Until recently, I never understood people that romanticize high school. My high school experience wasn't bad at all, but the ensuing decades were significantly better. Why would I want to go back?
But I kind of get it now. How's this for privilege: until COVID, my life generally improved year after year. Nothing is linear, of course, but the general trend was up. Now I look back at 2019 with a melancholy wistfulness that I believe is called "nostalgia."
I don't actually want to return to 2019, not really. I'd be living in a web of lies, and this time I'd be aware of it; I don't think my mind can withstand that much cognative dissonance. But the blend of security and possibility that 2019 held - I miss that. Part of aging, I suppose, is reckoning with the reality that at some point that secure station with seemingly endless future possibilities - that home - isn't coming back.
The truth will set you free, it's said, and I believe it. But what goes unsaid is that once free there are only a few paths worth taking, and none of them lead backwards. And so we travel onward, knowing we can't recreate what we've lost, but with a growing determination to make the most of the path we're on.
Thank you for your piece - I always appreciate a good reflection that prompts me to do the same.
I and many of my friends refer to ourselves as "refugees", and only half in jest. We grew up in different parts of the country, but we all agree that the places we remember from the past are dead and gone. There was nothing left for us in those places. It's a difficult adjustment to make, and, for a while, you really feel like a man out of both time and space, but thankfully, as you said, there are other expats, and I was fortunate to meet a lot of them, and they continue to come at pace.
You're right about home not needing to be perfect to be homesick for it. I was raised in the most cookie-cutter, soulless suburb imaginable. It was the quintessential place to buy in and sell out, as they say. The most culture we had were chain restaurants and groups of bored, schlubby middle-aged dads that would get together, dust off their instruments, and play old Boomer rock staples at the local watering holes on Friday nights. It was a decent place to grow up, but I lived there in my early twenties and couldn't have resented it more. For a young person, unmarried and unattached, it couldn't have been more of a dead-end place. But, at the same time, I go back and... it's still safe, overwhelmingly, and still affluent, too, and, unlike most places in the country, growing more so as more and more people flee the nearby cities. However, it certainly doesn't look like the place I grew up in. All the new construction is dreadfully ugly, modernist, Apple Store-chic crap, and all the new houses are cheap, ugly little boxes that are really just four walls of vinyl siding masquerading as a house (but still cost $600,000!) You go to the Costco and, looking and listening to the people around you, you'd think you'd somehow teleported to Bangalore. But, I think Bangalore is probably preferable to some of the nearby towns, which look more like Guatamala or Honduras every passing year. If I learned anything from living in a big city for a while, it's that there's an unspoken value that so many pretend not to know to being surrounded by people who speak the same language. How can you even form a community if you can't even speak to your neighbors? And, yes, I know - you can't, and that's the point. You mentioned the Kalergi Plan by name, so, you already know that.
Anyways, that's enough from me. Great read - always glad to know I'm not the only one who feels like an exile in my own country.
One of the greatest divides of our time is that WEIRD people (Western Educated Industrialised Rich (in the global sense) from Developed countries) don't realise they are the outliers of the global community. They believe everybody else simply needs to change through experience and education to embrace other cultures- after all, for them, multiculturalism is a very real living, breathing Utopia. Unfortunately, they are deeply wrong. Even in the West 70% to 80% of people prefer to live in culturally homogenous communities. It's why most sub-cultures self-segregate even in the absence of economic disparities. Gentrification isn't just about gentrification- it's about African American resentment at the erasure of culture by White people who like Yoga bars, acoustic guitarists yodelling and the politically correct complaining about their best stand up comics at local venues.
Homophily is like a family member, a beloved dog or a cherished family home. It cannot be replaced. A fifty year old woman who is attached to her culture whose community is displaced can never learn to be comfortable around her foreign-born neighbours, even if she is too polite to say anything about it. It's because many of the differences between cosmopolitans and the large majority of the population are rooted in brain differences. If that fifty year old woman cannot afford to move then she will become a lock-in within a community which is no longer her own. For most people, ease with other cultures simply cannot be learned.
The great irony is that the social science proves that as multiculturalism increases, social trust declines. It makes people far less likely to want to pay taxes to fund social safety nets. In all probability, it's the reason why America, with melting pot multiculturalism for centuries- when Europe was a patchwork of monocultures- never introduced social safety nets as extensive as those found in Western and Northern Europe. In embracing their Cultural Utopia, the Left put their Social Safety Net Utopia forever beyond their reach.
I'm lucky, I live in the house I grew up in, I hike the woods and trails I did when I was a kid, much of it unchanged - even as so much has changed around us.
I sense a disconnect though. Come, migrants, for the good life - except we are in a process of taking it all away. This is a deliberate and intentional destruction of the global hegemon. It is turning America into the third world these migrants are fleeing, both with the migrants and the Woke/ESG/DIE policy. Anyone who defends that is my enemy.
I think there is something about growing older and having a broader perspective that leads to nostalgia. As you said, the past was never perfect. When we are young we feel more vital and present, things have more of an impact on us. As we grow older we balance that with perspective and experience. It’s good for us to mature and grow wiser, but there will always be an emotional pull to an earlier time that felt simpler and more genuine, even if it was only due to our own youthful ignorance.
Your introduction really nailed it! I found myself holdng my breath in anticipation of which key piece of the unspoken truth you would dropping next. And I loved when you returned our gaze to the ponerogenic elites toward the end.
I'm imagining how I want to best share your article with my readers. I think I may focus on quote-celebrating the truth about the war on Westernkind and point them here read the rest.
I never understood how people romanticize Blockbuster, because that does exist and not just for the era.
Blockbuster was a corporate bulldozer that destroyed and consumed the ecosystem of mom & pop video stores. Celebrating a corporation that eliminated thousands of family businesses, where owners once bothered to know their customers as humans, is hardly any different than celebrating the dehumanizing Googles and Facebooks of today.
For me what I've just read helps make Substack the number one online event.
I don't like the word 'resonate' but on this occasion your essay did just that. You've presented the question and given the answer to something almost always on my mind.
Just discovered you Stack of Subs. Will be subbing.
This paragraph hit me very hard as I feel like I am going through a quarter-life crisis of sort. I am not in a bad place, just things are changing and future-shock is the perfect term I've been looking for. My life is good, but I guess I am growing up in a world that I wish was different.
"For now, let me just point out that if you feel disoriented and disconnected from what’s real, that is a normal reaction to a profoundly unnatural state of affairs. You are experiencing severe Future Shock — yes, it is a thing, every bit as real as the culture shock you would experience if you traveled down the rabbit hole and got stuck in Wonderland, in a surreal realm where everything means the opposite of what you think it means. Moreover, that sense that everything is “fake and ghey” is your soul letting you know it’s still alive, reminding you that you are not one of the Hylics/NPCs. So that sense of alienation is a good thing, because it shows you are psychologically healthy, since you are feeling a natural emotional response to profound changes in your environment."
Daniel, THIS has been so much on my mind lately, and i love that there's a word for it: FUTURE-SHOCK
i think i appreciated this article above the others esp because you took time to reminisce about how we older than twenty-somthin' might really be feeling inside. i long for people to tell the truth in these ways, to talk to eachother about what matters, and acknowledge what ALL we lost - for i believe we will have to grieve together at some point to heal--- or else, implode and dissolve.
Until recently, I never understood people that romanticize high school. My high school experience wasn't bad at all, but the ensuing decades were significantly better. Why would I want to go back?
But I kind of get it now. How's this for privilege: until COVID, my life generally improved year after year. Nothing is linear, of course, but the general trend was up. Now I look back at 2019 with a melancholy wistfulness that I believe is called "nostalgia."
I don't actually want to return to 2019, not really. I'd be living in a web of lies, and this time I'd be aware of it; I don't think my mind can withstand that much cognative dissonance. But the blend of security and possibility that 2019 held - I miss that. Part of aging, I suppose, is reckoning with the reality that at some point that secure station with seemingly endless future possibilities - that home - isn't coming back.
The truth will set you free, it's said, and I believe it. But what goes unsaid is that once free there are only a few paths worth taking, and none of them lead backwards. And so we travel onward, knowing we can't recreate what we've lost, but with a growing determination to make the most of the path we're on.
Thank you for your piece - I always appreciate a good reflection that prompts me to do the same.
I and many of my friends refer to ourselves as "refugees", and only half in jest. We grew up in different parts of the country, but we all agree that the places we remember from the past are dead and gone. There was nothing left for us in those places. It's a difficult adjustment to make, and, for a while, you really feel like a man out of both time and space, but thankfully, as you said, there are other expats, and I was fortunate to meet a lot of them, and they continue to come at pace.
You're right about home not needing to be perfect to be homesick for it. I was raised in the most cookie-cutter, soulless suburb imaginable. It was the quintessential place to buy in and sell out, as they say. The most culture we had were chain restaurants and groups of bored, schlubby middle-aged dads that would get together, dust off their instruments, and play old Boomer rock staples at the local watering holes on Friday nights. It was a decent place to grow up, but I lived there in my early twenties and couldn't have resented it more. For a young person, unmarried and unattached, it couldn't have been more of a dead-end place. But, at the same time, I go back and... it's still safe, overwhelmingly, and still affluent, too, and, unlike most places in the country, growing more so as more and more people flee the nearby cities. However, it certainly doesn't look like the place I grew up in. All the new construction is dreadfully ugly, modernist, Apple Store-chic crap, and all the new houses are cheap, ugly little boxes that are really just four walls of vinyl siding masquerading as a house (but still cost $600,000!) You go to the Costco and, looking and listening to the people around you, you'd think you'd somehow teleported to Bangalore. But, I think Bangalore is probably preferable to some of the nearby towns, which look more like Guatamala or Honduras every passing year. If I learned anything from living in a big city for a while, it's that there's an unspoken value that so many pretend not to know to being surrounded by people who speak the same language. How can you even form a community if you can't even speak to your neighbors? And, yes, I know - you can't, and that's the point. You mentioned the Kalergi Plan by name, so, you already know that.
Anyways, that's enough from me. Great read - always glad to know I'm not the only one who feels like an exile in my own country.
One of the greatest divides of our time is that WEIRD people (Western Educated Industrialised Rich (in the global sense) from Developed countries) don't realise they are the outliers of the global community. They believe everybody else simply needs to change through experience and education to embrace other cultures- after all, for them, multiculturalism is a very real living, breathing Utopia. Unfortunately, they are deeply wrong. Even in the West 70% to 80% of people prefer to live in culturally homogenous communities. It's why most sub-cultures self-segregate even in the absence of economic disparities. Gentrification isn't just about gentrification- it's about African American resentment at the erasure of culture by White people who like Yoga bars, acoustic guitarists yodelling and the politically correct complaining about their best stand up comics at local venues.
Homophily is like a family member, a beloved dog or a cherished family home. It cannot be replaced. A fifty year old woman who is attached to her culture whose community is displaced can never learn to be comfortable around her foreign-born neighbours, even if she is too polite to say anything about it. It's because many of the differences between cosmopolitans and the large majority of the population are rooted in brain differences. If that fifty year old woman cannot afford to move then she will become a lock-in within a community which is no longer her own. For most people, ease with other cultures simply cannot be learned.
The great irony is that the social science proves that as multiculturalism increases, social trust declines. It makes people far less likely to want to pay taxes to fund social safety nets. In all probability, it's the reason why America, with melting pot multiculturalism for centuries- when Europe was a patchwork of monocultures- never introduced social safety nets as extensive as those found in Western and Northern Europe. In embracing their Cultural Utopia, the Left put their Social Safety Net Utopia forever beyond their reach.
I'm lucky, I live in the house I grew up in, I hike the woods and trails I did when I was a kid, much of it unchanged - even as so much has changed around us.
I sense a disconnect though. Come, migrants, for the good life - except we are in a process of taking it all away. This is a deliberate and intentional destruction of the global hegemon. It is turning America into the third world these migrants are fleeing, both with the migrants and the Woke/ESG/DIE policy. Anyone who defends that is my enemy.
I think there is something about growing older and having a broader perspective that leads to nostalgia. As you said, the past was never perfect. When we are young we feel more vital and present, things have more of an impact on us. As we grow older we balance that with perspective and experience. It’s good for us to mature and grow wiser, but there will always be an emotional pull to an earlier time that felt simpler and more genuine, even if it was only due to our own youthful ignorance.
Your introduction really nailed it! I found myself holdng my breath in anticipation of which key piece of the unspoken truth you would dropping next. And I loved when you returned our gaze to the ponerogenic elites toward the end.
I'm imagining how I want to best share your article with my readers. I think I may focus on quote-celebrating the truth about the war on Westernkind and point them here read the rest.
I never understood how people romanticize Blockbuster, because that does exist and not just for the era.
Blockbuster was a corporate bulldozer that destroyed and consumed the ecosystem of mom & pop video stores. Celebrating a corporation that eliminated thousands of family businesses, where owners once bothered to know their customers as humans, is hardly any different than celebrating the dehumanizing Googles and Facebooks of today.
For me what I've just read helps make Substack the number one online event.
I don't like the word 'resonate' but on this occasion your essay did just that. You've presented the question and given the answer to something almost always on my mind.
Thanks.
Just discovered you Stack of Subs. Will be subbing.
This paragraph hit me very hard as I feel like I am going through a quarter-life crisis of sort. I am not in a bad place, just things are changing and future-shock is the perfect term I've been looking for. My life is good, but I guess I am growing up in a world that I wish was different.
"For now, let me just point out that if you feel disoriented and disconnected from what’s real, that is a normal reaction to a profoundly unnatural state of affairs. You are experiencing severe Future Shock — yes, it is a thing, every bit as real as the culture shock you would experience if you traveled down the rabbit hole and got stuck in Wonderland, in a surreal realm where everything means the opposite of what you think it means. Moreover, that sense that everything is “fake and ghey” is your soul letting you know it’s still alive, reminding you that you are not one of the Hylics/NPCs. So that sense of alienation is a good thing, because it shows you are psychologically healthy, since you are feeling a natural emotional response to profound changes in your environment."
It's the 1970s all over again, only gayer and with AutoTune.
Daniel, THIS has been so much on my mind lately, and i love that there's a word for it: FUTURE-SHOCK
i think i appreciated this article above the others esp because you took time to reminisce about how we older than twenty-somthin' might really be feeling inside. i long for people to tell the truth in these ways, to talk to eachother about what matters, and acknowledge what ALL we lost - for i believe we will have to grieve together at some point to heal--- or else, implode and dissolve.
Thank you for this meaningful piece.
Aaaaand some music to play next time you hear a DIE womyn complaining about Patriarchy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq3YD7fNZTI
Share your GNR experience. Back in the 80s, people were pining for the 50s and early 60s. See Hairspray, or Stand by Me, or Dirty Dancing.