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These kinds of deep dives into superficially trivial aspects of modern life can be interesting and, in some ways, healthy. But they are also just exhausting if
by NoboruWataya 1y ago
These kinds of deep dives into superficially trivial aspects of modern life can be interesting and, in some ways, healthy. But they are also just exhausting if you consume (or produce) too many of them.
Most of the things being dissected and critically analysed here are popular precisely because they don't demand too much thought to engage with in the first place. Being forced to consider the political or philosophical root causes of your enjoyment of cat memes just turns them from cheap laughs into hard work and saps the enjoyment out of them. You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also end up less happy.
IMO it's good that there is a blog out there putting out these kinds of analyses, so that people can visit it when that's the kind of thing they're after, and not visit it when it's not. The problem is people either over-consuming this content themselves in a manner similar to doom-scrolling, or having the content forced on them by people who want to shoe-horn these topics into every conversation.
- rixed 1y agoMaybe training your critical thoughts on mundane things helps to understand less mundane things, and give one the good habit of not letting alien ideas settle in unchallenged? Like gym for the mind? Ignorance is no more bliss than physical weakness is comfort. Also, isn't critical thinking synonymous with forming one's own opinions? If most of our ideas and opinions are not really ours, then really, who are we?
- coldtea 1y ago>You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also end up less happy. Ignorance is bliss. Keep smiling peasant, you don't want to risk your bliss by knowing that you're bound for the Soylent Green factory or that everybody in power and business plays you for a foul
- im3w1l 1y agoThis but unironically. In the movie no one was killed for the purpose of being turned into soylent green, they just used bodies of people who were dead anyway. I remember thinking that it's not such a big deal compared to all the other misery in that movie, and that ignorance was bliss in that respect. I don't fully remember the movie anymore, but there were many other things that were much worse that actually happened on an ongoing basis and leading to people suffering. Like the poverty.
- rixed 1y agoThe massive waste of human lives that result from the extreme poverty displayed in the movie is indeed the worse regression imaginable, and the worse objection to the reverence of modernity, but we are so accustomed to it that we would all have forgotten the movie if not for the twist about cannibalism.
- coldtea 1y agoIt's the reverence of modernity that got them there
- olooney 1y agoIndividual water molecules don't do much thinking either, but fluid dynamics is still an interesting and useful subject of study. If people seem to be putting considerable effort trying to understand such trivial things as memes, perhaps it's because they realize they are standing ankle deep in a rising flood and wish to avoid being swept away.