Inflating Faster Than My Gut

Seems like just a year ago I was paying less than 3 dollars a gallon for milk.

As James Greig laid out earlier this year, all of this is… annoying. Worse, though people keep telling me that this sort of thing is just kids being dumb and they’ll grow out of it, minimal investigation reveals that there’s plenty of people in their 40s and above who have gotten on this train. But beyond annoyance, I think it’s another example of behaviors that are sold as self-protective that will ultimately cause harm. I don’t write this stuff to hold people up for mockery but to argue that these are fundamentally self-destructive mental habits. Some have compared adult ADHD discourse to astrology, and the comparison is apt: both ascribe all of a person’s self to totalizing systems that (they imagine) bring order and meaning to their lives; both are exercises in unreality that can never actually create meaning in the way that people crave. I have always found this instinct to ascribe the whole self to a single factor to be bizarre, personally. Who wants to decompose the self down to one overarching attribute that’s shared by many millions of people? I guess some people just feel such little sense of self from simply inhabiting their natural personalities that they look everywhere for external definition. In the long run, it will provide no comfort.