After going through a lot of the news, Reddit, Youtube, etc, I have found something. Humanity is at the point where we have the most access to information-information that was fought over, that knowing it was death-yet we drown ourselves with filler. Where the enlightenment sought to educate to bring people to their higher levels of living, we live in the end of that experiment where we see people as no different as when we first picked up the rock as a tool. We squabble, fight over the most meaningless things, to see who controls the power, rather than how to live.
I have been following The Black Pants Legion, and while they are mainly a shitpost group, I see them mainly in the view of embracing the absurd, and are deep in the clown pill with some others thrown in. I am part of the auxilliary of them, and the aux is the same. A group of people from all walks of life, mainly upper blue collar low white collar that just want to get work done, go home and not care about the rest of the world falling apart.
Maybe not care is not the correct phrase, more like selectively care. They have saved houses, buried people, and raised about half a million for charity, but do so not to show off, but to help. You probably never heard of them, and that is fine by them.
I recently have been watching a series of videos by the The Functional Melancholic, recently culminating in watching 'Why Modern Stoicism Is A Joke', and he seems to be in a similar mindset. In the video, he discusses the way that stoicism was co-opted by the self help group not as a way to wade through the crash, but to sell support tools to 'help' wade through the crash. He then reflects on the need to be a true stoic, not in the sense of unfeeling save for anger as the modern form is, but to mastering yourself humbly. Not to be a wet blanket, but to ride the wave, rather than be caught up in it. Due to the mess of modern society as it dies, he also states that "Stillness is now rebellion. Kindness is now power. Silence is now a protest" as literally every moment of time is now wanted by society to move, produce/consume and talk about the latest thing you bought. There is no silence, no place for sitting, and any kind action is to be treated with skepticism due to the way that pure kindness is not rewarded.
These two channels offer 2 very different things, but I see them as one. A small group of people trying to understand who they are within the world, seeing society as a train hurtling off a cliff and being in the last car, and awake enough to see where it is going, trying to smash the coupler and pop the last switch from the cliff, or at least enjoy the ride. They do this through deep internal reflection and honouring history not as a pure repetition of what is to come, but as the poetry that forms the future. They are being stoic, standing in the face of the wave, and rather than bracing for impact or ignoring it and hoping it disappears, grabs onto wood or a surfboard to ride it out. They see the problem, see it cannot be fixed quickly or painlessly, but do not define themselves by the pain, but see it as a growth point to become more human.
I play the game Rimworld quite regularly, which is a scifi western colony simulator/story generator that is extremely easy to mod. So easy that there are now tools to manage the mods to make the hundreds you can have on at a time play nicer with each other and be in the correct load order. On the bottom of the window for the mod manager RimSort, there are 3 main buttons: Sort, Save, Run.
Each button has a basic task to do, sort rearranges the mods based on a community built database which states what order mods should be in for best performance. Save saves this list so it can be reused later, and Run starts the game.
These buttons are what I see the 2 channels above doing. Sorting through the mess of society, seeing what is deemed worthy to be saved, and getting ready to run it when this society is ready to be made new. Not a new society, but a rebuilt one. They are acting as explorers, collectors and practicing becoming sharers so that when time comes, they can rebuild.
In periods of flux, those with level heads willing to do work for themselves will succeed, those chasing the dreams of others are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
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