My Mom Died And I Don't Know What To Write About It

 Yeah. She died on June 10th. She was 68 years old.

I keep trying to write my feelings about it, but the moment my laptop opens, I have nothing.

So that's all I have to say about it I guess. I want to say so much more, but I can't think of anything.

Did (American) Pop Culture Reach A Dead End?

I saw a tweet a couple years ago that was talking about a local radio station. The person that made the tweet said something like, "The radio station says they, 'Play the best of the 80s, 90s, and today.' Well, today has been twenty years."

Does it feel like that, though? Does music feel like it's changed in the past twenty years?

If you think about the differences between 80s and 90s music, it's very easy to tell. The 80s had hair metal, lots of synth-pop, and rap music used lots of drums. The 90s had G-funk, alternative rock, pop-punk and ska. And with the exception of Nu-Metal, there isn't really a genre of music that is any different than today when you look at the early 2000s. At least it feels that way to me. Especially as far as rock music is concerned. Even new bands are bragging that they sound like early 2000s pop punk. Rock music has stayed largely the same.

For a few weeks I've been wanting to write this post but had trouble putting my thoughts to the keyboard. But I recently watched a video from The Punk Rock MBA that said something that made a lot of sense. He said that rock music has been around for seventy years, so there's nowhere else for rock music to go and still have it be called rock. To quote:

I kinda wonder if the reason that rock hasn't been innovative is the last decade or so is because it's basically all been done. What I mean by that is you can only push the boundaries of rock so far before it stops being rock. Like at some point if you change that formula of bass, drums, guitars, and vocals too much, then at some point it just stops being rock, right? It might be great music and it might be influenced by rock, but it's still not rock.

He's not wrong. We might be seeing the end of rock music.

He also said that a big problem with rock and rap these days is that it's not offending people. And that doesn't mean that it's bad that they're not being bigots. It's that during 50s-90s, music was offending old people and establishment types. In the 50s Elvis Presley angered silent generation parents by wiggling his legs. By the 80s rock music was invoking Satan. It had offended people so much that Al Gore forced musicians to testify about their music on the Senate floor (and you should definitely watch Dee Snyder destroy the Senate on YouTube. It's beautiful). In the 90s there were congressional hearings about gangsta rap. Marilyn Manson was protested by evangelicals. But not only is modern music not offending the establishment, it's simply not possible to do it anymore. Would anyone even give a shit if a satanic metal band came out today? Not me. I don't even listen to metal. Why would I have an opinion either way? Really the only way to be offensive these days is to do it politically, and while that does piss off the MAGA types, it's not seen as anything outside of the norm. The establishment loves MAGA as much as it hates it, so it's not really anti-establishment to piss them off, anyway.

At this point the only way rap music is going to piss off the establishment is if they embrace Satanism. I only know that because folks were pissed at Lil Nas X for a few minutes. But even in the world of hip hop, it doesn't seem like things changed much in the past two decades. In Da Club could be a new song now and nobody would think it was retro. 

As The Punk Rock MBA noted, the evidence that music hasn't changed much is that teenagers are on TikTok today doing dance videos to songs made twenty years ago. Nu Metal is having what I call "our 90's disco era" in which like disco in my youth, a genre of music that was once hated is now cool again. Teenagers today are into Nu Metal. That was not on my 2024 bingo card.

Hell, my wife got my kids into Simple Plan. Made them total superfans.

I'm not sure what the future holds for music, but I started thinking about this when I realized that even in my 40s, I'm still enjoying new music. My dad didn't. One of my biggest memories of my dad was him being hurt that I hated his music because it was old. And my dad hated alternative rock. He despised Green Day and all the punk and ska I got into when I was in high school. For me, my taste in music was partly to rebel against my father. My kids won't be able to do that. I'll probably be listening to their music, too.

Movies and television haven't changed much, either. The Office was a hilarious single camera mockumentary sitcom and it was the most popular sitcom on television at its peak. Today, Abbot Elementary is a hilarious single camera mockumentary sitcom and it's the most popular sitcom on television. Ten years ago people complained that all movies are sequels or reboots. Today pretty much everything in the theater is a sequel or a reboot. Twenty years ago we were seeing Star Wars and superhero movies in theaters. Now? Same deal. The only difference now is that some jokes made twenty years ago wouldn't be considered funny today.

The only mainstream genre I've seen any change in is anime. No wonder it's gone from a niche nerdy thing for 90s nerdy kids (hello!) to an entertainment medium that pretty much anyone born after 1980 enjoys. And while there's plenty of 90s anime to love, most of the anime of that time was action oriented, and very rarely comedic. Nowadays anime has everything from rom coms to psa's about getting enough exercise (seriously, it's called How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? and it's fucking weird). I just started rewatching Chainsaw Man with my wife. It's the most original tv show I've seen since The Good Place and it's fucking great.

The only American change to pop culture I've seen is the rise of content creation. And that's probably the only genre where there's a generation gap (while anime is original, everyone in my family is watching it). I absolutely despise any and all content generation aimed at Gen Z. Fucking Christ it's awful. It is the one piece of pop culture that makes me know how my parents and grandparents felt about anything I was into. How in the hell is PrestonPlayz married when he looks like he just started middle school? And every time he makes a video talking about how he spent a fortune on Amazon I just want to scream "YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE THE REVOLUTION, PRESTON!" My kids used to watch Ryan's Toy Review and it drove me insane. Yes, our generation started content creation, but this Gen Z stuff is...well...I don't get it. And I'm smart enough to know that I'm not supposed to. I'm not the demographic for the show. 

I hope we get to the point where we will see more scripted shows being made by ordinary people through social media, though. Omeleto is leading the way on showing short movies on YouTube, and it's a great channel. There's also a few low-budget self made sitcoms with their own YouTube channels that are great. On TikTok KallMeKris got a massive following by doing a series of one-woman skits that evolved into a tv show with a continuous story line and everything. She's awesome.

Maybe there's a lesson there. While the corporate world has been giving us the same movies and television to the point where they kill beloved franchises, it'll be the people the come together and make something beautiful.

Anyway, here's The Punk Rock MBA video I cited in the beginning. Enjoy:

No One Likes You When You're 43 (What's My Age Again?)

 Yeah, I guess I'm doing yet another post about getting old.

In just a few days I'm going to be 43 years old. Last week my mom asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. I told her that I had no idea. "Nobody celebrates turning 43 years old. After 35 birthdays don't really have that much relevance, anyway.", I told her. My 68 year old mom said, "Really, after 25, for that matter." Fair enough, mom.

My wife keeps asking me what I want to do for my birthday. And I seriously have no idea. I kinda want to go out to eat, but also don't because eating at restaurants is expensive. But I also don't want to get take out because that's expensive, too. But I also don't want to eat in because it's a weeknight so I'll have to do the cooking, anyway.

So I guess I just wish that my birthday wasn't happening this year. Maybe I should wait two more years to celebrate my birthday because at least I'd be celebrating a milestone of some sort.

Blink 182 said that no one likes you when you're 23. But when you're 43? No one even gives a shit. 

Maybe that's the direction this blog is going to head in. Me trying to find that ability to grow into the middle age in-between childhood and old age that us millennials had been forced into without the "young adult" era that our boomer and Gen X predecessors were given. We were infantilized for so long and when you combine that with our economic circumstances where we had to kick, punch, and claw our way to being barely middle class, the suddenly coming of being middle aged is hitting especially hard. And that's even if you managed to make it to barely middle class. I was one of the lucky ones on that. Not all of my millennial companions can say they did.

But either way, I have no fucking clue what I'm doing for my birthday. 

Younger Millennials Aren't So Young Anymore

I started this blog when I was 32 years old. The term "millennial" hadn't even been in the zeitgeist at the time. Most of us hadn't even heard the term until the mid 2010s when our generation was suddenly blamed for killing every industry from chain restaurants to napkins. The baby boomers that were writing the articles for easy clickbait didn't seem to know or care that the reason why millennials weren't spending money on those things was because The Great Recession had left us flat ass broke.

And it was in those 2010s that the new generation gaps were born. Angry baby boomers would rant against us in the comment sections of whatever news page on Facebook they decided to like. We would tell people that we're flat ass broke and need a break only to be told by said boomers that we're entitled because of participation trophies. Being so stunned by our parents' generation telling us that we don't deserve a job that doesn't pay starvation wages was pretty daunting. It wasn't until a few years later that someone pointed out that we only had the participation trophies because boomer parents couldn't handle the idea that their kid didn't win something. For fucks' sake, if anyone was entitled, it was them for demanding that we had trophies that we never wanted in the first place just so they wouldn't feel like they had raised a loser.

All those arguments were the beginning of the online generation gap. Boomers vs. Millennials. With Gen X wondering why the fuck they had been forgotten about.

We millennials were infantilized for long past the time that the youngest of us had reached adulthood. In fact, it wasn't until an anonymous Twitter user pointed out that many millennials were already in their mid-30s that the infantilization had ended. By that time, the oldest of Gen Z had begun reaching adulthood.

Why do I bring this up? I don't know. Nostalgia, maybe? I decided I was going to use this blog to write about my random thoughts after I deleted my social media, and I have a lot of thoughts to give on aging, I guess.

I'm about to turn 43. I'm the eldest of millennials. If I had been born just two months prior, I'd be the last of Gen X. I'm getting old and it's hard to deal with.

I think that being infantilized for so long kind of makes getting old that much harder to accept. And we were infantilized for economic reasons that were well beyond our control.

The Great Recession prevented nearly all of us from owning a home. Even today only half of us have one. Nearly seven in ten of Gen X and eight in ten of Baby Boomers own one.

Did you know that owning a home is the easiest way to generational wealth in America? I didn't until I was one of the lucky ones that now owns his own home. Fucking hell, the tax breaks ALONE for owning a home are insane. Credit scores are through the roof! My wife and I have money in savings for the first time ever! 

And half of my generation doesn't get to have that. It's fucking bullshit.

So because of our economic circumstances, at least half of my generation are still forced to scrape by like we all did just a decade prior. Because we didn't all graduate high school with a job that guaranteed a home like the boomers did we've been treated like kids most of our lives.

And now it's 2024 and we're far from children. I have to continuously wrap my head around the fact that there are now people born after 9/11 that are old enough to drink. Gen Z is starting to get old now, too. The oldest of them will be turning 30 in a few years. This year is to them what 2008 was to millennials, and if you think 2008 doesn't feel like it was sixteen years ago, welcome to the fucking club, buddy! Where did the fucking time go?!

Gen Z loves to remind us that we're now the old people. Goddamn it.

You ever see Gen Z talk about us on TikTok? Kids are fucking cruel, man! You'd think we were their parents or something.

So now along with our parents' generation treating us like we're fucking infants, we got the generation below us acting like we're senior citizens at the old folks' home. Jesus fucking Christ.

And we don't even know why they're so hostile, either. It's not like we aren't in the same economic boat as them. They were born after this country turned into a dumpster fire, but we were kids when the match that set that dumpster on fire was lit! Hey Gen Z, if you wonder why we harp on the 90's so fucking much, it's because we kind of MISS THE TIME WHEN THE DUMPSTER WASN'T ON FIRE!

Sometimes I wonder if I was blinded by youthful bias as to whether or not the 90s were that great, but then I remember that both of my divorced parents moved into larger houses at that time and the worst thing going on in politics is that the president had his dick sucked. Yeah, things were pretty fucking good back then.

But we watched helplessly as the years that you were born into turned into that dumpster fire, Gen Z, and goddamn it, we did our best to put it out. We fucking tried. So now we're old and tired and we need you to take up the mantle for change because the youth are always fearless and our backs hurt and it's hard to get us to a protest unless we can get a babysitter in advance. But don't forget that we walked so you fuckers can run. We took all the jokes about participation trophies so you can scream, "OK BOOMER!" at the top of your lungs.

I'll close this out with the queen of Elder Millennials (Iliza Shlesinger) giving her take on Gen Z:

The Strange Addiction of Posting Stuff Online

This is kind of an update to my last post. Maybe I'll post more about this as time goes on. I just know that I feel like I need to put my thoughts somewhere.

And that's what this post is about. Why the fuck am I addicted to posting stuff online?

I started reading blogs and news sites to keep up on what's going on in the world, and many times after reading a story I want to post a comment about it, or post the story to a feed on some social media site with my thoughts on the article. So I signed up for one of the news sites that still has a comment section and fired away with my thoughts on a news story. It felt good to say my piece and put it into the universe.

And then the old familiar rush of getting into an online argument began again. I posted my thoughts about politics online, and like chum thrown into the ocean, the sharks took the bait. Within minutes, I was high on arguing about politics online.

I'm not kidding. It's a high. I literally get an adrenaline rush from it.

Why am I like this? I don't want to be like this. I know that the years I spent having online arguments as my primary mode of social interaction fucked up my ability to talk to people in the real world. 

While typing all of that out, I decided to Google "why am I addicted to arguing online" and found a few articles about it. I guess I'm not alone in admitting that this is an addiction.

I found this article in Psychology Today that said of trolls and what they refer to as "troll-lite" (people that just enjoy arguing online) that said of us, "they are more narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic and sadistic." But I don't feel like I'm any of those things. 

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do have a need to be right all the time. And I also feel like everyone else should also be right all the time. If not, I should correct them.

Yeah, that would explain the addiction. It's a usually safe and anonymous way to get those two needs met. I get the feeling of superiority of feeling like I'm right and telling everyone else that they're wrong.

Fuck me, that's not a characteristic I want to have. That's definitely making it hard to make friends with people.

I've been staring at this screen for the past five minutes wondering if this characteristic is from trauma or something I was born with. I think it's because of my experience with religion. I was in the Independent Fundamental Baptist church when I was a teenager and if you know anything about that church, they do feel the need to be right about everything, and letting you know that you're wrong is a matter of keeping you from burning for eternity. 

Maybe that's it. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a combination of things. All I know is, this is something I need to change.

So I Deleted My Social Media

I deactivated my Facebook account and deleted the Mastodon and Reddit apps from my phone.

It was on October 5th that I did all of that, and it was ironically, because I talked to someone on Reddit.

A post on the site was talking about cellphone usage. I posted a comment about Stolen Focus and someone said that they read the book too, and suggested that I also read Digital Minimalism. I got a copy from my library and read it.

The book talks a lot about social media addiction. It cited an excellent article from political blogger Andrew Sullivan where he talked about what social media was doing to him in 2016, a full four years before I realized that I had a problem with it.

Digital Minimalism also discussed how to break free from social media addiction. The first step is to go completely without social media for thirty days. I'm three days away from that now.

The only social media I did keep was TikTok and YouTube. For reasons that I'm unsure of, I was always distracted by social media that uses reading, but can't say the same for the social media that uses videos. So far so good on that. It hasn't made me replace videos for the social media that I missed. I watch videos occasionally on my down time, but don't spend nearly the amount of time that I did scrolling Facebook and Reddit.

The good part of this is that I feel a lot less anxious than I used to. The lack of doomscrolling will do that to you. I know there's some stuff going on in Israel and Palestine, and the UAW just ended all their auto strikes, but otherwise I don't see a lot else going on when I read from news sites. And not seeing assholes in the comment sections of the stories I read has been nice as well.

But there is one down side to all of this and it's bothered me worse than I thought it would.

I don't have any friends to talk to.

My biggest regret of my social media addiction is that I let my real life friendships whither and fade away while I stayed inside and let arguing with idiots and trolls become my new social life. I was such a damn fool for doing so.

I should have worked on keeping the friends I had. I should have worked on making new ones. What I shouldn't have done is spend my entire 30s arguing with assholes on the internet.

In the past I would post when I was having a bad day on Facebook or somewhere else and I'd get sympathetic comments from total strangers. Now that I'm done doing that I wish I had some friends to tell about my shit day. I talk to my wife, but something about having a friend to vent to just feels different. I don't know why, but talking to a spouse just isn't enough sometimes. You need a friend.

So I guess that's why I'm here. Until I can make some new friends and/or reconnect with old ones, I gotta put my thoughts somewhere. 

Ironically since I won't be sharing this to any social media, there probably won't be anyone that sees this, lol. At least I can write down how I'm doing.

So I Went Without My Phone For A Week

The phrase "terminally online" is new, but I've been terminally online for thirty years. 

In 1993 my mom bought our first PC. We had a dialup connection and a super old school AOL account. After a while I was reading posts from various USENET groups and posting in chat rooms. 

As a bullied kid in middle school, the internet was a great relief from the constant hate that I received in the real world. I made friends. Had a few long distance girlfriends, even. It was nice to have people to talk to that weren't calling me homophobic slurs and reminding me that I'm a piece of shit. 

The years passed and I stayed online as much as I could. Even when I was in Iraq I was on the internet as much as possible, using it to escape the hell that George W Bush had decided to send me to. 

I got my first smartphone in 2007. Around that time I also got a Facebook account. And before long the phone replaced my PC as my go-to method of being terminally online. 

Being online kind of sucks now. Well, not kind of. It sucks. In earlier times it was easy to find people who liked the same things you liked. Chat rooms and internet forums were fun and friendly. Nowadays everyone is mean and wants to argue. It doesn't feel like anyone is having a fun conversation. It's now just endless arguments. And that's made it harder for me to socialize in real life, too. When most of your "social life" is spent arguing with assholes, that really shapes your perception of people. 

I've kinda hated social media for a while. A few years back I wrote about how I hated that every time I went on Facebook I just became angry as a stream of negativity was routinely pushed into my brain.

Since then I did my best to minimize my engagement on Facebook as possible. I deleted the app from my phone. I used the DuckDuckGo web browser to check my account on my phone instead (it helps to keep Facebook from snooping on your phone). I deleted nearly every post I ever made and removed myself from just about every photo I was tagged in. 

That didn't help.

To make up for my lack of Facebook usage, I got more active on Twitter and Reddit. People complain about Twitter since Elon Musk bought the thing but it was a shit show long before that. I left after "#chiligate", an online spectacle created mostly by trolls and bots in which a woman was dragged for making her new neighbors a pot of chili. It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen in my thirty years of being online and that's coming from someone whose seen the "Two Girls, One Cup" video. 

Reddit isn't so bad, but that's not the point. I was still terminally online. It didn't matter what I was doing, I couldn't put down my phone for more than a few minutes. It was affecting my ability to focus so much that I began to wonder if I had ADHD. Even when I was on my phone I couldn't focus on any one thing for more than a few minutes. Watching YouTube videos became hard to do if the videos were more than ten minutes long. I'd be five minutes in and want to check Facebook or Reddit.

You might have noticed that your ability to focus isn't what it used to be, either. Apparently this is a widespread problem. I'll write more on that in a minute.

My family likes to take a camping trip every year and we decided this time we'd go to Niagara Falls, Canada. I decided to leave my phone at home. In the past I'd use camping as an excuse to minimize my phone use, but even then I'd find excuses to go on it. I didn't want that this time. I wanted to be completely without my phone. Some folks call it a "tech cleanse". I called it "living my best 1997 life".

Of course I didn't want to be staring off into space the whole time I was on vacation, so I got a bunch of books from my library to keep me entertained. One of them was, ironically, a book about how we've collectively lost the ability to concentrate and while the book doesn't have social media as the only reason, it's one of the larger ones. I also got a watch so I wouldn't bother my wife for the time every few seconds. I brought an AM/FM radio to listen to music if I wanted. A 1997 life indeed.

I'd like to say that I instantly became more relaxed being without my phone, but that isn't true. I kind of felt stressed about having to constantly cook and then wash the dishes after. Which doesn't sound like a big deal, but considering I had to make daily trips to the grocery store and have to put in work feeding everyone every few hours; that was time I was spending not relaxing. I hate that that stressed me out so badly. 

But I wasn't stressed due to not having a phone. I wasn't feening for the latest updates from Facebook or Reddit. I wasn't craving another pointless argument about politics, or seeing boomers give asinine take after asinine take in the comment section of a Facebook newspaper page. I didn't even miss my phone at all. The only time I wanted a phone was when I had to look up some information about the local area. 

There were a few times we would go somewhere and I wouldn't have a book with me and there would be periods when I didn't have anything to do. I feared being bored before the trip (the fear of boredom is a big reason why I always had my phone on me when I was back at home), but when that happened I just told myself, "I guess I'll be bored now" and turned my brain off. When you're not constantly bombarded with content, you can do that. Just chill out, stop thinking, and let your mind just wander aimlessly. It was easy to relax during those times. 

I also found that reading actual books instead of constantly scrolling has its own meditative feel to it. Unlike social media, books aren't trying to make you angry to keep you reading it. I didn't feel anxious or angry reading my friend's latest book. I just immersed myself in the stories being told. 

When I got home I noticed that I was able to focus on things better. I won't pretend that I was cured of all of my issues regarding focusing, but I felt like I was on the right track.

Unfortunately after being home for almost two weeks and I'm starting to fall back into the same habits. The mindless scrolling and arguing about politics has begun again. I started bringing my phone back to bed because I need to keep track of the time and that's caused me to constantly check it when I'm cuddling with my wife and watching movies. Today I turned off my phone and chucked it across the room just so I would stay off of it (which got a few raised eyebrows from my family, lol). I was struggling to stay off my phone that fucking badly.

I'm going to do a few things to help me. For starters, I'm going to get an alarm clock so I don't have a reason to keep my phone by my bed. I'm going to buy a KSafe to keep my phone during times when needing my phone will be a low priority. I get books from the library so I can read instead of scroll. 

Sadly, I know that all the things I do are going to be a half measure at best. Individual solutions don't solve systemic problems, and we have a systemic problem.

I'm sure many of you have noticed that it's getting harder to focus these days. And social media, while not being the only reason, is one of the bigger ones. Studies have shown that our attention span has been rapidly decreasing over the past decade. And it's not just as simple as getting off our phones. We have to admit that that ship has pretty much sailed. We're not going without our phones or social media anymore than we're going without the radio.

Social media is designed to be addicting, and that's a problem that a lot of people aren't talking about. I remember around 2015 seeing a video on YouTube (I couldn't find the video, so I'm going by memory) of a guy being interviewed that said that people are addicted to their phones because every time a notification ding goes off, "it's a dopamine hit". He made it sound like being addicted to social media is a personal failing, like you're an asshole for wanting dopamine (news flash: we all want dopamine).

There's a thousand stories like that. Talking about all the studies done that show that social media is affecting our mental health and ability to focus, and almost all of them are treating it as a personal problem instead of a widespread, systemic issue.

While on vacation I read the latest book from Johann Hari called "Stolen Focus". For those of you who have read my work here over the years, it was Johann Hari's book about depression that I wrote several posts about back in 2019. He wrote a lot about how social media works in this new book.

The truth is that every time you browse social media or Google, there's a team of a hundred people monitoring you. Their job is to make sure that you're using their product as much as possible. And this is because they need to make sure you're watching as many ads as possible. 

Google and the big social media apps like Facebook and Twitter have numerous tools to keep you using their products as much as possible. And they do this because of their advertising tools.

When you first get an account on Google or the social media apps, they start out having an image of you as a random person. Just an expressionless person with no personality. As you continue to use their product, they notice what you like and put it into an algorithm meant to give you ads for things that you're most likely to buy. Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff gave a name to this advertising system: Surveillance Capitalism. And if you wonder why ads feel like they're listening in on you or reading your mind, it's because the algorithms used for surveillance capitalism are so goddamn good at making targeted ads that they've begun to predict what you'd want to buy in the future.

Two days ago I saw a local news story on my television saying that AI may be able to read minds. I wanted to scream at my TV, "WE'RE ALREADY THERE!"

Any time you're not using the internet, you're not looking at ads. So these companies do everything they can to make sure you're staring at your phone as much as possible. That's why staring at your phone on social media is so fucking addictive.

Have you noticed that Gmail on your phone no longer has a "mass delete" option? Or that the social media sites have infinite scrolling? Or why you have to work to make sure your apps don't give you push notifications? It's because they want you to be using their product as long as possible.

If we want to stop being so addicted to social media, we're going to have to collectively petition the government to get involved. That means make it a point to call your members of congress and tell them to end surveillance capitalism. And for those of us cynical fucks that don't think that can work, Europe has already done it. 

We have the power to get the fuck off our phones and get our attention spans back, but only if we accept that what's happening to us isn't a moral failing on our part. We're being deliberately fucked over by corporations and we need to stop them together.