This is what happens when we as a society center our education and work around the core values of productivity and performance, rather than coherence and vitality. If we taught humans how to "know thyself" and then how to be true to thine own self (have integrity), we'd have more sovereign humans giving expression and taking action as only they can. Thus, a wider field of possibilities and opportunity for new connections to be made between all our parts, which is what drives innovation.
Love that I'm finding more and more people exploring the harm in overly-patterned ways of being.
You might look at how Yale Prof Laurie Santos has turned her course on Happiness into something of a phenomenon over here. I'd sign up for yours if it were in English.
I see us as a society weighted down by anxiety and depression, the patterns a reaction to license rather than the cause of creative paralysis. We seem to me to be hanging on by fingernails to an edge over the abyss. Desperation does not foster creativity. We are in a death spiral imo.
The core values of productivity and work are long gone.
Hi Ann 👋🏻, I agree that desperation rarely creates the space for creativity to flow. However, what I have recognized is that it often creates the space for us to come crashing down or pause, and I see purpose in both those things:
1. The fall from grace and pause can provide a change in perspective that reorients us to what truly matters
2. They can also lead to our bodies resting long enough to signal safety so any disassociated or abandoned parts of our self can come back online and be reintegrated
I don't agree that problematic behavioral patterns stem from agency. Rather, I believe they arise when we PERFORM agency without honest connection to our own inner truth and authority.
Everyone has an internal guidance system made up of signals from our body, our feelings, and our thoughts. These help us identify what we want and what's “right” for us.
Stress makes that inner guide harder to decipher. When you’re overwhelmed, worried, tired, or trying too hard to keep others happy: the smart, decision-making part of your brain gets weaker, your body's signals get harder to feel, and your emotions feel more confusing. So your inner guidance works less coherently.
When you can’t hear yourself, you start copying others to feel safe. This creates habits or patterned ways of being that don’t feel like you, like people-pleasing, overworking, or numbing out to avoid problems.
The good news is that our inner guidance systems can be restored. They get stronger again when we rest, calm our bodies, and listen to and honor our own signals.
I know this because I've lived through it, and I've taken the time to learn from others and begin a practice or new way of BEing founded upon my inner coherence and vitality.
I think we are addressing two different problems, you the personal, I the societal.
I agree as to potential remedies that come from the crash or the pause. I just wish the collective were as amenable to healing as the willing individual.
The collective is made up of individuals, is it not? Heal the person > heal the family > heal the larger community. We can't control the group, but we can play our individual parts well. 🙂🫶🏻
I think the answer to the alleged lack of deviancy has to do with the fact that people can now channel their rebellious/anti-social impulses into activities that are political or, at the very least, adjacent to politics. Think of incels: they are quintessential weirdos who have just enough political cover (in the manosphere) to keep from being paid to serve as props in freak shows. Similarly, many of the high school kids I’ve taught who seemed alienated in the old Holden Caufield way expressed their social discomfiture by taking on performative persona (beliefs, identities, etc.) drawn largely from discourses and trends with deeply politicized roots. This tendency to politicize “weirdness” isn’t all bad, of course, but it does transmogrify weirdness into something less individualized and more contentious.
Hi David 👋🏻, when I propose that we might experience more innovation if we built our education and work upon the values of individual coherence and vitality, I'm not using estrangement and isolation as measurements for integrity of character and inner authority. I don't think weirdness equals inner coherence. Likewise, I don't think inner coherence leads to isolation.
The human body is a network designed to connect with other networks.
When your internal systems communicate clearly, your external communication becomes synchronous too. Other people’s bodies can read you, so you become part of the larger system again.
When your signals are fragmented internally (incoherent), your social cues become disorganized externally, and other people's bodies pull away. It creates isolation even when you want connection.
Ultimately, the problem is a feminized society. One ruled by HR cat-lady Karens that will see one drunken post on Facebook you made 10 years ago. You're unemployable because you slightly deviated from the mold. The inevitable result of hyper-egalitarianist policies: everyone is rendered the same with the exception of an oligarchic upper class.
I think a lot of why society feels less weird now starts in school, where free thinking and individual uniqueness are often discouraged instead of nurtured. Conformity is rewarded because it’s easier to produce compliant workers than curious innovators.
People who don’t fit the mold - the weird, the sensitive, the creative - are often bullied or punished for being different. Over time, that pressure doesn’t just silence individuality; it damages mental health. When being yourself costs you safety or belonging, survival mode takes over.
That mindset is also reinforced by corporations whose priority is profit and shareholder value. Uniformity is safer and more marketable, so everything - from homes to cars to trends - starts to look the same. What’s sold as “normal” becomes almost religiously upheld, even when it flattens creativity, spirit, and innovation.
But there are outliers. People who realize that weird isn’t a flaw - it’s beautiful, playful, and necessary. That curiosity, color, and joy are exactly what the world needs, whether society has caught on yet or not.
Weird never disappears. Some of us just choose to protect it, live it, and let it shine. Progress has always belonged to the weird ones first.
Weird didn’t die - it went underground. And it’s always been the underground that moves the world.
Your analysis is need of revision, namely we were a society centered upon education and core that which you have stated, essentially those evolving fro merit. Over the past four or five decades the educational emphasis has been the hollow mantra of “know they self” or “be there now” advice of guru Rama Dasdand still persist today. As such your thesis is wanting for its distorted line. You need to appreciate the past without judgement, so as to begin a realistic assessment of the present, and future. Warmest regards.
Your statement worries me. It feels like a prelude to accepting authoritarian leadership. (I'm not all thinking that was your intention.) My first thought as a counter to teach creativity.
Not all leadership is authoritarian. There are many degrees, more or less appropriate to a situation. Most effective leadership involves persuasion through argument, suggestion, or example rather than coercion, though government isn't shy of force when it is threatened. Imo all groups need leaders or they devolve into chaos. The larger and more complex the group, the larger and more complex the resultant hierarchy.
I see a true creative as inhabitant of his own inner world. Most people are not true creatives imo.
Totally. This is one of the most destructive impulses lurking within us. The destructive impulse to curb all possibility of destruction.
We need some unknown degree of hardship and tragedy to stay interesting, determined, innovative, spiritually alive. And there’s no indication that anyone knows where this line is, nor that we won’t readily cross it with some technological witches brew. This is what the dream of magic has been about all along.
Don,t know about boredom, but manageable pain fear discomfort struggle are the non-negotiable human lot. The trouble starts when they become life's definition.
Maybe.. maybe not… there’s a kind of intuitiveness about this answer that feels easy enough to make me suspicious of it. (But maybe that’s too contrarian)
In critical theory and cultural studies, cultural stagnation is well-tread territory, so much so that the "cultural stagnation" discourse has itself become stagnant. We've been talking about the decline of weirdness and our culture's failure to do anything but remix the past for so long that I'm afraid we're proving our own point on a meta-level.
In terms of a diagnosis, I think the "slow life" hypothesis is equivocating. The sort of weirdness/deviance addressed in this piece rarely takes the form of truly risky behavior. I agree that more people are invested in long-term security (especially in the form of financial security and physical health) for themselves and their loved ones than ever before, but I don't think this accounts for the foreclosure of the weird and deviant to any significant degree.
I'd point to technological homogenization: a society that turns virtually all phenomena into discrete, fungible, standardized data so as it make it more functionally manageable (i.e. capable of bearing profits) is a society that conditions people away from true weirdness. This is why I wouldn't use data to try to prove that weirdness is in decline. First off, there are too many variables to consider (my perpetual gripe with the social sciences — it tells stories that validate our intuitions by making complex stuff seem simpler than it is), but more importantly, it operates under the same assumption that's killing weirdness in the first place: that there is an objective ideal (of knowledge, design, art, behavior, etc.) to strive for and quantification is the way there.
I lived in a repressive era. It did produce from us some excellent weirdness as we rebelled. But it didn't tolerate it at all except to beat us up and arrest us for any slight deviation from the norm no matter how harmless.
It's higher risk to go wild these days because it can be recorded, uploaded and haunt you forever. Back in the 90s we could humiliate ourselves at a party then deny the rumours, leaving only a mystique of uncertainty. Once people can see the actual video of you dancing on a table with your underpants on your head, or whatever, mystique gone.
In general, transgressions are more easily searchable and weaponized. Kids are careful.
Agree! People argue it’s “the phones” that make kids anxious and depressed but I’d argue the most harm from phones is not so much the content/apps but the experience of living under surveillance 24/7. Parents track their kids’ every move and never give them a chance to rebel in little, even harmless, ways and take chances sneaking around. Businesses, schools and public areas have security cameras everywhere. And as you said, at any moment someone can pull out a phone and record you, ridicule you, turn you into a meme or worse, get you doxxed. I think constant surveillance has dramatically changed the experience of youth. The fact that at any given moment a parent knows not just if their kid is at school but what classroom they’re in is a brand new concept. (And yes, I know…school shootings etc but I’m just saying there’s a definite psychological effect of this on the surveilled.)
do you have any good sources / links / pieces I can read about this? I'm interested and curious to learn more about what others have said. thinking about writing something on it myself
As a social historian, the argument that we care a lot more about being alive, and therefore prefer to invest in the longer term, have better-controlled lives, and take fewer risks sounds plausible to me. My last book, The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, was about how early pregnancy loss went from being an accepted and mostly unremarked part of childbearing to an experience that many find devastating (and that advice-givers have increasingly presumed to be inherently psychologically devastating), because it has become typical for people to become attached to even very early pregnancies. In the book I point out that some people are afraid to try for another pregnancy because of how upsetting a miscarriage was. About 20% of confirmed pregnancies end in loss, mostly in the first trimester, so this is not a minor issue. I describe how the historical setup for this change in experience of pregnancy was centuries in the making, with the long term growth in expectations of personal control over fertility and child survival and the shift from extensive childbearing to intensive parenting. But the marked change in attitudes about early pregnancy happened on the same timeline you identify, starting in the late 1960s and really solidifying in the 1980s. On the other hand, certain kinds of individualism and nonconformity (especially LGBTQ) have increased (perhaps like baby names?). It would be interesting to consider what produces risk-avoidance that results in conformity, and what produces individualism. Those both seem like they could come out of affluence and predictable longevity.
Super interesting. I've long wondered about this: when you could expect half of your children to die before they hit puberty, what did it feel like to lose a child?
That's a complicated question, and historians have a range of opinions. We have many early modern sources from affluent mothers (who were the literate ones and therefore produced most of the sources) describing the kind of grief we would very much recognize when their toddlers died. Though in discussing this with a psychiatrist who specializes in childbearing issues, she said to me that it could not have been quite like it is today, because in her view, the way it impacts parents now would have led to society-wide meltdown if it happened to a large proportion of families. It's possible the real difference, though, was not in level of grief, but that religion provided a near-universal coping mechanism and people saw models of how to manage grief all around them all the time. (So in that theory, the religion would make the experience "feel different," but would shape a bio-psych grief response that's universal.) I do think that stillbirth impacted people differently. I think that because childbirth was much more dangerous, women were focused on their own mortality until after birth. Letters and diaries about stillbirth are typically much more measured than those about toddler deaths. And we have examples of the same woman describing acceptance after stillbirth but profound grief after the death of a toddler or older child. Poor people tend to make it into the historical record when they have broken laws or otherwise attracted attention from authorities, which means the historical record makes them look like more neglectful/abusive parents. There many in fact have been more issues because more people were impoverished and had a baby every few years whether or not they could afford it, but it would probably be a mistake to invoke those cases to represent the gestalt of a time. Still, there were many more "unwanted" children before birth control became a common practice, and I would not be surprised if more people were fatalistic about infant death. It's hard to find direct rather than circumstantial evidence, though, from people who did not leave written records.
Don"t you suppose the large families of the past absorbed the loss of a child or two more easily? Rural cultures especially seemed to understand the natural cycle as, well, natural. Life-death-regeneration, the rise and fall of the sun and moon, planting and harvest, all as natural as wringing your chicken's neck for dinner.
Images of life as a series of stages representing an uphill climb and a downhill diminishment were common (e.g. https://ihcatalog.librarycompany.org/life-age-of-man-stages-of-mans-life-from-the-cradle-to-the-grave-clayton-lewis/). But children dying was life cut short, not a natural cycle of growth and decay. And people didn't write about losing children as a "natural" thing. They wrote in religious terms about the faith and effort it took to accept God's will. I do think there was more sense that the birth of another child was consolation, compared to today, though.
For what is worth (sample size of one): my grandfather was one of fourteen siblings, rural Italian Catholic family. He lost two siblings as toddlers and his own mother at 4 (sepsis from tooth extraction…now that’s something the MAHA crowd wouldn’t like to remember).
Always talked about it as God’s will, but with huge sadness.
And on his deathbed, he beamed when he “saw” his Mamma coming to meet him. So yes, religion helped.
Normal is a much better way to describe it. There are old cemeteries here with "Loving Wife and Mother" surrounded by little stones, a hen and her chicks. Also lots of "Christian Sufferers."
It's easier for modern people to forget that life's invariables are change, chance, and loss.
Life cut short from disease and accident was omnipresent, crops destroyed from aberrant weather and pests. I grew up watching the faces of farmers faced with natural ruin.
Yes. One of the main themes of my book is the dramatic change from a culture that was much more fatalistic to a culture informed by the Enlightenment, with a more stronger sense that both societies and individuals ought to be able to control the natural world and control personal outcomes through reason and effort.
I suspect the large families were primarily rural protestant and too busy (and possibly unlettered) to leave written accounts of their lives. Rural faith communities were extraordinarily tight and likely provided more solace than theology. Has any work been done with family letters from the rural population?
Thank you for such interesting comments! Great topic!
Large families were typical across lines of class and location until the 19th century. And most of the population was rural. As you are pointing out, it's really hard to "hear" the voices of people who did not leave letters and diaries. I agree that faith communities were important for emotional support. Ministers interpreted child death through the lens of God's will rather than the "natural," which is likely to have informed how congregants understood it. But I think you are pointing to a couple of other things, possibly: first, while it might not have been described as "natural," child death was "normal" in the sense that most families went through it. So it was familiar, and by necessity accepted as part of life. And second, at a time with no reliable birth control and little in the way of a safety net, the loss of a child might relieve economic pressure. There have been documented times and places with customs of selective infant neglect, where economic pressure was high and birth control lacking. I don't think this was common in early America, though there were occasional arrests for infanticide by single mothers.
“Even if someone was crazy enough to pull a di Modica today, who could? The art school would force you to return home to your parents, the real estate would be unaffordable, the city would shut you down.” This!! Everything is optimised, everything is regulated, everything is under surveillance. It feels like there are very few, almost none true nooks and crannies left in the world.
I feel this is missing a key point, the rise of algorithmic feeds, which direct and evolve culture in the digital age like a universal natural selection force, generally towards homogeneity because mimetics or something
I noticed a change with television. It invented a common reality. I wouldn't be surprised if it coincided over time with our failing national imagination. It seems hard to believe, but tv in the old days amounted to everyone watching the same programming on 3 network channels. Reality mediated by screens and mechanical sound started after WW2, and television was as addictive as any other screen. It babysat small children with attractive nonsense, it invaded the classroom with humorless instruction, it mesmerized families with hours of homogenized "prime time."
There's also the fact that we have normalized all deviance -- a lot of great artists were gay, for example, like Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol, but now being gay is getting married and paying a surrogate and having a second home in Provincetown. Add to that cancel culture which polices true deviance. "When a true genius appears in the world you will know him by this sign - that the dunces have all formed a confederacy against him," etc. The dunces are stronger now.
Agreed––I had a whole section on this that I think needs a standalone post to really flesh out. Lifestyles that used to be marginalized have since been mainstreamed, which is mainly a good thing. No one *wants* to be marginalized, even if it makes it easier to entertain interesting thoughts.
I think we've mainstreamed *mild* deviance which defangs stronger forms. So yeah, be gay as you like but as long as you're also a normal consumer. But gay like, say, Genesis P. Orridge ? When you work in accounting?Heck no.
I think you're touching on the fact that at lot of "demarginalizing" is merely a way of broadening marketing and sales while virtue signaling acceptance.
I think there is a valuable distinction to be made and maintained between weird/crazy/destructive and weird/eccentric/interesting. That distinction seems lost on us.
But you don't think social media has anything to do with demarginalizing? Or that cancel culture has a Stasi-like presence in our lives that has actually lead to job loss and other real consequences that everyone would rather avoid by maintaining the new status quo, such as it is, and hide their real thoughts and ideas?
Saying things your community finds distasteful could always lead to job loss. Saying you hate Italians on Twitter or yelling it in town square are functionally the same. The only difference is people understand the latter could have consequences.
Are you suggesting that it's okay to prevent people from working for exercising their right to free speech online? Your examples are not equivalent, actually. There are abundant differences between yelling something in a town hall, which is ephemeral, and saying something once on Twitter ten years ago and constantly being reminded of it, often out of context, by trolls who mean to hurt you for their own gain or to regulate their own emotional instability. It's funny you bring up Italians. They have a law in Italy called "the right to be forgotten" which means that past mistakes should not forever haunt someone or be made public. It's a good law. Also, I'm Italian and I rarely find that there are consequences for bigoted speech against Italians. Cuomo pointed this out not too long ago when he was basically accused of having Mafia ties. There's also the fact that people online are not necessarily "from your community." Nor are the ideas that get people canceled necessarily wrong or bad or hateful, even if certain groups try to frame them that way. Like I said, it's creating a Stasi-like fear (job loss for expressing non-status quo ideas), and people like you, who seem to agree with the Stasi, not with the free-thinking public, are dangerous. And are no doubt one of the causes of the uniformity that we are experiencing. There is no defense for behavior like that.
You're right, they aren't equivalent. Because online you can use a pseudonym and avoid being 'canceled'. Who knew the Stasi could be tricked so easily?
Honestly, your concerns should be with the private institutions that can fire you over an opinion rather than online trolls. They are the problem in your equation, as they are private pseudo-governments that can drastically impact your life on a whim and that applies to way more than social media. Why is our quality of life dictated by what often is the decision of a single, unregulated individual? We don't have a Stasi problem, we have a petty tyrant problem.
Wondering if this has to do with an aging population?
And gotta say the current social and political climate has a chilling effect on my willingness to share something that will get me trolled, doxed, etc.
Aging could definitely be a factor for many of these trends. That's why I think the data from high schoolers is important––even when we compare across generations at the same age, we still see a change.
They’re the first generation to live under 24/7 surveillance. Life 360, sharing location on phones, security cameras everywhere — even in friends’ living rooms. How do you have even a minor rebellion when your parent will immediately be alerted if you skipped class to go to 7/11? When they can immediately text someone’s parents to find out if they’ll be home for the sleepover? They can even see every grade their kids get on a daily basis, down to the smallest pop quiz. It’s suffocating.
Lovely post and enjoyed the length and tone. It also fit nicely into a few conversations I’ve had lately and could forward it around as another example to think over.
I also wonder how much of this is also due to the depreciating returns to deviance in society today. Growing up without social media and 24/7 surveillance via other peoples smart phones, a lot of deviant behaviour is in the moment worth the potential payoff and marginally low risk that someone sees you and reports it/complains/etc. However, now, you are almost certainly going to be recorded (or the fear / assumption is there). So the risk to deviant behaviour is higher and the returns lower.
I also wonder if this is also due to how so many subcultures have become mainstream. You can now have a “click” without being deviant. Goth, cosplay, furries, everything that was once deviant and risky is now mainstreamed as a defined subculture.
So I can understand that kids growing up today and looking to shape their identity - they have so much to choose from, why bother with the potential downside of deviance?
The last point I keep wondering about is how much of his is shaped by boredom. Often deviant behaviour was found from an inability to find something interesting to do, but now we are always distracted - always something interesting just a few taps away, so why bother? This isn’t to say the tech is bad but just that it takes away a motivator for deviance.
Could the rise of various interlocking systems of surveillance be a part of this too? In the past, if you flamed out, you could get up and move to start over. Ellis island beckoned. The frontier, crabgrass or otherwise, was not closed. You point out that moving itself was more common 30 years ago. Moving now does not let you escape your creditors, your former employers, your judgmental family, your nosy neighbors. The mechanisms for declaring reputational bankruptcy are more costly, thus less deviance?
Agreed/my thought is surveillance. I need to think about the overall thesis some more (mostly because I tend to agree with it) but the most obvious explanation (and one I see in younger people regularly) is constant surveillance (much of it opted into in order to maintain what’s left of a social life). When I was a young person partaking in all manner of stupid and less-stupid stuff,there wasn’t a camera trained on me to post it to everybody, particularly if I made a mistake. How can you do something different if the different stuff is punished harshly when it doesn’t work. Most new things that are good have a zillion failures in their construction. It’s not just the internet, it’s the formal and informal policing everywhere. A friend and I were talking about how we’ve both heard normal people talking about their ‘personal brand.’ When corporations are people it seems to be that people become corporations.
My argument is that this is a result of society getting much too connected. When were in a densely connected web then trends flare up and die, tail outcomes are visible to all and more common to Matthew effect, and leading to more homogenisation in the middle.
I've written a couple times exploring it. Some being
Another counterpoint to weirdness/deviance not being totally in decline: the increase in the number of people identifying as LGBTQ+, especially trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive.
Of course, the mainstreaming of gay culture means it's way less countercultural to be gay and there are many many normie LGBTQ+ people, but as a gay person, let me tell you that there are a lot of weirdos in our community still.
I'm a bit of an iconoclast. I'm queer. I'm gender nonconforming. I'm childfree. I'm nonmonogamous and have 3 partners. I have a robust network of casual, friendship, and romantic connections. I do the casual hosting and socializing that people - especially those with kids - claim are dead now. I'm purposefully underemployed (meaning I have a lower status white collar government job that I can complete in 20 hours most weeks, and I don't more responsibility/status).
This all sounds very "modern", but I was reflecting just today that my everyday life is more like my grandmother's (b. 1927) than my own mother's. I work from home 3-5 hours per day, I make dinner during the workday, I live most of my day at home, just like my grandmother who raised 5 kids and operated a hair salon out of her home. And, then, at night, I have a fairly robust social life. The energy savings from working from home and from being underemployed allow me to have robust social life.
Fascinating stuff. Does progress require a certain degree of danger? It sounds as though a sense of safety certainly increases our aversion to risk. It makes me want to meditate on the fragility of life and how at any moment it could all come crashing down just to light a fire under my ass. Let your freak flag fly.
Very interesting theory. I hadn't thought of longevity as a factor; I thought it was the safetyism that so infects our culture.
I first noticed it in 1986, when the intake below mine at Cambridge was devoid of a single eccentric (I was almost alone in this in my year, but there were plenty above me). I thought it was just Thatcherism meaning that they wanted A Steady Career.
I have watched as individuality in all aspects of life has leached away, taking beauty and creativity with it, and rather thought my view was coloured by my not choosing the path well trodden.
Nine years in Germany from 2009 as an opera soloist taught me how a country could reject its history even to the detriment of its present.
The covid débacle opened my eyes to the (to me) scary degree of conformity in my fellow citizens, but that, I saw, was a fear response amplified on purpose by the powers that be.
Finally (or perhaps not; who knows?), I have fled to Argentina, where despite a strong collectivist streak, oddness is celebrated rather than squashed. Which as an artist I am glad of.
And this is the first time it has made much sense. Thank you.
As the author noted, unless these churches tell you to move in with them, marry their leader and give them ALL your money, it's not a cult. Might be authoritarian, might be same-thinking, but not a cult.
That's a pretty good burn, but 1) those don't have the intense social characteristics of cults which focus on separating people from society, and 2) we used to have conspiracy theories AND cults.
This post inspired me to start smoking
there's a great song lyric by Sulvan Esso that this reminds me of - "I was gonna die young. Now I gotta wait for you, hun".
also my take away
Wo man thats baddie baddie... I mean smoking's a whole philosophy!
Joe Strummer thought that barring smoking was a war on creativity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n62wjBUhZk
Did that this summer! No regrets 😎 (they’re organic…) bahahahaha
finally, some damn deviance around here
I’m always amazed when I go to the supermarket and see that most of the candy is the same as during my childhood 60 years ago.
I'm gonna start a cult!
This is what happens when we as a society center our education and work around the core values of productivity and performance, rather than coherence and vitality. If we taught humans how to "know thyself" and then how to be true to thine own self (have integrity), we'd have more sovereign humans giving expression and taking action as only they can. Thus, a wider field of possibilities and opportunity for new connections to be made between all our parts, which is what drives innovation.
Love that I'm finding more and more people exploring the harm in overly-patterned ways of being.
Nice, I really like the “overly-patterned ways of being” phrase too. Thank you 🙏🏻 ❤️
I literally teach a course that is called Know Thyself at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam! This is exactly what we are teaching them!!
You might look at how Yale Prof Laurie Santos has turned her course on Happiness into something of a phenomenon over here. I'd sign up for yours if it were in English.
How wonderful! We need more of this in the world. 🌿
I see us as a society weighted down by anxiety and depression, the patterns a reaction to license rather than the cause of creative paralysis. We seem to me to be hanging on by fingernails to an edge over the abyss. Desperation does not foster creativity. We are in a death spiral imo.
The core values of productivity and work are long gone.
Hi Ann 👋🏻, I agree that desperation rarely creates the space for creativity to flow. However, what I have recognized is that it often creates the space for us to come crashing down or pause, and I see purpose in both those things:
1. The fall from grace and pause can provide a change in perspective that reorients us to what truly matters
2. They can also lead to our bodies resting long enough to signal safety so any disassociated or abandoned parts of our self can come back online and be reintegrated
I don't agree that problematic behavioral patterns stem from agency. Rather, I believe they arise when we PERFORM agency without honest connection to our own inner truth and authority.
Everyone has an internal guidance system made up of signals from our body, our feelings, and our thoughts. These help us identify what we want and what's “right” for us.
Stress makes that inner guide harder to decipher. When you’re overwhelmed, worried, tired, or trying too hard to keep others happy: the smart, decision-making part of your brain gets weaker, your body's signals get harder to feel, and your emotions feel more confusing. So your inner guidance works less coherently.
When you can’t hear yourself, you start copying others to feel safe. This creates habits or patterned ways of being that don’t feel like you, like people-pleasing, overworking, or numbing out to avoid problems.
The good news is that our inner guidance systems can be restored. They get stronger again when we rest, calm our bodies, and listen to and honor our own signals.
I know this because I've lived through it, and I've taken the time to learn from others and begin a practice or new way of BEing founded upon my inner coherence and vitality.
I think we are addressing two different problems, you the personal, I the societal.
I agree as to potential remedies that come from the crash or the pause. I just wish the collective were as amenable to healing as the willing individual.
The collective is made up of individuals, is it not? Heal the person > heal the family > heal the larger community. We can't control the group, but we can play our individual parts well. 🙂🫶🏻
It is a nice thought!
“You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”
— James Allen
I think the answer to the alleged lack of deviancy has to do with the fact that people can now channel their rebellious/anti-social impulses into activities that are political or, at the very least, adjacent to politics. Think of incels: they are quintessential weirdos who have just enough political cover (in the manosphere) to keep from being paid to serve as props in freak shows. Similarly, many of the high school kids I’ve taught who seemed alienated in the old Holden Caufield way expressed their social discomfiture by taking on performative persona (beliefs, identities, etc.) drawn largely from discourses and trends with deeply politicized roots. This tendency to politicize “weirdness” isn’t all bad, of course, but it does transmogrify weirdness into something less individualized and more contentious.
Hi David 👋🏻, when I propose that we might experience more innovation if we built our education and work upon the values of individual coherence and vitality, I'm not using estrangement and isolation as measurements for integrity of character and inner authority. I don't think weirdness equals inner coherence. Likewise, I don't think inner coherence leads to isolation.
The human body is a network designed to connect with other networks.
When your internal systems communicate clearly, your external communication becomes synchronous too. Other people’s bodies can read you, so you become part of the larger system again.
When your signals are fragmented internally (incoherent), your social cues become disorganized externally, and other people's bodies pull away. It creates isolation even when you want connection.
In other words:
Wholeness and inner coherence enhances relational coherence. Fragmentation enhances relational isolation.
I thought of incels too.
Ultimately, the problem is a feminized society. One ruled by HR cat-lady Karens that will see one drunken post on Facebook you made 10 years ago. You're unemployable because you slightly deviated from the mold. The inevitable result of hyper-egalitarianist policies: everyone is rendered the same with the exception of an oligarchic upper class.
Love this ! thank you for sharing 🥂
I think a lot of why society feels less weird now starts in school, where free thinking and individual uniqueness are often discouraged instead of nurtured. Conformity is rewarded because it’s easier to produce compliant workers than curious innovators.
People who don’t fit the mold - the weird, the sensitive, the creative - are often bullied or punished for being different. Over time, that pressure doesn’t just silence individuality; it damages mental health. When being yourself costs you safety or belonging, survival mode takes over.
That mindset is also reinforced by corporations whose priority is profit and shareholder value. Uniformity is safer and more marketable, so everything - from homes to cars to trends - starts to look the same. What’s sold as “normal” becomes almost religiously upheld, even when it flattens creativity, spirit, and innovation.
But there are outliers. People who realize that weird isn’t a flaw - it’s beautiful, playful, and necessary. That curiosity, color, and joy are exactly what the world needs, whether society has caught on yet or not.
Weird never disappears. Some of us just choose to protect it, live it, and let it shine. Progress has always belonged to the weird ones first.
Weird didn’t die - it went underground. And it’s always been the underground that moves the world.
Your analysis is need of revision, namely we were a society centered upon education and core that which you have stated, essentially those evolving fro merit. Over the past four or five decades the educational emphasis has been the hollow mantra of “know they self” or “be there now” advice of guru Rama Dasdand still persist today. As such your thesis is wanting for its distorted line. You need to appreciate the past without judgement, so as to begin a realistic assessment of the present, and future. Warmest regards.
J
Ah, and how would you create that? I feel our bodies are wired for hierarchy and youre suggesting to combat that?
Your statement worries me. It feels like a prelude to accepting authoritarian leadership. (I'm not all thinking that was your intention.) My first thought as a counter to teach creativity.
Nope don't think we should. More of a commentary that biology wants us to pursue status - increased chance of survival.
Alternatively, I think we ought to be conscious of that and lead our lives pursuing more fulfilling things than merely chasing Status
Not all leadership is authoritarian. There are many degrees, more or less appropriate to a situation. Most effective leadership involves persuasion through argument, suggestion, or example rather than coercion, though government isn't shy of force when it is threatened. Imo all groups need leaders or they devolve into chaos. The larger and more complex the group, the larger and more complex the resultant hierarchy.
I see a true creative as inhabitant of his own inner world. Most people are not true creatives imo.
Maybe all the pain, fear, discomfort, struggle, and boredom that we continually work to get rid of are the catalysts of creativity and weirdness?
Totally. This is one of the most destructive impulses lurking within us. The destructive impulse to curb all possibility of destruction.
We need some unknown degree of hardship and tragedy to stay interesting, determined, innovative, spiritually alive. And there’s no indication that anyone knows where this line is, nor that we won’t readily cross it with some technological witches brew. This is what the dream of magic has been about all along.
ooh yeah
Don,t know about boredom, but manageable pain fear discomfort struggle are the non-negotiable human lot. The trouble starts when they become life's definition.
Maybe.. maybe not… there’s a kind of intuitiveness about this answer that feels easy enough to make me suspicious of it. (But maybe that’s too contrarian)
Art is pain
I wrote about this 2.5 years ago after listening to a speech given by Esther Perel on Artificial Intimacy (AI):
https://meunfolding.blogspot.com/2023/04/are-we-experiencing-extreme-level-of.html?m=1
certainly
In critical theory and cultural studies, cultural stagnation is well-tread territory, so much so that the "cultural stagnation" discourse has itself become stagnant. We've been talking about the decline of weirdness and our culture's failure to do anything but remix the past for so long that I'm afraid we're proving our own point on a meta-level.
In terms of a diagnosis, I think the "slow life" hypothesis is equivocating. The sort of weirdness/deviance addressed in this piece rarely takes the form of truly risky behavior. I agree that more people are invested in long-term security (especially in the form of financial security and physical health) for themselves and their loved ones than ever before, but I don't think this accounts for the foreclosure of the weird and deviant to any significant degree.
I'd point to technological homogenization: a society that turns virtually all phenomena into discrete, fungible, standardized data so as it make it more functionally manageable (i.e. capable of bearing profits) is a society that conditions people away from true weirdness. This is why I wouldn't use data to try to prove that weirdness is in decline. First off, there are too many variables to consider (my perpetual gripe with the social sciences — it tells stories that validate our intuitions by making complex stuff seem simpler than it is), but more importantly, it operates under the same assumption that's killing weirdness in the first place: that there is an objective ideal (of knowledge, design, art, behavior, etc.) to strive for and quantification is the way there.
this is a comment that does justice to everything i felt reading this.
It is my observation that the strictest societies produce and tolerate the best weirdness.
That's cause you get very highly concentrated and new forms of weirdness from all that repression in the air.
Thanks for that truly great comment
I lived in a repressive era. It did produce from us some excellent weirdness as we rebelled. But it didn't tolerate it at all except to beat us up and arrest us for any slight deviation from the norm no matter how harmless.
I'm really sorry that was your experience, but it became part of who you and I hope you value that.
It's higher risk to go wild these days because it can be recorded, uploaded and haunt you forever. Back in the 90s we could humiliate ourselves at a party then deny the rumours, leaving only a mystique of uncertainty. Once people can see the actual video of you dancing on a table with your underpants on your head, or whatever, mystique gone.
In general, transgressions are more easily searchable and weaponized. Kids are careful.
Agree! People argue it’s “the phones” that make kids anxious and depressed but I’d argue the most harm from phones is not so much the content/apps but the experience of living under surveillance 24/7. Parents track their kids’ every move and never give them a chance to rebel in little, even harmless, ways and take chances sneaking around. Businesses, schools and public areas have security cameras everywhere. And as you said, at any moment someone can pull out a phone and record you, ridicule you, turn you into a meme or worse, get you doxxed. I think constant surveillance has dramatically changed the experience of youth. The fact that at any given moment a parent knows not just if their kid is at school but what classroom they’re in is a brand new concept. (And yes, I know…school shootings etc but I’m just saying there’s a definite psychological effect of this on the surveilled.)
do you have any good sources / links / pieces I can read about this? I'm interested and curious to learn more about what others have said. thinking about writing something on it myself
As a social historian, the argument that we care a lot more about being alive, and therefore prefer to invest in the longer term, have better-controlled lives, and take fewer risks sounds plausible to me. My last book, The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, was about how early pregnancy loss went from being an accepted and mostly unremarked part of childbearing to an experience that many find devastating (and that advice-givers have increasingly presumed to be inherently psychologically devastating), because it has become typical for people to become attached to even very early pregnancies. In the book I point out that some people are afraid to try for another pregnancy because of how upsetting a miscarriage was. About 20% of confirmed pregnancies end in loss, mostly in the first trimester, so this is not a minor issue. I describe how the historical setup for this change in experience of pregnancy was centuries in the making, with the long term growth in expectations of personal control over fertility and child survival and the shift from extensive childbearing to intensive parenting. But the marked change in attitudes about early pregnancy happened on the same timeline you identify, starting in the late 1960s and really solidifying in the 1980s. On the other hand, certain kinds of individualism and nonconformity (especially LGBTQ) have increased (perhaps like baby names?). It would be interesting to consider what produces risk-avoidance that results in conformity, and what produces individualism. Those both seem like they could come out of affluence and predictable longevity.
Super interesting. I've long wondered about this: when you could expect half of your children to die before they hit puberty, what did it feel like to lose a child?
That's a complicated question, and historians have a range of opinions. We have many early modern sources from affluent mothers (who were the literate ones and therefore produced most of the sources) describing the kind of grief we would very much recognize when their toddlers died. Though in discussing this with a psychiatrist who specializes in childbearing issues, she said to me that it could not have been quite like it is today, because in her view, the way it impacts parents now would have led to society-wide meltdown if it happened to a large proportion of families. It's possible the real difference, though, was not in level of grief, but that religion provided a near-universal coping mechanism and people saw models of how to manage grief all around them all the time. (So in that theory, the religion would make the experience "feel different," but would shape a bio-psych grief response that's universal.) I do think that stillbirth impacted people differently. I think that because childbirth was much more dangerous, women were focused on their own mortality until after birth. Letters and diaries about stillbirth are typically much more measured than those about toddler deaths. And we have examples of the same woman describing acceptance after stillbirth but profound grief after the death of a toddler or older child. Poor people tend to make it into the historical record when they have broken laws or otherwise attracted attention from authorities, which means the historical record makes them look like more neglectful/abusive parents. There many in fact have been more issues because more people were impoverished and had a baby every few years whether or not they could afford it, but it would probably be a mistake to invoke those cases to represent the gestalt of a time. Still, there were many more "unwanted" children before birth control became a common practice, and I would not be surprised if more people were fatalistic about infant death. It's hard to find direct rather than circumstantial evidence, though, from people who did not leave written records.
I’ve always wondered about this!! I am going to check out your book :)
Don"t you suppose the large families of the past absorbed the loss of a child or two more easily? Rural cultures especially seemed to understand the natural cycle as, well, natural. Life-death-regeneration, the rise and fall of the sun and moon, planting and harvest, all as natural as wringing your chicken's neck for dinner.
My wonderful historian colleague Emily Abel published a piece on child death today--worth a read: https://andreasankar1.substack.com/p/life-and-death-before-public-health
Thanks for the link. Always interesting to read first-hand accounts, esp diaries.
Images of life as a series of stages representing an uphill climb and a downhill diminishment were common (e.g. https://ihcatalog.librarycompany.org/life-age-of-man-stages-of-mans-life-from-the-cradle-to-the-grave-clayton-lewis/). But children dying was life cut short, not a natural cycle of growth and decay. And people didn't write about losing children as a "natural" thing. They wrote in religious terms about the faith and effort it took to accept God's will. I do think there was more sense that the birth of another child was consolation, compared to today, though.
For what is worth (sample size of one): my grandfather was one of fourteen siblings, rural Italian Catholic family. He lost two siblings as toddlers and his own mother at 4 (sepsis from tooth extraction…now that’s something the MAHA crowd wouldn’t like to remember).
Always talked about it as God’s will, but with huge sadness.
And on his deathbed, he beamed when he “saw” his Mamma coming to meet him. So yes, religion helped.
Normal is a much better way to describe it. There are old cemeteries here with "Loving Wife and Mother" surrounded by little stones, a hen and her chicks. Also lots of "Christian Sufferers."
It's easier for modern people to forget that life's invariables are change, chance, and loss.
Life cut short from disease and accident was omnipresent, crops destroyed from aberrant weather and pests. I grew up watching the faces of farmers faced with natural ruin.
Yes. One of the main themes of my book is the dramatic change from a culture that was much more fatalistic to a culture informed by the Enlightenment, with a more stronger sense that both societies and individuals ought to be able to control the natural world and control personal outcomes through reason and effort.
The Enlightenment offers a great project, and probably a happier, if possibly less realistic, way to live.
I suspect the large families were primarily rural protestant and too busy (and possibly unlettered) to leave written accounts of their lives. Rural faith communities were extraordinarily tight and likely provided more solace than theology. Has any work been done with family letters from the rural population?
Thank you for such interesting comments! Great topic!
Large families were typical across lines of class and location until the 19th century. And most of the population was rural. As you are pointing out, it's really hard to "hear" the voices of people who did not leave letters and diaries. I agree that faith communities were important for emotional support. Ministers interpreted child death through the lens of God's will rather than the "natural," which is likely to have informed how congregants understood it. But I think you are pointing to a couple of other things, possibly: first, while it might not have been described as "natural," child death was "normal" in the sense that most families went through it. So it was familiar, and by necessity accepted as part of life. And second, at a time with no reliable birth control and little in the way of a safety net, the loss of a child might relieve economic pressure. There have been documented times and places with customs of selective infant neglect, where economic pressure was high and birth control lacking. I don't think this was common in early America, though there were occasional arrests for infanticide by single mothers.
“Even if someone was crazy enough to pull a di Modica today, who could? The art school would force you to return home to your parents, the real estate would be unaffordable, the city would shut you down.” This!! Everything is optimised, everything is regulated, everything is under surveillance. It feels like there are very few, almost none true nooks and crannies left in the world.
I feel this is missing a key point, the rise of algorithmic feeds, which direct and evolve culture in the digital age like a universal natural selection force, generally towards homogeneity because mimetics or something
I think this is a factor, but wherever we have data we see the trends changing before the rise of algorithmic feeds
I noticed a change with television. It invented a common reality. I wouldn't be surprised if it coincided over time with our failing national imagination. It seems hard to believe, but tv in the old days amounted to everyone watching the same programming on 3 network channels. Reality mediated by screens and mechanical sound started after WW2, and television was as addictive as any other screen. It babysat small children with attractive nonsense, it invaded the classroom with humorless instruction, it mesmerized families with hours of homogenized "prime time."
On —
'I wouldn't be surprised if it coincided over time with our failing national imagination.'
— I recall a Bloom County strip where Milo is wondering why there are no more geniuses, and the next panels show the gang watching Gilligan's Island.
That was better in the strip.
Still classic in the telling, esp if you're old enough to remember the originals!
There's also the fact that we have normalized all deviance -- a lot of great artists were gay, for example, like Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol, but now being gay is getting married and paying a surrogate and having a second home in Provincetown. Add to that cancel culture which polices true deviance. "When a true genius appears in the world you will know him by this sign - that the dunces have all formed a confederacy against him," etc. The dunces are stronger now.
Agreed––I had a whole section on this that I think needs a standalone post to really flesh out. Lifestyles that used to be marginalized have since been mainstreamed, which is mainly a good thing. No one *wants* to be marginalized, even if it makes it easier to entertain interesting thoughts.
I think we've mainstreamed *mild* deviance which defangs stronger forms. So yeah, be gay as you like but as long as you're also a normal consumer. But gay like, say, Genesis P. Orridge ? When you work in accounting?Heck no.
I think you're touching on the fact that at lot of "demarginalizing" is merely a way of broadening marketing and sales while virtue signaling acceptance.
I agree. It starts there but goes mainstream fast.
I think there is a valuable distinction to be made and maintained between weird/crazy/destructive and weird/eccentric/interesting. That distinction seems lost on us.
But you don't think social media has anything to do with demarginalizing? Or that cancel culture has a Stasi-like presence in our lives that has actually lead to job loss and other real consequences that everyone would rather avoid by maintaining the new status quo, such as it is, and hide their real thoughts and ideas?
Saying things your community finds distasteful could always lead to job loss. Saying you hate Italians on Twitter or yelling it in town square are functionally the same. The only difference is people understand the latter could have consequences.
Are you suggesting that it's okay to prevent people from working for exercising their right to free speech online? Your examples are not equivalent, actually. There are abundant differences between yelling something in a town hall, which is ephemeral, and saying something once on Twitter ten years ago and constantly being reminded of it, often out of context, by trolls who mean to hurt you for their own gain or to regulate their own emotional instability. It's funny you bring up Italians. They have a law in Italy called "the right to be forgotten" which means that past mistakes should not forever haunt someone or be made public. It's a good law. Also, I'm Italian and I rarely find that there are consequences for bigoted speech against Italians. Cuomo pointed this out not too long ago when he was basically accused of having Mafia ties. There's also the fact that people online are not necessarily "from your community." Nor are the ideas that get people canceled necessarily wrong or bad or hateful, even if certain groups try to frame them that way. Like I said, it's creating a Stasi-like fear (job loss for expressing non-status quo ideas), and people like you, who seem to agree with the Stasi, not with the free-thinking public, are dangerous. And are no doubt one of the causes of the uniformity that we are experiencing. There is no defense for behavior like that.
You're right, they aren't equivalent. Because online you can use a pseudonym and avoid being 'canceled'. Who knew the Stasi could be tricked so easily?
Honestly, your concerns should be with the private institutions that can fire you over an opinion rather than online trolls. They are the problem in your equation, as they are private pseudo-governments that can drastically impact your life on a whim and that applies to way more than social media. Why is our quality of life dictated by what often is the decision of a single, unregulated individual? We don't have a Stasi problem, we have a petty tyrant problem.
It is probably hard to realize that before the 1960s, socialization and common courtesy required people to "hide their real thoughts and ideas."
Those were the good old days imo.
Spot on! Instagram and TikTok breed generations of dunces. It's unstoppable, at this point.
Well said
Wondering if this has to do with an aging population?
And gotta say the current social and political climate has a chilling effect on my willingness to share something that will get me trolled, doxed, etc.
Aging could definitely be a factor for many of these trends. That's why I think the data from high schoolers is important––even when we compare across generations at the same age, we still see a change.
Good point. Sad to see Americans less weird. I like weird.
They’re the first generation to live under 24/7 surveillance. Life 360, sharing location on phones, security cameras everywhere — even in friends’ living rooms. How do you have even a minor rebellion when your parent will immediately be alerted if you skipped class to go to 7/11? When they can immediately text someone’s parents to find out if they’ll be home for the sleepover? They can even see every grade their kids get on a daily basis, down to the smallest pop quiz. It’s suffocating.
Lovely post and enjoyed the length and tone. It also fit nicely into a few conversations I’ve had lately and could forward it around as another example to think over.
I also wonder how much of this is also due to the depreciating returns to deviance in society today. Growing up without social media and 24/7 surveillance via other peoples smart phones, a lot of deviant behaviour is in the moment worth the potential payoff and marginally low risk that someone sees you and reports it/complains/etc. However, now, you are almost certainly going to be recorded (or the fear / assumption is there). So the risk to deviant behaviour is higher and the returns lower.
I also wonder if this is also due to how so many subcultures have become mainstream. You can now have a “click” without being deviant. Goth, cosplay, furries, everything that was once deviant and risky is now mainstreamed as a defined subculture.
So I can understand that kids growing up today and looking to shape their identity - they have so much to choose from, why bother with the potential downside of deviance?
The last point I keep wondering about is how much of his is shaped by boredom. Often deviant behaviour was found from an inability to find something interesting to do, but now we are always distracted - always something interesting just a few taps away, so why bother? This isn’t to say the tech is bad but just that it takes away a motivator for deviance.
Fascinating to think about this topic. Thank you!
Could the rise of various interlocking systems of surveillance be a part of this too? In the past, if you flamed out, you could get up and move to start over. Ellis island beckoned. The frontier, crabgrass or otherwise, was not closed. You point out that moving itself was more common 30 years ago. Moving now does not let you escape your creditors, your former employers, your judgmental family, your nosy neighbors. The mechanisms for declaring reputational bankruptcy are more costly, thus less deviance?
Agreed/my thought is surveillance. I need to think about the overall thesis some more (mostly because I tend to agree with it) but the most obvious explanation (and one I see in younger people regularly) is constant surveillance (much of it opted into in order to maintain what’s left of a social life). When I was a young person partaking in all manner of stupid and less-stupid stuff,there wasn’t a camera trained on me to post it to everybody, particularly if I made a mistake. How can you do something different if the different stuff is punished harshly when it doesn’t work. Most new things that are good have a zillion failures in their construction. It’s not just the internet, it’s the formal and informal policing everywhere. A friend and I were talking about how we’ve both heard normal people talking about their ‘personal brand.’ When corporations are people it seems to be that people become corporations.
My argument is that this is a result of society getting much too connected. When were in a densely connected web then trends flare up and die, tail outcomes are visible to all and more common to Matthew effect, and leading to more homogenisation in the middle.
I've written a couple times exploring it. Some being
https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/seeing-like-a-network
And
https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/meditations-on-barbells
Another counterpoint to weirdness/deviance not being totally in decline: the increase in the number of people identifying as LGBTQ+, especially trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive.
Of course, the mainstreaming of gay culture means it's way less countercultural to be gay and there are many many normie LGBTQ+ people, but as a gay person, let me tell you that there are a lot of weirdos in our community still.
I'm a bit of an iconoclast. I'm queer. I'm gender nonconforming. I'm childfree. I'm nonmonogamous and have 3 partners. I have a robust network of casual, friendship, and romantic connections. I do the casual hosting and socializing that people - especially those with kids - claim are dead now. I'm purposefully underemployed (meaning I have a lower status white collar government job that I can complete in 20 hours most weeks, and I don't more responsibility/status).
This all sounds very "modern", but I was reflecting just today that my everyday life is more like my grandmother's (b. 1927) than my own mother's. I work from home 3-5 hours per day, I make dinner during the workday, I live most of my day at home, just like my grandmother who raised 5 kids and operated a hair salon out of her home. And, then, at night, I have a fairly robust social life. The energy savings from working from home and from being underemployed allow me to have robust social life.
Fascinating stuff. Does progress require a certain degree of danger? It sounds as though a sense of safety certainly increases our aversion to risk. It makes me want to meditate on the fragility of life and how at any moment it could all come crashing down just to light a fire under my ass. Let your freak flag fly.
Very interesting theory. I hadn't thought of longevity as a factor; I thought it was the safetyism that so infects our culture.
I first noticed it in 1986, when the intake below mine at Cambridge was devoid of a single eccentric (I was almost alone in this in my year, but there were plenty above me). I thought it was just Thatcherism meaning that they wanted A Steady Career.
I have watched as individuality in all aspects of life has leached away, taking beauty and creativity with it, and rather thought my view was coloured by my not choosing the path well trodden.
Nine years in Germany from 2009 as an opera soloist taught me how a country could reject its history even to the detriment of its present.
The covid débacle opened my eyes to the (to me) scary degree of conformity in my fellow citizens, but that, I saw, was a fear response amplified on purpose by the powers that be.
Finally (or perhaps not; who knows?), I have fled to Argentina, where despite a strong collectivist streak, oddness is celebrated rather than squashed. Which as an artist I am glad of.
And this is the first time it has made much sense. Thank you.
Good stuff, except about cults. The statistics don't compensate for the fact that cults have been mainstreamed-QAnon, MAGA, etc.
I would regard most American megachurches as very cult-adjacent.
As the author noted, unless these churches tell you to move in with them, marry their leader and give them ALL your money, it's not a cult. Might be authoritarian, might be same-thinking, but not a cult.
They are not that interesting unfortunately.
That's a pretty good burn, but 1) those don't have the intense social characteristics of cults which focus on separating people from society, and 2) we used to have conspiracy theories AND cults.
Celebrity fandoms.