Degeneration Nation

He can't muster wearing anything other than the hoodie unless it is absolutely required. Just bottom of the barrel, end of the line, total degeneration. That is what you see.

This is totally honest. This is the spirit of 2023 Freakshow America incarnate.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1659260967962779652

Straight up hardcore pathetic.

If you don't think there is something off about this, if you think it is fine, if you think it is "good to change the dress codes" for politicians of the world hyper-power, the USA, so they can look like a kid in detention, you are lost.

I was always more into style than most other American guys. I first was into Neo-Prep, then I got older, weaved here and there, when I lived in Europe/Med when I was younger I dressed in a more young kind of Euro style, to blend in.

When I had kids my idea became more clear. When I was young, I always like style more but it was a bit more surface level. It was fun and I liked that. I wasn't applying as many deep levels to it. And that makes sense, I was really only feeling horizontally. Once I had kids I was able to feel more vertically.

It can be explained by sartorial changes.

Men and women dressing like androgynous balls of slop have contributed to this problem. No one wants to pursue romance if everyone looks unattractive. Everyone just retreats farther into digital world.

https://twitter.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1658603697709133826

Lots of men look like they believe appearance means nothing, that it has no impact on their attractiveness. Women generally don't want their man to put more effort into their appearance than they do, but most also don't want a guy who looks like a child who has given up.

Here are two clear and direct reasons to care about personal aesthetics / clothing / personal presentation.

One reason is great and grand, the other reason is personal / close. 1 / Great & Grand

If you want to make a difference in act, you can do so immediately by saying something meaningful and strong through your clothing. You can talk about so many things till you are blue in the face, but with clothing and aesthetics we can make an idea physical. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

It is really hard to put your finger on, but I think you can kind of tell that actors from today don't feel as comfortable in jackets and ties as actors from the past. It makes sense. For actors in the past it wasn't that much of a costume. For actors today it actually is. For actors today, when they wear a suit, tie, sport coat etc... it is almost a museum piece for them. For actors back then, these kinds of garments were familiar. No matter who they were, they spent more time in these kinds of clothes. It was present, not a thing of the past.

Notice how plain everyone's clothes look compared to today. No neon colors, nothing nuclear loud. This is in the 70s which is considered wild in pattern and style by most. This is also a rough photo on the street, nothing nice and curated. It looks natural compared to today. The clothing looks muted and organic, natural and honest compared to many sights you see on the street today.

There were crazy clothes in the 70s, wild style. We know this. But was it really worse than today? I don't think so. Our time is actually much more degenerated.

Very common kind of cartoonification

It is kind of cutesy and cartoony. The pictures of people don't have mouths or eyes or any character. They are smoothed over but it doesn't feel harsh or severe, there is a goofy kind of little cartoon feeling. This kind of design and aesthetic is everywhere, we forget how weird it is. It didn't really exist so long ago. This kind of smoothed over, goofy little person as an avatar with only the simplest differentiating features presented in a very toy-like way.

Every idea has already been thought. Not really, but if you want to, you can "know so much" that basically it becomes impossible for you to think on your own. Your self is crushed by the weight of everything that came before and then you are stuck only looking in the past. You can "know so much" that there becomes no territory left, nowhere left to move. So you are stuck, and life is stuck.

This is obviously not true in the deepest sense, it is a missing of the big truth, but there is a way that some bright people get themselves in this corner.

Part of the virtue of clothing that lasts longer than a short film is its ability to bridge the past to the present and to the future. It creates a coherent sense of living through time and life in this fabric that covers your body all day, every day. The value of keeping items longer - and that these items actually look better the more worn-in and personality revealing they become - helps to foster a more honest, constant, natural existence and life.

There is a malaise that comes from being disappointed by the future. It goes through practically everything but if we look at the clothing and aesthetics as a representation of that which is within it is easy to extrapolate out. You grow up and you imagine that when you get older things will be different. People are more serious, people are in control. You imagine that when you are older, things will be a bit different. Harder, but different. That is where the real action happens.

If you wanted to make a positive impact on the average American boy immediately, you would institute uniforms at all public school. Chinos, OCBD, Sweater. Uniforms create a cohesive aesthetic which level across and - in the case of even a basic uniform like I mentioned - up. The aesthetic-cultural anarchy our youth suffer under does them no good. Living in this kind of anarchy isn't providing them opportunity to express themselves in any natural, organic or true way. It is just throwing a kid in the water who can't swim and watching them flail.

There are so many struggles in life, so much to stress about. Finances, work and 100 things beyond our control. Yet, something I am thankful for every single day is the amount of time my wife and I get to spend with our children.

https://twitter.com/SahilBloom/status/1650194340222738435

We don't send them to daycare or school and we both work non-traditional jobs so we are both very present, to say the least. There is basically no way we could spend more time with our children.

So you never cared about dressing decently until yesterday and people you know are confused because you never used to care.

You try to put a good fit together but it doesn't feel right.

You look back at old (or even recent) photos and cringe at your fits.

It is okay. Everyone, without any exception, has photos of themselves looking worse than they would like themselves to look today. No one has lived their life without a bad fit, without a style detour or an unfortunate period. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or oblivious.

A completely different aesthetic and sense comes over you looking at these two photos so many years apart. You can feel the time in them, you can feel the spirit. In both pictures there are beyond brilliant guys, but apart from the smarts, there is something very different. It isn't about the specific people in the photos, you could change them all out with other guys and the same aesthetic would remain. It is bigger than the individuals. Not that the feats or achievements would remain the same, but the aesthetic would.

Slobification is a massive problem, of course we know that.

Cartoonification, or to put another way, a making everything silly and unserious, is equally present although less discussed.

It is all over the place. Cars, buildings, public "art", clothing, hair, media etc... Think of the pajama pants you see everywhere. They aren't only brown or black, olive green or maroon. They often have cartoonish designs on them.

Think of tennis shoes, it isn't only they are garments for sport and worn in inappropriate places, they are cartoonish looking.

It's nearly Impossible to overstate how bizarre the fashion of our day is for men.

I am always belaboring the shrinking of the shirt because in it, you see everything.

You have overly tight shirts that restrict movement.

The meaning is the making of man into mannequin. The undersized shirt shrinks his presence, shrinks his movement, and shrinks his action. It does all this practically but also philosophically and spiritually. It represents a shrinking and a restricting. It represents a drawing inward and almost an imprisonment.

It is a Monday, you are trying to dress decently, you are trying to not only show respect for yourself, but also the idea of civilization by presenting yourself with some shred of dignity.

Someone (almost always a guy) makes a snippy ankle-biter comment to you. What do you do?

The easiest thing to do when someone makes a snippy comment like this is de-escalate by laughing. Do not do this. It makes you into a joke and makes your choices into a joke, you accept "haha, oh it's just a little joke, I am really a silly person aren't I?"

Sometimes I look out the window and see our son laying on the ground looking up at the sky. Watching the branches sway, the snow fall, the leaves blow, the birds fluttering, sun shining, the wind breezing. He stays there, just looking, watching for quite some time. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… We are naturally full of wonder, then we strangle it a bit, then some more. We do so because we don't want to wonder, we want to be sure, we want to be bored. Then it is gone and we are sad because we don't really want to be bored, we don't really want to be sure.

I talk so incessantly about the degeneration and slobification of modern man for many reasons but one is because I have children. The world that the youth of today suffer under is one of chaos and disorder and clothing plays no small role.

Our children deserve a better world. There are young guys, middle aged guys and older guys who follow me here. Professionals, students, white collar, blue collar. There are guys from every walk of life.

There is a certain sadness that comes with the world not being as we wish it was or as it ought to be. Some languages have words to describe just this feeling. This feeling comes to feel particularly heavy and severe when you are a parent, when you have children. You read books to your children and they ask you questions about what is in the scene or what some word means. You explain it, but that world may not exist as vibrantly, or at all, as it once did. And it makes you terribly sad.

I recently received a message from a follower who has been working on dressing better.

He said -

"Dressing better, even when I am working from home is part of a greater initiative on my end to respect myself more."

I can't agree with this enough, this is the real key. Dressing decently isn't about some comparative thing with others. I don't compare myself to anyone else and neither should you. It isn't about materialism. It is about dignity, it is about an inner need, it is about modern man.