The 21st Century: Our Miserable Present

The 21st Century: Our Miserable Present 

If the 20th century was the stress test, the 21st century feels like the crash afterward: the long, dreary, numbing aftermath of the test results coming back inconclusive, contradictory, and disappointing.

The 21st century is Depression. Not in the economic sense (though that too, periodically), but in the psychological, existential sense. We’re not shocked, angry, or even bargaining anymore. We’re just… tired.

This is the era where the weight of everything finally sinks in:

Climate change isn’t a warning — it’s a reality.

The internet didn’t free us — it fragmented us.

The global market feels less like an economic model and more like a hostage situation.

We don’t expect things to get better, we expect them to get worse more efficiently.

There’s a certain bleak comedy to it:

Mental health is openly discussed, but everyone's depressed.

Everything is “connected,” yet isolation is epidemic.

We’re living longer, but not living better.

We have more “content” than any civilization in history, yet can’t remember what we watched 30 minutes ago. We work constantly while being told that AI is about to take our jobs. But not soon enough, apparently.

We're in the middle of a civilization wide burnout. We doom scroll in the morning, attend Zoom calls in the afternoon, and watch dystopian shows at night for fun.

And deep down, people are starting to ask questions that used to only show up in speculative fiction:

What if there’s no big fix?

What if this is the future?

What if meaning isn’t coming?

There’s a constant low level mourning for a world that feels like it should have been, a timeline that branched away somewhere around 2001 or 2008 and never came back.

Even the tech we worshipped has lost its shine.

Social media turned social life into a performance.

Smartphones made us dumber.

AI, the holy grail, feels less like salvation and more like the end credits rolling.

And yet, we go on. Because depression isn’t surrender, it’s survival. It’s numbness with occasional flickers of clarity, irony, rage, and yes, still… hope.

We’re in the long winter of the modern world, you could say a "winter of discontent", and most of us don’t know if spring is coming or if this is spring, and we just forgot how to feel it. The 21st century marks a shift. The shock of the 16th century, the denial of the 17th, the anger of the 18th, the bargaining of the 19th, and the testing of the 20th have all brought us here... to depression.

And this isn’t metaphorical. It’s literal. Rates of clinical depression, anxiety, and mental health crises have skyrocketed around the world, especially in the most “advanced” nations. In the United States, suicide is one of the leading causes of death. The World Health Organization calls depression the leading cause of disability globally. This is not a glitch in the system. This is the system now.

The 21st century is the century of stagnation. Everyone is too depressed to do or make anything. Even the people whose jobs are to create and innovate, like the entertainment industry and the tech industry, were merely just going through the process of making something generic and going home. They're just going through the motions making lackluster blockbusters, a slightly bigger cell phone or car, generic music, and by the number TV shows.  This is a time where people put in no effort or make the product bad out of spite for being forced to make it. This is a century just packed with nothing but sequels and remakes. This is the exact opposite of the shock stage of the 16th century whereas in the 16th century, people were shocked by new ideas, where everything felt explosive and unpredictable with new things being abundant everywhere. In the 21st century, people are bored by the present. It feels repetitive, stagnant, and devoid of vision. The present is monotonous, hyper managed, and drained.  Sure there are amazing stuff that has come out of the depression era but these are few and far between. For every great piece of media like Hacks or Blade Runner 2049, there are about 50 or 60 "Disney Live Action remakes". It is a dark time. 

It seems that between the 16th and 20th centuries there was a sense of energy and vigor from the people of those centuries who wanted to go out and be a part of the world. Whereas in the 21st century, people just felt…soulless. All life and energy had been drained from society. 

And the emotional response? It's everywhere. We’ve built entire subcultures around our collective sadness. Emo music dominated the 2000s. Doomer culture and "black pill" philosophy are online manifestations of total resignation: not just apathy, but anti hope. Even the memes, drenched in irony, sarcasm, and existential dread, reflect a culture that knows something is broken but feels powerless to fix it.

We are now a civilization whose default emotional setting is burnout. The 21st century didn’t bring us into a better future: it handed us the bill for the past 500 years.

The old optimism of the 19th and 20th century worlds, that technology and rationality would deliver utopia, has curdled into nihilism. Social media, once heralded as the next step in human connection, has accelerated isolation, division, and hatred. We are more “connected” than ever, yet lonelier than any generation in recorded history.

Even conservative movements of the 21st century are extremely depressing and nihilistic. In the 17th century denial stage, tradition was embraced with the hope of achieving salvation and a better, more sinless society. In contrast, the 21st century pushback is bitter. It is resentful. It is often populist but more bleak. Populist movements around the world don’t just offer a genuine return to the past: they offer revenge fantasies. Their nostalgia is weaponized. Their worldview isn’t hopeful...it’s exhausted. You can see this since conservative movements believe the West is falling, how Western Civilization is going to fall because of feminism, soy, gay people, trans people, and others. And how the solution is to push the most bleak, authoritarian policies possible. Their messages often sound more like: “Burn it all down because nothing matters anyway.”

And so, people look backward. Because of this century's nightmare, nostalgia was ever present. Although nostalgia has always existed, the 21st century depression era was probably when nostalgia would increase more than ever before. It is everywhere in the century, with everyone getting stuck in the past and wanting better times compared to the more bland present. 

Patriotism and nationalism is on the decline across the Western World in the 21st century unlike in the bargaining era or even the testing era. People couldn't even pretend to look forward to the future or have faith in their countries anymore. The only thing people have the most passion for during this period was nostalgia for a better time or a longing for a simple era. The simple time could range from the 1990s to all the way to before the industrialization of the bargaining era. Or a wishing for “acceleration” so society collapses and we could start over. In a way there was a Y2K bug that caused a collapse just not quite in the literal sense people expected it too. Everyone was just waiting for something to happen. 

This century is like one…long… hour glass. It was purgatory, an endless sea of gray. Everything was dull and disheartening. Everyone was hollow. 

The 21st century did not just have nostalgia for the past, it also saw lots of contempt and anger towards the past, though unlike the 18th century, this isn’t anger for the modern world, but rather, anger against it, or against certain parts of it. The need to criticize modern history, again, has always existed but it was at its peak during the depression era. Statues of figures like Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes and others have been contested or removed or vandalized. It saw groups like the 1619 Project, which reframes U.S. history around the legacy of slavery, suggesting 1619, the arrival of the first enslaved Africans, as a foundational date. There are even people suggesting that countries such as Britain and America and others are inherently racist and founded on white supremacy and try to argue their countries were “never great”. But it's not just on the left, oh no. Even on the right, people try to revise history such as claiming Churchill “was the villain of World War II” or try to go after any early movements in history just for somewhat being behind modern progressivism and the problems of today. 

It seems the 21st century would just not let go of the past, whether through nostalgia or anger over it. An obsession with the past is common during depression. I think it's safe to say when one is happy, they aren't going to reminisce about earlier times. If one is happy, they are living in the moment. Even if one is angry, they are focusing on the future and trying to change right now. Your anger is directed towards a problem now and towards a person currently. It is only in sadness that reflects on the past and looks backwards on what was lost. It is based on the idea that if things went differently, life would be better. 

This is the true face of 21st century depression: not just sadness, but a kind of emotional collapse. Institutions no longer inspire trust. Governments appear impotent. Economic systems seem rigged. Even the climate, the literal environment, reflects the mood: hotter, sadder, more unstable.

We’ve stopped testing the modern world. We’ve stopped bargaining with it.

Now, we’re just moping about it.

This century is not defined by what we’re doing, but by what we’ve stopped believing in. Faith in anything. In meaning. In the idea that things can be better. All of it feels… distant. And the result is a spiritual stagnation unlike anything in prior centuries. Even the wars and violence now feel automated, senseless, endless. The grief of the premodern world has bottomed out into existential fatigue. 

But if the stages of grief continue, then perhaps…

A new stage is coming.

Our stages of grief continue...