7 ms·

A beautiful read. It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. I can only liken it to the immediate aftershock of Brexit in London. London (note: not

A beautiful read. It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. I can only liken it to the immediate aftershock of Brexit in London. London (note: not Central London, that's another planet) always had this vibe to me of greyish-grimeyness mixed with a chaotic sense of unity -- like the bleak greybrown visuals coming from above and below bound everyone together under the same dull (sometimes suffocating) blanket of boredom and dysfunction, dotted with moments of spontaneity that would lend a friendly cheer or jeer alike before people hurried on to their next destination. After Brexit, the blanket got lifted and I started seeing teeth. Sure, people used to shout at each other, but there was usually no substance to it, merely just a short disagreement between two people. Now there was something larger behind it, and I was seeing it everywhere. Over the years, every time that I came back, the city would just get worse before my eyes. Public transport had always been bad and always been grotty, but it had never been this bad and this grotty, had it? Homelessness too had always been a problem, but I'd never seen these levels before, with what seemed like an entire community sleeping under a bridge, only to be swept away the next day either on their own volition or by the authorities. Watching my friends and family go from vibrant people with cheeky humour, to tired and vigilant individuals with a bitter edge to everything said. Maybe it's just me getting older, but I always feel like I'm witnessing the loss of a badly defined culture/vibe that I had taken for granted before my entire life, vanishing before my eyes.

meindnoch 3y ago
They ended Peep Show, that's the reason.
- tetris11 3y ago
  Croydon just hasn't been the same since
ilikerashers 3y ago
I was back in Dublin lately and got the same feeling. Everyone talking about immigration, unfair housing and poverty. It's gone from being a friendly place to a suspicious one in a handful of years.
- closewith 3y ago
  I wonder if it's just something you've become aware of recently. Certainly unfair housing and poverty have plagued the city its entire existence, and were always hotbed topics in living memory. If by immigration, you mean the refugee crisis, that's a pan-European affair. Another commenter here said: > I think it's the revelation that a shared culture and experience whose existence you took for granted really never existed. You feel untethered. I think that may have happened to you.
  - ilikerashers 3y ago
    I don't live there or share the viewpoint. I picked it up from people I know who live there now and how their attitudes have changed. While it might be pan-European, the sentiment in Dublin is certainly new. People seem... fed up. Now there's been a far-right riot, the rest of the world is also aware.
    - closewith 3y ago
      > While it might be pan-European, the sentiment in Dublin is certainly new. That's the point, it's not new. You and others are just realising that the shared culture and experience you thought was universal was just a bubble.
      - ilikerashers 3y ago
        While it’s a nice thought experiment, I find it hard to dismiss centuries of culture as a bubble. The idea that history is meaningless is dangerous.
        closewith 3y ago
        I live in Ireland and work in frontline healthcare. I interact with people all across the country and the socio-economic spectrum. I can tell you that you definitely were and are likely still in a bubble. The Dublin you thought you knew never existed and the change you think you've experienced is a Dublin that was always there. This is very common amongst my friends and colleagues in tech. They live in a different world.
mathieuh 3y ago
I think it's the revelation that a shared culture and experience whose existence you took for granted really never existed. You feel untethered. I live in Northern Ireland and I get this feeling when I come upon a street festooned in Union Flags and painted kerbstones. It's like stepping into a different country.
- rayiner 3y ago
  > I think it's the revelation that a shared culture and experience whose existence you took for granted really never existed. You feel untethered. I’d hazard a guess that many British felt that same feeling long before Brexit, and that’s part of what caused Brexit in the first place.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    But it turned out that everyone had a different vision of nostalgia, leading to the Brexiteers fragmenting into ever more fractious and undignified factions sabotaging each other in public. There's no single date for the end of the British Empire, but a lot of the strife of the 60s and 70s was dealing with the economic and psychological effects of that. For many European countries with empires.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      Must be surreal. Americans should take notes.
      - pjc50 3y ago
        The American empire is a long way off collapse. People also underestimate collapse-inducing factors in countries with unfree political systems; we can't really see how China is doing internally. The sense that fragmented factions actively want to choose collapse in order to accelerate their own power grab within the collapse is similar in the US to Britain, though. Not as similar to Austria-Hungary and its fragmentary nationalists. Will it have a Gavrilo Princep or a Tetsuya Yamagami? Hard to predict.
082349872349872 3y ago
> Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way (1973) Edit: although come to think of it, the British Empire so beloved of Brexiteers actually made it through the Great War (unlike Austria and Russia), hanging on right up until 1956.
- UncleSlacky 3y ago
  Depending on how you define it, the Empire still exists (Britain still has colonies, even if they don't call them that). The return of Hong Kong to China is generally considered the "end of empire", though. The sun will not set on it as long as it holds Pitcairn: https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/
- graemep 3y ago
  I do not think it is true that the empire is beloved by Brexiteers. As someone born in a former colony who voted leave, I was definitely not nostalgic for the empire. If anything I feel the EU is more nostalgic for the heights of European power than the UK - all the multipolar world stuff they love. We are going back to a two super-power world, and China is the other super power.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Depends how you define "beloved by Brexiteers". According to [1], in 2020 "A third of people in the UK believe Britain’s colonies were better off for being part of an empire, a higher proportion than in any of the other major colonial powers, a global survey has revealed." And "Brexit-supporting leave voters were more than twice as pro-empire than remainers." Further, 39% of Leave voters vs 16% of Remain voters answered yes to "Would you like Britain to still have an empire?", while 40% of Leave voters vs. 66% of Remain voters answered "no", so in that sense you could well say it's not "beloved" by Brexiteers - given they to on the balance prefer no empire, but it's beloved by a significantly larger portion of Brexiteers. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/uk-more-nostalgic-for-empire-than-other-ex-colonial-powers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/uk-more-nostal...
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
aa-jv 3y ago
It maybe wasn't just Brexit, but also the Internet .. things have gotten very banal throughout the Western world.
jemmyw 3y ago
That was a well written comment. I read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49201192-the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49201192-the-sunken-land... earlier this year and it has the same kind of vibe about Brexit, without ever mentioning it. Your writing reminded me of the book.
- tetris11 3y ago
  Thanks, I will check it out. I think one piece of media that summarized the general feeling of it all for me was the song "The Truth of the Twilight"[0,1]. 0: https://genius.com/16860113 https://genius.com/16860113 1: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vnRYapgm72k https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vnRYapgm72k
foobary 3y ago
I visited London multiple times in the past years, and I watched in real time what you described too. People seem to have gotten grumpier, more stressed, tired.
DeathArrow 3y ago
>It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. It seems to me we are not too far from witnessing the next one falling.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Russia?
ido 3y ago
> It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. I can only liken it to the immediate aftershock of Brexit in London. Surely there's an even closer comparison within living memory: the fall of the soviet union.
pjc50 3y ago
This is the long slide from the highs of "cool Britannia", with acceleration points at 2008 and 2016. There was a slight "now what?" vibe at the Millenium, coupled with a sense of "the end of history" that we could now all relax into liberal technocracy by day with a bit of a party at night. The lack of vision has slowly turned into a lack of hope. The huge industry marketing "fear of the other" is succeeding. Britain's always had its "community solidarity" feeling, but it also has uniquely British kinds of sullen jobsworthness, disengagement, complaining with no intention of fixing anything, resentment, and parochialism. Those are surfacing more. The retreat of the Empire has left the governing structures intact, but on a shrunken scale. The devolved nations are treated like colonies which must be reined in from the centre periodically. London has abandoned the idea of travel to distant Manchester as too expensive, in favor of hoarding resources for a shrinking set of blue non-urban counties.
- ksec 3y ago
  >The lack of vision has slowly turned into a lack of hope. Couldn't have said it better. Lack of Vision, Lack of Leadership, and Lack of execution.
- drivebyadvice 3y ago
  Interesting to see you guys talking about this, I just read something with Adam Curtis where he was describing Britain right now as being like the USSR before it collapsed. Disillusionment, lack of vision for the future, a growing sense of nihilism.
chubot 3y ago
My recommendation of Fall of Civilizations podcast from a few days ago [1] seems relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations/videos https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations/videos Maybe it will be some solace that's excellent work done by one your countrymen :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514078
rayiner 3y ago
Do you feel less like a “world citizen” now?
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Feeling like "the centre cannot hold" in my birth country makes me feel much more cosmopolitan (if not exactly «bezrodny»), actually.
Eumenes 3y ago
> It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. I can only liken it to the immediate aftershock of Brexit in London. The British empire fell way before Brexit. Swinging demographic changes, neoliberalism, decolonization, globalization, delegating policy to Brussels, etc. The same thing is happening in most western nations. It doesn't have to be this way but it is.
acc_297 3y ago
Adam Curtis gave an interview on his Traumazone film which is referenced in the first few paragraphs of this article on a youtube channel PoliticsJOE He discusses at some lengths parallels to Brexit and broadly the feeling you describe here
eadmund 3y ago
> After Brexit, the blanket got lifted and I started seeing teeth. I’ve seen that same regression here in the U.S. It started in late 2016, and got significantly worse with the pandemic. We’re in a very dangerous period in history. It’s not that long ago that one group of men were cheerfully annihilating another group of men, and I worry quite a bit that we’ll return to that. I think that it might even worse than before, because there is so much less love and beauty in the world now than before.
- brvsft 3y ago
  I too have seen the same regression shortly after <imminent election did not go the way I wanted it to>. Crazy.
direwolf20 3y ago
I think the whole western world is like this. Possibly the other worlds, too, but I don't know them.

meindnoch 3y ago

They ended Peep Show, that's the reason.

tetris11 3y ago
Croydon just hasn't been the same since

ilikerashers 3y ago

I was back in Dublin lately and got the same feeling. Everyone talking about immigration, unfair housing and poverty. It's gone from being a friendly place to a suspicious one in a handful of years.

closewith 3y ago
I wonder if it's just something you've become aware of recently. Certainly unfair housing and poverty have plagued the city its entire existence, and were always hotbed topics in living memory. If by immigration, you mean the refugee crisis, that's a pan-European affair. Another commenter here said: > I think it's the revelation that a shared culture and experience whose existence you took for granted really never existed. You feel untethered. I think that may have happened to you.
- ilikerashers 3y ago
  I don't live there or share the viewpoint. I picked it up from people I know who live there now and how their attitudes have changed. While it might be pan-European, the sentiment in Dublin is certainly new. People seem... fed up. Now there's been a far-right riot, the rest of the world is also aware.
  - closewith 3y ago
    > While it might be pan-European, the sentiment in Dublin is certainly new. That's the point, it's not new. You and others are just realising that the shared culture and experience you thought was universal was just a bubble.
    - ilikerashers 3y ago
      While it’s a nice thought experiment, I find it hard to dismiss centuries of culture as a bubble. The idea that history is meaningless is dangerous.
      - closewith 3y ago
        I live in Ireland and work in frontline healthcare. I interact with people all across the country and the socio-economic spectrum. I can tell you that you definitely were and are likely still in a bubble. The Dublin you thought you knew never existed and the change you think you've experienced is a Dublin that was always there. This is very common amongst my friends and colleagues in tech. They live in a different world.

mathieuh 3y ago

I think it's the revelation that a shared culture and experience whose existence you took for granted really never existed. You feel untethered. I live in Northern Ireland and I get this feeling when I come upon a street festooned in Union Flags and painted kerbstones. It's like stepping into a different country.

rayiner 3y ago
> I think it's the revelation that a shared culture and experience whose existence you took for granted really never existed. You feel untethered. I’d hazard a guess that many British felt that same feeling long before Brexit, and that’s part of what caused Brexit in the first place.
- pjc50 3y ago
  But it turned out that everyone had a different vision of nostalgia, leading to the Brexiteers fragmenting into ever more fractious and undignified factions sabotaging each other in public. There's no single date for the end of the British Empire, but a lot of the strife of the 60s and 70s was dealing with the economic and psychological effects of that. For many European countries with empires.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    Must be surreal. Americans should take notes.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      The American empire is a long way off collapse. People also underestimate collapse-inducing factors in countries with unfree political systems; we can't really see how China is doing internally. The sense that fragmented factions actively want to choose collapse in order to accelerate their own power grab within the collapse is similar in the US to Britain, though. Not as similar to Austria-Hungary and its fragmentary nationalists. Will it have a Gavrilo Princep or a Tetsuya Yamagami? Hard to predict.

082349872349872 3y ago

> Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way (1973) Edit: although come to think of it, the British Empire so beloved of Brexiteers actually made it through the Great War (unlike Austria and Russia), hanging on right up until 1956.

UncleSlacky 3y ago
Depending on how you define it, the Empire still exists (Britain still has colonies, even if they don't call them that). The return of Hong Kong to China is generally considered the "end of empire", though. The sun will not set on it as long as it holds Pitcairn: https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/48/
graemep 3y ago
I do not think it is true that the empire is beloved by Brexiteers. As someone born in a former colony who voted leave, I was definitely not nostalgic for the empire. If anything I feel the EU is more nostalgic for the heights of European power than the UK - all the multipolar world stuff they love. We are going back to a two super-power world, and China is the other super power.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Depends how you define "beloved by Brexiteers". According to [1], in 2020 "A third of people in the UK believe Britain’s colonies were better off for being part of an empire, a higher proportion than in any of the other major colonial powers, a global survey has revealed." And "Brexit-supporting leave voters were more than twice as pro-empire than remainers." Further, 39% of Leave voters vs 16% of Remain voters answered yes to "Would you like Britain to still have an empire?", while 40% of Leave voters vs. 66% of Remain voters answered "no", so in that sense you could well say it's not "beloved" by Brexiteers - given they to on the balance prefer no empire, but it's beloved by a significantly larger portion of Brexiteers. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/uk-more-nostalgic-for-empire-than-other-ex-colonial-powers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/uk-more-nostal...
- 082349872349872 3y ago

aa-jv 3y ago

It maybe wasn't just Brexit, but also the Internet .. things have gotten very banal throughout the Western world.

jemmyw 3y ago

That was a well written comment. I read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49201192-the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49201192-the-sunken-land... earlier this year and it has the same kind of vibe about Brexit, without ever mentioning it. Your writing reminded me of the book.

tetris11 3y ago
Thanks, I will check it out. I think one piece of media that summarized the general feeling of it all for me was the song "The Truth of the Twilight"[0,1]. 0: https://genius.com/16860113 https://genius.com/16860113 1: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vnRYapgm72k https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vnRYapgm72k

foobary 3y ago

I visited London multiple times in the past years, and I watched in real time what you described too. People seem to have gotten grumpier, more stressed, tired.

DeathArrow 3y ago

>It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. It seems to me we are not too far from witnessing the next one falling.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Russia?

ido 3y ago

> It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. I can only liken it to the immediate aftershock of Brexit in London. Surely there's an even closer comparison within living memory: the fall of the soviet union.

pjc50 3y ago

This is the long slide from the highs of "cool Britannia", with acceleration points at 2008 and 2016. There was a slight "now what?" vibe at the Millenium, coupled with a sense of "the end of history" that we could now all relax into liberal technocracy by day with a bit of a party at night. The lack of vision has slowly turned into a lack of hope. The huge industry marketing "fear of the other" is succeeding. Britain's always had its "community solidarity" feeling, but it also has uniquely British kinds of sullen jobsworthness, disengagement, complaining with no intention of fixing anything, resentment, and parochialism. Those are surfacing more. The retreat of the Empire has left the governing structures intact, but on a shrunken scale. The devolved nations are treated like colonies which must be reined in from the centre periodically. London has abandoned the idea of travel to distant Manchester as too expensive, in favor of hoarding resources for a shrinking set of blue non-urban counties.

ksec 3y ago
>The lack of vision has slowly turned into a lack of hope. Couldn't have said it better. Lack of Vision, Lack of Leadership, and Lack of execution.
drivebyadvice 3y ago
Interesting to see you guys talking about this, I just read something with Adam Curtis where he was describing Britain right now as being like the USSR before it collapsed. Disillusionment, lack of vision for the future, a growing sense of nihilism.

chubot 3y ago

My recommendation of Fall of Civilizations podcast from a few days ago [1] seems relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations/videos https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations/videos Maybe it will be some solace that's excellent work done by one your countrymen :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514078

rayiner 3y ago

Do you feel less like a “world citizen” now?

082349872349872 3y ago
Feeling like "the centre cannot hold" in my birth country makes me feel much more cosmopolitan (if not exactly «bezrodny»), actually.

Eumenes 3y ago

> It really must be bizarre watching an empire crumble. I can only liken it to the immediate aftershock of Brexit in London. The British empire fell way before Brexit. Swinging demographic changes, neoliberalism, decolonization, globalization, delegating policy to Brussels, etc. The same thing is happening in most western nations. It doesn't have to be this way but it is.

acc_297 3y ago

Adam Curtis gave an interview on his Traumazone film which is referenced in the first few paragraphs of this article on a youtube channel PoliticsJOE He discusses at some lengths parallels to Brexit and broadly the feeling you describe here

eadmund 3y ago

> After Brexit, the blanket got lifted and I started seeing teeth. I’ve seen that same regression here in the U.S. It started in late 2016, and got significantly worse with the pandemic. We’re in a very dangerous period in history. It’s not that long ago that one group of men were cheerfully annihilating another group of men, and I worry quite a bit that we’ll return to that. I think that it might even worse than before, because there is so much less love and beauty in the world now than before.

brvsft 3y ago
I too have seen the same regression shortly after <imminent election did not go the way I wanted it to>. Crazy.

direwolf20 3y ago

I think the whole western world is like this. Possibly the other worlds, too, but I don't know them.