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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Therapeutic culture has somehow managed to turn 3/4th of ordinary human experience into trauma, while at the same time creating a culture hyper focused on feelings and especially negative feelings as facts. If I were to try to cure depression and anxiety I’d spend more time trying to get the person to understand that bad things happen to everybody, that you’ll get better with time, and that focusing on how broken you feel just makes things worse. And until you start living despite the hurt and the “trauma” (which unless you’re fleeing a literal war zone or horrific abuse, is probably something fairly normal to human life) you just aren’t going to heal.

Hard agree.

I think most problems in America are not so hard to solve. We’re just losing our ability to knuckle down and actually do the work. We’re the people looking for ways around having to do work. We want gamification of education, because why should we study, it’s boring and feels like work. We don’t want to count calories and macros and stick to a healthy diet because it’s not as exciting as deep fried raviolis and white sauce pasta. We don’t want to exercise. Instead we’re looking for quick fixes.

Hard disagree. While there's more room for gluttony now, and fat acceptance movements certainly don't help, I don't believe the people of today are fat while our people of the 1970s were thin because the people in the 1970s worked harder at being thin.

Also I'm pretty sure never-becoming-obese-and-staying-thin is a lot easier than becomes-obese-and-now-must-become-thin.

I don't have a study for this but I simply don't believe if you take two thin identical twins, force-feed one until they gain 100 pounds, and then challenge them to lose it, if they even succeed, the one that loses 100 pounds will not be the same as the one who never gained in the first place. The one who lost 100 pounds will almost certainly be ravenously hungry for ever. Like 95% chance of this. Maybe higher.

They probably didn’t think about food as much, but they also lived in a culture where physical activity was normal and expected. Kids were told to play outside, and often played youth sports as well. There were also norms around eating— smaller portions, less snacking, fewer fizzy drinks. A lot of foods are nearly double the size they were in 1970 which doesn’t help, but at the same time, it we had the same food norms as 1970, and cut portions to about 1/2 of what we eat now, ate three meals and a light snack per day, you’d look about like the average person in 1970. (https://www.yourweightmatters.org/portion-sizes-changed-time/)

I think some forms of processing change food such that it doesn’t trip your satiety system. It’s something I’ve observed. A potato is much more filling than the equivalent amount of potato chips. A chicken breast is more filling than the equivalent in nuggets, one homemade cookie is as filling as 4-5 Oreos. I can’t explain why that works, but it seems to.

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