Around 1,950 years ago in Pompeii, a weaver named Successus fell in love with a barmaid named Iris.
She did not love him back.
We know this because his rival, a man named Severus, decided to humiliate him publicly. He grabbed something sharp and carved this into a wall for the whole city to read:
"Successus the weaver loves the innkeeper's slave girl named Iris. She does not care about him at all. But he begs her to have pity on him. His rival wrote this. Goodbye."
Imagine walking to work and seeing that with your name on it.
Successus found it. And instead of letting it go, he carved his reply directly underneath:
"Envious one, why do you get in the way? Yield to a man who is better looking and being treated very unfairly."
Severus came back one more time to end it:
"I have spoken. I have written. You love Iris, but she does not love you."
Then, in 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and buried the wall, the tavern, and the entire argument under 20 feet of ash. The thread was frozen mid-beef for almost two millennia until archaeologists dug it up and translated it.
We will never know who got the girl. We do not even know if any of the three survived.
Pompeii has over 11,000 of these inscriptions. Bar reviews. Bragging. Bad poetry. A bakery wall that says "Welcome, hungry people." Two guys fighting over a girl in the comments.
The technology changes. We do not.
Even with something like Crohn’s, it’s a mindtrip to achieve remission when so much of your attention been focused on your disease.
Your identity is a trap.
It is so, so fascinating to me how GLP-1s are colliding with something that, for lack of a better term, I'll call 'fat identity'.
It's one thing to argue that fat people shouldn't be discriminated against. But a lot of fat people seem to have constructed an entire identity out of being fat. They took the moralizing lectures they faced from others and turned it around into moralizing about bigotry, with a new label of fatphobia. It's treated similarly to gender or race bigotry. And while there are surely a lot of people being jerks to the obese, a lot of fatphobia sure looks like "my doctor told me I should lose weight" from the outside.
People seem to have forgotten that while nobody should be a jerk to fat people for no reason, being fat is in fact a medical issue. It is, in an objective sense, a problem to be fixed.
Now we have a drug that (erasing some nuance) just solves the problem. And there are instances of fat-identity influencers basically shamed by their communities/fans for losing weight. People lose the weight but still somehow cling to the idea that parts of the process were fatphobic. It feels like watching identity deconstruction in real time.
It makes me wonder - are there similar cultural recriminations for deaf people who get cochlear implants? If we developed a pill to cure blindness, would some blind people still cling to blind identity, or call a doctor bigoted for suggesting the pill?
I got to thinking about “civic marriages” and how unprecedented it is. A marriage has always needed to take place before some sort of cleric; Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Hebrew, etc., the Church, the Mosque…
But in the Liberal Age one can skip that and go before the state… but maybe one isn’t really skipping the clergy after all. Maybe there are no ‘secular’ marriages.