'Stucktopia': why it feels like nothing ever changes

Life in the first half of the 2020s can feel somewhat like sitting in a waiting room. We pass the time, but nothing much seems to change. On the surface, this is surprising. Politics, technology and the climate have rapidly changed the way we all live. So it’s hard to see and understand why we all feel so stuck.

Literary critic Hillary Kelly may have an explanation. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, she describes a concept she calls “stucktopia,” which names a world that is not wholly bad, but rather agonizingly unchanging. America is like this, she says, and it’s the reason why so many people feel hopeless. 

The idea that our society is resistant to change isn’t new. In 1992, philosopher Francis Fukuyama published “The End of History and the Last Man,” in which he argued that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, major historical developments had ceased. Liberal, pluralistic capitalism was the final result of thousands of years of progress, and could not be undone except temporarily. It possessed, for Fukuyama, both a moral and an economic superiority. Unlike Kelly, Fukuyama celebrated the idea of stuckness. It meant that all humankind was to one day taste the fruit of technological advancement. We were stuck at the best point in history; it was nonsense to desire better.

But tastes change. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Financial Crisis and the Covid pandemic, the idea that we will forever retain our current social structure now seems less appealing. Recent iterations of the stucktopia idea are more critical. They emphasize the sense of ennui that many face. The idea now is not that things won’t get worse, but that they can’t be improved.

The internet personality Paul Skallas — known for championing a way of life based on the ancient Mediterranean — wrote an article on our “stuck culture” two years ago. Skallas alleges that the basic facts of American life have not changed in the last decade and a half. Smartphones, for instance, may have radically altered how we communicate back when they made their debut, yet their form and function has been stable since the iPhone was introduced. 

Likewise, pants have shrunk from wide to skinny before ballooning outward once again, but at the same time the wardrobe of the average American man has narrowed to little more than a stack of jeans and T-shirts. Things may be improved and trends may change, says Skallas, but they are no longer replaced.

In entertainment, too, our culture can feel stagnant. Music publishers buy the rights to old hits and push them back to the top of the charts, keeping them on the airwaves long after they have lost their appeal. The same few songs receive remix after remix, and stay in popular consciousness barely-changed. An endless stream of sequels and reboots parades through theatres and streaming sites

As Kelly notes, sucktopia has become a theme in the very television shows which help to perpetuate it. In “Fallout,” “Silo,” “Andor,” and especially “Severance,” characters are depicted trapped in bizarre and labyrinthine prisons where every day is the same as the last. In all these shows, hopes of escape are slim and a sense of agency is hard to find. Distant, unfeeling rulers flatly refuse to allow any change. These characters are stuck in the same bland, administered noplace to which we denizens of stucktopia are confined.

But nowhere is the feeling more ubiquitous, more deeply-felt than in politics. Healthcare, climate change, housing costs: there seems to be an endless list of problems which never get solved, policies which are never passed. For the last ten years or more, we have been told that each presidential election is the most important of our lifetimes. And each time a major policy package is passed, the Supreme Court strikes it down, landing the process back where it began. Even the names on the ballot stay the same. Donald Trump just completed his third consecutive presidential run. Until he withdrew from the race last summer, Joe Biden was set to have been on every ballot since 2008 except one.

Reasons vary as to why so many feel stuck in place, but they all have a similar theme: our society rewards stability and safety while discouraging people from taking chances on the unfamiliar. This is true in areas from the personal to the professional to the political. 

Much of this comes from the shift of large parts of American culture to the internet. Many of our ordinary interactions — conversations with friends, social recreation, meetings and interviews — take place through the mediation of a screen and signal. Major shifts in online behaviour do not register as life events; it’s hard to think of a change that could take place on an online platform which would make us feel that the world had fundamentally altered.

But further, the most slickly-designed internet products aim to eliminate novelty from our interactions with them. Algorithms and apps allow us to find new content we like without having to sort through the options ourselves. Dating apps offer the chance to screen out potential mates who do not resemble those with whom we have had success in the past. Because of this, it can seem like new things we encounter are the same as those we already know.

As a result of our social lives’ move to the internet, we leave the house less than we used to. Analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey shows that we now spend over 90 minutes more at home each day than we did in 2003, and more than 60 minutes more than we did in 2019. That’s an extra hour and a half each day that we spend in controlled environments, shielded from most new experiences.

Our political structure, too, takes pains to keep us away from uncharted territory. The two-party system, combined with widespread gerrymandering, ensures that most elections are not competitive, and even if they were, winners would have little ability to reshape the machines which lifted them to power. Added to this, the average person has little, if any influence on politics. A 2014 study found no correlation at all between the support of the bottom 99% of income earners and the chances of a bill becoming law.

To fix this, a shift is needed both in personal attitudes and in social structures. As individuals, we can embrace experiences which have the potential to defy our expectations, even if this means we might be disappointed. We can go on blind dates, see local musicians perform live, and make friends through recreational sports. Even if some, or most, of these do not pan out, they provide avenues for unexpected changes in our tastes and lives.

At the political level, however, change must be more collective. Reform plans such as proportional representation have been proposed, which could give more people a say in their government and help to alleviate the feeling of futility. A government more reflective of Americans’ priorities would change with the times and be able to tackle issues as they arose.
The best solution, however, is the one that is implemented. States, including California, are taking steps to regulate the addictive digital products that have eaten our time and overwhelmed our attention spans. And, for the first time in more than a decade, young people have reduced their use of dating apps over the last few years. This attempt to be more mindful of our technology use might mean that we’ve already taken the first step towards getting our culture moving. Perhaps the country is rebelling against stucktopia without even knowing it.