I don't know when or why we pathologized self-discipline (maybe the postmodernists, as you mentioned), but it's utterly essential. It's a good thing.
Something people miss out on, in a culture of infinite choice, is the simple concept of growing up. Part of being an adult, or a mature citizen, is limiting your own "freedom" and disciplining yourself to be useful - both to your future self and to those around you.
One thing I keep coming back to is the need to excise this impulse that popular feminism encourages to simply do what you want and let yourself off the hook for lack of discipline. I also find it odd and troubling that the audience for the stoicism revival has largely been men, and the people talking about this are also men. I'm not sure why women are utterly uninterested save for those like me, who are in the minority. I've got some thoughts on what a new feminism that isn't obsessed with bodily liberation might look like, but then I wonder if the entire word should just be thrown out because it has a marketing problem among freethinking women and so many men.
Thanks for sharing your story. I'm a guy and I've suffered some brain-melt for mostly different reasons, but there were a lot of relatable moments and ideas.
I appreciated your perspective on personal discipline. I've been beginning to think, and find, that self-discipline is an effective cure. Even little things like waking up early enough to get some exercise in, or cleaning up more promptly, have had a huge impact. I think we would all be better off if there were a revitalization of that sort of discipline as a virtue outside of the "alpha male", "libertarian entrepreneur", "obedient Christian" and other such right-wing aesthetic circles that I find it to be associated with nowadays (which is not to say they actually adhere to it of course).
Your conclusion that online political mobilization isn't possible, however, is something that stood out to me as incongruous. I've found Substack in particular to be a bounty of considerate voices on difficult topics. There are also Nazis and neo-puritans every other sort of social media cultist, of course, but overall it stands in stark contrast to the quality of conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, or TikTok. This morning I even found a cool-headed, nuanced discussion of the Hamas/Israel war. There are action-focused communities like Chop Wood Carry Water that are surely more effective than the endless echo-chamber op-eds and repeated repeated comment section exchanges that melt our brains. Basically, here you are, back on social media, talking about politics, but equipped with the IRL social infrastructure and discipline necessary to sustain it. Is that not testament to your having some hope that politics on the web can be pragmatic?
You’re right about Substack, actually, and I hadn’t included it in my assessment. But a counterpoint - is mobilization possible on a distributed scale? I’m starting to think it can only be effective if done locally, because people don’t owe strangers anything. I also wonder if we think this is possible simply because WEIRD people are likelier to be cosmopolitan and feel kinship in a distributed manner like we do online. But I agree, I am doing literally that. I try to talk less about politics and more examine why we are how we are, but…I have wondered what the point is other than getting my frustration out. It’s not like the people who I’m talking about are actually reading this :-D I will say though that people have been the most considerate of feelings when arguing on Substack than anywhere else.
As for discipline, I wish we would talk about it more, and I wish alpha male reactionary culture hadn’t put the concept out of elite female favor, because all I see in women’s society is excuses for not having it. And you’re right, it’s the little things that help build one’s identity as a disciplined person, and once you have the identity it snowballs into a total lifestyle change. Maintenance of discipline is the only reason I can write with regularity. But, I think perhaps the most concerning issue that feeds this is the decline of reading. I’m curious what you’ve seen out there in your social circles on these topics. I can’t conduct studies on these things, so I do qualitative research as best I can.
This has nothing to do with leftism or feminism. As a techie who worked on online ads and demographic (mainly sex and age) based ad targeting. I'm telling you: almost everything you talk about here is advertising, you are seeing what you are seeing and feeling what you are feeling because corporations want to make you spend money and time on stuff you don't need. And to best achieve these goals they try to stir certain emotions in you. You don't need to overthink this.
There are only a few things you can do about it: 1. Block ads, everywhere you can. 2. Avoid consuming content passively and adopt a more proactive approach. 3. Pay for content, there are good stuff out there, like writers on substack. It costs a lot of money to produce good content. Compensate the honest and original creators.
None of these have anything to do with leftism, rightism, feminism, whatever. It's has everything to do with corporate profit. The advertising team of a major website I worked on was all POC women, including the tech leaders. They too complain about being pressured by their parents to get married and make babies just like all the young women of their age. The older ones complain about taking care of children. However, at least they are making loads and loads of money, several times more than their peers of the same age, because they are profitting off your attention and unhappiness.
Going to again disagree. Capitalism and the iteration of feminism popular today that is all about choice and encourages narcissistic personality traits are inextricably tied. There is a tendency to shy away from holding feminist sensibilities accountable for things, and I'm kind of done blaming capitalism for things that individual people decide to do because of said obsession with choice and the incentives of instagram. It really doesn't matter that Instagram creates capitalism-driven incentives - the users have choices to not behave that way. This paradigm of feminism is in the cultural waters, and I've experienced it up close and personally. I'm very very done with blaming the narcissism-driven actions of individuals on a nebulous definition of capitalism. It's a cop out for shitty individual behaviors, and we can agree to disagree.
Well that's just it though - Capitalism has to give more and more "choice" in order for people to keep buying. Also, global Capitalism is based on the American values of "rugged individualism" - so there's your "me-me-me" narcissism that fuels the economic system. The Internet is the perfect medium to express these values on a global scale (thus influencing people everywhere) and the perfect medium to showcase and exercise all that "choice" in buying products, and "choice" in behavior.
I understand what you’re saying. Are you also saying that this does not at all meld with and shape feminism? From where I’m standing, it does. I don’t presume your gender, but neither side of this argument is falsifiable. It’s based on experience, and cannot be anything else. I’m not denying the forces of capitalism in shaping the psyche, but I have to maintain that individuals can make better choices and be better behaved toward others, and what I largely get from women who participate in the advertising industrial complex is this behavior toward other individuals - the darker personality traits come out in people, and they also came out in me, which is why I feel strongly about this. I will address this question of why I’m blaming feminism and individuals for these larger issues instead of capitalism. First, capitalism is going nowhere, but individuals still have agency. It sounds like you might be saying there is zero agency to be exercised here, and if so, that is my point of disagreement. If you take the exhortation to cultivate virtue as a departure point, there’s really no excuse for not developing it regardless of your social context. And I mean real virtue in the ancient sense, not virtue defined by political opinions. I think women in particular have been disincentivized from doing so, and the feminism in the cultural waters posits that you can do and prefer whatever you want, all choices are equal. This opens the door for someone to hurt another person and then call the victim a problem because she dared to call a person out on harmful behavior.
So what I see online is a bunch of people calling women out for what they perceive as problematic behavior, labeling them "Feminists" when nowhere do these women themselves self-identify as "Feminists". Feminist is a buzzword to attract clicks to podcasts. Jedidiah Bila was notorious for this but it's pretty much the formula on all videos.
Are you saying that self-identified Feminist activists are doing problematic things and attributing them to Feminism?
I don't disagree with you about the source. But I do think that the ads and the simulacrum of identity that results is heavily tied with the feminism that came from Tumblr. The content that's favored algorithmically is also of the feminine outrage variety - emotion is absolutely weaponized. I understand your perspective from the building side (I, too, work in marketing tech but not digital ads). It can be that corporate profit incentives drive this behavior and it becomes a feedback loop. My experience in online communities that consist of professional liberals and especially professional women led to these conclusions. It's not even about advertising in FB groups, though the discourse is certainly affected by advertising, I will grant. I will agree to disagree in that I think what you and I are saying both contribute. There is a pathological way in which the advertising platforms encourage women to behave, and it came first from Tumblr and infected the rest of the social internet. Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
“…the social internet distorts one’s sense of how many friendships can be genuinely maintained, so one has to accept the ‘opportunity cost’ of missing out on new friendships with like-minded people.”
Social media also caused me to overemphasize the importance of finding a perfect group of like minded people. Most of the meaningful IRL interactions and relationships I’ve developed over the past few years have been with people I would have never sought out online. Reality is so much more beautiful and complex than anything I’ve experienced online.
This is an excellent piece of writing. I’m thankful that deBoer shared it.
Thank you so much! Because I just started your thoughts are especially appreciated. I know what you mean about the overemphasis. After I graduated in 2011 I placed WAY too much importance and spent too much time in a 'community' of elite liberals who work in the shadow and actual D party, and boy did I absorb a lot of their opinions and neuroses despite having always considered myself a liberal. Worse still, the more women who got added, the lower brow the conversation became, and eventually the tenets of wokeness had taken over to the point at which I found myself in agreement with white guys most of the time. It was a weird experience. If you have any thoughts on the gender dynamics of the left zeitgeist, I'm always curious to hear the perspective of men.
Great line from article: "The selfie is the enemy of self-esteem."
Really nice piece.
I don't know when or why we pathologized self-discipline (maybe the postmodernists, as you mentioned), but it's utterly essential. It's a good thing.
Something people miss out on, in a culture of infinite choice, is the simple concept of growing up. Part of being an adult, or a mature citizen, is limiting your own "freedom" and disciplining yourself to be useful - both to your future self and to those around you.
One thing I keep coming back to is the need to excise this impulse that popular feminism encourages to simply do what you want and let yourself off the hook for lack of discipline. I also find it odd and troubling that the audience for the stoicism revival has largely been men, and the people talking about this are also men. I'm not sure why women are utterly uninterested save for those like me, who are in the minority. I've got some thoughts on what a new feminism that isn't obsessed with bodily liberation might look like, but then I wonder if the entire word should just be thrown out because it has a marketing problem among freethinking women and so many men.
Right, the marketing problem has done a lot of disservice both to the word and the idea.
I dig the idea. Curious to hear more
Thanks for sharing your story. I'm a guy and I've suffered some brain-melt for mostly different reasons, but there were a lot of relatable moments and ideas.
I appreciated your perspective on personal discipline. I've been beginning to think, and find, that self-discipline is an effective cure. Even little things like waking up early enough to get some exercise in, or cleaning up more promptly, have had a huge impact. I think we would all be better off if there were a revitalization of that sort of discipline as a virtue outside of the "alpha male", "libertarian entrepreneur", "obedient Christian" and other such right-wing aesthetic circles that I find it to be associated with nowadays (which is not to say they actually adhere to it of course).
Your conclusion that online political mobilization isn't possible, however, is something that stood out to me as incongruous. I've found Substack in particular to be a bounty of considerate voices on difficult topics. There are also Nazis and neo-puritans every other sort of social media cultist, of course, but overall it stands in stark contrast to the quality of conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, or TikTok. This morning I even found a cool-headed, nuanced discussion of the Hamas/Israel war. There are action-focused communities like Chop Wood Carry Water that are surely more effective than the endless echo-chamber op-eds and repeated repeated comment section exchanges that melt our brains. Basically, here you are, back on social media, talking about politics, but equipped with the IRL social infrastructure and discipline necessary to sustain it. Is that not testament to your having some hope that politics on the web can be pragmatic?
You’re right about Substack, actually, and I hadn’t included it in my assessment. But a counterpoint - is mobilization possible on a distributed scale? I’m starting to think it can only be effective if done locally, because people don’t owe strangers anything. I also wonder if we think this is possible simply because WEIRD people are likelier to be cosmopolitan and feel kinship in a distributed manner like we do online. But I agree, I am doing literally that. I try to talk less about politics and more examine why we are how we are, but…I have wondered what the point is other than getting my frustration out. It’s not like the people who I’m talking about are actually reading this :-D I will say though that people have been the most considerate of feelings when arguing on Substack than anywhere else.
As for discipline, I wish we would talk about it more, and I wish alpha male reactionary culture hadn’t put the concept out of elite female favor, because all I see in women’s society is excuses for not having it. And you’re right, it’s the little things that help build one’s identity as a disciplined person, and once you have the identity it snowballs into a total lifestyle change. Maintenance of discipline is the only reason I can write with regularity. But, I think perhaps the most concerning issue that feeds this is the decline of reading. I’m curious what you’ve seen out there in your social circles on these topics. I can’t conduct studies on these things, so I do qualitative research as best I can.
This has nothing to do with leftism or feminism. As a techie who worked on online ads and demographic (mainly sex and age) based ad targeting. I'm telling you: almost everything you talk about here is advertising, you are seeing what you are seeing and feeling what you are feeling because corporations want to make you spend money and time on stuff you don't need. And to best achieve these goals they try to stir certain emotions in you. You don't need to overthink this.
There are only a few things you can do about it: 1. Block ads, everywhere you can. 2. Avoid consuming content passively and adopt a more proactive approach. 3. Pay for content, there are good stuff out there, like writers on substack. It costs a lot of money to produce good content. Compensate the honest and original creators.
None of these have anything to do with leftism, rightism, feminism, whatever. It's has everything to do with corporate profit. The advertising team of a major website I worked on was all POC women, including the tech leaders. They too complain about being pressured by their parents to get married and make babies just like all the young women of their age. The older ones complain about taking care of children. However, at least they are making loads and loads of money, several times more than their peers of the same age, because they are profitting off your attention and unhappiness.
Great women to work with though.
"This has nothing to do with leftism or feminism. "
It's popular to blame Feminism for things that are Capitalism's fault.
Going to again disagree. Capitalism and the iteration of feminism popular today that is all about choice and encourages narcissistic personality traits are inextricably tied. There is a tendency to shy away from holding feminist sensibilities accountable for things, and I'm kind of done blaming capitalism for things that individual people decide to do because of said obsession with choice and the incentives of instagram. It really doesn't matter that Instagram creates capitalism-driven incentives - the users have choices to not behave that way. This paradigm of feminism is in the cultural waters, and I've experienced it up close and personally. I'm very very done with blaming the narcissism-driven actions of individuals on a nebulous definition of capitalism. It's a cop out for shitty individual behaviors, and we can agree to disagree.
Well that's just it though - Capitalism has to give more and more "choice" in order for people to keep buying. Also, global Capitalism is based on the American values of "rugged individualism" - so there's your "me-me-me" narcissism that fuels the economic system. The Internet is the perfect medium to express these values on a global scale (thus influencing people everywhere) and the perfect medium to showcase and exercise all that "choice" in buying products, and "choice" in behavior.
I understand what you’re saying. Are you also saying that this does not at all meld with and shape feminism? From where I’m standing, it does. I don’t presume your gender, but neither side of this argument is falsifiable. It’s based on experience, and cannot be anything else. I’m not denying the forces of capitalism in shaping the psyche, but I have to maintain that individuals can make better choices and be better behaved toward others, and what I largely get from women who participate in the advertising industrial complex is this behavior toward other individuals - the darker personality traits come out in people, and they also came out in me, which is why I feel strongly about this. I will address this question of why I’m blaming feminism and individuals for these larger issues instead of capitalism. First, capitalism is going nowhere, but individuals still have agency. It sounds like you might be saying there is zero agency to be exercised here, and if so, that is my point of disagreement. If you take the exhortation to cultivate virtue as a departure point, there’s really no excuse for not developing it regardless of your social context. And I mean real virtue in the ancient sense, not virtue defined by political opinions. I think women in particular have been disincentivized from doing so, and the feminism in the cultural waters posits that you can do and prefer whatever you want, all choices are equal. This opens the door for someone to hurt another person and then call the victim a problem because she dared to call a person out on harmful behavior.
So what I see online is a bunch of people calling women out for what they perceive as problematic behavior, labeling them "Feminists" when nowhere do these women themselves self-identify as "Feminists". Feminist is a buzzword to attract clicks to podcasts. Jedidiah Bila was notorious for this but it's pretty much the formula on all videos.
Are you saying that self-identified Feminist activists are doing problematic things and attributing them to Feminism?
I don't disagree with you about the source. But I do think that the ads and the simulacrum of identity that results is heavily tied with the feminism that came from Tumblr. The content that's favored algorithmically is also of the feminine outrage variety - emotion is absolutely weaponized. I understand your perspective from the building side (I, too, work in marketing tech but not digital ads). It can be that corporate profit incentives drive this behavior and it becomes a feedback loop. My experience in online communities that consist of professional liberals and especially professional women led to these conclusions. It's not even about advertising in FB groups, though the discourse is certainly affected by advertising, I will grant. I will agree to disagree in that I think what you and I are saying both contribute. There is a pathological way in which the advertising platforms encourage women to behave, and it came first from Tumblr and infected the rest of the social internet. Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
“…the social internet distorts one’s sense of how many friendships can be genuinely maintained, so one has to accept the ‘opportunity cost’ of missing out on new friendships with like-minded people.”
Social media also caused me to overemphasize the importance of finding a perfect group of like minded people. Most of the meaningful IRL interactions and relationships I’ve developed over the past few years have been with people I would have never sought out online. Reality is so much more beautiful and complex than anything I’ve experienced online.
This is an excellent piece of writing. I’m thankful that deBoer shared it.
Thank you so much! Because I just started your thoughts are especially appreciated. I know what you mean about the overemphasis. After I graduated in 2011 I placed WAY too much importance and spent too much time in a 'community' of elite liberals who work in the shadow and actual D party, and boy did I absorb a lot of their opinions and neuroses despite having always considered myself a liberal. Worse still, the more women who got added, the lower brow the conversation became, and eventually the tenets of wokeness had taken over to the point at which I found myself in agreement with white guys most of the time. It was a weird experience. If you have any thoughts on the gender dynamics of the left zeitgeist, I'm always curious to hear the perspective of men.