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Notes -
'Cause life is a game that no one wins
But you deserve a head start the way your life's goin'
So throw in the towel, 'cause your life ain't shit
No take that towel and hang yourself with it
Life's short and hard like a body-building elf
So save the planet and kill yourself
If you're feeling down-and-out with what your life's all about
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
Suicide rates and murder among teens and the power of memes.
For those old enough to remember, these will be familiar times. Let me ask the '90s teenagers in the room, what was the dominant feeling of the age?
I would say that it was mostly a decade in which the youth aesthetic was of depression, sullen expressions, heroin chic, and underpinning it all, suicide. Suicide was in the air from the minute Cobain suck-started a shotgun. The music had song titles like “Hey man, nice shot” and “Lift your head up high and blow your brains out”. Subtle stuff. On the black side of the culture, gangsta rap was big. Drugs, murder, drugs, murder, booty. Still lighter than the white side.
Would it surprise anyone if I told you that the '90s were the only improvement in the teen suicide rate since the Depression? Murder rates peaked in '92 and dropped for twenty years.
Let's consider more recent history. The teen culture from 2010 to 2020. I'm not sure how those in it would classify that era, but to me it seemed like a decade of social media, politicization and gender. The Z discovered a giant pool of suicides (the lowest rate in decades) that they could save with hormones and surgery. They were the first generation to tackle racism and really make black lives matter. The aesthetic of the age is chipper, smug, vague, androgynous. Black culture has moved from the ghetto to the antiracism seminar. The result?
Suicide rates rose swiftly throughout the decade among teens, bringing them back into line with the already high rate before the '90s reversed course for twenty years. Murder rates started rising in 2013 and shot up in 2020. Mostly among young black men.
Death has a way of clarifying things, as it's tough to fake.
One cannot go back to the past, but we would do well to consider what sociopolitical norms and policies might have contributed to that massive achievement, and we absolutely must be extremely clear about which ones lead to the reversal. And no, I'm not talking about Lupus and Jimmy Pop.
This is why I believe that modern psychiatry is fundamentally broken to a much greater degree than even most critics of it are willing to acknowledge. The United States just absolutely pours money into psychiatric "medicine", with spending now soaring into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. More people are treated, more people are drugged, more people are involved with this system than ever before. When we do this with cancer, we get interminably slow progress, but progress nonetheless. When we do this with psychiatric "medicine" we get more bodies than we've ever had before, because their treatments consistently fail to beat having parents that will say, "go outside and run around till you're tired".
I think the problem is that society in general no longer teaches people how to self regulate. In 1990, there were problems, and there were sad people. But I think the message of the era was much more Stoic, learn to deal with and manage your feelings, fix your own problems, and get on with it. Feelings being front and center strike me as a luxury belief, and one that really only works if you don’t have many problems other than your feelings.
For almost all people outside o& the elite throughout human history, life was hard and was understood to be hard. These were and still are realistic expectations for life for all but the elite. What has trickled down since 1990 are two things. First the idea that you are supposed to be in a state of happy bliss for any sustained amount of time. You are supposed to be fulfilled and happy doing everything. Struggle isn’t a part of the plan. Boredom isn’t a part of the plan. Having things suck wasn’t part of the plan. And second that you should be able to do what you like doing for a living. If you’re born to be an artist, a singer, or a writer, then you should be able to do that instead of a normal job. You should be able to go on vacation when you want or need one. This, unless you’re pretty well off and have a spouse making a substantial amount of money simply isn’t reality. Reality is working even when tired or burned out, perhaps a a difficult job you might not even like, then coming home to kids and chores and cooking. If you’re in the mindset of “I don’t like this, and it’s a great tragedy that I’m not living a thrilling life,” then your expectations are so far above reality that you’re going to be miserable. If you’re then taught by therapy-culture that you should focus on negative feelings, and self-care over those feelings, you’re going to spend you life suffering. This was known all the way back to Epictetus in the West and Buddha in the east. Focusing on things you don’t have and thus suffering for the lack and then focusing on how bad the suffering makes you feel is a good way to make yourself miserable and probably depressed.
Here we have Plato, writing around 375 BC, expounding a rather familiar theory. Irreverent youth, doting parents, equality with slaves and foreigners--he presents such entitlement as the failure mode of democracy. When the people grow too accustomed to liberty, he says, they will become soft and rebel at the lightest of impositions.
Do you think 90s America was the first time and place that we plebs got that much liberty?
Not the first time, obviously, but the pattern is quite similar to the decadent pattern that goes along with the decline of other civilizations in the past. The combination of lísiense and luxury create a chaotic weak people who can no longer maintain the high civilization that produced them.
If that were true, the Boomers should have been absolutely demolished. Same for the Victorian English, the Renaissance Italians, the actual Stoics. They all presided over temporary surges of wealth unimaginable to Plato’s generation, and they all held on to power anyway.
I’m saying that pattern is hindsight bias. Elders always have and always will insist that their successors are entitled, irreverent, and possibly effeminate. That doesn’t mean they’re right.
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