Notes on anti-Christ, pt. 2
I'm leaving some links here that I feel mesh with the theme of the obsolete human. This post will be updated.
"The New Housing Market Premium" – Ben Carlson
Some facts and figures from Derek’s excellent piece:74% of all restaurant traffic is takeout or delivery (up from 61% pre-Covid)The share of people have dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years.Adults now spend an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2000
(Ghost as an editor sucks. Very hard to use, so I'm switching to Obsidian to do my writing. If anyone at Ghost is reading, your editor sucks.)
I think Covid only solidified the trend that was already well-established. I made the decision to leave the city in 2014 when I realized there was nothing there in terms of people, and that I was paying higher costs for a job that could be done remotely. I literally only knew people from work and only ever worked. The other people I met were from online dating sites or meet-up groups, and no lasting relationships were formed. In general, the more exposure I had to people, the less I wanted to be around them (unless they were co-workers). Oddly, the sense of a shared mission made the relationships enjoyable and welcome. It's now common to admit that socializing is unpleasant for most people, including unrepentant extroverts.
Japan's aging problem is every techno society's imminent aging problem. Japan is just further along, blazing a trail as it were. You know humans are obsolete when they not only stop reproducing, but also don't care when the consequences are laid out.
AI is the only solution; either it succeeds very soon, or we see euthanasia become mandatory, deep cuts in social benefits, or an accelerated collapse in Western economies. Cutting benefits won't address the number of elderly people who hang on for years, eating cat food, however.
Tyler Durden
This Chesterton quote reflects an older idea that was found in Catholic social thought. The modern Church focuses more on LGBT and climate change now, having I think tacitly ceded its supernatural claims. It functions as little more than an appendage to the globalist blob of NGOs, activists, corporations, oligarchic fronts like the WEF.
It took me many years to realize something hippies already knew, namely, that the Church and state are always linked. The Church is a handmaiden to the zeitgeist.
Religious types and social conservatives (generally the same) have pointed at the West's loss of faith in Yahweh as the cause for its social decline. Nihilism is also fingered, but the problem of technology is omitted because it is seen as a gift, a liberator which feeds, heals and entertains us.
A man living in a techno society with a little disposable cash can spend it on video games and get lost in virtual reality, living a better version of himself with perhaps a group of online pals. He will never have enough money to have a wife and children. Techno societies do have a short window in which it is attainable, but technology is always advancing, finding new ways to shift labor to cheaper areas of the globe or replacing expensive workers with indentured servants (H-1 B) in their own backyard. In America, the post-World War II period was only a 25-30-year period in which a man, liberated from his rural farm, could raise a prosperous family by selling his labor to another.
Whenever we think of a golden age caused by technology, we look back to this very small window in time that was, for America, the fruit of many millions lost to war. The orderly, happy world of 1950s and 60s TV shows, in which there was prosperity and housework was becoming less tedious and more involved, was extremely short-lived, as capital had already begun planning the transfer of middle-class wealth into its own pockets.
Is it just me, or does it sound really odd that while the "silver tsunami" is being discussed, the number of good-paying jobs has gotten even worse than it was several years ago? The gig economy was a thing before Covid, but as more and more elderly people begin retiring, there is no way to fund the national pension plans using tax revenues from Uber drivers and YouTube content creators. The logic of the "services economy" from the 1990s is that low-paid workers will own nothing and be anything but happy in a conventional sense. Bankruptcy and reset are on the horizon, with everything in full churn by 2028.
One would expect that, with so many Boomers retiring each day, slots would be opening up... but that's not happening.
Here's a VLOG on the death of marriage by YouTuber Large Man Abroad. It's become so noticeable: the death of interaction between the sexes. Pearl Davis has also remarked on this exciting feature of Western civilization.
