/lit/ - Literature

>>9315570
Yeah. Like a Mexican standoff. Maybe with some of the participants pointing the guns at their own heads as well.

Ther's all this guilt, all this shame, all this fear. Maybe it's the horror of history or the sheer dread of the future or the overwhelming amount of information we suddenly have about how atrociously unforgiving nature is and the sheer magnitude of world debt and so on. Maybe all of it. Maybe it's people just realizing that infinite ice cream can't fill the existential stuff that's missing for peace, order, happiness, those old cliches - and those can't be crowbarred back into existence no matter what Bannon thinks.

If you talk to Boomers they really believed that by the year 2000 we would be living in a Jetsons universe and things would just be wonderful. We're dealing with the fallout from a lot of naiveté that things would just get better. Because they were so good after the war (well, for some...not for everyone...) They really believed it. People today, and coming, are going to be the ones who have to deal with a much less sunny possibility horizon, I can't blame anyone for feeling angry or fucked-out about it. I'm resigned to it too.

>There are people who derogate the idea of getting triggered in lockstep with an aim to discredit and ridicule the ordered and productive process of criticism, accountability, and response recently seen here. But as anyone who can appreciate the utility of that process can agree, extending basic courtesy to other participants in a discussion isn't a censure on the marketplace of ideas, but an affirmation of it. In the other direction lies demagoguery and political echo chambers.

Yep. That's *completely* it. Echo chambers. What's rare to find is...empathy, courtesy, all this. Manners are patrician! Chivalry is a good look, and it's not supposed to offend anyone, it might just be a thing that *men feel the need to do...* Maybe we learned this trick form the French, that the person who cares the least in an argument always has the higher hand...but the loser in the end is the argument itself.

Too much ugliness, too much cynicism. You can hear in people's voices, you can see it in their faces, the self-loathing of *people who have everything and don't know what to do with it.* It happens. People feel guilty about their success...

The stakes just seem so high. Maybe they are. But it's not making a very robust kind of individual who is capable of dealing with adversity, hardship, disappointment, with not getting what one wants. And maybe there's a kind of nihilism underneath it that says, if I can't get what I want, then life has no meaning or purpose, it's all worthless...

And then you put social media into the mix and give everyone a personal and private echo chamber, like Facebook, that touches on a million other echo chambers, and eventually that comes to feel more real than the real thing...

Anyways, all this to say I agree.