Forty: Never Left (02-23-2023)
Hello again, it's been a while.
Chinese spy balloon, out-of-fiction toxic spill, Queen's dead. It is all ultimately amusingly benign in retrospect.
The world, its people really, has become very anxious about its near future. There's apparently going to be world war, nuclear war, economic collapse, and climate crisis at levels unseen, now, in minutes. Urgency about these schizophrenic fears has been building or has held at an unusually high level for months. Panic, outrage, and fear are major economic drivers. People love TV, people love their phones, and they love staring at them when they're angry and afraid. None of this is particularly insightful or novel as a realization, but it is all increasingly apparent. The amount of common folk, the typically online but not irredeemably so, those who would not immediately associate their internet use with their personality, who express anxiety about technology and its oversocializing effects, is visibly increasing.
Being "online" is an old phenomenon, but is no longer an unusual condition. Most people are now online, but their self-image is not online-first. Most people see their social media feed as a reflection of themselves, their "for you page" as a manifestation of their personality, not in external force on their behavior. The dehumanization that the screen and username present has now completely eliminated any appearance of socialization on the internet- the whole of social media is now an entertainment machine, a feed rather than a forum. A trough, not the agora.
But this is all old news! It is worse now than ever, but every curmudgeon was right, and they won no prize. The helplessness of the situation is certainly a new phenomenon, it can seem impossible to unplug and resume the life from before, and it's often trivialized- it's silly to touch grass. Interesting then, that it's as easy as just unplugging to unplug. Just don't look, just do something else, just talk face to face with someone. What is so difficult about rendering joy from these experiences, which occur anywhere and everywhere, is that it requires abandoning the new normal facade of cynicism, a resultant condition from oversocialization. When everything is so serious the world is ending, nothing is serious when the sun rises the next day.
There is no further remedy to be offered to a person struggling in the realm of internet oversocialization. If you're male, you can always begin investigating sounding, the insertion of narrow objects into your ureter, which is imaginably incredibly painful and damaging. Such immensely private, depraved, and destructive behavior is fittingly appropriate for a directionless and confused person. Facing the full width of a complex and amoral world is much easier with a Nintendo DS stylus in your phallus.
Satire