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.
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.
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.
Important topic but distractingly long essay. Important to point out that a lot of that teen behavior is self reported and it's just as easy to conclude that they are less likely to report doing these things than previous generations. The idea that teens are goody two shoes is counter to the skyrocketing overdose and psychological trauma statistics.
Overdose deaths among adolescents (say ages 10–19 or 13–19) have dramatically increased. For example: from July–Dec 2019 to July–Dec 2021, among persons aged 10-19, median monthly overdose deaths increased 109%, and overdose deaths involving illicitly manufactured fentanyls (IMFs) increased 182%.
Although self-reported risky behaviors like alcohol use and smoking have dropped dramatically among teens, mental-health indicators have moved sharply in the opposite direction: large rises in depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and suicidality suggest that fewer visible “miscreants” doesn’t equal fewer hidden struggles — the picture is one of shifting risk, not risk eliminated.
Overdose deaths could be explained by fentanyl making drug use way more deadly even among a constant or shrinking crowd of users.
As for trauma and mental health... for all we know, the lack of "weirdness" could be causing those. More loneliness, more repression, more fear, less self-expression, none of that seems healthy.
Do you think the opposing risks could be related? I don't know about you, but my underage drinking experiences happened at house parties. Teens these days think house parties were invented for the movies -- they basically don't exist anymore. So no parties is a sign of a fractured (more online, solitary) social life, correlating to less drinking and also more anxiety.
In terms of causality, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Alcohol is a social lubricant, so more alcohol could lead to more socialization. In order to underage drink you first need a friend who will supply the goods. But in having this social group, you are therefore less likely to be depressed, anxious, hopeless, and more likely to be independent from your parents and be a little more self-assured.
If you are using drugs to cope with your problems, is it more likely to be a solitary thing? You are a "goody two shoes" but feel smothered by your overbearing parents and isolated from the social world of rebellious fun.
So my theory boils down to:
Correlation between fun parties where people form social bonds and engage in risky behaviours
Correlation between overachieving lonelies who use drugs to cope with their lack of social bonds
Yeah...OR (Or perhaps AND, IDK I'm just spitballing here...is that still a word?) THE SYSTEM that we all now live in has been optimized and flattened to an Nth degree in the name of profit and frankly, a world of optimal flat people makes a bunch more money than a bunch of wackos who are all doing their own thing. It's still in the background, still ever-present. Maybe people are just more boring now because they're more likely to follow the path of least resistance.
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
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
“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.
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.
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.
The line that isn't being drawn is the correlation between the increase in safety and the decrease in suffering possibly causing or contributing to creativity and culture. Also, the homogenization caused by globalism and the internet is a massive force. Paul Kingsnorth talks about aspects of this in Against the Machine.
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.
"I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.
Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
I was flipping through Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom recently, and this feels related. As freedom has gotten more organized, the questions that are asked have been funneled "What should I watch on YouTube", "What kind of tuna should I get delivered" has replaced "What kind of drugs should we do tonight" and "What kind of giant life swerve should I make next week". Your diagnosis about risk management seems right, wealthier people buy more insurance (and have fewer kids). There is an escape to expectations that has happened: when you expect certain outcomes in life, your strategies for living will conform to what you imagine will cause those expected outcomes.
I do think that the additional destitution/lack of options for well-paying work will lead to higher levels of societal deviance, though. There is something about a lack of access to easy outcomes that sends people down creative pathways. Unless the Internet's dopamine is too good, and all is already lost.
This post inspired me to start smoking
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.
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.
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.
Important topic but distractingly long essay. Important to point out that a lot of that teen behavior is self reported and it's just as easy to conclude that they are less likely to report doing these things than previous generations. The idea that teens are goody two shoes is counter to the skyrocketing overdose and psychological trauma statistics.
Overdose deaths among adolescents (say ages 10–19 or 13–19) have dramatically increased. For example: from July–Dec 2019 to July–Dec 2021, among persons aged 10-19, median monthly overdose deaths increased 109%, and overdose deaths involving illicitly manufactured fentanyls (IMFs) increased 182%.
Although self-reported risky behaviors like alcohol use and smoking have dropped dramatically among teens, mental-health indicators have moved sharply in the opposite direction: large rises in depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and suicidality suggest that fewer visible “miscreants” doesn’t equal fewer hidden struggles — the picture is one of shifting risk, not risk eliminated.
Overdose deaths could be explained by fentanyl making drug use way more deadly even among a constant or shrinking crowd of users.
As for trauma and mental health... for all we know, the lack of "weirdness" could be causing those. More loneliness, more repression, more fear, less self-expression, none of that seems healthy.
Do you think the opposing risks could be related? I don't know about you, but my underage drinking experiences happened at house parties. Teens these days think house parties were invented for the movies -- they basically don't exist anymore. So no parties is a sign of a fractured (more online, solitary) social life, correlating to less drinking and also more anxiety.
In terms of causality, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Alcohol is a social lubricant, so more alcohol could lead to more socialization. In order to underage drink you first need a friend who will supply the goods. But in having this social group, you are therefore less likely to be depressed, anxious, hopeless, and more likely to be independent from your parents and be a little more self-assured.
If you are using drugs to cope with your problems, is it more likely to be a solitary thing? You are a "goody two shoes" but feel smothered by your overbearing parents and isolated from the social world of rebellious fun.
So my theory boils down to:
Correlation between fun parties where people form social bonds and engage in risky behaviours
Correlation between overachieving lonelies who use drugs to cope with their lack of social bonds
The classic jock/nerd dichotomy
Maybe all the pain, fear, discomfort, struggle, and boredom that we continually work to get rid of are the catalysts of creativity and weirdness?
Yeah...OR (Or perhaps AND, IDK I'm just spitballing here...is that still a word?) THE SYSTEM that we all now live in has been optimized and flattened to an Nth degree in the name of profit and frankly, a world of optimal flat people makes a bunch more money than a bunch of wackos who are all doing their own thing. It's still in the background, still ever-present. Maybe people are just more boring now because they're more likely to follow the path of least resistance.
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
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
“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.
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.
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.
The line that isn't being drawn is the correlation between the increase in safety and the decrease in suffering possibly causing or contributing to creativity and culture. Also, the homogenization caused by globalism and the internet is a massive force. Paul Kingsnorth talks about aspects of this in Against the Machine.
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.
"I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.
Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man."
I was flipping through Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom recently, and this feels related. As freedom has gotten more organized, the questions that are asked have been funneled "What should I watch on YouTube", "What kind of tuna should I get delivered" has replaced "What kind of drugs should we do tonight" and "What kind of giant life swerve should I make next week". Your diagnosis about risk management seems right, wealthier people buy more insurance (and have fewer kids). There is an escape to expectations that has happened: when you expect certain outcomes in life, your strategies for living will conform to what you imagine will cause those expected outcomes.
I do think that the additional destitution/lack of options for well-paying work will lead to higher levels of societal deviance, though. There is something about a lack of access to easy outcomes that sends people down creative pathways. Unless the Internet's dopamine is too good, and all is already lost.