill never learned. So when most people realize the map is fraudulent, they don’t build anything—they just sit there, scrolling through videos as escapism replaces purpose. 3
So what do we do with this?
I want to be honest with you in a way that most writing on this subject aren’t. I don’t know. I have no fucking clue what we do with all this and I’m suspicious of anyone who does. The market for answers to this particular crisis is clearly booming—productivity hacks, stoicism repackaged as male self-improvement, wellness routines, political movements promising to restore what was lost, podcasts, manifestos, supplements. All selling the same thing in different packaging: a new forward-myth to replace the one that broke. A new destination to orient yourself toward. Another bullshit map, different cartographer, same fundamental lie.
I’m not interested in selling you that.
What I can offer is this.
The thing you’re feeling, that specific flatness, that sense of slow-motion heaviness without comprehensible direction, the awful exhaustion that sleep never fixes…that’s not a personal failure. It’s not just you, and you shouldn’t tell yourself that you should be able to endure it better. The world is both literally and metaphorically on fire right now. Reducing it to either chemical imbalance or moral shortcoming ignores the real fact that, as I’ve observed daily over the past year, this is happening on a civilizational scale. It’s not laziness, or ingratitude, or you not sticking to your morning routine. No. This is a very historically-specific experience, the one of living inside a story that’s suddenly stopped being true, in a culture that’s not yet found the courage to admit it.
You’re not broken, you’re just paying attention, and perhaps being more honest with yourself about the world than most. Paltry consolation, I know, but there really is a strange, cold comfort in that. It’s not hope. I wouldn’t dare insult you with hope. It’s something more like precision, the precision of finally being able to see clearly what you’ve always been looking at. It may not feel like it, but what’s just now coming into still-blurred focus is the early stages of the civilization we grew up in reckoning with the fact that it was built on promises that couldn’t be kept.
Please understand that I feel it too, even if from afar. I may be separated geographically, but emotionally, I’m caught up in the same whirlwind albeit in different ways. I feel the most crushingly lonely whenever I turn on that luminous rectangle of mine and wade into the oceanic storm of American digital currents.
Then I put it in my pocket, and life becomes ordinary again. Vietnam comes rushing back—hot, loud, immediate, hospitable, and totally indifferent to everything I just read. I see the toothy-white smiles of whole families enjoying a ride on their motorbikes together. I’m never sure if that’s relief or abandonment. The glaring disparity between my physical world and digital life is jarring, if not wholly disorienting, leaving me forever unsure which is the real world and which is fake.
The phone contains people I love in genuine pain. Outside my window is a city that has no idea they exist. Both are real, and both leave their marks on me. I pocket the phone and the city wins by default, by sheer physical insistence, but I'm never fully convinced it should. I’m not completely outside your nightmare, just outside enough to diagnose it from a different perspective, but still caught up in it enough that moving on simply isn’t an option. Thus, I write my responses to those flat messages.
Every morning I wake up in the sticky humidity of Vietnam and check my phone, fruit vendors already loud outside, stiff coffee already calling my name. And somewhere, across the ocean, in a time zone that’s somehow still yesterday, the people I love are waking up inside that reckoning, reaching for their phones, sending me their short, tired, honest dispatches from the interior of a country that’s only beginning to understand what it’s lost. I’m thankful for them, even in their lifelessness.
I read every one. I write back every time.
It’s not enough, but it’s all we have.
Thanks for reading. Read the follow-up essay to this here:
There's No Such Thing As Society
The United States is lonely. Everyone knows it, but few know it the way I know it.
Called The Vietnam War in the United States, it’s called The American War here in Vietnam.
On the one hand, my country did atrocious things to theirs, things they witnessed, horrors that still haven’t gone away, like the fallout of agent orange and unexploded bombs still lurking all over Southeast Asia. On the other hand, I wasn’t even born yet.
The great tragedy that I implore my American peers to acknowledge, no matter how uncomfortable, is that the American map to paradise has always, without fail, been a map to a paradise that’s already been established by someone else, someone else’s paradise that needed to be destroyed, be they African slaves sent to the U.S. on ships, ways of life that America perceived as a threat, Latin American countries with labor and resources that needed to be exploited, the list goes on. The map wasn’t just a lie that’s defrauded you, but it’s harmed many more people around the world far worse than you’re hurting right now.