I am legally prescribed stimulants.
I also stay far the hell away from short-form dopamine hits, because holy shit.
Used to literally eat until I was sick because my brain craved the “nice chemicals” I was unable to produce naturally. I can’t imagine self-medicating with digital brain-rot content, and I feel awful for the people these days that may be unknowingly doing just that. Even worse: that it’s incentivised by big companies!
Same. They tried to get me with Vine, then TikTok. No way, not even once. I know my brain.
Same here, with both of you.
I do like to joke about the whole “our attention spans are getting shorter” crowd that now they’re experiencing my life before medication, but… I really wish the neurologically typical people in my life would listen when I warn them about what waits for them if they keep abusing those stimulants.
The internet used to be way crazier back in 2000’s or smth.
It was less popular, so now there’s just way more stuff, but a larger % used to be crazy shit.
The Golden Age was before Web 2.0
Before just anybody could easily post content, there was a barrier to entry - you had to learn how to put HTML together. Sure, it wasn’t too hard, but it kept people like mad relatives from posting their racist nonsense for the world to see.
Yeah the crazies back then were a bit better than the ones today. At least they had to be able to cobble up an html site, but to be fair, that was pretty common.
My point being that the craziest bullshit back then was at least a bit more sophisticated than the facebook crazies you speak of.
Also most content wasn’t mediated by large sites like social media platforms, which moderate their content. Actually writing an URL was way more common than now as it’s all just clicking links and icons.
Also, it was a lot less insidious - the crazy stuff was a lot easier to detect.
Granted, stuff like Time Cube Theory usually ended up incorporating antisemitic and anti-islamic tropes, but you’d have to wade through literally pages of red flags before you got there.
Now this kind of stuff is more sneaky - it presents as more reasonable, which makes it much more dangerous.
It was like smoking weed on a hot summer weekend for the first time. We’'ll never experience that again.
Ah yes, like Grandma’s coffee, where you are trying to download some cracked games on mIRC and you get 15 DMs with people asking if you want to “trade pics” and you are 13 so you have no idea what they are talking about, you just want the new Commander Keen rip, but then it hits you like a ton of bricks one day 20 years later…