It is actually fascinating and incredible how much GLP-1s just silence the noise and the want of addiction, and I say that from personal experience, I have backed into sobriety due to simple lack of interest in substances.
“Only olds seem to gravitate towards the stock-standard “Why can’t we just go back to the ‘90s?” crap”
I still look back fondly to the Reagan years as a time before everything went downhill. I’m only 42!! 😬
“Orthobros and tradcaths”
Are both intensely un-American if you ask me. Joseph Smith prophesied that “both popes” (orthodox and Catholic) would unite against the United States in last days of the Republic. Both are race-enemies of the American nation.
“draw of authoritarianism in the Internet age”
Well, it coincided with a period of American weakness vis-a-vis its geostrategic rivals. The 1970s were similar in this respect. I don’t think it’s directly related to the technology, although OTOH many large US tech corps were projects to control the American population from the beginning - for example Facebook was designed by DARPA to short-circuit nascent peace movements.
“explanation for this has already been supplied by McLuhan,”
Care to elaborate for those of us who haven’t read him?
“r/TheRedPill — which I remember reading as a teen and then it completely firebombing the way I saw teen boys, which already wasn’t charitable.”
Female internet use has generally not improved my view of women, either (I suppose default.blog is an exception).
“I was 27 and started having sex I enjoyed”
Sorry to hear that, it’s only starting to dawn on me how widespread this problem really is.
“I remember thinking it depicted “the purest kind of love” because I had so deeply internalized what pick-up artists and my real-life environment said about women.”
What? I’ve heard this before from other women and I don’t understand. Care to explain?
“What is going to happen to mommy bloggers and family influencers as the birth rate continues to decline? Is anyone writing about this?”
Many will go out of business. This has been going on in low birth-rate countries in East Asia for over a decade now.
“did Adderall impact our politics at all?”
Yes!! It made a lot of (mostly white and otherwise promising) men deeply dysfunctional. I did not take it much and the only times I’ve ever found the idea of a woman pegging me appealing were while coming down from an adderall high. So I suspect a lot of the millennial college-educated white male population likes getting pegged because their mommies fed them adderall like candy - definitely had some unusual impacts on gender politics.
I think adderall use skews white because my friends who took (who were mostly white) it liked the appeal of taking a “white man’s drug” (boosts productivity supposedly, even though Asian kids are out-concentrating their white peers in spades).
“infantilization and the literacy crisis.”
That does sound interesting! People don’t read as much because they watch sound bites all day? Sounds like a familiar topic…
These are lovely thoughts. You've been truly a thought leader, so please do continue being unashamed about it.
I'm often thinking about JD Vance's endless journeying, a kind of Internet rock climbing. It's the closest thing we have to Obama's story, where the necessarily self conscious striver trying to articulate what it ought to mean to do good in this modern age gets enmeshed in real webs of need and obligation, while coping with the obvious insufficiency of their nuclear family by grabbing what they find in the social world and re-cooking it to fit their own journey. Stanning to please their funders, then reintegrating, then marking the blend with shards, almost lightning bolts, of independent authenticity.
You with your periods of submerging of self in the Internet, followed with your drive to investigate how it went that way, and then writing about it, to bridge the distance from your own personal path and the paths of a generation who followed your path too, albeit more passively and with a shared group reinforcement, have a lot in common with Vance and Obama who were early but fortunately for them not too early.
Of course, Obama with his quiet sponsors from the Harvard Federalists and then Patty Pritzker, and Vance with his book and then Peter Thiel and Trump Jr., are exceptional cases. But even though you didn't have those sponsors, your journey is, to me, similar, and your attachment to right wing pubs for your paid writing is a bit like Obamas ties to the Federalists that got him thru Harvard and to UChicago.
“infantilization and the literacy crisis" hmm this is very intriguing... I've noticed people are calling mispronouncing words "illiteracy" which is not the definition, but it's almost used as a way to pat these people on the head and saying they're so dumb/childish of course they don't get those words.... Also related but not really, the way AI writing is defended because it's ableist to expect people to write themselves? Seems infantilizing to me.
Ironic when spending time reading about topics that don't tend to come up in daily conversation is a common cause of 'not knowing how that word is pronounced'.
It's funny how this whole meme of converting to a high church faith to own the libs has become so mainstream (JD Vance is one, rly) that it's starting to become lame again. There's a lot of talk about the increasing popularity of religion amongst young people but it also seems oddly performative, which I guess also goes for new atheism itself at its peak. Interesting how you get to see these cycles as you age up.
I find it really bizarre when people change their entire epistemology and concept of the supernatural or lack thereof due to politics; I can understand the reverse much more easily, that this is a trend speaks to the extent to which people really aren't serious about how they think about things
And infantilisation and the literacy crisis I think has to do with Neil Postman’s work and the thought that writing and reading serious amounts of longform as our primary mode of communication encourages deep and serious thought. If we’re not reading and writing as much and relying on shortform video instead we lose the benefits of a written culture and return to a much more infantilised state where we are swayed by bright colours in character, loud noises, whatever we last heard etc.
"so, this was, I don’t know, until I was 27 and started having sex I enjoyed — I remember thinking it depicted “the purest kind of love” because I had so deeply internalized what pick-up artists and my real-life environment said about women."
???? Why you didn't have sex you enjoyed earlier and why pick-up artists made you think that gay men are "the purest kind of love"?
The link is the beauty of things that are made by a huge number of people working selflessly without needing credit for their work. And how that’s really quite an ancient way of working which modern ideas of authorship have subverted and which we’re rediscovering via collective work on online worlds like The Backrooms.
It is actually fascinating and incredible how much GLP-1s just silence the noise and the want of addiction, and I say that from personal experience, I have backed into sobriety due to simple lack of interest in substances.
Excellent stuff here, left a reply in the Google form
“Only olds seem to gravitate towards the stock-standard “Why can’t we just go back to the ‘90s?” crap”
I still look back fondly to the Reagan years as a time before everything went downhill. I’m only 42!! 😬
“Orthobros and tradcaths”
Are both intensely un-American if you ask me. Joseph Smith prophesied that “both popes” (orthodox and Catholic) would unite against the United States in last days of the Republic. Both are race-enemies of the American nation.
“draw of authoritarianism in the Internet age”
Well, it coincided with a period of American weakness vis-a-vis its geostrategic rivals. The 1970s were similar in this respect. I don’t think it’s directly related to the technology, although OTOH many large US tech corps were projects to control the American population from the beginning - for example Facebook was designed by DARPA to short-circuit nascent peace movements.
“explanation for this has already been supplied by McLuhan,”
Care to elaborate for those of us who haven’t read him?
“r/TheRedPill — which I remember reading as a teen and then it completely firebombing the way I saw teen boys, which already wasn’t charitable.”
Female internet use has generally not improved my view of women, either (I suppose default.blog is an exception).
“I was 27 and started having sex I enjoyed”
Sorry to hear that, it’s only starting to dawn on me how widespread this problem really is.
“I remember thinking it depicted “the purest kind of love” because I had so deeply internalized what pick-up artists and my real-life environment said about women.”
What? I’ve heard this before from other women and I don’t understand. Care to explain?
“What is going to happen to mommy bloggers and family influencers as the birth rate continues to decline? Is anyone writing about this?”
Many will go out of business. This has been going on in low birth-rate countries in East Asia for over a decade now.
“did Adderall impact our politics at all?”
Yes!! It made a lot of (mostly white and otherwise promising) men deeply dysfunctional. I did not take it much and the only times I’ve ever found the idea of a woman pegging me appealing were while coming down from an adderall high. So I suspect a lot of the millennial college-educated white male population likes getting pegged because their mommies fed them adderall like candy - definitely had some unusual impacts on gender politics.
I think adderall use skews white because my friends who took (who were mostly white) it liked the appeal of taking a “white man’s drug” (boosts productivity supposedly, even though Asian kids are out-concentrating their white peers in spades).
“infantilization and the literacy crisis.”
That does sound interesting! People don’t read as much because they watch sound bites all day? Sounds like a familiar topic…
Oh also, iirc adderall has a negative impact on male sexual performance. It’s not good for you.
Did a lot of your boyfriends in your younger years take adderall? Might be related to not enjoying sex until 27 🤔
No! I didn’t enjoy it but I also wasn’t really doing it..maybe once a year at most
A lot of younger American women *not* having sex often is also something that has only recently started to dawn on me, since
the ones I was involved with before I met my foreign ex-wife were very forward and had a body count of ~30 by the age of 21
I encountered that a lot in college
Can address your other q’s later
re : 2.) https://youtu.be/_dDFZlF_SK0?si=OlWux2LxPRKq7fxX
These are lovely thoughts. You've been truly a thought leader, so please do continue being unashamed about it.
I'm often thinking about JD Vance's endless journeying, a kind of Internet rock climbing. It's the closest thing we have to Obama's story, where the necessarily self conscious striver trying to articulate what it ought to mean to do good in this modern age gets enmeshed in real webs of need and obligation, while coping with the obvious insufficiency of their nuclear family by grabbing what they find in the social world and re-cooking it to fit their own journey. Stanning to please their funders, then reintegrating, then marking the blend with shards, almost lightning bolts, of independent authenticity.
You with your periods of submerging of self in the Internet, followed with your drive to investigate how it went that way, and then writing about it, to bridge the distance from your own personal path and the paths of a generation who followed your path too, albeit more passively and with a shared group reinforcement, have a lot in common with Vance and Obama who were early but fortunately for them not too early.
Of course, Obama with his quiet sponsors from the Harvard Federalists and then Patty Pritzker, and Vance with his book and then Peter Thiel and Trump Jr., are exceptional cases. But even though you didn't have those sponsors, your journey is, to me, similar, and your attachment to right wing pubs for your paid writing is a bit like Obamas ties to the Federalists that got him thru Harvard and to UChicago.
Mitch Horowitz has been dispatching about New Thought if you're not already following
“infantilization and the literacy crisis" hmm this is very intriguing... I've noticed people are calling mispronouncing words "illiteracy" which is not the definition, but it's almost used as a way to pat these people on the head and saying they're so dumb/childish of course they don't get those words.... Also related but not really, the way AI writing is defended because it's ableist to expect people to write themselves? Seems infantilizing to me.
I wonder if this is related to rise of audiobooks/the aural culture
Ironic when spending time reading about topics that don't tend to come up in daily conversation is a common cause of 'not knowing how that word is pronounced'.
the smartest people I know mispronounce words constantly - for real!
I think because they use words which expand their vocabulary
exactly.
It's funny how this whole meme of converting to a high church faith to own the libs has become so mainstream (JD Vance is one, rly) that it's starting to become lame again. There's a lot of talk about the increasing popularity of religion amongst young people but it also seems oddly performative, which I guess also goes for new atheism itself at its peak. Interesting how you get to see these cycles as you age up.
I find it really bizarre when people change their entire epistemology and concept of the supernatural or lack thereof due to politics; I can understand the reverse much more easily, that this is a trend speaks to the extent to which people really aren't serious about how they think about things
And infantilisation and the literacy crisis I think has to do with Neil Postman’s work and the thought that writing and reading serious amounts of longform as our primary mode of communication encourages deep and serious thought. If we’re not reading and writing as much and relying on shortform video instead we lose the benefits of a written culture and return to a much more infantilised state where we are swayed by bright colours in character, loud noises, whatever we last heard etc.
Oh this makes more sense than what I said haha.
YES
Um … how do you post while breastfeeding two babies at once? Neuralink?
On my phone! I prop em up on pillows
Scene: Medical Office, mother with baby on lap
Doctor: Time to start him on solid food
Mother: I didn't know my boobs could do that
"so, this was, I don’t know, until I was 27 and started having sex I enjoyed — I remember thinking it depicted “the purest kind of love” because I had so deeply internalized what pick-up artists and my real-life environment said about women."
???? Why you didn't have sex you enjoyed earlier and why pick-up artists made you think that gay men are "the purest kind of love"?
"Medieval Cathedrals" = projects that take more than one lifetime to complete (c.f. Sagrada Familia)?
Lots of "anonymous" (by our standards) participation maybe?
The link is the beauty of things that are made by a huge number of people working selflessly without needing credit for their work. And how that’s really quite an ancient way of working which modern ideas of authorship have subverted and which we’re rediscovering via collective work on online worlds like The Backrooms.