Over the past year or so, I’ve felt the world—the social world, people’s behavior, the Discourse, you all with your Tik Tokking and memes and such—to be increasingly unintelligible. It’s like there’s a book I’ve been reading, with some clear passages and some confusing ones, in which the text begins transforming into something runic and alien, completely boggling. To be more specific, I have the feeling that people’s actions are more frequently incomprehensible to me than used to be the case. I mean people in a broad sense: of different backgrounds and political leanings, including everyone from perfect strangers to familiar internet personalities to friends and family. I’m not 100% certain that this isn’t mostly in my head; once you notice something you start looking for it, such that you end up accumulating examples of it in a not-necessarily-representative way. But even adjusting for that possibility, it feels like a thing, and I’ve been trying to work out what it might mean.
I feel the same way! Thanks for this beautiful text.
I think about this a lot and just wanted to say thanks. I really enjoyed how you unpacked it.