After work, I lay on the couch scrolling through short videos for two hours; when I turned off my phone, my mind felt completely empty. It wasn’t until I recently read Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life that I realized this sense of emptiness wasn’t just my problem.
In the book, Fisher breaks this feeling down into three categories:
First, the ghost. Those futures we’ve lost but which never truly left—like the childhood belief that “hard work pays off.” Looking back now, that future never actually arrived.
Second, the strangeness. Things intrude and disrupt the order, like realizing your parents are better at scrolling through short videos than you are, or that your job might one day be taken over by AI.
The third is gloom. Things that should have appeared never did. After working overtime and coming home, you don’t know what to do; you pick up your phone and put it down again. You can’t quite call it emptiness, but something is definitely missing…
Fisher was deeply immersed in depression while writing this book. He didn’t hide it; in fact, he distinguished between depression and depressive moods. In his view, a depressive mood is an acceptable experience, one that carries a certain subtle sense of grandeur. Depression, however, is different. He says, “Depression is not sadness, nor is it a state of mind; it is a theory about the world and about life.”
He also analyzes why Ian Curtis, the lead singer of The Joy Division, committed suicide—which is, in fact, an analysis of himself. He saw the dangerous allure of depression, and at the same time, he saw how suicide absurdly romanticizes life. Twelve years later, Fisher made the same choice.
Reading this, I felt he wasn’t writing an academic paper, but performing surgery on himself.
In recent years, as the pace of daily life has accelerated, the pace of cultural development has slowed. We scroll through our phones faster and faster, yet our hearts grow emptier. Trending topics change every minute, yet nothing seems to truly matter to me. At work, we’re chased by KPIs; after work, we’re pushed by algorithms. We crave speed in everything—fast food, short videos, instant news… And what’s the result? Every song sounds familiar, every movie feels like one I’ve already seen.
Closing the book, I found myself thinking: perhaps our generation isn’t without a future; we just haven’t yet learned to bid farewell to that past that has already died. Let the ghosts wander on…