I’m going to bet that for most of you, 2023 hasn’t really started yet. January tends to be a month of nihilism lurking menacingly under a theater of meaning-making. You emerge from an inward-directed fortnight, devoted to personal reflection, family intimacy (welcome or not), and planning rituals, into a fresh-washed world that needs re-engaging.

And then… a stall.

With a sinking feeling, you admit to yourself that you cannot just cold-start a year after the holiday pause based on well-laid color-by-numbers plans. So many words to write, books to read, pounds to lose, miles to run, pounds to lift, promotions or jobs to get, prizes to win, Everests to climb…

Somewhere deep down you know this is no way to live. This is sound and fury signifying nothing. Without an emotional keynote to guide you, it is hard to know what part of that all-at-once complexity to attend to. Even the skeleton of a year in prospect, let alone one clothed in the flesh and blood of events and action, is overwhelming.

Low-ambiguity emotions, it turns out, are the prioritization hacks the productivity mavens can’t help you bootstrap. That intuitive click of strategic orientation is as much a feeling of finding emotional rightness in relation to the world as it is an elegant sense of how to take it on. And it cannot be found in your brainstorming notes, your annual resolutions, or further introspective forays inwards. It can only be found in the world outside, because it is about how you belong in the world and what you see in it, not who you are.

So you have to decide how to care about the world before you can get going, and the seed for that caring has to be found out in the world, not within the more intimate or personal zones of your life.

Adopting an emotional posture towards the year ahead is necessary, and perhaps sufficient to get going. You can do without the well-laid plan and list of resolutions, but you cannot do without a direction-setting mood, a vibe vector. A default disposition with which to respond to the events that are going to start coming at you.

Traditionally, this mood is supposed to be an optimistic one. Fresh starts, blank sheets, and so on. But any relatively unambiguous mood will do. A sense of grim doom will work just as well as a sense of renewed enchantment. What matters is that the mood be pure and legible enough to be destabilizing and animating. Low emotional entropy is necessary to get you going. The right mood helps you intuit what to attend to first, then second, then third…. the mood creates time for you.

The stakes are high. If you do not pick a mood with which to engage the year, you will slip into a period of anxious ennui, until one is picked for you by the the gathering momentum of lifelessly evolving circumstances, such as the tax documents piling up in your inbox. And then before you know it, your lifeless plans have lifelessly unraveled, January has turned into August, and the heat death phase of the year has taken over.

That’s why I find January to be, as I said, nihilism lurking menacingly beneath a theater of meaning-making. The right starter mood of the year makes the difference between faking it or making it for yet another year. It will shape how you care about the world for the whole year ahead. And increasingly, it is hard to find.

For the last several years, I’ve usually found my starter mood on Twitter. We had peak Wordle frenzy in January 2022 (which got me thinking and writing about Derangements), and sea shanties in January 2021 (which got me thinking and writing about Involvement Music).

Curiously, I find that my mood-setting vibe vectors tend to be small currents of conviviality like this, rather than major news events like the Capitol Hill insurrection two years ago, or Kobe Bryant’s death three years ago. This is why Twitter was an exceptional place to go moodstrapping in past years. Whatever momentous and tumultuous crap was unfolding at higher altitudes, down at the shitposter altitudes, there was usually human-scale public fun to be had, and mood-dowsing to be done.

In hindsight, pre-Musk Twitter was, if not a “town square,” a genuine tool of conviviality in the sense Ivan Illich. And at no time was this more evident than in January. Beneath the sloshing-about of ceremonial New Year’s goodwill, there used to be an undercurrent of emotional sensemaking that found expression in the lively contest of little trends competing to break the internet and set the tone for the year.

Now of course, that’s gone. As best as I could tell from my newfound spectator role, New Year’s on Twitter this year seemed to feature only a forced bonhomie reminiscent of the Windows 95 launch, with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer dancing awkwardly onstage.

No good-natured memes have won the hearts or minds of the Very Online, at least on Twitter. And it’s not clear anything similar can happen anywhere else. The highlight of 2023 so far has been a rather joyless and mean-spirited dunkfest on the book-a-week reading plans of podcaster Lex Fridman. The episode is particularly notable because we typically tend to January generosity when it comes to validation of people’s ceremonial resolutions. Even the jokes about gym attendance tend to be good-natured. But thanks to the Muskening, the positive vibes on Twitter, both vector and scalar, appear to have dissipated. You have to go moodstrapping elsewhere. Twitter is now a place for Real Men™ to dunk on each other’s little impostures and hypocrisies, not snowflakes seeking elusive vibes and memes to start their years.

I think the lesson of Fridmangate is that the world at large is suffering from a sort of emotional imposter syndrome. For the first time in many years, none of us knows quite how to feel about the year ahead, and so it becomes tempting to dunk on particularly forced-seeming attempts to manufacture animating moods. Some are faking affective attitudes of engagement they don’t feel. Others are calling bullshit on them for pretending to care, but struggling to find ways to care ourselves.

Sincerely felt animating moods and emotional postures are the core of what I think of as logics of caring. A logic of caring is a coherent way to feel about the world; a way that has a certain robustness to the emotional tumult of events small and large, and the cognitive potential to breathe life into the lifeless color-by-numbers plans we tend to make for ourselves periodically.

And in recent years, good logics of caring have become harder and harder to come by.

Until the Great Weirding, there was a sort of default Whiggish logic of caring available to all to make use of. You were supposed to care that Hans Rosling’s graphs were climbing steadily up and to the right, and many actually kinda managed it. There was also a default way to reject that default logic, with an alternate logic of gloom, and again many managed to do adopt that for themselves, quite sincerely.

Either way, until January 2017, deciding how to care about the year ahead was a no-brainer. A Coke-vs-Pepsi choice. Emotional postures that were distinct without being different.

In 2017, the fragile but genuine larger logics of caring began breaking down. You could, of course, be for or against Trump (or AOC, or Wokeism, or Bolsanaro, or Orban, or Johnson…), but it felt a little… narrow. We called these degenerate logics of caring derangement syndromes precisely because they seemed too narrow to serve as ways of caring about the world at large.

But despite their obviously unsatisfactory quality, derangement syndromes of one sort or the other replaced the expansive logics of caring of the past. At its heart, tribalism, in the sense of the modern slur rather than the historic condition, is about degeneracy in logics of caring.

So between 2017-20, there was something obviously degenerate about how we cared about the world through various narrow lenses, but we seemed unable to do anything emotionally smarter. A particularly vivid and public example has been Main Character Musk himself. The man who once declared that humanity must become a multi-planet species (an expansive logic of caring whether or not you agree with it or believe that it was sincerely held) is now obsessed with defeating the “woke mind-virus,” and is tweeting about the irony of being the Man of the Year a year ago while watching his fortune (and fortunes) dwindle.

We did enjoy a brief respite though. In January 2020, the pandemic rudely yanked us out of our narrow derangements, at least for a while. For a brief period, our imaginations expanded, and we talked of ancient pandemics, cultivated a deep sense of history, and paid compassionate attention to the world at large, beyond the objects of our various derangements. And whatever we believed about the pandemic and the early responses to it, we acted like the citizens of the world we were, rather than deranged obsessives. We were governed by a real, if short-lived, logic of caring.

It didn’t last, of course, and we soon traded historical curiosity about the Black Death and the Spanish Flu, and concern for nurses around the world, for newly rebottled old derangements.

It was nice while it lasted.

But now, in January 2023, we find ourselves, for the first time in decades, without a default logic of caring to work with. There is no obvious animating mood to surrender to, fiercely resist, or imaginatively break from. It’s an emotional doldrums. Whiggish optimism is dead. Trump and his cohorts around the world have slid into relatively ignorable obscurity. Covid has been declared over by fiat. The emotional urgencies of climate change, if not the actual challenges, have been tamed by bureaucratic capture. The Ukraine conflict has receded from the headlines. We’re reduced to watching an exciting game of 0-0 draw soccer. The most interesting thing going on in the world right now is literally the weather.

There are no worldwinds to work with. No natural sources of narrative urgency to tap into.

The only individuals who still seem to be governed by animating moods powerful enough to punch through the collective fog of anxious ennui are those drawing down the destabilizing potential of unprocessed personal traumas and insecurities. We are living off the fucked-upness fossil fuels of individuals too trapped by their pasts to notice the absurdities of the present. So they soldier on, still trying to win worlds others can no longer even see.

Yet, even they must, I feel, be alive to the slight ridiculousness of keepin’ on hustling when the larger narratives, from which such logics of traumatized caring are derived, are themselves unraveling. But maybe not.

At some level, I am mildly envious of Kevin McCarthy who, as I write, is reducing himself to a state of utter humiliation in pursuit of a once-powerful job (Speaker of the US House of Representatives) that apparently nobody wants now, within a larger story nobody else can make sense of anymore. His career seems animated by neither a logic of caring, nor a derangement syndrome, but some hidden mainspring of masochism-causing trauma within him. He is the main character of a kind of zombie history playing out, thanks to the sheer lifeless momentum of such things as budgets and taxes. Later this year, we will see this begin to unfold on a larger scale, as the crackpots who still want to be President of the US go at each other in tired televised debates I suspect fewer people than ever will watch. It is hard to care anymore about who gets to be President. Anyone who wants it is too insane, too old, or both, for anything good to come of it.

Possibly it’s about the money. If nothing else works, money tends to supply, if not a real logic of caring, a usable ersatz substitute that works for a certain weird subset of humanity that cannot tell the difference between caring about money and caring about the world. If enough ambitious and driven people don’t know how to care about the world, but do know how to care about money, the show can go on for everybody. Money can make the world go around perhaps because it is the only logic of caring for some, and it works well enough that that is enough.

At smaller scales, you can see similar trajectories unfolding elsewhere. Entrepreneurs hustling along even as Silicon Valley loses the plot. Traders in regular and crypto-markets going through the motions even as nobody appears able to make sense of the underlying economic landscapes. James Cameron continuing to make huge-budget movies that nobody seems able to genuinely care for.

But it all feels like a rearguard effort. The enervating moods of the last few years — Goblin mode, quiet quitting, laying flat — are still with us, and gaining strength, steadily undermining all prevailing logics of caring, turning them into zombie logics.

There are, of course, the various perverse logics of pseudocaring waiting in the wings as always; the various urges towards reactionary re-enchantment and wishful utopianism. But none of these larps seems any more likely to come truly alive in 2023 than in any previous recent year. And we’ve lived with these perverse logics for long enough now, it’s hard to conjure up any particularly fresh anxieties about them.

Given this bleak landscape of failing and stillborn logics of caring all around us, I should feel hopelessly nihilistic right now, but curiously I don’t. I’ve spent the last few weeks making a clock, building Meccano models, and re-reading the Sherlock Holmes canon, and I don’t feel particularly oppressed by the bleakness, even though intellectually I feel like I ought to.

In fact, I am feeling weirdly relieved about how this year is getting started. For the first time in a long time, we don’t have to pretend to be for or against large cartoon grand narratives of the world. We don’t have to talk ourselves into hustles. We don’t have to pick from a menu of derangements to respond to the world. We can set aside too-familiar fears about various demons and mind-viruses lurking in the margins — if they were going to destroy the world, they would have done so already. The world seems able to accommodate their marginal presence without falling apart.

So we can just wait patiently for the right mood to come along, and learn to care about the world by actually just living in it, rather than in some emotionally charged simulation of it, hewing to one historicist script or another. We have to get our logics of caring from somewhere, but it doesn’t have to be from stories for children. We can actually just attend to the world we’re living in, rather than to derelict stories about it. Stories are nice to have, but it is better to have no story than a bad one.

Sure it makes caring harder, and in consequence, planning and scheming and resolution-ing harder as well. But on the other hand, we’re off the clock now. So long as you pay your bills and manage to stay alive, no particular historicist urgency need infuse your calendars and to-do lists. The upside of two years of quiet, progressive disengagement from overweening grand narratives is that we are finally starting to find the seeds of real agency in the ruins of apparent historical necessity.

Perhaps we had to quiet-quit the world to actually begin living in it, and that’s the condition in which true logics of caring are to be found.