“Somewhere in the past decade or two (pick your own cultural ruin-marker), it stopped being a side quirk that people don’t listen and became a full-blown civic emergency, an extinction-level collapse of attention, curiosity, and the basic mammalian ability to register, or have any interest whatsoever in, another person’s interior life.”
I got all the way to “as I’ve been writing about for years …” before I clocked this as something I won’t bother to finish.
Humans as a species have never listed as the lead quote implies. We’re a shallow species whose interpersonal communication is far more of a handshake than a learned debate. If you go against someone else’s notions you may, at best, get them to remember a short phrase. (And if you’re really lucky and repeat a phrase a few times, it may even be one that accurately reflects your position!)
I got a little bit further and it turned into, “all the ways I wasted time as a kid are superior to the ways that people waste time today”
And this is coming from someone who did the exact same things around the same time as them. I loved those times, but, they were described with such an air of superiority that they don’t really deserve.
Lots of people listen, and lots of people don’t.
Somewhere between the sixth algorithmic outrage of the morning and the ninth “you’ll-never-believe-this” clip of the afternoon, people forgot how to do the slow, unprofitable work of letting someone else’s words actually hit their bloodstream.
This is where I popped smoke for an evac. I know this writing style, have seen it before countless times on countless other blogs, and it’s trying too hard to be edgy and angry. There’s most certainly a demographic for this, and author is definitely writing to that demographic, and I’m not it.