Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level… and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.
The only thing I can compare it to is 1984’s newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced… and this is … organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
Its even impacting the art we make.
Idiot plots.
Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.
Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and ‘Schrödinger’s Irony’ style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
One of my most frightening and profound realizations as an adult, was that our language is our most powerful tool and nobody seems to know or care. It’s how we can abstract the universe, rearrange ideas and concepts and come up with new ways to approach problems and explain feelings.
Because if you’re not consciously explaining your feelings, you’re unconsciously doing it, and make no mistake, your brain is ONLY a tool for telling a story to explain your feelings. It’s not some vast computer or calculator, it’s a hyper-charged neural network designed to write stories to tie up loose ends and provide cause and effect for the world around you. It doesn’t seek logic or reason, it just wants continuity.
The sooner you realize this in life, the sooner you can start getting a handle on things like your own mental health, identifying rumination and where it comes from, figuring out what choices give you the best outcomes and how to overcome momentary discomfort for great rewards later. Things that our disconnected world is increasingly having a harder and harder time doing.
Because we’re abandoning language. And no, listening to social media and reading posts doesn’t boost your language, it doesn’t train your brain how to take YOUR experiences and feelings and abstractify them into ideas you can move around and view from different perspectives… something we should be able to do with ease if we have a large enough toolset to make accurate pictures of our lives. Social media and reading posts doesn’t boost you abilities to accurately abstractify the world and your life, it just gives you other people’s stories. Which are usually equally inaccurate or limited in scope.
If we don’t have language tools to help your brain write a more accurate story, you will believe terrible things about yourself, about others, about the entire world, and you will live in that state always.
Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level… and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.
The only thing I can compare it to is 1984’s newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced… and this is … organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
Its even impacting the art we make.
Idiot plots.
Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.
Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and ‘Schrödinger’s Irony’ style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.
One of my most frightening and profound realizations as an adult, was that our language is our most powerful tool and nobody seems to know or care. It’s how we can abstract the universe, rearrange ideas and concepts and come up with new ways to approach problems and explain feelings.
Because if you’re not consciously explaining your feelings, you’re unconsciously doing it, and make no mistake, your brain is ONLY a tool for telling a story to explain your feelings. It’s not some vast computer or calculator, it’s a hyper-charged neural network designed to write stories to tie up loose ends and provide cause and effect for the world around you. It doesn’t seek logic or reason, it just wants continuity.
The sooner you realize this in life, the sooner you can start getting a handle on things like your own mental health, identifying rumination and where it comes from, figuring out what choices give you the best outcomes and how to overcome momentary discomfort for great rewards later. Things that our disconnected world is increasingly having a harder and harder time doing.
Because we’re abandoning language. And no, listening to social media and reading posts doesn’t boost your language, it doesn’t train your brain how to take YOUR experiences and feelings and abstractify them into ideas you can move around and view from different perspectives… something we should be able to do with ease if we have a large enough toolset to make accurate pictures of our lives. Social media and reading posts doesn’t boost you abilities to accurately abstractify the world and your life, it just gives you other people’s stories. Which are usually equally inaccurate or limited in scope.
If we don’t have language tools to help your brain write a more accurate story, you will believe terrible things about yourself, about others, about the entire world, and you will live in that state always.