The great American Melodrama

 Welcome to USA -er- United States of Anxiety. Welcome to this unique world of hyperboles – coast to coast.

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from listening to someone describe their Tuesday. It's not the exhaustion of, say, manual labour, or grief, or sitting in a middle seat for six hours. It's the exhaustion of maintaining a straight face while a fully employed adult explains that their week has been "INSANE" — because they had back-to-back meetings and the parking garage was full and, at some point, the office ran out of 1% cow’s milk. A tragedy, truly. Historians will record it.

America has always loved bigness. Big skies, big dreams, big portions that arrive at the table looking like a geological event. Fine. That's the deal. But somewhere along the way the bigness crept into the language and just... stayed there, metastasizing, until ordinary words stopped being able to hold ordinary things. Now everything is "AMAZING" or "BRUTAL" or "ICONIC", and those words mean precisely nothing, and everyone just keeps using them anyway, louder.

It all started, probably, with "GREAT". Once a word earns enough usage it gets debased, like a currency someone's been printing too much of. A sandwich is great. A parking spot is great. Gary from accounting, who remembered your birthday, is "LITERALLY THE GREATEST HUMAN BEING ALIVE". Once the word died its quiet death, the language had no choice but to escalate. If the floor is great, the ceiling has to be somewhere near insane, and so here we are.

So nobody eats lunch anymore — they "GRAB" it, with the energy of someone defusing a device. They return to "THE TRENCHES", which is what the open-plan office apparently is now. They are "SLAMMED", "DROWNING", "IN THE WEEDS" — all phrases borrowed from actual emergencies, applied to the problem of a Thursday with three deliverables. Somewhere in the afterlife a coal miner is staring into the middle distance, speechless.

Corporate America is the worst offender because corporate America has the most to hide. If you're asking people to spend their lives doing things that don't matter very much, you need language that makes it sound like it does. So they're not doing their jobs — they're "CRUSHING IT", "KILLING IT", "GOING TO WAR" for the Q3 numbers. The meetings are fires. The competitors are threats to be "DESTROYED". The new brand refresh is a "GAME-CHANGER" — a phrase that has now been applied to so many products that one begins to suspect the game has never actually changed once.

Then there's the personal stuff, which is in some ways more depressing. People are no longer interested in things; they're "OBSESSED". Not with anything serious. With a candle, or a condiment, or a specific form of flavoured water that has, apparently, "CHANGED THEIR LIFE". A chicken sandwich gets a paragraph. A minor inconvenience gets a eulogy. The Wi-Fi drops for forty seconds and a grown person announces they are "LITERALLY DYING", deploying the word "LITERALLY" to mean the precise opposite of literally, which is fine, language changes, but then they also use "DYING" to describe a state in which they are clearly and demonstrably not dying, and at a certain point you have to ask what words are even for anymore.

What's genuinely strange about all of it isn't the exaggeration — humans have always exaggerated, it's one of our better qualities. It's the uniformity. The same ten words, distributed across three hundred million people, stamping everything flat. Your real enthusiasm and your performed enthusiasm sound identical. Your actual crisis and your inconvenience crisis are indistinguishable. The boy who cried wolf, except the wolf is a slow elevator and the boy works in content strategy.

The language was supposed to make things feel bigger. Instead it made everything the same size, which is the size of nothing.

So they stagger on. Not tired but "BURNED OUT". Not busy but "DROWNING". The printer didn't jam — it "CHOSE VIOLENCE". The restaurant was not good — it was "ELITE". 

The rest of the world watches this and feels, understandably, a little dizzy.

Scream loud enough about everything, and you lose the ability to scream about anything. A culture so committed to living at maximum volume has a problem — it has nowhere to go when something actually happens. No register left. No word left unburned. That bowl of hyperboles looks empty now.

When the real thing arrives — the grief, the crisis, the moment that actually deserves the language — they'll reach for the words and find they already spent them. On a candle. On a sandwich. On a Tuesday.

—  Dilip Subramanian