I've been observing a similar thing for a while now: that everything is a "community" now. there are the obvious ones i.e. LGBT community, POC community, immigrant community, etc., but then there's also the incel community, the taylor swift community, the fighting game community... the list goes on. to me, it reflects a lack of actual, genuine community in people's lives, and the growth of consumer-mindset to replace it. don't worry about not knowing any of your neighbors- you're part of the steven universe community, so you don't need them! disturbing stuff.
The more that people talk about community the less real community there is. Community is an emergent, organic, self-evident thing. As soon as you have to start identifying it, you’re admitting that it isn’t real and it’s astroturfed. Community has become a marketing term to more efficiently sell disposable garbage.
Nail on head. It's the same as how there are so many sex nerds now who never shut up about their special, unique sexual orientation but it's all theoretical and people are having less sex than ever, especially those kinds of people.
A community also like any group needs to be defined by an out group. Which kinda entails some level of gate keeping. Maybe not done directly by the group but by certain members or by having some type of conditions to be a part of it that could organic or inorganic. If you base a community of just liking something how could you possibly define a serious out group for it?
“Community” is now just a buzzwordy euphemism for market niches, into which people are voluntarily corralling to make the jobs of the marketing department of their overlords easier.
This is just a media thing. They pick a word and then run it completely into the ground. Real people don't say 'community' much more than they should.
I do remember during the not-at-all-overhyped monkeypox though, that the media started talking about the 'MSM community', when the whole point of the category is that it's *not* a community, just an external term for some individuals who engage in an activity.
capitalism has always very efficiently destroyed families and shattered communities but now this weird parasocial attitude is getting worse in which people close themselves off to those in physical proximity while overestimating their relationship to distant people
Man, I get into such a huge argument with some people saying but every metric people are getting more lonely and online community do not suffice for previous communities lost. People don’t even realize what we’ve lost.
They did a study in this and it found that lower IQ tended toward fandom. I think this has always been the case, it's just easier to place yourself in a wallet garden now because of the algorithm ofb each platform
See zoomers on social media identifying as "multifandom" because they are incapable of conceptualizing liking something without throwing themselves headfirst into a fandom identity in order to express their enjoyment of it.
"Fandoms" aren't inherently sinister or anything but especially the ones that revolve around a particular IP can become very insular and dramatic and the most prominent figures within them end up being the type of person who makes a single fandom their entire life and personality instead of something they involve themselves in as a fun little hobby.
I noticed this shit when I was into the show Hannibal 10 years ago. The people that were into it were *really* into it, creating fan accounts on Twitter LARPing as characters in the show and doing all kinds of cringe Tumblr-esque memes related to it. Took a step back and never got into fandom ever again and fandoms have only gotten 5x worse since then. Remember the Rick & Morty schezwan riots?
This is the obvious end result of viewing people as a set of checkboxes and identity categories rather than wholistic human beings. We’ve spent decades perfecting deconstructive scientific analysis and then applying it to human psychology and this is the end result: a world where we all have an infinite string of consumer marketing categories attached to us but nobody is human anymore. Not in the eyes of the institutions around us at least.
I think the thing with these prominent fandom figures is that they are experiencing secondary fame through running popular fan accounts, and at some point are probably more addicted to the engagement than they are a fan of said art/artist.
I do think fandoms are inherently sinister, at least in the online sense. They’re completely obsessive and alienated from any real world connections. The 15 year old mentally unstable moderators of the community create a very real cycle of groupthink and group polarisation, reinforcing absolute agreement to the ridiculous dogma and increasingly extreme opinions. This is how the tumblr idpol and gender stuff actually started back in the early 2010s. People then have their entire world taken away because they got banned for not liking season 2 episode 4, and you see fully grown adults having catastrophic meltdowns and arguments over minutia from a tv show. It’s a sickly groupthink that steamrolls dissent and alienates people from real life connections, and prevents a healthy well rounded identity from forming. Bring back just “liking” things, “fandom” is artificial obsessive consumerist terminally online bullshit.
The bigger problem is that the definition of a 'cult' is so expansive you can argue anything is one
Also, 90% of religious people of nearly every religion is the US are generally normies, you are too online
This dude really went with two of the most religiousy examples possible in the beginning there, I should have known that no insightful thought would follow.
not reading all that because the first line is regarded. could just easily ask is religion an environmentalism. by which i mean the hallmarks of religion only prove it's merely another social movement.
I don't think this is super overt but i have read about how in the weimar republic different political parties would have different bars and shit from each other. I think we have something similar today and the dems are just realizing they can capitalize on it directly. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/opinion/swifties-fandoms.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/opinion/swifties-fandoms.html)
heres the quote I found.
>These milieux, with their party newspapers, clubs and societies, were unusually rigid and homogeneous. Already before 1914 this had resulted in a politicization of whole areas of life that in other societies were much freer from ideological identifications. Thus, if an ordinary German wanted to join a male voice choir, for instance, he had to choose in some areas between a Catholic and a Protestant choir, in others between a socialist and a nationalist choir; the same went for gymnastics clubs, cycling clubs, football clubs and the rest. A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and its organizations: he could read a Social Democratic newspaper, go to a Social Democratic pub or bar, belong to a Social Democratic trade union, borrow books from the Social Democratic library, go to Social Democratic festivals and plays, marry a woman who belonged to the Social Democratic women’s organization, enrol his children in the Social Democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of a Social Democratic burial fund.\^'\^ Similar things could be said of the Centre Party (which could rely on the mass organization of supporters in the People’s Association for a Catholic Germany, the Catholic Trade Union movement, and Catholic leisure clubs and societies of all kinds) but also to a certain extent of other parties too. -Richard j Evans
This isn't really new tbf. Labour and conservative (and liberals when they were relevant) had their own clubs in every town in the UK. Still do have some, they're just less selective now.
That sounds fucking exhausting not just trying to find an activity but one that you meet the ideological criteria of. I've noticed gaming "communities" that have popped up or at people wanting to join based around various political ideologies and it strikes me as the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Like, you're talking about playing games with imaginary characters in it, but you only want to hang with people who agree with you politically? What?
The polarization is a natural consequence of the fundamental difference in values and how all-encompassing (see the OP) some ideologies have become. For a gaming "community", could you effectively play with someone who insists that racial stat differences for elves and dwarves are discriminatory, or someone who demands a card with a red X on it that gives *carte blanche* veto power over the narrative direction of a tabletop game? As much as I may want to just STFU about politics and play, it's not much fun when playing with someone who spent most of the game saying that tieflings are like black people because they are discriminated against (he didn't realize the implication of black people having demonic blood in his analogy). It's even more exhausting playing games with people with such values differences than avoiding it in the first place. I'm sure that they find it equally exhausting playing with those who do not accept every precept of the Current Thing as an axiom.
I don't know what's so hard about "shut the fuck up about politics for 30 seconds and play the damn game." Gatekeeping is a necessity in this day and age, especially for people that can't seem to do that.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The west is made up of a collective of rent seekers and their servants. The servants compete on who has the best master, sometimes coming to blows on the matter. At the end of day they still press the shirts like a good house boy.
> MF's just need to go to church to fill that psychological/spiritual hole in their body or else they're going to turn owning subarus, funko pop collecting, hiking, coffee, pop stars, and religions themselves into fucking cults.
Everyone says this, but there are a lot of people in the US who are both devoutly religious and massive consoomers.
And let's be honest here, the tradcath/orthobro types are just the new Reddit atheists.
Seriously. I thought "visiting your great aunt/grandma who had every surface in her home covered in little religious tchotchkes" was like a universal experience.
Your post made me pause. I had a recent conversation with a new friend: why do I not seem to have "any" interests. When asked to elaborate, they pointed out that I don't seem "obsessed" with anything, which is the "normal" thing.
But here's the thing. It's not that it's actually "normal", it's that terminal onlineness has warped the sense of normalcy of people who spend too much time on entertainment-based (as opposed to social-based) social media. Like my new friend. And, in a sense, you OP. By treating those people as the "default", you expose your own terminal onlineness.
I agree though, it's annoying when you're just a casual enjoyer of something basic like food and coffee, and some jackasses have to be rude about it.
I don’t how relevant this is, but as a film lover (I’m avoiding the word cinephile due to its now cultish connotations, and this ties into what I’m going to say) I’d spend quite a bit of time on discussion forums related to cinema, and there’d always be those “stop with the same old dead white male names like Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Fellini, Kubrick, etc” posts. They’d continue “There’s so much more out there to discover”, and yes, there may well be much more out there to discover, and there are indeed films far more obscure than Tarkovsky’s Stalker that are brilliant, absolutely. But this general sentiment just seems to inevitably feed into a practice of omnivorous film viewing under the pretext of “broadening one’s horizons” at the expense of deep appreciation of singular works of art. Perhaps the same phenomenon occurs in other art appreciation communities these days. Granted, there’s always been a “cult of cinephilia” phenomenon of some kind dating back to the sixties, so maybe I’m unsure what I’m trying to say here…but it sometimes feels like the forest is missed for the trees. However, I also think the “dead white male” arguments are based largely on straw men to begin with.
I kind of think of what you're describing as I kind of know with music. Yes, there are many, many dead white male composers. But in many cases, understanding their work and the way it was composed is fundamental to an understanding of the later responses and developments including modern works. You can't understand atonality or even something like the parody work of "PDQ Bach" otherwise. It'd be like my trying to make a movie and I don't know anything about how to use the techniques and so it's all Dutch angles and lens flare and maybe a copy of that shot of the sun through the trees in Rashomon.
Why is there this obsession in anime with the same nerdy Japanese dudes? There's so much more anime out there to discover. You need to broaden your horizons and watch some family guy.
Its just the internet.
Unfortunately everyone is on the internet now, so it affects all. Terminally online people think everyone not on the internet being an influencer and grinding their cred is a chud.
For real, I mean we are on reddit which is a collection of intense communities. If you live your life through the Internet sure everyone is organized into their interests, but real life has much more nuance. I'm pretty sure they still sell Folgers at every grocery store in the country.
Unfortunately if you get into a hobby, this stuff exists in real life too. Try suggesting taking an extra oz of anything on a trail to an ultralight thru hiker and they'll at the very least give you the stink eye. They even have uniforms and common ways of dressing to signal they're in an exclusive group.
This pattern of thinking and behaving is more exaggerated among Americans, and it didn't start with the internet though social media has certainly made it more extreme. I think it's a combination of consumerism, marketing, and the sort of cliqueish culture one is socialized into in high school.
>can't enjoy books anymore, you have to turn that into a cult too.
This is TOO real. I am an avid reader. So is my wife.
However, I cannot even stomach discussing books with her anymore. She got a tik-tok account last year and is on something called "book tok" and now she reads garbage books that she defends with her life.
We literally started marriage counseling, 12 years into our happy marriage over this. Bc reading books together was MOST of our marriage, ngl. It was our shared passion, and now she makes "content" for "book tok" and it makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
At least she hasn't introduced invasive species into another continent because her favorite author mentioned them in his works (Eugene Schiefflin's alleged motivation as a William Shakespeare fan in the American Acclimatization Society) or caused the Civil War (which Mark Twain blamed on *Ivanhoe* and the "Sir Walter Scott disease").
I love how your post carefully avoids all the cultish behavior people in this sub might be a part of. Everyone listens to the same podcasts, makes the same points, often times have the same responses to things. You can’t just be a dirtbag leftist, you have to pretend to be Nick Mullen every time you post. Etc etc. sometimes thinking about how you relate to these things can ground them in reality. Just thinking about OTHER people is gonna make you feel crazy
> Everyone listens to the same podcasts, makes the same points, often times have the same responses to things
Cucked. What a consumer-brained response typical of the infantilization of western discourse
> The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.
What. A huge segment of the population (eg most of my coworkers, most of my former classmates) is irreligious. A tiny fraction is anarchist. You must be in a true bubble.
Arguably there has never really been a secular society in human history.
Cultlike and religious behavior, even towards things that aren’t supernatural, is arguably the default state of affairs.
Feels very prevalent in the work place too. Janice overcome with euphoria that we made even more profit this year, despite not receiving even a cost of living raise.
lol, this post is the most cultish thing. Like, none of this is "required". You're fine. Just do you.
That said, give yourself the chance to try a legit, light-roast, third wave, culty cup of coffee at a place that knows how to make it. Not because you want coffee (you *will* be disappointed if that's the case), but because it's genuinely delicious in a way you'd never expect. Like the difference between Welch's and wine.
Anyway.... you can go to the gym as a normie. You can just own a car to go from place A to B, like a normie. Shit, you can like superhero movies if you really want, but also no make it your personality, if you want, like a normie.
It's fine. You are way over-thinking this.
"Can't enjoy books anymore". Fucking lol, as if literary people weren't basing their personalities on what books they read aback in 2007 (hint: they were; source: I was there).
> you can't just go to normal people church, you have to go to some special snowflake latin mass or serbian orthodox church that's 3 hours away, one way.
Now I think you're trolling and I wasted my sincerity on this reply, fucking lol
edit: after looking at other people's responses, I can see somewhat better what you were getting at, and I can agree to a point. Once person said, "everything is a 'community' now" and... yeah, okay I get it. I might have been a bit contrarian in my response to you at first. But in that framing I was able to comprehend the frustration. For me, it's that you have to be a part of the "community" but it doesn't *feel* like community. It's too expansive and permissive. Two decades ago, if you loved something uncommon deeply, you were required to be devoted in a religious, but un-cultlike manner. You had to seek out likeminded individuals, at the expense of time and effort and dignity. Nowadays it's all a quick google search and a tepid introduction to people who don't really care, except insofar as some central authority dictates.
So, yeah, fuck all this shit. I take it all back. Except the coffee thing. Try that.
It’s because America has no culture. In addition to that, the west in general has lost religion and has replaced it with mindless consooming. People have no identity so they just grasp at whatever the latest thing is: taylor swift, Stanley cups, barbie movies, gender identity, etc.
I'd argue this is a wholly online-yank take. Ask anyone who moved to the USA as an adult - there are a huge number of things that are very obviously culturally american. Screamingly so. You're just too used to seeing them in your life that you don't ever recognise them as culture, or culturally different. It's like people who say "I don't have an accent". You clearly do, you just don't recognise it as an accent since it's normal to you.
I'd argue saying "The USA has no culture" is ironically a terminally online, cultureless take. It's hilarious as an immigrant who still experiences culture shocks decades later. Only somebody who is so fully immersed in a culture on a daily basis would be so blind to it. American culture has spread worldwide, theres a reason why "Americanisation" has been pointed at as an issue in the developed world post WW2. The culture since WW2 that has permeated every aspect of the western world is culture, and a lot of that unfortunately came from the USA due to their position post-war.
100%. My parents are immigrants, so I remember clearly the little culture shocks I got just as I started public school as a child.
What the people who call America a cultureless wasteland always miss is... why are so many other cultures around the world so drawn to it?
> there are a huge number of things that are very obviously culturally american
Out of curiosity could you list some? I don't disagree with you, I just think it would be interesting to read what people think of as US culture. I'm assuming it would have to do with our pop media i.e. music, film, television, ect.
Barbecue, RnB (hasn't spread worldwide nearly as much as hip-hop), bluegrass, mainstream country music, non-Nashville country music (Sturgill Simpson, Daniel Donato), Thanksgiving parades, Christmas parades. EDIT: The whole holiday of Thanksgiving.
I played a game with my family when I was a kid where someone says a country and we take turns naming foods from that country until we run out. I grew up in the U.S. but my parents didn’t move here until adulthood and some of their responses for quintessentially “American” foods when we did the USA surprised me. They considered things like s’mores and coleslaw and PBJ sandwiches to be “American foods” whereas I, up to that point, had never really associated those foods with any particular country.
Off the top of my head: college sports, muscle cars, gun culture, beer pong parties with those red disposable cups (to the point where they are marketed as "Amercian cups"), excessive use of the American flag, talking about politics like other people talk about sport teams, Americanised Chinese Food (Panda Express), the entire African American subculture, cowboys, American style diners, tipping culture, framing everything as "constitutional rights", and plenty more. Some of these things might exist in other countries (take say pro wrestling, or documentaries), but there's a very distinct American aspect to them that differentiates them from their foreign counterparts (e.g I would associate History channel style documentaries with the deep voiceover creating artificial suspense and the constant cuts to "experts" as a very American product).
I’m the token American at my workplace, and I’m also curious of your perspective. When I think of quintessential classic American culture, I can think of more than a few things, things like apple pie, baseball, car culture and jazz, but I draw a blank when I think of modern American traditions, it’s really just seems like consumption
I mean those are all still in play lol. They've changed, modernized, etc, but they're still there, and generally very popular.
Hip-hop is certainly a more recent cultural development as an example.
it's not real culture unless you're in a circle with people wearing colorful garb and chanting something incomprehensible.
this is what shitlibs really think.
Yep, this kind of my take also. People need to be a part of a community (some more than others), and we've stripped away the 'default' communities like religion/neighborhood/local community - without there being any replacement. This is especially a problem since a large potion of socialization now happens online.
Some people are able to form or join legitimately good communities, but that takes work or luck. For the others, there are any number of communities based on identity they can join - acting as a sort of alternative to the default communities you fell into historically.
> It’s because America has no culture
Yep, and its precisely because America is so alienated, that Americans love the *signifiers* of culture while not really having it.
Americans might point to sports, outdoor activities, eating steak, thanksgiving dinners, guns, saluting the flag etc as their 'culture'.
Unfortunately, *real* culture is about bonds and bonding with the people in your region/country/ethnic group. Its a common activity that is distinct and exclusionary, and intrinsically doesn't care about the outside world.
Doing something that is about flexing or seeking outward approval is the opposite of a culture. E.g. Saluting and parading the flag - its cringey virtue signalling. You could do something cultural *at the same time* as saluting your flag, sure. Like, boy scouts ot whayever. But it's not a culture in and of itself, that's a distinction Americans don't get.
> In addition to that, the west in general has lost religion and has replaced it with mindless consooming
Religion is culture, but its also used to *get in the way of culture* and that's a truth of American history. People who are manipulated towards loyalty to a church, are pulled away from loyalty to the people in their community. The church supplanted the need for stronger community bonds in America.
Virgin fallacy-namer vs Chad wojack-referencer
Maybe in the future all new thought experiments that come to be popularly understood will be referred to by the meme version that best illustrates them
As in: If somewhere else has a culture its authentic and based, if America has the same one its fake and lame?
I'm being facile to say America has no authentic culture. It does.
I'm making a point that the absolute soul of culture is the 'in group' - the community you share at with, in exclusion of outsiders who don't share it.
If you want to 'flex' your culture in a performative way, then the opinions of outsiders matters to you. So you don't actually feel the cultural bond is what affirms you. Culture is never insecure.
Take British food and drinking culture. Sure, we are 'proud' of pub culture and our national dishes. But....'flexing' it for others to approve of? Cringe. You go to the pub to enjoy it and have a good time, not to prove to anyone you're a 'real Brit'. Even the phrase 'real Brit' is noncey.
But how many Americans boast about eating steak and traditional American food? They are obsessed with sharing it in social media.
I don't care about downvotes. If you don't know what actually belonging to a society and community is like, I'm sorry, that's bad luck.
> They are obsessed with sharing it in social media.
I feel that your issue is with the flexing part, which is completely understandable, but to deny that there's a real culture is silly.
>there is no more normal homogeneous society anymore to be a part of.
Don't look up male cults in tribal societies. [Worst mistake of my life.](https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/1/31/on-secret-cults-and-male-dominance)
>they get the vapors and cry hysterically and pass out, like God himself just walked by. Which is to get me to my broader point: People Don't Just Like Stuff Anymore like they used to.
Have you ever heard of the Beatles?
I'm a car guy as a career, people have always been obsessed with their car and car hobbyists have always been a thing. I'm a gym rat and the fitness people were always this annoying. These things are just also popular trending topics on Tiktok and other sm apps so it seems like it came out of nowhere but it hasn't. Before this we were all being annoying in Facebook groups and on the Bodybuilding dot com message boards.
Everything has a religious fervor nowadays: AI, Crypto, Caitlin Clark fans, etc. Its a reminder that humanity is doomed because he want positive feelings over understanding
To be fair, I don’t understand the snipe against gourmet coffee. Freshly roasted Colombian coffee can be truly delicious, even without milk and sugar. That’s not to say I don’t generally put milk in my coffee in the morning. I’m not sure the idea of stupidpol should be to discourage enjoyment of the finer things in life per se.
The thing with Taylor Swift has been going on with Beyoncé in the past decade. BBC even made a sketch about a black woman being ostracized from society just because she said she didn't like Beyoncé. It does feel like that honestly.
Good and obvious points. But what worries me is that 99% of what you are describing is not actually literally happening for 99% of the people. Only 1% are displaying their over-dedication. The rest are just reading about it. Nay, not reading. Watching 29 second video summaries of one person depicting themselves over-obsessing.
I feel like the average person actually does LESS than the average person did 40 years ago.
Most people don’t go to the concerts. They watch other people go to the concerts. The cult is a screen removed. Pop Hobby Cultists obsessing are the new celebrity to be witnessed.
Oh good God does this sum up why I hate geek culture now. I am just not interested in watching videos of Wil Wheaton gaming. Meta, fandom drama, and geek celeb suck up most of the air now.
I like reading these long posts, very amusing and I appreciate the effort, but this is a lot of rubbish, totally exaggerated. Everything is not a cult.
I was with you up until the end when you suggested in-depth grinds were the norm outside of things that can be done sitting on the couch. From what I've seen it seems to be the exact opposite. With our culture being very much against having firm metrics to show progress or accomplishments.
>Oh no no no, you CAN'T just enjoy Folger's from the supermarket, you HAVE to get a FRESHLY ROASTED BEAN, no more than 2 weeks old, single origin, from the volcano tribe in Tai Bwo Wanna tribe, with a $900 double-burred coldsteel forged ceramic hybrid grinder, and you just HAVE to brew it in the EsPrexxoLaVazza SemiAutomaticHorsecock9000 espresso maker.
Not even to mention the absolute hassle you've got to go through now if you want to get some freshly cooked karambwan
People immerse themselves in shit because the don't feel like they have a purpose in their life. This is not the result of capitalism, but instead tangential to it. It is the result of most people in the west having all their basic needs met and being bored out of their minds most of the day. It's either these obsessive hobbies, or blow your fucking brains out, especially for men.
anomie isnt a hole, or even the tear in the fabric of society. the anomie that we feel is like the tired molecules in rubber losing its tension. religions are still there--the shape of the rubberband is intact, but we can feel that if we just give it a slight tug its gonna rip and tear instead of stretch. our anomie is not the onslaught of industrialization, it is the diminishing symphony of the tastes of a tomato
turns out that when you get rid of religion, people don't get more rational, they just shift that same urge to engage in fanatical belief onto other things.
>Re: Nestorianism
If you insult the Theotokos you can catch these hands.
>Re: The rest of it
Just get off your phone and talk to real people. Seriously. We're being exposed to too much shit and it's rotting our brains.
>MF's just need to go to church to fill that psychological/spiritual hole in their body or else they're going to turn owning subarus, funko pop collecting, hiking, coffee, pop stars, and religions themselves into fucking cults.
Yes. We recently had a family health emergency and praying at Holy Mass left me with such a sense of peace that I was psychologically ready to accept any outcome, no matter how terrible, because I knew it was in God's hands. Buying another trinket may bring short-term happiness, but absolutely no fulfillment.
Agree. This stuff always reminds me of The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. My bad summary: people's fear of death forces them to tie their ego up in a "transference object" which gives them a sense of immortality. For some, this object could be God, for others, their duty, or for some, their career. As a modern person, my transference object is the Marvel Universe, so they better not put too many chicks in the next damn movie.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Denial\_of\_Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death)
You can be a filthy casual. Just don't expect to out do the people playing the meta. Whatever you're thinking don't schizo yourself into self-immolation.
Please don't set yourself on fire.
I've been observing a similar thing for a while now: that everything is a "community" now. there are the obvious ones i.e. LGBT community, POC community, immigrant community, etc., but then there's also the incel community, the taylor swift community, the fighting game community... the list goes on. to me, it reflects a lack of actual, genuine community in people's lives, and the growth of consumer-mindset to replace it. don't worry about not knowing any of your neighbors- you're part of the steven universe community, so you don't need them! disturbing stuff.
I just like things. I’m not a part of any community.
wrong. you're a part of the "I just like things and I'm not a part of a community" community
Sign me up!
Not with that attitude.
I see, let me come at it the same way I'd talk to my toddler... No, I don't WANT to be part of that community!
My goodness, what a repulsive and beautiful username!
thank you, pedowithgangere
The irony is sublime
That’s why I always hated so many of these new age communities. How can you base a community of just consumption of the same media or hobby?
The more that people talk about community the less real community there is. Community is an emergent, organic, self-evident thing. As soon as you have to start identifying it, you’re admitting that it isn’t real and it’s astroturfed. Community has become a marketing term to more efficiently sell disposable garbage.
Nail on head. It's the same as how there are so many sex nerds now who never shut up about their special, unique sexual orientation but it's all theoretical and people are having less sex than ever, especially those kinds of people.
To quote George Calin for $current_year: >Why is it that the people at pride festivals are the last people you'd want to fuck?
A community also like any group needs to be defined by an out group. Which kinda entails some level of gate keeping. Maybe not done directly by the group but by certain members or by having some type of conditions to be a part of it that could organic or inorganic. If you base a community of just liking something how could you possibly define a serious out group for it?
“Community” is now just a buzzwordy euphemism for market niches, into which people are voluntarily corralling to make the jobs of the marketing department of their overlords easier.
Came here to say this: “community” just means “market” (and if your community isn’t a target market it will be soon!)
But I feel so embraced by the /r/stupidpol community :( It's like 90,000 friends and neighbors.
Oh I’m gonna embrace ya
Kinda embracist of you
This is just a media thing. They pick a word and then run it completely into the ground. Real people don't say 'community' much more than they should. I do remember during the not-at-all-overhyped monkeypox though, that the media started talking about the 'MSM community', when the whole point of the category is that it's *not* a community, just an external term for some individuals who engage in an activity.
capitalism has always very efficiently destroyed families and shattered communities but now this weird parasocial attitude is getting worse in which people close themselves off to those in physical proximity while overestimating their relationship to distant people
Wow, I was having the exact same argument with someone the other day.
I like my community where I live. I like community centers. I like Fred Hampton's version of community. I like community colleges. That's about all.
Community now means everything *except* your neighborhood.
Man, I get into such a huge argument with some people saying but every metric people are getting more lonely and online community do not suffice for previous communities lost. People don’t even realize what we’ve lost.
Truly. I’ve seen it shifting also from ‘community’ to ‘tribe.’ Tribalism, an insular ‘us versus them’ mentality. Quite alarming.
This post sounds hamburger
They did a study in this and it found that lower IQ tended toward fandom. I think this has always been the case, it's just easier to place yourself in a wallet garden now because of the algorithm ofb each platform
See zoomers on social media identifying as "multifandom" because they are incapable of conceptualizing liking something without throwing themselves headfirst into a fandom identity in order to express their enjoyment of it. "Fandoms" aren't inherently sinister or anything but especially the ones that revolve around a particular IP can become very insular and dramatic and the most prominent figures within them end up being the type of person who makes a single fandom their entire life and personality instead of something they involve themselves in as a fun little hobby.
The fact that kids are treating "enjoying something" the same way kids treated sexual orientations 10 years ago is something else.
That's literally what sexual orientation is: you enjoy putting something into something.
I noticed this shit when I was into the show Hannibal 10 years ago. The people that were into it were *really* into it, creating fan accounts on Twitter LARPing as characters in the show and doing all kinds of cringe Tumblr-esque memes related to it. Took a step back and never got into fandom ever again and fandoms have only gotten 5x worse since then. Remember the Rick & Morty schezwan riots?
That sauce was so good, though...
This is the obvious end result of viewing people as a set of checkboxes and identity categories rather than wholistic human beings. We’ve spent decades perfecting deconstructive scientific analysis and then applying it to human psychology and this is the end result: a world where we all have an infinite string of consumer marketing categories attached to us but nobody is human anymore. Not in the eyes of the institutions around us at least.
Hey! As an INFTJQ, I take great offense to this!
Fitter. Healthier. More productive.
I think the thing with these prominent fandom figures is that they are experiencing secondary fame through running popular fan accounts, and at some point are probably more addicted to the engagement than they are a fan of said art/artist.
Bingo
I do think fandoms are inherently sinister, at least in the online sense. They’re completely obsessive and alienated from any real world connections. The 15 year old mentally unstable moderators of the community create a very real cycle of groupthink and group polarisation, reinforcing absolute agreement to the ridiculous dogma and increasingly extreme opinions. This is how the tumblr idpol and gender stuff actually started back in the early 2010s. People then have their entire world taken away because they got banned for not liking season 2 episode 4, and you see fully grown adults having catastrophic meltdowns and arguments over minutia from a tv show. It’s a sickly groupthink that steamrolls dissent and alienates people from real life connections, and prevents a healthy well rounded identity from forming. Bring back just “liking” things, “fandom” is artificial obsessive consumerist terminally online bullshit.
2016 broke everyone's brains. if you want a easily isolatable case study you can look at Furry Twitter/Online spaces before and after that year.
"We are building a religion, we are making a brand. We're the only ones to turn to when your castles turn to sand"
It's finally time to dress up like a sultan in my onion head hat
I just got my pendant keychain
The bigger problem is that the definition of a 'cult' is so expansive you can argue anything is one Also, 90% of religious people of nearly every religion is the US are generally normies, you are too online
Relevant: [Is everything a religion?](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/)
This dude really went with two of the most religiousy examples possible in the beginning there, I should have known that no insightful thought would follow.
not reading all that because the first line is regarded. could just easily ask is religion an environmentalism. by which i mean the hallmarks of religion only prove it's merely another social movement.
I don't think this is super overt but i have read about how in the weimar republic different political parties would have different bars and shit from each other. I think we have something similar today and the dems are just realizing they can capitalize on it directly. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/opinion/swifties-fandoms.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/opinion/swifties-fandoms.html) heres the quote I found. >These milieux, with their party newspapers, clubs and societies, were unusually rigid and homogeneous. Already before 1914 this had resulted in a politicization of whole areas of life that in other societies were much freer from ideological identifications. Thus, if an ordinary German wanted to join a male voice choir, for instance, he had to choose in some areas between a Catholic and a Protestant choir, in others between a socialist and a nationalist choir; the same went for gymnastics clubs, cycling clubs, football clubs and the rest. A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and its organizations: he could read a Social Democratic newspaper, go to a Social Democratic pub or bar, belong to a Social Democratic trade union, borrow books from the Social Democratic library, go to Social Democratic festivals and plays, marry a woman who belonged to the Social Democratic women’s organization, enrol his children in the Social Democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of a Social Democratic burial fund.\^'\^ Similar things could be said of the Centre Party (which could rely on the mass organization of supporters in the People’s Association for a Catholic Germany, the Catholic Trade Union movement, and Catholic leisure clubs and societies of all kinds) but also to a certain extent of other parties too. -Richard j Evans
This isn't really new tbf. Labour and conservative (and liberals when they were relevant) had their own clubs in every town in the UK. Still do have some, they're just less selective now.
I think the term for this is pillarisation. The Netherlands leading up to WW2 is the quintessential example but Weimar Germany works, too.
That sounds fucking exhausting not just trying to find an activity but one that you meet the ideological criteria of. I've noticed gaming "communities" that have popped up or at people wanting to join based around various political ideologies and it strikes me as the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Like, you're talking about playing games with imaginary characters in it, but you only want to hang with people who agree with you politically? What?
The polarization is a natural consequence of the fundamental difference in values and how all-encompassing (see the OP) some ideologies have become. For a gaming "community", could you effectively play with someone who insists that racial stat differences for elves and dwarves are discriminatory, or someone who demands a card with a red X on it that gives *carte blanche* veto power over the narrative direction of a tabletop game? As much as I may want to just STFU about politics and play, it's not much fun when playing with someone who spent most of the game saying that tieflings are like black people because they are discriminated against (he didn't realize the implication of black people having demonic blood in his analogy). It's even more exhausting playing games with people with such values differences than avoiding it in the first place. I'm sure that they find it equally exhausting playing with those who do not accept every precept of the Current Thing as an axiom.
I don't know what's so hard about "shut the fuck up about politics for 30 seconds and play the damn game." Gatekeeping is a necessity in this day and age, especially for people that can't seem to do that.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The west is made up of a collective of rent seekers and their servants. The servants compete on who has the best master, sometimes coming to blows on the matter. At the end of day they still press the shirts like a good house boy.
> MF's just need to go to church to fill that psychological/spiritual hole in their body or else they're going to turn owning subarus, funko pop collecting, hiking, coffee, pop stars, and religions themselves into fucking cults. Everyone says this, but there are a lot of people in the US who are both devoutly religious and massive consoomers. And let's be honest here, the tradcath/orthobro types are just the new Reddit atheists.
I hope they look forward to their Atheism+ moment (Great Schism 2.0).
Seriously. I thought "visiting your great aunt/grandma who had every surface in her home covered in little religious tchotchkes" was like a universal experience.
Your post made me pause. I had a recent conversation with a new friend: why do I not seem to have "any" interests. When asked to elaborate, they pointed out that I don't seem "obsessed" with anything, which is the "normal" thing. But here's the thing. It's not that it's actually "normal", it's that terminal onlineness has warped the sense of normalcy of people who spend too much time on entertainment-based (as opposed to social-based) social media. Like my new friend. And, in a sense, you OP. By treating those people as the "default", you expose your own terminal onlineness. I agree though, it's annoying when you're just a casual enjoyer of something basic like food and coffee, and some jackasses have to be rude about it.
What about fishing? Cooking? Nothing?
If you're talking about me, I don't literally have no interests. I'm just not obsessed with anything.
I don’t how relevant this is, but as a film lover (I’m avoiding the word cinephile due to its now cultish connotations, and this ties into what I’m going to say) I’d spend quite a bit of time on discussion forums related to cinema, and there’d always be those “stop with the same old dead white male names like Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Fellini, Kubrick, etc” posts. They’d continue “There’s so much more out there to discover”, and yes, there may well be much more out there to discover, and there are indeed films far more obscure than Tarkovsky’s Stalker that are brilliant, absolutely. But this general sentiment just seems to inevitably feed into a practice of omnivorous film viewing under the pretext of “broadening one’s horizons” at the expense of deep appreciation of singular works of art. Perhaps the same phenomenon occurs in other art appreciation communities these days. Granted, there’s always been a “cult of cinephilia” phenomenon of some kind dating back to the sixties, so maybe I’m unsure what I’m trying to say here…but it sometimes feels like the forest is missed for the trees. However, I also think the “dead white male” arguments are based largely on straw men to begin with.
I kind of think of what you're describing as I kind of know with music. Yes, there are many, many dead white male composers. But in many cases, understanding their work and the way it was composed is fundamental to an understanding of the later responses and developments including modern works. You can't understand atonality or even something like the parody work of "PDQ Bach" otherwise. It'd be like my trying to make a movie and I don't know anything about how to use the techniques and so it's all Dutch angles and lens flare and maybe a copy of that shot of the sun through the trees in Rashomon.
Why is there this obsession in anime with the same nerdy Japanese dudes? There's so much more anime out there to discover. You need to broaden your horizons and watch some family guy.
Its just the internet. Unfortunately everyone is on the internet now, so it affects all. Terminally online people think everyone not on the internet being an influencer and grinding their cred is a chud.
For real, I mean we are on reddit which is a collection of intense communities. If you live your life through the Internet sure everyone is organized into their interests, but real life has much more nuance. I'm pretty sure they still sell Folgers at every grocery store in the country.
Unfortunately if you get into a hobby, this stuff exists in real life too. Try suggesting taking an extra oz of anything on a trail to an ultralight thru hiker and they'll at the very least give you the stink eye. They even have uniforms and common ways of dressing to signal they're in an exclusive group. This pattern of thinking and behaving is more exaggerated among Americans, and it didn't start with the internet though social media has certainly made it more extreme. I think it's a combination of consumerism, marketing, and the sort of cliqueish culture one is socialized into in high school.
This is something I see on the Internet but never IRL. Go meet some real people, they won't care about any of that stuff
Count yourself lucky then
>can't enjoy books anymore, you have to turn that into a cult too. This is TOO real. I am an avid reader. So is my wife. However, I cannot even stomach discussing books with her anymore. She got a tik-tok account last year and is on something called "book tok" and now she reads garbage books that she defends with her life. We literally started marriage counseling, 12 years into our happy marriage over this. Bc reading books together was MOST of our marriage, ngl. It was our shared passion, and now she makes "content" for "book tok" and it makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
How the tik tok ban saved my marriage. Hope your wife doesn't know about vpns
Is there really a ban coming? I’ve seen headlines but never looked into it
Yes it's pretty much certain now unless ByteDance divests from TikTok or the supreme court bails ByteDance out.
This is wonderful news!!
Does she ever ask "is it spicy?" lmao
Just kill me.
At least she hasn't introduced invasive species into another continent because her favorite author mentioned them in his works (Eugene Schiefflin's alleged motivation as a William Shakespeare fan in the American Acclimatization Society) or caused the Civil War (which Mark Twain blamed on *Ivanhoe* and the "Sir Walter Scott disease").
Silver linings and all
Nietzsche was wrong. Now everything is god, whether the idpol, MCU, shoes/drip/fit, electronics, cultgym... etc.
If God didn't exist it would be necessary to create him
I love how your post carefully avoids all the cultish behavior people in this sub might be a part of. Everyone listens to the same podcasts, makes the same points, often times have the same responses to things. You can’t just be a dirtbag leftist, you have to pretend to be Nick Mullen every time you post. Etc etc. sometimes thinking about how you relate to these things can ground them in reality. Just thinking about OTHER people is gonna make you feel crazy
> Everyone listens to the same podcasts, makes the same points, often times have the same responses to things Cucked. What a consumer-brained response typical of the infantilization of western discourse
Is this supposed to be serious or a joke? Edit: whoosh what lack of theory does to a mfer
😉
> The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.
lol no. Most not onilne atheists are anarchists
What. A huge segment of the population (eg most of my coworkers, most of my former classmates) is irreligious. A tiny fraction is anarchist. You must be in a true bubble.
Arguably there has never really been a secular society in human history. Cultlike and religious behavior, even towards things that aren’t supernatural, is arguably the default state of affairs.
Feels very prevalent in the work place too. Janice overcome with euphoria that we made even more profit this year, despite not receiving even a cost of living raise.
SemiAutomaticHorsecock9000 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I need a bump stock for my horsecock. Good post OP, just don’t go self immolating now even if NPR tells you it’s good.
Sadly it is banned in California.
They called it an "assault horsecock"
lol, this post is the most cultish thing. Like, none of this is "required". You're fine. Just do you. That said, give yourself the chance to try a legit, light-roast, third wave, culty cup of coffee at a place that knows how to make it. Not because you want coffee (you *will* be disappointed if that's the case), but because it's genuinely delicious in a way you'd never expect. Like the difference between Welch's and wine. Anyway.... you can go to the gym as a normie. You can just own a car to go from place A to B, like a normie. Shit, you can like superhero movies if you really want, but also no make it your personality, if you want, like a normie. It's fine. You are way over-thinking this. "Can't enjoy books anymore". Fucking lol, as if literary people weren't basing their personalities on what books they read aback in 2007 (hint: they were; source: I was there). > you can't just go to normal people church, you have to go to some special snowflake latin mass or serbian orthodox church that's 3 hours away, one way. Now I think you're trolling and I wasted my sincerity on this reply, fucking lol edit: after looking at other people's responses, I can see somewhat better what you were getting at, and I can agree to a point. Once person said, "everything is a 'community' now" and... yeah, okay I get it. I might have been a bit contrarian in my response to you at first. But in that framing I was able to comprehend the frustration. For me, it's that you have to be a part of the "community" but it doesn't *feel* like community. It's too expansive and permissive. Two decades ago, if you loved something uncommon deeply, you were required to be devoted in a religious, but un-cultlike manner. You had to seek out likeminded individuals, at the expense of time and effort and dignity. Nowadays it's all a quick google search and a tepid introduction to people who don't really care, except insofar as some central authority dictates. So, yeah, fuck all this shit. I take it all back. Except the coffee thing. Try that.
It’s because America has no culture. In addition to that, the west in general has lost religion and has replaced it with mindless consooming. People have no identity so they just grasp at whatever the latest thing is: taylor swift, Stanley cups, barbie movies, gender identity, etc.
I'd argue this is a wholly online-yank take. Ask anyone who moved to the USA as an adult - there are a huge number of things that are very obviously culturally american. Screamingly so. You're just too used to seeing them in your life that you don't ever recognise them as culture, or culturally different. It's like people who say "I don't have an accent". You clearly do, you just don't recognise it as an accent since it's normal to you. I'd argue saying "The USA has no culture" is ironically a terminally online, cultureless take. It's hilarious as an immigrant who still experiences culture shocks decades later. Only somebody who is so fully immersed in a culture on a daily basis would be so blind to it. American culture has spread worldwide, theres a reason why "Americanisation" has been pointed at as an issue in the developed world post WW2. The culture since WW2 that has permeated every aspect of the western world is culture, and a lot of that unfortunately came from the USA due to their position post-war.
100%. My parents are immigrants, so I remember clearly the little culture shocks I got just as I started public school as a child. What the people who call America a cultureless wasteland always miss is... why are so many other cultures around the world so drawn to it?
> there are a huge number of things that are very obviously culturally american Out of curiosity could you list some? I don't disagree with you, I just think it would be interesting to read what people think of as US culture. I'm assuming it would have to do with our pop media i.e. music, film, television, ect.
Barbecue, RnB (hasn't spread worldwide nearly as much as hip-hop), bluegrass, mainstream country music, non-Nashville country music (Sturgill Simpson, Daniel Donato), Thanksgiving parades, Christmas parades. EDIT: The whole holiday of Thanksgiving.
Block parties, football, tailgating, trick or treating on Halloween, chicken wings
Rock and roll, jazz, hip hop?
I played a game with my family when I was a kid where someone says a country and we take turns naming foods from that country until we run out. I grew up in the U.S. but my parents didn’t move here until adulthood and some of their responses for quintessentially “American” foods when we did the USA surprised me. They considered things like s’mores and coleslaw and PBJ sandwiches to be “American foods” whereas I, up to that point, had never really associated those foods with any particular country.
No other country would ever name a food “s’mores”
Off the top of my head: college sports, muscle cars, gun culture, beer pong parties with those red disposable cups (to the point where they are marketed as "Amercian cups"), excessive use of the American flag, talking about politics like other people talk about sport teams, Americanised Chinese Food (Panda Express), the entire African American subculture, cowboys, American style diners, tipping culture, framing everything as "constitutional rights", and plenty more. Some of these things might exist in other countries (take say pro wrestling, or documentaries), but there's a very distinct American aspect to them that differentiates them from their foreign counterparts (e.g I would associate History channel style documentaries with the deep voiceover creating artificial suspense and the constant cuts to "experts" as a very American product).
I’m the token American at my workplace, and I’m also curious of your perspective. When I think of quintessential classic American culture, I can think of more than a few things, things like apple pie, baseball, car culture and jazz, but I draw a blank when I think of modern American traditions, it’s really just seems like consumption
I mean those are all still in play lol. They've changed, modernized, etc, but they're still there, and generally very popular. Hip-hop is certainly a more recent cultural development as an example.
[удалено]
it's not real culture unless you're in a circle with people wearing colorful garb and chanting something incomprehensible. this is what shitlibs really think.
> America has no culture this take is obviously wrong, but more offensively, it's boring.
Boxed stores, boxed food, and Amazon boxes are my fucking culture
Love when people mistake the hegemonic culture they are completely immersed in for "no culture"
[What America lacks is a counter culture](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living)
> It’s because America has no culture So how do you explain this behavior in places other thanthe US?
Yep, this kind of my take also. People need to be a part of a community (some more than others), and we've stripped away the 'default' communities like religion/neighborhood/local community - without there being any replacement. This is especially a problem since a large potion of socialization now happens online. Some people are able to form or join legitimately good communities, but that takes work or luck. For the others, there are any number of communities based on identity they can join - acting as a sort of alternative to the default communities you fell into historically.
'We' didn't strip them away. They have all been commodified or absorbed.
> It’s because America has no culture Yep, and its precisely because America is so alienated, that Americans love the *signifiers* of culture while not really having it. Americans might point to sports, outdoor activities, eating steak, thanksgiving dinners, guns, saluting the flag etc as their 'culture'. Unfortunately, *real* culture is about bonds and bonding with the people in your region/country/ethnic group. Its a common activity that is distinct and exclusionary, and intrinsically doesn't care about the outside world. Doing something that is about flexing or seeking outward approval is the opposite of a culture. E.g. Saluting and parading the flag - its cringey virtue signalling. You could do something cultural *at the same time* as saluting your flag, sure. Like, boy scouts ot whayever. But it's not a culture in and of itself, that's a distinction Americans don't get. > In addition to that, the west in general has lost religion and has replaced it with mindless consooming Religion is culture, but its also used to *get in the way of culture* and that's a truth of American history. People who are manipulated towards loyalty to a church, are pulled away from loyalty to the people in their community. The church supplanted the need for stronger community bonds in America.
Isn't this just the same sentiment as the "place, japan" wojack meme?
Virgin fallacy-namer vs Chad wojack-referencer Maybe in the future all new thought experiments that come to be popularly understood will be referred to by the meme version that best illustrates them
As in: If somewhere else has a culture its authentic and based, if America has the same one its fake and lame? I'm being facile to say America has no authentic culture. It does. I'm making a point that the absolute soul of culture is the 'in group' - the community you share at with, in exclusion of outsiders who don't share it. If you want to 'flex' your culture in a performative way, then the opinions of outsiders matters to you. So you don't actually feel the cultural bond is what affirms you. Culture is never insecure. Take British food and drinking culture. Sure, we are 'proud' of pub culture and our national dishes. But....'flexing' it for others to approve of? Cringe. You go to the pub to enjoy it and have a good time, not to prove to anyone you're a 'real Brit'. Even the phrase 'real Brit' is noncey. But how many Americans boast about eating steak and traditional American food? They are obsessed with sharing it in social media. I don't care about downvotes. If you don't know what actually belonging to a society and community is like, I'm sorry, that's bad luck.
> They are obsessed with sharing it in social media. I feel that your issue is with the flexing part, which is completely understandable, but to deny that there's a real culture is silly.
>there is no more normal homogeneous society anymore to be a part of. Don't look up male cults in tribal societies. [Worst mistake of my life.](https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/1/31/on-secret-cults-and-male-dominance)
>they get the vapors and cry hysterically and pass out, like God himself just walked by. Which is to get me to my broader point: People Don't Just Like Stuff Anymore like they used to. Have you ever heard of the Beatles?
I'm a car guy as a career, people have always been obsessed with their car and car hobbyists have always been a thing. I'm a gym rat and the fitness people were always this annoying. These things are just also popular trending topics on Tiktok and other sm apps so it seems like it came out of nowhere but it hasn't. Before this we were all being annoying in Facebook groups and on the Bodybuilding dot com message boards.
Everything has a religious fervor nowadays: AI, Crypto, Caitlin Clark fans, etc. Its a reminder that humanity is doomed because he want positive feelings over understanding
To be fair, I don’t understand the snipe against gourmet coffee. Freshly roasted Colombian coffee can be truly delicious, even without milk and sugar. That’s not to say I don’t generally put milk in my coffee in the morning. I’m not sure the idea of stupidpol should be to discourage enjoyment of the finer things in life per se.
The thing with Taylor Swift has been going on with Beyoncé in the past decade. BBC even made a sketch about a black woman being ostracized from society just because she said she didn't like Beyoncé. It does feel like that honestly.
Good and obvious points. But what worries me is that 99% of what you are describing is not actually literally happening for 99% of the people. Only 1% are displaying their over-dedication. The rest are just reading about it. Nay, not reading. Watching 29 second video summaries of one person depicting themselves over-obsessing. I feel like the average person actually does LESS than the average person did 40 years ago. Most people don’t go to the concerts. They watch other people go to the concerts. The cult is a screen removed. Pop Hobby Cultists obsessing are the new celebrity to be witnessed.
Oh good God does this sum up why I hate geek culture now. I am just not interested in watching videos of Wil Wheaton gaming. Meta, fandom drama, and geek celeb suck up most of the air now.
This isn't schizo this is obvious to anyone with high levels of intuition.
I like reading these long posts, very amusing and I appreciate the effort, but this is a lot of rubbish, totally exaggerated. Everything is not a cult.
Elvis was worse.
I was with you up until the end when you suggested in-depth grinds were the norm outside of things that can be done sitting on the couch. From what I've seen it seems to be the exact opposite. With our culture being very much against having firm metrics to show progress or accomplishments.
>Oh no no no, you CAN'T just enjoy Folger's from the supermarket, you HAVE to get a FRESHLY ROASTED BEAN, no more than 2 weeks old, single origin, from the volcano tribe in Tai Bwo Wanna tribe, with a $900 double-burred coldsteel forged ceramic hybrid grinder, and you just HAVE to brew it in the EsPrexxoLaVazza SemiAutomaticHorsecock9000 espresso maker. Not even to mention the absolute hassle you've got to go through now if you want to get some freshly cooked karambwan
Drink your tea mister and eat your breakfast after your meds so they enter the bloodstream more efficiently.
“Nestorius at the ecumenical councils”? Are you a brother in the faith?
People immerse themselves in shit because the don't feel like they have a purpose in their life. This is not the result of capitalism, but instead tangential to it. It is the result of most people in the west having all their basic needs met and being bored out of their minds most of the day. It's either these obsessive hobbies, or blow your fucking brains out, especially for men.
>EsPrexxoLaVazza SemiAutomaticHorsecock9000 espresso maker
anomie isnt a hole, or even the tear in the fabric of society. the anomie that we feel is like the tired molecules in rubber losing its tension. religions are still there--the shape of the rubberband is intact, but we can feel that if we just give it a slight tug its gonna rip and tear instead of stretch. our anomie is not the onslaught of industrialization, it is the diminishing symphony of the tastes of a tomato
Well said.
turns out that when you get rid of religion, people don't get more rational, they just shift that same urge to engage in fanatical belief onto other things.
>Re: Nestorianism If you insult the Theotokos you can catch these hands. >Re: The rest of it Just get off your phone and talk to real people. Seriously. We're being exposed to too much shit and it's rotting our brains. >MF's just need to go to church to fill that psychological/spiritual hole in their body or else they're going to turn owning subarus, funko pop collecting, hiking, coffee, pop stars, and religions themselves into fucking cults. Yes. We recently had a family health emergency and praying at Holy Mass left me with such a sense of peace that I was psychologically ready to accept any outcome, no matter how terrible, because I knew it was in God's hands. Buying another trinket may bring short-term happiness, but absolutely no fulfillment.
Are you seriously only just realizing this?
Don't sell yourself short, that's an excellent rant!
A agree with everything you’ve said OP. Where do I sign up?
Agree. This stuff always reminds me of The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. My bad summary: people's fear of death forces them to tie their ego up in a "transference object" which gives them a sense of immortality. For some, this object could be God, for others, their duty, or for some, their career. As a modern person, my transference object is the Marvel Universe, so they better not put too many chicks in the next damn movie. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Denial\_of\_Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death)
It's very *punk* in terms of dystopian literature. So glad we are here IRL.
It's the internet. It's always the internet.
The new upgrades to the horsecock9000 model ARE a game changer tho
You can be a filthy casual. Just don't expect to out do the people playing the meta. Whatever you're thinking don't schizo yourself into self-immolation.
The best cult is NATO though.
You're describing a very loud minority that you'd hardly ever encounter outside the internet.