This is a weird time of year for me. I am one of very few, though, dismayingly, not that few, Americans who have experienced not one but two national-tragedy-level traumas. And both of those traumas happened around the same time of year, meaning I have what you could call PTSD flare-ups around August and September, exacerbated by all the content that gets posted about the tragedies each year online.

Though this year, both my Trauma Anniversaries came and went with little fanfare. The anniversary of Charlottesville, the second capital T trauma I lived through, was hardly mentioned online. And September 11th, the first capital T trauma I lived through, landed with a dud; we are doing a bad job of never-forgetting—even the most jingoistic among us could only muster lackluster (and possibly stroked-out) expressions of sadness.

The absorption of political violence into the American psyche, its refraction into jokes and desensitized takes that then get spit out onto the internet, that then get refracted even further into even less-in-touch-with-reality takes and jokes, that then beget even more nihilism and doomerism in real life—all that was already happening. But it seems to be happening with much more totality, and much more speed these days.

Whatever you think about the specifics of any particular instance of political violence, I think it would be good if we all paused for a bit and understood exactly how we process these things. I am not tsk-tsking anyone for not feeling sad about Charlie Kirk’s murder. He was a uniquely evil man. But I think there’s a difference between tsk-tsking and asking the question: what, exactly, is to be gained from the memeification and constant joking about death?

In better-organized eras of leftist activism, one could make the argument that violence was a necessary component of a revolutionary political program. But the murder of Charlie Kirk was likely not part of a larger political program. I cannot imagine it will lead to anything better in the future. It was a murder based in internet nihilism that, as we’ve already seen, will just engender further internet nihilism. The joking and glib posts and the murder itself are two extremes on the same strand of desire—to feel dopamine catharsis by any means necessary.

I cannot predict what Kirk’s death will bring, but if I had to guess, based on all the other political violence the United States has experienced in the last several decades, the answer will be: nothing good. It is just more grist for the mill. Another shot of dopamine in our veins to temporarily make us feel better (whether we are pro- or anti-Kirk, the dopamine reaction to his death, whether it foments joy or anger, is, in all ways that matter, the same) as the world around us gets worse and worse.

We are gooning into the apocalypse...