Zeitgeist is a word from German meaning "Spirit of the times". The Gist of the culture in that era.

When you boop, you touch it right on the nose. Exactly on-point.

So many journalists, writers, and communicators try to capture the core of our cultural zeitgeist through articles or youtube videos. They try to express what we all each feel in our individual lives but haven't yet found the words to express. They want to boop the zeitgeist on the nose. But the era we live in is strange and unique in ways that are very hard to capture in words or video. Things are changing very quickly, and it is difficult to express. Questions that used to be easier to answer have become fuzzy and chaotic over the last decade or two:

What are our cultural norms these days, in practice? What do people care about, and why? What motivates people to act? What keeps people from acting? What unites us? What divides us?

How do most people truly feel on a daily basis? What do people actually spend their time thinking about? Why?

What parallels can we draw between the experiences of hundreds of millions of people to explain the road humanity finds itself going down?

I feel as though humanity is struggling very hard to answer these questions right now. We are struggling to write a convincing narrative to ourselves, about ourselves. One that makes us feel good about our culture, that gives us purpose and drive. But when we look at the world, it looks pretty bad. So it's hard to come up with a convincing story, even if you kind of play dumb to try and make it work.

When an individual has a story about themselves that they tell to themselves (and others) this is called "ego". When a whole culture of millions has a shared story they tell themselves, about themselves, we can call it "cultural ego". Cultural ego is propagated and reinforced through the media, as opposed to a person's ego which is propagated and reinforced through their mind, word, and immediate social relationships.

I believe in 2017 we are currently experiencing a cultural ego crisis. An mass identity crisis. The media is struggling to come up with good stories for us to believe in, and many people are searching frantically for new narratives to regain their sense of cultural ego so they can feel good about their culture and their place in it. This process is causing a lot of emotional lashing-out as people try to combat the cultural ego death/transformation they see coming down the road, because of the obviously bad path our country (and many countries) are on due to corporate and billionaire influences. It is simply unsustainable. It will have to change.

I think much of the divisiveness and polarization we've seen come about in American society this last decade is due to this cultural ego crisis brought on by a failing economy. Ultimately, it's hard to lie to yourself about the superiority of your culture when you are in destitution. So a lot of people are coming to sober realizations about how screwed we are, which create an anger that the media skillfully redirects on to scapegoats so the truly powerful aren't even talked about. This is how I'm afraid it will go down, but the silver lining is that the more people that are aware of this possibility, the less likely it becomes.

Does this story get close to booping the zeitgeist? If not, what new narrative truly expresses hidden feelings that we all share? Thanks to the internet, we have an opportunity to shape our own cultural narrative outside the mainstream media, and describe our own world and come up with our own shared story about our lives. Let's use it!