You put everything I have been feeling and experiencing into words. Especially the mean world syndrome aspect, where I have found even people closest to me affected by it. The world is not at all as scary and difficult as it is made to seem, especially by social media. And once you remove one of the catalysts, and see the world for what it is, you don't even feel the need to return, and you also see how it had affected you.
Well done! I've always felt social media was a little sinister, and stopped using it to seriously express my opinions around age 14.
I still lurk on Twitter a fair amount, mostly because the opinions of Trump/Elon/Vivek/etc. are going to have a massive impact on all our lives starting in around two weeks. Elon's pro-skilled-immigrant and anti-Islamist views are ones I'm actually pretty thrilled about, and it's gratifying to see my main political enemies (white supremacists, radical Muslims) eat shit. ("Trump betrayed us! No!")
But these platforms definitely propagate mental illness. A lot of the guys on Twitter/Reddit/etc. talk like they're in their twenties, but you lurk their profile a bit and realize they're actually 45 or something. So they never grew up. They just spent the past two decades harassing people on the Internet, which is a mind-boggling waste of time. The Internet was supposed to usher in a new era of human understanding. Instead it's now some middle-aged white loser sending me AI-generated pictures of Indian people covered in sewage and me sending back real-life pictures of white guys eating shit from the toilet and links to articles about whites now being a minority for Americans under age 20. Zero cultural or social value.
Sorry, I don't mean to harp too much about white people (some of my best friends are white!), but most social media is a big race war at this point, so it's tough to talk about without bringing that up. Hollywood and legacy news outlets are meaningless now, nobody really reads books, and most people can't afford to go outside. So they take whatever social capital they had from pre-Pandemic ("I'm white!"), try to flex on the Internet using it, and then get their asses handed to them. If social media has had one good impact, I think it's the end of bullshit white identity as a meaningful political bloc. Republicans purging their racist base and Democrats sidelining theirs to the loser wing of the party is a tremendous consequence that's redefining global politics. I'm personally thrilled.
I gotta be honest. I don't like Elon Musk, and I think the H1-B program is terribly designed. I think we should have more unconditional visas for high-skill and high-talent people, but I'm against creating a class of workers whose employers can threaten them with (in all likelihood) deportation. It's bad for them and it's bad for domestic workers who have to compete with them. We should fix rather than scrap the program, but I don't think Musk's intentions are all good. That said, I think he's probably less toxic than Trump.
Sorry to hear that you're experiencing racial harassment. That sucks. What kind of loser does that?
I hope you're right about both parties dumping their racists. That tribalist garbage has no place in our society. That said, I don't know how optimistic I can be. I think American racism is deeply intertwined with its classism and its extreme capitalism, and I don't think those are going away any time soon. Also, while the left overestimated the toxicity of Trump I, it's hard to know what Trump II is going to bring.
That said, losing the 2024 election was probably the right thing for the Democrats. We really need to dump these unprincipled, insider-trading bastards. We keep rejecting people like Bernie Sanders in favor of "electable" centrists, but this never actually results in winning elections—the only two times we've won in the 21st century were after a Republican (Bush with Iraq, Trump with Covid) killed a million people; that's how bad at winning we are, because the American people aren't stupid and can tell we, as a party, don't stand for anything.
I never knew that the concept "mean world syndrome" had a name. I'd always wondered why all the PBS Frontline documentaries I was watching were so negative.
Edit. It's sad that you quit Reddit. Actually it was you that introduced me to Substack when you cited your article on AI and the future of literature.
You put everything I have been feeling and experiencing into words. Especially the mean world syndrome aspect, where I have found even people closest to me affected by it. The world is not at all as scary and difficult as it is made to seem, especially by social media. And once you remove one of the catalysts, and see the world for what it is, you don't even feel the need to return, and you also see how it had affected you.
Well done! I've always felt social media was a little sinister, and stopped using it to seriously express my opinions around age 14.
I still lurk on Twitter a fair amount, mostly because the opinions of Trump/Elon/Vivek/etc. are going to have a massive impact on all our lives starting in around two weeks. Elon's pro-skilled-immigrant and anti-Islamist views are ones I'm actually pretty thrilled about, and it's gratifying to see my main political enemies (white supremacists, radical Muslims) eat shit. ("Trump betrayed us! No!")
But these platforms definitely propagate mental illness. A lot of the guys on Twitter/Reddit/etc. talk like they're in their twenties, but you lurk their profile a bit and realize they're actually 45 or something. So they never grew up. They just spent the past two decades harassing people on the Internet, which is a mind-boggling waste of time. The Internet was supposed to usher in a new era of human understanding. Instead it's now some middle-aged white loser sending me AI-generated pictures of Indian people covered in sewage and me sending back real-life pictures of white guys eating shit from the toilet and links to articles about whites now being a minority for Americans under age 20. Zero cultural or social value.
Sorry, I don't mean to harp too much about white people (some of my best friends are white!), but most social media is a big race war at this point, so it's tough to talk about without bringing that up. Hollywood and legacy news outlets are meaningless now, nobody really reads books, and most people can't afford to go outside. So they take whatever social capital they had from pre-Pandemic ("I'm white!"), try to flex on the Internet using it, and then get their asses handed to them. If social media has had one good impact, I think it's the end of bullshit white identity as a meaningful political bloc. Republicans purging their racist base and Democrats sidelining theirs to the loser wing of the party is a tremendous consequence that's redefining global politics. I'm personally thrilled.
I gotta be honest. I don't like Elon Musk, and I think the H1-B program is terribly designed. I think we should have more unconditional visas for high-skill and high-talent people, but I'm against creating a class of workers whose employers can threaten them with (in all likelihood) deportation. It's bad for them and it's bad for domestic workers who have to compete with them. We should fix rather than scrap the program, but I don't think Musk's intentions are all good. That said, I think he's probably less toxic than Trump.
Sorry to hear that you're experiencing racial harassment. That sucks. What kind of loser does that?
I hope you're right about both parties dumping their racists. That tribalist garbage has no place in our society. That said, I don't know how optimistic I can be. I think American racism is deeply intertwined with its classism and its extreme capitalism, and I don't think those are going away any time soon. Also, while the left overestimated the toxicity of Trump I, it's hard to know what Trump II is going to bring.
That said, losing the 2024 election was probably the right thing for the Democrats. We really need to dump these unprincipled, insider-trading bastards. We keep rejecting people like Bernie Sanders in favor of "electable" centrists, but this never actually results in winning elections—the only two times we've won in the 21st century were after a Republican (Bush with Iraq, Trump with Covid) killed a million people; that's how bad at winning we are, because the American people aren't stupid and can tell we, as a party, don't stand for anything.
I never knew that the concept "mean world syndrome" had a name. I'd always wondered why all the PBS Frontline documentaries I was watching were so negative.
Edit. It's sad that you quit Reddit. Actually it was you that introduced me to Substack when you cited your article on AI and the future of literature.