Why Are You So Mad?

Everybody chill

[BONESAW 🕊️ @BonesawMD]

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.

– Napoleon

[27. @dimvji]

everything used to be 20 dollars and now that i finally have 20 dollars everything is now 200 dollars

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

“It says here in the history book that the good guys have won every single time.”

- Norm MacDonald

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm increasingly convinced that the ultimate sign of growth is faster recovery. You still get upset. You still make mistakes. You still have bad days. But you return to center faster.
Apologize faster. Reset faster. Learn faster. Fast recovery compounds.

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

"Favourable conditions never come.” –C.S. Lewis (1941)

[blue @bluewmist]

Honestly once you realize you're not in trouble all the time and really no one has power over you, the second half of life begins

[𝜗℘ @lacedli]

The kindest thing literature does is remind you that your peculiar little feelings have always existed. Someone, in some century, was equally confused by love, bored by society, tired of performing, and hungry for meaning.

[blue @bluewmist]

Ten lazy years can disappear the moment you lock in. Six months of discipline can erase a decade of drifting. Momentum is magic. It turns yesterday's failures into tomorrow's fuel.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I went to In-N-Out and ordered a cheeseburger. The cashier, a calm young woman named Destiny, asked me a question I did not expect.

"You want that Animal Style?"

I paused.

I did not know what this meant. But a samurai does not admit he does not know. So I answered with weight.

"...Animal Style."

"Cool. So that's mustard-grilled, extra spread, grilled onions, pickles. Yeah?"

I understood now. This was a sacred permission. For one meal, I was being told to put down my manners at the door. To eat the way a beast eats, without shame. I had waited my whole life for someone to give me this order.

"Yes," I said. "I will become the animal."

Destiny did not blink. "...Okay. You want your fries Animal Style too?"

I stopped. Even the potatoes?

"The potatoes also become animals?"

"I mean, they get cheese and sauce and grilled onions, so..."

"Then yes. Let the potatoes abandon their restraint as well."

"...Got it." She was the calmest woman I have ever met. "3x3, 4x4, or just the one?"

I did not know these numbers, but I knew a challenge when I heard one. "How many must I face?"

"It's, like, how many patties you want."

"How many is the most honorable?"

"...Four is a lot."

"Then four. A warrior does not ask for fewer."

She wrote it down without argument. A 4x4, Animal Style, with animal fries. She warned me once, kindly. "That's gonna be huge." I told her I was counting on it.

It arrived. It was a tower. Cheese and sauce ran down my hands the moment I lifted it. There was no clean way to eat it. There was no dignified way. That was the entire point.

I ate it like a beast. Both hands, no honor, grilled onion on my chin, and I have to be honest with you, it was the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.

For thirty years I have kept my manners at every table in the world.

They handed me a burger and told me to be an animal, and I have never felt so free.

So tell me, America.

The whole country knows the secret menu. What else are you hiding in plain sight?

And "Animal Style." Was I eating the animal, or finally becoming one?

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

The entire sneering apparatus of the modern temperament exists to prevent a man from admitting one pathetic, annihilating truth: that the blue sky is still beautiful, that cold water still tastes like a small free mercy, that being alive in this stupid, squalid, gorgeous wreck of a world is still the greatest unearned gift ever thrust upon any shivering, ungrateful creature

[blue @bluewmist]

i keep a document on my phone called "things that felt like the end of the world but weren't."

every time i'm spiraling i add to it. then i read the old ones.

"didn't get into first choice college" (met my best friend at second choice).

"thought i'd never get over them" (can barely remember their face now.

it's becoming proof that i can survive everything.

even this.

[. @Fimiye]

i wish there was a more intense way to express my emotions than crying. i want to burst into flames

[* @_lowkeyalfred]

There’s absolutely nothing more pleasing than watching yourself do the things you said you’d do. I really value honoring the promises I’ve made to myself.

[Mark Hyman, M.D. @drmarkhyman]

Laughter is anti-inflammatory. Crying is regulating. Hugging is immunoprotective. Singing is vagal toning. Dancing is neurogenic.

Joy is a biological necessity.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

The problem with universal suffrage is that the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the smaller the fraction of people there are in it with the native intelligence to understand how it works.

When the majority of humanity was employed in whacking at the dirt with a pointed stick, and the height of technology was a slightly better pointed stick, anyone with a triple digit IQ could understand what was going on.

Now, we have things like stock markets, the internet, transportation infrastructure, and the Linux kernel, but most people who vote are unable to conceive of these as anything but large piles of chocolate coins, or something else they can put their mouths.

Because that's how the average monkey interacts with money. They stack the blocks, the research assistant gives them a token, they exchange the token for a banana.

It's no good trying to explain to the monkeys what supply chain is, or how a trillion dollars worth of rockets can't magically be converted into a trillion dollars worth of bananas just because they're both measured in dollars, as if a six-foot man and a six-foot plank of wood were interchangeable.

Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn't really help.

Because the problem isn't just that the monkeys aren't paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys.

Their brains simply don't have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept.

In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don't.

You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions.

But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of "retard" changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what's really going on gets steadily higher and higher.

Eventually, the category "retard" grows until it includes the average person.

This has already happened.

Nick Knudsen isn't dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that's sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn't correctable, because the problem isn't ignorance, it's complexity.

You can't make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can't even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren't believable to someone who doesn't have the framework to understand how they fit together.

The people who understand what's going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn't even think they sound smart.

He thinks they sound crazy.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

The message of a protest is "we don't like this".

The message of a riot is "we don't like this, and we're able to do something about it".

People who unconditionally call for peace and calm, regardless of the provocation, don't fundamentally understand how politics works in the real world.

They do understand that the purpose of politics is to provide an alternative to violence, but that's as far as their understanding goes. They don't think through the implications, usually because they are quite comfortable with things as they are.

If politics is an alternative to violence, then politics is a proxy for violence.

And that means you have to dole out power in proportion to capacity for violence. Or someone's going to figure out they can do better by flipping the table.

Monarchy wasn't replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.

Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.

(Ancient Greek democracy had a similar relationship with the hoplite warrior.)

When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people's minds, and those who can't effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.

And they'll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.

This isn't some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either "the status quo works for me, so I don't want you to upset it", or "I suck at violence, and I don't want to have to fight".

They want young men demoralized, so that their artificial meritocracy of spreadsheets, or their non-meritocracy of patronage networks, can be protected from the natural meritocracy of conflict.

This means that riots aren't actually for achieving any specific material aim. They are for reminding the comfortable that judges and bureaucrats and policemen have home addresses and families. And that violence is always on the table.

A protest would only send the message that the Irish don't want to be ethnically cleansed. But the bureaucrats and judges and lawyers already know that. They just don't care.

A riot reminds them that they have to care, because the Irish have a long tradition of doing something about it.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.

Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.

The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain's way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism.

Because it isn't appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things.

This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold.

And my cat Dante's favorite joke is "I BITE your toes! ... but actually, I don't bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!"

Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I've never yet seen anything funny that couldn't be understood this way.

But there's a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don't interrupt defense mechanisms.

They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic.

This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it's a threat.

The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1949.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain.

The year is 1956.

Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over.

The year is 1966.

A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots.

The year is 1979.

Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005.

The year is 1985.

Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning.

The year is 1992.

There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with.

So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now.

Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one.

It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.

[Why Are You So Mad? @YouAllMakeMeSad]

@spencerpratt

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.