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So good, so good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to 60% off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas and Free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack Denial is a Funny Thing the thing with someone in denial is you can never get them to acknowledge the thing they're avoiding. However, from seeing how their mind works through the process of avoiding that thing, you can see that they know exactly what it is subconsciously, although their subconscious is trying to protect them. So it's never allowed to percolate to the conscious mind through not admitting it and avoiding all of its edges. In fact, their every thought is colored by it. When someone is in denial, are actually obsessed with the thing that they're avoiding. That being said, if they were to accept it, they would realize it wasn't as scary as they thought. For those that don't know these things, the human mind is over 90% irrational and less than 10% rational. Almost all of our mental power lies in the murky, chatonic depths of the subconscious. Monsters and angels lie inside our minds, waiting for opportunities to spring out into physical reality. Modernity is an aesthetic at best. Beneath it lies forces millions of years old that have fought time and time again for their place inside of us. When we fight them, we lose. I declared independence from the Society three years ago. What I mean by that is not that I'm launching a revolution, but rather I realized that the society had nothing to offer me. Whenever I talked to the society, they just demonstrated their utter contempt for me and for nothing I've really done that was irredeemable in their eyes and the best thing I could do would be to practically kill myself enough. I guess I have no reason to work with them then. In the time since, I've stopped watching new movies, consuming new music, and even YouTube besides music at this point. While the Internet is full of many issues, there are good parts as well, such as online strategy games that can help sharpen your mind. Like today's sponsor, World of Warships, a free to play PC naval combat game where players command iconic historic warships in tactical team based battles with battleships, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers and submarines. Every match brings explosive action, strategic decision making and and cinematic naval warfare inspired by real ships in history. In Honor of America's 250th birthday, World of Warships will be offering awesome new challenges like win a battle in an American ship, play only American ships for an entire session, and America's Fleet attempt your highest damage game using an American battleship. They also have new ships to try out like the Tyr 9 Cruiser Fort Worth and Tier 10 Wisconsin Golden. Plus you can get WOW on console with World of Warships Legends so you can play from anywhere. This epic event is limited time, so click the link below to get awesome rewards like a million credits, seven Days Premium Stars and Tripe Camo, Premium Cruiser, USSS Albany Premier, Premium Destroyer, USSS Smith and much more. This is a great deal, so stop mindlessly scrolling and click the link to play something actually engaging. In the digital based world. You can control which inputs you allow into your mental system and so I use that in my favor. I have my favorite musical artists and content which I consumed from years ago. I've been building my worldview out with older books, which I've found was significantly healthier and better quality than the things we produce today. As I read more and more stuff from a century ago or the 19th century, it's often staggeringly superior by every conceivable metric that it's hard to consume pop culture from the last 60 years. I also have a large enough friend group and social network that I don't have to interface with modernity's mental illnesses if I don't choose to. There's this myth that I don't read books written after 1960. That's totally untrue. And it's really not okay that people are allowed to just make sh. T up online without literally any evidence, which they've done a lot with me in the past. The vast majority of the books I read were written after that date, but I do read a lot before then too. I've just stopped caring at all what the current culture says. When I started doing this, I didn't really notice the effects. However, after years as I built out my own internal mental model on older stuff and the society kept going, I started noticing staggering differences. I feel like a stranger in this new world. I don't know what happened. It's like I ended up in a strange dystopian sci fi novel and no one else is in on the joke. Like, I'm frequently in shock that people actually believe the things that they say. It's like they're possessed with a disjoint between their bodies and their voices, as if they're puppets being pulled by strings where their joints move like marionettes. I remember people being better at performing sanity. I Remember a time when the things people said made sense. Now it feels like people just say things. They expect me to understand what they're saying, but it all just sounds like rationalizations. Everything feels discordant. Like seeing some third world country where you see incomprehensible chaos under the beating sun with the smell of trash everywhere. The worst thing is, others treat this as totally reasonable. Well, in fact, this was just bullshit they made up on the spot, which if you asked them as people even a decade ago, they would say what they believe now to be completely insane. I know they remember a world where this wasn't the case, but they don't. There's one huge variable to life today that no one can really talk about, which as I walk around, I constantly see. We're all completely addicted to these screens. The way it is is that our internal monologues are so attached to the screens that I think if you separate most people from their PH phones for longer than a few hours or even minutes, they would start to panic and have an addictive withdrawal. We don't know how to live without our phones. And the thing is, I'm only 24, so I'm really young. I remember a world before screen addiction. I remember playing in the forest as a child before the great addiction. However, almost no one talks about screen addiction. I rarely see it on the news. And when I talk to people, they seem to have never considered the idea that they're hopelessly addicted. At the same time, whenever I look at people, they're always staring at their screens. When you're at the airport or on the train, every single person is glued to their phone screens and they're not even looking at the scenery around them. The worst element of this is that it's not like the things on their screens are helping them. They're hooked up to this superconductor of mental illness. When I go online, I'm just horrified at how evil people are. I don't understand how people can't seem to see what they're doing. Something horrifically evil is is currently happening. It's about to get a lot worse, and people are just going to enable it. It feels like I'm watching a train barrel towards a brick wall without stop and the drivers are too drunk to realize it. Part 1 what we've lost the way addiction works is that it gradually eats at you until you've realized that you've already lost everything to it. A heroin addict will lose their family, their work, their passions, hobbies, and sense of self. To feel the warm glow of safety from. Let's do a little roll call. Let's see everything we've already lost to screen addiction. It used to be completely normal that children would play outside. It's so jarring. When I went to a third world country like Mexico where the kids play outside given, the implication I realized is that in America they don't. I've started to see that in a lot of America, the kids don't even go trick or treating on Halloween, which is so depressing given that's one of the best moments of childhood. It's the gradual trickle of losing everything we care about. Instead, the children stay at home playing with an iPad, which is a childhood in the same way that porn is sex. Speaking of that, now that at least a majority and potentially higher than 60% of new relationships are formed due to the Internet, we now see the negative consequences of the Internet ripple into the mating crisis. You could see this mechanism in every layer of the society where now work or banking requires the Internet. Socialize and do status games through the Internet. People don't go to the bar or third places to meet one another. They do so through social media, which carries none of the same benefits of real human communication. One of the really horrible lessons about human nature that this has taught us is that if you strip away every other element of social communication between the connection, the relational depth, learning skills or whatever, and then you just leave the status games even with for most people, no money involved, the vast majority of the population especially so women will pick just having the social media stripped down, status games about how many likes you get versus other people, and they will jettison actual social life for that. And what that signifies is that the thing they cared about the whole time for all of these social communications and the functioning of a healthy society was the status games. That was the reason they were doing it. If you were to go back to the 1950s and see the society that so many conservatives love to valorize, all of the social institutions which right wingers like to reclaim, like church, community, family, dating, reading, making, art, culture and patriotism are all dependent on people not being on their phones. What the digital age has really shown is how communal so much of human existence is. We've become become very isolated as a quote society with a plurality of Americans saying they have no close friends. And this is even more exacerbated among young people. Nearly 90% of Gen Z feels lonely and half of Gen Z are virgins. From the new stats that have come out, the famous book about isolation, bowling Alone came out in the 90s and things are only so much vastly worse ever since. We've all had to live in the screen based era where this atomization has become normalized. What is a holiday spent in isolation? Christmas or Easter are just another day with maybe a nicer meal or a present you bought for yourself, an apartment that you wake up, work from home in and stay in isolation without knowing anyone in your building is practically a prison cell. Entire generations of women invested in their careers since they were told by society that it would make them happy, but but later realized that they actually wanted a family. This in turn has sparked generations of female left wing radicalism to pull down all of the crabs trying to leave the bucket. Think of the generations of young men who would be willing to die for their country, be pillars of the community or start families if they had any connection to their local society, a mate or the culture had any desire to see them as human. Think if people had the ability to impact their local town, how much more invested they would be in its development and they wouldn't just have to see its gradual decline. We've massively hobbled the human potential of our society for zero gain. Part 2 A social failure I'm naturally introverted by disposition. Plenty of times I've gone to a new place like the Appalachian Trail or France, where I knew I would be alone for months. When I first moved to Texas, I didn't know anyone here and I accepted that being alone by itself doesn't bother me much and is my natural default state. I'm still social though, because I'm a biological human, a species which evolved to live in groups. I've moved so many times over my life and so I've entered and left countless friend groups. This means that if I have to leave a given place or leave a certain social group, it doesn't really fill me with much dread. What I've found is that different places have similar types of people and so if you maintain a coherent character, you can attract people like you wherever you go. What this made me realize is how much people's sense of self is tied to fairly brittle and low quality social communities. It's frankly heartbreaking to see people sacrifice everything to their social groups, which will never offer them anything in return. Political radicals, for example, are entering into surrogate religions to fulfill their spiritual identity and community needs that religion could solve. Instead, what the ideology does is abdicate the responsibility for their own lives to the government which they end up worshiping. The state will never be able to fulfill those human needs. So instead it just psyops them into worshipping the state even more. The left and other modernists like the Nazis worship the state as a force capable of remaking reality in its image. Is it any surprise when the school system, which is our child rearing and is run by the state, while the major social media outlets or the news companies are directly or indirectly serving the state's interests? Of course the state propounds worship of the state. When I look at social media, I see these people spend their entire day on screens and often all of their free time. Besides work, the average zoomer spends eight to nine hours on a screen recreationally every day, not including screens for school, which most classes mandated even when I was in high school and the rest of the population isn't far behind. Even old people and baby boomers are still addicted to their screens. Social media exists to serve the purpose of real interactions in social community. The reason people spend so much time on social media is that it provides a surrogate which is convincing enough to hack the human mind that it's a legitimate social connection while providing none of the underlying depth that close social interaction would. If you want to look at social media, it hacks especially female status games. This is something that John Haidt has written about extensively, where suicide rates have doubled among teenage girls, and these same increases also occurred with female teenage depression since smartphones and social media were popularized. As I researched this, I just found a horrifying statistic that about a third of teenage girls have had a major depressive episode. There's also the whole meme about teenage virginity rates skyrocketing with the invention of the iPhone. This is since women operate in their own status hierarchies, which they're quite invested in, in that they operate under rules of COVID competition. If the social dynamics and leftism seem confusing, it's since female relational warfare is not your natural operating system, studies have found. And Joyce Benison's wonderful book warriors and warriors talks a lot about how female stat hierarchies operate under the COVID of equality, which is a shield of plausible deniability for low trust status games. The Internet can hack into this biological circuit in a way similar to when Native Americans first bought alcohol from the Europeans, whose communities were then destroyed by that. Ill keep in mind the system is actively designed to suck up as much attention as possible, and this comes most easily through provoking negative emotions which are deeply wired into the human psyche for obvious reasons. That means that a lot of this is by design, although the people who Built. This didn't set out to cause mass mental illness. A huge issue with modern leftism or our current ruling ideology is that it can't see that without social institutions or standards that human behavior defaults to brutal low trust extraction. That means that when these systems were put in place by people who automatically assumed human nature to be good, and then they set no standards or systems to clean out the Internet, that we would get the lowest quality option of the Internet possible. Anyone who's been a discord moderator or sees what happens when a city stops policing can see how it automatically degrades to the most low trust, least effective and lamest option possible. The reason that freedom is so rare over history and must be protected is that the deep tension in human societies is that you need social standards or authorities. But these can't abuse their own power, although from an authority's purely short term perspective, they have every reason to do so. This makes most of the Internet what Sam Francis would call an anarcho tyranny, comparable to many left wing cities in America, where the right wingers who would push social norms that would stabilize said cities are actively and brutally suppressed. Meanwhile, antisocial criminals or leftist terrorists are actively supported, not even suppressed. This creates an artificial state of nature where without these oppressive authorities, you'd see a natural hierarchy emerge of people who could stop these criminals, while the authorities refused to actually exercise any of the authority which only they are responsible for. This means that a lot of how lame the Internet currently is is by design. We could have a much better Internet, but we've chosen to hook up our entire society to the psychological equivalent of an open sewer vent that no one is cleaning. People do not seem to comprehend that if wielded correctly, the Internet could be the best thing on earth. People don't seem to comprehend that if wielded correctly, the Internet could be the best thing on earth. It could be a living work of art and a cry for freedom. We have more control over the Internet than we have over material reality. So why don't we turn the Internet into Renaissance Florence or Classical Athens or the American frontier? If we had the Internet in the 1950s, it would reflect that society and would be far more productive since you'd have segments of the Internet with strict moderation. That would just be for productive discourse or other segments for families and the like. The reason that technologists often say that technological innovation is positive for society, while the technological innovations of recent times times often feel negative to our real lives is that earlier eras of Western history were much better governed, so they were able to negate the technological negatives while reaching the positives. The horrible Dickensian factory work conditions 200 years ago sparked a moral panic to help the poor, which none of the disbalances of the digital revolution have provoked from our elite. The rise of the automobile provoked the creation of a highway system, while the government today wouldn't be able to build those highways, so cars would just clog up our normal street system, making us resent them. Furthermore, if cars were invented today, they'd be so regulated that only the rich could afford them where you'd need the equivalent of an airplane license to drive them, while the regulations would make it unprofitable to mass produce them cheaply for the public. This would provoke profound envy from the masses, who would potentially vote in many Western countries to ban the rich from owning cars for what were really spurious climate reasons, which still doesn't stop them from doing that in our world. A consistent theme in this entire video is that the modern materialist worldview is very bad in assessing things by quality or value in a way that can't be measured numerically. To return to an older theme in this video, from a human perspective, it's clear why social media can have such a clear negative effect on women. Social media naturally strips nuance and context from social interactions, which are the positives that allow depth while leaving the elements that provoke envy or dissatisfaction. It's unclear if this is intentional since the left often generates these through social interactions they own since like school or the media given the left benefits from them. As an example, most people won't mind if their boss makes more money than them, if their boss is kind and clearly competent. For many public figures, we can respect that they genuinely gave contributions to society great enough that if they're not paid for them, it's deeply unfair. However, if you're forced to stare at another girl who you believe to be prettier than you and you see that she has more like that's pure envy and self loathing Fuel with no Humanizing elements Another two major elements of the incentives provided by the Internet which provoke this crisis of young female mental health are the lack of resolution or depth for the lack of resolution. All of digital culture is designed to be a shallow pool where there's no way to really level up. For an example, in sex, the Internet keeps you in a state of moderate titillation without release, while in a healthy human soc, sexual titillation would be correlated with release. I notice it in books, since books operate the exact opposite way, where you'll read a 300 page book on the French Revolution and by the end your knowledge of the topic has progressed. For the Internet, you'll pick up a lot of little facts, but never general concepts or knowledge. The issue is that the first type of knowledge is categorically superior to the latter on a vast basis. Fun facts don't build up to change you or how you think. It's the same thing that the Internet rewards really vast, very peripheral networks, but makes close friendships very difficult. I find, especially so with successful people who have large networks, that if you actually try to figure out how many of these supposed friends they can really trust or rely on in bad times, it's often none. I had an experience recently that horrified me where I was very sleep deprived and so my internal monologue turned off. And so I didn't have the voice inside my mind that's constantly talking and analyzing things and that stuff. And I found I spent more time on the screen and I realized that the reason I was doing this is that we've offshored everything to screen based life. And I can spend hours off the screen because I can read, or I'll often go for hours straight where I'm not quote unquote doing anything because I'm just thinking and I'm processing my internal monologue. And when I was very sleep deprived, I realized not everyone or the vast majority of people are not like this. And I felt the profound sense of how trapped they must feel that their only reality is the screen and they're not offered any alternative by society, and that must make them feel deeply powerless and lost. I don't believe in humble bragging, but I do believe in bragging. And I think beneath that is an underlying point that's deeply concerning. That in a society where we've removed all of the alternatives to screen addiction, and most people realistically either work through their internal monologues, through social interactions, or they work. So when you've offshored both of those to screens, you have totally cut off the density of their lives and the depth of their lives and meaning. This means that the Internet provokes feelings of perpetual adolescence. I call the part of life when you're young and trying to start a family, master a career, or develop a sense of identity as the journeyman phase. From that being the term for that phase of a craftsman's life in the pre industrial world, we've extended the journeyman phase for most young people today to be their entire lives, where they never get to become real adults. The Internet works like this, where, as I've watched the digital right develop since COVID I've been disappointed since it's never evolved to come to any genuine conclusions. We're stuck in this permanent state of dissatisfaction against the left, while whenever someone tries to develop a new coalition, which is really a life or death issue for us, so the left doesn't destroy the west, the mob pulls them back down. This means that every single interaction has to be shallow, since depth is punished, which over the course of years feels like a bunch of toddlers fighting over who gets the shared box of toys while not realizing that there's a tiger who's about to eat them and there's a much larger box of nicer toys they could reach if they delayed gratification for 20 minutes. That since with the removal of any depth or shared context, the only signaling device left is the most shallow performativity. Part of the reason the woke left has been able to dominate the Western world is that they're perfectly designed to play into the performative, anatomized nature of the Internet world. In exchange for mouthing the right words, the people involved are able to get excused for the most reprehensible behavior, which is a good deal for a lot of the worst people. I remember when a friend explained to me that most discourse on Twitter isn't about making statements to clarify your thought process, but is instead tribal signaling. I started to notice how the mob would radically change its opinions on topics overnight, or would believe contradictory things. I didn't realize that the cohesion mattered to them that much, and I didn't understand why they were willing to sacrifice their individuality for a group that offered them literally nothing. People aren't making money or deep friendships from these Twitter mobs. It's just a surrogate for religion and community that they don't realize can't perform the same role. Humanization is the most powerful force for social cohesion. If you interact with people of differing social classes, personalities, ethnicities, or sexes, you can be aware of the negative or positive aspects of their group identity while still being able to see them as people with souls. For example, in our society, the envious hatred of the rich and the rich's decision to screw over the working classes in a litany of ways. Both stem from the loss of shared ties that would bind the upper and lower classes together in a normal society, with as an example, the village lord who has responsibility and duties to the peasants, or vice versa. Those are always less extractive than the system or the total state. It's why I find a lot of the hatred across the sexes online worrying. The female hatred of men is obviously dangerous, but in reverse for the men who are hating women now, it's not the pre modern comprehension of different abilities, but a dehumanized hatred. I often have a sense of the current digital misogyny. You guys are aware we're stuck with the foids, right? We can't treat them like a foreign nation. Even if in the last few decades feminism has been inexcusable, we are forced to sleep in the same beds with them. The Internet pushes the opposite of humanization and narratives that are the exact opposite of it. While there's no wait for actions, this means that social performance becomes the only vector. Authors have spoken about for thousands of years how disastrous the mob is. Pre modern political philosophy was centrally about how to avoid the mob, since so many choices that people regretted enormously afterwards were only possible since the mob abdicated responsibility for everyone involved. Humans are innately herd animals and we have a mental switch that in group we can get away with behaviors like breaking buildings or laws, which we wouldn't try as individuals. Crowds are nightmares since they adjust to the lowest quality behavior since there's no one directing them according to the rational will. The Internet is designed to exacerbate this to the worst degree. It combines a total lack of consequences with no standards, and then a bias towards negative psychology. People are so terrible online since it's actively rewarded by their peers, while they wouldn't behave in this manner in person since they'd get punched in the face. I've started to notice that the rudeness and poor quality of Internet discourse bleeds into real life, which is disappointing. To be fair, though, making a division between the Internet and real life feels more and more pointless as time passes, given everything quote unquote real or current in our society occurs online while nothing changes in person. If everyone is constantly hooked up online, we become a digital society that happens to be stuck in physical reality. We're already living in the Ready Player one reality. What all of this means is that we end up in a uniquely bad constellation of variables where you have these crowds form with incentives that pander to the lowest common denominator through shallow emotional appeals vetted solely through performative morality. This is literally the worst thing possible, and it is staggeringly lame. It stops anything constructive from getting done, while these mobs frequently call for literal physical violence. But people are so addicted to the Internet, they don't actually organize or do stuff. For a brief example for why this doesn't work. Let's look at romance. We all know that dating apps have failed for young people, with only about a quarter of Gen Z still using dating apps anymore. At the same time, this void hasn't been filled where young people just aren't dating anymore because they're all online and thus not going to third places or social groups to meet one another. This means that the most reasonable place to meet other people is online, which is where young people spend their time. The thing though is that the Internet is actively designed to be anti seductive and anti erotic. When I say erotic, I don't mean porn, but an underlying quality that exists throughout the world. When you're walking through a beautiful Italian cobblestone town, drinking a latte by a garden, the environment is far more conducive to human reproduction on a passive level. When our grandparents were dating, they lived in a more human environment with various social institutions or just the world around them that was built in a certain way, so it was easy to romantically escalate. In fact, it felt second nature where it wasn't something you really thought about. This is why older generations don't comprehend why young people don't mate or date, since they haven't processed that all of these social stabilizers have totally vanished. Meaning, rather than being natural, mating is something you have to accomplish through a society actively designed against it on 20 levels. When young people say that they don't want to bring a child into this world, what they mean is that this is an anti human culture where even their ancestors, who may have lived as peasants in their own filth, lived in a culture that had more incentives set up for human reproduction in society. Remember, animals in captivity don't breed. This is true across the society, but it's also true online. For example, romantic relationships tend to start within dense social communities which create social environments of repeated social contact with differing levels of depth, shared social codes to mediate the interactions, and social interactions with plausible deniability built in. If you look at the statistics, in previous generations, people largely didn't meet their partners in the bar or in the club, but through friends, church, university, school and work. Part of what Wokeness has done is ban dating through these different avenues. So people go online. The Internet is structured in the exact opposite way as it would be to be conducive to mating where it's entirely shallow, with no privacy, zeroed down depth, no repeated contact, the most low trust communications possible, judged in the least charitable light possible. The Internet is also anti romantic in that it tends to be disjointed and gross, with it actually being taboo on most of the Internet to post sincere, vulnerable or beautiful things. Those sorts of things establish a frame which allows attraction. Attraction is also generated by dominance, and declaring personal dominance is seen as deeply taboo online. If you wanted to hit on a girl publicly online, in most cases you would have a mob of haters immediately attack you and call you cringe for the mere act of trying. If you fail romantically at all, a girl can repost how cringe it is with zero social shame and her friends will cheer her on. I've heard multiple girls say that their boyfriend was bad in bed online and that shocks me since if anything should be socially taboo for a stable society, it's that our society normalizes such degenerate stuff and penalizes such normal heterosexual behavior. But we allow this. Every story like that decreases the total amount of sex massively through destroying social trust. And so the constant media events about people being sexually or romantically insane and exploitive have created a massive low trust equilibrium that's very hard to break. Keep in mind that people learn culture through osmosis, not through books. People learn what behaviors are socially appropriate from their friends, movies, music, art, family, school, history books and everything else. This is why the social institutions like art, art, universities, politics or media, promoting degeneracy and actively degrading moral, honorable or pro social behavior is profoundly dangerous. In a way I'm shocked people don't understand. We're setting a precedent that this behavior is acceptable. Humans aren't machines. So we take in the feedback from our group and this creates a culture where it's taboo to be moral or sincere. This will cause total social collapse, like the fall of Rome or the Maya. This should be obvious since society is held together through human relationships. When the birds tweet to one another, they're normally either doing dominant signals over territory, calling for mates, or perhaps doing bird philosophic dissertations. This means that little birds which grow up know how to engage in these behaviors. People learn this stuff through osmosis. And so for someone Gen Z like me, it means their entire lives. There has never been a model on how to succeed in life. There has never been a social script about how to be happy, succeed romantically, find meaning in everything else. Most people can't see outside their society's cultural frame, so when they're not offered scripts for these, they just don't do the behaviors. A big reason that Gen Z doesn't date is they've never been offered scripts for how to signal interest, escalate, and then move through dating to marriage, then to be happy in marriage. The environment is so sterile that they just give up. I've had a sort of intuitive feeling lately that time both moves too quickly and too slowly. What I mean by that is that if you follow the Internet, there will be constant new trends which are often deeply horrifying, like the Iran war or Epstein, just for very recent examples. These burn people out since constant emotional stimulus without resolution fries our brains. We're designed for something to happen, and then we see its effects, and then we can move on and learn the lesson. What the current regime is doing by extending this process as long as possible is driving everyone crazy. Since we lose our ability to think or even understand how the world works on any level, since the society so muddles it all that we give it up. Our ability to understand the world is the same thing as our agency within the world. This means we're effectively enacting soul death on our entire populations because we're not willing to own up to the costs of our era of history. It gets even worse from here, though. How humans are created. A major theme of this video is you can't view all consciousness or minds as the same or equal. If you raise your children incorrectly or manage your society poorly, you will face consequences. This should be obvious where on paper, we believe that social engineering is the underlying variable that pushes human nature. But we put very little thought into the incentives we're using to train people. This really means that the left, which runs the educational system, only cares about power, since they've invested all of their efforts into ideological propaganda and none into cultivating the next generation as humans. I think this screen addiction is destroying our ability to be human. I don't think this is the only cause where the fact that it's occurring at the same time as mouse utopia means that the screens are supercharging a previous trend. What the screens do is shut down the normal experiences and things which have allowed humans to form for all of our history going back millions of years. Keep in mind that we are the only society ever which doesn't value culture. Where everyone else believed that culture was needed to produce the trait humanity without it is a total personal or soul loss. That's deeply horrifying for other people in history. This outcome in our society that seems totally bizarre to us would be a logical, natural endpoint in their comprehension of the world. Something else to think about is that this is the first time in history we've ever had this technology and it's only about 15 years old. And so we should prepare for social effects that we don't know about already, because when unprecedented things happen, they have unprecedented consequences. And it's really remarkable that we put in all of this technology and we did not think at all about any of the consequences. It's deeply insane and immature. John Haidt's book the Anxious Generation covers the effects of this. Well, well, it's really remarkable that he seems to be the only person who's talking about the negative effects of screen addiction, given how big an issue it is. He talks about how we've statistically found cognitive declines in intelligence, sociability, durability test taking, mental health, or every other observable metric due to this. This shouldn't be politicized and it isn't really right now where woke ruling classes could try to fix this. But alas, they only care about revenge and power. The point where this gets even more concerning is that entire generations are being raised in front of screens without other inputs that they need as children. This is on top of all of the other very serious social issues I talk about on this YouTube channel. I'm Gen Z. So I saw this process emerge. I grew up before screens and phone addiction were normalized. I grew up without TV or Internet for years in a rural area where the nearest neighbors were miles away. So I found modern America confusing when I started to deal with it as a teenager. I like to say that when I was a child, enough of the 20th century John Hughes post war golden age America was left that a viewer could confuse the two for being the same. The screen addiction would be a subtle sci fi introduction to the the plot that would quietly make the audience realize that this is a sci fi dystopia before that subplot really gets hammered home. After Covid, by the 2000s you'd realize that this was a sci fi cosmic horror masquerading in the ruins of 20th century America. By the time I was a teenager, screen addiction and social media obsession was already totally normalized. As a zoomer, I've seen most people my age not really develop as adults or people. They're stuck in a perpetual adolescence where they've reached none of the markers of adulthood. Half of Gen Z are virgins. And I briefly want to gloat that I predicted the numbers on this would be way worse than the old statistics. While people called me a madman at the time. It's really remarkable how being a madman these days means you're making pattern solving bets on what's plausible while most people only believe something if the regime feeds them statistics on the topic. This is even after most of them say they hate and distrust the regime, but they still take their theory of reality. Gen Z experienced horrible helicopter parenting which allowed them no agency. They were often burnt out and worked to death as teenagers with 12 hour a day, seven day a week work schedules. The schools didn't teach them any real knowledge while their countries were robbed from them and they can't get work work. This has of course created a generation of hollow entitled zombies. I find it mind boggling. People can complain about people who are often just teenagers who have barely entered adulthood and not find blame in their parents who had control over them until a year or two before. It's also remarkable that if you were to see this outcome and see all of the things in the Zoomer's life that have led up to this, it would be a natural culmination. But no one can put the context together. Modernity strips everything of context. Part of why equality is such a bad idea is that you can deprive a child of all of the experiences that would allow them to be a healthy, mature adult. And then when you're pushed on it, you can say that every style of parenting is innately equal, so this wasn't abusive. Equality translates to the total removal of standards or direction in application. It also means with childrearing that the youth mature with no roadmap on how to live as an adult in any way, since they were told that every path is equal but that every accepted path was also toxic. This is effectively burning the map to reach your destination while asking you to be grateful for how virtuous it was to do so. For a few other examples of this, memory formation occurs in context, normally physically mediated. What you have with years in front of a screen is you're not forming memories or learning. Since learning is predominantly a biological, somatic physical process. I mean learning in the sense of life experiences, not intellectually. This ends up producing adults with the levels of maturity of children and also stops them from developing their own sense of self which is formed through through struggle and opposition to the world. If you don't have the ability to form memories, you also can't create a narrative of your own life to derive meaning from or learn lessons from your own experiences. This makes you incredibly dependent upon the group, which is toxic and offers you nothing. The predominant way we learn, and I mean learn here as in general life wisdom, not academic topics, is through deep social relationships. This is how you're Taught how to perform certain social roles. Of course, marriage and friendships fail since there's no operating code for how to arbitrate disputes. Logic on how to manage your relationships, increase the depth of said relationships, learn from them or rituals that would help people maintain relationships. This stuff is necessary since otherwise it's impossible to really communicate with people. Since social relationships remain peripheral, what I tell people is that politeness is very important because it's a short circuit that allows depth in relationships. If you can be polite to someone, it's a way of cutting through lots of layers of social complexity through subtle interaction. Banning social standards and scorning morality or politeness makes social life impossible. Role models in our daily life is how we learn things that are useful and applicable to us as individuals. This is a basic human biological need. And so you have to see its removal not as an abstract issue, but as a very concrete one that will destroy the entire rest of the society. If we don't fix these sorts of issues, we will slam directly into mouse utopia and social suicide within the matter of several years. Without these things, it becomes impossible to develop as an individual. The only feedback you will receive in life is from the Internet. Since peripheral relationships aren't strong enough to rewire how we think or live, this will create a deeply self loathing individual. Since humans need social mirroring to be able to conceive of themselves on a deep level. Our sense of self is in many cases a reflection of our social perception. Thus, when you remove deep mirroring or empathy, that person's humanity atrophies and dies. Since they need others to see their depth in order to recognize and master it. The world would appear maddening since no matter how much you change or evolve, the Internet, which is the main social channel left, will not reflect or change you. AI could change this, but we can't count on AI to replace real human interactions. I hope you can see how the incentives here lead immediately to mass crowds and madness. Unmoored from a sense of self or roots, people become deeply susceptible to ideological plagues. They have no other frame or experiences to cross reference. If these political ideas are reasonable. This is how events like the French or Russian revolutions, which espoused utterly ridiculous ideas, won. This is the pure embodiment of the lonely crowd. I made a video about last year. The end result of this is a zombie culture where things don't resolve correctly. Where the economy isn't working but no one cares enough to reset it. It one where everyone knows the politics is run by evil ped trying to kill their civilization, but no one does anything about it. One where none of the social institutions work. This theme of mouse utopia and screen addiction will be the inspiration for a bunch of videos in the future where I'll explain my system to avoid screen addiction and survive mouse utopia. Before we can have the medicine, I need to show you the wounds. I will finish with this. Do we want this? Is this the world we want to live in for the rest of our lives? Remember, much as you might not feel it, you still have agency.
Host: Rudyard Lynch
Date: July 3, 2026
In this thought-provoking solo episode, host Rudyard Lynch delves deeply into how the internet and ubiquitous screens have fundamentally reshaped—and in many ways damaged—human psychology, relationships, and culture. Lynch draws on history, philosophy, and personal reflection, painting a bleak yet incisive portrait of what he calls a “screen-addicted” society and warning of dire consequences if we fail to change course. With references to historical analogies, social science, and his own Gen-Z experiences, the episode offers not just a critique but a challenge to reclaim our agency and humanity.
Timestamp: 10:00 – 17:00
Timestamp: 17:00 – 24:00
Timestamp: 24:00 – 34:00
Timestamp: 34:00 – 40:00
Memorable Quote: “Social media exists to serve the purpose of real interactions in social community. The reason people spend so much time on social media is that it provides a surrogate which is convincing enough to hack the human mind… while providing none of the underlying depth…” (38:15)
Timestamp: 40:00 – 49:00
Memorable Quote: “We’ve chosen to hook up our entire society to the psychological equivalent of an open sewer vent that no one is cleaning.” (46:20)
Timestamp: 49:00 – 1:01:00
Timestamp: 1:01:00 – 1:16:00
Timestamp: 1:16:00 – END
On Denial:
“When someone is in denial, [they] are actually obsessed with the thing that they’re avoiding.” (02:00)
On Society’s Decline:
“I feel like a stranger in this new world… It's like I ended up in a strange dystopian sci-fi novel and no one else is in on the joke.” (08:40)
On Screen Addiction:
“The worst element of this is that it's not like the things on their screens are helping them. They're hooked up to this superconductor of mental illness.” (15:00)
On Loss of Childhood:
"Instead, the children stay at home playing with an iPad, which is a childhood in the same way that porn is sex." (20:30)
On Social Media’s Hollow Connections:
"Social media is convincing enough to hack the human mind that it's a legitimate social connection, while providing none of the underlying depth…" (38:15)
On Society’s Collective Blindness:
“We’ve massively hobbled the human potential of our society for zero gain.” (32:00)
On Social Decay:
"It is shocking how disastrous the mob is. Pre-modern political philosophy was centrally about how to avoid the mob, since so many choices that people regretted enormously afterwards were only possible since the mob abdicated responsibility for everyone involved." (1:05:45)
On Dehumanization:
"The Internet pushes the opposite of humanization and narratives that are the exact opposite of it. While there's no weight for actions, this means that social performance becomes the only vector." (1:08:30)
On the Future:
“Without these things, it becomes impossible to develop as an individual. The only feedback you will receive in life is from the Internet. Since peripheral relationships aren't strong enough to rewire how we think or live, this will create a deeply self-loathing individual.” (1:22:00)
| Timestamp | Segment/Idea | Notable Point or Quote | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------| | 02:00 | Denial and the Subconscious | “In denial, you're obsessed with what you're avoiding.” | | 04:30 | Disengaging with modern culture | "I’ve just stopped caring at all what the current culture says." | | 10:00–17:00 | Screen addiction as a hidden crisis | "I rarely see it on the news..." | | 20:30 | Loss of real-world childhood | "Playing with an iPad... [is] childhood like porn is sex."| | 30:00 | Gen Z isolation & loss of community | “90% of Gen Z feels lonely and half are virgins.” | | 38:15 | Social media as surrogate connection | See quote above. | | 46:20 | The internet as "an open sewer vent" | See quote above. | | 1:10:00 | The internet as anti-romantic/anti-erotic | Discussion on online dating and romance | | 1:16:00–End | Loss of memory, meaning, and healthy maturation | Analysis of memory/identity formation & social feedback |
Lynch ends with a pressing challenge to listeners:
"Do we want this? Is this the world we want to live in for the rest of our lives? Remember, much as you might not feel it, you still have agency." (Final minute)
He hints at future episodes focused on combating screen addiction and societal atomization, suggesting that change—while difficult—remains possible if we choose to act.
Overall Impression:
This episode is trenchant, personal, and urgent, blending sociological insight with personal narrative and historical reflection. Lynch’s style is forthright and, at times, polemical, but his warnings about screen addiction and social decay are grounded in both statistics and lived experience. For anyone interested in the intersection of technology and civilization, this is essential listening.