I am trying to give up swearing. It is proving to be difficult. Even more difficult is attempting to give up being sarcastic — and whatever derivative or similar humor that’s in the same vein.

Sarcasm is too expensive an activity to engage in for me personally, and frankly, the same goes for the United States. The ability to be able to detect the nuance of that kind of humor is absent in most. Certainly part of it due to mere naivete. More alarmingly the line between what is reasonable and what is absurd is all but gone. The mundane is unbelievable, and the norm is irrationality. Satire requires a common reference point, and that reference point is so divergent among everyone, that it renders satire irrelevant. A practical example is The Onion. With an uncomfortable amount of regularity, it is cited as an actual news source. The insidious corollary to that is The Onion also seems to accurately predict cultural shifts towards the absurd. Or it reports actual news in a screamingly satirical tone. Sigh.

Humor is the sugar that helps us cope with having to deal with the drudgery and the terror of life. But the US has a problem with its humor intake much like its actual sugar intake. I’ve written about this before, how gravitas is lacking in many aspects of our life. News reporting in particular has to be sweetened with humor in order to make it palatable to most. Kind of picking on The Daily Show here, but we are well past the point where we can hope that Trevor Noah or John Oliver or Jon Stewart will spark an understanding, through humorous presentation, that the issue they are reporting on are important, serious. I tend to think that it downplays the gravity of it; that those issues can be shelved for another day while we browse for our next entertainment fix. Although I think Jon Stewart has pivoted away from that sort of thing now.

Sorry to be a Gen-X wet blanket, but I think things are going to get a lot more dire if we don’t put on our “Well, we gotta get this done” boots on and stop trying to laugh our problems away. Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely feel that urge to pull inward, to coddle my own helplessness, and embrace the futility. I don’t know if writing about this is a first step or an only step.