American culture has become addicted to black pilling. Americans have become systematically inclined to emotionally and mentally surrender when they see negative odds and treat them as a certainty. 

Cole Ellison | October 22, 2026

American culture has become addicted to black pilling. Americans have become systematically inclined to emotionally and mentally surrender when they see negative odds and treat them as a certainty. We watch our podcast or the news, and we hear the same talking points from all sides. Americans are given many viewpoints on how an issue will negatively impact their lives, and very few solutions. But when we hyper-fixate on the potential chaos looming in the coming future and ruminate, we slowly fragment our society.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations that a person's character and agency are formed by what he focuses his mind on and by his refusal of what Christendom would later call sin. The soul itself is shaped by that which you focus your mind on. One obvious consequence is that a free people who truly start to believe “nothing I do truly matters” have already, in part, relinquished their right to self-government.

Social media feeds today are filled with nihilism and shared despair. You have endless content immediately available, presenting ideas about society and the state of the nation. Content that expresses ideas such as building a career being pointless, being a homeowner being impossible, and the only guarantee being the inevitability of personal failure. Instead of encouraging people to seek ways to improve or fix the issue at hand, it encourages them to bond over a collective notion that “it’s over.” These same individuals also get pulled into nihilistic ideas about physical determinism, eco-fatalism, and political defeatism. When you fail to discipline and focus your mind, it becomes intensely........

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