Men’s Mental Health™
Earlier this week, I was talking to my boss about men’s mental health. My hot take was (1) that I believe hysteria is real, and (2) that it manifests in highly gendered ways, but (3) that it isn’t exclusive to women. Whereas hysteric women might text all their exes that they’re going to kill themselves, hysteric men read books with titles like Stoicism 101 and sign up for Ironman triathlons.
Agreeing, my boss told me about this time his friend went to a get-together at a cabin by the beach. Sometime during the party, a man left abruptly, walked to the shore, buried himself in the sand, and just laid there for hours. Everyone felt it was too awkward to go check on him and figured he was just going through something, so they just let him be.
The guy was all right in the end, but I’m deeply amused by the concept. Just burying yourself in sand and waiting for the tide to come in.
Clickbait: Substack in decline??
Despite my non-stop posting over the past month, I go back and forth about the future of this Substack. I also go back and forth about the future of Substack in general. I joked on the ill-fated Notes section of this site that everyone’s asking whether we’ve reached peak wokeness, but perhaps we’ve reached peak anti-wokeness as well. Both were bad—embarrassing and churlish—and mutually reinforcing, and we should be glad to meet somewhere on the other side of the dialectical process. Even a former Dimes Square tick has announced that he plans to detach himself from that artery and find a new one to remain true to his punk spirit or w/e. Best of luck.
Best of luck to the Substack TERFs, to based Deleuzeans, to that guy with thousands of subscribers who once told me in a Discord channel that he thought monks’ bodies simply reabsorbed the sperm they produced, sending them into divine frenzy, and I quit the channel, deleted my Discord account, and wrote in my journal that I think that, as an adult, you have an ethical responsibility not to be a dumbass. You can be a midwit—that’s inescapable—but not a dumbass.
Technically, I used the R-slur, but it’s probably time to say so long to it. It’s tacky again.
There’s probably a Steven Pinker book about why we like to believe that things are in decline—or at least articles declaring them to be—even when the evidence gives no suggestion of that or points to the contrary. Is it something in human nature that leads us to prioritize the bad? Or do the indicators not tell the right story? Substack formed its culture in the epistemic crisis of 2020. The online left fragmented after Bernie, and the online right fragmented after Trump; COVID introduced many to the Very Online; TikTok emerged and galvanized new micro-trends; BLM created backlash against mainstream liberals and W O K E N E S S . Suddenly, everyone was ranting about “elites,” but elites weren’t billionaires anymore but Sarah (she/they) from HR.
Substack took off during a period of low-hanging fruit, is what I’m saying.
Please subscribe to my newsletter to read my original takes on
Why porn killed eroticism
Why porn killed sex
Why people aren’t having sex
Why people having sex aren’t having babies
Why porn hurts young people
Why movies should show more sex
Why movies should show less sex
Why dating apps
Why hookup culture
Why #MeToo hurt women
Why gender is hardwired and that’s important
Why feminism was bad
Why women are bad
Why men are bad
Why men shouldn’t be told they’re bad
Why men should reclaim masculinity
Why men can’t read books
Why men can’t write books
Why men should learn to hunt with primitive tools they make
Why trans
Why trans
Why trans
Why trans
Why trans
Why universities are too woke
Why free speech is my only principle
Why I wouldn’t punch a Nazi
Why culture feels so stale
Why culture feels so boring
Why culture feels so blah
Why you shouldn’t take SSRIs
Why ADHD is fake
Why autism is fake
Why everyone has autism
Why critical race theory is wrong
Why we should say the R-slur
Why I FUCKING hate “In this house we believe” signs
Why contemporary literature is bad
Why wokeness is bad
Why the internet is bad
Why this film from 1938 is good
Why I’m still mad about that Gillette commercial
Why AOC is a fake friend
Why I’m clever for reading The Culture of Narcissism
Why demographics matter
Why crime matters
Why Democrats
Why Republicans
Why Americans
Why black Americans
Why the economy
Why liberalism
Why Western civilization
Why God
Why you should touch grass, actually
Is the internet dying, or are you just growing up?
Everyone says that the internet is dying. There’s probably no indication this is true, but sometimes it feels true. Or maybe we’re just growing older. Growing up as a millennial, I suppose I thought that the internet was for young people—Default Friend likes comparing it to the mall as a former hang-out zone for Cool Teens—but that I’d eventually grow out of it when I developed real-life commitments. WELP. Instead, I’m thirty-one, single, have two friends, and live in a town with plenty of national restaurant chains but nowhere to develop meaningful communities. I also generally dislike people, so please don’t think I’m, like, bemoaning by my so-called “alienation.” But if I’m bored enough, I’ll read gossip about micro-celebrities I don’t know on weird message boards for femcels to keep myself from undergoing complete neurological collapse during extended periods of isolation.
(My hot take about “incels”—scare-quotes mandatory—is that their resentment toward women is, in part, their resentment toward being deprived of the offline life that dating, marriage, and children promised. Have I already said this here? I think I have. Let me say it again.)
You can learn a lot about the internet and your place in it by thinking about the Trending Topics feature on Twitter. In theory, Trending Topics exist to promote the newest and most current content on the site. In practice, it just recycles everything. You log on and Jordan Peterson has 42k new tweets about him. He couldn’t be more of a spent force, but he will persist in the algorithm because users click on what they recognize, search out familiar sources of Schadenfreude, and continue the lives of dead men. So we’re caught in a zombie loop. You think you’re going to stop reading updates about Jordan Peterson by the end of this decade? Buddy, you’re still going to be clicking, and I will too.
I’ll drop the term “eternal recurrence,” because Substack won’t let you press the Send button unless you have at least one reference to Nietzsche.
We could say it’s dopamine, but it’s honestly just bad faith. We like this shit. We like the anger and the digs. We like to share the stupidest fucking shit we’ve ever seen with the one friend who still opens our texts. We also like to share videos of cute raccoons stealing packages of Twizzlers. There’s always a payoff. There’s always an actual war we can turn into a proxy war against the people we don’t like. We pretend like we’re dying by the sword, so we don’t have to acknowledge that we live by it. After all, it doesn’t feel like we’ve chosen it. Let’s call it an addiction. Let’s call it a t o m i z a t i o n . Besides, we’ll have plenty of time to touch grass when our corpses are in the ground. Until then, read one more article about the crisis of masculinity. This one will solve it.
Of course the economic model undergirding most of the internet supports this eternal recurrence of takes. Everyone’s incentivized to play the hits, but why are the hits never played out? Why does “Why men need to be honest about the damage of porn” ostensibly hit the same way as “Mr. Brightside”? That’s what I’m asking.
I’m not sure you can “curate” your way out of this problem.
When I wrote my article about midwits—which, adorably, inspired a few people to call me the real midwit (a point I admit to proleptically in the article!)—a couple people on reddit said that just because I felt myself above masculinity discourse didn’t mean it wasn’t important. That’s fair: I’m elitist, insufferable, moralistic, self-serious, vain, easily bored, and over-read in cultural discourse. Maybe you feel like AOC discourse is important, and maybe it is. I shouldn’t let my boredom become my morality—isn’t that the epitome of being internet-brained? I just hold out hope for something genuinely exciting. Not merely the feeling of churning.
Posting through it.
My hesitancy toward writing a Substack has always been that I believe people should shut up more. We live in the take economy, and what could be more “subversive”—or frankly humane—than not adding to the endless sea of dross? Than not asking for someone’s attention? Isn’t that a sort of largesse of spirit?
In writing this post, I’ve concluded nothing about my thesis, if there was one, but I feel fairly confident that I’m undergoing a mental collapse and have been posting through it publicly for a solid month. Damn—how humiliating. Bury me in the sand and let the tide come in. The good news is that I read a thread on /fit/ recently that highly recommended the psych ward—very relaxing and good for reading and bodyweight exercises—so the worst-case scenario, though unlikely, is a pretty good one, it turns out.
I’m trekking my way back up Magic Mountain (which is much funnier the second time through) and will try to commit to it through the holidays and see you on the other end—level-headed, handsome as ever, and with even better takes than usual. Let’s stick to monthly posts at most; any more than that and I get weird.
I love you. Stay off Twitter. Real twinks never die.
Daniel
"Why people aren’t haven’t sex" absolutely sent me. I love your writing and your ideas - this was a great read.
“...but I feel fairly confident that I’m undergoing a mental collapse and have been posting through it publicly for a solid month.” No need to feel ashamed about that. It feels like the modern Western culture is just one continuous collective mental collapse since the advent of social media. But then I’m just a crotchety GenExer - what do I know? 😅