I post field reports. I’m on the ground. I don’t make shit up or give out pills or have any real positions.

I post what I see.

Take it or leave it.

******************

I contend that the brain doesn’t actually differentiate the things it sees on a screen from things in the physical world, moreso as media technology becomes increasingly refined.

Programming indeed

You could view it as a full spectrum assault on the brain and nervous system.

Digital, chemical, environmental, social.

Molding a totally new type of nervous system.

Don’t think of it as viewing or watching.

Think of it as exposure, like radiation.

Intensity. Duration. Your own unique biology affecting how much damage is done. People peering in at you afterwards, waiting to see the effects from behind reinforced glass.

It makes more sense

***********************

You’re lucky if you can save one or two people in this life.

Luckier if they’re you’re friends/family, but maybe not.

It’s always nice when a little nice thing you did comes back to have an outsized impact.

That phrase “cheap and easy” just resounded heavily in my mind.

That might be the core issue here.

How many years of being cheap, taking the easy way out? Too many.

I think I solved it.

Even in 2018-19, I started getting queasy at work when I was buying something on amazon 2 or 3 times, just throwing out old shit and getting new shit in the blink of an eye.

The speed and carelessness of the whole thing started to give me motion sickness.

But you justify it in the moment by it not being your money, not having the guys to fix it, not having the guys who would even know how to fix it, and you’re only human after all. Underpaid, undervalued, undergivingashit

Chinese gloves by the bucket that rip and tear in a few days, adhesives that don’t really adhere, anyone you get on the phone being beyond giving a shit even when you sprang for the silver service plan or the mid tier item

I remember my mother making fun of my grandfathers for saving screws, lengths of wood, odds and ends, knowing how to fix anything.

But those guys wanted for nothing, gave their wives everything, lived like kings.

Never saw a PCB until they were 65

When we fire up a d*ting app, what are we really doing?

Trying to get laid? Fall in love? Prove our mettle? Do better than our parents? Not die alone?

In aggregate, we’re trying to inhabit patterns of the past which were handed down to us by memory and media

You can get divorced at the drop of a hat.

Someone you knew well can have their mind ruined by a year of medical-media-terror campaign streamed into their head.

People are going to start hedging against this whether they want to or not.

It’s already happening.

This is already becoming us. The pond we were in is an old modality.

We didn’t want to make this leap.

It happened to us. What they perceive as a threat is, to us, simply a confluence of factors.

Who is more terrified, really?

The Australians or Us.

It’s us, no question.

What we do to assuage our terror is travel, get on dating apps, relay stories to our friends that make us look good, lie about how much money we make and how much our parents gave us

Which, ironically, is the very thing that accelerates this life-stage-dissolution.

Papering-over in an attempt to more perfectly map our lives over an ideal whose vapors we spent our formative years huffing.

Remember when they had minimum wage employees putting a temperature gun to your head so you could go buy paper towels?

I wonder if that got people acclimated to strangers putting gun shaped objects up to their heads and pulling the trigger

We are all on our own trip. We’re drifting farther and father apart whether we want to or not.

The real task will be to embrace this alienation, then transcend it.

It won’t be like the movies, and you’re almost guaranteed to find yourself somewhere unimaginable

People wear their minds on the outside of their bodies.

Like cuttlefish

Crazy but quiet things are happening right now.

People are checking out, forgetting things, quietly leaving things behind, never doing things again, unwittingly doing something for the last time.

It will be stranger than we can suppose as individuals, but embarrassingly obvious in aggregate.

And it’s all happening right now

Remember when they had a bunch of light shows over major cities last NYE, and they didn’t actually clarify that what you were seeing on TV were CGI, and people had to post videos from their apartment showing that the skies were empty?

Why’d they do that?

If you’re not sleeping with your wifi off and your phone on airplane mode, you’re not gonna make it