The World Goes Mad
Wednesday, February 23, 2022 - Sunday, January 1, 2023
Synopsis
On February 23, 2022, the news that Russia had decided to invade Ukraine shocked the entire world. At the time, I was sitting in the living room, and when the notification came through, I immediately turned on the television to see the news.
Coupling that with some incidents ongoing in my personal life, that moment was the beginning of a nearly yearlong period of misery that would forever paint 2022 as one of, if not the, worst year I'd ever lived through.
My routine was cemented throughout from that point until mid-summer: I'd wake up feeling depressed and incredibly miserable, get through the day, watch some YouTube videos with my father in the evenings, and go to bed feeling fine. This was interrupted only for a few days in March, and didn't end until late June.
Politics continued to sour throughout the year as well. With the Republican Party so far ahead in the polls, and with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, I was incensed and angry at the political climate I found myself in.
From that point on, the remainder of 2022 was filled with occasional recurrences of misery, and I began counting down the moments until the year would finally be gone. Things began to look up in November, beginning with the midterm results that saw that Democrats had done much better than expected, followed by the Nosiphus server's resurgence after several months of downtime. The remainder of the playlist's time would be better, until a brief downturn at the very end that was over after a few days.
In essence, The World Goes Mad is not an era of my life that I am interested in reliving, and I'm glad to say that things have been much happier since then.
Notable Songs
As things deteriorated for me in February and March, I found Old Days to be very useful in giving me solace. I had a brief week at the end of March where my mind was briefly cleared, and it felt very liberating, but alas, it was not to last: I still had a long road ahead of me.
Old Days had been with me before 2022, and remains with me, and thankfully, I do not have a negative feeling when I hear it. It was too important in getting me through a rough year.
As I progressed through this rough patch of my life, one thing changed significantly: I did not want to spend any amount of time by myself. I would take my laptop with me and sit in the living room instead of staying in my own room. My grandparents like to watch RFD-TV for the music shows, particularly on Saturday evenings. One episode of The Marty Stuart Show contained a performance of the theme song to the old Western Have Gun Will Travel. Country songs aren't really my thing, but there are a few that I like.
During this low period of my life, there was one line of comfort that I had. In the evenings, I would come home and watch YouTube videos with my father in the living room. Landscaping is the opening song used by the YouTuber Enderman, who we'd often watch. I listened to a lot of vaporwave at the time. Additionally, we also watched a lot of liminal spaces content at the time. All of these things helped me work through this rough patch of my life.
1234 was not a song I discovered in 2022, as I had known about it not long after it had came out, and I while I did like it then, I had no avenue to listen to it during the days of The First Few Years, when my musical consumption was still controlled by my parents and grandparents.
I rediscovered it in 2022, and it was a bit of a nostagic reminder of the late 2000s, and of a much happier era in my life. In essence, it was something of a comfort tune, which I desperately needed throughout 2022.
Mrs Magic holds a unique place in my heart. While I didn't discover it until January 21, 2023, there was a brief downturn in mid-January that harked back to the previous year's seemingly endless series of miserable events. In many ways, this song felt more fitting as the ending of this playlist rather than at the start of A New Dawn. I view it as the swansong for The World Goes Mad, and I use it to recognize that I've made peace with what I went through in 2022 and have moved on to better things.