Funny that! You might want to consider a career in stand-up. Seriously! Voted for him 3 times but he has earned a bit of ribbing and your contribution is right up there w/Matt Taibi’s - he recently labeled BO “the fat Elvis of neo-liberalism,” a sublime coinage indeed.
"The Left" is a many-faceted thing. DID need not specifically be a central platform of Biden's campaign. But a moderate or left-wing publication publishing an op-ed bluntly stating that adults should not act as enablers for social media based culture-bound syndromes should not be something difficult to contemplate.
this left/right dichotomy is oversimplified and overamped by the two-party system in the US, I'm trying not to think of people as left or right, or of so-called leftists having anything particular in common with each other, it's about as pointless as thinking Catholics and Protestants are two fundamentally different categories of human beings -- what's important to me are identifying our societal & global problems and coming up with workable solutions -- I think Freddie is onto something about the faddishness of certain mental illness diagnoses and the harms that can occur when we identify with a mental illness instead of treating mental illness
I think it seems that way because those circles wield outsized power in media and cultural production but they do not wield outsized material power. At the end of the day the mentally ill homless person in my neighborhood whos constantly in distress is not benefiting from any of this tik tok clout. The black people in poverty in west baltimore are not benefiting from their "voices being uplifted" by netflix and the trans children who are being abused by their families or others are not enjoying the clout that Harry Stiles gets for wearing a dress.
I’m not sure how what you’re saying is in contradiction to what I’m saying. People in the circles of power (including not just media and cultural production, but now also large swathes of corporate America) use these ideas to perform “I am the right kind of person to hold power,” which aids in their competition with their elite peers. It is also useful to those who are trying to scrabble their way up into the elites.
Obviously woke performance alone is not sufficient to get you access to the levers of power. You need smarts and ruthlessness and a fair number of lucky breaks. But it is, in many environments, a necessary condition to such access.
I'm saying that you're mixing up two types of power one of which is symbolic and the other of which is material. Cultural power and power over politics and the economy are two entirely different things.
And I’m saying that practicing this stuff is now very much a part of being the kind of person who has power over politics and (especially) the economy.
Right, and this is another blind spot many liberals have: pretending incentives either don't work, or are less powerful than we know they actually can be.
The incentives around identifying as trans now, or pretending to have DID/MPD, or pretending you caught Tourette's Syndrome from a Tik Tok video ... the incentives are all there, and you're seeing the results they've produced.
This should not be a very controversial observation, but as I said earlier, here we are.
I love your writing. This is a really good interrogation of something I've noticed on social media. The other disturbing part of this is it tries to ensnare you. Especially if you've had a mental health crisis, so many institutions are set up to encourage you to make that part of your identity not just on social media but among therapists themselves. It's actually difficult to find a provider who doesn't buy in to this culture of valid feelings etc. Lots of learned helplessness going on. Now, at 26, I am sick to death of my feelings being affirmed; instead I want to feel better.
I’ve noticed something: lots of people have generalized anxiety and depression. I’m one of them. Who knows why? I’m sure the huge changes to human life caused by tech certainly contributes; I began experiencing anxiety and depression after giving birth, so there’s definitely disrupted chemical processes going on.
But what I’ve noticed is lots of young people online referring to “my depression” and “my anxiety.” It seems a small thing, but I find it telling how many use that possessive case when describing a condition I would very much like to be rid of.
I’m a big proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy for the simple reason that reframing how you think of traumas/illnesses/disappointments goes a long way to actually treating them.
My grandmother, a WWII veteran, HATED having to get medical treatment. She would’ve rather made her own sling out of an old pillowcase than go to the hospital when she broke her shoulder. She loathed the idea of being a burden.
Whereas now, the kids these days LOVE being a burden! It’s self-care to disrupt the lives of those around you for attention.
Of course, if you deform your limbs and joints by not getting them set properly when they break, you might end up an even bigger burden!
My family inherited the whole don't-be-a-burden ethos, too, but also a raft of heritable health problems, so that not seeking timely medical attention when you actually do need it is seen as being irresponsibly burdensome. The rub, of course, is when do you really need it and when are you just whining?
YES. that’s something I tried to get her to understand: by doing risky things “for herself,” she was increasing the burden to everyone else. It’s easier to carry her cup of tea up the stairs than care for her when she’s broken a bone falling down the stairs.
There’s very much a sense of, “You must learn to navigate the world as the kind of person who will always be depressed and anxious,” as opposed to “You must learn to live without depression and anxiety.” The latter isn’t equally possible for everyone, of course, but the idea that improvement isn’t possible, only accommodation, feels pretty depressing to me.
CBT is great. Again, I know mileage varies, but it made an enormous difference for me.
One perspective I've heard on this is that "depression" and "anxiety" are generalized ways of talking about more specific emotions or cocktails of emotions, and that it's important to understand those actual emotions. That is somewhat counter to (or at least irrelevant to) CBT as I understand it. I've not tried CBT but it seems rational, and I've heard a lot of people talk about success with it.
Yeah I mean for me the most basic CBT is just reframing thought patterns to better align with external reality, so I can then adjust my internal narrative. It takes commitment and discipline to do that. Anything can be gamed.
If I understand what you're positing, it's something basically like there's an inertia or path of least resistance of sorts to each person's mental processes / being, and that a new treatment can temporarily disrupt that inertia, but that in most cases we figure out how to metabolize that treatment into the inertia. Am I understanding you correctly?
Alexander seems to come down -- tentatively as he notes -- on the side of it's not that the treatments get less effective; it's that the initial effectiveness is a mirage.
A sort of Weberian rationalization where the systems evolve to serve certain ends, not all of which are improved mental health, and those systems get disrupted by new treatments (resulting in, potentially, some increase in successful treatment because the mechanisms and ideas of that treatment have not been rationalized into an institutional system). Then as the systems and people assimilate the new treatment, it becomes a cog in the system like all the other cogs before it. Thanks, that's insightful.
Still, any "real illness" could be thought of as "warranted malingering". And all drugs as performance-enhancing drugs. (Even the lifesaving ones, considering death is usually detrimental to performance.)
I can see how this would be true for a lot of people. I know someone who went to therapy until it got “too sad” and the “too sad” bit was when they started addressing what the person needed to change.
Well when I say “CBT” I’m referring to basic, reframe-the-story-you’re-telling-yourself practices. Acknowledging and understanding your emotions is key to the reframing working.
For me, anxiety and depression were unrelenting and unrelated to anything going on in my life. It made no sense. It was neurochemical. I felt nothing, or I felt anger. I feel awful about it, but my husband bore the brunt of my cognitive pain. Only when I acknowledged to myself that what I was feeling wasn’t warranted by anything in reality was I able to get help.
Cognitive behavioral therapy seems to be the best form of therapy for everyone. At least if their goal is to become better or at least more functional.
When I was studying neuroscience, I always wondered why this wasn't the go-to therapy for everyone. The answer, of course, is money and time. Which is too bad! I think many people struggling with anxiety or depression or any number of other issues would be doing a lot better now if healthcare were free and available.
I have a very scratch-the-surface understanding of neuroscience but it would behoove people to realize that thought patterns and the resulting behaviors change the physical brain structure. Something that starts as cognitive can very much become something tangibly physical. What we think and choose to do matters greatly.
Absolutely! The pervasiveness of a dualistic understanding of humanity has separated people's minds from their bodies. What you're describing is very real. We used to say "neurons that fire together wire together," which basically just means that anything you do a lot (whether writing with one hand, whistling, or thinking about suicide) is something that becomes easier to do.
Our brains are endlessly flexible (neuroscience speech calls this plasticity). Far more flexible and moldable than understood even twenty years ago. This is both good and bad news! You can literally change yourself. But it also means experience can change you in permanent ways that you would not have chosen.
A lot of truly wonderful things are nonetheless oversold. Modern medicine generally. Heck, modernity itself. CBT has been oversold as a treatment, unfortunately, and that has contributed to suffering people's distrust of it. And that's on top of the time and money it takes.
I've benefited from CBT-type therapy, too. It has a great reputation for making even the least "self-indulgent" of suffering (like "OMG I'm dying of cancer and my one hope is incredibly painful chemo that'll nearly kill me anyhow and how do I cope?") more bearable. But its great reputation means it can create unrealistic expectations for patient improvement. See, for example, the PACE scandal. And it's no surprise when already-suffering people resent the hell out of the insinuation that the only reason CBT didn't help them more is basically through their own moral failing.
So true. I guess I should be more clear that I mean “some CBT techniques” rather than “ongoing CBT sessions with a therapist.” A lot of us with non-life-threatening mental illness could benefit from better mental hygiene.
Even people with life-threatening problems, whether physical or mental, generally benefit from better mental hygiene. How big a benefit? Depends, somewhat, on the problem.
My brain processed this as "CBD" and I was really excited about someone else calling it out as being oversold and a waste of time and money. Then I got to the second paragraph.
Couldn't agree more. As a typical teenager and young adult I struggled with depression and anxiety. I have had a few waves as an adult, during times of stress. But working through these times of struggle by focusing on how I think and observing my own destructive patterns and working to correct them cognitively has made me a more functional contributor and more fulfilled person.
I pin so much of these problems on the therapeutical community, which, like pharma, has preferenced a steady revenue stream to helping others achieve health and self-sufficiency. Much easier to enable your patients neurosis and feed it and collect the insurance money. See you same time next week.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is like a healthy diet and lots of exercise. Good for the person, but bad for revenues.
Also, I want to admit to being one of the "it's just elite colleges, it doesn't matter" people. I thought they'd start working at Goldman Sachs and become boring Obama liberals.
Meanwhile, we have the likes of J.D. Vance pushing for a de-Baathification of government to install like-minded Nationalists. It's becoming a tit-for-tat thing now which is really a sad reflection of Americans in general.
I have former law school classmates like that. They get to make gobs of money working on M&A and land-rights deals for banks and oil companies, but still be the heroic underdog who fought to bring in more diverse food options for catering.
My God, I have so many former law school classmates who are like this. And, almost to a person, similarly all work on the side of the powerful. The kicker is that I'm old enough I remember when they were in law school and either pre-woke or proto-woke which makes it even funnier.
Goldman Sachs is very good at paying tribute to whatever ideas grant power and influence. They will happily provide you with all the ESG products and services you want. But don't kid yourself. David Solomon and friends are disgusted by this type of stuff and are far too powerful to lose anytime soon.
I think there's some amount of drinking the cool-aid to give oneself in management a pat on the back, but yes, functionally, DEI, sexual harassment training, "ethics training" where they teach you that you're not allowed to give bribes and such, these are all for the legal protection of the company.
Add the new Disney/Marvel show Moon Knight to the list of pop-culture portrayals of DID. Also there is a sub-Reddit r/fakedisordercringe that documents this trend quite well, you can even see a while back Tik-Tokers we’re obsessed with pretending they had tics from Tourette’s, got bored with that then moved on to DID. What disorder will they pretend to have next? Only time will tell
Oh, the Tourette thing is alive and well. Credulous coverage in the NYT as recently as a few weeks ago. The spike in Tourette-like symptoms seen during the pandemic hasn’t abated.
My vague theory is that because these categories are so vague and mutable, you can milk them forever by changing them slightly - TikTok Tourette doesn’t look much like actual Tourette. I was on tumblr when DID was the identity in vogue there, back in 2010-2012. This iteration of it looks different but has the same roots, just centered on a much less insular online community. Recently I was introduced to a Discord bot that allows people to use a tag that changes their display name/chat name so they can easily and obviously switch alters during text conversations, something we didn’t have a platform to do that on ten years ago.
It's a shame because Moon Knight has been a z-tier Marvel hero for literal decades and was one of my favorite superheroes when I was younger, mostly because of the great art. In true superhero fashion, his DID is caused by a near-death experience and possible presence of a literal Egyptian God in his mind (I say "possible" because the comic always had a lot more fun with unreliable narrators and perception)
"They would like the laurel of victimhood without the actuality of being victimized."
Yes. This phenomenon exists with sexual identity as well. I've said before that the rise of identifications like "gray ace demisexual" (aka having a normal sex drive) is because kids today want to be Queer but they don't want to be queer.
They're also surrounded by a 24/7 porn culture that tells them that a "normal" sex drive involves being slapped, spit on, choked, and hit during sex -- or doing the slapping, spitting, choking, and hitting.
If that's the modern definition of "sex," then hell yeah, I'm "gray ace demisexual," too.
I remember in the 90s being pissed off because the conservative definition of sex was that sex is degradation for women, and the right response is to "lie still and think of England." Meanwhile, the left-wing definition was that sex is degradation for women, and "for $39.95, we'll sell you these fair-trade leather handcuffs!"
The part before the comma they both completely agreed on. There was NO desire to question that.
Now we see what's become of it in the generations that followed. :-(
Yep. Thus we also end up with a generation of young men who simultaneously want -- in their own words -- "some fucking slut to suck my cock" and then wonder why young women won't go near them because what healthy young woman wants to be viewed as "some fucking slut?"
I've seen so many men say that they won't perform certain sex acts with women they want to marry because they want to be able to "respect their wife".
And it's like...so you're a-okay *doing whatever act* and disrespecting those women? The disrespecting women thing isn't a barrier to you, you just want your wife to be a sweet chaste little thing? Okay then.
(I've come across a couple women too who enjoy giving oral sex and are disappointed their boyfriend/husband doesn't want it, and when they push into it are told he doesn't want it because he "wouldn't be able to respect her" after it. Like, seriously? It's a blow job)
That whole "Eve, tempted by the serpent (because of her weakness?) infecting Adam with the evil she learned" trope has poisoned a lot of things over the years.
Madonna/Whore complex. It's as old as the hills. I'm guessing someone has written a book or two about the conflicting desires of men when it comes to sex. And if they haven't, they should.
"Grey" asexuality means you don't consider yourself to have a strong sexual attraction to anyone, at least not based on gender, BUT don't fit neatly into the conventional "categories" of asexuality either (roughly: "repulsed by sex," "apathetic about sex," or "enjoys sex physically without feeling attraction"). "Grey ace" is literally shorthand for "in the asexual grey area."
It's probably overkill to include "demisexual" on TOP of "grey ace," but "demisexual" generally refers to a sex drive that's triggered by emotional intimacy—not simply "I want to have sex with people who I'm intimate with," but "I don't remotely think about sex UNTIL that intimacy exists." I'm not sure how that would combine with ambiguous asexuality? I typically hear "demisexual" included as part of the asexual spectrum to begin with, but I'm not also One Of The Kids, so who knows.
IS THIS ALL EXTREMELY STUPID? Yes, absolutely! In the same way that astrology signs, Meyers-Briggs designators, and Hogwarts houses are. And this version of overly-jargon-y sex nerdiness originated in the same place: bored teens with smartphones taking Buzzfeed quizzes and reading faux-taxonomical posts on Tumblr. So much of what we assume is cultural dysfunction is really just kids being bored online.
Personally, I think there are probably some interesting divergences in where sex drives originate: different sensations trigger different things in people, "masculine vs. feminine" is technically separate from "male vs female" and also affects sex drive, some sexual stimulation IS mental/emotional versus sexual/physical, and so on and so forth. And in this age of fandoms and geeks, it's unsurprising that sex fandoms and sex geeks have increasingly become a thing—which is a separate but interlinked phenomenon from "sex positivity" as an unparsed whole. My take, generally, is that neither side delves into "what's actually happening" enough to form a coherent position on this matter.
My other take, though, is that asexuality should not be included within the LGBT umbrella, and that it's ahistorical and gross to equate "asexual stigmatization" with what other people have suffered for the sake of their sexuality and gender identity. I feel like "non-normative sex" is a great thing to form solidarity around, whether geekily or otherwise, but that can find its own voice, instead of appropriating a movement that exists in the face of horrific oppression.
I don’t think these terms are stupid - I think they can be helpful on the level of personally understanding or even communicating one’s proclivities to a partner or potential partner. For instance, in the gay and lesbian world there are people who only receive or only give and corresponding terminologies (that differ by region etc from my experience). I want to know that the person I’m about to go to bed with has a compatible proclivity.
Where I think it gets stupid is when it becomes a personality or identity. It made sense at one point (and still does in some places) to clearly identify as gay or queer etc either to find others (including potential partners) or for organizing purposes. I have no idea why anyone would feel the need to publicly identify as “demisexual,” however. Using it as a descriptive term with someone you’re about to go to bed with, ok.
I think that publicly identifying by sexuality is just more popular these days in general. It feels to me like that usual mix of half "genuinely doing away with taboo" and half "people looking to post shit online." And I'm sure that a part of that is non-LGBT individuals looking to join in the fun, and part of it is really just that same impulse that led my generation to get really into Taurus and Leo and Aquarius as personality designators again—which, ugh.
Personally, I tend to be more worried about reactionary or bigoted forces coagulating than about overreach within one given culture, perhaps because I cynically assume that ANY subculture is going to have some measure of people taking things too far, being jerks, making mistakes, etc. So all this falls under the heading of: I hope it brings the teens happiness, I personally find it mildly socially annoying, and I'm wary of being too critical of it all, less because I'm scared of "being canceled" than because I find I'd much rather be critical of a large chunk of the folks doing the criticizing in the first place. It's hard to distinguish between genuine criticism or worry and people parroting criticism/worry to mask their desire to return to a place where casual intolerance was okay.
(I'm not sure if any of this is genuinely interesting, forgive me—I'm just spinning gears out loud.)
Agreed entirely. Having come up in the late 2000s and early 2010s (I graduated high school in 2011), I watched gay lib hit light speed, and by graduate school I was haughtily told that “identifying” as a lesbian was less “queer” (read: radical?) than other identities like “pansexual.” (The person who first said this to me offline was a “pansexual gray ace” who is now married to her Irish Catholic husband and expecting twins; because of her purported attraction to “all genders,” this remains, I am told, somehow vastly more “queer” than my own marriage, which is to another woman.)
I think there is something to be said for the ways porn culture has warped view of sex and sexuality (I also recently had a 30-year-old friend confess that she felt apprehensive about new sexual encounters because she, a straight “demisexual” woman, wasn’t sure if she was a “top” or a “bottom” - a meaningless distinction between a man and a woman, I’d think, but she had conflated the two with the dominant and submissive partner, and seemed to expect all sex to include that dynamic). I also think “queerness” is a quick and impossible to disprove clout grab, which is wild because the people doing this act like homophobia is both a constant oppressive force (thus making their demi-poly-gray-queerness so very radical and brave) and also nonexistent (which is easy when you’re either a blue check liberal in a major city in a blue state who has only ever dated men, or when you’re only queer online, or both). I recall once telling a story of kissing my wife at a baseball stadium in update New York and being asked to leave by the management (this was in 2014); someone replied that public displays of affection could “trigger” “sex-repulsed aces.” Don’t get me started on the resurgence of a bizarre purity culture (sex scenes in films are apparently unnecessary and prurient and have no artistic value, or so the hyperwoke and IRL-friendless tell me).
I don’t know where I’m going with this but I find it all alarming and exhausting. This week a “queer femme” on Twitter blew up for saying that washing her 11 year old daughter’s hair and providing advice to said daughter’s 18 year old informally adopted brother constituted “emotional labor.” I think the real harm is coming home to roost and it’s gonna be a fight in the mud for who can claim the most oppression first to say anything other than constant validation is that oppression made manifest.
I was born in 1966, and I saw "gay lib" go from people getting the shit beaten out of them, to men dying in droves of AIDS during the administration of a president who was slowing losing his mind and refused to even say that single monosyllable out loud, to grudging acceptance, to marriage rights ... and back to being hated for the same thing that got them beaten up way back when: only wanting to have sex and marry people of the same goddamned sex.
Only now instead of being accused of "perversion" like they called it in the 1950s, they're hated for being "genital fetishists." And now it's the left doing it! It's bonkers!
All this crap is just a woke way to hate women, gay people, and lesbians again.
All I ask people who are skeptical that a lot of this is about misogyny and discomfort with homosexuality is to consider seriously why there are no (cis) female only spaces allowed on Reddit except on porn subs, where they are allowed to require cis only female on female porn for the gratification of men? But not female only lesbian subs for women to express their sexuality?
I'm not sure what this means. Reddit expressly disallows female only subReddits but allows male only subs? Either is ridiculous, but it seems insane. Am I reading you right?
No. They disallow cis female only lesbian or womens subs. Meaning that they must be inclusive of all who identify as women. Any subs that don’t follow this rule are banned. But they DO allow porn subs to be trans exclusive and feature only natal female women. So a lesbian sub run by lesbians that only want to allow cis lesbians will be banned. But a lesbian PORN sub can allow only cis female submissions.
Most of this is being driven by "allies" - ie, people who have no skin in the game and can move on to the next cool thing when they've sucked the marrow out of this one.
I find it entirely plausible that DID will be the next cool thing
This is true. On some of the more louche dating sites large numbers of fairly obviously straight women call themselves queer. Why? Because it’s cooler than calling yourself straight. Unfortunately a lot of this identity stuff devolves to high school coolness nonsense.
"How do I get a nice oppressed identity hall pass from my ultra-earnest PMC peers in the Acela Corridor without actually having to suck ... well ... you know ... ?"
My son was "diagnosed" with this, DID, by a substance abuse counsellor when he was a raging alcoholic. It was so handy that it wasn't really him trashing the house, terrorizing his girlfriend and getting DUIs.
Yes. And it misdirects other attempts to help. If professionals are distracted by helping someone with their personalities, they aren’t addressing the pesky alcohol problem. That’s why being distracted by all these idioms of distress is so pernicious.
Yes and especially the notion that it's caused by childhood trauma so they go excavating around in their pasts to find what supposedly caused this. Thus they aren't responsible for their behavior and it's someone else's fault that they're like this.
If you read the book “Blueprint” by Robert Plomin you will likely find some comfort there.
There is a very pernicious aspect to a lot of the 21st century trauma-driven narratives: trauma is supposedly responsible for everyone’s problems, so if you have a troubled child, what did YOU do to him? This belief kicks parents when they’re down and desperately trying to help their kids.
Yes people experience trauma. I’ve had my share so I’m very sympathetic. And people’s trauma can cause problems. I certainly can notice some effects in myself. Everyone to some degree is both warped and helped by their set of life experiences. But plenty of people with _very_ traumatic backgrounds function just fine overall (including me), and plenty of people with relatively trauma-free backgrounds can still struggle with very severe mental health concerns.
So “trauma” is not the magical explanation everyone currently thinks it is.
I hope your son is doing better now -- or if he’s not yet, that he will. Having a mentally I’ll or substance abusing child is really rough on the entire family.
I'm curious--did he attempt to get a real diagnosis and therapy, or did it become the focus of his substance use sessions, or did he just kind of run with the idea himself?
He was recommended to this substance abuse counselor by someone in his rehab. She diagnosed him with DID right away and all of his sessions were about her trying to contact the alter that was - as he explained it - the one who was actually drinking himself blind and raging around.
I realized that it was woo-woo bullshit when he told me that she was really good at working with DID and she had a lot of other patients that had it. To the extent anyone actually believes in DID, it's supposed to be a "rare psychiatric disorder diagnosed in about 1.5% of the global population." So did she have all of them?
It was very frustrating because he really did need help badly. I was afraid he was going to hurt someone or end up in prison.
DID doesn’t exist except as a cultural creation, so the numbers will vary according to how “popular” it currently is (similar to psychogenic tic disorders or trans identification).
If you google around 1.5% is bandied about but many people think it's inflated by a lot. My calculation was more like what is the likelihood that there are so many DID patients going to this one obscure lady drug counselor in a medium town in north Texas? Wouldn't they be psychiatric patients?
Ever wonder if everyone’s mental health was better when they had to hunt for berries and small game or maybe carry water around in a re-purposed animal bladder? ( My friend does, am asking for them.)
No, because that would be foolish romanticism. If your friend wants a life hard enough that living past 40 is a major accomplishment all by itself, there are still places where they can find one, but I doubt they'll like it all that much if they do.
Maybe your friend could stand to talk to somebody, if that's a problem they have. Reasoning instead from "there are things about my life I would like to change" to "it was a mistake to come down from the trees" seems if nothing else a little hasty.
FWIW, I was trying to introduce the possibility that the trend FdB wrote about was symptomatic of something deeper than a tik-tok trend. No, I don’t pine for the good old days when starvation was such a constant threat that infanticide was a viable option for coping w/it. (Knuckle dragger that I am, I still prefer my hydro flask to a repurposed animal bladder.) The point I was trying to hint at was that being engaged in physical activity- particularly if one’s life depends on it - has the salutary effect of occupying one’s mind, to the exclusion of superfluous and damaging distractions. Now that we’ve cleared the problem of acute material insecurity- for the most part, anyway - many people simply have more time on their hands than they really know what to do with. The results aren’t always positive. The ill effects of a sedentary lifestyle on physical health have been widely noted. Freddie’s post illuminates the latest ill effect on mental health. Suffice it to say that working to keep one’s body alive may be a better thing than sitting around pretending it’s got more than one tenant.
The idea that modern life lacks a sense of overarching purpose is hardly novel. But it's hardly a panacea to imagine creating such a thing, either. It's been tried in the recent past, and the results offer little to recommend the practice - or, at the very least, a list of catastrophic failure modes you want to be very sure how to avoid from the start.
Individual purpose is harder work, for sure. It requires more of each person to find the thing that for them makes life worth living. But it does seem safer on net, or at least to limit the blast radius - although in fairness I have to admit the jury is yet still out on that.
I think the Finns would agree with that take. Despite the cold and gray winters they rank as one of the happiest nations, and I’m sure the fact that most are regularly engaged in outdoor activity and labor is part of why.
No. Hunter-gatherer cultures are rife with death and violence; one book I read estimated that between 1/5 to 1/3 of women in a certain tribe had killed at least one of their own infants (typically because they got pregnant again while still nursing and elected to keep feeding their older baby instead of feeding the newborn or trying to juggle feeding both, but also because of obvious or suspected birth defects). The majority of men die violently. Any injury or illness can become life-threatening, and it's a coin toss whether any child will make it to five years old.
It's very hard for me to imagine that this doesn't have deleterious effects and even if they don't, the lives of those who perish need to be weighed equally to those who survive. "Everyone has impeccable mental health but half of all children die" doesn't seem like an obvious trade-off to me.
That’s fair (though I think there’s been a certain amount of exaggeration of the horrors of hunter-gatherer life by Steven Pinker and his acolytes). On the other hand, “we keep most of the children alive but half the adults are neurotic nutcases and everybody’s fat” doesn’t seem like an obvious trade-off to me, either.
On my better days I’m optimistic that we can find a way to make modernity work well with our small-band-primate biology. We shall see.
generally speaking, i'd say yes (and there's some anthropological evidence to support the claim that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time and less stress). i think a lot of what drives this sort of thing in our culture is our lack of daily purpose and how so few of us participate in the essential responsibilities of life. sustenance, shelter, safety, etc. and the people we share them with are often taken for granted, and the insubstantial things we invest ourselves in--and build our identities around--are often vain and unsatisfying. i live on a farm, and getting up every morning to care for animals or tend my garden and orchard or muck stalls keeps me grounded in the immediate and uncompromising necessities of the real world. there's just no room for indulging in self-pity or fantasy when actual work needs to be done, and i know every day what the simple purpose of my work is. i don't know how i'd be if my reality was the human centipede that is social media, but i know i wouldn't fare as well in comparison.
"Ideas core to the toxic mental health ideology that kids are absorbing on TikTok include
That intense childhood trauma is universal or near-universal, despite the fact that it simply isn’t, and thank god
That trauma is somehow ennobling, a maker of meaning, a creator of identity, a way to be unique and special, rather than something terrible we should do everything we can to prevent
Correspondingly, that to be mentally healthy is undesirable, when it’s a condition we should aspire to secure for everyone
That mental illness is an identity, the most important and central element of someone’s self, rather than an unfortunate detail, and that the right way to have a mental illness is to revel in it, celebrate it, fixate on it completely, act as though there’s nothing else interesting or meaningful about you than your mental illness
That any critical thinking or questioning of their rhetoric about mental illness is inherently a matter of “stigma” and thus illegitimate, and that the job of doctors and therapists is always to affirm their self-diagnoses, not to act as independent and dispassionate agents
That anything they feel is valid, that their emotions are a perfect guide to their reality, and that anything that contradicts their intuitions or their desires is by definition the hand of oppression."
Victim status is highly prized in the West these days. Victim status trumps any argument, even to the point where any and all malfeasance is excused and even praised if committed by the right sort of victim.
The irony of course, is that if early childhood trauma were so universal and damaging, imagine how people must have suffered in the olden days, or in the Third World right now.
This has been around for 40 years in a general form. That long ago I used to work for a firm in the Denver office that also had a group in Manhattan. I noticed in one large group get-together in Denver, and when visiting the NYC office often, that all the Coasties could talk about their personal lives was their visits to Psychiatrists. Of the group in NY, only one was obviously dysfunctional - except not in his professional life, which was a huge success. Either the Boss was artful at picking mentally suffering people as employees, or more likely, it was a way to achieve status in a group. A way of communicating out East. The people in Denver rolled their eyes when they couldn't be seen. So it's mutated from adults to young adults, and to kids. To people who really suffer from mental illness, these people are a bunch of terminally selfish counterfeits. They are so self-absorbed that their skeletons are on the outside.
Again it seems exactly like the consumptive chic movement of the 19th century where women adopted the look of the consumptive because dying of TB was glamours and real and made you special.
A more recent example might be the stereotypical benzo (mommy’s little helper) addict 1950s housewife. Only boring average common women were happy being a housewife - those with depth suffered and needed to medicate that suffering.
The early aughts “pro-ana” stuff is a good one too. It made “sense” because there was so much pressure on women to be very skinny but it was also clearly social contagion.
Yet they’re all invested in the videos. You’d think at least one of these diverse personalities would be reluctant to participate, but amazingly they all want you to like and subscribe.
Playing with identity has ever been the privilege and recourse of the young, that is to say, people who are still figuring out what they're going to do and what they've got to do it with. That's fine as far as it goes, and can be both enjoyable and useful. But I'm not sure there is any longer a distinction to be made between play and work - certainly the "grind" or "hustle" cultural concept argues that there's not; by that rubric, if you're not doing work, you're wasting time. From a perspective like that, no such thing as play can even exist. And a lot of the Internet, these days, lives and breathes that concept. Can you blame them? The algorithm eats that shit up, so especially on as algo-driven a platform as TikTok, which by all accounts is actively hostile to and quite good at preventing users curating their own experiences, that mindset is liable to be at the core of most or all of what you see.
Hence trivially the escalation, because it's a Red Queen's race: you have to run as fast as you can all the time, just to avoid losing ground. If you actually want to earn, if you want to have an audience at all, you have to stand out. I think all of what you describe pretty much falls out of that. It's of a piece with Logan Paul's exploitation of a suicide, or with that guy who deliberately crashed a plane for YouTube views a little while ago - same purpose, same outcome, and if the blast radius of that plane crash was smaller then that's only by happenstance.
It's not identity play any more, because on the Internet not much of anything can be play at all any more - not that there aren't places where it still can, but they're very niche and not geared to generate engagement, and even there you see the effect on people of the prevailing culture. It's identity *work*, identity as personal brand, and I'm less worried about it somehow poisoning the wider culture - the wider culture is already poisoned! - than I am about the effect it's going to have on the people who are tied up in it now. I don't see that they ever really had much of a chance, and while it's reasonable to expect people to rise above their circumstances, it's a bit Calvinist to ignore the fact that not everyone has that in them, or should need to.
I'm just glad I had the good fortune of a chance to mostly figure out who I am before all this shit came along. I don't know how the hell anyone who didn't have that luck is going to deal with the same problem, and I'm glad that's not a problem anyone expects me to try to solve.
(It's also worth noting that all you're going to see on TikTok or Twitter, unless you know how to look and expend the effort in doing so, is the people who've found the most success in this Red Queen's race that the modern public Internet has largely become. Just being aware that these algorithms exist and do what they do does not suffice to render you immune to their effects.)
I think this is a great insight. I’ll add to it that youth is more glamorized and glorified than ever online, and I wonder if the ongoing extension of youth into adulthood and the obsession with youth culture also extends this identity-formation period. Of course identity formation goes on your whole life one way or another, but obsessively trying on labels like a high schooler deciding which lunch table to sit at now goes on way, way beyond high school.
What matters is the interaction between the two, because how we are in "the outside world" depends in irreducible part on what we bring to it from within ourselves. But that interaction seems hard to come by these days, I think not least on account of being a lot harder to monetize.
That is one philosophy but it is not the only one. For me personally my belief is that the world is going to do to you what the world is going to do to you. Your reaction is paramount but it's critical to recognize the dominant partner in this relationship.
FWIW, in terms of the prediction that this will graduate from TikTok nonsense to real-world nonsense, I do personally think the tide has shifted and some of the crazy is starting to drain away. People are still getting incredibly mad about it, but it feels like every day criticizing wokeness becomes a little bit more possible. It's also possible I'm just projecting from my own experience here of course. But still, it feels to me like the direction of the wind has shifted.
Vertical videos are violence
Almost every video I’ve ever seen that uses that audio clip is of a dog making a mess so my reaction is a bit different.
Funny that! You might want to consider a career in stand-up. Seriously! Voted for him 3 times but he has earned a bit of ribbing and your contribution is right up there w/Matt Taibi’s - he recently labeled BO “the fat Elvis of neo-liberalism,” a sublime coinage indeed.
"The Left" is a many-faceted thing. DID need not specifically be a central platform of Biden's campaign. But a moderate or left-wing publication publishing an op-ed bluntly stating that adults should not act as enablers for social media based culture-bound syndromes should not be something difficult to contemplate.
What’s the reasonable alternative to the left?
this left/right dichotomy is oversimplified and overamped by the two-party system in the US, I'm trying not to think of people as left or right, or of so-called leftists having anything particular in common with each other, it's about as pointless as thinking Catholics and Protestants are two fundamentally different categories of human beings -- what's important to me are identifying our societal & global problems and coming up with workable solutions -- I think Freddie is onto something about the faddishness of certain mental illness diagnoses and the harms that can occur when we identify with a mental illness instead of treating mental illness
yoga gets a bad rap LOL, it's done wonders for my aching back :-)
Huge benefits within certain insular progressive circles, yes.
But those insular progressive circles wield outsized power in our society. So a benefit in those circles is a big material advantage.
I think it seems that way because those circles wield outsized power in media and cultural production but they do not wield outsized material power. At the end of the day the mentally ill homless person in my neighborhood whos constantly in distress is not benefiting from any of this tik tok clout. The black people in poverty in west baltimore are not benefiting from their "voices being uplifted" by netflix and the trans children who are being abused by their families or others are not enjoying the clout that Harry Stiles gets for wearing a dress.
I’m not sure how what you’re saying is in contradiction to what I’m saying. People in the circles of power (including not just media and cultural production, but now also large swathes of corporate America) use these ideas to perform “I am the right kind of person to hold power,” which aids in their competition with their elite peers. It is also useful to those who are trying to scrabble their way up into the elites.
Obviously woke performance alone is not sufficient to get you access to the levers of power. You need smarts and ruthlessness and a fair number of lucky breaks. But it is, in many environments, a necessary condition to such access.
I'm saying that you're mixing up two types of power one of which is symbolic and the other of which is material. Cultural power and power over politics and the economy are two entirely different things.
And I’m saying that practicing this stuff is now very much a part of being the kind of person who has power over politics and (especially) the economy.
Right, and this is another blind spot many liberals have: pretending incentives either don't work, or are less powerful than we know they actually can be.
The incentives around identifying as trans now, or pretending to have DID/MPD, or pretending you caught Tourette's Syndrome from a Tik Tok video ... the incentives are all there, and you're seeing the results they've produced.
This should not be a very controversial observation, but as I said earlier, here we are.
I love your writing. This is a really good interrogation of something I've noticed on social media. The other disturbing part of this is it tries to ensnare you. Especially if you've had a mental health crisis, so many institutions are set up to encourage you to make that part of your identity not just on social media but among therapists themselves. It's actually difficult to find a provider who doesn't buy in to this culture of valid feelings etc. Lots of learned helplessness going on. Now, at 26, I am sick to death of my feelings being affirmed; instead I want to feel better.
Genuinely, wishing you the best of luck with getting better.
I’ve noticed something: lots of people have generalized anxiety and depression. I’m one of them. Who knows why? I’m sure the huge changes to human life caused by tech certainly contributes; I began experiencing anxiety and depression after giving birth, so there’s definitely disrupted chemical processes going on.
But what I’ve noticed is lots of young people online referring to “my depression” and “my anxiety.” It seems a small thing, but I find it telling how many use that possessive case when describing a condition I would very much like to be rid of.
I’m a big proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy for the simple reason that reframing how you think of traumas/illnesses/disappointments goes a long way to actually treating them.
My grandmother, a WWII veteran, HATED having to get medical treatment. She would’ve rather made her own sling out of an old pillowcase than go to the hospital when she broke her shoulder. She loathed the idea of being a burden.
Whereas now, the kids these days LOVE being a burden! It’s self-care to disrupt the lives of those around you for attention.
Of course, if you deform your limbs and joints by not getting them set properly when they break, you might end up an even bigger burden!
My family inherited the whole don't-be-a-burden ethos, too, but also a raft of heritable health problems, so that not seeking timely medical attention when you actually do need it is seen as being irresponsibly burdensome. The rub, of course, is when do you really need it and when are you just whining?
YES. that’s something I tried to get her to understand: by doing risky things “for herself,” she was increasing the burden to everyone else. It’s easier to carry her cup of tea up the stairs than care for her when she’s broken a bone falling down the stairs.
There’s very much a sense of, “You must learn to navigate the world as the kind of person who will always be depressed and anxious,” as opposed to “You must learn to live without depression and anxiety.” The latter isn’t equally possible for everyone, of course, but the idea that improvement isn’t possible, only accommodation, feels pretty depressing to me.
CBT is great. Again, I know mileage varies, but it made an enormous difference for me.
One perspective I've heard on this is that "depression" and "anxiety" are generalized ways of talking about more specific emotions or cocktails of emotions, and that it's important to understand those actual emotions. That is somewhat counter to (or at least irrelevant to) CBT as I understand it. I've not tried CBT but it seems rational, and I've heard a lot of people talk about success with it.
Yeah I mean for me the most basic CBT is just reframing thought patterns to better align with external reality, so I can then adjust my internal narrative. It takes commitment and discipline to do that. Anything can be gamed.
If I understand what you're positing, it's something basically like there's an inertia or path of least resistance of sorts to each person's mental processes / being, and that a new treatment can temporarily disrupt that inertia, but that in most cases we figure out how to metabolize that treatment into the inertia. Am I understanding you correctly?
Alexander seems to come down -- tentatively as he notes -- on the side of it's not that the treatments get less effective; it's that the initial effectiveness is a mirage.
A sort of Weberian rationalization where the systems evolve to serve certain ends, not all of which are improved mental health, and those systems get disrupted by new treatments (resulting in, potentially, some increase in successful treatment because the mechanisms and ideas of that treatment have not been rationalized into an institutional system). Then as the systems and people assimilate the new treatment, it becomes a cog in the system like all the other cogs before it. Thanks, that's insightful.
All illness, even physical illness, is really "just a" gatekept social category.
Malingering as it's classicaly understood is apparently quite rare:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/malingering-the-lord-voldermort-of-medicine/
Still, any "real illness" could be thought of as "warranted malingering". And all drugs as performance-enhancing drugs. (Even the lifesaving ones, considering death is usually detrimental to performance.)
I can see how this would be true for a lot of people. I know someone who went to therapy until it got “too sad” and the “too sad” bit was when they started addressing what the person needed to change.
Yes, I can see that being the case -- we often want to change our behavior, but we don't like the changes that may improve it.
Well when I say “CBT” I’m referring to basic, reframe-the-story-you’re-telling-yourself practices. Acknowledging and understanding your emotions is key to the reframing working.
For me, anxiety and depression were unrelenting and unrelated to anything going on in my life. It made no sense. It was neurochemical. I felt nothing, or I felt anger. I feel awful about it, but my husband bore the brunt of my cognitive pain. Only when I acknowledged to myself that what I was feeling wasn’t warranted by anything in reality was I able to get help.
I wish I'd written my original response differently; it was pretty indifferent to your experiences. Sorry about that.
Not at all! I didn’t get that from your response. Just illustrating how I thought you were right actually, that the emotions must be recognized.
I'm glad that was the case!
Cognitive behavioral therapy seems to be the best form of therapy for everyone. At least if their goal is to become better or at least more functional.
When I was studying neuroscience, I always wondered why this wasn't the go-to therapy for everyone. The answer, of course, is money and time. Which is too bad! I think many people struggling with anxiety or depression or any number of other issues would be doing a lot better now if healthcare were free and available.
I have a very scratch-the-surface understanding of neuroscience but it would behoove people to realize that thought patterns and the resulting behaviors change the physical brain structure. Something that starts as cognitive can very much become something tangibly physical. What we think and choose to do matters greatly.
Absolutely! The pervasiveness of a dualistic understanding of humanity has separated people's minds from their bodies. What you're describing is very real. We used to say "neurons that fire together wire together," which basically just means that anything you do a lot (whether writing with one hand, whistling, or thinking about suicide) is something that becomes easier to do.
Our brains are endlessly flexible (neuroscience speech calls this plasticity). Far more flexible and moldable than understood even twenty years ago. This is both good and bad news! You can literally change yourself. But it also means experience can change you in permanent ways that you would not have chosen.
A lot of truly wonderful things are nonetheless oversold. Modern medicine generally. Heck, modernity itself. CBT has been oversold as a treatment, unfortunately, and that has contributed to suffering people's distrust of it. And that's on top of the time and money it takes.
I've benefited from CBT-type therapy, too. It has a great reputation for making even the least "self-indulgent" of suffering (like "OMG I'm dying of cancer and my one hope is incredibly painful chemo that'll nearly kill me anyhow and how do I cope?") more bearable. But its great reputation means it can create unrealistic expectations for patient improvement. See, for example, the PACE scandal. And it's no surprise when already-suffering people resent the hell out of the insinuation that the only reason CBT didn't help them more is basically through their own moral failing.
So true. I guess I should be more clear that I mean “some CBT techniques” rather than “ongoing CBT sessions with a therapist.” A lot of us with non-life-threatening mental illness could benefit from better mental hygiene.
Even people with life-threatening problems, whether physical or mental, generally benefit from better mental hygiene. How big a benefit? Depends, somewhat, on the problem.
My brain processed this as "CBD" and I was really excited about someone else calling it out as being oversold and a waste of time and money. Then I got to the second paragraph.
Lol. I dunno my CBD lipgloss has really made a dent in the depression I feel due to postpartum-onset cascade of hormones.
Oh, I have reason to suspect CBD is oversold, too.
Get a second alter without anxiety and have them kill the original alter
Then do a remake of Face Off but instead of switching faces the lead actors just keep swapping personalities.
Couldn't agree more. As a typical teenager and young adult I struggled with depression and anxiety. I have had a few waves as an adult, during times of stress. But working through these times of struggle by focusing on how I think and observing my own destructive patterns and working to correct them cognitively has made me a more functional contributor and more fulfilled person.
I pin so much of these problems on the therapeutical community, which, like pharma, has preferenced a steady revenue stream to helping others achieve health and self-sufficiency. Much easier to enable your patients neurosis and feed it and collect the insurance money. See you same time next week.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is like a healthy diet and lots of exercise. Good for the person, but bad for revenues.
21st Century Salon has a similar article: https://bprice.substack.com/p/tiktok-tics-and-mass-sociogenic-illness?s=r
Also, I want to admit to being one of the "it's just elite colleges, it doesn't matter" people. I thought they'd start working at Goldman Sachs and become boring Obama liberals.
You stealth optimist, you.
Idk about Goldman Sachs, but I think this woke stuff has a chance of hurting elite colleges, especially wrt dropping the SAT
Yes but they'll never shut up about how they're "decolonizing" it
Meanwhile, we have the likes of J.D. Vance pushing for a de-Baathification of government to install like-minded Nationalists. It's becoming a tit-for-tat thing now which is really a sad reflection of Americans in general.
I have former law school classmates like that. They get to make gobs of money working on M&A and land-rights deals for banks and oil companies, but still be the heroic underdog who fought to bring in more diverse food options for catering.
My God, I have so many former law school classmates who are like this. And, almost to a person, similarly all work on the side of the powerful. The kicker is that I'm old enough I remember when they were in law school and either pre-woke or proto-woke which makes it even funnier.
Haha
Goldman Sachs is very good at paying tribute to whatever ideas grant power and influence. They will happily provide you with all the ESG products and services you want. But don't kid yourself. David Solomon and friends are disgusted by this type of stuff and are far too powerful to lose anytime soon.
that was fucking fascinating. This stuff has been rolling for more than a decade. thanks!
They did. They just started having DEI trainings at Goldman
Yes, but the purpose is to train associates so they have the vocabulary to better sell ESG services.
Those are to protect against discrimination lawsuits
I think there's some amount of drinking the cool-aid to give oneself in management a pat on the back, but yes, functionally, DEI, sexual harassment training, "ethics training" where they teach you that you're not allowed to give bribes and such, these are all for the legal protection of the company.
I’m actually in job training right now. No one has mentioned the bribe thing, so I assume it’s cool here…?
I mean, if it’s not in the training...
Add the new Disney/Marvel show Moon Knight to the list of pop-culture portrayals of DID. Also there is a sub-Reddit r/fakedisordercringe that documents this trend quite well, you can even see a while back Tik-Tokers we’re obsessed with pretending they had tics from Tourette’s, got bored with that then moved on to DID. What disorder will they pretend to have next? Only time will tell
Great show IMO, probably “problematic” in the context of the DID fad. If only the censors censored what I want!
Oh, the Tourette thing is alive and well. Credulous coverage in the NYT as recently as a few weeks ago. The spike in Tourette-like symptoms seen during the pandemic hasn’t abated.
My vague theory is that because these categories are so vague and mutable, you can milk them forever by changing them slightly - TikTok Tourette doesn’t look much like actual Tourette. I was on tumblr when DID was the identity in vogue there, back in 2010-2012. This iteration of it looks different but has the same roots, just centered on a much less insular online community. Recently I was introduced to a Discord bot that allows people to use a tag that changes their display name/chat name so they can easily and obviously switch alters during text conversations, something we didn’t have a platform to do that on ten years ago.
It's a shame because Moon Knight has been a z-tier Marvel hero for literal decades and was one of my favorite superheroes when I was younger, mostly because of the great art. In true superhero fashion, his DID is caused by a near-death experience and possible presence of a literal Egyptian God in his mind (I say "possible" because the comic always had a lot more fun with unreliable narrators and perception)
"They would like the laurel of victimhood without the actuality of being victimized."
Yes. This phenomenon exists with sexual identity as well. I've said before that the rise of identifications like "gray ace demisexual" (aka having a normal sex drive) is because kids today want to be Queer but they don't want to be queer.
They're also surrounded by a 24/7 porn culture that tells them that a "normal" sex drive involves being slapped, spit on, choked, and hit during sex -- or doing the slapping, spitting, choking, and hitting.
If that's the modern definition of "sex," then hell yeah, I'm "gray ace demisexual," too.
It also tells women that normal female sex drive is willing to have lots of hookup/casual sex, which...doesn't seem to be true for many women.
I remember in the 90s being pissed off because the conservative definition of sex was that sex is degradation for women, and the right response is to "lie still and think of England." Meanwhile, the left-wing definition was that sex is degradation for women, and "for $39.95, we'll sell you these fair-trade leather handcuffs!"
The part before the comma they both completely agreed on. There was NO desire to question that.
Now we see what's become of it in the generations that followed. :-(
In reality, what could be kinkier than remaining immobile whilst thinking of a small country in the United Kingdom?
This is a vastly underrated comment.
Booyah, and TYVM
While at the same time, telling women that if they do have lots of hookup / casual sex, they're in some sense deserving of denigration.
Yep. Thus we also end up with a generation of young men who simultaneously want -- in their own words -- "some fucking slut to suck my cock" and then wonder why young women won't go near them because what healthy young woman wants to be viewed as "some fucking slut?"
I've seen so many men say that they won't perform certain sex acts with women they want to marry because they want to be able to "respect their wife".
And it's like...so you're a-okay *doing whatever act* and disrespecting those women? The disrespecting women thing isn't a barrier to you, you just want your wife to be a sweet chaste little thing? Okay then.
(I've come across a couple women too who enjoy giving oral sex and are disappointed their boyfriend/husband doesn't want it, and when they push into it are told he doesn't want it because he "wouldn't be able to respect her" after it. Like, seriously? It's a blow job)
That whole "Eve, tempted by the serpent (because of her weakness?) infecting Adam with the evil she learned" trope has poisoned a lot of things over the years.
Madonna/Whore complex. It's as old as the hills. I'm guessing someone has written a book or two about the conflicting desires of men when it comes to sex. And if they haven't, they should.
I don't know if gray ace demisexual is a real identifier, but that's a pretty funny way to describe yourself.
LOL then basically every human being is a gray ace demisexual. This is a very inclusive sexual orientation!
The precise breakdown is something like this:
"Grey" asexuality means you don't consider yourself to have a strong sexual attraction to anyone, at least not based on gender, BUT don't fit neatly into the conventional "categories" of asexuality either (roughly: "repulsed by sex," "apathetic about sex," or "enjoys sex physically without feeling attraction"). "Grey ace" is literally shorthand for "in the asexual grey area."
It's probably overkill to include "demisexual" on TOP of "grey ace," but "demisexual" generally refers to a sex drive that's triggered by emotional intimacy—not simply "I want to have sex with people who I'm intimate with," but "I don't remotely think about sex UNTIL that intimacy exists." I'm not sure how that would combine with ambiguous asexuality? I typically hear "demisexual" included as part of the asexual spectrum to begin with, but I'm not also One Of The Kids, so who knows.
IS THIS ALL EXTREMELY STUPID? Yes, absolutely! In the same way that astrology signs, Meyers-Briggs designators, and Hogwarts houses are. And this version of overly-jargon-y sex nerdiness originated in the same place: bored teens with smartphones taking Buzzfeed quizzes and reading faux-taxonomical posts on Tumblr. So much of what we assume is cultural dysfunction is really just kids being bored online.
Personally, I think there are probably some interesting divergences in where sex drives originate: different sensations trigger different things in people, "masculine vs. feminine" is technically separate from "male vs female" and also affects sex drive, some sexual stimulation IS mental/emotional versus sexual/physical, and so on and so forth. And in this age of fandoms and geeks, it's unsurprising that sex fandoms and sex geeks have increasingly become a thing—which is a separate but interlinked phenomenon from "sex positivity" as an unparsed whole. My take, generally, is that neither side delves into "what's actually happening" enough to form a coherent position on this matter.
My other take, though, is that asexuality should not be included within the LGBT umbrella, and that it's ahistorical and gross to equate "asexual stigmatization" with what other people have suffered for the sake of their sexuality and gender identity. I feel like "non-normative sex" is a great thing to form solidarity around, whether geekily or otherwise, but that can find its own voice, instead of appropriating a movement that exists in the face of horrific oppression.
I don’t think these terms are stupid - I think they can be helpful on the level of personally understanding or even communicating one’s proclivities to a partner or potential partner. For instance, in the gay and lesbian world there are people who only receive or only give and corresponding terminologies (that differ by region etc from my experience). I want to know that the person I’m about to go to bed with has a compatible proclivity.
Where I think it gets stupid is when it becomes a personality or identity. It made sense at one point (and still does in some places) to clearly identify as gay or queer etc either to find others (including potential partners) or for organizing purposes. I have no idea why anyone would feel the need to publicly identify as “demisexual,” however. Using it as a descriptive term with someone you’re about to go to bed with, ok.
I think that publicly identifying by sexuality is just more popular these days in general. It feels to me like that usual mix of half "genuinely doing away with taboo" and half "people looking to post shit online." And I'm sure that a part of that is non-LGBT individuals looking to join in the fun, and part of it is really just that same impulse that led my generation to get really into Taurus and Leo and Aquarius as personality designators again—which, ugh.
Personally, I tend to be more worried about reactionary or bigoted forces coagulating than about overreach within one given culture, perhaps because I cynically assume that ANY subculture is going to have some measure of people taking things too far, being jerks, making mistakes, etc. So all this falls under the heading of: I hope it brings the teens happiness, I personally find it mildly socially annoying, and I'm wary of being too critical of it all, less because I'm scared of "being canceled" than because I find I'd much rather be critical of a large chunk of the folks doing the criticizing in the first place. It's hard to distinguish between genuine criticism or worry and people parroting criticism/worry to mask their desire to return to a place where casual intolerance was okay.
(I'm not sure if any of this is genuinely interesting, forgive me—I'm just spinning gears out loud.)
A lot of this makes perfect sense to me actually.
Agreed entirely. Having come up in the late 2000s and early 2010s (I graduated high school in 2011), I watched gay lib hit light speed, and by graduate school I was haughtily told that “identifying” as a lesbian was less “queer” (read: radical?) than other identities like “pansexual.” (The person who first said this to me offline was a “pansexual gray ace” who is now married to her Irish Catholic husband and expecting twins; because of her purported attraction to “all genders,” this remains, I am told, somehow vastly more “queer” than my own marriage, which is to another woman.)
I think there is something to be said for the ways porn culture has warped view of sex and sexuality (I also recently had a 30-year-old friend confess that she felt apprehensive about new sexual encounters because she, a straight “demisexual” woman, wasn’t sure if she was a “top” or a “bottom” - a meaningless distinction between a man and a woman, I’d think, but she had conflated the two with the dominant and submissive partner, and seemed to expect all sex to include that dynamic). I also think “queerness” is a quick and impossible to disprove clout grab, which is wild because the people doing this act like homophobia is both a constant oppressive force (thus making their demi-poly-gray-queerness so very radical and brave) and also nonexistent (which is easy when you’re either a blue check liberal in a major city in a blue state who has only ever dated men, or when you’re only queer online, or both). I recall once telling a story of kissing my wife at a baseball stadium in update New York and being asked to leave by the management (this was in 2014); someone replied that public displays of affection could “trigger” “sex-repulsed aces.” Don’t get me started on the resurgence of a bizarre purity culture (sex scenes in films are apparently unnecessary and prurient and have no artistic value, or so the hyperwoke and IRL-friendless tell me).
I don’t know where I’m going with this but I find it all alarming and exhausting. This week a “queer femme” on Twitter blew up for saying that washing her 11 year old daughter’s hair and providing advice to said daughter’s 18 year old informally adopted brother constituted “emotional labor.” I think the real harm is coming home to roost and it’s gonna be a fight in the mud for who can claim the most oppression first to say anything other than constant validation is that oppression made manifest.
I guess I’d ask, who could reasonably be described as “queer” without falling somewhere under the headers of L, G, B, or T?
I was born in 1966, and I saw "gay lib" go from people getting the shit beaten out of them, to men dying in droves of AIDS during the administration of a president who was slowing losing his mind and refused to even say that single monosyllable out loud, to grudging acceptance, to marriage rights ... and back to being hated for the same thing that got them beaten up way back when: only wanting to have sex and marry people of the same goddamned sex.
Only now instead of being accused of "perversion" like they called it in the 1950s, they're hated for being "genital fetishists." And now it's the left doing it! It's bonkers!
All this crap is just a woke way to hate women, gay people, and lesbians again.
All I ask people who are skeptical that a lot of this is about misogyny and discomfort with homosexuality is to consider seriously why there are no (cis) female only spaces allowed on Reddit except on porn subs, where they are allowed to require cis only female on female porn for the gratification of men? But not female only lesbian subs for women to express their sexuality?
I'm not sure what this means. Reddit expressly disallows female only subReddits but allows male only subs? Either is ridiculous, but it seems insane. Am I reading you right?
No. They disallow cis female only lesbian or womens subs. Meaning that they must be inclusive of all who identify as women. Any subs that don’t follow this rule are banned. But they DO allow porn subs to be trans exclusive and feature only natal female women. So a lesbian sub run by lesbians that only want to allow cis lesbians will be banned. But a lesbian PORN sub can allow only cis female submissions.
I had no idea Reddit was moderated with that kind of heavy hand. That's incredible to me. Freedom of association is fundamental.
Is that true across most internet spaces? You can't have sex-specific whatevers? Or is this a Reddit thing?
Most of this is being driven by "allies" - ie, people who have no skin in the game and can move on to the next cool thing when they've sucked the marrow out of this one.
I find it entirely plausible that DID will be the next cool thing
Everybody wants to be queer, but nobody wants to have homosexual sex but us gays and lesbians.
This is true. On some of the more louche dating sites large numbers of fairly obviously straight women call themselves queer. Why? Because it’s cooler than calling yourself straight. Unfortunately a lot of this identity stuff devolves to high school coolness nonsense.
"How do I get a nice oppressed identity hall pass from my ultra-earnest PMC peers in the Acela Corridor without actually having to suck ... well ... you know ... ?"
My son was "diagnosed" with this, DID, by a substance abuse counsellor when he was a raging alcoholic. It was so handy that it wasn't really him trashing the house, terrorizing his girlfriend and getting DUIs.
Yes. And it misdirects other attempts to help. If professionals are distracted by helping someone with their personalities, they aren’t addressing the pesky alcohol problem. That’s why being distracted by all these idioms of distress is so pernicious.
Yes and especially the notion that it's caused by childhood trauma so they go excavating around in their pasts to find what supposedly caused this. Thus they aren't responsible for their behavior and it's someone else's fault that they're like this.
If you read the book “Blueprint” by Robert Plomin you will likely find some comfort there.
There is a very pernicious aspect to a lot of the 21st century trauma-driven narratives: trauma is supposedly responsible for everyone’s problems, so if you have a troubled child, what did YOU do to him? This belief kicks parents when they’re down and desperately trying to help their kids.
Yes people experience trauma. I’ve had my share so I’m very sympathetic. And people’s trauma can cause problems. I certainly can notice some effects in myself. Everyone to some degree is both warped and helped by their set of life experiences. But plenty of people with _very_ traumatic backgrounds function just fine overall (including me), and plenty of people with relatively trauma-free backgrounds can still struggle with very severe mental health concerns.
So “trauma” is not the magical explanation everyone currently thinks it is.
I hope your son is doing better now -- or if he’s not yet, that he will. Having a mentally I’ll or substance abusing child is really rough on the entire family.
I'm curious--did he attempt to get a real diagnosis and therapy, or did it become the focus of his substance use sessions, or did he just kind of run with the idea himself?
He was recommended to this substance abuse counselor by someone in his rehab. She diagnosed him with DID right away and all of his sessions were about her trying to contact the alter that was - as he explained it - the one who was actually drinking himself blind and raging around.
I realized that it was woo-woo bullshit when he told me that she was really good at working with DID and she had a lot of other patients that had it. To the extent anyone actually believes in DID, it's supposed to be a "rare psychiatric disorder diagnosed in about 1.5% of the global population." So did she have all of them?
It was very frustrating because he really did need help badly. I was afraid he was going to hurt someone or end up in prison.
She was probably a quack. But 1.5% is a pretty high rate. Wouldn't that still be like 3 million people in the US? ( I doubt that percentage).
DID doesn’t exist except as a cultural creation, so the numbers will vary according to how “popular” it currently is (similar to psychogenic tic disorders or trans identification).
Isn't most substance-abuse treatment pretty quacky, even when it's trying its hardest not to be?
Unfortunately it does seem pretty quacky to me.
If you google around 1.5% is bandied about but many people think it's inflated by a lot. My calculation was more like what is the likelihood that there are so many DID patients going to this one obscure lady drug counselor in a medium town in north Texas? Wouldn't they be psychiatric patients?
Ever wonder if everyone’s mental health was better when they had to hunt for berries and small game or maybe carry water around in a re-purposed animal bladder? ( My friend does, am asking for them.)
No, because that would be foolish romanticism. If your friend wants a life hard enough that living past 40 is a major accomplishment all by itself, there are still places where they can find one, but I doubt they'll like it all that much if they do.
It’s clearly better to live long and prosper while suffering from intractable neuroticism. Copy that.
Maybe your friend could stand to talk to somebody, if that's a problem they have. Reasoning instead from "there are things about my life I would like to change" to "it was a mistake to come down from the trees" seems if nothing else a little hasty.
FWIW, I was trying to introduce the possibility that the trend FdB wrote about was symptomatic of something deeper than a tik-tok trend. No, I don’t pine for the good old days when starvation was such a constant threat that infanticide was a viable option for coping w/it. (Knuckle dragger that I am, I still prefer my hydro flask to a repurposed animal bladder.) The point I was trying to hint at was that being engaged in physical activity- particularly if one’s life depends on it - has the salutary effect of occupying one’s mind, to the exclusion of superfluous and damaging distractions. Now that we’ve cleared the problem of acute material insecurity- for the most part, anyway - many people simply have more time on their hands than they really know what to do with. The results aren’t always positive. The ill effects of a sedentary lifestyle on physical health have been widely noted. Freddie’s post illuminates the latest ill effect on mental health. Suffice it to say that working to keep one’s body alive may be a better thing than sitting around pretending it’s got more than one tenant.
The idea that modern life lacks a sense of overarching purpose is hardly novel. But it's hardly a panacea to imagine creating such a thing, either. It's been tried in the recent past, and the results offer little to recommend the practice - or, at the very least, a list of catastrophic failure modes you want to be very sure how to avoid from the start.
Individual purpose is harder work, for sure. It requires more of each person to find the thing that for them makes life worth living. But it does seem safer on net, or at least to limit the blast radius - although in fairness I have to admit the jury is yet still out on that.
I think the Finns would agree with that take. Despite the cold and gray winters they rank as one of the happiest nations, and I’m sure the fact that most are regularly engaged in outdoor activity and labor is part of why.
No. Hunter-gatherer cultures are rife with death and violence; one book I read estimated that between 1/5 to 1/3 of women in a certain tribe had killed at least one of their own infants (typically because they got pregnant again while still nursing and elected to keep feeding their older baby instead of feeding the newborn or trying to juggle feeding both, but also because of obvious or suspected birth defects). The majority of men die violently. Any injury or illness can become life-threatening, and it's a coin toss whether any child will make it to five years old.
It's very hard for me to imagine that this doesn't have deleterious effects and even if they don't, the lives of those who perish need to be weighed equally to those who survive. "Everyone has impeccable mental health but half of all children die" doesn't seem like an obvious trade-off to me.
That’s fair (though I think there’s been a certain amount of exaggeration of the horrors of hunter-gatherer life by Steven Pinker and his acolytes). On the other hand, “we keep most of the children alive but half the adults are neurotic nutcases and everybody’s fat” doesn’t seem like an obvious trade-off to me, either.
On my better days I’m optimistic that we can find a way to make modernity work well with our small-band-primate biology. We shall see.
generally speaking, i'd say yes (and there's some anthropological evidence to support the claim that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time and less stress). i think a lot of what drives this sort of thing in our culture is our lack of daily purpose and how so few of us participate in the essential responsibilities of life. sustenance, shelter, safety, etc. and the people we share them with are often taken for granted, and the insubstantial things we invest ourselves in--and build our identities around--are often vain and unsatisfying. i live on a farm, and getting up every morning to care for animals or tend my garden and orchard or muck stalls keeps me grounded in the immediate and uncompromising necessities of the real world. there's just no room for indulging in self-pity or fantasy when actual work needs to be done, and i know every day what the simple purpose of my work is. i don't know how i'd be if my reality was the human centipede that is social media, but i know i wouldn't fare as well in comparison.
You wrote:
"Ideas core to the toxic mental health ideology that kids are absorbing on TikTok include
That intense childhood trauma is universal or near-universal, despite the fact that it simply isn’t, and thank god
That trauma is somehow ennobling, a maker of meaning, a creator of identity, a way to be unique and special, rather than something terrible we should do everything we can to prevent
Correspondingly, that to be mentally healthy is undesirable, when it’s a condition we should aspire to secure for everyone
That mental illness is an identity, the most important and central element of someone’s self, rather than an unfortunate detail, and that the right way to have a mental illness is to revel in it, celebrate it, fixate on it completely, act as though there’s nothing else interesting or meaningful about you than your mental illness
That any critical thinking or questioning of their rhetoric about mental illness is inherently a matter of “stigma” and thus illegitimate, and that the job of doctors and therapists is always to affirm their self-diagnoses, not to act as independent and dispassionate agents
That anything they feel is valid, that their emotions are a perfect guide to their reality, and that anything that contradicts their intuitions or their desires is by definition the hand of oppression."
Victim status is highly prized in the West these days. Victim status trumps any argument, even to the point where any and all malfeasance is excused and even praised if committed by the right sort of victim.
The irony of course, is that if early childhood trauma were so universal and damaging, imagine how people must have suffered in the olden days, or in the Third World right now.
This has been around for 40 years in a general form. That long ago I used to work for a firm in the Denver office that also had a group in Manhattan. I noticed in one large group get-together in Denver, and when visiting the NYC office often, that all the Coasties could talk about their personal lives was their visits to Psychiatrists. Of the group in NY, only one was obviously dysfunctional - except not in his professional life, which was a huge success. Either the Boss was artful at picking mentally suffering people as employees, or more likely, it was a way to achieve status in a group. A way of communicating out East. The people in Denver rolled their eyes when they couldn't be seen. So it's mutated from adults to young adults, and to kids. To people who really suffer from mental illness, these people are a bunch of terminally selfish counterfeits. They are so self-absorbed that their skeletons are on the outside.
Again it seems exactly like the consumptive chic movement of the 19th century where women adopted the look of the consumptive because dying of TB was glamours and real and made you special.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-consumptive-chic-carolyn-day-bloomsbury
A more recent example might be the stereotypical benzo (mommy’s little helper) addict 1950s housewife. Only boring average common women were happy being a housewife - those with depth suffered and needed to medicate that suffering.
agree. I was wondering what the historical trends of this were. I was only thinking as far back as gluten intolerance.
The early aughts “pro-ana” stuff is a good one too. It made “sense” because there was so much pressure on women to be very skinny but it was also clearly social contagion.
I clicked on the video...
How do the alters have different ages? How come some are American?
Yet they’re all invested in the videos. You’d think at least one of these diverse personalities would be reluctant to participate, but amazingly they all want you to like and subscribe.
I'm just talking about physics here. How is one alter younger or older?
what?
Lorenz is controversial but there’s zero evidence that she’s lied about her age.
I've looked into this a bit more.They have different heights too!
I see a different etiology, I think.
Playing with identity has ever been the privilege and recourse of the young, that is to say, people who are still figuring out what they're going to do and what they've got to do it with. That's fine as far as it goes, and can be both enjoyable and useful. But I'm not sure there is any longer a distinction to be made between play and work - certainly the "grind" or "hustle" cultural concept argues that there's not; by that rubric, if you're not doing work, you're wasting time. From a perspective like that, no such thing as play can even exist. And a lot of the Internet, these days, lives and breathes that concept. Can you blame them? The algorithm eats that shit up, so especially on as algo-driven a platform as TikTok, which by all accounts is actively hostile to and quite good at preventing users curating their own experiences, that mindset is liable to be at the core of most or all of what you see.
Hence trivially the escalation, because it's a Red Queen's race: you have to run as fast as you can all the time, just to avoid losing ground. If you actually want to earn, if you want to have an audience at all, you have to stand out. I think all of what you describe pretty much falls out of that. It's of a piece with Logan Paul's exploitation of a suicide, or with that guy who deliberately crashed a plane for YouTube views a little while ago - same purpose, same outcome, and if the blast radius of that plane crash was smaller then that's only by happenstance.
It's not identity play any more, because on the Internet not much of anything can be play at all any more - not that there aren't places where it still can, but they're very niche and not geared to generate engagement, and even there you see the effect on people of the prevailing culture. It's identity *work*, identity as personal brand, and I'm less worried about it somehow poisoning the wider culture - the wider culture is already poisoned! - than I am about the effect it's going to have on the people who are tied up in it now. I don't see that they ever really had much of a chance, and while it's reasonable to expect people to rise above their circumstances, it's a bit Calvinist to ignore the fact that not everyone has that in them, or should need to.
I'm just glad I had the good fortune of a chance to mostly figure out who I am before all this shit came along. I don't know how the hell anyone who didn't have that luck is going to deal with the same problem, and I'm glad that's not a problem anyone expects me to try to solve.
(It's also worth noting that all you're going to see on TikTok or Twitter, unless you know how to look and expend the effort in doing so, is the people who've found the most success in this Red Queen's race that the modern public Internet has largely become. Just being aware that these algorithms exist and do what they do does not suffice to render you immune to their effects.)
I think this is a great insight. I’ll add to it that youth is more glamorized and glorified than ever online, and I wonder if the ongoing extension of youth into adulthood and the obsession with youth culture also extends this identity-formation period. Of course identity formation goes on your whole life one way or another, but obsessively trying on labels like a high schooler deciding which lunch table to sit at now goes on way, way beyond high school.
I think people get too stuck in their own heads. What really matters is the outside world, not one's self conception
What matters is the interaction between the two, because how we are in "the outside world" depends in irreducible part on what we bring to it from within ourselves. But that interaction seems hard to come by these days, I think not least on account of being a lot harder to monetize.
That is one philosophy but it is not the only one. For me personally my belief is that the world is going to do to you what the world is going to do to you. Your reaction is paramount but it's critical to recognize the dominant partner in this relationship.
FWIW, in terms of the prediction that this will graduate from TikTok nonsense to real-world nonsense, I do personally think the tide has shifted and some of the crazy is starting to drain away. People are still getting incredibly mad about it, but it feels like every day criticizing wokeness becomes a little bit more possible. It's also possible I'm just projecting from my own experience here of course. But still, it feels to me like the direction of the wind has shifted.
Yeah but what is shifting to? Getting trans teachers fired? Banning books?