Feelings of despair in America now peak in our youth. It didn't used to be this way.
Whatever's causing this, I think Bernie probably speaks to these feelings. (I believe the largest single driver is phones/social media, but we don't know) https://t.co/el6nmAx1Zd pic.twitter.com/FygIyTm8rd
— Hunter
(@StatisticUrban) March 9, 2025
Probably is the smartphone/social media combo. That’s a cognitive poison pill we’re wholly unsuited to deal with.
In my hands is my new PlayStation 2. Jack Tretton is smiling at me. Everybody in Best Buy is smiling.
I take off my PS VR headset. I am back in the senior care facility. Nobody has visited me for 12 years. I put the headset back on.
I hold my PlayStation. I am smiling, too. https://t.co/IFMw7gdQuA
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) February 2, 2025
I do not like this post. Not at all.
Videogames are something I never really got into and I never owned a PS2. But I do remember that release day as it was all over the news.
What pre-internet experience do you miss the most?
I miss the lack of surveillance. Not that there was none, but it had a cost; if someone or some entity wanted to keep tabs on you it was an active effort. These days if you have a mobile phone or a car made since ~2015 nearly anyone can buy your data and find out a huge amount of info. The government of course can also track your every move effortlessly. And don’t even try to convince me that smartphones do not “listen” to our convos. Unless you’ve gone full clown, it’s obvious that they do.
We’re all in the panopticon now, with no way out.
It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human.
They are going to regret all of those painfully-stupid tattoos too.
But it’s the complete lack of social skills of that generation that is the real problem. At least a few are attempting to do something about it, but it’s a drop in the bucket and probably will not matter.
This isn’t entirely wrong, but it also isn’t fair to women.
It ignores that being attractive isn’t actually that easy. We live in an obesogenic environment that requires a lot of self-control. And to be what most men consider attractive1 involves quite a lot of work from women: “natural” makeup, shaving legs and armpits, dressing decently and flatteringly and other skin care and body care routines that most men are not even aware of.
But it’s right in that men are more judged on things they have no control over, especially in the US2.
As a first approximation, women are valued for merely existing; men are valued for status and achievements. Those men who have neither are considered disposable by both men and women.
I probably made fun of the Fat Acceptance/Healthy at Every Size movements more than I should have. It’s not that it was punching down. The reality is that those groups had vast cultural power and it was easy to get canceled for standing against them.
What was more morally suspect is that both movements were populated by pitiful people who believed they had no agency. It’s not a good idea in general to make sport of the pathetic even if they do have some power. It’s just poor form.
Still, they deserved resistance because their movements spouted antiscientific nonsense and perpetuated great harm, especially against kids. That needed some form of smackdown.
Burger King Stuck in the 70’s.
Nope. That’s what some early 1990s Burger Kings looked like. Which is itself a poorly-done revival of 1950s diner motifs, which was a rehash of 1920s prefabricated diner aesthetics, which was itself a recapitulation of earlier horsedrawn express wagon designs that were popular in the 1880s.
So. Nothing is original. All is appropriation, remixing and reinvention.
Denmark to ban mobile phones in schools and after-school clubs.
The phone addict nutty buddies are gonna be crying about this as they always do, because anyone who does anything to reduce this cognitohazard they see an implicit indictment of their poor choices.
But fuck ’em.
Tattoos do not look good on either gender, but they are the worst thing to happen to women aesthetically speaking since this popular fashion during the early 17th Century:
The scoop neck is ok, but everything else there is terrible. Just like tattoos. What a sad blight. And combine that with near-ubiquitous obesity and…yeah. It’s bad.
The quest to offend no one leads to art that elevates and inspires no one.
Appropriate everything, says what’s true, look into the darkness, cast aspersions and dent your helmet bashing through to the truth. One should not aim to offend, but excising anything with power and beauty is what the goal of removing all possibility of the offensive ineluctably leads toward.
All good art is offensive in the original Latin sense: it hits you, it moves you, it strikes against you. Otherwise, it’s worthless.
WTF that’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Gen Z Woman Just Discovered ‘Millennial Pause.’
This pause is real, but is not due to just the former quirks of various social media apps. Not at all. It’s because analog recording tech such as audio cassettes and VHS tapes usually had a 1-3 second period where they had to spool up and actually start recording when you hit the button.
A lot of millennials (and all of Gen X) remember those times, while Gen Z has no clue; all of that was gone by the time they came around.
And that is where the pause comes from.
The return of Trump was also made nearly-inevitable with fourth wave pseudo-feminism declaring all men inherently evil “Schrödinger’s rapists” while claiming all women are angelic by nature because they are naught but tiny little blameless children, even up to their 40s.
That just ain’t how people are, and men are tired of hearing about it. Even I am extremely over it, and I didn’t vote for Trump.
True, but there’s more to it than that. And the “more” paints progressives in an even worse light, unfortunately. I remember the tail end of the pay toilet battles during the early and mid-1980s. The progressives got them banned because “no one should have to pay to do a basic bodily function” and because their position was that there should be free and plentiful public restrooms1. But then they never bothered to build any political power to achieve this goal.
Like much of progressivism, the pay toilet battle highlighted a tendency which has metastasized to be even worse now — they take something away, even if imperfect, and replace it with nothing at all.
And that’s never a winning strategy, weirdo degrowther fantasies aside.
That’s a great observation. It leads one to wonder why we became so fearful. And why we collectively decided that all relationships are only about power. I’ve heard people posit it was due to increased precarity, but that doesn’t ring true to me. That’s a pat answer that only touches the surface.
There’s no single explanation of course, but I believe this retrogression has more to do with smartphones, social media and the exaggerated performativity they inject into the sociocultural landscape than it does with the socioeconomic concerns. Essentially, by compressing us back into de facto small communities again with Instagram, Facebook and those other evils, we’ve been forced to resume the mores and norms of a medieval village. That is, a now-virtualized non-locality where everyone knows or can easily discover your business and pass judgment upon you, sometimes with devastating consequences.
We are not cognitively set up to handle this compression of all of us into one tiny yet vast mental conurbation, so we adapt in various ways — most of which are actually maladaptive to any end goal of human happiness or eudaimonia. The solution isn’t to retreat to a past that would no longer be composable with now-novel minds never seen in human history but to tame the beasts of tech and moral overreach to make our tools serve us rather than have us further bent to their whims and limitations.
At least, we should do this. We probably will not and instead will stumble along until something breaks. But change will occur either way. That, at least, is certain.
