This is such a great article, and timely. We actually moved to a different city and state largely for cultural reasons and I can't stress the difference it has made in our lives. Our former location was an upscale neighborhood of a blue city. Very suburban and great for kids. Parks, trails and such but also a very planned community. Kids were tightly controlled.
I remember my daughter doing a messy craft project with one of her 10 year old friends on the porch one day while I was in the kitchen making a meal. Her friend lived across the street and ran home to get something. I received an apoplectic call from the girl's mother as she had "crossed the street unsupervised". This was the same 10 year old girl whom my husband had taken to a skating rink with our kids and he had to buckle the girl into her seat in the car because apparently her parents were still doing that for her and she didn't know how. She was also an only child to older parents. This was common in that neighborhood. The neighborhood was full of kids but you never saw them. No kids in the streets. Nobody riding their bikes. Nobody for my kids to play with without my arranging a play date in advance and coordinating every second of their time or the other parent wouldn't green light it.
So we moved. We moved to a lake community in a red city in a red state. There aren't even sidewalks in our older and heavily wooded area and the streets are filled with kids. Packs of boys on bikes, girls zipping around on scooters, teenagers walking down the street holding hands, kids walking dogs, you name it. Kids stop by randomly asking if my kids can come out to play. Most families here have many children. Only children are rare.
My 10 year old and her sister use their phone to coordinate meet-ups in the neighborhood but neither are on social media. None of their friends are either. They head out after school and they come home for dinner or by dark, whichever comes first There's a lake park, dozens of friends, a small soda and snack stand near the golf course, and a wooded creek area where they built a fort all within a two mile radius of my house. My kids do love technology but they aren't hooked to their phones. They like watching gaming channels on YouTube and Fail Army videos. My oldest is an avid gamer and likes challenges with her friends. They often come over to the house and they game together.
I love our community. We are outside a lot and spend our summers on the lake. There are block parties. Karenesque mothers exist but they are rare and they are mocked. As are teens who preen on Instagram. They are seen as shallow and everyone wonders why they aren't with the other kids jumping off of the pier in the summers.
Where you choose to live makes a huge difference. We couldn't have done this in our last community. There just wasn't the support. You cannot make a culture on your own.
Amen to all of this. I have two daughters 10 and 16. My older daughter has wisely avoided all social media though she likes to play games anonymously as a usually male avatar. She has complained that some online games try to force her to sign up for a Facebook account to use them. She is the psychologist amongst all of her friends and seems to be the most well adjusted I could imagine in this current dystopian era. I don't think regulations are going to be necessary per say, as I think a perfect storm is brewing that will slice through the digital panopticon: first, safe and effective is already meeting safety first, and the sudden, unexplained dropping dead of even a small portion of young, invincible, never dies of friends, peers, celebrities can ultimately move the needle on what looks risky, especially if it really happened within the family. Second I agree that the technology was too new at first to really be evaluated and that is not the case anymore. Both of my girls are well aware of the potential for internet stalkers but also the more immediate threat of everyone knowing what they say and do at every moment. They are sensitive to issues of internet bullying, hacking data and deepfakes in ways that even I am sometimes impressed by. They may have a better intuitive sense of what is real on the internet than even I do, and they question it all. Third I think the very things that underpin the digital dystopia: that being reliable electricity and internet, are going to become increasingly wonky and unreliable, forcing alternate choices for even the most diehard zombie user. We shall see!
I think I've mentioned here before that I work as a tutor. I recently had a very interesting chat with one of my students about wokeness. If he is at all representative, the kids get it. He has figured out that the people he want to hang around with are the people who go to the gym. He has decided that reading books is a good idea. He believes in biological sex, not fluid gender. He understands that as a straight white man the world hates him. Most importantly, he understands that authority figures like his principal are cowards because they don't stand up to the social justice mob.
And this kid lives in *California*! This is what rebellion looks like in 2023.
One caveat--> don't discount the "why not just ban it" proposals.
We heard for decades that banning abortions wouldn't do anything to reduce abortions--well the results are starting to come in and it appears, yes, banning abortion in fact reduces abortion.
We heard for decades that legalizing drugs wouldn't do anything to increase the drug problem, in fact it would alleviate it--well, the results are now rolling in and it appears that, no, in fact legalizing drugs massively increases your drug problem.
I get the hesitancy on this--many of us were awakened and are unified in our politics by our opposition to the Covid mandates--and there's a kind of knee-jerk "don't tread on me"/Libertarian instinct that makes us want to avoid using the law when it comes to cultural issues because we saw what horrors abuses of it create. But it's not that mandates don't work that makes them bad, it's what's being mandated or the fact of the mandate itself, that is bad. Is a porn ban in itself bad? Is an abortion ban or drug ban? I'm not so sure. it's an issue that needs more thought and maybe more nuance.
A great synopsis and suggestions. I am deeply grateful I grew up outdoors and free to roam, most of my free time. I hope more kids recover and embrace that. We need to adapt, and part of that is getting back to some core things that make us strong, while using technology to our best advantage.
My husband was one of those crazy adolescents - dove off cliffs, road his bike to the mall in East LA, learned to snowboard by just getting on the craziest slope he could find, etc. I asked his mom once how she handled it. She said, “I always told him that I don’t want to know about it. Just don’t even tell me. But come home in one piece.”
Have you ever heard about the "other" hypothesis of where this linear timetable can take the world?
The Great Simplification is the theory that all this Panopticon super city surveillance feminisation can not last because of Energy Requirements. That we broke the supply chains ⛓️, that ESG etc shall cripple the West & that there ain't enuf batteries to power fisting our world.
We need to get bullying back into schools. It is no coincidence that all of this transgender fantasy role playing contagion has followed massive campaigns to end bullying in schools. The mechanism for peer groups to police their own acceptable social behaviors has been neutered.
Less bad social media is on the way. Private message me to learn more.
But there are other factors..
1. It's at least partly chemical. I was noticing changes back in the 1990s: girls "developing" earlier and guys maturing later, if not at all.
2. To leave virtual space, we need a better meat space. For example, where I live, the parks close at sunset. Given how long school bus routes are, this means nearly zero time for kids to use the parks in the winter. Set up cop stations in the parks and keep them open until bedtime, or even later. Hire more school bus drivers and smaller busses and get the kids home in time.
Iceland once had a terrible teenage drinking problem. They fixed the problem by giving their teens something else to do.
3. Finally, stop trying to cram too much academics into little kids! Most preschoolers should be focusing on learning basic social skills and exploring their physical world. Learning how to read at such an early age is suitable for freaks only. It is far less abusive to wield paddles to impose education when the children are older and harder to intimidate than to cram too much while the kids are small.
The black mirror makes for an interesting Demiurge comparison. This being is symbolized by the black cube, lead is the material associated with Saturn (aka demiurge) and it has a 3D cube for it's 'crown' aka the storm. A three dimensional reality prison of despair (black is associated with deep negatives) for the hapless 'human' (a prison suit designed to chain the immortal spirit to the jail). It makes me wonder if we are imitating a false god, trapped within the black cube we decided to fashion our own artificial realities... fittingly viewed through a black cube.
Alas, this resonates. Two of my kids are teenagers: a girl and a boy. The girl was banned from Insta and Tik-Tok etc (I read Haidt on this years ago) and in any case, she’s like me and hates taking selfies. But I think there is a general feeling of never knowing when the mob might turn, even if you don’t use such sites, and several friendships have been lost when girls of her acquaintance got sucked into the whole getting likes. The boy is doing better.
The years we spent running around the city. Later, moved to the country, spent my best years on horseback, exploring the world, our bodies, our limits. God was I lucky!
The price for all this freedom? Lost one brother who got addicted to the adrenaline.
I like to use the Burning Man slogan "Safety third." It isn't last, but it certainly isn't first or even second. I mean come on, the purpose of life isn't to survive it.
I think however the obsession with safety (which drove much of the Covid hysteria) is as much a symptom as a cause of our current social decay. When a culture and particularly its men lose a sense of purpose, then what else is there to do but muddle through life? In absence of a mission beyond oneself, all that's left is oneself.
I appreciated the sense of futility that colored the sections of this article that attempted to say what we can do about it. I think the decay of society is so far advanced that there is nothing to be done, except to create what I call (borrowing from Ken Carey) "Islands of the future in an ocean of the past." Islands of health and sanity. The Nofap initiative is an example of that.
This is such a great article, and timely. We actually moved to a different city and state largely for cultural reasons and I can't stress the difference it has made in our lives. Our former location was an upscale neighborhood of a blue city. Very suburban and great for kids. Parks, trails and such but also a very planned community. Kids were tightly controlled.
I remember my daughter doing a messy craft project with one of her 10 year old friends on the porch one day while I was in the kitchen making a meal. Her friend lived across the street and ran home to get something. I received an apoplectic call from the girl's mother as she had "crossed the street unsupervised". This was the same 10 year old girl whom my husband had taken to a skating rink with our kids and he had to buckle the girl into her seat in the car because apparently her parents were still doing that for her and she didn't know how. She was also an only child to older parents. This was common in that neighborhood. The neighborhood was full of kids but you never saw them. No kids in the streets. Nobody riding their bikes. Nobody for my kids to play with without my arranging a play date in advance and coordinating every second of their time or the other parent wouldn't green light it.
So we moved. We moved to a lake community in a red city in a red state. There aren't even sidewalks in our older and heavily wooded area and the streets are filled with kids. Packs of boys on bikes, girls zipping around on scooters, teenagers walking down the street holding hands, kids walking dogs, you name it. Kids stop by randomly asking if my kids can come out to play. Most families here have many children. Only children are rare.
My 10 year old and her sister use their phone to coordinate meet-ups in the neighborhood but neither are on social media. None of their friends are either. They head out after school and they come home for dinner or by dark, whichever comes first There's a lake park, dozens of friends, a small soda and snack stand near the golf course, and a wooded creek area where they built a fort all within a two mile radius of my house. My kids do love technology but they aren't hooked to their phones. They like watching gaming channels on YouTube and Fail Army videos. My oldest is an avid gamer and likes challenges with her friends. They often come over to the house and they game together.
I love our community. We are outside a lot and spend our summers on the lake. There are block parties. Karenesque mothers exist but they are rare and they are mocked. As are teens who preen on Instagram. They are seen as shallow and everyone wonders why they aren't with the other kids jumping off of the pier in the summers.
Where you choose to live makes a huge difference. We couldn't have done this in our last community. There just wasn't the support. You cannot make a culture on your own.
Amen to all of this. I have two daughters 10 and 16. My older daughter has wisely avoided all social media though she likes to play games anonymously as a usually male avatar. She has complained that some online games try to force her to sign up for a Facebook account to use them. She is the psychologist amongst all of her friends and seems to be the most well adjusted I could imagine in this current dystopian era. I don't think regulations are going to be necessary per say, as I think a perfect storm is brewing that will slice through the digital panopticon: first, safe and effective is already meeting safety first, and the sudden, unexplained dropping dead of even a small portion of young, invincible, never dies of friends, peers, celebrities can ultimately move the needle on what looks risky, especially if it really happened within the family. Second I agree that the technology was too new at first to really be evaluated and that is not the case anymore. Both of my girls are well aware of the potential for internet stalkers but also the more immediate threat of everyone knowing what they say and do at every moment. They are sensitive to issues of internet bullying, hacking data and deepfakes in ways that even I am sometimes impressed by. They may have a better intuitive sense of what is real on the internet than even I do, and they question it all. Third I think the very things that underpin the digital dystopia: that being reliable electricity and internet, are going to become increasingly wonky and unreliable, forcing alternate choices for even the most diehard zombie user. We shall see!
I think I've mentioned here before that I work as a tutor. I recently had a very interesting chat with one of my students about wokeness. If he is at all representative, the kids get it. He has figured out that the people he want to hang around with are the people who go to the gym. He has decided that reading books is a good idea. He believes in biological sex, not fluid gender. He understands that as a straight white man the world hates him. Most importantly, he understands that authority figures like his principal are cowards because they don't stand up to the social justice mob.
And this kid lives in *California*! This is what rebellion looks like in 2023.
One caveat--> don't discount the "why not just ban it" proposals.
We heard for decades that banning abortions wouldn't do anything to reduce abortions--well the results are starting to come in and it appears, yes, banning abortion in fact reduces abortion.
We heard for decades that legalizing drugs wouldn't do anything to increase the drug problem, in fact it would alleviate it--well, the results are now rolling in and it appears that, no, in fact legalizing drugs massively increases your drug problem.
I get the hesitancy on this--many of us were awakened and are unified in our politics by our opposition to the Covid mandates--and there's a kind of knee-jerk "don't tread on me"/Libertarian instinct that makes us want to avoid using the law when it comes to cultural issues because we saw what horrors abuses of it create. But it's not that mandates don't work that makes them bad, it's what's being mandated or the fact of the mandate itself, that is bad. Is a porn ban in itself bad? Is an abortion ban or drug ban? I'm not so sure. it's an issue that needs more thought and maybe more nuance.
A great synopsis and suggestions. I am deeply grateful I grew up outdoors and free to roam, most of my free time. I hope more kids recover and embrace that. We need to adapt, and part of that is getting back to some core things that make us strong, while using technology to our best advantage.
My husband was one of those crazy adolescents - dove off cliffs, road his bike to the mall in East LA, learned to snowboard by just getting on the craziest slope he could find, etc. I asked his mom once how she handled it. She said, “I always told him that I don’t want to know about it. Just don’t even tell me. But come home in one piece.”
She’s somewhat of a genius, my mother-in-law.
Children of Men meets Idiocracy: The Sequel: How it Happened Fast and We Got Family Styled and Shit
I HATE THE LONGHOUSE I HATE THE LONGHOUSE GIVE ME MY CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE BACK
Have you ever heard about the "other" hypothesis of where this linear timetable can take the world?
The Great Simplification is the theory that all this Panopticon super city surveillance feminisation can not last because of Energy Requirements. That we broke the supply chains ⛓️, that ESG etc shall cripple the West & that there ain't enuf batteries to power fisting our world.
We need to get bullying back into schools. It is no coincidence that all of this transgender fantasy role playing contagion has followed massive campaigns to end bullying in schools. The mechanism for peer groups to police their own acceptable social behaviors has been neutered.
Less bad social media is on the way. Private message me to learn more.
But there are other factors..
1. It's at least partly chemical. I was noticing changes back in the 1990s: girls "developing" earlier and guys maturing later, if not at all.
2. To leave virtual space, we need a better meat space. For example, where I live, the parks close at sunset. Given how long school bus routes are, this means nearly zero time for kids to use the parks in the winter. Set up cop stations in the parks and keep them open until bedtime, or even later. Hire more school bus drivers and smaller busses and get the kids home in time.
Iceland once had a terrible teenage drinking problem. They fixed the problem by giving their teens something else to do.
3. Finally, stop trying to cram too much academics into little kids! Most preschoolers should be focusing on learning basic social skills and exploring their physical world. Learning how to read at such an early age is suitable for freaks only. It is far less abusive to wield paddles to impose education when the children are older and harder to intimidate than to cram too much while the kids are small.
The black mirror makes for an interesting Demiurge comparison. This being is symbolized by the black cube, lead is the material associated with Saturn (aka demiurge) and it has a 3D cube for it's 'crown' aka the storm. A three dimensional reality prison of despair (black is associated with deep negatives) for the hapless 'human' (a prison suit designed to chain the immortal spirit to the jail). It makes me wonder if we are imitating a false god, trapped within the black cube we decided to fashion our own artificial realities... fittingly viewed through a black cube.
Re: Just F-ing Lift Bro: My dumbbells came in today.
Alas, this resonates. Two of my kids are teenagers: a girl and a boy. The girl was banned from Insta and Tik-Tok etc (I read Haidt on this years ago) and in any case, she’s like me and hates taking selfies. But I think there is a general feeling of never knowing when the mob might turn, even if you don’t use such sites, and several friendships have been lost when girls of her acquaintance got sucked into the whole getting likes. The boy is doing better.
A-fucking-men!
The years we spent running around the city. Later, moved to the country, spent my best years on horseback, exploring the world, our bodies, our limits. God was I lucky!
The price for all this freedom? Lost one brother who got addicted to the adrenaline.
I like to use the Burning Man slogan "Safety third." It isn't last, but it certainly isn't first or even second. I mean come on, the purpose of life isn't to survive it.
I think however the obsession with safety (which drove much of the Covid hysteria) is as much a symptom as a cause of our current social decay. When a culture and particularly its men lose a sense of purpose, then what else is there to do but muddle through life? In absence of a mission beyond oneself, all that's left is oneself.
I appreciated the sense of futility that colored the sections of this article that attempted to say what we can do about it. I think the decay of society is so far advanced that there is nothing to be done, except to create what I call (borrowing from Ken Carey) "Islands of the future in an ocean of the past." Islands of health and sanity. The Nofap initiative is an example of that.