Cope springs eternal

A few thoughts on the lifeblood of the internet: COPE.

Cope, in noun form, as in “this is cope,” is internet-native slang for “psychological defense through self-delusion.” It’s not that different from the verb form but has a darker valence. In this version, to cope is not the capacity to deal well with difficulty but an inability to handle a blunt truth, a pathetic need for mental palliatives. The act of cope-ing is lying to yourself in plain sight and, of course, of being seen exhibiting cope. 

The crisis of comfort has been diagnosed before: Today’s humanity is a former husk of itself, atrophied by affluence, survival machines who finally get to live in the climate-controlled, treat-dispensing walled garden their ancestors could only dream of. But our grasping for comfort extends beyond convenience food, fleece blankets, and constant entertainment. We are also longing for spiritual comfort. 

In Self Made, Tara Isabella Burton documents the history of our shifting self-concept from one where identity comes from outside of ourselves: our tribes, our families, and our relationship with an external divinity, to one where we are at the helm of every aspect of who we are. From subjects of a pre-ordained system to objects of our own making: “modern-day deities, simultaneously living works of art to be admired by others and ingeniously productive economic machines.” God has gradually moved from providing the external, fixed but consoling firmament of your “lot in life” to an internal entity: the mystical spark of authentic will. Your mission now is to chip away at your(self) until you hit the bedrock of authenticity, until you reveal and create “who you’re supposed to be.” The self-made man is the pinnacle of the zeitgeist: the artist, the entrepreneur, the celebrity. They all exhibit supreme acts of will in shaping themselves and their environment to fit patterns revealed within their authentic self. 

With bare survival out of the way, the emergent meaning that springs from overcoming the relentless challenges of nature with your kin group loses its shine. What is left are status games, aesthetics, and vibes. As our exposure to more potential ways of self-creation grows, and as the last vestiges of the “lot in life” model disappear, the more or less explicit message is that self-creation is not only possible, it is mandatory. Up to this point, we’ve not managed to produce a mythology explaining why failing to create yourself is acceptable. But for most of us, base reality inevitably entails fewer avenues for self-creation and lower status in the hierarchy of self-making than we’d like. We could be doing better on many dimensions, but we’re not, which creates distress.

Cope bridges the gap between the life you could (should!) lead and the one you have. 

Despite its unpleasant connotations, cope is essential for people who are chained to self-creation. It provides a scaffold for the ego when it falls short. The media we relate to on a day-to-day basis is a schizophrenic mix of idolatry and cope. Here is the pinnacle of human achievement, beauty, and wealth, and here is a wealth of reasons why you do not qualify: you may be mentally ill, have trauma, be trans, or be oppressed by socially constructed beauty standards, tax dodging billionaires, austerity, gynocentrism, or the deep state. Take both pills together for best results. God may not be there to console you, but your favorite influencer is - the merchant of cope.   

The merchants of cope are icons of self-creation. They are admired not just for their worldly accomplishments, though they do help, but for their ability to provide a frame for our own self-making. Some prefer their framing in the form of visual inspiration, some as a consoling narrative—either of hope or certain doom and some in the form of an endless array of rigorous 10-point plans that they’ll never follow. 

The consumer of cope feels a scattered hope that one fragment, one image, one paragraph from the torrent of daily media will trigger an epiphany, and they will be redeemed. The false self will fade, authenticity will ensue, and the right path will light up in dazzling neon before them. And it does happen. The revelation lottery has many noticeable winners, most evidently the merchants of cope themselves. The reality is that information does redeem sometimes, but cope, by definition, can’t. 

Cope is not about the content, but about the psychological function of consuming it. Both the content that offers options for what you might do, such as interior design, fitness, health, and financial planning, and the content that provides reasons for why you are not doing these things, such as conspiracies, social critique, and, let’s be honest, politics, can serve the function of cope. You might do one of the 176 useful things you’ve scrolled through today, or, even better, you might collect a few more for use in an indeterminate future. You could start looking around for little ways to improve your existence, but when the world is on fire and “improvement” itself is a heteropatriarchal concept or a plot by our gynocentric hypergamous overlords, it seems best to sit tight. 

Agency is the natural enemy of cope, but it is in short supply. We do not have ultimate control over our lives. We are all at the mercy of the zeitgeist, of material, physical, and mental constraints. Our window on an ever more complex world is narrow and filled with noise. Ambiguity is painful. One tried-and-tested way to collapse ambiguity is to seek certainty in others: authority figures, public intellectuals, pundits, journalists, all successfully self-made individuals. These guys grabbed ambiguity by the neck and slayed it through careful study, sharp reasoning, and a bias for action, so they can now provide a framework to soften the chaos in your mind. 

Some of the more popular forms of cope present as an amorphous, external evil entity. For politics and social critique, the most effective dark matter is THEY. THEY subsist on your life force, unrealized potential, and the life you could have lived if THEY weren’t out to get you at every step. THEY fulfills a vital function in the marketplace of cope. THEY is a stand-in for forces that oppose me or conspire to reduce my status and increase theirs at my cost. But just like poverty is self-explanatory - you have no wealth, being low status - you have no standing - is the baseline. THEY represent the god-of-the-gaps argument for why you are not who you might have been. 

Another common dark miasma is trauma, an externally imposed, malevolent burden on your authentic self. Self-diagnosis of mental health issues is a scrambling to replace the old “lot in life” model with another just as inescapable constraint. It’s the “dog ate my homework” for self-creation. And it’s understandable. The age-old model had a precious function. It legitimated many worthy but otherwise unimpressive lives. The world is a stage, and some people will inevitably perform poorly.   

Peter Turchin’s theory of Elite Overproduction states that societies that generate too many contenders for the elite but don’t provide enough elite positions of power are in trouble. Slighted elite aspirants are the motor of history, the instigators of new intellectual movements, and the ferment of revolutions. Under post-scarcity and at least presumed meritocracy, the seed of potential elite status has been planted in more people than ever on countless possible dimensions. Cope has a pacifying effect on the would-be elites. It’s the path of least resistance, contains both the disease and the cure - somehow, at some point, destroying amorphous oppressive social entities: capitalism, the patriarchy, the longhouse, the deep state, but not today - and in reality manifests as team sports and entertainment. Status is zero-sum, but cope is infinite.     

Agency is a gift and a burden. The Cathedral of Cope offers existential relief packaged as information. Here are one hundred reasons why you are trapped, why the life you thought you could have is out of reach, or, alternatively, one thousand genius hacks you’ll never implement.

Cope, then, is both a reflection of our time and a mechanism for enduring it. It reveals the deep fractures in a culture obsessed with self-making, where the weight of agency collides with the limits of reality. It is a paradoxical balm: it soothes by acknowledging our constraints yet often keeps us tethered to them. Cope fills the space left by a world that no longer offers shared myths to legitimize ordinary lives. Instead, it invites us to grapple with ambiguity through a kaleidoscope of narratives, idols, and imagined enemies.

In this way, cope reflects the paradox of our age: a world teeming with opportunity yet constrained by systemic limits and personal incapacity. It legitimizes failure not as a moral or personal shortfall but as an understandable outcome in a game where the odds are unevenly distributed. Whether through narratives of external oppression or the promise of internal reinvention, cope bridges the chasm between aspiration and reality, not by resolving it, but by offering temporary shelter from its abyss.

In the end, the question isn’t whether cope is inherently good or bad—it is a necessary response to the pressures of self-making in an age that demands much and delivers sparingly. What matters is recognizing it for what it is: a scaffold, not a sanctuary. A tool to be used sparingly, lest it becomes a crutch that binds rather than frees.