We all thought it was just us, right? Every time you pick up a book or a story, it seems more perverse and depressing than the one before. Ever since the 1990s, the written word has generally been a huge downer. Just us imagining it, we must be weirdos. Right?
Nope. It seems that around 1999-2000, something really did happen. Some guys and gals did a paper on it. The results are, hmm, interesting:Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.
Emphasis mine. Note that they did this analysis in three languages, English, German and Spanish.
It is worth reading the original article, which is found here. PDF downloadable. The graphs are particularly interesting.
This coincides with the timing of me starting to complain I couldn't find anything to read. By 2014 I'd abandoned reading entirely and took up writing instead, which is when the graphs level out at a high level. Currently I read only from a small stable of authors whose works I enjoy, largely I think because they're not depressing and hopeless.
The timing also coincides with the Sad Puppies 1-2-3-4 campaigns in the Hugo Awards. Larry Correia didn't get pissed off over nothing, methinks.
It is difficult not to seize on this study and scream "SEE? I TOLD YOU SO!!!" I'd welcome some more studies like this to start refining this idea that the media we are exposed to is becoming more depressing every year. Also to bring in some other correlations like the sales of antidepressants, geographic and demographic data on depression and anxiety disorders, etc.
My off-the-cuff reaction to this is that these guys really got a hold of something here. This is a real thing. The -causes- of it are another question entirely. I'll -guess- that it has a lot to do with the rise of Post-Modernism and it's little brother Critical Race Theory in the ivory tower, and also the consolidation of the publishing industry in N. America and Europe. In my oh-so-humble opinion some research into the incidence of major depression and anxiety disorders in the publishing industry might prove very fruitful indeed.
Note that trad pub's employees skew heavily (very very heavily*) to the white woke female demographic. This is a group that has been indoctrinated in the idea that things are terrible and getting worse and who tend to have miserable personal lives because of the lack of gentlemen (as in behaving like one) for them to meet, date and marry. Plus they tend to live in urban semi-shitholes on limited salaries while they see people they know who sold out to banking or law making enormous sums of money and selfishly not spending it on them.
ReplyDelete*not implying that individually they are heavy (though some certainly are)
Hi Francis,
ReplyDeleteYes, the pink-haired SJW set, that was my thought as well. But this is three different languages we're talking about here. This is a pretty big deal, bigger that New York publishing.
Interestingly, I've noticed the same thing about TV shows. Granted, I don't watch many - but I used to watch a few of the comic book shows. (The Flash, etc.)
ReplyDeleteI've long since dropped them all - honestly don't even know which ones are still running, and don't really care. I could maybe tolerate the typical leftist messaging, but they pretty much all descended into dark and depressing themes and never really found their way out.
I've always preferred the traditional, uplifting comic book hero, but I guess the leftists running the show can't stand that anymore.
Hell, in one of the most cringeworthy moments in recent cinematic history, they couldn't even let Superman say "Truth, justice, and the American way." A pox on all their houses.
True. The exact same demographic are the librarians, the sales clerks and bookshops (to the extent they exist still) and so on.
ReplyDeleteAll the gatekeepers are that demographic or closely related ones. So we're (they're) kind of trapped. Fortunately there's indie publishing and (Amazon) ebooks so non-depressing fiction is easy to find once you start looking
In a wider sense though I think that (in the US) post Bill Clinton, the left lost any positive thoughts and that seeped through the various bastions of leftism like the MSM and academia.
Clinton (and Tony Blair in the UK who was of very much the same mould) sold the population on leftist ideas with some kind of inspirational message. Obama kind of sold the population on the inspiration that HE was a sign of positive change. But that's it. The fact that Trump could say "make America great again" and have that be mocked is somewhat mindblowing. In the past the left wanted America to be great too. They may have had a different idea of what "great" involved but they wanted America and Western civilization to prevail. Now they don't and I don't really see why. Particularly when you look at things objectively the world is (even with the current covidiocy) massively better off than it was before.
And while you may not think that other countries should not be influence by US culture the fact is they are. Germany for sure, both in mocking the uneducated 'rednecks' and in sucking up to the glamour of Hollywood.
I don't know enough about Spanish language culture/literature to know whether there are differences between Spain and Latin America (or between nations IN Latin America) but I would not be at all surprised that their intellectuals are similar.
Prizes and recognition have been going to "dark" themes and negative protagonists for a long time, if you look at lists of "great literature." Just thinking about literature I read through my undergraduate years, there are lots of celebrated authors that were no fun:
ReplyDelete1. Hemingway (the Nick Adams stories should come with anti-depressants)
2. Borges ("Emma Zunz" is perhaps not well-known in English, but it gets in the head of a murderess; he has many of these)
3. Poe
4. Gabriel García Márquez (not just the ants-eat-the-final-baby "Cien Años de Soledad" but depressing short stories)
5. Ray Bradbury (I really like his work, but "Something Wicked This Way Comes" has no happy ending and amidst all the wonderful Eternal Family stories is poor mortal Timothy)
6. Katherine Anne Porter (I can't remember the names of these short stories, but how's this for a theme: a child loses his innocence after drowning his kitten, another child accidently reveals the criminal neglect of a neighbor mother whose disabled child died, yet another child is being used by his favorite "aunt" as an excuse to rendezvous with a married man, and the adult child known only as "Him" is finally sent to an institution)
7. I can't remember the gay author's name, but I read a Spanish novel in which a fierce Hispanic woman mourns her philandering gay father's deaths at the hands of a Marine hitchhiker he tried to seduce aka assaulted. (Did I mention "gay"? Mi profesor did.)
Correlation between "great literature" of the past and depressing subject matter created the current feedback loop that pushes everything towards the Makes-Flannery-O'Connor-look-like-PG-Wodehouse Model.
I think the real problem is depressing children's books. Kids who sorta-like-to-read become hate-to-read when all assigned readings are about kids in wartime, coping with death in the family, or being misunderstood because of one's disability/race/sexual orientation.
Thinking of library books I read on my own, there were some tearjerkers like "I'm 15 and I Don't Want to Die" and "Where the Red Fern Grows," but my English teachers selected books like "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH," "A Wrinkle in Time," and "The Trumpet of the Swan" to read in class. (Special case: White's "Once and Future King," which I mistook for a kid's book. "Mom, what does 'mee-so-gee-nee' mean?")
There was only one author whose name I learned to avoid after getting burned three times: Katherine Paterson, Queen of Depressing Endings. She had four major awards (including two National Book Awards and a Newbury Medal) before 1980, so I'd characterize her as a contributor to the current malaise.
The problem isn't dark topics. I asked some middle school boys about their favorite books, and they pointed me to "Hatchet," "Ender's Game," and "Touching Spirit Bear" which are survival stories. They aren't depressing, though, because the protagonist survives and learns a thing (or three) about himself.