One of the more interesting facts of our age is the lack of tragic stories being told via books and film.

Now, don’t get me wrong, plenty of tragic circumstances are constantly splashed across our collective social media feeds; from people we know, people we don’t, people experiencing tragic circumstances across the globe, and much more. Circumstances imposed upon them by fate, identity, chance (both random and purposeful), and nature. And we observers of this stream of tragedies are tacitly rewarded by the algorithm for engaging through clicks, scrolls, and eye movements, for “engaging” with the stories of these circumstances.

While it may initially appear as though there are more tragedies in the world, the actual fact of the matter is that there aren’t more tragedies now than there ever were before in human history. From the burning of a random village in the Amazon in 1500 B.C. to a person soliciting funds for cancer treatments on a GoFundMe page in 2026 A.D., tragic circumstances are a regrettable and pervasive human constant.

What is missing in our tragic circumstances-soaked social media feeds is fictionalized stories of real people overcoming those tragedies to become heroic and succeed in the end. It’s almost as if we have wound up in a place in our social media feeds that is a full realization of the frustrated, nihilistic fictional lament of the Hollywood writer and director, Charlie Kaufman, in the film Adaptation (2002): “What if the writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens? Where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies, they struggle and are frustrated, and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world.”

This is where the tragic plays of William Shakespeare can help us sophisticated, nihilistic, deconstructionist, and social media addicted post-moderns navigate how to put tragic circumstances into a narrative form to extract meaning, significance, and even closure from them. It turns out that the tragedies of Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello aren’t just “…tales told by an idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5). They remain the best method humans have of coping with the brute facts of the natural world and both random–and purposeful–circumstances that happen to us.

And the ones we love.

Let’s bring back the telling of tragic tales, for the hurly-burly will never be done, and the never-ending tragic battles are ever to be lost or won.