The Phantasmagoria Has No Plot

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote, describing the way human beings arrange experience into something that feels survivable. Story, in her formulation, wasn’t about meaning-making for its own sake. It was about orienting oneself in the “shifting phantasmagoria.” Knowing where you are, knowing what matters, and, perhaps most importantly, knowing how one thing leads to another. Life rendered manageable and, even amid chaos, somewhat predictable.

What stood out about this year’s Super Bowl advertising was not any single message, trend, or execution. The ads did not seem to emerge from a shared understanding of what kind of moment this is. God and gambling appeared next to one another. And the Backstreet Boys are apparently back.

But it is the incoherence of these ads that is such an accurate reflection of where things are. What was visible was a culture circulating many responses to the pressures of daily living at the same time, without the ability to reconcile them.

We saw sports betting. You might not be able to control the future, but you can still play! The tone was pragmatic, casual. You know, just “betting on the right guy.”

But that framing obscures what’s actually happening. For many younger viewers, gambling isn’t casual at all. It’s financial nihilism. If homeownership is unattainable and retirement accounts feel like fiction, why not bet on sports?

Then we heard from God. “He gets us.” This was a message of reassurance. In a world wanting more and more, Jesus can offer rest from the overwhelm. From the material things, from the constant performance of social media, from the centuries-old search for more.

Artificial intelligence showed up as a helper, and the emphasis was on its usefulness. AI was positioned as something that could reduce effort and take on the exhausting work of decision-making in something as consequential, and yet mundane, as making a new house a home.

Weight-loss and wellness appeared, too. Bodies were presented as problems to be solved. Health means following a protocol. Inject (or swallow), track, and adjust. These were about control—about restoring a sense that something deemed too big or unruly can be brought back into order.

Threaded through nearly all of this was celebrity — a lot of celebrity. Celebrity offered a kind of anchor across all of these themes. You recognize the person, and recognition feels like reliability or relatability. In a way, the celebrity is absorbing the anxiety around a particular product or idea (as in the Alexa ad). In a moment of overwhelming complexity, a familiar face does enormous psychic work simply by being familiar.

What struck me most was how each of these categories maps cleanly to a real anxiety. Economic instability. Spiritual drift. Cognitive overload. Physical dissatisfaction. Loss of trust. All of the ads felt connected to what it feels like to live in the world today.

The gambling ads suggested agency: you can still make smart moves. The religious ads suggested release: you don’t have to hold everything yourself. The AI ads suggested delegation: some of this can be handled for you. The pharmaceutical ads suggested discipline: correct the system and things will improve.

These positions don't negate one another, but they don't form a sequence or a structure. There's no indication of what comes first, what matters most, or how to navigate conflict between them. They function as parallel responses rather than parts of a larger story. We're back in the phantasmagoria—the shifting chaos Didion described—but without the story that makes it navigable.

Each ad made sense. The problem was watching them back-to-back. Bet on the game. Let Jesus carry what you can't. Let AI think for you. Inject this weekly and your body will shrink. One framework after another, each offering a different solution to a different problem, none acknowledging the others exist.

The ads reflected a culture that knows what it's reacting to—economic precarity, spiritual exhaustion, physical anxiety, cognitive overload—but has no agreement about what comes next.

Didion wrote about narrative as a way of making experience coherent. But coherence requires energy, and energy is in short supply. People are working longer hours for less purchasing power. They're parenting while scrolling, sleeping badly, managing chronic conditions, watching their savings lose value. Right now, most people are just trying to make it through the week. The culture can't hold a conversation about where we're going when individuals are focused on whether they'll be okay tomorrow.

The Super Bowl remains one of the few moments of shared attention left, a place where collective assumptions used to surface almost accidentally. This year, it felt chaotic.

What’s happening now is a culture responding to pressure through multiple frameworks at once, with no expectation that they’ll synthesize into a coherent worldview. The single explanation is dead. What remains is a cross-section of strategies for getting through.