is your greatest source of vulnerability.’ Excellent substack and well writen, in lauguage that is fraught with deep meaning, easy to follow, yet haunting too, it is indeed original, excellently written and provides a window into a reality that we often do not know of, we overlook, and never gave it much mind. I share this stack for I peered into a speci…
Self-absorption leads to the destructive conditions she describes.
Hi Paul,
This was a very candid piece that is well written and honest, and the writer does comes across as authentic and knowledgeable.
This is not a world I grew up in (I'm 52) and it is difficult to relate to.
My stepdaughter is now 30 and is married. She was not really part of it either.
What comes out of it, however, is the disconnect between the online world and the real world.
Essentially the Q of: fake vs. real.
This permeates everything today, and even here on substack where people hide behind pseudonyms/noms de guerre.
In terms of violence/gratuitous violence, which is well documented on all media and espaecially mainstream with not much censorship - something I can never understand - I always find it difficult to understand how one human being can hurt another, because tomorrow you might no longer be the aggressor and then you yourself will feel the pain. I suppose violence is a physical manifestation of the online hate and bullying that turns many sickos and pussified voyeurs on.
This highly virtual world is however more prevalent in the West than it is here in South Africa.
I think the problem is slightly more subtle and nuanced than the writer suggests - and I offer this - there is a real search for identity now; for the creation of a persona.
The real world is difficult to do this in - it is brutal; however, both young women and young men are able to create a fiction of themselves on the internet and on social media apps.
Add in the IT tools for creating fakes and enhancement of eveything physical, and you can live in a fictitious world of make-believe where eventually, you can become the avatar itself.
This then descends into a wholesale mental illness which is where the West de-facto is.
I watched a movie a long time ago about a very shy, yet not unattractive, man who had a thing for his attractive lady neighbour. He would crank call her at night and tell her in explicit detail about how he would ravage her sexually. In a strange way, she did get turned on by his attention. One night, she upped the ante and told him to come over and show him in person. He was now in a quagmire - because his ego was at stake. The inevitable happended - he was simply useless in person - a shy bumbling nitwit who had no social skill nor technique, and clealry zero sexual performance skill.
So, the upshot of what I am saying is young people and even people already in their 30's need to understand that sex and intimacy is a physical act not a virtual one. Men talk a good game -exacerbated by the internet - simply a haven for anonymous and talentless cowards - but if said men were to be faced with a sexually confident and aggressive woman who knew her way around the world of lovemaking, he'd be just like the useless bloke in the movie I mentioned above.