People say that every generation and as a result we have a whole-ass society who never made actual plans for themselves or their community, from the death-cult evangelicals who think World War 3 is a good thing because it means Jesus is going to take them away to play with their dead grandma and dead pets, to the tech-oligarchs and their fetid simp followers who think we’re going to have a “singularity” any year now and everyone is going to get whisked away to play with their virtual dead grandma and dead pets. Down to the basic doomers who feel emotionally stunted and look forward to nothing for themselves.

Avoiding your emotions is a great strategy for having a middle-age breakdown like no other.

You’re doing nothing but baiting and trolling this whole post. Why don’t you take your anger out in a healthy way and go for a jog or something. A worthy block if I ever saw one. Get helpful or get out.

Neither of you are wrong.

Everyone’s problem with the sea shells was that you wouldn’t be able to clean yourself properly when you imagine physically using them.

That’s… not the joke. Holy shit have people over-thought the three shells. It’s not supposed to make sense or have a physical utility that you can imagine. THAT IS THE JOKE.

User above was kind of right that it reflected an anxiety about change to personal habits for “environmentalism” and other things that were happening at the time like people pushing for saving water in the bathroom.

I rather we have all our basic needs met and be advocating for rock music. It’s not like the people enforcing the laws there are at all dangerous or violent, the whole world there is just a clash of ideology that apparently enough people are fine with that there’s no mass marches or protests.

At risk of diving into theory here, If I had to choose between the two, I rather be in a dystopian system that preserves its dystopia with calm, naive civility rather than armed death squads.

Attempts to explain the joke have thoroughly ruined the joke.

I always took it to mean “I wish I could believe that this is real, it ignites my hope and dreams, but reality is still ruling it out so I have to accept what facts tell me.”

Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the message that most people took from it, which if you were to boil down to just its essence in America at least, it says “Believing is just as good as anything else. Go ahead if you want it.” and I think it made way, way too many young, impressionable people who never picked up on the irony of the show to go on to accept conspiratorial thinking and self-delusion about utter nonsense.

I think neither view is accurate really, people who readily believe in the supernatural have been very much been the same kind of person for the last half century, which is that breed of person who doesn’t know a lot about science and history and related fields, but will immediately start tying together disparate pieces of evidence to support a pre-conclusion that the answer is supernatural, while more scientific minded people are usually like “It’s probably not aliens, but we need to learn more and study more to eliminate everything else first” and are generally very ready to consider the fantastic if they can learn anything about it… it’s just that reality is what actually rules it out, not some stuffy adherence to science as a dogma.

This is why I dislike X-files now despite loving it when I was younger, it fed deeply into the uneducated mind that they too can be a “Mulder,” casting aside process and “going against the grain” to find the reality that THE MAN doesn’t want you to know. It led to a whole ass generation of middle-americans believing in magic oil and horse dewormer, which was one of the many forces that opened the door for massive harm done to our society and collective understanding of objective reality.

When I was little my family got invited to join this rich hippy’s commune, we got to see the “plans” ahead of time, and noticed that every bathroom had multiple toilets facing each other with no privacy barriers, the organizer also kept boasting about how they would use their sewage to fertilize the gardens.

I’m sure this all creates a lot more questions than anything else, but the short answer is no, my family wanted nothing to do with that kook’s crazy caca cult compound when they were making their own.

“Grok, write me a propaganda piece for my substack.”

“I hate politics” = “I don’t want to get into an argument with some right-wing foulmouth chud who doesn’t listen to reason.”

“I don’t follow politics.” = “I am a right-wing, foulmouth chud who doesn’t listen to reason and don’t want to get fired or put on social media so I will abstain from revealing my feelings at this time.”

“I don’t understand politics.” = “For the love of fucking God, I work 6 days a week and am raising two kids and three dogs, I have to pack my entire personal life into several hours on a weekend when everything is closed, and people are trying to talk to me about the latest Epstein thing and I don’t get what I’m supposed to do about it, I just got told my insulin brand isn’t covered anymore and need to find a cheaper substitute and the insurance hotline won’t return my calls.”

Translation: they’re going to make everything else more expensive, like they already do to offset hardware prices, but like turbo edition price hikes.

“Oops! All price hikes!” edition shit.

Fun fact, if you do itemized tax returns, you can make cash donations to your school, fire department or road authority, etc. and get a receipt and then deduct that from your taxes, it’s basically forcing your state to spend your taxes where you want it spent.

Note: it’s been a long ass time since I did itemized returns, your mileage/laws may vary.

Okay then, you don’t actually care. I’m done with the convo and will never see another message from you.

You’re not listening, this isn’t a political issue, it’s logistics.

Right now, in South Korea, if they don’t open borders then every woman will have to have five children and each of their children will need to have five children to keep the nation functioning.

This is a trend-line that many countries are following because of capitalist influence crushing family and community, it’s just that South Korea is ahead of the pack. If you don’t care and want rapid decline, then good, embrace it and thump your chest that you want millions and millions of people to die as logistics networks collapse over the next several decades. If it was slower we could adapt, but it’s happening too fast for supply chains to adapt to, the supply chains that get you your medicine and toys and food and medicine for developing nations.

If this is acceptable to you, then fine. Wear it proud and say you’re against humanity broadly, there are plenty of people who think our world would be better off without us at all. You’re not allowed to complain about other social issues like withdrawing vaccine research and so on, and it makes me wonder what you’re even trying to do by interacting with anyone online or why you care if someone is “blowing dog whistles” it’s all contradictory.

I am citing an issue with xenophobic capitalism, and you won’t even get past your own breathless reactionary impulses to consider that this is an issue that will become a bigger and bigger issue, unless you think the current crisis in South Korea and Japan are conspiracy theories.

Okay so you’re too emotional to read or understand things that you would otherwise agree with, can’t backtrack on reactions, right?

Ah, so that’s what it is. You saw someone bad screaming about problems with population demographics and have been programmed to scream and rage whenever you see someone actually talking about a real issue, that’s a real good way to become stupid.

This has nothing to do with ethnicity, this is logistics, countries that are simultaneously not opening borders for immigration AND not doing more to support family growth are going to experience economic collapse, which will have catastrophic effects on distribution networks.

You still with me?

Rapid population collapse hurts more people than the harmful effects of overpopulation, and modern trends are showing a global decline in birth rates, with some nations like South Korea are going to be completely insolvable within a couple generations and cities will be abandoned.

SK is the worst case, but this is widescale and largely a product of capitalist influence and authoritarianism making people not want to have relationships and family, along with the toxic social effects of the internet.

You want me to shove data up my ass too?

https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/picture-this-demographic-decline-andrew-stanley

https://www.bsr.org/en/emerging-issues/the-global-population-slowdown

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/27/nx-s1-5576355/population-babies-capitalism

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/population-decline-future-shock-no-more

Don’t let fuckers like Elon Musk hijack issues that actually matter and have control over how you feel about what you see. Why would you give someone like that so much power over how you feel?

You can’t say you hate what happened with USAID and ignore the effects on logistics from industrial nations becoming unable to produce. This is about capitalism crushing our hope for a future and making people not want to have lives and futures.

This whole “why don’t you do it first” reply is no more intelligent than saying “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” or other dumb thought-stopping exercises vomited out by a generation with no attention spans. I reject it, I block those who dump that like they’re somehow doing some good by trying to find hypocrisy in an idea that makes them uncomfortable.