Wow it has been a while.
I’ve been working on other stuff, so I kind of neglected this blog for a bit, but, it has given me time to think about some new topics of conversation.
Like for example:
Isolation.
So I like to write about relationships, as you know if you’ve been here a while, and I like to write about the nature of love, fear, and so on.
But with all this, the global spy search engine tends to recommend me videos of people talking about their opinion on relationships.
I might think they were outliers, except that even in my own college classes people express the same views.
In my last class, I heard people talk about how being in committed relationships was hard, expensive and so on.
In the same class, a guy also asked some of the girls in the back row if they’d ever consider getting a Sugar Daddy (not him, he was just weird and the topic had come up in the lesson for whatever reason).
On said no way, it would be too awkward, even if it was just to fake date.
The other said she’d do anything for the right amount of money.
I thought “I can’t believe I’m listening to this conversation in the middle of a class.”
What happened right?
I blame the internet mostly.
To use the clice phrase, we’re at a point wehre this is reality? MEn think it’s too much effort to commit, and women think they’d do anything for money in some cases.
Now sure, that’s just one girl…but her attitude is becoming more prevalent.
I don’t know how this happened, where we’ve taken the shame of the diea of doing sex for money.
People call that “slut shaming” now.
Liek being alsut is someting to be proud of.
Even if you had no moral obligations, i’s apoor healthy chioce at the very least, so that’s like saying peope should be proud of smokin gor drinking ro drugs.
That’ll be it next, watch. “Junkie Shaming” the new crime.
IT always baffles me how poeple never stop to think that the reason orgarian might be pushing for this “no shameing our poor decisons” is because they make money off our addictions.
Anyone notice those ads that are oopenly mocking us for our addciotn now?
The ones that are like “You can seek social validation wihtout lagging out.”
“You can game all night etc.”
“Lose to a 12 year old.”
Ha, ha, ah.
Why don’t they just say:
“We know you have no self respect, no purpose in your life, and no value as anything but a consumer to up our numbers, please keep paying us to feed your addiction to screens so that you never think about the world outside your little bubble that might actually have real problems.”
You know in the classic “Fahrenheit 451” the people live in houses where the walls are TV screens, and some you can interact with, making your life more and more into a work of fiction, till they can’t even understand the format of a book, or have a real conversation with a real person anymore.
In an anime of all things, “Darling in the Franxx” People replace real human relationships with a machine-forged connection, and replace sex with happiness stimulation, and food with this weird energy they input into their bodies directly.
They become immortal…but at the price of ceasing to be human beings. At the end they all turn into pure spiritual mental energy and become part of the hive mind. [Sorry for Spoilers, but I doubt anyone reading this would care about those.]
The show isn’t that good at exploring the concept intellectually, but it’s certainly unnerving.
It used to be a joke that we were becoming like machines, but, now people are really starting to just take that seriously.
At least here, to be fair, it’s not global.
But I’m talking about the West, were I live, naturally.
You don’t need me to tell you this, though, you can see it yourself.
If you watch our shows now, even actors are becoming more robotic and fake in their delivery. The goal isn’t to come off as a real person anymore, it’s to be quippy and mock modern culture.
It’s actually become modern culture to mock ourselves, anything and everything, and nothing can be taken seriously.
I listen to people talk sometimes, and it’s like they don’t even know how to be serious at all.
Their tone, their facial expressions, they seem devoid of real purpose…you wait for the joke to be over, but it’s like it never is…until you offend them, then no one has any sense of humor.
I’m not sure how we compartmentalized our lives to this point, it seems like someone took great care to ensure that we did, however.
I can feel the draw myself too. I live in this culture, and I’m tempted by it, same as everyone else.
But at least I still know I’m tempted. As C. S. Lewis pus it, if you can feel the spell working, then you’re not fully under it yet.
Which is found in the Silver Chair, which is actually a book that coves the temptation of distraction and dulled senses a lot. I never liked it, it was unsettling, probably because it hit too close to home.
Actually Prince Rillian in that book acts a lot like people do now. Unable to take anything seriously, unless it’s an insult to the very witch who’s keeping him under her spell. Then he becomes very angry.
He’s easily distracted. Flippant.
But when he breaks free of the enchantment, he becomes clear headed and implores them to help him.
Later the witch tries to re-enchant them all, dulling their minds again, but their friend Puddleglum uses pain to clear his head, and tells her off. Freeing them all finally so they can kill her.
The moral of the story?
Real sensations are what block out the fake ones.
All of us can go along the way we do, until something truly bad happens.
But it seems the Overloads known as the entertainment industry are trying to take great care to tell us that suffering in the land can be remedied only with more distractions.
How many people got movie streaming services during COVID?
A lot of us realized the value of real interactions, but a lot of people, especially younger ones, fell more deeply under the spell of using screens for everything. (I say with irony, because I’m using one right now.)
So let’s talk about this: Why did this happen?
How did we become so distracted?
I think we all know how it slowly became more and more normal to stare at screens.
But let’s talk about the real reason it’s so appealing.
People now use the excuse that they have too much social anxiety to want to make friends, leave their house, and try anything really.
But that’s not it.
I’ve no doubt that many people do have anxiety, but most of the ones I talk to don’t really have anything that crippling, they just have insecurities, and we all have those.
If you can talk and read emotional cues like a normal person, I wouldn’t say you have anxiety, per sec.
But I don’t believe even the insecurities are the real reason.
To put it in blunt language, people of the younger generations–which is starting to see anywhere form 12-40 years old, who voice these views, are often arrogant, self absorbed twits.
It’s not really that we’re afraid to socialize, it’s that we’ve decided three fundamental things.
1: Other people are a lot of work
2: Other people are annoying, and they sometimes find us annoying,
3: Other people are just not worth our time.
Why is everyone we don’t like toxic now?
You notice that?
Some people are toxic, but we’re slapping that label onto every single flaw.
Throughout human history, many individual have not particlayr liekd ohter humans, that’s not new.
What is new is broadcasting that fact with so much flippancy, and so little remorse for it.
I mena, there’s been many cruel societies, but they had families, they had gatering to celebrate, and not showing up still made you kind of an oddball.
Now u can laugh it off.
What I find particualrly delusional about this new way of thingkin is taht poepel ac tlike it’s speical.
Like, “oh wiat, human interaciton is hard? Who knew? It’s not liek we’ve writtne, sung, and performed aobut htat for hundreds of years.”
Yeah, it is hard.
Everything worth doing is hard.
But you don’t duck out of doing it just because of that.
See, we’re not shying away from each other because we’re scared–we’re doing it because we’re spoiled.
We can have a fake form of humanity projected into our homes at any minute of any day at any given time.
We can have porn, and pay for sex if we want the real experience (real being subjective there), so we don’t need to commit to a willing relationship. It’s normalized now to pleasure ourselves if nothing else.
You know. I don’t do any of those things…and I don’t feel I’ve lost anything in my life. I’m kind of glad actually, I feel like they create weird habits.
I guess I’m writing this because I think the real wake up call we need might not just be about politics and religion.
To even get there, we need connection.
The Bible says that God Himself said, even before there was sin, there was one thing that was not good.
And that was: “It is not good for Man to be alone.”
God said man needs help. A supporter. A life saver. Something we need desperately.
Man wanted companionship, but he also needed it.
Don’t we all want that? Most of us don’t admit it, but just being wanted can feel cheap. We want to feel we contribute something also. But just being needed can feel hollow. We feel like it should be both. And it was supposed to be both.
As always, we’re ever rebelling against our Creator.
One would think that we’d at least want to be around each other.
But we should remember that Adam and Eve turned on each other immediately after they turned on God.
People ask sometimes how Christians can believe something that sounds that much like a fairy-tale. The fruit, the trees, the snake.
I don’t find it so hard to believe, because I see all this played out all the time, every day. Even if the facts weren’t true, the principles are on point.
The story of Ed gen isn’t actually about knowledge being a bad thing, like some people say.
Ir’s about trust.
Do you trust God, or the devil?
Do you trust your spouse? Or God?
And when you break the trust of God, and your spouse, guess who wins? Not you. The devil.
Love is about trust. You can’t have love without trust.
And we are so determined not to trust anyone now.
I watched one video, where a woman said she got divorced after 5 years.
I’m thinking “Five years? Unless he was a deadbeat, a cheater, or an abuser, what problems would you have in 5 years that couldn’t be worked out if you were willing to grow?”
You can grow out of a lot in 5 years, so if things weren’t working out, the problem was probably one or both of them didn’t want to change at all.
And what is the idea with expecting to get married, and not have to change anything about yourself?
The idea we’re fed is that people who love you accept you the way you are.
Well yeah, they do.
But that doesn’t man you wouldn’t have to change.
You may put up with someone’s flaws, out of love, but that done mean you like it, or that you should. Flaws often hurt us more than anyone else.
And then there’s the things that aren’t sin, but you still need to be able to let them go.
For example, what if you’re allergic to a food? Should your spouse eat it in front of you? Maybe if you’re okay with it…but what if you aren’t? It’s not a flaw to eat food…but it can be a point of contention.
I’m just using this to illustrate. And yeah, I’ve seen couples fight over things that stupid. Who hasn’t?
I’m not saying someone should be telling you how to change. But if you annoy them…you might want to think about compromising.
And you now…not all of our personal habits are worth hanging onto.
We’re told now that “Self” is the most important thing.
There’s fear at the base of that.
“I can’t trust anyone else to love me, so I have to love me.”
My therapist once told me to try to give myself the kind of parental validation I didn’t get.
That didn’t work. It did work when God helped me.
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. If everybody out there is so busy loving themselves, they won’t try to love you.
Someone has to be willing to be different. But more people were willing to in the past, when an relationship based on helping each other was considered normal and healthy.
Now people say you shouldn’t need your partner.
And then it’s okay to bail on them. Because you don’t need them anyway.
Like…you can need someone and still learn to live without them. If they do leave, or die perhaps. Things change. But then you learn to need someone else. We’re not made to not need each other. Literally.
And if you don’t see why you need other people…That’s proof that you do.
Anyone who is arrogant enough to think they are doing fine on their own already needs others way more than they realize. It’s just insane to not need anyone.
I’m not here to say you can’t live alone, sure, you can live alone in a house, or apartment. That doesn’t mean you’re alone all the time.
Being alone is supposed to be a punishment, in the prison system. It sounded like a lot of people wouldn’t even mind it, if they had WiFi.
Ugh.
I’m so sick of this.
You know, I consider myself an independent woman. I don’t let other people make my decisions for me.
But I rely on my family all the time for things.
I don’t mind relying on men either. Not for everything, but it’s reasonable for some things.
And I really, really don’t see what the big deal is about it.
Why is it so bad? We’re all born needing everything done for us. All we can do is relieve ourselves, which is a metaphor in of itself.
And we learn our whole life to do more things for ourselves, but we do them with other people. If we stop learning form others, we’re saying we arrived.
I think in marriage you have to learn from each other. That used to be the philosophy of a lot of people. You can’t remake your spouse (at least not without breaking them) but you can teach them, and any decent person was expected to learn.
Not now.
And it’s not good for us.
Depression is at an all time high, mental illness of every kind, low self worth.
But our arrogance is through the roof.
You can be arrogant and still have low self worth. You have an elevated idea of your own rights, but a low idea of the value of you even existing to exercise them.
Figures, as soon as we believe we’re the only ones who have any say in our lives, we feel like they have no meaning.
Men especially need other people to feel like they have meaning in their lives. Women do better amusing ourselves even with indirect contact, and having hobbies, but we still need other people too. I do think we tend to cut ourselves of from them less in general
Also, little tip ladies. if you’re gong to complain about the bar being low for men, maybe you should make sure you’re giving them something to actually impress anyone for. Do you really want it to just be about sex?
I have high standards because I have high ones for myself.
This is what I aspire to be:
- Kind
- Honest
- Smart
- Interested in His ( and other peoples) interests, at least enough to be supportive.
- Brave enough to confront a problem and also to admit when I’m wrong.
- Humble enough not to take myself too seriously.
- Confident enough never to not value my part in a relationship or my worth as a person
- Determined enough to always try to find solutions, not just gripe about problems.
- And relaxed enough to let stuff go that doesn’t really matter.
- Not ever thinking I have all the answers, or that I have none of them.
This is just the short list.
I am not all of these things all the time, but I do try to be them.
I’m not expecting someone else to always be like this, but I do expect them to think values are important, and to act be trying to meet them, even if they have slip up.s
I’ve seen enough of people claiming they have values and then not doing jack to fulfill any of them.
And I’m even more scared by people who now don’t care, and don’t think they need values. Except spitting out the SJW programmed ones.
I wouldn’t even mind as much if most of them were honest about it.
Like, I’d rather have someone who is fully convinced that Pride is a moral cause, but at least really believe that, then the many people I know who just say it because it’s what everyone says, they don’t know why they believe it, they don’t care either.
Someone once asked a man on the street what the two biggest problems in our society were:
The man answered “Don’t know, don’t care.”
The questioner said “You’re right, those are the two biggest problems.”
And they are.
We don’t know what’s happening, we don’t know the facts, we don’t know each other.
And when you don’t know, you can’t care.
And we choose not to know, and we choose not to care.
So if I have anything to add to this, it’s that there’s only one solution.
Make a different choice.
That’s literally all you can do about this.
Then teach others to do the same.
We may not stop the culture from doing this, but we don’t have to do it ourselves.
As an aside, i found an article while I was trying to find the quote for this chapter that sort of confirms what I was saying about trust, if you want to check it out:
Until next time, stay honest–Natasha
drybonestruth 