Online world is weird when you're a 40+ year old nerd
Online world is weird when you're a 40+ year old nerd
People really are thinking that their Discord dramas etc. are important. And people really, really think, that because they have 100k subs on YouTube, they’re important, better somehow.
We have had all of the internet for decades and people’s media literacy has only gone down. A lot. People rather spend hours arguing online about who is evil and who is good instead of reading some bare minimum philosophy and doing a bit of introspection, checking their own thinking. I see people repeat painfully common talking points about the nature of reality as if we didn’t have tons of literature challenging every single thought you could ever have about it. “MaYbE wE lIvE in A SiMuLAtiOn”… Read about Plato’s cave. Read Nondual texts. Read BOOKS. And these same people are out there trying to change the world. I fucking promise you, every single profound thought you’ve had while smoking a bit too much weed has been discussed in philosophy for thousands of years.
People still say shit like “pull yourself up from the bootstraps” as if willpower and free will in general were some kind of endless resource everyone has but because they “choose” to be lazy/worthless/etc. they just don’t use it. And people are quick to agree with this when we talk about mental health issues, which is great. But ask them to apply the same logic to people they disagree with politically, suddenly “correct opinions” are just out there, available and everyone who doesn’t just adopt them just like that must be evil. Everyone who didn’t grow up smart enough, in an environment that encourages learning must be evil.
Good and Evil. Also things that don’t exist in anything else but the human mind and somehow, we kill people over it. You’ve been brainwashed into believing into good and evil since you were a kid, because we’re generations into people who were also brainwashed to believe it. It takes conscious effort to drop that belief, and a fuckton of willingness to NOT consider yourself morally superior. You value human well-being to whatever point you do and if you’re lucky, you’ll run into your personal trolley problem sooner or later. Whatever you think about yourself is nonsense anyway, you’re a different person every moment of every day. No, you don’t have mental illness about it, that’s the natural state of all humans but at some point we actually started to believe that we are supposed to come with a cute little description about our True Self on the box we were shipped in (thanks American media industry). Then we angst over not knowing who we are, or not living up to who we are supposed to be, or not being able to fulfill our potential or whatever spin you internalized about The Finding Out Who You Really Are© project. And most of all, whatever you think you are, you certainly aren’t good enough (buy this product, it might make you good enough).
People STILL in the year 2026 make an artificial separation between the mind and the body, all because Western psychology was largely colored by Christian beliefs in souls. At best, people go “oh yeah sure, exercising is really good for your mind”. True. Now let’s say that mental hygiene is good for the body and you get called an antivaxxer. Tell people that you practice Loving-Kindness meditation and people call you weird or tell you that it’s pointless because nobody is going to change because you send them good vibes. These same people are the ones spending hours online, calling others racists, cucks, libtards, rightoids, trannies, nazis, pedos and more. But the weird ones are those who cultivate compassion for 20 minutes a day and gently cradle their hate in love, instead of vomiting it on others. But let’s be trauma-aware, put in trigger warnings, consider accessibility and disabilities. The Buddhist monks doing the walk get shit because “they’re just walking” - yeah but they aren’t posting the upteenth tired meme about how much The Other Side sucks.
Propaganda still works. After all this shit past few years, people ACTUALLY somehow still believe that’s it’s a good idea to discuss politics on social media. Because they’re totally sure that THEIR side is impartial, trustworthy and flawless. There couldn’t possibly be bad actors on THEIR side with the sole intention of spreading misinformation.
People march over homeless people in their own city, protesting for some issue happening on the other side of the globe that they can’t do anything about.
It’s a weird fucking timeline.