Nick Cave Has Pitch-Perfect Take On Why Modern Men Are Suffering

Nick Cave is an incredible artist, writer, musician, and film composer — and he also has a perfect diagnosis of what is happening to men in the modern world.

If you are unfamiliar with the Australian singer and frontman for the band “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,” I recommend checking out his interview with The Atlantic — yes, the middle-brow rag that occasionally produces articles worth your time. In it, Cave discusses why he makes music, how he has grieved the death of two sons, and why humans need some form of mystical transcendence in their lives, whether it comes from religion, art, or music.

Cave writes on a blog, The Red Hand Files, where he receives and addresses letters from readers. Many of those readers, he says, are nihilistic and miserable. As Cave summarizes it, they think “the world is shit.”

“That has a sort of range: from people that just see everything is corrupt from a political point of view, to people that just see no value in themselves, in human beings, or in the world,” he told The Atlantic, explaining that the sad, dark messages he receives for his blog suggest that all of modern culture is “anti-sacred, secular by nature, unmysterious, unnuanced.” (Stream the Daily Caller’s new documentary, ‘Selling Sex, here)

The singer also discusses how he discovered conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson but later grew disenchanted by his political posturing and endless spats on Twitter. “They were seriously beautiful things,” Cave said of Peterson’s early lectures on the Bible. “I heard reports about people in his classes; it was like being on acid or something like that. Just listening to this man speak about these sorts of things—it was so deeply complex. And putting the idea of religion back onto the table as a legitimate intellectual concern.”

Whatever one thinks of Peterson (like Cave, I, too, have become disenchanted with him), Cave’s diagnosis of the modern world being “unmysterious” and “unnuanced” is spot-on.

Modern life offers very little in the way of mystery, nuance, and things that are sacred. Social media and its legion of influencers give you shallow glimpses into their lives without the depth that comes with a novel or the ambiguity of a painting. We have replaced religion and the worship of saints with the worship of secular idols. We have replaced the desire for romantic love with the desire for porn.

But, as Cave argues, they are antidotes — you just need to have enough hope to seek those things out. Organized religion. An intimate relationship with a loving partner. Books and movies that have substance, that have something to say about the human condition, that aren’t just the videos and reels that pop up on your Instagram feed. Cave’s music, perhaps?