/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16150746]

what are some books that deal with the topic of the sudden rise in infantilism in modern society?

strictly non-self help please

[Anonymous No.16150755]

>NOOO, YOU CAN'T JUST MAKE ALLEGORYNOS, THAT'S CHILDISH AND STUPID AND BLUEPILLED

[Anonymous No.16150767]

>>16150755
fucking retard

[Anonymous No.16150774]

>>16150755
shut the fuck up

[Anonymous No.16150780]

>>16150755
kys

[Anonymous No.16150792]

>>16150755
Dumb cunt

[Anonymous No.16150797]

>>16150767
>>16150774
>>16150780
>>16150792
cope

[Anonymous No.16150802]

>>16150755
Dilate

[Anonymous No.16150809]

>>16150746
> USA = Gryffindor
Nigga, what?

[Anonymous No.16150818]

The key marketing demographic today is teenagers, which is unique historically. At no other time in history has a fourteen-year-old had so much money to spend, and so much power of what they purchase. Although "boomers" are still the wealthiest age bracket, they can only be tempted to buy so many novelty items while teenagers, who have no real grasp of the value of money, no real self-restraint on what or how much they buy, and are prone to the kind of peer pressure which insists they must keep up with those their age in terms of their cultural status signifiers etc, are more than happy to spend hundreds of dollars on video gaming chairs, various consumer technology, and whatever else is necessary to allow them to experience whatever phase, scene or fad they are currently trying out. Social media has allowed teenagers to form pressure groups and to demand that their "voices be heard", and marketeers are more than happy to co-opt this shallow ambition to change the world for the better by accommodating teenage parlance, promoting the kinds of fads teenagers promote (e.g., transsexuality) and also to present themselves in the public sphere as though the companies were themselves run by teenagers (e.g., social media profiles of multi-billion dollar corporations posting "YAAAS QUEEN SLAY" about a new pro-black musical album by Beyonce). Their success in capturing the teenage demographic then encourages newspapers and so on to adapt their own strategies, realising that world-weary boomers will one day no longer be around to buy physical newspapers about serious issues, and so instead write in such a way that the budding teenage readership will be encouraged to perceive that newspaper as being on-brand, etc. It is a disgusting state of affairs, that much is obvious. Add to this the cult of youth appealing to so many bored, vain boomers who fear old age and its telltale signs, and you get a culture wherein anything teenage-related isn't confined to the margins like rock & roll etc, and treated as a kind of rebellious fringe culture, but is treated as the mainstream itself. The fact is that your entire life could be ruined TOMORROW by an autistic, vegan, transgender 14-year-old living in the suburbs of Owensboro, Kentucky who for light entertainment has decided to find something offensive you posted online eight years ago and shared it with his 4,100 fur-friendly, mental health-advocating, communist, anti-TERF Twitter followers, and who has decided that you are the embodiment of evil in a world where people are either "good" or "bad, and lacks the maturity, intelligence and self-awareness necessary to understand the concepts of nuance, redemption, self-development and so on. There goes your job, your wife, your home, your hope of a future career, meanwhile Jaxon has switched back to Fortnite to spend another $100 of his father's alimony check on a new loot crate.

[Anonymous No.16150826]

David Foster Wallace is your best choice - His essays especially in “Consider The Lobster” reflect on modern infantilism as stemming from things such as shortened attention span to even the commercialisation of porn (Big Red Son). Well worth a read in examining the infantile behaviour of many (especially American) adults.

[Anonymous No.16150838]

>>16150826
consider what

[Anonymous No.16150848]

>>16150838
The Lobster

[Anonymous No.16150902]

Death of a common culture. Why do you think we've stopped building statues, stopped making comparisons to plays, no longer paint happenings in the light of old stories, no longer reference either the Greeks nor the Bible, etc.? The old common reference point is dead. Up to the 20th century you'd have statues and carvings with references to the ancient Greek gods. A common reference point means people can talk about things using what's commonly known, often stories.

With the death of this a new common reference has to be created, and it came in form of popular culture. There was really nothing else to grasp at. Given time, it will probably morph into something more "sophisticated".

[Anonymous No.16150906]

>>16150902
is that a book?

[Anonymous No.16150930]

>>16150906
No, it's an artwork from my favorite artist, Maximilian Liebenwein. I actually individually discovered a lot of different pieces from him that I liked a lot, before discovering they were made by the same person.

[Anonymous No.16150993]

>>16150818
Maybe back in 1962 or whatever gramps. We don't have any money.

[Anonymous No.16150994]

>>16150818
Pretty black pilled, but a very insightful post nonetheless. Too good for this board actually.

[Anonymous No.16151003]

>>16150906
>painting
>is that a book
Fucking retards are everywhere.

[Anonymous No.16151027]

>>16150818
You offer many perspicacious insights here but your essay deals more with the effects of fundamental causes rather than describing from where this current predicament could be seen to stem from.

[Anonymous No.16151032]

>>16150818
Good post. Thank you, anon.

[Anonymous No.16151056]

>>16151027
continuing:
I think Nassim Taleb's concept of minority rule, Douglas Murray's eloquent (although not originally his) allegory of the Western world as Icarus who survived his fall, Eric Weinstein's notion of Embedded Growth Obligations, and Mencius Moldbugs view of progressivism as entropy go a long way of explaining what is going on.

[Anonymous No.16151060]

>>16151003
I think he was referring to “Death of a common culture” not the picture

[Anonymous No.16151064]

>>16150993
Yours and his points aren't mutually exclusive.

[Anonymous No.16151067]

>>16150746
Toxic Culture and The Me Generation-squared!
>Tavistock Institute by D.Estulin

[Anonymous No.16151074]

>>16150994
We should encourage effort-posting rather than dispirit those who do.

[Anonymous No.16151082]

>>16150930
but is that a book recommendation?
>>16151003
the image did not even load for me until now.

[Anonymous No.16151101]

>>16150818
The entire board can be as good as this post as long as YOU (yes, you reading this) put in the effort to effortpost and to NEVER respond to trolls for ANY reason.

[Anonymous No.16151153]

>>16150746
Still waiting for proofs of this so called "infantilism in modern society" beyond the same rebranded moral panic of yore. Kids this days!

[Anonymous No.16151171]

>>16150902
Not because they are dead to the mainstream users does it mean that we cannot still lean and find answers on them. They provide me with so much comfort

[Anonymous No.16151179]

>>16150826
>(Big Red Son
Thanks for the recommendation bro , that actually sounds really interesting .

[Anonymous No.16151214]

Going to have to agree with this guy >>16151153

Every generation creates its own culture, albeit seemingly around the same desires and anxieties as the last, and just as dependent on the market of the day.

Animation movies have jokes that only the parents can get, and kids books have always had adult themes. Critics have always panned the immature, but that is where the generation goes because it is new and theirs.

It is no more or less appropriate to reference Tom Sawyer than it is to reference to reference a popular movie.

[Anonymous No.16151230]

>>16150818
I disagree with the sentiment behind this effortpost but well put nonetheless

[Anonymous No.16151264]

>>16151064
Yes it is. He states that marketing to teenagers is historically unique. It’s not

[Anonymous No.16151353]

>>16150818
Aw Shit!

[Anonymous No.16151372]

>>16151101
You’re an idiot, lol
The post is just long. Corporations have been marketing to teenagers for decades it’s not a new phenomena. The argument is also way too inclusive; wtf do consumer goods sold in grocery stores (not consooomer goods, I mean like P&G shit) want with teenagers?

[Anonymous No.16151528]

>>16150746
Actual answer, this book basically deals with exactly the problem you describe. It was surprisingly prescient.

[Anonymous No.16151539]

>>16151372
you're nitpicking. the argument wasn't that bad..

[Anonymous No.16151548]

>>16151528
Oh, man I was just looking at this, I wish it had come out more recently than 2008.

[Anonymous No.16151554]

>>16150755

You deserve the oven

[Anonymous No.16151557]

>>16151528
>>16151548
The salt from gamers in the goodreads reviews is very amusing.

[Anonymous No.16151561]

>>16151539
It’s not that bad, but it doesn’t justify the “if we all pitch in and longpost just like this we can make this a trending subreddit!” gushing.
Really, I just think he’s netting immature millenials in with his descriptions of teenagers which pretty much brings us back where we started because it doesn’t explain why it’s lucrative to treat a 30 year old like a 16 year old

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.16151580]

>>16150746
Simon Pegg’s A Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses

It wasn’t sudden. The layers have been forming since the rise of capitalist commercialism

[Anonymous No.16151584]

>>16151554
>>>/pol/

[Anonymous No.16151613]

The dudes who play games now would have been arranging tin soldiers back then if middle class, and losing their money on gambling and drink if working class and upper class.
I think video games have led to the decline of knowledge of card games but not much more desu. They only really mirror the expansion of socially redundant men in exhausted societies with stagnent growth. But that's the fault of exhausted societies with statement growth.
The people who collect beetles are still out there, they've just decided to collect information. It's called Wikipedia. That's where those people have ended up today.

Growth in efficiency leading to less work, exporting of work leading to less work, lack of expansion into 'terra nova' in ways which open up new work whether industrially at home or very literally abroad. Less opportunies requiring mass participation and thus a base level of respect from society.
Look at any developed country and you're gonna see a redundant group of men at the bottom and the top. Japan, China, SK, UK, USA. Indeed look at many developing countries and you're gonna see similar groups although I'm not gonna pontificate on them but you get similar time wasting. If you take Black dudes today playing 2K, a generation or two ago they were playing dominoes. White dudes, FIFA and the pub. I think the only real difference is that they do this at home now rather than in pubs, clubs, cafes, and bars, so their wives and mothers are aware of it more first hand so it's more shameful.
Out of sight, out of mind, bring back gaming cafes and LAN parties. Let the women in their life at least pretend they're looking for work that isn't out there.

[Anonymous No.16152127]

>>16150746
>>16150746
If you can distill infantialism to sentimentalism (which i think you can- the former is essentially a version or manifestation of the latter) civilisation has been moving from intellectualism to sentimentalism (generally trending at least towards more sentimentalism) for millenia. Read Guenon- I shit you not.

[Anonymous No.16152141]

>>16150746
The stupid Keanu Reeves general post kills me every time I read it

[Anonymous No.16152352]

The problem comes from the lack of natural transition from school years to adult life. In first world countries, you grow up in a protected environment and then one day, you are suddenly tossed out to make reason of the surrounding world. By default you cling to the things that gave you comfort for so long, escaping from facing the realities of adult life.

[Anonymous No.16152380]

>>16151372
>>16151561
Advertisers have always known (certainly since the 1920s) that women are the key consumers within the household, and that something like seventy-five percent of consumer decisions made within the household are made by women. The sentimental, enthusiastic, emotion-inducing kind of adverts were always made to appeal to women, and that is an historical fact documented in numerous mainstream books about advertising. This becomes confused somewhat in the age of the internet as there is no real such thing online as man or woman, there is simply an IP address and its shopping patterns, both of which are targets for exploitation regardless of age. Obviously advertisers and cultural puppeteers understand demographics and who their consumer base is, which is why producing an advert about leisurewear in 1956 wherein most of the young actors were of african heritage would have confused audiences back then, but today although the overall population is still overwhelmingly white, the youth demographic in many countries (US, UK, Canada etc) is anywhere from thirty percent "non-white" and so it makes sense to have overwhelmingly "non-white" actors in advertisements, both to meet the tacitly accepted diversity quotas and to appeal to budding audiences who future tastes and biases (e.g., "I've always been a Nike kind of guy") are being formed as we speak.

The notion of a "teenager", if my memory serves me correctly, did not exist as an ontological term and demographic bracket until something like the 1950s, as before then people tended to work from an earlier age but were poorer and still treated as the subservient figure within their family unit, and thus their purchasing power was diminished. The 1950s gave rise to "teenage culture", which was in short a period of proposed self-discovery, extended leisure, experimentation, rebelliousness, and self-expression, but even that stereotype was largely reserved to the established middle-class of the US (e.g., Rebel Without a Cause), as the grip of religion, the family unit, and a more locally-focused community and its own pressures to respect ones elders etc were still strong. But still, people were quite poor on the whole (from a European perspective, so Americans may have been far wealthier on average), and consumer objects were still rather limited. A teenager could save up to buy a new LP or something like that, but recreational travel abroad, technological items, and so on were still a rare luxury, and a family unit (despite its inherent flaws, such as alcoholic domineering fathers, etc) meant that money was more likely to be pooled together for the sake of the family rather than any of its members individually. This explains the relative success of some newly-arrived immigrant groups in the UK for example (e.g., the Sikhs) who tend to operate as family units, often living in multi-generational households and pooling their money to acquire new houses which they then rent out and so on.

[Anonymous No.16152398]

>>16150755
Absolutely unequivocally based.

[Anonymous No.16152433]

In an era when fifty percent of marriages ended in divorce, the idea of a stable family unit which replicates itself with each new generation is an ideal of a bygone period. The issue of atomisation begins in the home, and without the traditional virtues of the husband / father (self-restraint, identifying value and hardiness in new products, discipline) and the wife / mother (practical handiwork, planning of provisions, selfless attention to younger kin) a child today is far more likely to seek a paternal and / or maternal influence in the culture external to its home, and the shortest route to doing so involves celebrity worship, treating savve younger Youtube marketeers as older siblings (e.g., make-up tutorials by a twenty-something marketeer who refers to her followers as "sisters"), and seeking father figures in the likes of Jordan Peterson and so on who, for all their value, still have an obvious desire to make a lot of money (books, self-authoring programmes, lectures, one-on-one consultations, novelty rugs, etc). This is not always a bad thing, as not all parental influence is beneficial, but taking the time to guide and nurture a son or daughter is likely more beneficial than allowing them easy access to the money you make in an economy which no longer exists in such a way as to allow them to easily replicate that kind of wealth as they themselves grow older. Without any thought of the morrow, and no internalised restraint in mind to encourage them otherwise, the teenager today simply expresses themselves without any real thought of consequence or cost, and the culture at large, rather than serving as some kind of boring, vaguely antagonistic monolith, like the embodiment of a pair of well-meaning parents, instead caters to them and offers nothing which might one day really nourish them and encourage self-improvement in them. Society and culture rather treats these young people, drunk on leisure and still very wealthy historically speaking, the way a sinister salesman would treat a naive older lady who has wandered into his shop: by adapting their speech patterns in order to impress the victim (who then assumes both that the marketeers is like them, and that they themselves must be rather eloquent talking the way they do), by spending countless millions on advertising designed to appeal to the selfish side of their character (rather than the benefit to their household etc - the closest thing to empathy here is Mark Fisher's discussion of the iPod which was sold as a means of combating AIDs "or whatever"), by promising a great deal even if the object is absolutely superfluous to their needs, by not taking into consideration their age and the effect this may have on their ability to form rational judgements, and so on. Today, a teenager is an atomised unit of consumption, and can be targeted directly and persistently online via cookies, tailored ads, suggestion-led pressure advertising ("people who bought this also bought..."), and worst

[Anonymous No.16152574]

>>16150755
Literally, unironically this.

[Anonymous No.16152587]

>>16150930
Why would a mermaid wear a wreath, crown, or necklace? They'd come off when the mermaids go diving.

[Anonymous No.16152605]

>>16151584
kys american

[Anonymous No.16152714]

>>16150818
old people have all the money KEK

[I No.16152825]

>>16150746
none I guess. such book must be written by a warrior who is one on one against universe, and western men are all cucks.