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𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗

@shagbark_hick

The reason it feels nearly impossible to quit Twitter is because of the almost complete and total absence of intellectual life in the offline world. There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo. I've been practically everywhere in the US -- the last scraps of that culture were already basically finished in the mid-2010's. After Covid, it's all dead. Everywhere. Even where people swear up and down it isn't dead. Formerly, there were always cheap havens for library layabouts, slacker autodidacts, artists, writers, whatever. Now, basically none exist -- and whatever made the formation of yesteryear's "scenes" possible seems to have come unglued. In fact, the types of people who ever built them seem to be going rapidly extinct. In lieu of robust offline discourse (which is to say discussions that exceed the daily gibbering about who-got-what new UTV, who won what game, and so forth), Twitter discourse comes to the intellectually-starved man like smartphone pornography comes to the randy young "incel." It's almost too tantalizing to stay away from. Hence the jokes made towards anyone who swears they're "quitting X." Yet the more we use it, the more we distract ourselves and shy away from actually BUILDING real-life, IRL iterations of the very thing we seek here. It's a complete trap, and without question, I have fallen into it. Sure -- many will rise to defend the very limited daily chatter that takes place in so many bars and diners, etc. They're right to defend it, but for some people, it is simply not enough. It cannot sustain them. They need to talk about ideas with "ideas men" sometimes. There is nothing wrong with this need -- it has always existed. I'd say we desperately need some kind of a low-rent, cheap "mecca" for academic bums and creative dropouts, but I fear that the formation of one may no longer be possible. Where once the intellectually starved young man struck out for old New York, or for Milan, or for Paris, or whatever -- now, he sates his hunger with paltry surrogates on the internet, and is consequently never moved to action. This has the effect of neutering him; his archetype may well fade into history because of that little piece of glass in his pocket. Very likely, I need to try to build such a haven offline anyway, even if such an effort only constitutes a kind of tragic "last stand." Though I'm re-assessing how exactly I've been approaching this, I'm just not gonna give up. I can't really afford to -- the alternative simply seems to be too bleak.

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