Finding Allocosmia: The anti-narcissism of my generation

"Today, let’s take three deep breaths for our friends in Israel and Palestine.” - My yoga instructor last week

Trigger Warning: dark post, talk of suicide toward the end.

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There is this basic confusion that, I think, permeates our thinking today. Specifically, today we’re living in some kind of individualistic, nightmarish world where the idea of the individual has colonized the globe and is destroying everything. In one sense, this is true, and in another, it is not true—and I think both senses are actually quite obvious.

The sense in which it is true is the psychological one. Today, we live more isolated and less communal lives than ever before. For many, the pandemic exacerbated this trend. Many white-collar workers no longer even go to an actual workplace and instead work from home. We look at our phones in public spaces. Informal spaces for exchanges, like smoke breaks, have more or less disappeared. What we perceive as news is determined by personalized algorithms rather than a shared common text.

But the sense in which it is not true that we are living in a totally individualized world is in the structural, ecological, and sociological sense. We now live in an entirely interdependent global economy. In this way, we are more dependent than ever before on an external structure for our survival. Here we find that the terms “individualism” and “independence” are not equivalent—we are psychologically individualistic and entirely dependent. In this way, our culture seems somewhat adolescent, totally subsumed by the institutions that we rely on for our lives.

Perhaps adolescent is harsh. Let’s say narcissistic—that is, psychologically striving for individualism while maintaining material dependence. I don’t mean this as the lay version of narcissism in the pathological inflated-self-ego sense, but rather in the sense that a hyper-focus on the self is propped up by others for practical or material support. Some have called narcissism a cultural phenomenon emerging from the profound rise of consumer culture, the decline of community and meaningful work, and the resultant weakening of traditional social ties and values. It is the emergent property of our culture that the wellness industrial complex profits off of. The narcissist is characterized by intense anxiety about the self, a thirst for admiration, a fear of competition and dependency, a sense of entitlement, and a pervasive sense of emptiness or meaninglessness.

The internet’s attention economy has effectively reversed this today. Today, the attention of the masses is often projected as far afield as possible. The global drama dominates the spotlight. National outfits have destroyed all the local media, and international corporations have begun to annihilate the national outfits. Our attention then becomes totally attached to an unreal collective—the global, the national, whatever guarantees no action.

This is not to say that there is no global community or that we should not aspire to more global solidarity, but today, the way the global and national dominate the attention economy is destroying the tapestry of real social life. The way this emerges psychologically is, in a sense, the reverse of the narcissism that characterized the Boomer generation. Where narcissism emerges as “intense anxiety about the self,” this new phenomenon emerges as “intense anxiety about the globe.” Whereas narcissism reorients all social energy back toward the self, this new thing reorients all social energy back toward the entirety of humanity, the entire globe, all of existence. It is, in a sense, a pathological universalism that I want to call allocosmia.

Drawing on the etymology of narcissism, I infer the term "allocosmia" from the Greek roots "allo-" meaning "other" and "cosmos" meaning "world" or "universe." This term would suggest an obsession that is outwardly directed towards the world at large rather than inwardly towards the self. He, she, and they are “an allocosmic.” I want to introduce this term for no other reason than that I think it needs a fucking word that conversations can pivot around, without which we will continue to cast our attention into carbon rather than biodiversity, wars far afield rather than violence in our backyard.

What is not clear is whether this is something new or merely an evolution of narcissism. What I mean by this is that at the most basic psychological level, obsession over faraway massive problems the size of the globe is often a means of dealing with a deeply personal psychological insecurity. In 1886, Emerson wrote that “each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises...the fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible and intelligible.” The fusion of personal and political crises is as old as society. What is new today is how far afield we go searching and, thus, how estranged our ability for political action becomes. But even if allocosmia is narcissism for a global age, the effect is the same: the neutralization of political imagination and action.

This inflection comes from my anarchist streak against nationalism, my nationalist streak against empire, and my preference for the this-worldliness Nature over the intoxicating universals of Reformist Christian other-wordliness. Counterintuitive as it is, today we worship individualism and universalism simultaneously—key elements in our neoliberal economic order.

Critics of post-modernism like Stuart Jefferies have concluded that the fragmentation of our politics is a result of consumerism. He wrote that “We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?”

And yet the book from which this comes is called Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, and thus signals at least subtly toward the intrusion of the global imaginary into our lives. For me, these two things are one: consumerism and globalism—to rehash my point from the start, individualism and dependence. Beyond the material, we are also dependent on this system for what to think about.

In a recent short video from Frankie’s cultural observations, he notes that “to illustrate the generational differences between the human species on a plummeting plane, Millennials will be the ones arguing over who gets the first oxygen mask based on intersectionality; Gen Z will be filming the carnage on their phones because they're too emotionally detached to care about what happens; and Boomers will be the ones flying the plane into the ground because they were too stubborn to ask the air traffic controller for directions.”

If, as Jimmy Carter suggest, Boomers are a generation of narcissists who were so overly concerned with themselves as to not ask air traffic control for directions, then we Millennials are a generation of allocosmics who are so overly concerned with global concerns and sociological universals as to not remain accountable to themselves in the immediate world they live in. If Boomers crashed the plane because they thought air traffic control might be giving them misinformation, then we Millennials will ensure everybody’s demise by remaining totally entranced and distracted by distant drama while the fields outside our homes lie fallow.

I mean, this is mostly to introduce a term, but when my yoga instructor opens class with, “Today, let’s take three deep breaths for our friends in Israel and Palestine,” there’s part of me that wants to throw up. It just felt like this unbelievable moment of confluence between Boomer narcissism and Millennial allocosmia. Let’s at least be sincere about our narcissism: we’re all here because our backs hurt from our 20/30-something white-collar jobs and because the society outside pushes us to think about everything everywhere, all at once—in other words, nothing never ever.

The fleshy realities of genocide play out despite our secular thoughts and prayers in the basement of a climbing gym in a gentrified part of Seattle. Perhaps we should send our thoughts and prayers for the guy in the alley behind the gym who’s about to OD on fentanyl, adding to our country’s running tally this year that will topple 100,000 deaths.

There is a kind of trap that emerges within the way we are taught to think about political problems. One example of the trap is that global problems require global solutions. This sensibility forecloses the possibility that it is indeed the global itself that generates global problems; this pathology of thought seeks to align political solutions with the scale on which the social or biophysical problem appears to the most imperial of scientists.

In political imagination, the authoritarian believes the solution to the state problem is national policy, and a national problem is international policy. My inclination as a lower-case-A anarchist is that the solution to relationship problems lies in the individual, the solution to national problems is state policy, and the solution to international problems is national policy—and out of these smaller-scale efforts emerge newer properties at the larger scale of sociological organization.

Let me say the quiet part out loud: In a moment where some of our biggest problems have grown to a global scale, there needs to be less attention paid to the international and national and more attention paid to the state and local. An obsession with global, universal, and national policy is an inescapably colonial mindset, regardless of the ideals espoused.

If, for Emerson, private life must be fused with national life, today’s mind has become fused with all of humanity. To reiterate, this is not about critiquing expanding spheres of solidarity but rather about challenging the notion that the infinite expansion of solidarity and attention, even when it outruns its ability to precipitate actual human action, is necessarily good. This is also to say (a lesson that I’ve learned from my brilliant partner Laura, who is from Spain) that there is an all-too-American tendency to attend selectively only to a) the individual or b) the biggest possible community. We’re either global capitalists or “survivalists,” nothing in between. What is lost in this is a balanced middle ground of local and regional attention.

Our ability to pay attention to this is being killed off right now by neoliberal media, which, as expected, only attends to individual insecurities or huge ones. It’s not their fault; they’re profit-driven, and it’s what we want: big things that we cannot change or immediate threats. When the two intersect, we find allocosmic gold—vague threats to personal insecurities.