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#coming of age
whokilledjared · 2 days
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the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself. (& takes on social media)
Hi.
I'm lonely.
The moment I got "two weeks off school" in sophomore year, life went to 4x speed & I can't turn it off no matter how hard I try.
Maybe COVID-19 adolescence did numbers on me. Somewhere between the iPhone 5c and ChatGPT, 14-hour screen times have live-streamed to me a steady, homogenous death of culture.
Nothing is cool anymore. Nothing is sacred. Every movement is a trend, and every cult classic a sequel.
The value we place on things being beautiful, on being "cool," and our gatekept appreciation of how hard these things were to find: it's been co-opted, or perhaps stolen. It's been stolen by the new merchant class. "Disruptors" and "innovators" turning our lives into a burgeoning black mirror prequel. Soon, we'll graduate too, and we'll wring every morsel of value in each others' lives dry for cash.
Plain and simple, I think we're being manipulated.
Your dates are an algorithm. Your music is a social signal. And Zuck knows when you sleep.*
God. What the fuck are we doing???
“Individuation is becoming the thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.” — Carl Jung
Recently, I deleted Instagram. My first impulse was to post a story or something, announcing my departure. But then, I thought that would be lame.
I got rid of my account, too. Kinda. Over 1 year, over 800 followers removed, and what remains of me is a little grey icon, and "JM_0000000010" where my name and face used to be.
yay.
There were many people I wish I could have been friends with, but I wonder, too, why I find myself so drawn to the validation of others. Does social media affect me worse, or do we all just choose to ignore it, languishing in private?
At any rate, this last year has almost felt like re-learning how to be a human being.
Personally, I think one of the biggest markers for maturity is when you become willing to disappoint the people you know in favor of what feels right to you, when you start to unravel the stories you’ve told yourself (or been told) about who you are and what you should be. In short, the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself.
And sometimes, I think about every college student that has ever lived. My grandmother, my dad, and so on. Just consider for a moment all kids who graduated before 2010:
What was it like for the ones in 1940? To walk around, before a campus had computers? In 2006: To meet someone pretty, but forget their number? In 1999: To cram into dorms, and watch Seinfeld live on-air?
Would I, like my dad in 1988, have braved cold night, brisk wind, & landline phone-call just to knock and see if my friends were too busy to hang?
What stories could I tell if there was even the slightest chance of getting lost on the way home from a party?
Humans are social creatures. We crave our friends like water. To me, the clearest difference between Dasani and Instagram is that one of them comes in a bottle.
Yet despite these distractions and comforts we have in 2024, somehow, we still have engineering students. People who carve out time in their day to sit down, look at paper, and solve differential equations. But then, that's not so hard, is it? It just takes time. Precious, fucking, time.
At Meta, leagues and leagues of these engineers power behavioral scientists, who are competing for the highest salary. Their benchmarks? Your FOMO. Guilt. Anxiety. Obsession. The worse you feel, the more you engage with their content. The more you engage with their content, well, you're starting to get the point.
Try something for me: Open up Instagram, but don't tap anything. What happens? How many little animations? How many tiny nudges prompting you to get lost? Our home-pages are billion-dollar diving boards, hoisting us over engineered catacombs of subconscious quicksand.
My homepage is my FOMO, my envy, and my crushes. The pain and struggle of trying to be someone who I am not. My little existential crises, bundled-up, packaged, and shipped with a like button.
To abandon your social networks entirely, however, requires a safety net of close friends. After all, your friends are online, and you'd be miserable without them.
This is the problem with our monkey brains. Millennia of sociological natural-selection have made us quite great at feeling terrible. We're damn good at making tribal status games to play with, too.
Seeking refuge in quirked up septum piercings and boygenius listeners, my time in counter-cultural, alternative "scenes" between St. Louis and Tampa has shown me that even the weirdest of folks and the most removed can accidentally find themselves reduced to nothing more than high-school popularity contests. Even if I love them. Even if they're amazing people. We're human.
We can't "quit social media" as much as we can't "quit bottled water" Sure, we can, but it's inconvenient. And even without a bottle, we're still drinking water.
So I lost touch with my friends. I got no new updates on their lives. I forced myself into the inconvenience of not having a phone to reach for in fleeting moments of boredom. Suddenly, I was out of the loop. Suddenly, I was bored. And suddenly, nobody missed me. My only friends were the ones I had the time to text. Everyone else ... does not exist.
Weekends have become more valuable than ever. Without the empty social calories of seeing my friends' pictures, I find myself planning hangouts as often as my schedule allows. I have more lunches, more study sessions, and more is done in the company of less.
And I have the time to breathe.
And in this calm, I think I found my answer: it's my misplaced ambition. These fears of anxiety and people I thought I would miss, they seem represent something I want to see more of within myself. Something I want to develop, lean into more deeply, as an individual. And I think that's quite normal; to look out into the world and feel attracted to things we want to see more of. This is, I think, how everyone develops their own definition of beauty — and of coolness. It's largely the intersection of what we find most interesting, and what we want to see more of in the world. Because beauty and coolness, by definition, are rare and hard to find. If they were everywhere, nothing be beautiful, nor would anything be cool.
When we all turn into wrinkles and cataracts, bad backs and heart attacks, for a brief, glorious moment, our lives are going to flash before our eyes. In this moment, you'll see your story. The ultimate progression of you.
How much of that will be skibidi toilet and reaction clips? How much of that will be arguing on the internet? Can you tell me, just how much of your life will you have skipped over to pacify your intentionally-lowered attention span?
That girl whose number you couldn't find Those passing questions over coffee that you couldn't search on Google The boredom of a subway ride
Those are not inconveniences, they're what the older generations refer to as "life."
* (oh, but if you can't sleep, consider this aside: Google knows the angle you walk at, how fast you're walking, and they've got crowdsourced pictures of everywhere around you at all times of the day. fun bedtime thoughts <3)
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septemberkisses · 3 months
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the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.
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manicpixieangel444 · 3 months
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starc4stic · 9 months
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yourfavcoquette · 4 months
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I like to romanticise life by pretending im in a coming of age film
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joytri · 2 months
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L'apelle du vide
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blkinfilm · 9 months
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The Wood (1999)
Instagram: blkinfilm
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renstrapp · 21 days
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How Could You by Ren Strapp
How Could You, my debut graphic novel published by Oni Press, is coming to stores everywhere December 17, 2024. It’s full color, 200+ pages, and lettered by the talented Tayden Kovac aka @catskullery
Join Molly, Lou, Olene, Yona, Jackie, and Anjali as they try to sleep with each other and have the worst semester of their lives <3
Read all about it at The Mary Sue and at Bleeding Cool
PRE-ORDER NOW!! use indiebound if you're sexy
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mad-girlslove-song · 8 days
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when ethel cain said “i tried to be good am i no good am i no good am i no good” which started with her self-loathing after being abused by her father and neil perry said “i was good. i was really good” and then he killed himself because he knew that he would never be good enough for his father
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jeanlucgodardluvr · 3 months
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girlhood
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buryme-makeoutcreek · 11 months
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How can I forgive myself for growing up before I was ready?
Fatima Aamer Bilal //Nickie Zimov //Cameron Awkward-Rich// Mitski// Fortesa Latifi// Mad Men// Succession// Grady Hendrix// Sylvia Plath// @twofigs// Shanice Bloodbloom// Jenny Slate// Simon & Garfunkel// Raven Leilani// Carrie Fisher
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thebadwitch · 9 months
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i know i made you the big star ✨
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manicpixieangel444 · 6 months
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teenage love.
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jahnavisurenda-21 · 1 month
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Hazbin Hotel ||Alastor X Reader||Rest A Little My Dear
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It's tiring and feeling burnt out but the stack of thoughts, longing and paperwork won't let you sleep.
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It had been approximately two years since that horrible night, but you're not exactly sure how time works in hell, or how many days make a year, or how many days make a month.
You asked some of your other friends as well Charlie, Vaggie, and Angel they just shrugged, although Vaggie did ask you the reason. Then looking at you she figured it,
"Oh, I see... you're still hoping huh?" Vaggie didn't want to tell it, but she thought you were hoping for something meaningless.
"Come now my dear, it's not healthy for you to be locked up in your bedroom the whole day." Alastor reminded, dragging you outside.
To cure you of your homesickness he would make the food you used to enjoy, love, and fight with your sibling for.
Alastor could have handled that, but he knew the stages of acceptance involved Denial, Turmoil, more denial, romanticizing the impossible, and then initial acceptance.
It was a while since you landed here, and the moment he had seen you he knew you could be a more hopeless case than Charlie and a complete misfits of the misfits.
"Here at least come to one of the most pleasant cities of this miserable hell!" Alastor said grinning,
Two weeks passed, And Alastor had gone out for 'Urgent matters' he thought you were to lighthearted to understand or even know about it.
That night he was pleasantly surprised to see you wrapped up with a blanket on your bed, you were taking his advice and calming down a little.
He sat by the bedside, "I know my dear, it's painful. As painful as missing my mother. You know I'd give anything to see her once again." Alastor then looked at you, "Now my dear, when I go, I hope you will help me run this hotel and not stay cooped up here. It's definitely not healthy, well I guess this is hell. Now I better get going. My dear."
"Ah there you are Charlie... why not help me out a little you see my darling Y/n will probably be all delusional again, dreaming, drifting, and mindlessly browsing all sorts of information in those content books of hers, and that picture box thing, so make sure she doesn't get a little to delusional okay?"
But Charlie knew your stubbornness passes the gates of hell and to the doors of heaven, you avoided everyone, anything to study, you studied for hours, without Alastor things got really hellish.
One day in your room staring out to the red skies, Niffty called out to you,
"So why are you such a boring person huh? Why are you not a bad girl?"
"That's because she doesn't belong here Nifftly." Charlie's soft voice called out, she then took your hand, "I know it's hard for you, to have left everyone behind, I know your longing to pick up where you left, you want to forget you are trapped in hell. I can't promise your departure back to Earth, I know your scared, but we'll be right by your side."
You laughed with tears, "You sang and told me this, you and Alastor I'll never know the secrets behind your dazzling smiles, and those songs you both sing so naturally. Thanks."
Alastor was up against the wall eavesdropping is a rude word, he just wanted to make sure you were alright. He was too respectful to eavesdrop.
An hour later, again you think because you don't know how time worked in hell.
"Ah my dear! I see your less delusional than before!" Alastor came smiling, he was really relieved you were smiling.
He had never made a deal with you, because he hoped that one day he could see you truly happy when you return to Earth happily, and when you die, he knows he would most likely never see you again and now he will have two people to give up everything for to just see them once again.
After everyone left, you took Alastor's hand, "I see your in a much better mood!" Alastor commented, "It's thanks to you."
"Oh no my dear, Just smile and one more thing just rest a little more my dear."
And smile you did, the most purest one in his eyes.
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theopiumeater · 15 days
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Lilja 4-Ever Artwork
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I feel like cis people would be able to understand trans people more if they, and all of us, understood that "baby", "girl", "boy", "woman", "man", "mother", "father", "wife", "husband", etc are all different genders.
A child has wildly different experiences and roles than an adult. A parent has wildly different experiences and roles than a non-parent.
A child is gendered differently than an adult, and vice versa.
People will struggle so hard to understand how a person can transition into a man or a woman if they grew up as a girl or a boy, respectively, but....
Gender isn't static, even for cis people.
A cisgendered girl also transitions into the gender of a woman. A cisgendered boy also transitions into the gender of a man. A non-parent transitions into the gender of a parent.
Yes, for transgender people, the transition is often more complex and "shocking", but everyone transitions into different genders throughout the course of their life.
And people have always understood this. In many cultures around the world, male and female children would be dressed and addressed in roughly the same way, without much binary differentiation, until they reached a certain "coming-of-age" point, where they would reach a new gender.
Just yesterday I was at a Chalaka/Upshernish ceremony for a little boy in a family I know. This ceremony is practiced in some Jewish communities, where a boy's hair isn't cut until his third birthday, when his hair his cut and his peyot are left intact, signifying his next step in his life's journey, and the begining of his education. You'll find in these communities that little toddler boys and girls look very similar until they're three, and often they're mixed up by outsiders because they associate long hair with girls. In many ways, this ceremony is a ceremony wherein a Jewish boy transitions from the gender of a "baby", to the gender of a "boy".
Coming-of-age ceremonies exist in pretty much every culture, and mark important transitions and new gender assignments.
The transition from infanthood to childhood, the transition from childhood to adulthood, the transition from singlehood to marriage, etc etc. These are all different genders.
If you can understand that a girl is different from a woman, and that to become a woman you must transition from one stage to another, then you can understand that one can transition from one "opposite" gender to another.
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