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Why do we have so many hysterical people in society today? If you look at old news footage even 20-30 years ago most of the time people are relatively chill. If you go 100 years back people are reallyyyy chill, just like “then I was in the war and I killed 100 men, then I was shot through the left eye, then I came home and married my high school sweetheart but she died due to diphtheria. Then I got in a car crash and lost both my legs, but overall I can’t complain” It’s actually pretty rare to see someone overwhelmed to the point of hysterical shrieking, yet on the internet it’s extremely common place. I don’t think this is because life is harder now. If anything, it’s objectively easier, safer, and more comfortable than at almost any other point in history. What has changed is how emotion is rewarded. Today, emotional dysregulation gets attention, validation, amplification, and sometimes even status. Calm, restraint, and proportional reactions don’t go viral. Hysteria does. Outrage does. Collapse does. We’ve also externalized resilience. Instead of learning how to regulate discomfort internally, people are taught that every emotional spike deserves immediate external response agreement, soothing, outrage on their behalf. So you end up with a culture where being overwhelmed isn’t a temporary state to move through, it’s an identity to perform. And once hysteria becomes a social currency, you start seeing a lot more of it.

Replies (7)

That wonderful maternal instinct of the feminine, so necessary in the home to ensure all are provided for, now of significant influence in public office and big business, the domain for so long managed with the ‘don’t complain and get on with it’ masculine instinct, has made way for unprecedented levels of complaint, not only on the part of the neglected, those of genuine grievance, but any who would claim victimhood, the opportunist, those of questionable motive. Combine this with the magnification capability of a social media geared specifically to react to outrage, and you have a factor? This situation can emerge without anyone necessarily to blame. We evolved within a natural world which for so long demanded the co-operation of highly specialised roles simply so we could survive. Now it appears the restraint has been lifted, though not really. The cost is painfully apparent. Stay grounded. Maintain skills and smarts. Build co-operative community of value.
I think a major part missing here is the fact that people are significantly less healthy now. Now that I’ve fixed a large part of my health by following #animalbased, #peatstr & #primal principles (plus a healthy dose of critical thinking), I can see where my health was failing me. I’m more relaxed, more composed and more whole than I was years ago. I can see now why RFK Jr. chose to focus on health of Americans as his top priority. On the other hand, you have people who haven’t figured this out yet (which is a lot of people). Add in a mix of drugs (pharmaceutical or otherwise), plus a chaotic, confusing, collapsing fiat society, it’s no wonder many people are hysterical. Hysteria has always garnered attention. However, the commonality of it and incentives around it have increased. View quoted note →
almost everyone is infested with parasites crawling thru their glymphatic system in the brain and the rest of the flesh; the various species hijack the hormone, neutrotransmitter, and nutrition systems, hence the chaos and retardation; oh yea, usually fighting them in the open makes the enemy stronger; read my reads;
Humans are hardwired to compare, everything. They especially compare their idea of themselves to their perception others. Social media has been a catalyst for this type of comparison and allowed people to compare themselves easily, with everyone, everywhere. This isn’t an accident, it has become the primary way to hijack and monetize your attention. Before social media (and television) you compared yourself to your friends and neighbors, in real life, who were largely in a similar position as yourself. This created a dynamic: constructiveness was valued over craziness. Advertising executives want you to have a relationship with what they’re selling. With an extreme increase in competition for attention (as communication became easier through print, then radio, then television, then the internet) while simultaneously lowering the opportunity costs to create and maintain relationships (mainly through social media) the dynamic shifted from constructiveness to craziness as advertisers began to reward those that could hijack the most attention. The like button created instant reward from people that users had real relationships with and this was the Trojan horse for shifting the value of those relationships to the platforms and advertisers. Eventually, real relationships were replaced by transactional relationships. These no longer require mutual benefit to maintain because the incentive (money) no longer comes from the person giving their attention. That person is just signaling that their attention has been captured through likes, follows. The advertisers are the ones who pay, they pay only for access to brains, and so long as “content creators” can keep collecting attention above the attrition rate they will get rewarded by those advertisers. In this dynamic, crazy gets rewarded over constructiveness. View quoted note →