Something Is No Longer Holding

Notes on a Culture Beginning to Notice Its Own Cracks.

This piece is not an argument and not a manifesto. It is an attempt to describe a sensation I keep encountering in different places, online, at work, and in conversation, that something which used to hold our culture together no longer quite does. I am not proposing a replacement, taking a side, or predicting an outcome. I am simply trying to name a pattern as honestly as I can, while it is still forming. If you recognise the feeling, this is for you. If you don’t, that’s fine too.

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I have noticed something of late, not a rupture exactly, but a loosening. Something that once held the culture together no longer does, and the strain is beginning to show. It is not yet a visible break, more a quiet shift beneath the surface. I have noticed it, and others have too. The veneer of the world we thought we knew is starting to peel.

The shallowness, the spectacle, the simulacra are no longer convincing in the way they once were. They still exist, but they fail more often now, in small, almost embarrassing ways. There is a faint, largely unspoken resistance to the unreal, and I suspect the flood of AI-generated slop has only accelerated this fatigue.

I see people beginning to want the raw and the real again. They want values that can withstand contact with reality. They want to feel that their work, even in corporate settings, actually produces meaning. A quiet rupture is forming.

Perhaps COVID exposed it. Perhaps AI hastened it. Or perhaps the culture has simply reached the limits of its own pretences. I am not certain.

One way to see this shift more clearly is through two pieces of media that model it with unusual precision: Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) and Cyberpunk 2077. One is a western set in the final days of the Old West; the other is set in an alternative near future of high-tech, low-life.

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RDR2 is the story of an old-fashioned criminal gang coming face-to-face with the modern world. It is a slow, deliberate world where actions have consequences, and not all of them are immediate. It is a game where, if you choose violence, it doesn’t hold back. You can see the man you just shot slowly bleed out, crying for help, and his widow approach you weeks or months later, dressed in black, to tell you exactly what she thinks of you.

But the good you do is reflected as well. Acts of charity can echo years later. If you are charitable early in the game, you can see that kindness made concrete in the epilogue, in the form of a building now complete. Progress is slow and not always straightforward, and even a friendly drink can end with a night in the drunk tank.

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Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a world where you are either somebody or one wrong turn away from an unfortunate fate. It is a world where you are always chasing the next upgrade, the next thrill, the next drug, just to survive in an environment where power and corruption consistently beat genius and honest work.

Corporations function as fiefdoms, government is little more than a façade, and the only justice you are likely to find comes at the end of a gun, making the Wild West look tame by comparison. Everything is projection: bright neon lights, clothing designed for maximum provocation, and some of the most shameless and vulgar advertising imaginable. Even the things that matter are rented.

It is a world that claims to be capitalist, but is in reality a form of corporate anarchy. Nothing settles. Nothing waits. Actions are largely meaningless because nothing lasts long enough to accumulate consequence or meaning.

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Of the two games, you can see them as reflections of our current world. We, as a species, have lived through both, not literally, but culturally and experientially. We once inhabited a world where consequences mattered, where values could be built and accumulated over time. It was slower, but it produced real value. Even an office job carried a clearer sense of meaning. People were more directly connected to the values that mattered to them.

Then something changed. I don’t think it was a single event or a single technology. Rather, the world transitioned into something built on high stimulus, high churn, and superficiality. Value became detached from meaning, and effort became detached from reward.

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Gaming provides a clean example. With the rise of battle passes and microtransactions, why work toward something genuinely interesting when you can pull out a debit or credit card and pay £10 for it instead? You get it quickly, but it’s hollow. You didn’t earn it; you purchased it. And if the most desirable items are only obtainable through payment, and are better than anything you can earn in-game, then the system has stripped effort of significance altogether.

Gaming may be a clear example, but it is not the only one. The internet and social media have suffered the same fate. There were once long videos on specific subjects, posts that required sustained reading, and topic forums where debate could be heated but civil. Now, short videos under ten seconds dominate, arguments are reduced to “tweet” battles, and emotion and “owning” the other side matter more than understanding. This is doing real psychological damage.

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For many people, work has become meaningless. They don’t see the impact they are having. They are doing something, but they cannot clearly see what that something is. People are burning out, quiet quitting, or leaving work altogether, sometimes opting for government assistance because, materially, it feels like the better deal. Meaning has been drained in favour of efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Some job markets struggle to attract and retain staff and increasingly turn to automation to compensate, while the government, as usual, fails to address the underlying problems.

We now have a culture where meaning is collapsing at an accelerated rate, and people are beginning to notice.

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I have seen this “awakening,” if you could call it that, in many places: on YouTube, Substack, social media, in person, and at work. More people seem curious about what lies behind the veneer. They may not yet be ready to tear it away, but they are no longer satisfied with the surface they have been given, and that dissatisfaction itself feels new. This does not look like a mass conversion to a new worldview, nor a strike, a rebellion, or any coordinated withdrawal of value. It is something early and uncoordinated, and for now, that is all it can honestly be.

None of this is entirely unprecedented. People have always opted out at the margins. But those exits were usually tribal, leaving one camp to join another, exchanging one set of slogans for a rival set. What feels different now is that this disengagement is cutting across those lines. It is not consolidating into a counter-tribe. It is too individual, too dispersed, and too uncoordinated for that. Whatever this is, it appears to be slipping through the usual left-right filters rather than reinforcing them.

It is also far too early to say whether anything durable or meaningful will come of this. Most such shifts dissipate before they cohere into institutions, norms, or shared language. For now, the claim is only descriptive: something appears to be loosening, without yet replacing what it displaces. I do not know what it is, where it leads, or whether it will become anything at all. But the pattern is there.

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People are rejecting corporate jobs. They are increasingly wary of anything tied to AI. Trust in institutions of any kind is at an all-time low. There is a general unease in the air, as even long-standing narratives are beginning to wobble under their own weight.

Climate discourse, once framed in absolute and escalating terms, is increasingly marked by qualification and revision. Even outlets traditionally committed to these narratives have begun publishing cautious walk-backs, such as recent acknowledgements that microplastics may not, in fact, be ubiquitous throughout the human body. These are not reversals so much as reluctant corrections, but they signal fatigue in stories that once permitted no doubt.

For a long time, governments and much of the media made it costly to challenge these narratives at all. Dissenting research was frequently marginalised, and the label “climate denier” was used to collapse a wide range of positions into a single moral category. That smear did not merely target bad-faith rejection; it was often applied to legitimate critique, methodological disagreement, or attempts to introduce trade-offs into the discussion. The result was not scientific confidence, but narrative rigidity.

This does not mean rejecting environmental concerns. I value living in a clean, stable environment, rich in life. That is a human value, and a legitimate one. What I reject are environmental movements that subordinate human flourishing to abstract metrics, treating people as obstacles rather than moral agents. When forced into a choice, I prioritise human life and human flourishing without apology. An ethic that cannot articulate trade-offs, or that frames humanity itself as a negative variable, is not pro-nature—it is anti-human in its moral logic.

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The veneer of our culture, one strikingly similar to the world of Cyberpunk 2077, has cracked, and I doubt it can be repaired. I am watching the news less and using social media less. I see how vapid and empty much of it is, designed to drive clicks and emotion rather than to inform or ground. Aside from a few select people and pieces, most of it is advertising, slop, or celebrity nonsense. Why should I care if Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a new car or a new cat?

Modern media is not much better. Occasionally, there is something worthwhile, but there has not been a single film I’ve watched this decade that I would confidently call art. I think the last truly great films, films that were art rather than product, came out in the 2000s, and I am not alone in thinking this. There is a clear trend of people returning to older games, films, and music, not out of nostalgia, but because, on balance, they are simply better.

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There is a reason The Lord of the Rings Trilogy is regaining popularity. It depicts a world where meaning is earned rather than declared, where power is treated as dangerous rather than liberating, and where restraint is a form of strength rather than weakness. Progress is slow, effort matters, and actions carry consequences that extend beyond the immediate moment.

In a culture saturated with spectacle, irony, and disposable meaning, LOTR feels grounded rather than escapist. People are returning to it not because it is comforting, but because it presents a moral universe that respects reality, limits, and earned value.

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This mirrors my own journey. Unlike the veneer that holds together much of our culture, and the world of Cyberpunk 2077, which is increasingly being rejected, I find myself drawn back to Red Dead Redemption 2.

Yes, I play as an outlaw on the run, but I can be as vicious or as virtuous as I choose. I can help an old blind man, or rob him blind. I can earn an honest living for the camp by hunting, fishing, treasure hunting, and bounty hunting, or I can simply do what outlaws do best. All of this exists naturally within the world. The story itself is about a man learning what actually matters, and trying, imperfectly, to atone for some of the wrongs he has done.

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Unlike Cyberpunk 2077, where some choices can lock you out of relationships or endings but don’t really matter narratively beyond that, RDR2 is a game that reacts to your choices. Its morality system is simple but unforgiving. Honour operates on a scale, from high honour to deep dishonour, and it is your overall moral direction, not a single dramatic choice, that matters. Honour is shaped by everything you do, not just story moments. Consequences often take many hours to surface, and by the later chapters, a sustained pattern of dishonour can lock you out of some of the most emotionally important and character-defining moments in the story. Growth is not denied because of one mistake, but because of long-term evasion.

Also, unlike Cyberpunk 2077, RDR2 is a game that rewards slowing down. If you take your time, it gives something back. Staying in camp a little longer lets you witness small interactions between two or three gang members, moments that reveal who they really are. Even after playing for longer than I care to admit, I still notice things I had missed. You can watch wolves play, hear people sing songs, or bump into eccentric characters, including a lost Englishman searching for his missing best friend.

And this isn’t just true of the game. Outside of it, I am slowing down as well. I am savouring things more, noticing more, taking out the earbuds and paying attention to details I had never registered before, simply because I was too busy to see them.

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So… this shift has happened. What next?

Frankly, I don’t know what comes next. There are many directions this could go. What I do see is that the dominant cultural narrative of the past decade, largely left-coded, progressive, and managerial, appears to be running out of momentum. At the same time, a counter-narrative on the right is beginning to surge into the vacuum. Neither functions as a coherent vision of human flourishing. Both look more like reactive strategies for coping with the same underlying collapse of meaning than genuine alternatives to it.

Both sides offer stories, slogans, and enemies, but very little in the way of durable meaning. One is fraying under its own abstractions; the other risks becoming a mirror image, animated more by resentment than by creation.

People are craving meaning, and they are getting it wherever they can. I expect religion will see a resurgence, simply because it provides structure and orientation, even if it is not always in the individual’s best interest.

As a more distant hope, I would like to think we may also see renewed interest in something closer to actual capitalism, where values are traded voluntarily, things are genuinely created, and meaning is produced alongside profit rather than displaced by it.

I want to believe there is the possibility of something genuinely better if we are willing to think clearly and seize the opportunity in front of us. The old systems are in full panic, trying to lock people back into patterns that no longer work. In doing so, they may only be accelerating their own collapse.

One way or another, change is coming. All I know for certain is this: I am rejecting the superficial and returning to what has meaning, from the media I consume, to the games I play, to the food I eat and the clothes I wear.

Thus, the most I can reasonably hope for is that others read this and recognise the sensation, not as persuasion, but as confirmation that they are not the only ones who have noticed something no longer holds.