Everest selfies for the gram! Long lines and piles of trash at the world’s apex

We need a complete and total stop to summiting Everest until we can figure out what’s going on.

So someone might be tempted to say after taking one look at the viral video of the long, slow line of hikers taking their turns at the top.

More and more people, stepping over the frozen corpses of those who came before them, spend more and more money to feed the internet more and more images of themselves doing something that once no one did and that now lacks enough room to accommodate all comers.

“It’s crazy we’ve turned Everest into a DMV line at altitude for really rich people,” sighed one poster on X. “Imagine getting on top of Everest and next person in line nudges you in two minutes yelling, my turn babes,” joked another.

Of course, you don’t have to be rich to climb Everest or any mountain. But the self-defeating spectacle of today’s spiritual lemmings ascending the famed peak, only to hit the dab for the gram and descend, underscores how much our wealth today is being channeled into vain, hollow, formulaic, and increasingly automated behavior.

It’s a sharp reminder that, for all the ways technology shapes our behavior independent of our hopes, beliefs, study, and schemes, it also serves our passions and plans the way the fabled monkey’s paw grants wishes good and hard.

The irony is painful. We fallen humans constantly look for ways to surrender the freedom we seem to so jealously defend — when, in reality, the stronger motivator is that we get jealous of people who seem to have more freedom than we do because we hate it whenever anyone seems to have more of anything than we do.

As a result, we simultaneously lust after ways to automate our choice-making and thirst to feel special compared to all the others who are increasingly similar to us.

NAMGYAL SHERPA/Getty

So we build tech that can help that process along, but when it does, we become super resistant to recognizing how much of our own control we’ve given it, just as we allocate our money toward the same demented ends.

Now, on Mt. Everest, both those forces are converging in spectacularly absurd and depressing style. More and more people, stepping over the frozen corpses of those who came before them, spend more and more money to feed the internet more and more images of themselves doing something that once no one did and that now lacks enough room to accommodate all comers.

Pop music is no longer the “early warning system” Marshall McLuhan once recognized in society’s artists, but at least one band saw this coming — the edgy, catchy, and always topical Everything Everything. Recent single “The Mad Stone,” off the band's new album "Mountainhead," decries our relentless foolishness through a metaphor come obscenely to life on Everest:

“Are you coming outside? I can make it a business, I can sell you it,” the lyrics begin. “At the peak of Choice Mountain, you've been saving up.”

At the very top, there was a screen that showed a picture of a man
Who stood there looking at a picture of a man who stood there
Looking at a picture of a picture of a man on a screen
And he was looking at another picture of a man who stood there
Looking at a picture of a man who stood there looking at a
Picture of a picture of a man who was the double of me …
The Mad Stone is singing
Can you say the same?
You get no pleasure from your pleasure center
In your reptile brain

At a time when so many of us just can’t wait to lay all the blame for our towering ills at the feet of this or that — oligarchy, technology, anything but our own selves — it’s hard to break out of the infinite regress of mirrored images and experiences described by Everything Everything. But is it really any more difficult than that climb back down from the DMV at the top of choice mountain?