This letter is the introduction to the new issue of Vice magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.
Yesterday, before I got out of bed, I had seen a gang of Irish teenagers dole out a vicious beating to a foreign-born Black man at a leisure center, a former television star—her beautiful girl-next-door looks lost to years of self-abuse and botched plastic surgery—in the throes of what looked like a nervous breakdown, and a dozen Australian children fall to their deaths from an airborne bouncy castle. It’s hard to rouse yourself from a breakfast like that; it lives with you like a grudge for the rest of the day even if you’re not consciously processing it.
There have always been reasons to feel down on the world. There hasn’t always been the means to remind yourself of all of those reasons, via visceral video evidence, before your feet touch the floor in the morning.
Which is how we end up here, at the outset of The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue. It can often feel as though we are all living with a pessimism that’s so ingrained it’s become default, an internalized laundry list of complaints that batter us about the head every day—it’s the environment, it’s the politics, it’s the wars and the famines and what the internet is doing to our brains. It’s microplastics in our balls and missiles in our skies. It’s gene-edited Chinese supersoldiers and murdered aid workers. At this stage, these sources of misery are so indelibly etched in the public imagination that even thinking of having to write them all down in a list was in its own way demoralizing.
That’s why, for this issue, we wanted to start from the apparently entrenched consensus position that we are all doomed to fry to death on an ailing and exhausted planet surrounded by liars, bigots, and narcissists, and work our way back toward the light. Is doing so futile? Is the impulse contrarian? Can the existence of a new Hal Hartley film and a chemically refined version of ecstasy really stack up against all the horrors and atrocities of modern life? These are rhetorical questions, with invisible answers. All I know is that it would’ve been a lot easier to pull together The Reasons to Be Disconsolate Issue and that usually, the harder of two options is the more necessary and rewarding way to go.
We have reasons for cheer that really run the gamut, from potential planet-saving strategies that may just ensure the survival of the human species, to rhapsodies on the beatific banality of a well-spent Saturday. We have a big celebrity fashion shoot and an extremely positive set of album reviews. We have seven mental coping strategies for the end of the world and one universally agreed-upon definition of transcendental romantic love.
It might not be an issue for everyone. But, as someone with access to VICE.com’s traffic statistics, the amount of people still finding and reading the enduring 2012 opus “How to Suck Your Own Dick” every day tells me there are plenty of optimists left out there, even if they do seem to have too much time on their hands.
Regards,
Kevin Lee Kharas
Editor, Vice magazine
This letter is the introduction to the new issue of Vice magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.
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