You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
"man is a social animal" sounds all fluffy bunnies but what it means is that there are deep structures in your brain that try to kill you if your perception of your social status is too low. in Dunbar-number-sized social groups most people could clear this bar. most now can't
this means that rational and accurate self-perception, as matters stand with our world-sized pool of fish making everybody small. is a suicide pact. this is the source of a truth we all recognize: in modern society, to be sane is fucking nuts
our survival drive never goes away either, though, so we're continually working out dozens of ways to cope with this. if you run into people on the lowest rungs of society in your day-to-day, you mostly run into ones who are obviously deeply crazy
this is a matter of selection pressure; the ones whose brains couldn't work out some way of hacking their self-perception are mostly dead now. higher up, a very popular solution is celebrity culture, where you identify with a figure of worship and participate in their status
an enormous amount of activity is continually devoted to growing and nurturing subcultures that are large enough to sustain a sense of status and small enough for that sense of status to be accessible, then trying to manage that balance against the vicissitudes of churn
most of culture war can be usefully viewed as people trying to build senses of themselves as important, which gets particularly ugly when your sense of yourself as important is based on your sense of specific other people as unimportant
it appears to be natural to react to other people trying to puff up their sense of their importance with annoyance, but i feel like it would be helpful to keep in mind that as awkward and ham-fisted as this behavior might get, it's a matter of raw fucking survival for all of us
Imagining a cascade failure wherein a population is shown an ordered list of their relative social statuses, making each person immediately aware when they've become the lowest on the list...
the person lowest on the list will fight like hell to stay there. the person second lowest on the list should be immediately placed on suicide watch
being the lowest on the list is a position of distinction that allows a paradoxical construction of contrarian status, being the second lowest on the list means you can't even be the best at sucking
eXACTly
It's just not very clear how brain structures try to kill us.
it's not the clearest thing ever, no, but it looks like depression
The formulation seems backwards to me... it’s like saying there’s something in our body that tries to kill us if we don’t get enough food or water. Maybe technically true (?) but it seems like a strange way to describe what’s happening.
your car stops running when it runs out of gas; that's like hunger and thirst. if, instead, your car's gas tank was rigged with a bomb that exploded when it fell below 20% capacity, you could compare that to hunger and thirst, but the comparison would be highly suspect
my claim is that the phenomenon under discussion is more like the bomb
Is there a specific reason you think it’s more like the bomb example than the deprivation of a resource? Is it because socialization doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that could be “stored” and therefore the pain must be self-inflicted?
a resource that exists if a pattern recognition engine triggers and doesn't exist if it doesn't is very different from food or water
Thinking of it as a bomb might make sense evolutionarily if its detonation typically took the form of high-risk high-reward run amok. In modern society, that’s less encouraged (though maybe increasingly popular) and a higher percentage wallow impotently instead.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
