Surrealism and nihilism were two of the characteristics I associated with Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” when I first heard it in the 1990s, although what interests me about the song now has very little to do with the song itself. I am more interested in the sensation it evokes in me when I look at the world around me. For quite some time, I have felt that something has changed in the way people inhabit ordinary life. I do not see distorted faces, strange smiles, or anything resembling the disturbing imagery associated with the song. I see something much less spectacular and, for that reason, much harder to explain. I see tired faces. Long faces. People looking as if they have already spent most of their emotional energy before the day has even properly started. I see people waiting, complaining, reacting, calculating, enduring. What I rarely see is spontaneity. There is still movement everywhere, obviously. People work, talk, travel, buy things, make plans, laugh occasionally and continue with whatever remains of their routines. But underneath all of that, I keep noticing the same absence: very little seems to come from a place of genuine enthusiasm anymore.
What I recognize most clearly is not sadness, at least not in the conventional sense. It is accumulated exhaustion. It appears in conversations that become complaints almost immediately, in the irritation people carry into insignificant interactions, in the sarcasm used as a permanent defense mechanism, and in the indifference that has gradually become socially acceptable. I do not even think most people are consciously choosing any of this. It seems more like a response that has become habitual. When disappointment becomes sufficiently repetitive, people stop reacting to each individual disappointment and begin reacting to everything as if another disappointment were already expected. I notice this because I do it too. I can become impatient, cynical, detached, unnecessarily skeptical. I can look at something that should interest me and feel absolutely nothing. That is precisely why I do not want to write about this as if I were standing outside of it, observing some strange species called “other people.” I am part of the same environment. I breathe the same air, deal with the same frustrations and absorb the same emotional residue. Whatever I am seeing in other people is also something I have to recognize in myself.
There is, however, something particularly unsettling about realizing that this condition can exist without producing any obvious catastrophe. Nothing necessarily has to collapse for life to become emotionally diminished. A person can continue functioning perfectly well while losing the ability to feel that ordinary existence has any texture. That is the part I find difficult to ignore. I am not talking about some philosophical “nothingness” detached from reality, nor am I trying to turn exhaustion into an existential doctrine. I mean something considerably more mundane. I mean waking up already tired of the day. I mean conversations in which nobody is really listening because everyone is waiting for their turn to express frustration. I mean people becoming accustomed to bad news, bad conditions and bad expectations until the abnormal becomes another piece of routine. I mean the strange normalization of emotional depletion. What bothers me is not that people are unhappy. Human beings have always been unhappy for countless reasons. What bothers me is the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between someone who is genuinely content and someone who has simply stopped expecting anything different.
This is probably why I understand the impulse behind Soundgarden’s work without pretending that I possess the artistic language that made it possible. I am not a musician from Seattle, and I have no intention of imitating an aesthetic that belongs to another time and another group of people. What I can do is observe, process and translate what I perceive into my own language. I tend to analyze things even when analysis does not make them more comfortable. Sometimes I also somatize them, because there are experiences that remain in the body long after the mind has finished explaining them. That combination is what I have to work with. I look at people and situations, absorb what they communicate, consciously or otherwise, and then try to understand why certain patterns keep appearing. I do not necessarily find an answer. Sometimes the most honest result of observation is simply realizing that the pattern exists. Perhaps that is also why I keep returning to the same images in my head: not because I want to exaggerate reality, but because reality itself has become difficult to describe without sounding exaggerated.
And maybe that is what this “black hole” means to me now. Not darkness, not some grand philosophical void, and certainly not the end of anything. It is the gradual disappearance of things that used to make ordinary life feel less mechanical. Curiosity. Humor without bitterness. Conversation without an ulterior motive. The capacity to be surprised. The willingness to care about something without immediately protecting yourself with irony. I still find those things, but increasingly in fragments, and perhaps that is why I notice them so intensely when they appear. I do not know whether this is a temporary condition, a consequence of the particular reality I happen to inhabit, or simply the way adulthood looks when enough disappointments accumulate. I only know what I see and what I feel when I look at it. I see people continuing to exist while carrying less and less of themselves into the existence they are continuing. I see myself doing it sometimes. And instead of pretending that I have a solution, I would rather examine it, write about it and see how far the observation takes me. If there is anything I learned from that strange Soundgarden song, it is not how to escape an unsettling reality. It is how to look at one without needing to make it comfortable first.
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.