Nothing ever happens” as a nihilistic statement is from a place of privilege. It is easier to say “nothing ever happens” as you are sat in your studio apartment in a fairly nice city or from a relatively small town in the middle of the Western world but these phrases aren’t said everywhere. They aren’t said in warzones, they aren’t said in places where rockets are flying overhead, they aren’t being said in places where statues are being ripped from pedestals by tractors and cables. It is a place of privilege to feel like “nothing ever happens” as you are able to ignore what happens in the rest of the world. If you feel like “nothing ever happens”, maybe it’s the politics that surround you that violently reinforce the status quo. Maybe it’s how the status quo is reinforced by capitalism and neoliberalism. Maybe it’s how those systems work to keep things feeling just fine enough that no one, at least in the privileged position of being a person in Britain, will ever feel the need to do anything. Maybe “nothing ever happens” because you aren’t doing anything. If you want something to happen, maybe you should make something happen instead of waiting for times to change for you.
A lot of evidence for “nothing ever happens” is failed plots in history like close calls during the cold war or failed assassinations. However, if you think for more than two seconds, you’ll remember that there are assassinations that do happen and bombs that do go off. If nothing ever happens, you could probably still meet a Russian tsar. “Nothing ever happens” is only a phrase that makes sense if you don’t think about it and just say it.
“Nothing ever happens”, as a majority of things that are said online by people who don’t know very well, originally started on 4chan as early as July 2014. The first reference to this phrase is posted alongside a meme of a man wearing a Nazi SS officer cap, complete with imperial eagle and totenkopf. The phrase’s origins do not have a good foundation. These origins should be noted and not brushed off. It is a foolish person who builds his belief system on the sayings of Nazis because they fall away, and great the fall of them will be. This form of right-wing nihilism based in Western societal privilege makes you mentally lethargic and morally laissez-faire. If you want the world to be a better place, get out of the mental-bed rot moment and throw away the phrase “nothing ever happens”.