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Freddie deBoer has a new article out in which he argues that our society has become overly permissive (without ever actually using the phrase "the permissive society"). He uses a few recent articles to set the scene (an increasingly defeatist sense among the laptop class that there's no option but to be extremely online; a qualified defense in the New Yorker and New York magazine of the notion of being an iPad parent), before getting into the meat of his argument. Where before our society expected people to behave in a certain way most of the time, increasingly there's a broad sense that all lifestyles are equally valid; that there's nothing wrong with following the path of least resistance (in terms of effort expended), at all times in every sphere of your life; and that people who do hold people to higher standards of behaviour than the bare minimum are being toxic in some way. Where before the expectation was to dress formally in the office, now "smart casual" rules the day (if that); where before it was only profoundly autistic and unemployable men still playing with Lego and cosplaying as Star Wars characters in their thirties, now such behaviour has become entirely normalised among the gainfully employed. The boilerplate celebrity interview question "What book are you currently reading?" was retired years ago: no one is reading books anymore, or if they are, it's the same YA slop their teenage children, nieces and nephews are reading. If modern Anglophone has a telos, it's "umm, let people enjoy things??"
Freddie's point is well-taken and I agree with most of it: Disney and Marvel adults are contemptible, as are adults taking out second mortgages so they can follow Taylor Swift. Grown adults who don't know how to cook proper meals and eat fast/convenience food for every meal should feel ashamed, even if they aren't. Some examples of the trend are conspicuous by their absence: it's interesting that Freddie brings up "adult men who proudly eat nothing but chicken nuggets and Kraft macaroni and cheese" and women wearing snuggies in public without once alluding to the body positivity/health at every size movement, even though it's a perfect example of the relaxing of standards across the board. (I mean, these people spent years complaining about the "toxic and unrealistic beauty standards" promulgated by the fashion industry and social media, and apparently succeeded in replacing them with - nothing.) But one of the specific examples he cites seems oddly in tension with the others:
I agree with him that, in the modern Western world, there's no longer much of an expectation for people to live and present themselves "authentically" : among sufficiently online women, using Instagram filters on your selfies is the rule rather than the exception; cosmetic surgery (in both sexes) is more common than ever; the less said about LinkedIn, the better.
But it occurred to me: for all of the other examples of the trend towards relaxation of standards, isn't this precisely how the people engaging in these lifestyle choices would defend them? "I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin wearing a tie to the office - wearing a hoodie and sweatpants makes me feel more like myself." "I used to read boring grown-up books because that's what was expected of me and people would make fun of me for reading Harry Potter on the tube - I like that now I can read Harry Potter without shame." And so on.
What do you think?
This may be a cheap shot, but this is another of the increasingly many Freddie articles that convince me that he's bubbled, and most importantly, needs to get off Twitter and/or Bluesky. I know he says he doesn't have an account on either, but he's clearly reading both of them, and he's overly concerned about or invested in niche cultural or elite scenes that nobody of sense should be paying attention to.
For instance, just to spork a little bit:
Who is actually watching SNL? Is it important? Why is Freddie watching it, and if he is, why is a mediocre comedy show a pressing issue?
Surely it bears some gentle reminder here that most people don't read New York or The New Yorker, and that the tastes of this small, relatively exclusive group of Americans does not necessarily communicate more than the pathologies of that particular set?
Were they? Every writer I was reading in the 2000s? I can't think of any, and Freddie isn't that much older than me. I seem to remember there was plenty of mainstream entertainment still decrying the concept of selling out - heck, School of Rock is from 2003, and that was sympathetically ranting about the mainstreaming of rock music. Now, twenty years later, I think there are still plenty of people very concerned about selling out - I googled "site:reddit.com selling out" and there appears to be an awareness of what it is and a dislike for it. It may well be true that people writing for prestigious publications don't believe in selling out, but the key there might be the phrase "writing for prestigious publications". Of course the people working for The Man are going to defend The Man! So it has ever been.
Everyone? Really? How many people are actually spending all their time comparing themselves to Instagram models? In this case I genuinely don't know. Statista tells me that about 170 million Americans, or a bit over half the country, is on Instagram. That's a lot. What are the usage patterns among those people? Are they all regular checking Instagram, or is that figure inflated? (It follows Facebook numbers pretty closely and it's owned by the same company - is it just the same account?) I'm not particularly informed here (I have never used Instagram), but my point is just that there are a few more questions I'd ask before concluding that this is actually as ubiquitous as Freddie suggests.
Again, I just ask... is it? Really? Where? By whom? The last I checked, the tabloids like Woman's Weekly at the supermarket checkout were full of celebrity gossip and were still generally perceived as trashy. In what world is he living where the same old celebrity garbage is not low-class?
Once more time I will ask - how prevalent is this type of person actually? Is this a widespread phenomenon, or is this just Freddie reacting to a particularly annoying type of person on the internet? There is a very striking gap between the kind of strange person I can run into on the internet (including, alas, in places like the Motte), and in men I meet in real life or on the street, most of whom, actually, I do see with real jobs and families and realistic long-term aspirations. This is just anecdotes versus anecdotes, but my point is - don't let anecdotes based on a handful of personal experiences shape your picture of an entire generation.
How many thirty-year-olds do you know in real life who would not be embarrassed to admit to having a Star Wars bedspread? How many actually read comic books? It might be worth the gentle reminder that the comics industry is not doing particularly well. Movies are one thing, but comics qua comics just don't seem to be a cultural juggernaut.
'Contemporary elite culture' is the key phrase here. I don't know how the BlueSky hive mind would respond to that question - I haven't asked them. But even if they respond exactly the way Freddie says they would, that is a small, highly-selected-for group, and I would be wary about generalising anything about wider American culture from BlueSky.
I have never heard of Sabrina Carpenter and have no idea who she is. Is it possible - just possible - that Freddie is taking the habits and rhetoric of a highly rarefied group and generalising them to the whole of the Western world?
On a side note:
Hang on, Freddie was criticising selling out before, and now he's in favour of dressing respectably? Does no one else sense a tension here? Is The Man good or bad in this narrative? The Man is the one who says people need to dress nicely and eat their vegetables and read adult novels and not have bedrooms full of science fiction posters and video game figures; but The Man is also the person people sell out to. The Man is the one who defines popular music tastes and demands conformity with them.
Are we supposed to resist and rebel against The Man when it comes to music or art, but obey and conform to The Man when it comes to fashion or interior decoration? Doesn't that seem a bit contradictory? How do you have both at the same time?
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While I am neither much into Star Wars nor own any Lego, my take is that in the grand scheme of things, all past times are equally silly. It used to be that some sorts of silliness were seen as appropriate and proper, such as nobles going hunting (despite not being threatened by food scarcity), or people learning an instrument to signal their sophistication, or sports fans of whatever the socially approved sport was getting very excited about it.
Cosplaying as someone caring about federal politics is just as silly as cosplaying as a member of the rebel alliance: you will no more change the outcome of the presidential election than you will change the outcome of the galactic war. (It is a lot more bitter, though, because the cosplayers take it more seriously.)
Learning a dead language like Latin is just as silly as learning a fantasy language like Klingon. The canon of Latin works is well translated into modern languages, you are unlikely to find new insights by reading the originals. (Granted, the number of people who require Latin for their job is slightly higher than the number who require Klingon, but still a tiny fraction of the population.)
Reading Shakespeare is unlikely to give you unique insights into the human condition you could not have gotten from other sources. Read it if you like, but don't pretend that you are doing something more useful with your time than the person who reads YA novels or smut.
Quite frankly, I am a single man in my late thirties who (like most of my generation) is unlikely to ever earn enough to buy a house near their workplace. But my life could be much worse, e.g. if I tried on top of that to permanently cosplay as a responsible adult and forced to pick up some horrible sport (like running) instead of video gaming or to read books which are considered age-appropriate (is Scifi allowed these days?) or waste another half-hour per day into dressing myself instead of simply picking up my jeans from the floor.
There are actually a number of untranslated(at least to English) Latin works out there. Moral Theology by St. Alphonsus of Ligouri is likely the most prominent.
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My dad is into the South Pole in a big way, and owns dozens of books about various Antarctic expeditions. He once attended this event where all the people pretend they're on such an expedition (may have been Scott's, I can't remember) and dress for the occasion.
Sometime later I won free tickets to our city's Comic-Con. I don't have much interest in this sort of thing, but my girlfriend at the time was a big Marvel fan so we went. I was telling my dad about the cosplayers, and he sort of scoffed at what a silly way it was to spend one's time. I pointed out that, while it's certainly silly, it's not objectively more silly than cosplaying as an Antarctic expeditioner in a warm and dry restaurant.
Hard disagree. It's true that the insights gained from Shakespeare can be gained from other sources, because Shakespeare's insights are in the water supply. But spending hours poring over The Tempest at least has a chance of resulting in you understanding something new about the human condition (even if you could have learned the same thing in a shorter period of time from a more accessible source), whereas I think learning anything noteworthy from reading smut is more or less impossible.
While I broad-strokes agree with you that some hobbies considered high-status are no less silly than certain hobbies which are considered low-status, I'm not going to go the full cultural relativist maximally nihilistic "it's all bullshit anyway". I do actually believe that good things are good. Ceterus paribus, pastimes which actively engage the mind, the body or both are more edifying than those which do not. Of course learning Klingon is a waste of time in the scheme of things, but I would still rather someone put the effort into learning Klingon than simply passively watch TOS for the fifteenth time. Even if the only reason you're going to the gym is so that your Thor cosplay is more convincing, that's a hell of a lot better than not working out at all.
I also disagree that your life would be worse if you took up running. I mean, it could be, but I found it did wonders for my mood and energy levels, and I'm far from alone in reporting that experience.
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A lot of what Freddy is pointing to is actually just extended adolescence- adults acting like teenagers(and usually not particularly cool teenagers, they’re not larping as football quarterbacks here). Judging this is against the neomorality; acting in a way which implies judgement of this lifestyle is an act of judgement- I think this is the real reason behind the progressive horror of age gap relationships, and lots of other strange seeming blue tribe ideas about sex, dating, child rearing, and marriage.
There’s other neomorality components as well, but to argue that modern blue tribe mores just amount to ‘judge not, whatever floats your boat brother’ like the hippies of old- you realize the hippies are republicans now, the guys pushing neomorality were the preps. There’s definitely a code even if it’s stupid and allows lots of things it probably shouldn’t. But it’s more likely to be a moral inversion than a true laissez faire.
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It's bizarre to me that De Boer here can't recognize his own massive blindspots, and realize that he's written an article not about America but about the dynamics of white Blue Tribers. He writes extensively about music, and never mentions Country, only Pop (which he despises) and 90s Punk or Indie (which he valorizes). He writes extensively about the concept of Selling Out in the year of our Lord 2024, and never mentions Donald Trump, the dominant figure of American (and by extension, world) politics for a decade now, who is the embodied avatar of Selling Out. He skips talking about the current kerfuffle in Congress, in which a rich man is openly threatening to fund primary challengers against sitting politicians who go against him. When he discusses celebrities, they are exclusively the celebrities he cares about, not the ones that have dominated other branches of American culture.
He writes about culture becoming a series of fakes, without talking about the physical manifestations of this: licensing deals. Professional sports jerseys used to be made in the USA, largely for a while in Pennsylvania by Majestic. It used to be possible when I was a kid to go to the Majestic Factory Outlet here, and actually buy factory seconds or overruns of jerseys. Now, Majestic is just a license owned by a corporation, Fanatics, who manufactures all of the jerseys and gear through contracts with other companies, which actually make the jerseys in China or El Salvador or Vietnam. The question of whether Fanatics or Nike or Under Armor or Reebok gets the uniform contract is purely one of which logo is placed on the jersey, the actual manufacturing will be bid out largely to the same foreign manufacturers regardless. Yet the price of an "authentic" jersey is the same, or higher, than it ever was. What does authenticity mean in that case? It's mostly a legal concept, this jersey is authentic because some money was paid to the team and the league. But it no longer really signifies quality, no longer really signifies particular skill in its creation, or even that it was made in the same way or in the same factory as the professional jerseys. Everybody knows that the item is being made by contract factories.
And this is true for virtually every fashion brand, even most high end fashion brands outside of Hermes and a few others don't have their own factories and craftsmen. Even bags that brag that they are "made in Italy" are often made by Chinese workers who have been imported to Tuscany so that the label can be applied.
It used to be possible to purchase an item that was meaningfully "authentic" and one that was meaningfully "fake." The authentic jersey was properly made from high quality materials in Pennsylvania, the fake was cheaply made in China. Now the on-field pants are so bad that you can tell the fake jerseys in the stands because they are nicer. And anyway, they're all made in some contract factory overseas. So what makes one "authentic" and the other "fake?" What makes a real Chanel a real Chanel?
The reason the idea of "authenticity" has been abandoned is because it always resulted in something incoherent, an endless internecine conflict over minutiae. Punk was largely a cultural failure. I don't know why Freddie is trying to resurrect it.
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It's useful to have a bit of historical perspective of what's considered acceptable or necessary. For example, the tuxedo--currently the most formal of men's wear--was originally casual-wear among upper-class:
It took about two decades for the tux to get accepted as formal wear--in US, which as now are far more into being informal:
Another example: the corset. I remember watching a Perry Mason episode (thought I can't remember which one) where the female witness gets scolded for not wearing a corset to court. The exact quote: "Save the jingle for the husband." That's either late 1950's or early 1960's.
Another example: jeans, which were worker's clothes.
I am very happy that, when I go in public, I am not expected to put on a corset and stockings and wear heeled pumps, à la 1950's. My knees thank me that I can wear sneakers; my legs are much warmer in the winter in jeans or warm cargo pants, and it's nobody's business what underwear--if any--I choose to wear. If that means that I have to encounter people who chose to go out in crocks, sweatpants and a tube-top, then that's a trade-off I am willing to take.
While we are at it, I will also throw in the Chinese foot binding:
There are many historical examples of norms and expectations that are either arbitrary or actively counterproductive. Therefore, when a current norm or expectation is getting relaxed, I would examine it on its own merit before decreeing it bad. Is a business suit really superior than "smart casual" for all white-collar work?
(Personal anecdote: I know an NVIDIA software engineer whose boss explicitly warned him to not wear a tie to work. In software engineering lore, the shirt-and-tie is associated with the famous IBM dress-code for its engineers, and therefore it's associated with stodgy, inflexible corporate ethos.)
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I think this is inadequately handled.
https://www.thecut.com/article/gen-z-ipad-kids-generation-screen-time.html I just clicked through to his first link about iPad kids. On the issue of raising children in a big city like New York, my impression is that in the past the norm was to live near relatives and trusted acquaintances (co-religionist or co-ethnic, for instance), and let bands of roving kids wander the neighborhood with little parental involvement, to be called back for dinner. Now, they know people from different parts of town, meet up at a park, then go out to lunch together at a restaurant. That is not inherently lower effort than the previous arrangement. They might not have to keep their apartment clean or cook lunch, but now they have to keep children quiet in a restaurant, which doesn't really allow adult conversations.
The kids don't have permission to do what they would prefer, such as playing a game, so they settle for the permission they can get, to watch a show on a phone, which is still better than fidgeting and getting dirty looks. That is not necessarily permissive, though, since their first choice of running around, playing, and exploring is denied them. I don't get the impression that kids are eager for permission to watch more shows. They're much more eager for permission to take small risks. I offered some kids the opportunity to look at stuff on their chrome books or chip away at little pieces of soapstone. They strongly preferred the stone, but I stopped because it's too loud for the adults. That is not permissive. There is no permission to make noise and accidentally hurt a finger. It would be more permissive in the case of the restaurant to give them a little playground like fast food places used to have.
As a teen and young adult, I read Classics. Lately, I've been reading Brandon Sanderson novels. This is because I had a lot of free time then, and don't have it now. The Motte and Sanderson novels are compatible with brain fog from waking up every few hours to feed an infant, and interacting with other young children every few minutes, while Kant is not. I don't really have a good model of what's going on with Taylor Swift or Marvel fans (are there still Marvel fans left?). As I recall, Don Quixote was basically a spoof about a man who read a lot of Star Wars novels, thought that Jedi were real, and then decided that he was one. I gave up because the second hand cringe was too strong, not something that I can recall happening with any other novels.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about reading Sanderson instead of Dostoyevsky as permissiveness. The latter is, of course, better, but I'm tired and my memory is bad. I'm unable to read it after working and caring for children. My parents are retired, and reading Dostoyevsky again. They have a little book club. They have permission to spend time on good books, permission to spend the best part of the day on that, instead of on working.
Again, a lot of people don't seem to feel permission to be an ordinary person, doing a slightly below average 9 - 5 job, sending their kids to the ordinary public school, to themselves become an average person living an average life. Who can work a stable job at Kodak for 30 years? "Many people have lamented that kids these days say they want to be famous YouTubers instead of astronauts." Sure. The only astronauts I know anything about are the ones that got stranded because Boeing messed up bringing them back. Which was a story entirely about how unreliable Boeing now is, and not at all about the astronauts themselves.
I was chaperoning a kids' dance party this week. The kids don't know how to dance, even things like the Cupid Shuffle, where they literally call out the moves. Some attempts were made to do that dance where they squat, bounce, and throw their legs out, kind of like in Russian dancing. The dance they attempted was harder than normal folk dancing, but at least known. This was because they don't know how to dance, not because we're so permissive we let them dance however they want. They probably want to be taught how to dance. The adults might even prefer to teach them a dance, but didn't necessarily have permission to do so, or knowledge of how to go about it.
On clothing, I likewise don't necessarily find the mess that is our current clothing choices to be permissive, so much as burnt out or depressed. People mostly aren't dressing in clothing that they love and find beautiful for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Straight men don't seem to have a ton of choice for what to wear in public, outside of special interest clubs. They're dressing in jeans and hoodies because that's the cultural norm, to which they are dutifully adhering. I like Uniqlo clothing and follow their collaborations. There was a surprising amount of buzz this fall about slightly less terrible looking sweatpants. They sold out! They come in not only grey and black, but wine! So exciting. Theoretically, people have permission to wear all sorts of things. Actually, they are so confused and guilt ridden, they wear the same dress a hundred days in a row. That is not a sign of permission.
I'm not sure what's going on with the adults eating exclusively chicken nuggets and Mac & cheese, but it sounds like depression again? Or an eating disorder? It certainly doesn't sound enjoyable.
It is not time for me to make an effort post on this, so I offer instead some fragmented thoughts.
Or in general, they do not know how to ask, and we don't know how to answer.
This is how 100% of the young men I know operate (though it's not how I've seen boys operate, so naturally there's some hope left). It's universal. Where are all the women [effectively] flashing their tits at young men who take risks, anyway? (I am not a woman so I can't be part of the solution; men actually can't do this outside of very specific circumstances.)
This is a Boomer-parent-specific problem in general. We're 40 years into our society-wide 100-year Prohibition/Panic cycle on the kid-snatching thing so this is going to continue being a problem for the next 50 years.
It is society's allergy to risk that destroyed them. Scared their kids will touch a needle in the ballpit (wtf?), scared they'll get sick or hurt, scared of the inevitable lawsuit, scared of the judge that will find in the plaintiff's favor with financially ruinous results.
Yeah, but the men who really do this all converge on women's clothing these days. I prefer looser pants, and always have (there are a few things I'm not willing to compromise my otherwise high agreeableness on; this is one of them, not that I really need to do it these days), partially because of high sensitivity in relevant areas (mainly around the waist), but long skirts (and tights, when applicable; it's literally just long underwear lol) are warmer (they trap air, like a wetsuit does) and are easier to move around in than jeans are. They're softer and available in a wider variety of materials, too. If they fit better I wouldn't wear anything else. This happens with undergarments too; the male ones are bulky and relatively uncomfortable, but the female ones that still function when applied to male anatomy are actually the exact thing I want [provided I can hide that I'm doing it perfectly; this isn't actually a sex thing, but most people will take it as one, obviously]. While certain manufacturers have tried to make this for men, they put a stupid seam at the bottom length-wise, which defeats the entire purpose.
And this ultimately bleeds into their children. They stop asking. The "kids are naturally rebellious" meme is something Boomers have exposure to but not something that naturally happens if you're a half-competent parent (to the point that I believe the rebellious ones simply had incompetent parents, or ones that would fail to be consistent because 'it was convenient for my kid to take risks in childhood when they were small, now they're teen-aged and want to take larger ones and I'm big mad about that').
This is why, if they make the mistake of appearing before me, I tend to address them directly, because they aren't going to do that themselves. My goal when I meet one is, ultimately, to encourage the expression of... uh, expression in an environment of "everyone you know hates you, wishes you were dead/wishes you'd just go back to the iPad, and your co-ethnics won't help because they have internalized the exact same message, it's For Your Safety".
It's not exactly rocket science to figure out why teenagers are shunning drugs and having less sex. They have internalized "not an adult" (it's like that thing the kids do in IT, but in reverse, where not being an adult is the thing that gives you protection from the invisible clown that lives in the sewers) and they'll stay that way until they die- their kids will probably be all right, though, shame it'll cost them all their good years before they figure that out.
The first step to fixing a problem is making sure those affected are even acknowledging there's a problem with it in the first place.
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I work with a guy who's an extremely picky eater. Every day for lunch he eats a cheese toastie from the nearby garage. His wife cooks him chicken nuggets and chips for dinner every night. The team once went out for lunch at a nearby Thai restaurant, and he had a bowl of ice cream.
While it will not surprise to learn that he is rail thin (almost emaciated) and his teeth are in shockingly poor shape, he gives no outward impression of being depressed at least as far as I can see.
Well, let's put it this way.
Most kinds of meal and by extension every ingredient has some kind of unpleasant taste to it. Sometimes, I plan meals based on what unpleasant taste I'm OK with submitting to on that particular night, and if the only things I have in my fridge are or add up to that, I go out for a burger or tendies instead if I have the opportunity to do so. (This can also happen with scents, and maybe a more extreme pickiness is created when the two are combined- though scents usually prompt initial aversion.)
Some of these ingredients have worse tastes than others, or those tastes are stronger in some people (insert "kids hate brussel sprouts" meme here, which I've always found pretty weird- though a good chunk of this is just parents being shit at cooking and just forgetting about certain things because they haven't eaten anything truly new in 20 years: he's not resisting the food to be difficult, he's resisting the food because it smells terrible right when you open the box and you forgot that matters).
I believe most people experience this with intentionally bad-tasting things- beer's the best example, because they're all bitter and awful as an inherent property of being beer. But it's the kind of unpleasantness, or the unpleasantness you are actively tolerating for other reasons, that makes it a viable beverage. Coffee is the same way, to a point- the reason people put cream and sugar in it is because they aren't actually in it for the coffee taste, they're doing it for other reasons. It's a coffee-flavored warm milkshake at that point, and I like milkshakes because they're milkshakes, not because they're coffee-flavored. (Most specialty coffee is absurd to me for this reason: because a lot of it is made to express the coffee flavor, and that flavor is bad- otherwise you wouldn't have to add sugar and cream and chocolate to it- so why would I want to spend 5 dollars on that when I can just get the cheap drip coffee and season it to the coffee-flavored-warm-milkshake taste that I actually wanted in the first place?)
The exception to those things are so-called "hyper palatable" foods. Your burgers, your tendies, your toaster pastries. There are very few distinct or recognizable ingredients in them, and so the possible space of undesirable tastes and textures is minimized (and in the case of processed foods this is either intentional or an emergent property in their development)- except perhaps for the store-bought frozen ones. Those are all turbo-garbage and they aren't even any cheaper; I don't know why anyone buys those outside of something their kid can prepare on their own when required. The frozen pizzas are like that too.
Take Doritos, for instance: it's a corn chip with good-tasting stuff on it. Or a McDonald's cheeseburger: it's [homogenized] beef, a slice of [homogenized] cheese, mustard and ketchup (both highly consistent mass produced substances), and maybe a bit of pickle (whose method of preparation is consistent and results in a taste that dominates what the cucumber originally may have tasted like). Pizza does that, tendies do that (bonus points for being a sauce-delivery mechanism; also, the McDonald's Szechuan sauce actually was as good as the meme suggested), toaster pastries do that, PB&J does that (though this kind of sandwich is actually really unpleasant to eat).
Contrast that with, say, a fancier curry (not the Glico stuff): you have all the ingredients in the sauce (including the fish sauce, ugh), the peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. You get a larger cross-section over which taste can go wrong (and... if you don't put those things in, it's just not curry) and it stinks up your kitchen something fierce because that's just what garum-based cuisine does (actually, lots of stuff does this- roast beef in particular is fucking awful for this; I can't begin to count the number of times I'd get home from school and smell that in the oven, but because it would take time between the 'oven's on, something's cooking' signal and the 'this is roast beef, not cookies' signal it'd be a cocktease 100% of the time).
I suspect this is heritable; my folks cook the absolute shit out of everything they make (everything's gotta be well done) and don't appear to actively enjoy eating what they make, but what they do make other than that are very simple 3-ingredient casseroles (or meatballs, or what they call chili) that take the form of what I described above. Of course, that's also very vulnerable to low-quality ingredients or the mix being wrong, and if one of the ingredients is changed then you literally can't make it any more.
On the rare occasions I cook, I also depend 100% on recipes. I can't "season to taste" when I don't know what it's even supposed to taste like, or if I do that, one of the ingredients on its own tastes bad anyway/once you can taste it, it's too late to season it; it doesn't help that I'm constitutionally incapable of chopping things in a way that doesn't mash them to bits (nobody else has a problem with this).
So if you're in control of what you eat, and you can spend 10 bucks on one of those store-bought BBQ chickens or get tendies instead, I'll take the tendies every single fucking time, because those chickens tend to be dry, under-seasoned, slimy, and you have to take them apart to eat them- why the absolute fuck would I take the effort to do that, or expect anyone else to, when the tendies are strictly superior 100% of the time if I'm in the mood for chicken?
Maybe it's learned helplessness; maybe if I did meal prep for the same meal 10 times and recorded exactly what I did, I could gradient descent my way into the tastiest possible version of a dish 100% of the time (which I think is what those meals-in-a-box promise, but they don't advertise that fact- the reason I don't want to cook is because it takes a half hour to chop everything and the produce I'd have to buy is always sub-par at best, which those services do not solve). But I don't think that's worth the cost or effort because that would take me literally all day and I can just go out for a fucking burger instead- maybe when I can no longer do that I'll consider it, or I'll be making food for my [hopefully future] wife and I can at least customize or appreciate it for that reason instead.
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Chad tendie-maxxer vs. Virgin balanced-and-varied-diet fan.
god_i_wish_that_were_me.jpg. Only partially kidding. In some ways, it'd be nice to be so unaffected by flavor fatigue and the culinary Coolidge Effect such that I could eat the same things every day and not get tired of them. Especially if someone prepared them for me to bypass the sandwich effect. It would be embarrassing ordering off the kids' and dessert menus each time going out with co-workers, though, particularly as a man.
While not entirely surprising, if you told me in isolation someone ate cheese toasties, chicken nuggets, and chips everyday, I'd guess it was someone on some sort of poor man's dirty bulk diet (maybe more like unhoused man's dirty bulk diet). Usually I'd hypothesize the terrible teeth would be mostly due to poor oral hygiene and not diet, but given how wedded he is to eat-hot-chip-and-tendie, perhaps there is some real nutritional deficiency and/or microbiome issue there as the primary causal mechanisms.
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Interesting, I wonder what's going on there? And whether social pressure would get him to eat more variety, or just cut him off socially? It seems like it might be a problem if they have kids, though now the schools offer free lunches even on breaks I guess.
My uncle once talked my father (baker at 5 star restaurant, foodie of the French and James Beard tradition) into eating more wasabi with his sushi than he preferred. He talked for several days about how much he regretted it, and how annoyed he was.
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This is a great post.
One of the problems adults seem to have is assuming that kids have no agency in their interpretation of their instructions from adults. One of the classic examples is the Participation Trophy, widely decried for making kids think they did something when they didn't. I grew up at peak participation trophy, I have a box of them somewhere or other. Little marble bases with little plastic baseball players on top, given to me for playing first base on a winless team when I was nine years old or so. Most critics think that the problem is that kids will think they achieved something that they didn't, and maybe some did, but all I got was a distaste for trophies in general. I had some trophies, they weren't interesting, why worry about them?
On the other hand, when I was 12, and my little league team went 18-0 and made it to regional playoffs, and one of the parents had little pullover windbreakers made for that team, I valued that jacket greatly. I still have it, somewhere. Achievement is an objective fact, strength is an objective fact, beauty is an objective fact. Attempts to hide the ball will simply create new instances of Euphemism Treadmills.
In the same way, I think a lot of what is getting criticized as childishness by Freddie is in reality a warped view of maturity inflicted on kids. Being quiet, being compliant, being unobtrusive, are all traits that are valued and rewarded in children. Then we find ourselves with adults who grew up that way and wonder what happened.
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Are these not still a thing where you are? I see lots of them.
Not really. We went to one with a wooden ship play fort in Louisiana, and it was lovely until we got rained out. I think Chick fil-a has them here.
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Amusingly literary opinion seems to switch between:
vs.
at regular intervals
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Man, I don't agree with this at all! I feel like our hyper-online society is increasingly sorting into hyper-specific bubbles with very strict standards of how you're supposed to behave, with harsh criticism of anyone who doesn't follow the norms. And now that everyone owns a smartphone with an HD-camera, there's increasing pressure to present yourself online with an absolutely perfect selfie in a killer pose. When I look at my parents' old photos, it's mostly blurry polaroids in awkward poses because none of them were expected to be pro models.
I read "No Filter" a while back (great book, btw) and Instagram has actively fought this pressure throughout its existence. They want more content developed, not less, after all.
I have to say, though, that I don't feel like I can't post a sloppy picture, but I do have a bit of a responsibility to my friends who follow me not to create worthless content. A drunken, wheedling, and weepy Facebook status is inflicted on dozens of people instead of being saved for a conversation. A grainy photo of some crappy sandwich isn't interesting. Hell - if I comment here it should have at least some trivial value.
If you're taking up your audience's time, you should care a little about making it interesting. Sometimes, it's not more nefarious than that.
Ok, but what makes it interesting? It used to be that people took photos to comemorate a real moment in time. That "grainy photo of some crappy sandwich" might be the sandwich you ate on your birthday, or you wedding, or your graduation, or whatever. Now, people have to get a catered sandwitch with a professional-looking photo to "remember" those occasions.
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Rules on attire have relaxed but other rules around work have become stringent. Smoking and drinking when staying late at your white collar office job is obviously gone; off-color and boyish humor is gone; flirting with female employees at work is gone. Progressive shibboleths have been instituted. Where you go to school matters more, whether you’ve stayed at the same job matters more. Appearance of hair and teeth matter more. So is the workplace really more “relaxed”? It’s just no longer uniform regarding clothing, but it’s less-permissive in a whole lot of other areas.
A lot of this is that non-fiction is filled with filler as it’s considered more respectable to publish a book rather than a pamphlet or booklet (so diminutive!). You can glean a lot of the valuable information of a non-fiction book from reading reviews and seeing discussions online.
I dunno, a lot of the filler in non brilliant non fiction books is serving the role of making space for you to think about something a lot, and trying multiple ways to teach something to up the odds of it lodging in the reader's mind. You can read a one page version of Atomic Habits and get all the actual informational content, but you won't have marinaded in it and spent time applying the advice to your own life in the way that you will if you read the whole thing. The ideas won't come across as so throwaway.
I'm truly not citing Atomic Habits as some example of genius! It's just I really don't think it's only status considerations that are driving book length works with relatively little informational content.
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The first sign of a dullard is that they read non-fiction.
Harsh, but fair.
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I read a great deal of non-fiction and I still snorted at this.
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I love you for this. Wow. I forgive all our previous arguments and even your comment about humans being machines. ;P
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Boooo! Some nonfiction is great.
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Hey, I read non-fiction! 😡
I do engage with a ton of fictional content, although it’s generally not in the form of novels. (I’ve recently started reading novels again as part of a sort of two-person book club with my mother, but it’s still not generally my preferred mode of imaginative reading.)
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I like authenticity because maintaining some persona that is at odds with my more natural behavior just plain takes energy I'd rather not have to spend that way. I also like authenticity in others because that makes it easier to interact with them, thanks to not having to try and guess what's real and what's acting.
But I wouldn't want give up standards just because I authentically would naturally like to be much lazier than the reasonably industrious professionalism I try to live up to. I'd rightfully be judged as a worse person. Hell - what if everyone else gave up theirs, too? No amount of judgement could save us then. Judging others for their behavior is very obviously good, and having standards is in my opinion a question of how to define them rather than some categorical question of whether or not to have them at all, and if so then just as the status quo is. And man, I wish people would loudly advertise their standards so that socially inept morons like me won't be reliant on futile attempts to read the room.
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RE: the authenticity point, I noticed sometime in the last decade that whole subcultures seem to have mostly died out and there certainly seem to be no new ones arising.
Has anyone actually seen a 'hipster' in real life recently? Is anyone still seriously going around trying to live the Goth or Emo lifestyle, are Metalheads still a distinct, recognizable class of music fans? And this is going to sound weird, but even hip-hop/urban culture seems to have reigned in their stylistic excesses. I haven't seen sagging pants, spinning rims on blinged out Cadillacs or absurdly long chains with absurdly large pendants in a long time. OCCASIONALLY some slightly new music genre spins out but the vast majority of popular music these days seems to fall into about 4 genres.
The only pimped out rides I notice these days are usually lifted trucks with underbody lights.
Its like, despite living in the single best possible era for people with niche, 'esoteric,' and bespoke interests and tastes, we seem to be homogenizing more than ever.
If we are maximally permissive, and there are no real social standards to 'transgress' against perhaps everyone just sort of gravitates to the nearest cluster of peers and just apes their style, with minor variations. You can't be 'counter' to any social rules if the rules don't actually forbid much. I suppose nudity is still taboo.
I say this as someone who hasn't really changed my personal style in about 20 years. So it felt like everyone was making things up as they went along either way, but now they're not even bothering to make it up, they just pick from approximately 3, maybe 5 predefined style palettes and buy the recommended brands and then they're good to go. Maybe they change a bit with the seasons. Pumpkin spice gives way to Peppermint Mocha.
My previous job was the first job I’ve had in 20 years where none of my coworkers wore a metal band shirt. Yes, they very much are. Long (preferably black) hair, all black clothes, band shirt.
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Yes and I work with two.
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Yes, to all of the above. Have you actually been to any metal shows lately? I have, and I assure you that there are still tons of people there who are very visually-identifiable as “metalheads”. Sleeve tattoos, facial piercings, black band T-shirts, etc. There are still plenty of goths, too. To the extent that “hipster” ever meant anything coherent, there are still plenty of hipsters, too.
There are also plenty of musical subgenres all over — both new entries in genres you’d recognize, and totally new genres you wouldn’t know anything about unless you sought them out. Young people are still innovating musically, no more and no less than they were thirty years ago. Perhaps you are just out of touch with what’s new and hip among the new generation? There’s no shame in that; it happens to everyone.
I'll push back on this some. Yes, if you go to the events specifically for this group, you'll find people dressed up for the occasion, and you'll get the impression the culture is strong and the fanbase is numerous. Doesn't really tell you how many of them are actually consider it a significant part of the identity.
I'll also ask, what's the median age of the members of the crowd these days?
As far as I can tell, sleeve tattoos and facial piercings don't necessarily mark you as any particular subculture anymore. A sleeve tattoo could be a biker, a veteran, an SJW, or a handful of other And part of my point is I haven't seen people wearing those black band shirts out in public very often.
I don't think the kids these days are falling into the 'standard' categories where they define themselves in large part by the music they listen to. I'm also guessing they don't attend concerts with the same regularity as previous generations.
What are some examples? Because every so often I DO go seeking out new genres because I get bored with music pretty quickly these days. I've found spinoffs of known genres, like Argent Metal or Folk Metal. I discovered The Hu in 2020 and Bloodywood in 2021, and more recently Gloryhammer.
But none of those have achieved much 'mainstream' cachet, they're simply not , and they aren't playing at large venues, although occasionally they'll be the opener for a larger act.
The only genre I can think of that seems 'new' is Phonk, which is pretty interesting on its own and get more interesting when you combine it with metal
I'll just point to the part of my comment where I said "as someone who hasn't really changed my personal style in about 20 years." I have literally never been in touch with what's 'new and hip,' so my exposure to it was usually what percolated through to everyday life. And my point is in 'everyday life' I'm not seeing the folks who are obviously identifiable as metalheads, goths, emo, or hiphopheads as often as it feels like I used to.
I don't want us to talk past each other. I hear you saying "These scenes are alive and well! There's dedicated fans and active bands and there are regulars shows at many venues!" And I'm replying "Great. Awesome, but their penetration into the overculture appears to be virtually nil."
Although I have heard from friends in Nashville that the current scene for Country and Blues is on fire right now, as old as those genres are.
So, here’s where I somewhat agree with you: There are far fewer people nowadays who define themselves in terms of their relationship to a single genre of music, in opposition to other genres. My mother is a traditional Gen X metalhead; she was going to thrash metal shows as a teenager in the 80’s, and has made “I listen to metal music” a central pillar of her identity for her entire adult life. I was raised around this (by her, at least — my father’s musical tastes are significantly more broad) and I have a very intimate exposure to the way that culture operated both when she was younger and when I was first entering into it.
One of its central tenets was: we hate pop music, we’re separate from mainstream culture, we’re proud to listen to metal and nothing but metal. Watching TV shows like VH1’s Most Metal Moments, this was driven home to me; being “metal” meant hating mainstream culture, and it usually also meant partying extremely hard and engaging in varying degrees of antisocial behavior. (Example: Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx fatally overdosed on heroin, but was resuscitated back to life. He partied so hard he literally died and lived to tell the tale! How metal is that?!)
Needless to say, I found these aspects of the culture extremely cringe and alienating, combined with the wanton interpersonal violence I witnessed and at times experienced in the “mosh pit” at metal shows. I drifted away from the culture, even as I continued to be interested in the music. I ceased to make “listening to metal, and making sure other people know I listen to metal” an important part of my self-image, and I embraced listening to a wide variety of genres. I saw no reason to feel embarrassed to listen to Job For A Cowboy and to Katy Perry in the same day. I think that most people my age and younger have embraced this sense of being musically and culturally omnivorous. Even someone who decides to cultivate a visual aesthetic of being a metalhead — the piercings, the tattoos, the dyed black hair, the black band T-shirts and ripped jeans and denim jackets with iron-on patches — is very often okay with also partaking in the fruits of other subcultures. In other words, millennials and zoomers don’t do “guilty pleasures”. If something brings me pleasure — especially something as harmless and anodyne as listening to a particular song — why on earth should I feel guilty about it? So yes, in that sense, subcultures have become more permeable and less dedicated to exclusivity.
As for specific musical genres/subgenres that have only become popular in the last 5-10 years, I could name a few: K-pop, hyperpop, synthwave/vaporwave, drill rap, rap-country, and, as you named, phonk. I’d also point to significant shifts or evolutions in particular genres which had been previously established. For example, Latin pop and reggaeton have undergone something of a renaissance and mass popularization with acts like Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Ozuna, Rosalía, and Anitta. Hip-hop and pop-punk have begun an interesting fusion at the hands of acts like Machine Gun Kelly, Sueco, POORSTACY, Iann Dior, and Magnolia Park. And then in the realm of indie rock, there’s been a sort of refinement of the vague constellation of the new-wave/post-punk-influenced dance-rock sound popularized in the aughts by bands like The 1975, The Killers, Phoenix, and Two Door Cinema Club. Newer bands like The Strike, Sub-Radio, Wild Cub, and The Griswolds have strengthened the 80’s synthpop influences, and have also integrated elements of disco as well as some of the African-influenced sounds from Paul Simon’s Graceland album.
As to the question of whether young people attend concerts as often as they did thirty years ago, my assumption is that they probably don’t, but I don’t have any strong data to back that up. Certainly some newer acts like Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Travis Scott, and Khalid can still fill up arenas of young people. They’re still breaking into the overculture, despite none of them merely aping older musical styles.
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Division of labor and specialization.
Maybe this isn't quite the same because I actually know how to cook quite a few dishes well, but I've chosen to do so less and less over the years as my net worth has increased. The value I place upon my leisure time has been increasingly, highly non-zero. After spending a large part of my day/week wagecucking, or at least salarycucking, the last thing I want to do in my spare time is more work.
Cooking is rather time intensive—not just the act of cooking itself, but moreso the cleaning afterward. Just like you pay a Person of Hookery not for the sex, but rather to go away.
I could spend hundreds of USD a year having my slop delivered to me, or picking it up, and it's barely a drop in the bucket compared to the impact of a typical day's market movement on my portfolio. When I do have my slop delivered, it's multiple entrees (saving the rest for later days) so I at least get some economies of scale relative to the relatively fixed costs of delivery fees and tipping.
Thus, I don't feel ashamed at all. The situation might be different if I were the stereotypical urban young person making low six figures (the first digit closer to being a 9 than a 2) in a VHCOL area with little saved/invested, having my avocado toast or whatever delivered to me one meal at a time for 30 USD a pop.
I mean, my grandpa has massive gaps in his culinary knowledge. He will admit that he probably should know how to cook many things he doesn’t, but that he’s older and never really had much reason to learn.
Grown adults who can’t cook isn’t new. When he was my age his wife cooked, his wife still cooks, and in the unlikely event she passes before him(she’s younger in addition to the tendency for men to die earlier), he’ll eat fast food or be cooked for by his children or live in a nursing home.
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Food delivery isn't very good specialization. There is a major agency problem. Restaurants are incentivized to make food cheap and tasty, but health and nutrition are opaque to you. You have no control over portion sizes. Everything is premixed which makes reheating leftovers in a satisfying way difficult. It's also kind of an all-or-nothing thing; if you get food delivered regualrly, you don't gain the skills to cook well, and ingredients become difficult to use in time since you don't cook often enough.
I'm saying this as someone who did this myself; it may have saved some time, but in retrospect, I think learning to cook is important even for people who can afford delivery regularly. The exception is if you're actually rich enough to pay someone to cook for you; the rich man with a personal chef has none of these problems. But subsisting on slop from grubhub is sort of an awkward in-between.
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I don't think personally cooking one's own meals was ever the standard for men living in cities. Or women with money, running a moderate household. I'm not sure how meaningful it is that they would hire a cook directly, rather than a courier. But Freddie, at least, is a communist, and probably opposed to the ways of wealthy households.
I don't know about all flavors of communism, but Soviet Union ideal was that everyone eat at canteens.
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I wouldn't think to judge a millionaire for indulging in the screamingly bad deal that is food delivery but.... what about the other parts? The generation of a ton of useless plastic and other trash, the total inability to get a fresh french fry, the inability to actually know when your food will be there, the general inconsistency....
Every time I get food delivered, it feels the opposite of luxurious. Unless it's pizza or sushi, I only feel ripped off and pathetic.
Then again I'm in a tier 2 city suburb. Door Dash may perform better in a tight urban center.
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I don’t think you shouldn’t feel ashamed. My first digit (at least in USD) is closer to a 9 than a 2 and I still enjoy cooking. The relationship between your food and you should be healthy. Call it spiritual garbage, but so is much of our relationship with human civilization.
To cook feels to me fundamentally healthy. It is satisfying. And I find that - Michelin starred restaurants aside - I can do better in thirty minutes in my own kitchen than pretty much anyone available on the apps.
I'm not in a position to have food delivered, but I find that almost any pre-prepared Costco meal is better than one I cooked (they keep up with the trends; they have birria now). We still cook from raw meat and root vegetables about half the time, but unless it's a taco or something, there's a marinade, some kind of eggs and crumbs or else cooked in a pan and deglazed, then some kind of roasting for one to six hours. The tacos are not bad, but also not better than from a food truck, and with less variety. I absolutely cannot cook proper beans, but I think it takes 8 hours and a piece of pork fat. We can't bring ourselves to eat enough beans to justify that.
Beans take longer than that.
More evidence I should stick with takeout beans.
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Whereas to me it is tedious and unfulfilling. If I were doing it for someone else that might be different, but it’s just spending an hour of my life (I’m clumsy so prep and cleaning takes forever) to accomplish something that lasts a few hours at best. And the result is inferior to any restaurant.
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I meant in the other direction, i.e., closer to $99,999 than $200,000. The stereotypical urban young person does not make closer to $900,000 than $299,999.
I wouldn't call it spiritual garbage, but I don't think or feel in such a manner.
There is a certain satisfaction to it, but there too lies the opportunity cost of leisure time and effort. I don't know about 30 minutes—especially when including cleaning time—but I also believe I generally cook better than most mainstream restaurants, at least the dishes I'm good at. I've gotten pretty good reviews from dates and family. However, the former is likely biased in me having a halo effect by the nature of the occurrence, and the latter is biased in that we likely like similar flavor profiles (and I've appropriated many ingredients/techniques from them).
The sandwich effect, flavor fatigue, and the culinary Coolidge Effect whack away at the enjoyment I get out of my own food.
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I guess I don’t see anything unhealthy about the thought process, “Somebody who does this for a living, and whose job it is to cook food, is likely going to do a better job than I would at making this dish. Also, that person is on the clock at that restaurant anyway and would still be preparing someone else’s food, even if it’s not mine, whereas I’m off the clock and could be using this time for leisure instead of for cooking.”
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Declaring one's own aesthetic preferences to be moral precepts was supposed to be a conservative failing, not one of old-school commies.
"Proper business attire" wasn't handed down from the Gods, it didn't even become that until the earliest 20th century.
C.S. Lewis answered that one:
Should be expected from a communist. His error here is he's taking "crypto bros or hustle bros or WallStreetBets types" as the mode. No, these people have always been with us. They're flashy but not the norm. Some of them hit it big, most of them fail. The idea of "going to college, getting a good job, working hard, and slowly building wealth for retirement." has rarely been more valorized.
Two words: Elvis Presley. Nothing's changed much here recently.
1990s? Certainly it goes back at least to the 1960s. And as with the "crypto bros", most everyone DID sell out, usually sooner rather than later. Most of those who didn't had nothing to sell. Note the complaint here is rather in conflict with the complaint about insufficient valorization of ordinary lives and work.
Hahaha
The history of authoritarian communism gives lie to that claim.
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If you look at videos of Elvis performing in his prime, I think most of the people going hysterical and literally fainting were teenage girls. I think that's largely Freddie's point: that certain behaviour which is acceptable in teenagers is very unbecoming in adults who ought to know better. Which includes many Swifties. I absolutely think the phenomenon of unmarried childless thirty-plus women spending small fortunes in order to go see a teenybopper on tour is a new one, actually.
But C.S. Lewis did have varied and challenging artistic tastes! There's nothing wrong with a person in their thirties reading YA fiction in addition to reading books intended for adults. It's when YA fiction, fantasy, sci-fi etc. is all that you read that it becomes a sign of immaturity.
Elvis's rabid teenage fans grew up to be his rabid thirty-plus female fans (and his remaining rabid 80+ female fans who sustain SirusXM's Elvis channel). Same goes for Swift; she's not a teenybopper anymore; she was famously born in 1989 making her 35 years old.
Possibly this was less obvious in the days of “live fast, die young”.
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But that's actually my question - in the 1970s, were there actually any unmarried childless women in their thirties showing up to Elvis gigs and literally fainting with excitement?
Sorry, when referring to Taylor Swift as a teenybopper I meant that her music's primary target demographic is and always has been teenage girls, not that she herself is a teenager.
In a word, yes.
I mean, do you have any evidence to support this claim?
Do you have any reason to doubt? I couldn't, without significant effort, produce specific evidence of this. And my experience with "citation needed" is no citation will be accepted anyway. But here's something in the ballpark.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Elvis/comments/xhef68/on_december_31st_1975_elvis_performed_the_largest/
That was needlessly rude. "There's no point providing evidence for my factual claims, because even if I do you people won't believe me anyway" seems profoundly out of keeping with the ethos of this space.
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This is obviously false, though. Her primary target demographic, throughout her career, has been, “people of roughly the same age as Taylor Swift.” As she has aged, her fanbase has aged along with her, and her lyrical subject matter has evolved concurrently. Yes, many girls who are currently teenage are into Taylor Swift, but she doesn’t have the cachet among that demographic that she did 10 years ago, and the majority of people at her shows are millennials, none of whom are currently teenaged.
That's fair. I guess from a compositional standpoint, what little of her music I'm familiar with screams "pop for teenaged girls" for me, even the more recent stuff, even if the lyrical content is more mature than one would expect of pop for teenaged girls.
People’s comfort music is usually reminiscent of what they listened to as teens. Not sure why they’re so over the top about it, but the preference is unsurprising.
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I’m not hugely into following pop stars, but aren’t her most popular songs from earlier in her career when she acted like a teenager because, well, she was one.
Not at all. Her commercial peak began in her mid- to late-20s and has persisted well into her 30s.
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Of course, but even her more recent singles (like "Anti-Hero") sound, from a compositional perspective, largely indistinguishable from singles released by the current generation of teen or early twenties pop stars, whose target demographic is teenage girls.
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I mean you basically just admitted you haven’t listened to very much of her music, so why should anyone take seriously your opinions regarding its composition qualities?
Last year I was curious if there was anything to this whole "academic analysis of Taylor Swift's music" thing, so I listened to the song which, to my understanding, is universally considered to be her crowning achievement: "All Too Well". It sounded like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that didn't make the album, and the lyrics were decidedly adolescent, even juvenile. If that's the best she can do (according to all the music critics and academics who have built up a cottage industry around obsessively analysing her music and lyrics), I see little reason to dig any deeper. If there are songs in her discography which are more impressive from a compositional or lyrical perspective, I'll give them a go, but I honestly don't expect to be impressed.
I'll grant that some of the singles are catchy if forgettable.
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I think there is something different in a lot of these areas in that the fans of (insert Taylor Swift, LEGO, Star Wars, Marvel, Funko Pops, Video Games etc) would probably still have been fans in the past, at least to some extent, but due to trends around marriage and having kids, instead of listening to a radio station or going to a movie or whatever they have high levels of disposable income and time to spend on their hobbies that would otherwise be spent on children.
I personally see this as net negative for society, others might see it as net positive, but I think it is hard to argue it is not happening.
It's not that it's not happening. It's that it's not new. Video games are kind of the exception, but the idea that they were ever just for children never really solidified; the Boomers (except the youngest) pretty much played them ONLY as adults if they played them, and every generation since never stopped playing.
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This seems like a classic motte-and-bailey situation. I find that I'm put off by this sort of rhetoric not because I disagree that having varied and challenging artistic tastes is of value, but because I at least suspect that I am actually being called to narrow and limit my artistic tastes. Indeed, your OP here is all about how our society needs to be less permissive - how we should permit fewer things, fewer styles, less art.
What makes you think that?
Because the complaints focus on the cringe art that the targets of the criticism are associated with, and not on the good art that they are failing to engage with.
Well, it's rather pointless trying to discuss the merits of a particular work of art with someone who hasn't experienced it, surely.
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I think these things started as luxury behaviors of a certain class of elites wealthy enough to afford to buck the normal lifestyle rules. The tech bros could largely get away with their hoodies and jeans and openly admitting to loving Star Wars and Marvel because, especially at the time, being in tech was a pretty elite skill set, and they got away with it because you didn’t want to lose your best programmers because you tried to make them wear suits or something. And early on, the adoption of comic books and fandoms were driven by people seeing that this new class of elites in the tech industry were into comic books and other forms of fantasy science fiction stuff, so people started to see it as okay if not aspirational because tech guys like it and they’re rich.
In some sort of weird way, the let it all hang out ethos seems like the same thing. It’s saying “I’m so high on the social hierarchy that I no longer have to worry about pleasing other people.” People much lower on the scale have to live by the dictates of wider society and their boss’s expectations of their lifestyle and behavior and dress. They have to not be too weird or childish in their public opinions and interests as those things might make a boss think of you as immature. The mania for mental illnesses is a similar thing— I’m so high up the hierarchy that I can afford to have obvious mental illnesses without it negatively impacting me. Or striving in general. If you’re rich, you can let it slide and only try when you really want to because you can easily get a job through your social network.
That last one about mental illness has been around for a while. I remember the old saw about how if you have enough money, you are no longer “crazy” you’re “eccentric”
Speed is such a great movie, Dennis Hopper looked like he was having so much fun.
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Hey, you don't have to call me out like that!
I do often feel like an odd man out on the motte sometimes in terms of my low-brow-ness; with the exception of video games, the motte seems quite opposed to geekery. (And I don't even like video games very much!)
I can certainly see the detraction of people who seem to eat up whatever they're fed by corporations with the mouth-wide-open meme face, but this just doesn't describe the fan communities I've participated in, particularly those that include a decent helping of straight men. If anything, fan communities of pop culture are more critical of bland, soulless corporate output than outsiders! If you don't believe me, go find a not-woke straight man into Dungeons and Dragons, comic books, or yes, anything owned by Disney, and ask him what he thinks about how things are going.
This is also true about theme parks. To use an SAT analogy, if you want to see the thing that is to the Disney-theme-parks what the motte's wellness wednesday thread is to dating apps, you should take a look at the WDWMagic rumors forum and bask in the straight male annoyance.
In fact, old-school Disney World fan communities have a term for people who uncritically accept every change, believe every new ride is the greatest thing ever made, worship Disney the company instead of appreciating the product for what it is -- they call them "pixie dusters." And they imbue the term with every ounce of contempt with which you use the phrase "Disney adult." (I think you both are talking about the same people!)
(And if you want to see what data nerds get up to when they like theme parks, you should look up Len Testa, who has made a ton of money selling subscriptions to his model of Disney World crowding.)
I guess I've never understood the contempt the Disney company seems to generate -- yeah, the classic movies are fairy stories, and yeah, they're watered down folklore, and yeah, that's not a real castle, and I get it, no real country looks like how it's represented in EPCOT, and absolutely, small towns don't really look like Main Street. But they're all idealized, with the goal of delighting and inspiring; they're mythical, in the positive use of the word. And we (used to) have a term for idealized depictions of things created to delight and inspire: we called it "art."
This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of the recent discussion about McMansions -- I don't exactly find the 'mcmansion style' great, or anything, and definitely find them excessively and cheaply ornamented. But I don't know, I can't find it in my heart to get angry or contemptuous about the styles in which people build their houses. Eh, I guess, is my response.
My view is that highbrow culture abandoned normies, not the other way around -- before some fuzzy time in the 1900s, much of the literature people read were enjoyed by both the high and the low. Shakespeare once drew crowds of everyone from the groundlings to the Queen, and wrote everything from profound monologues about the human condition to sex jokes. Do you think I meant country matters? (That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.) Charles Dickens drew crowds with each chapter, yet remains studied by scholars to this day. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Bible, which (whatever your views on its divine inspiration or literary quality), has inspired intellectual reflection and interpretation by everyone from uneducated slaves to legendary philosophers.
But at some point things changed, poetry became irrelevant, literature became self-referential and obtuse, high fashion became crazy, and anyone uninterested in participating in the intense status competition of the highbrow world retreated to pop culture, because it was the only thing left that didn't have status hierarchies and impenetrable entrance requirements that make reddit gatekeeping look welcoming.
In fact, reddit gatekeeping-like things are important in this conversation: what's happened in our culture, IMO, isn't that everything's gotten so lowbrow because the people became awful, though some element of that is real. What's happened is that the middlebrow, and the on-ramps to highbrow, collapsed. If you want to start on fashion, or literature, or culture of any kind, your choices are now fast fashion/pop culture, or chasing the elusive and always-changing status hierarchies optimized for status signalling and not for human flouirishing. Your options are DeviantArt or photographed urinals; your options are Marvel or French films with no plot. There are no more coffee pots: there are Keurigs or there are artisanal espresso machines. Which way, western man?
(MaiqTheTrue had a good post on a similar topic a while back; people feel like there's no option other than perfection or avoidance, and so avoid being mediocre at things that might give them meaning. The internet and mass media has a lot of blame for this.)
Your point on things like cooking at home, healthy diets, and work attire is well-taken. But critically, these are matters of health and professional culture, not personal eccentricity or hobby. People should cook at home because it's more economically efficient and better tasting, in a sense that could gain ubiquitous agreement. People should eat a healthy diet because obesity and metabolic disease leads to a great many health problems. People should dress professionally at work because it psychologically leads to a higher regard for oneself and one's colleagues, in an environment where personal eccentricity and interest not only is but should be less important.
But I just can't make the mental leap from this to placing a great deal of moral importance on what people do in their garages or basements. Sometimes people just have interests that are obsessive or low-status -- they aren't harmful, they aren't impure, they aren't violating the law or the commandments, they're just doing their silly things at home with their spare cash. I'll agree readily that doing things like taking out a mortgage to follow Taylor Swift on tour is a bad expense, and there are more productive things that people might do with that kind of money. But ultimately, people need their weird hobbies -- even in the old days, rich people did odd things like selectively breed and arbitrarily evaluate various kinds of dogs on standards that have nothing to do with actual canine health or capability. Hobbies are odd sometimes, and that's just how it is. I suppose this is the "just let people enjoy things" argument, but... just let people enjoy things, I guess?
Most of what Freddy seems to care about doesn't strike me as central parts of social permissiveness -- in fact I would argue he focuses on the cultural elements he does because he agrees with the broader sense of permissiveness that's causing problems in society. Scratch the surface of any of his posts, and you see that he's not only not a conservative, he's an all-in progressive, with some areas of strategic disagreement with progressive politics. I would argue that, like many things, this is Mr.-Intellectual-Marxist Freddy DeBoer arguing against things that average people like to signal his great intellectualness and refined taste.
There are absolutely areas where our society has become so obsessed with non-judgment that we've permitted people to fall into deep holes from which we don't know how to rescue them. But I don't know... there's just so many things of moral relevance to critique out in the world, I don't know that pop culture hobbies that are somewhat childish or obsessive would hit my radar even if I did consider them immoral.
But that's enough on that, I have to go finish a LEGO set.
The middlebrow was cultivated and developed by the 00s hipsters, which would indeed probably be what Freddie deBoer's tastes probably run towards, considering not only his social status and age group but also his various stated preferences on his blog. Then the hipster culture either collapsed on itself or was mercilessly attacked from various sides and slunk back to forced poptimism or dumb contrarianism or whatever the evolutions were, and we now have what we have now.
I suppose hipsters could be said to be middlebrow, but not in a way that is ideal; they established all sorts of arbitrary status hierarchies and positioned themselves as better than others because of their tastes. The point of a real middlebrow is that it's confident in itself, realistic, and for the many people: it needs to be accessible and yet thought-provoking, like an iceburg that invites participation but also offers deeper exploration to those who are interested. My point is that these two elements, once united, have been separated; you either get something designed with "enigmas and puzzles" to keep people lost in a maze, or you get something accessible but shallow. It's hard to blame people for reading all sorts of depth into pop culture, when their alternative is things that are designed to be impenetrable.
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We permit some things and forbid others. Same as every other time and place in history.
That depends on what you mean by "lifestyle" and what you mean by "valid". Out of all the choices that one might make, which ones contribute to your "lifestyle" and which don't? (Your choice of what brand of detergent you use presumably doesn't, but your choice of who you sleep with presumably does). And what would constitute an "invalid" lifestyle? Is it merely, something that is discouraged by your immediate family? Something that is unable to provide a living wage? Something that is outright illegal?
Based on the repressive response from the powers that be, we can surmise that the organizers of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally did not have a lifestyle that was judged valid by our society. Alex Jones appears to not have had a valid lifestyle either.
Ok, maybe there's still a lot of red tape in politics you might say, but when it comes to sexuality it's all fair game. You can be trans, you can be gay, it's all fine. Well, I have a (straight cis male) friend in his 30s who's dating a 21 year old college student. He doesn't advertise her age much, for obvious reasons, and she's kept his age a secret from her friends as well. They both know what the reactions would be. Is his lifestyle valid?
On the contrary, I think that the hyper-competitive middle class striver mentality is alive and well. This depends to some extent on what social circles you run in, of course. But I've posted on TheMotte multiple times (and again just this week, in fact) about continued cuts at universities to all non-STEM programs. That's what undergrads want anyway, they want what's going to get them a good-paying white collar job. Are these the actions of a society that encourages "doing whatever you want"? Or are these the actions of a society that places a very high premium on economic productivity?
Sure, you can dress smart casual... as you work nights and weekends (and respond to emails and texts even when you're not "working") to get that big project over the finish line. You wouldn't want to not be a team player, right?
It's more like, "be very afraid" - be very afraid of climate change, and systemic racism, and Covid, and... ...how exactly is anyone supposed to have time to enjoy anything with these cataclysmic threats constantly lurking in the background?
Perhaps. But my reasoning would probably be different from yours. If they are contemptible, it would be because they're simply stupid and empty people, not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with Star Wars or Marvel per se.
I doubt that, say, King Louis XIV knew how to cook for himself. He had people to do it for him. Should he have been ashamed of himself?
("Hard work", "grit", certain senses of "self-reliance" - these are all specifically middle class virtues. They are not universal across all times and places and all cultural strata. The nobility have their virtues and obligations as well, but they are distinct in important ways.)
I find that hot so I'm all for it.
I see nothing but authenticity everywhere I look. Antifa and BLM rioters, pro-Palestine student protesters, the entire institutional network of leftist apparatchiks - I think that all of these people are perfectly authentic, and they are earnestly dedicated to the causes that they claim to be dedicated to. If you want to analyze the substance of what it is that is being authentically revealed - that's another matter. But you can't accuse them of concealing anything.
Sorry if this comes off as overly critical. But this isn't the first time that I've heard this idea (that our problem is that we've become "too permissive"), and I think it's just a completely deleterious and misguided narrative that presents a significant misdiagnosis of the situation.
Cooking is too time and culture specific, I think. The quintessential Victorian parody of middle class office worker life, The Diary of a Nobody, describes everyday life and troubles of one Mr Charles Pooter, a London city clerk, who does not know how to cook, either. He has a wife and they employ a maid and a charwoman.
Agreed that hard work and grit are virtues for commoners. Self-reliance of a family unit is more specifically a rural virtue. Urbanites are reliant on each other and of the city: they make a virtue out of sophisticated understanding of city life. Personal self-reliance is an individualist virtue.
Great comment. Do stay here (if this isn’t a regular’s alt).
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Yes, and an "overly permissive" society is a society in which too many things are permitted and too few are forbidden. Not a difficult concept to grasp, I would've thought.
The word "encourage" or any of its synonyms appears nowhere in my post. As far as I grasp Freddie's point, it's not that following the path of least resistance (expending the least amount of effort) is encouraged, but doing the bare minimum isn't forbidden i.e. is permitted.
No idea what the point is meant to be here. The dress code in my last job, my current job and the job before that (post-Covid) was smart casual. My hours were 9-5 and I rarely had to work late, and never nights. In the two years I worked in my last job there was one occasion in which I had to work on the weekend. I don't think my experience is at all uncommon.
They seem to manage alright.
I think so. Is there any skill more fundamental to self-preservation than the ability to feed oneself?
Gross.
Go to any one of these protests, and you will find that 20% of the people protesting are true believers and 80% of people are there because their friends were going, or because they're hoping to signal that they're the right kind of person on Instagram, or because they want to get laid. Nothing is more performative or insincere than modern wokeness. How many of the people who shared a black square on their Instagram in June 2020 had even the slightest idea of what the intended message of said image was? You think everyone who ever dressed up in black bloc gear earns a living at the local vegan co-op or working for an activist nonprofit? I'm sure an absolute majority of these people subsequently put away childish things and took a cushy job at Merrill Lynch.
In punk (and by extension Antifa) circles, pretending that you're from a less affluent background than you really are is so common that satire websites poke fun at it. And while you might concede this point, it's certainly not like leftist apparatchiks would conceal something as fundamental as their ethnic back- oh wait, damn.
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Are you sure you know what a snuggie is?
https://snuggiestore.com/
Yes. I'm just a big fan of pajamas or anything pajama-like on women.
Snuggies are too loose to be attractive. I'm a big fan of the onesie. Feels great to hug a gal in one.
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What about things that are both highbrow and lowbrow, like old Buster Keaton films? Or for a more recent example, the cartoon Over the Garden Wall?
Edit: for that matter, what about the first three Indiana Jones films? Not highbrow, but are you really going to criticize an adult for being an Indiana Jones fan?
Being a fan? No. Buying all the merch (including the authentic Indy Funko Pop), spending hours and hours discussing why the new movies suck, spending a small fortune on the authentic hat and whip so that you can cosplay several times a year? Past a certain point, I do think I'd find such a person rather sad.
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Has it though? Or is this another symptom of being extremely online?
I'm certainly aware of these people existing but people who play with Legos in their thirties or go cosplaying are still weird. It is not entirely normalised. The only people I know who do this stuff irl are "deeply autistic" men and women (although not unemployed but employed as programmers).
What has been entirely normalised is stuff like adults playing video games.
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Freddie remains the king of boldly speaking truth to power by heroically proclaiming exactly what conservatives have been saying for decades. This problem is obviously based on very deep and foundational assumptions of progressive ideology and seeing this as a problem to some extent entails reckoning with the entirety of leftism.
As I see it, the leftist reasoning goes something like this. The last hundred years of psychology, sociology and neurology have chipped away at the idea of human agency, attributing more and more of our decisions and outcomes to factors outside of our individual control. Perhaps it is genes being identified that are linked to obesity or studies that have linked obesity to "food deserts" or poverty or systemic racism, the sum is that as we gain more and more knowledge about the causes of obesity less and less of it is left to personal agency. Agency becomes a sort of "god of the gaps". And while this is most apparent when it comes to conditions that are borderline clinical like obesity or serious social failings like crime, there is no reason that similar dynamics should not be at play in less medicalized failings like "being an ipad parent" or "having childlike pickiness about foods". Perhaps you only eat chicken nuggets as an adult because you were raised in an unprivileged background where your parents never exposed you to more adventurous cuisines? Perhaps you have some as-yet-unidentified gene that makes you "supertaster" and thus highly sensitive to flavors? Perhaps you have some kind of nebulous "trauma" and relying on comfortable childhood foods is therapeutic, I don't know, this sort of BS reasoning is trivial to makeup if you are in the right frame of mind.
The basis of this is viewing a human as an automaton, a deterministic collection of neurons with no ghost inside the machine. If a shoplifter or obese person is merely a product of their environment (or nature) then a picky eater is really no different. All things must be permitted.
Of course I disagree vehemently with leftists here. I don't necessarily disagree on viewing a human as an automaton, after all I am an atheist and a materialist, so I can't claim that humans have some ineffable soul that directs their actions and is responsible for agency. However, I think leftists ignore the degree to which social attitudes and shaming are part of the very environment that inform our actions. For example, taking obesity, I agree that obesity is largely driven by genetics, food environment, sedentary lifestyle/occupation etc, and none of those things are really "personal agency", however, part of that environment is "social pressure to be non-obese", in other words, fat-shaming.
For some reason leftists tend to consider shaming and social pressure as completely irrelevant factors of the environment. I've brought this up in discussions on reddit, that maybe "fat-shaming" actually effectively helps people maintain a healthy weight, and this idea is usually met with disdain. However, leftists are highly inconsistent on this point, as they surely believe shaming people for racism to be highly effective and critical in stopping racism.
In my mind the ascended POV is to recognize that humans are largely controlled by their environment, but to recognize the critical role that shaming has played throughout human social history as one of the most important parts of that very environment.
While i agree with and endores the overall thrust of your post, i would like to break out this specific claim as i do not think it is true at all. I think that this is the "big lie" that the left tells itself to avoid grappling with the manifest contradictions of thier ideology and so that they continue looking down thier nose at all those "things conservatives have been saying for decades" (and in some cases centuries). In the meantime, the material truth is that the only thing that any individual will ever have complete control over is thier own decisions.
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Well but we are just a product of our genetic code and environment. What other factor could influence a decision. There is no "free will" outside of that.
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Funnily enough, I made a similar point about a year ago:
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Huh? What a strange claim. The entire basis of the critical-constructivist worldview at the heart of modern leftist social critique is a hyperfocus on how social attitudes and shaming have a deterministic effect on nearly every aspect of our lives. That’s a key pillar of what they mean by “systemic racism” and “fatphobia” and “heteronormativity”. They think about these things every bit as often as you do, if not more.
The difference is that they believe that reducing the amount of shame individuals experience based on unchosen identity characteristics is a key goal of social justice.
You claim that shaming fat people would have a direct impact on reducing obesity. The leftist rejoinder would have two parts:
Do we actually have strong evidence that this is true? Sure, people in, say, the 1920’s were less fat than people in the 2020s. And yes, at that time, fat-shaming was also more common. But do we actually have any concrete evidence that there’s a causal relationship between these two phenomena? What if people were less fat because of material factors, such as the prevalence of cigarette smoking, the far greater average level of physical labor performed by the average person on both a professional and domestic basis, and the difference in the chemical composition of foods at the time? (Lack of preservatives, lack of seed oils, etc.) If that’s the case, then people’s relative lack of obesity at the time was not primarily due to some greater level of civilizational virtue, and certainly not primarily due to people consciously endeavoring not to be fat because of the threat of shaming. In other words, those people didn’t earn their thinness in some important moral sense. They simply followed the normal patterns of life at the time, and it happened that those patterns were less lipogenic — no idea if that’s a real word — than the normal patterns of life now. Those same people, even if exposed to the exact same level of social messaging about the dangers of fatness as they were in the 1920s, would still turn out fat nowadays because the material changes in our society make it much more difficult to remain thin given the exact same effort level. So, the shaming doesn’t do much of anything except make people feel miserable about things that are largely out of their control, barring very atypical levels of agency.
Even if the shaming did have some measurable effect, it’s still morally wrong and we still shouldn’t do it. The tradeoff isn’t worth it. For every one fat person you manage to inspire to lose weight via shaming and bullying, you’ll just have twenty who spiral into depression and self-sabotage. Shaming has highly variable effects depending on the specific traits of the victim; not only that victim’s personality, but also his or her material circumstances. If that individual has a thyroid condition, for example, shaming is very unlikely to produce an impact on that person’s fatness, but is very likely to produce strong feelings of shame which will achieve nothing positive. And of course, this is all without getting into the frankly somewhat selfish, self-aggrandizing, and ugly motives underneath most actual acts of bullying. Bullying is rarely a prosocial act done for the benefit of the bullied; that’s a self-serving narrative concocted after the fact. Shaming degrades the shamer as much as it damages the shamed. It makes society coarser, more mean-spirited, lower-trust, etc. It encourages the worst and most predatory aspects of the human personality. All so maybe on the margins, 10% of fat people will be a bit less fat for some period of time. Not worth it at all!
Now, to be clear, I personally don’t endorse all of this. But it’s a coherent and sophisticated worldview. It’s certainly not that leftists just haven’t thought about shaming and its importance.
Maybe "ignore" is the wrong word and you could say "deny" instead, but 1 is exactly what I'm saying, they would deny the effect of fat-shaming on reducing obesity or deny that it played a critical role socially. They wouldn't say that fat-shaming had no effect on humans, but that it had no positive effect and generally not engage with the serious tradeoffs at play.
They are engaging with the tradeoffs — they just arrive at a different conclusion than you do! Firstly because there’s a very real disagreement about the facts. Again, do you actually have any evidence that fat-shaming contributed significantly to why people were less fat a hundred years ago? I’m not saying it’s implausible, but I do think there’s a lot more going on and that the picture is genuinely quite complicated.
There is no consensus “leftist” position on obesity. Contrary to what you may imagine, dispositions toward the “fat acceptance” movement remain quite varied among progressives. Positions range from “fatness is entirely socially-constructed, there’s actually no serious health problems associated with fatness, why don’t we just rethink our society to make it more accommodating towards the obese” to “there’s clearly some factors, largely outside of the control of individuals, that are making people more fat than they used to be, and until we figure out what those are and how to fix them, it’s just pointlessly cruel to fat-shame people.” Most serious progressives don’t deny that things like portion control and not eating exclusively fast food have some contribution, but they would argue that these are far from the only things going on, such that shaming is not an effective tool in most cases.
And now that the potentially revolutionary technology of semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) offers a concrete solution to what might be making some large percentage of fat people fat, we might now be able to fix the issue without anyone having to get bullied! And now that we do have Ozempic available — and once we get a better understanding of its long-term effects and ways to mitigate any downsides — I think more progressives will be more comfortable utilizing shame as one tool in the toolkit when it comes to people who clearly have the opportunity to be thin and who still choose to be obese instead.
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There's a branch in the tree of argumentation around free will that goes to "even if we are automations that can't prevent them, we are still responsible for our nature".
I believe the tie between responsibility and agency is a novelty of the modern era brought about by the focus on logic and individualism.
We can no longer kill murderers because they are murderers and that's the proper thing you do to such people, now we have to be compassionate if they had no other choice but murder. This is, whatever one thinks of it, completely destructive of standards. Every single issue becomes a race for sophistry that justifies indulgence of any kind.
And the issue is, Liberalism only seems to work by combining high standards with individual freedom. This containing the seeds of its own destruction: standards become impossible to maintain because they can't be justified under the auspices of individual freedom. They become arbitrary prejudices and we slowly forget that those are load bearing.
I'm afraid most of the philosophers that noticed this problem also argued it was essentially impossible to solve and that civilizations that reach this stage are doomed because that burst of freedom is their peak.
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