mannishboywrites

[mannishboywrites]

Why Try?

I think about the Hikikomori a lot. For those that don't know, I'm referring to the phenomenon first identified in Japan of young men secluding themselves indoors, either living alone or (more often) still in their parents' homes. While the prevalent definition of a hikikomori contains the provision that they must be NEET (not in education, employment, or training), I think too much is left on the table, and the problem at hand would not be understood to be at the scale that it truly is. More on that in a bit. These men have become the subjects of a fairly dynamic field of study over the last couple of decades, and academics have identified a number of interlacing explanations. I'd like to train my dilettante eye on a few of them for a moment.

Modern technologically is pervasive, and much of our lives are not only enraptured by it, but depend on it. As an almost-well-paid bureaucrat who benefits(?) from the post-COVID home office revolution, there is no way I could do my job without a reliable computer, fast internet access, and at least two monitors. Daily, I access vast databases that store so much information, a small warehouse would have been required in the days of pen-and-paper. My job would be fundamentally different and I would be a much less efficient worker without the benefits of our current level of technological advancement, and I am far from the cutting edge. This theory feels a bit too obvious or "common sense" for me. It's basically impossible to scientifically put to the test, but how could there be nothing to it? Some people really would rather throw on a VR helmet, buy a quality fleshlight, and invest in a premium subscription to a site of their chance than go somewhere to meet a romantic partner. But more on that later.

I'll admit that this next theory is a bit beyond my current level of training to fully explain, but I can summarize what I have been told and what I have been able to glean from cursory analysis. Marxists have been ringing the warning bells since the 1970s that the old coot's theory about the rate of profit inexorably dropping off has been generally proven true, at least in effect. Economies are volatile after the financial boom of the 1980s, and Japan in particular has been in stasis since the 1990s. Some researchers point to this stagnating economy as an issue. In the not-so-distant past, it was pretty hard to make a living without leaving your domicile and clocking in somewhere for eight, ten, or god help you, twelve hours. With the decline or at least stagnation of industrial jobs in countries leading the way in the capital markets, there are just fewer people, men in particular, taking on work that requires them to be in the same room, vehicle, or job site with other living, breathing people. If you spend the better part of your day working or preparing to work and your job is to go into the home office across the hall from your bedroom, it doesn't leave much time for anything else. For the NEET crowd, what is really the difference if your parents are able to support you to the same degree or better than how well you'd be able to support yourself? After all, your net wages are likely to be significantly lower than theirs were and the necessities in life are much more expensive. May as well stay home, right?

Finally, we come to a pretty nebulous point that I think is most obviously created by the first two, but maybe explains the phenomenon more clearly. The fact is that nobody knows how to meet people anymore because there are no shared spaces anymore, in person or otherwise. As much as I think the hand-wringing around "polarization" by the political centrists who just want us all to get along even when some of us would love nothing more than to kill the rest of us annoys me to no end, their identification of a more polarized society is accurate. As you can tell from how I let that last sentence linger a bit too long, I could go on for awhile about the political side of polarization, but that's for another day and probably another platform entirely. What I'm referring to is what I'll call interest-driven polarization. Now, more than ever, I can choose to never interact with someone I don't want to interact with. It would take actual effort and not a small amount of research to find a space where a diverse group of people can get together to interact with one another.

Here's an example that illustrates my point: a close friend of mine is a specialized mechanic. As such, he works in a dealership/repair shop with an almost entirely white, conservative, rural group of people. He himself is white and comes from a small town. The difference is that he isn't conservative at all. He is forced, by the nature of his job, to sit and talk with people who aren't like him. These are people he would never interact with if he had a job like me or most of the other people I know. I'm not saying it's fun or even healthy to be in constant interaction with people you're a hair's breadth away from arguing with every day, but the fact remains that he is one of the vanishingly few people in his age-bracket who has this experience.

Contrast this with another friend of mine: same age, but with an advanced degree from a prestigious school, a job in the financial sector, and wealthy parents. While he is south Asian and the people he encounters through work span the demographic spectrum, they all have roughly the same outlook on the world. To a person, they all share nearly every belief and conviction that he does. This in turn leaves him unchallenged and inculcated from a world outside of this circle, engendering a sort of naivety that he is still shocked by whenever it is made apparent. Ultimately, he has no rational reason to get away from it.

When your livelihood depends on a homogenous social circle and your interests are so easily catered to by boutique shops, twitch streams, algorithmically generated advertising, playlists, and youtube feeds, it becomes too easy and seductive to ever leave your comfort zone. You'd have to try.

To wrap up here, I want to pose a sincere question: why try? I've been sitting on this post for almost a week, having begun a draft and stalling at the second paragraph a day after my first. I kept writing and asking myself why I should try to finish it. I have multiple short stories sitting in google docs, half finished and not half bad. But why try? Nobody will read them, and I can gain gratification doing anything else in the world? I know many young men who probably ask themselves that question every time they're confronted with the anxiety of stepping out of their door. My friends are all on discord or twitter. Why do I need more? My career is almost certain to be a dead end, so why pour myself into it? It can be psychologically damaging to talk to women and get rejected or mocked, so why try to find a way to meet them without being a creep?

Dear reader, I have no idea how to answer these questions without giving someone an answer that doesn't feel weak or forced. I'm not in the business of dispensing platitudes. What I do know is that life is hard, and it must be in order for your actions to be of consequence. When you are stuck at home, only knowing what you want to know or talking to who you want to talk to in a way of your choosing, you will feel as though you're missing something. You're going to try to find that thing, but only in the way that you know how. It's dangerous to go that path alone. The problem is that we're all alone, and many of us wouldn't have it any other way.

[mannishboywrites]

What the hell is going on?

The internet has been pissing me off lately. It seems like it's impossible to log into my Twitter account (fuck off, Elon, I'm not calling it X) to say "ratio+L+get gud" to a journalist without being shown some blue-check misogynist with a marble bust avatar telling me that I must save my sons from the degenerating forces of public school, Netflix, and indoor plumbing. I can't open Instagram without seeing a LinkedIn evangelist telling me that the only way to success is to start your day with a five mile run at 3am and block off two hours before lunch for something called "deep work" in between liquid meals that will run you $50/day. I just wanted to watch videos of some guy showing me how to play "Supernaut" by Black Sabbath on the bass. Instead of three hour video essays about one specific armor piece in Dark Souls 2, YouTube wants me to watch two guys with questionable hairlines sit in a studio and debate how high a woman's body count can be before she has been gone from NPC to refuse in their eyes.

It may sound like I'm complaining about The Almighty Algorithm, but I really hate the idea of being that boring. As someone who has a working understanding of Marxian social theory, I promise that I will be more annoying than dull. As such, what has really been fueling my consternation has been the feeling that nobody really knows why they're doing what they're doing, nobody knows where they are going, and everything feels like an artifice. Other people are not people in the way you are, they're obstacles, foils, marks, rungs on a ladder, predators, or prey. Seeing them as anything other than an object with a use value at least and ideally an exchange value is a sign of weakness best avoided.

If you've spent even a second on the internet, you've certainly seen the various hacks that people smarter, sexier, richer, and more skilled than you have to offer, all for the low price of a Patreon subscription. It's not a get rich quick scheme, it's an optimization method. It's not how to make friends and influence people, it's how to become an Influencer with a powerful Brand. You're not having a crisis of identity, you're just a Beta in need of some guidance on how to develop the Sigma grindset. You have so much to learn, and a bald man with HGH gut can probably teach you.

Until I forget or lose interest because I started another character in Elden Ring, I'll be exploring the various ailments of what Marx would call alienation and how they manifest on social media in the form of content (another concept I'll probably talk about because I hate it so much) designed to be consumed, regurgitated, and consumed again in a cycle that not only radicalizes the viewer, but the creator themselves. In post-industrial capitalist society within the Imperial core, people have lost the concept of class as a scientific term. We don't share spaces with people we don't already think we'll get along with, we don't bond over things that aren't commodities, and we don't have relationships that aren't transactions. When you've been steeped in that brew from birth (usually sometime in the Reagan administration or after), it's not hard to see why Andrew Tate isn't rejected as a psychopathic cancer to a civilized society or why Jordan Peterson's vapid, half-baked Jungianism can't be laughed off as the mumblings of a charlatan. The fact is, people are desperately looking for something that just isn't there, and when they aren't armed with a truly social set of ethics or basic media literacy, anybody with any confidence or semblance of authority will do as a surrogate role model.

I can't say this blog is going to be well-planned or even well-sourced all the time. Hell, I'm not even sure how long I'll keep up with it. Hopefully, I'll get some of you thinking about how dangerous it can be to distance yourself from your fellow people. At the very least, we'll get to gawk at some real freaks. That's what the internet should be for, I think.