Video games replace your inner vitality with some externalized, behavioralist sense of motivation. (arguably pornographic) They replace your inner sense of time (kairos) with an externalized, mechanical and homogenized measure of time (chronos). And they replace your inner sense of importance with an externalized, gamified list of goals to achieve.
This is why people who play a lot of video games are so consistently tired, have a terrible relationship with time (which seems to either zip by, or feel tediously slow), and are so confused about what they actually want.
Attunement to the body solves all of those things, but it's one of those things that requires a complete overhaul of how you live, what you value, and how you experience life even. Learning to live slower is a big part of that, but you need the vision to see why it's so important in the first place, you can't be coerced into living more slowly and more consciously, and you can't be coerced into love, which is one of the main fruits of living an embodied, truthful and conscious life, because love is what naturally arises when the soil of your life is healthy.
Both God and the Devil are cures to the apathy of our times. God fills you with passion and joy, the Devil fills you with ambition and obsession, whereas the mediocre man just drowns in a sea of apathy. The former is obviously preferable, because Goodness is Absolute and Eternal in a way that selfishness or egotism aren't, but it is preferable to be a 'selfish' person, in the same way that Nietzsche is for instance, a sovereign individual who has no interest in what the mass approves of, than it is to be someone who bends backwards against the demands of an unconscious and quite insane society.
The Devil 1 gives you reassuring 2 answers, whereas God gives you the Whole of life, including its pain, uncertainty, loneliness and grief. The Devil promises you a miraculous cure, a magic bullet to solve your problems, whereas the cures that God prescribe you require pain, discipline, surrender, patience, and courage.
Experience is much deeper than what the (literal) mind can grasp, and what the self can perceive on its own, which is why Evil comes with so many justifications and so much certainty (I had no other choice), whereas Goodness simply is, and puts you fully in your lived experience, allowing you to savor it. Evil is about giving you what you want, or more precisely, what your unconscious, self-informed self wants, whereas Goodness gives you something which is beyond your self, the totality of life.
Pepper is valuable because it adds 'rugosity' to what we eat. If we only had salt, our food would become 'smooth' in a sense, almost 'sweet' (even if it's salty), whereas pepper gives the food a sort of edge that makes its taste more interesting.
Similarly, sketches can often look more interesting than the finished drawing or painting that follows from it, because its messiness gives a sort of 'fractal' quality to the drawing. We can also think of how nature produces fractal quality, in the form of trees, plants, clouds and rivers, which are far more interesting than the smooth surfaces that modernity tend to create, which is probably why everyone is bored all the time, because we live in a world of smooth boredom 3 where nothing is particularly interesting, and everything is done out of utilitarian (or hedonistic) needs.
Remaining on culinary grounds, there is an anecdote that Mussolini tried to make Italians eat rice instead of pasta, because most of their wheat was imported, whereas rice could easily be grown in much of Italy, and he wanted the nation to be more self-reliant, because evidently a lot of countries wouldn't want to trade with a fascist nation. Despite all of the push and propaganda that went into it, Mussolini didn't succeed because Italians were that attached to their pasta and their cultural heritage.
There is something rather hilarious about all of that, because it means that fascism can spread and convert entire nations to its ideology, but as soon as it attacks people's preferences, no matter how unimportant they are, then the people start taking those things seriously and start resisting the changes, because they finally start affecting them.
Extrapolating those lessons to our times, it means that the West will have no problem waging wars on other countries and committing all sorts of atrocities, as long as we can keep our nice food, our nice sports events, and our nice cars, even if the latter will have to become electric so that we can pretend that the myth of progress is still real. Bread and circuses as they often say.
Incidentally, in the company I worked for, there was a move to another building, which also allowed the company to make lots of small compromises in the process to reduce the costs of its offices, such as having less parking spots for its employees, having less office space (replacing it with homeworking time), that type of stuff. After the move, they also overhauled the menu for the in-house restaurant and stopped serving fries, a staple in Belgium, because of health reasons. The employees weren't too happy about that one decision however, and in only a few weeks, the restaurant started serving fries again, showing that again, people can tolerate a lot when it comes to their actual living situation, but they will never accept that people touch their food. An important lesson for any to-be dictators, in case you ever considered that as a career path.
My parents frequently complain about the things they buy. They don't seem so keen on buying better things, or accepting that things are all in all getting worse.
This makes me think that I've done this quite a lot. Complaining without actually changing my circumstances, which is better than blind acceptance, which is simply a form of resignation, but obviously doing something about your situation is the best thing to do, even if the only thing to do is to consciously accept things.
I believe that this is one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal rules—not that I pay much attention to what he says—that you shouldn't complain about something unless you are ready to do something about it. Which is a good point to make, because as we all know, misery loves company, and boy do people love to complain together in groups without doing anything whatsoever about their life.
It seems that the main service that streamers and podcasters provide to people these days is give them the sense that they have friends. Surrogate friends, surrogate conversations.
Sports already played the role of surrogate meaning and surrogate self-overcoming in a world that cannot allow those things to exist outside of carefully designated activities—you're allowed to be great at playing basketball, but not to be great at living outside of the system—and pornography allowed people to have a surrogate of love and intimacy, and it seems that every important human desire is likewise captured into the surrogate-making machine of the system.
Worst is the fact that all of those are being co-opted into passive activities of spectatorship. 4 Sports might be meaningless, but at least it involves real effort and mastery of yourself, whereas watching sports, or porn, or playing video games, or watching people on Twitch play video games, is just an act of submission in the face of the adventure that is life.
I have toyed around with the idea of writing a (non-fiction) book called 'Cuck Society', just because the title is so hilarious to me, but it really seems that one of the endgame of the modern world, if it wasn't already collapsing right in front of us because of fundamental reasons, is a world where hardly anyone does anything but watch a tiny minority of people actually do things. In that world, people wouldn't even go outside, have conversations with people, and do things they're interested in, they would simply watch others do it for them, because they're too scared and incompetent to do anything themselves. Being actually competent and wanting to live your own life has quietly become one of the most subversive things to do nowadays.
Common words in corporatespeak: dynamic, flexible, innovating, integrated, alignment, feedback, exchange, dialogue, collaboration, 5 strategic, coherent, synergistic, transition, shift, progress, continual, expertise, crisis 6, and many more that I can't think of from the back of my head.
The most important aspect of corporatespeak is not the terms nor the meaning behind them, it's that meaning itself, whether the explicit, literal meaning of words, or the implicit non-literal meaning of tone, rhythm, body language, gesture and eye contact, do not matter at all.
What matters instead is a constant sense of reassurance. You are well liked at work if you behave predictably and listen to orders, not if you are competent. The company wants the situation to unfold as predicted, not for people to behave sanely and consciously. And whatever problem arises, there always must be this sense that someone, somewhere, will solve it, or more realistically, that someone somewhere can be blamed for it.
Do not question what the whole ordeal is about. Why people are doing all of this. Why we are supposed to take any of this seriously. And whether the real, fundamental problems underlying the assumptions of the systems we depend on are actually being addressed or not. None of that can be expressed within corporatespeak. It's not that people are not allowed to talk about the box they find themselves in, it's that the language within offices simply does not allow it, it automatically filters away any deep (radical) inquiry about the context, which is the far more subtle and disturbing nature of our neospeak.
One reason why certain people come to dislike movies that are commonly loved is that they might have seen them (or at least clips of them) so much that they have gotten sick of them.
I am thinking for instance of movies like Forrest Gump or Good Will Hunting. Not that those movies are perfect, far from it, but my point is that anything can start to look terrible if you watch it over, and over, and over again.
Good movies are supposed to be rewatched with a decently big time gap between them, not analyzed to death until you get sick of every scene and dialogue, because the known is always, always dead. This is why young children are delighted and surprised by just about everything, because they haven't filtered the astonishing qualities of their experience with the veil of knowledge that our minds impart us with, which is why people who continually do the same things over and over again are in an important way, dead inside.
From random people on the internet
Voting is the adult version of writing a mail to Santa.
"It would be very bad for the world if face-eating leopards were prevented from eating people's faces" —A face-eating leopard.
If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets.
Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative to do nothing.
This one is from Alexander Theroux, (Darconville's cat) not a random internet person.
1 I notice how I now use the "Devil" to mean two distinct things. In my piece on Men, Devils and Angels, my idea of the devil was basically Nietzschean: a person who rises above the masses even if their morality seems monstrous to others, because they are driven by something deeper than mere conformity. Here we could say that these are the "conscious devils", the stage of development I peg between regular, unconscious people, and conscious, loving people (angels basically). The second type of Devil, which is what I'm pointing to here, is more like the 'source' of corruption, which is not exclusively found externally of course, because we all carry a piece of Hell in us, the capacity of self-deception of the self-informed self. Perhaps I should refine my terms so as to distinguish between those two so as to be more clear, but for now, let's simply use "lower case d" devils for the individuals, and "upper case D" Devil for the more metaphysical source of corruption.
2 "Reassuring" also means the type of reassurance that miserable, cynical people seek from one another: reassurance that we are right in our misery and that the "normies" are all stupid sheep. People who are steeped in misery find it more comfortable and reassuring than genuine peace.
3 A term I got from Darren Allen, in his Fire Sermon.
4 Even the direction of devices has shifted towards passive consumption. Phones are presented as simply being 'pocket computers', but it is essentially impossible to create things on a phone, and far easier to just spend your entire day scrolling on an infinite feed. You can't write at any decent pace without a real keyboard, you can't draw, make music, or edit videos, and you can't write computer programs on a phone because it is so locked of any functionality. You're just restricted into being a consumer. (a dreadful word if there ever was one)
5 I live in Europe, and instead of calling workers 'employees', they have turned to calling us 'collaborators', presumably because the former indicates a dominant relationship—one side using the other for their own needs—and the latter suggests a two-sided, mutually beneficial relationship. It's just bullshit branding of course, the underlying power structures haven't changed. It is interesting however how the term 'human resources' has stayed in place, which strikes me as far more egregious than 'employee', but what do I know, maybe I haven't attended enough synergistic workshops.
6 Quite rare that companies openly talk about things going badly, but it happens in the insurance sector where I happened to work.
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Monthly Apathy Boredom Fascism Collapse Fractality Surrogate Cuckoldry Technology Mind
2026-08-16