You’re scrolling through your feed and you see a video of a robot dog dancing to a song written by a math equation while, in the background, a literal forest fire is being livestreamed by a drone. It’s a lot. Honestly, it’s too much. You probably muttered it to yourself this morning: what a stupid time to be alive.
It’s not just a meme anymore. It’s a legitimate sociological vibe. We are currently living in a period of "polycrisis"—a term popularised by historian Adam Tooze—where the sheer volume of weird, high-stakes, and deeply dumb events happening simultaneously has broken our collective ability to process reality. We have the sum of all human knowledge in our pockets, yet we use it to argue with strangers about whether a certain celebrity’s pregnancy was "faked" by a PR firm.
Complexity is everywhere. We’ve reached a point where the world is so interconnected that a stuck boat in the Suez Canal can literally make your favorite cereal more expensive six months later. It’s absurd. It feels like we’re living in a simulation that’s running out of RAM, and the glitches are starting to show.
The Attention Economy Is Making Us All A Little Bit Worse
Basically, everything you see online is designed to make you angry or shocked. Why? Because those are the emotions that keep you clicking. Researchers at NYU found that "moral-emotional" language increases diffusion by 20% for every word added. We aren't being fed the truth; we're being fed whatever keeps us from putting the phone down.
This creates a cycle of "doomscrolling." You know the feeling. You start out looking for a recipe and end up reading about the impending collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). By the time you’ve finished your morning coffee, you’ve already processed more existential dread than a 14th-century peasant did in a lifetime.
It’s a stupid time to be alive because our brains haven’t evolved to handle this. We are biologically wired for a village of 150 people—Robin Dunbar’s famous "Dunbar’s Number." Instead, we’re trying to manage the opinions, tragedies, and dance routines of 8 billion people. It’s exhausting. You’ve probably noticed your attention span shrinking. It’s not your fault. The platforms are literally outplaying your dopamine receptors.
The Rise of "Slop" and the Death of Nuance
Have you noticed how much of the internet is just... bad now? 2024 and 2025 saw a massive influx of "AI slop"—content generated by machines, for machines, to trick search engines into showing you ads. You search for "how to fix a leaky faucet" and get a 2,000-word essay that says nothing.
This degrades our trust. When you can’t trust a photo, a video, or an article, your brain starts to switch off. You stop caring. This is "cynical fatigue." It’s a defense mechanism. If everything is fake, nothing matters, right? But things do matter. That’s the tension. We are living through massive historical shifts while being distracted by the digital equivalent of jingling keys.
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Reality Is Now Stranger Than Satire
Look at the headlines from the last year. If you had shown them to someone in 2010, they’d think you were writing a bad sci-fi novel. We have billionaires cage-fighting (or at least talking about it) while competing to colonize Mars. We have influencers making millions by pretending to be "non-playable characters" (NPCs) on live streams, repeating phrases like "ice cream so good" for hours.
It feels like a parody.
Satirical sites like The Onion have actually struggled recently because real news is often more ridiculous than anything they can invent. This is the "Poe’s Law" of modern existence—the idea that without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it's impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of it.
Why We Are All So Weirdly Nostalgic
Notice how everyone is obsessed with the 90s and early 2000s right now? It’s not just fashion. It’s a longing for a time when things felt "solid." Before the algorithms took over. Before every moment of your life had to be "content."
In 2002, you could go to a concert and just... watch it. Now, you’re watching it through the screen of the person in front of you who is recording it for followers they don't even like. It's performative. We’ve traded presence for "reach."
We’re nostalgic for a time when a "viral video" was just a guy falling off a ladder once every six months, not a constant stream of manufactured outrage. The simplicity of that era feels like a luxury now.
The "Optimism Gap" and Why You're Actually Okay
Here’s a weird fact: most people think the world is going to hell, but they personally feel okay about their own lives. This is the "Optimism Gap." Data from Gallup and other major pollsters consistently shows that people's perception of "the country" or "the world" is significantly lower than their perception of their own well-being, local community, and job.
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We are being tricked by the macro view.
The internet gives us a "God-eye view" of every tragedy on earth. In reality, your neighbor probably still helps you shovel your driveway. Your local coffee shop still knows your order. The "stupid time" is mostly happening in the digital layer we’ve draped over reality.
How to Survive the Stupidity
You can't change the fact that we’re in a weird historical bottleneck. But you can change how much of it you let into your brain. It sounds like a cliché, but "touching grass" is actually backed by science.
A study published in Scientific Reports found that spending just 120 minutes a week in nature significantly boosts health and well-being. It’s about grounding yourself in the physical world. The physical world isn't "stupid"—it's predictable. Gravity works. Trees grow. Dogs are happy to see you.
The Economy of Absurdity
Let’s talk money, because that’s where the "stupid" feeling gets really painful. We are living in an era where housing prices in some cities have decoupled entirely from local wages. In 2026, the dream of owning a home feels like a hallucination for many under 40.
Instead of traditional wealth-building, we see "lottery-ticket" investing. People putting their life savings into "memecoins" named after frogs or dogs. It’s a rational response to an irrational system. If the "normal" path (save 10%, work 40 years) is broken, why not bet it all on a digital token?
This is what happens when the future feels uncertain. We stop planning and start gambling. It’s another symptom of the "what a stupid time to be alive" phenomenon. When the macro-economy feels like a casino, people start playing the slots.
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The Weirdness of Modern Work
Then there’s the work itself. David Graeber wrote about "Bullshit Jobs" years ago, and it’s only gotten more intense. We have millions of people working in "middle-management" roles where they just move emails from one folder to another.
AI was supposed to automate the boring stuff so we could paint and write poetry. Instead, AI is writing the poetry and painting the art, while humans are still stuck doing the data entry to train the AI. It’s the exact opposite of what we were promised.
Is There a Way Out?
Probably not "out," but definitely "through." History is full of these weird transitions. The Industrial Revolution felt like a "stupid time" to the people whose lives were upended by machines. The invention of the printing press led to 100 years of religious wars because people finally had access to information they weren't ready to handle.
We are in the "Information Dark Age." We have the tech, but we don't have the wisdom yet.
We are the pioneers of a new way of being human—one that is permanently connected. We’re the "test pilots" for this lifestyle, and yeah, we’re crashing into the walls a lot. It’s messy. It’s loud. It’s frequently embarrassing.
Practical Steps for Your Sanity
If you're feeling the weight of the absurdity, there are things you can do that aren't just "delete your apps."
- Curate your inputs aggressively. If an account makes you feel like the world is ending every time you see their posts, unfollow them. Even if they’re "right." You don’t need to be updated on the apocalypse every 15 minutes.
- Prioritize "High-Resolution" experiences. A text is low-res. A phone call is medium-res. A coffee in person is high-res. The higher the resolution, the more "human" you feel.
- Accept the absurdity. Sometimes, you just have to laugh. The world is a circus. You can either be a stressed-out spectator or you can just enjoy the show.
- Focus on the local. You can’t fix a geopolitical crisis in a country you can’t find on a map. You can fix the broken fence in your backyard or volunteer at a local shelter. Impact feels better than observation.
The world might be moving in a direction that feels nonsensical, but your life doesn't have to follow suit. We are living through a massive, global experiment in human psychology. It’s okay to acknowledge that it’s weird. It’s okay to feel like everything is a bit "off."
By narrowing your focus to what you can actually control, you stop being a victim of the "stupid time" and start being a person who just happens to be living in it.
Actionable Next Steps
- Audit your notifications tonight. Turn off everything that isn't from a real person you actually know. You don't need news alerts, game reminders, or shopping "deals."
- Establish a "No-Screen" hour. Pick one hour before bed where the "stupid world" isn't allowed in. Read a physical book. Build a Lego set. Stare at a wall. Anything that isn't digital.
- Pick one "analog" hobby. Start something that requires your hands and has a physical result. Gardening, woodworking, baking—something that the algorithm can't touch or optimize.
- Limit your "outrage consumption." If you find yourself reading a 50-tweet thread about a controversy that won't matter in three days, close the tab. Your time is literally the only thing you truly own. Stop giving it to people who want to make you mad for profit.
The noise isn't going away. If anything, it’s going to get louder as AI makes it easier to scream into the void. The only way to win is to stop listening to the volume and start listening to the things that are actually real. It’s a weird time, sure. But it’s the only time we’ve got.