Survival Is Insufficient: The Value of Art in a Dying World
[Special Note: This is an article I wrote in the spring of 2021, a year after lockdowns, so it’s a bit dated, but I wanted to share it here because it still captures a relevant picture of the world we live in—and why art still matters. Perhaps even more so now than ever.]
It’s been a year.
During that time, I’ve done almost no writing. Very little reading. Lots of watching the world crumble and thinking, what to do, what to do—where do we go from here? It’s survival now.
Cities have fallen to ruin, people I know have lost their livelihoods, dreams, and futures, books are burning, our faceless internet society has come to life, and none of this matters to the ruling elite because it doesn’t have to matter to them.
Our world is rotting and there’s no use denying it. Probably, it’s been this way for a long time and we just didn’t know it because we were too busy with things like fleeting internet fame and vapid celebrity gossip. It came slowly, then all at once.
I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out how to write this post. I’ve spent a long time looking into the black abyss of nihilism and wondering, is it even worth it? Is anything? But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, so it must be. Because survival is insufficient.
A Core of Humanity
As I said, I haven’t read much this past year—everything was such a nightmare—but one book I did read was Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a book about a disease that wipes out roughly 95% of the world’s population, leaving behind an apocalyptic wasteland where the remainder of humanity must survive. The real reason I picked it up, though, was because it followed a traveling symphony, which was the last thing I expected from a survival story. Without spoilers, the question was this: In a dead world, in a shell of society, there’s more to humanity than mere survival—and if there’s not, is it really humanity?
This stuck with me all year as I watched people struggle, drift apart, even denounce one another under an orthodoxy of fear. Where’s the symphony, I thought, what’s there to keep people from going mad?
And I realized: there was nothing.
Art itself was dying—and what art was left was just another manufactured corporate echo of the orthodoxy of the dying world. There was nothing new. Nothing real. Nothing human.
But there needed to be. For the love of God, there needed to be.
A Way Forward
Finally, I’ve started to think about writing again—seriously. Over the past couple of months, I wrote a few pieces of short fiction, and I realized, this has become more important to me than ever before. Not because there’s fame or money to be had (there probably isn’t) and not because I have something to prove to people—but because survival is insufficient.
Because the future I want isn’t a bottomless abyss where nothing matters. Not for me, not for anyone.
Together, we must find a way forward. And one of those ways, I think, is art—daring, honest art that can’t be forced into the shoebox of conformity, that isn’t destined to pace the same six by ten prison cell until it’s worn a hole through the carpet.
We need fresh art and fresh perspectives to feed the souls of people—regular people—who are crying out for water in a parched and withered landscape. And who will give it to them? Who will be the symphony?
It’s up to us. You. Me. Regular people. People who are willing to stand up, face the dying world, and work to build something better. Human beings were created to create, and so that’s what we must do—because survival is insufficient.
And now, my friends, Excelsior!