The Digital High Is Wearing Off

Experts estimate that chronic loneliness can be as damaging to one’s health as smoking anywhere between half a pack and a full pack of cigarettes a day. Irrespective of how you feel about the health effects of tobacco, the statement couldn’t be more clear: loneliness is a silent killer.

Recently I was reflecting on the importance of childhood friends. I did a livestream where I was joking around in the same way as a friend and I used to in middle school. The friends we have early in our development give us all sorts of strategies to work with, attitudes to imbue, cues to pay attention to, and relevant feedback that help us to be successful adults.

The great malady of the day is the social estrangement introduced by hyper tyrannical government overreach. People are losing their ability to relate with each other. You’re compelled, by force, to wear a mask in many public places. Others, those who are afraid of life, wear masks willingly. You have a harder time reading these people. You can’t see if they’re smiling. Many have given up on smiling altogether and carry with them dead eyes. The movies about zombies are coming true. Just as environmentalists decry the loss of species variety brought on by “development”, so can a person look at the loss in variety of life strategies. No longer do people take the kinds of risks they took, socially and economically, a hundred years ago. They emote far less than their parents and grandparents did. People are losing their humanity. People have to mount an effort of will to find a smile and since humor is being outlawed, emit a laugh.

All of this loss of expression means that young people are increasingly isolated with their sense that something is wrong in all of this. At least, those of the young that aren’t undergoing medical experimentation at the behest of their anxious and totalitarian parents. Indeed there is something wrong, gravely wrong, with this whole arrangement. Children need all manner of input so that they will sustain a healthy adult culture when they come into their earning years. Children need love. Yet at every turn they are shown dead eyes, masks, government tyrants who wish to cull the herd, degenerate fantasies in the media, and time wasting video games that keep them in a mental ghetto the size of a developer with no moral courage.

Opening up to people and connecting is precisely what we must endeavor to get past this period where the West has been deprived of its certainty and dignity. The media may have completely reengineered three generations of Westerners to be undignified fluffheads with no backbone but we do not mend the wounds by doubling down with more of the same. The way out of social isolation is to get texting (over Signal), to get traveling about, to invite people over, to become involved in the local community (despite the insanely prohibitive gas prices), and to spend more time talking, less time scrolling social media. Social media has been a gift and a curse. For a brief window of time (2013-2017), it allowed people to push back on the globalist regime’s narratives in real time. Due to rampant censorship on the part of cowards and tyrants, most of what remains is the deadening Fear Of Missing Out that keeps people coming back in the hopes that the whole house of cards will collapse and one can watch it from their smartphone. Maybe this will come to pass but the more a person inputs their being into social media, the more “digital” the world becomes.

One does well to input their life energies into other people and into physically tangible pursuits. The mad rush of everybody “working in tech” is dying off because the government has harvested all the innovation it needs to realize a breakaway society for the elite. The loophole in the economy is closing. People will need to be able to socialize with other people once again to make their living, not just plug 1’s and 0’s into a computer screen that robs one of their time in exchange for some Fedcoin.

We understand that organic food, when the producer is being honest, sustains our bodies better than factory food. Why then do we not apply the same understanding to our sensory input and output? Everyone is chasing the “meme high” to appear as a Marvel character who everyone on Instagram will love. There is no imagination in this. When people’s expression is informed by people who are connected to nature and God, their self-expression has a lot more to do with what is actually real and important in this life. For most, this is a quieter and less glamorous life but it is also a lot closer to what is actually sustainable on a long term scale. Digital fiat in the form of dancing on the backs of migrant coders on H1-B visas is a high that is coming to an end. Who will do the right thing and take up the pen and pad again? Who will be on the shortwave or the HAM for a late night chat? Who will “pay a visit” to another’s parlor? Must we always serve the diminishing logic of bankers with server facilities that are built to withstand bunker buster bombs? Why chase that?

A big sea change is coming.