Cultural Black Holes

Cultural phenomena with gravity wells that suck people in and hurt them. You can feel it in your body — the weight, the dread, the hopelessness. They exist in media environments and feeds and they pull your attention and mood downward.

Examples:

• The COVID cultural black hole
• The AI doom cultural black hole
• The environmentalist cultural black hole
• The US politics cultural black hole (both left and right have their own)

The key insight: these black holes are made of real news, real events. They’re not fake. But they represent a selective attention pattern that compounds sadness and helplessness. Sadness lasts longer than any other emotion, so the gravity well is self-reinforcing.

The opposite force is Cultural White Holes.

First identified by Andrew during COVID (2020) as “the COVID blues” — see The COVID Blues.