The Ruined Generation
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The Internet was supposed to bring with it a renaissance, a new enlightenment and a brighter future. It was to be a time when people became smarter, having access to the collective knowledge of humanity at their fingertips, and with the invention of the smart phone, in their pocket, always. What could go wrong? A lot, it turns out. Actually, just about everything. The promise was not kept. All we ended up with was a bunch of narcissists desperate to share pictures of the food they're eating and demanding validation for their existence from everyone else.
Scroll through social media and you’ll be inundated with selfies and pictures of food. Did something really happen, did you really eat a meal if you didn’t tell the world about? It’s not that these people think you need to know where and what they’re eating, they need you to know. They want the likes and comments, they crave those more than the nutrition in the food. Hell, they probably choose where to eat based on how the food looks more than the taste or cost.
There is an entire segment of our population who now lives for the validation they receive from others. They need it. It’s not just because they like it, it’s because they have no self-worth without it.
It used to be that if you didn’t like someone, or they didn’t like you, you’d simply avoid them and the problem wasn’t only solved, it disappeared. Now people you’ve never met, will likely never meet, and probably would dislike if you did, demand you not only acknowledge their existence, but you celebrate it as well. If your beliefs, deeply held religious or simply a matter of taste, hinder the approval they desire you are labeled an “ist” or a “phobe” of some sort, then God protect you.
A recent column in The New York Times exemplifies this mentality perfectly, not because of its content as much as its existence. Entitled, “How Do I Define My Gender If No One Is Watching Me?” the sub-headline of, “Without the public eye, who are we?” completes the giveaway.
It’s a column full of progressive buzzwords and feelings about things most people couldn’t care less about.
Here’s a little fact most people understand: no one cares how you want to live your life, or who or what you think you are. Most people simply want to be left alone. As long as whatever you do is done with willing adults, and is legal, who gives a damn?
That’s not good enough anymore, you have to give as many damns that are requested of you, lest the mob be sent after your life.
The author of that Times piece wrote, “I was surprised by how much my gender instead seemed to almost evaporate. No longer on the alert for how to signal a restaurant’s waitstaff that neither 'he' nor 'she' applied to me, or for whether colleagues and neighbors would use the right language — devoid of anyone to signal my gender to — I felt, suddenly, amorphous and undefined.”
This is the mentality – validate me. But that quest for validation does not lie in accomplishment, it does not lie within each person to the left, it lies in the attention of others; in getting others to validate them. Friends, family, and strangers alike must constantly validate them. Using the “wrong pronoun” or refusing to use a made up one is not a mistake that doesn’t matter, it is an affront that matters more than anything else.
This isn’t about the transgender issue, this is just the latest example that caught my eye. It’s with every issue on the left. People and corporations are in a woke-off to “prove” how much they support voting rights, even though Georgia’s new law actually makes it easier to vote. It’s not enough that people live in fear of COVID-19, you have to triple-mask while lecturing anyone else who wants to see their family about how they’re worse than Hitler, even after being vaccinated.
Seeking validation for your existence outside of yourself means you’ll never find it, ever. The Internet is the pathway through which people who otherwise would’ve found contentment have found misery. A generation of Americans are seeing this pathway illuminated and praised in popular culture as though it’s something to aspire to, when it is the exact opposite; it is the road to misery and ruin. How we get out of this death spiral remains unknown, but the first step is to stop elevating those who impose it on us. The second is much easier, stop electing the Democrats who fostered and benefit from it.
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/04/06/the-ruined-generation-n2587409
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There are a lot of negatives with social media. But the above is the tip of the ice berg.
The internet allows societies to organize themselves differently. The internet will change the definition of "nation"
Again - I say this often and it's kinda trite, but the internet is on the level of the printing press and we ain't seen nothing yet.
Just as the constitution gave the press a prominent place in the founding documents, the role of the internet requires similar thinking.
It won't do with just a Section, law or regulation.
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The other thing I've found is that if you actually speak to this 'ruined generation' in person, many of them aren't the way this guy is portraying them.
He's basing his opinion of an entire generation on what he sees online. Which is another downside of social media.
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@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
He's basing his opinion of an entire generation on what he sees online . . .
And he's also conflating social media with the Internet. To say 'everything went wrong' with the promise of the Internet is just silly.
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Also, some of it's just good old fashioned complaining about the modern world.
I've no idea who the author is, these folk are everywhere and I don't have a clue who most of them are - if you look at his profile, he's written 2135 articles, and over 119,000 tweets.
How does one person do that?
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@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
Also, some of it's just good old fashioned complaining about the modern world.
I've no idea who the author is, these folk are everywhere and I don't have a clue who most of them are - if you look at his profile, he's written 2135 articles, and over 119,000 tweets.
How does one person do that?
The author is Mik's kinfolk...
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@jolly said in The Ruined Generation:
@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
Also, some of it's just good old fashioned complaining about the modern world.
I've no idea who the author is, these folk are everywhere and I don't have a clue who most of them are - if you look at his profile, he's written 2135 articles, and over 119,000 tweets.
How does one person do that?
The author is Mik's kinfolk...
- We should not count that against the author.
- Look at Mik’s post count on TNCR!
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@jolly said in The Ruined Generation:
@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
Also, some of it's just good old fashioned complaining about the modern world.
I've no idea who the author is, these folk are everywhere and I don't have a clue who most of them are - if you look at his profile, he's written 2135 articles, and over 119,000 tweets.
How does one person do that?
The author is Mik's kinfolk...
He's a good guy. I listen to his podcast sometimes. And I enjoyed his book, Outrage Machine or somesuch.
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@xenon said in The Ruined Generation:
There are a lot of negatives with social media. But the above is the tip of the ice berg.
The internet allows societies to organize themselves differently. The internet will change the definition of "nation"
Again - I say this often and it's kinda trite, but the internet is on the level of the printing press and we ain't seen nothing yet.
Just as the constitution gave the press a prominent place in the founding documents, the role of the internet requires similar thinking.
It won't do with just a Section, law or regulation.
Take your thought a bit further, the nation state as dominant withers away? And what about China suppressing access? And think about China as writing the algorithms that rule the internet.
It would be fun to jump ahead 30 years to see what happened.
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You lot are such a bunch of miserable old farts.
I'm actually quite optimistic for the future - something will turn up!
I don't hold with all this 'The young today are so terrible' routine. And if they are, (which they're not) we've got nobody to blame but ourselves.
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@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
You lot are such a bunch of miserable old farts.
I'm actually quite optimistic for the future - something will turn up!
I don't hold with all this 'The young today are so terrible' routine. And if they are, (which they're not) we've got nobody to blame but ourselves.
It's technology to the rescue, but it certainly is an unknown, compared to the rest of history. Fact: you are living through generational changes to the human experience happening at a faster pace than circa 99% of your ancestors.
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@horace said in The Ruined Generation:
@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
You lot are such a bunch of miserable old farts.
I'm actually quite optimistic for the future - something will turn up!
I don't hold with all this 'The young today are so terrible' routine. And if they are, (which they're not) we've got nobody to blame but ourselves.
It's technology to the rescue, but it certainly is an unknown, compared to the rest of history. Fact: you are living through generational changes to the human experience happening at a faster pace than circa 99% of your ancestors.
I know, it's really quite exciting! Obviously, Very Bad Things are possible, but despite my admittedly somewhat artificially manufactured online persona as the most miserable man on earth, great things are also possible!
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@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
You lot are such a bunch of miserable old farts.
I'm actually quite optimistic for the future - something will turn up!
I don't hold with all this 'The young today are so terrible' routine. And if they are, (which they're not) we've got nobody to blame but ourselves.
They are definitely not. They are whip-smart, fast as hell, problem solvers and much more open minded than prior generations. Sometimes to a fault, but that will work out over time.
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@mik said in The Ruined Generation:
@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
You lot are such a bunch of miserable old farts.
I'm actually quite optimistic for the future - something will turn up!
I don't hold with all this 'The young today are so terrible' routine. And if they are, (which they're not) we've got nobody to blame but ourselves.
They are definitely not. They are whip-smart, fast as hell, problem solvers and much more open minded than prior generations. Sometimes to a fault, but that will work out over time.
+1
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@jolly said in The Ruined Generation:
How we get out of this death spiral remains unknown, but the first step is to stop elevating those who impose it on us.
That's already happened. And it's the damn kids these days who are directly responsible.
Americans have always had a shorter tolerance for a particular kind of public bullshit, and you see it happening now with influencers and folks who are YouTube famous. The original formula of "look how exciting my life is" doesn't work anymore—you get mocked for promoting that kind of shit today. The only way to make it on those platforms today is to be yourself and to innovate.
And you can thank the lazy, selfish Millennials for that because not only do they spend an assload more time on these platforms than the writer of this article ever would, but they contribute much more to them, too.
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I made a promise when I was young that I would never start going on about how awful the young are when I got old. I'd never go on about how in my day we made our own entertainment, and how whatever it was that replaced TV isn't a patch on watching freaking Scooby Doo at 5 o'clock after we walked home from school in our underwear because we couldn't afford to catch the bus.
I'm not having it. When I was 15 I spent most of my available free time smoking behind the bush shelter, drinking hard cider on golf courses and generally being a little shit.
The people who spent their lives in church may have had different experiences. Bloody boring ones, most likely, which is why they're complaining now.
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@jolly said in The Ruined Generation:
Scroll through social media and you’ll be inundated with selfies and pictures of food. Did something really happen, did you really eat a meal if you didn’t tell the world about?
That's this guy's fault, entirely. His total ignorance of the very same shit he's pontificating about is why he sees selfies and pictures of food.
I follow about 1,500 accounts on Instagram. I never see selfies and pictures of food in my feed. Not even in the sponsored posts. That's because I don't use Instagram to keep in touch with friends or follow celebrities, I use it to get better with photography. Every account I follow is a photography account, from people who are at least as knowledgable as me or more so.
The algorithms only spit out what your actions show you want it to spit out, jackass. Curate your feed. If you don't want to see selfies and breakfast pictures, stop liking selfies and breakfast pictures and stop following accounts that post that shit. It's literally that easy.
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@aqua-letifer said in The Ruined Generation:
@jolly said in The Ruined Generation:
Scroll through social media and you’ll be inundated with selfies and pictures of food. Did something really happen, did you really eat a meal if you didn’t tell the world about?
That's this guy's fault, entirely. His total ignorance of the very same shit he's pontificating about is why he sees selfies and pictures of food.
I follow about 1,500 accounts on Instagram. I never see selfies and pictures of food in my feed. Not even in the sponsored posts. That's because I don't use Instagram to keep in touch with friends or follow celebrities, I use it to get better with photography. Every account I follow is a photography account, from people who are at least as knowledgable as me or more so.
The algorithms only spit out what your actions show you want it to spit out, jackass. Curate your feed. If you don't want to see selfies and breakfast pictures, stop liking selfies and breakfast pictures and stop following accounts that post that shit. It's literally that easy.
Yes.
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@doctor-phibes said in The Ruined Generation:
I made a promise when I was young that I would never start going on about how awful the young are when I got old. I'd never go on about how in my day we made our own entertainment, and how whatever it was that replaced TV isn't a patch on watching freaking Scooby Doo at 5 o'clock after we walked home from school in our underwear because we couldn't afford to catch the bus.
I'm not having it. When I was 15 I spent most of my available free time smoking behind the bush shelter, drinking hard cider on golf courses and generally being a little shit.
The people who spent their lives in church may have had different experiences. Bloody boring ones, most likely, which is why they're complaining now.
It's like were related or something. Scary actually. lol