I love living on the West Coast and working in tech, and I fully appreciate the many levels of privilege it affords me. Likewise, I've learned a ton and gained countless hours of recreation from Reddit and the other social aggregators. At the same time, there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about it all.
Reddit's never-ending stream of upvoted videos is a machine for showing me the best and worst of humanity. That's enriching and often hilarious. But those best videos often leave me feeling like I can't compete. Why should I practice a little guitar if I'm never going to be as good as that guy playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on a ukelele? The videos of mishaps aren't any better. Anytime a video of someone doing something foolish gets a million views, I get a little more self-conscious.
It reminds me of that traumatic transition in middle school when I first became really aware of social pressure and fitting in. Because I wasn't used to this signal, the gain was really high and I was constantly paralyzed by self-consciousness. The Internet is that times a million, forever.
I used to feel good about my even mediocre accomplishments because I lived in a world where I wasn't constantly surrounded by the world's best X for all possible X. I'd like to get back to that state, but it's really hard to turn off that level of self awareness. Deliberately choosing to be unaware is not the same as actually being unaware. It's another layer on top when the goal is to strip off the inteceding layer. I can't go back to before ironic-detachment post-modernism. The best I can hope for is a "New Sincerity" post-post-modernism, which isn't the same.
The part about degeneracy touches a nerve too. I don't know if I've ever tried to articulate this properly, but today's progressive liberal culture is possibly the most confining culture I've ever lived in. In many ways it feels like a neo-Victorian society where the expectation to follow the norms is high and the price for the slightest transgression is even higher.
The values it adopts are strictly better than Victorian times and many of the places I grew up in the South. Equality for people of all genders, races, ability, orientations, etc. Care for the environment. Intolerance of sexual harrassment or violence of any kind. These are good values.
But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense. There seems to be little room for human error, personal growth, or misinterpretation. A slip of the tongue can easily summon a career-ending mob on Twitter. (Or, at least, it seems that way.) If I tell a joke, is that a micro-aggression? If I don't tell a joke, is my seriousness itself another micro-aggression? While the laws are just, the penalties associated with breaking them are Draconian.
Maybe it's supposed to feel this way for me now. I'm straight, male, white, able, and middle class. Perhaps I felt freer in my youth because I was in a position of implicit power where there were fewer consequences if I did or said some dumb shit that hurt someone else. And maybe I have to be more careful now because that power imbalance is being restored.
But as someone who has always strived to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., someone who has always had been sensitive to the discomfort of others and tried to not hurt people, it's kind of a bummer being in a culture that makes me feel even more cautious than I already naturally did. Meanwhile, there's still apparently no shortage of actual fascist, racist, sexual predator asshats out there who clearly couldn't care less about liberal culture.
It feels like we're policing ourselves to the point of madness when we weren't the problem in the first place.