recently i was stuck somewhere and read through over 20 years straight of a single newspaper comic. newspaper comics are an interesting medium because theres simultaneously zero continuity (its 9000 isolated incidents) while also being one single line: one massive narrative
this particular comic started in the 90s. this means you're about... 80% of the way in, the world and characters are established, and then tech world kicks in - suddenly they have phones, social media exists, it just opens up into their world. just like it did in real life.
this is an interesting case study for the interplay of tales, people, tech, social media - all that. you can feel the flattening effect. it feels somewhat cheap, but its also unavoidable. you cant just freeze time and pretend it doesnt exist, but it still flattens the characters
my prediction is that most people will engage with this upon typical culture war lines, as you see above. perhaps this is correct or incorrect, its irrelevant to what i have to say - because, maybe uniquely, this confluence of issues really defies that sort of analysis, at all.
for example, look at the above first paragraph. twitter has recommended me like 1000 big posts about this. california passes a law that says schools dont have to tell parents if a kid says or does XYZ. in this case, identifies as trans. this guy says, that should not be the case
heres some genuine esoteric psychology advice (for entertainment purposes only):
you have a job. we say “have” so, you think its “just there”. its something you got, and now you possess it. thats wrong. if you “have” something like a job, you are creating that job.
things dont just exist eternally in a static state in this sphere: so, every day, you are creating that job. you don’t realize it, but you are. if you weren’t, it would just decay or go away or be destroyed. so, youre creating your job every day without realizing it.
next:
now, you get to a point where you dont like your job anymore. so, you think: now, i have to fix this. i have to create a solution. i have to create something to counter this problem in my job.
but, thats wrong: because youre still creating the job, every day. so, what happens?
van dusen (psychologist who worked with schizophrenics and read swedenborg) eventually adopted an energy vampire model of the voices his patients were hearing, he claimed explaining this to the patients consistently resulted in the voices telling patients to physically attack him
he basically claimed that he could sit (at least a significant percent of his) patients down in a room and go through a script, like “i am going to start explaining something to you - here’s what the voices are going to tell you to do”: first they would tell patients to leave.
(might mix up the order here) - then, they would tell patients to not listen to him, then finally when none of that was possible, and he was explaining what was happening as a phenomenon, they would tell patients to attack him. like a predictable pattern, one, two, three.
tech interfaces used to be much more actively customizable. you could just poke in and make everything green, pink, anything. this is much less of a thing today. this probably stems from a kind of allergy to sincerity - someone might see your interface and see how much you cared
jordan peterson really got his whole thing locked into a single meme: "clean up your room". whats lesser known is what the second step was: make it beautiful. the idea was that by trying to make something look nice, you would then be forced to be open to harsh personal criticism
regardless of what you think about him or his work, this is true. if you hang a painting up in your room, people are going to come over, and they might say, "...thats the painting you chose?" - and you have nowhere to go. you can only say, well, yeah. you're total unguarded.
'medical mundi' is a term i started to use, internally, at a time in my life when i was often in and out of hospitals.
the 'medical world' really is 'a world'. it is a realm. it has its own way of being, its own paradigm, and its self-contained.
thats medical mundi.
...
you dont really notice when you enter medical mundi. something happens, and you go to the hospital. thats just what you do. you're just there.
but, you notice when you leave. you're back in the parking lot - hours, days, weeks later. like a stone, you hit the earth. you're back
i have lots of memories like that. suddenly, you realize you were just in a whole separate universe. thats usually when it all hits you. things dont really hit you in medical mundi. people talk to you, you're doing stuff, but you're kind of just there. its just happening to you.