Farewell, 2022, You Were Annoying

Highlights from the year in which righteous anger gave way to Meta Rage

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VERY FEW OF MY APOCALYPSE FANTASIES qualify as cheerful, but there's one that brings a smile to my face: It's a few years into the future, and the world is ravaged by war and wildfires. A solemn-looking young boy and his determined father push a rusted shopping cart down a desolate street. Think Cormac McCarthy's The Road but real, and therefore tacky. The boy tugs at his dad's sleeve. "Father," he asks, "were you alive before everything fell apart?" The man nods. "What did you do to stop it?" The man crouches down, puts his hand on his son's shoulder, and-his eyes watering from emotion and ash-says, "I wrote a brutal one-star Yelp review for an animal shelter because they had a drag-queen story hour for rescue dogs."

We are facing disaster in about 60 different ways. Climate devastation? You bet. Fascism? On the rise. More pandemics? Seems likely. Civil war? Possibly. Nuclear war? Throw it on the pile. A new Red Hot Chili Peppers album? No: This year, we got two. Life in 2022 felt like waiting for the other shoe to drop, in a bed next to a space heater, in a building that could implode at any moment with no warning. The Doomsday Clock has been set to "we are 20 minutes late for Doomsday." The shit is real is what I'm saying. Instead of mobilizing to at least try to get something done, we largely retreated into the safety of empty outrage. In the face of problems we felt increasingly powerless to solve, we created little problems in our minds and demanded action against those. The prolonged and sometimes productive anger of 2020 gave way this year to a repeated and always performative gettin' up of dander. 2022 was all about Meta Rage.