The Real Reason 'Nothing Ever Happens'

I'm all in...

I’ve decided to take a bit of a break from documenting the world of the Thieloids and GSF for a quick cultural digression (if you would indulge me here).

Memes come and go, usually without too much of a fuss and without being that interesting. In addition, most are quite forgettable. Which is something I can’t say for the, now seemingly ubiquitous, ‘nothing ever happens’ meme format.

A format that is notable, in my view, for a few reasons, primarily because not only is it funny and infuriating in equal measure, but also because it serves as a surprisingly revealing lens through which to understand one of our culture’s most profound neuroses. One that is shared, judged by the popularity of the format, by far more people than I had previously thought.

Let’s start by briefly discussing the obvious: in order to really ‘get’ the nothing ever happens memes, you have to understand their main subject: Chudjak. A character created to mock angry and resentful right-wing young men who spend too much time seeking release for their ennui by pursuing catharsis on the internet. One of Chudjak’s primary catchphrases, before ‘Nothing ever happens,’ was always ‘The West has fallen, billions must die.’

This declaration is a humorously melodramatic response to what, one assumes, are merely the petty personal disappointments and resentments that Chudjack, as the obvious stand-in for the right-wing anon, attempts to blame on the inscrutable waves of history. A situation he believes can be remedied only by some kind of cathartic and cataclysmic world-cleansing event in which ‘billions must die.’

But, absurd as it sounds when you describe it literally, I think there is very much something to this. As in, I believe it taps into something a huge amount of people are currently feeling on some level, to the point where it actively drives many of their actions and opinions.

I am obviously not the first one to remark on the strangeness or the ubiquity and popularity of ‘apocalyptic content’ of various stripes (primarily expressed in films and video games) throughout the last several decades. Usually this takes the form of various narratives in which society has been decimated by one or another cataclysm, leaving only small groups of intrepid survivors to rebuild amid the ruins. And though particular iterations of this kind of stuff come and go (zombie franchises seem largely played out at this point), the overall genre shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. And for good reason, I think, as the ‘apocalypse genre’ taps into many of the very real and deep dissatisfactions many (most?) people have with modern Western society.

Hence why the apocalypse, though portrayed as a disaster, is actually experienced as a kind of liberation for many of the fictional characters portrayed in the genre’s various stories.

After the great liberatory ‘happening’ event represented by any given apocalypse the stupidity and boredom of modern life are instantly and irrevocably abolished in favor of a new life of excitement and adventure. Characters are largely freed from the shackles of their previous lives, in many cases even including the baggage of the most supposedly sacred of family bonds, in favor of a now unencumbered future of independent survivalism and adventure.

In addition, our main character, almost always having the good fortune of being one of only a handful of survivors to escape death, has now experienced a profound boost in relative status. Regardless of whatever lowly position he may have suffered through in the previous dispensation, in this new apocalyptic world, regardless of how seemingly dire his situation may seem at any given time, he is now a ‘main character.’ He is now someone who matters, someone whose words and decisions carry weight and meaning—someone who is going places and doing things.

I think the appeal of this is all pretty obvious and i’m sure other people have written about it at length due to this very obviousness. However, there’s a bit more to this, at least when it comes to our ‘main character’: Chudjak.

12 Years a Chudjak

The Chudjak’s authoritative command that ‘billions must die’ reveals a desire for a similar type of emancipation on the part of the embittered right-wing anon whom he symbolizes.

‘Billions must die’ is a request for the cataclysmic event that Chudjak implicitly assumes would not only see those he resents (liberals, black and brown people, women, men with girlfriends, etc.) justly punished for their crimes but also the surge in relative status he believes he would also assuredly enjoy in the wake of said disaster. His current lack of which is the true basis of his assessment that ‘the West has fallen.’

Is this not precisely the exact source of the discontent that has infected much of the English-speaking world and also much of today’s Europe as well? A discontent felt by men in particular about their relative status (or lack thereof) in modern society?

Is this also not the key driver of so much of our unhappiness? And probably the best and simplest explanation for declining birthrates the world over (among many other social maladies)? Even at the risk of being a bit reductionist, I’d say so.

This is a truth that is often obscured by the economic arguments that tend to dominate the discourse among the allegedly educated and literate classes, which tend to skew toward both materialist diagnoses and corresponding technocratic fixes. In enters the everyman who says his life is much more expensive and generally worse now, and he feels much poorer and unhappier than his parents were at his age, and on cue the host will bring in some neo-libtard ‘expert,’ usually potato-shaped, to point out that ‘ackchyually’ per capita GDP is significantly higher than it was 30 years ago, etc.

[Pictured: a member of the potato shaped neoliberal ‘expert’ class]

In the economic sense there is a small element of truth to the neo-libtard’s arguments, but only an element of it. They end up obscuring the genuine economic and social concerns brought up by the everyman and are really a sort of semantic evasion of reality.

I don’t feel the need to get into why exactly your average neo-libtard expert is generally wrong about his economic assessments, as it is boring and also irrelevant to the point here. However, the bigger problem is that the very economic argument itself misses the point, as it is, once again, too reductive and fails to apprehend the real problem: that of relative social status.

And in a deep and abiding sense, it is truly the most ‘problematic’ of all social problems.

Simply put, while in a certain and limited way a rising tide can indeed lift all boats economically (as in, we all technically have more ‘stuff’ than our grandparents, aka ‘GDP,’ etc.), the same is very rarely true in a social sense. Humans will always work to differentiate themselves socially, creating new hierarchies even if old ones are abolished. This is one of the primary reasons why any kind of ‘leftism’ based on universal human ‘equality’ as an end state (the most caricatured version of traditional Communism, etc.) is doomed. Even if the age of true communism finally dawned and resulted in an actual post-scarcity society, human beings would immediately go about finding other ways to differentiate themselves from each other, resulting in a new class structure (just one no longer based on economics).

A big part of the reason why this has always been the case, and always will be, is due to human sexuality. In general, women tend to pursue sexual relationships with men who are ‘more than them’ in some important respect. In the past this has sometimes tended to be economic, but it doesn’t have to be, and what it is is very contingent on the values of a particular society at any particular time (i.e., if a given society extols the virtues of singer-songwriters and/or cardboard box salesmen, women will be more attracted to them in general, etc.).

This is just ‘how it is,’ and, yes, it does motivate men to strive for higher positions/take risks occasionally, resulting in ‘innovation,’ etc., but just as frequently it results in stupidity, violence, or other destructive behaviors.

I don’t think one needs to imbibe the ‘redpill’ or indulge in the intellectual slop known as ‘evo-psych (made-up bullshit that simply takes any given human behavior, however complex, and proceeds to make up a story about why it is ‘ evolutionarily adaptive’) in order to recognize this; it’s simply a common sense observation about human behavior that pretty much everyone can see.

Thus, after a certain level of basic needs are met, human beings no longer compete over ‘stuff’ (even if it may appear that they are); they are actually competing over relative social status, which may or may not be conferred by acquiring more ‘stuff.’

Being inherently a zero-sum game, this is a brutal state of affairs that is not particularly conducive to even superficial happiness for most people, especially when particular societies remove the various traditional barriers that had previously existed to tamp down on this frequently destructive dynamic in the name of ‘freedom’ or other dubious concepts.

Hegelian dreams aside, the only respite for those wary of this, somewhat degrading, arraignment has historically been referred to as ‘the kingdom of God.’ A state of affairs that, fortunately for some, has always been illegal in the United States.

But where does this leave our dear Chudjak? Well, not anywhere good. And it is here that we can see the transition from Chudjak’s ‘optimistic’ observation that ‘the West has fallen, billions must die’ to the embittered conclusion that in spite of it all ‘nothing ever happens.’

Chudjak is a longtime consumer of doomer content; he has been a mark for every single piece of doomer clickbait produced in the past 20 years. All of which have made extravagant promises to him: America is about to collapse! The economy will implode! China will soon collapse! Russia will soon collapse! The dollar will collapse! Nuclear war is right around the corner! WWIII is right around the corner! Civil war is right around the corner! A new pandemic is right around the corner! etc.

But it never seems to happen, does it? One might even be tempted to conclude that nothing ever happens. Hence we can see the Chudjak’s dejection at the repeated and continual failure of such ‘prophecy.’ A dejection that leads to the bitterness of ‘nothing ever happens,’ a contrarian stance taken in response to the incessant, algorithmically incentivized doomerism of the ever-churning content mills. A doomerism that our Chudjaks dreamed of for so long, cataclysms they thought might lead to emancipation from the tedium, sadness, and isolation of their own lives.

Of course, the truth is that both the ‘happeners’ and the ‘nothing ever happeners’ are both right simultaneously, even if only in a very narrow sense.

The end of the post-war American order (in reality an entire ‘life world’) is here, and it is happening right now, as we speak, in a thousand ways both big and small. A process that cannot be meaningfully reversed, even by someone with as much remarkable luck and charisma as Donald Trump.

At the same time, for our legions of Chudjacks, ‘nothing’ will happen all the same regardless of whatever epochal historical events they live through. For in order for ‘something’ to happen, something would have to not only happen, but happen to them. An exceedingly unlikely event even under the most extreme of ‘happenings.’

The stock market could see a 70 percent crash, and the Chinese could sink the entire Pacific fleet, and still ‘nothing’ would happen because Chudjack would remain a nobody. He would still be what he has always been: a spiritual cripple, enslaved not by some insidious outside force but by his own laziness, narcissism and inherent lack of agency.

A malady not even the end of the world can save him from.