Nothing gives me worse second hand embarrassment than a man openly staring me up and down while his girlfriend/wife is standing right there. For MINUTES. I die a little for her. I put my head down avoiding eye contact. She knows. I know she knows. She knows I know. Now we’re both trapped in this humiliating little social triangle neither of us wanted while he remains blissfully unaware that he’s embarrassing her. Why does this happen so often.
Tattoo removal is about to become a massive industry. Gen Z has rejected post-modernism and they are absolutely mogging older generations.
This is the first summer in over a decade where almost every young girl I’ve seen in a bikini is completely natural.
No tattoos
No dyed hair
No septum rings
No heavy makeup
The little acts of transgression against the natural form have all been done to death, the bodies have been destroyed.
The creativity going forward will be to look healthy, natural, and fertile.
creativity is dead because art for the last century has been exclusively deconstructive and transgressive. What made you feel something was precisely because it zag'd while society was zig'd; while society was ordered, proper, and repressive, it was chaotic, grunge, and expressive. But the trouble is that after a century of this, there is nothing left to zag against. There is simply no cultural core for us to deconstruct anymore, such that all attempts to do what we used to do always fall flat.
To analogize this, consider cocaine. Doing cocaine is fun precisely because it is in moderation. You have a life, you have friends, you have health, you have money, etc. So you can go flood your brain with dopamine for a night, have a blast, spend the next day recovering, and return to your life with a net positive experience.
However if you do cocaine all day every day for a decade, this is no longer true. You no longer have friends, because you've abandoned or destroyed your relationships in pursuit of more cocaine. You no longer have money because you stopped going to work to get high. You no longer have health, etc. The more you do the drug, the less fun it is. The more it just becomes the only thing that keeps you feeling well enough to not kill yourself.
Art for the last century has basically been blowing lines of deconstructing the the cultural core with built the west (Christianity, mostly) and we all participated in it because it felt like good to be naughty and "sin". But now, in retrospect, predictively, we are all "addicted to cocaine" with "no dopamine or money or health left to sustain the addiction".
The return to older movies, music, games, etc is an attempt to relive this era of "feeling something"; to imagine we live in a world of repression whose chains we are shirking. As far as I've seen, it doesn't actually work thought. It's more about the thought of what we remember these old things to be, reminiscing on the feelings they gave us back when they meant something (or imagining what is was like, far more romantic than it actually was) rather than genuinely meaning something to us today. This might work for a bit. But its effect is temporary.
The art of the 21st century that will finally matter, that will finally make us feel something, will be that which does the opposite of what we have done for the last century. It will not transgress for transgressions sake, nor even pursue the dopamine high at all. It will be something more constructive, more peaceful, more eternal. It will make you feel something not as a means of experiencing something new and exciting but as a means of recovering something we have lost and are recovering. What exactly it looks like beyond that, I am not yet sure.
@swipehound Yeah man. Very true. This is the kind of girl you can text:
3P?
And she’ll respond with:
I have a friend when?
Not necessarily the healthiest idea though. Proceed with caution.
@swipehound This girl was 20, religious, and breaking bad. We hooked up a few more times. The things she confided she had been doing in between with other guys makes Lana Rhoades look innocent. It is what it is.