Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure

[searcher]

Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure | Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson

Decadence in our era comes in technologically mediated forms, emptied of desire and obsessed with self-optimisation

www.theguardian.com

 

[nickndfl]

You are not getting the proper strain.

 

[CiscoKid]

Not allowed to feel joy anymore. Anytime you see a group of people having a good time, sure enough there will be a small group of purple-haired, nose ring, gender goblins screaming that they shouldn't be having a good time because _________________.

Just fill in the cause du jour because they have a lot of angst and grievances. They are overweight, ugly, look like circus freaks, and have no meaningful education because they all wasted their formative years studying "gender studies" and protesting "the man". These are people who never feel joy or happiness and cannot stand seeing anyone who does. They only know anger and inarticulate rage because the communists pretending to be high school teachers have programmed them this way.

It's kind of funny, but once you've seen it you cannot unsee it. And they are all caricatures of one another. I guess this is how they recognize each other in public. Whenever I see one, I just go down the checklist seeing how many boxes these troons have checked in their quest to be circus carneys. Cheap, ugly tattoos. Check. Facial piercings - eyebrows, lips, nose. Check, check, check. Ear gauges. Check. Brightly colored hair so that normal people can immediately tell they are toxic in nature. Check. Neck tattoos guaranteeing that they will never make more than minimum wage. Check. Bumper stickers all over the back of their vehicle announcing how "tolerant" they are of every freak fad that comes along and, if you're not, they will assault you. Check.


Just imagine where these children who never grew up will be when they hit their fifties or sixties and realize that they have nothing. That they have been turned into useful idiots by the very people that they are rallying against and then cast aside when they are no longer useful. I'm really not sure what they are going to do at that point because they sure as hell aren't smart enough or deep enough to be insightful.

 

[pmbug]

I experience joy every day. I also eschew decadence.

 

[CiscoKid]

Me? I go out of my way to find the joy in life. And it's all around us. The joy of refilling my hummingbird feeders in the morning. I get a lot of pleasure watching them throughout the day jousting for position at one of the many feeders. I try to get a picture of each morning's sunrise. I smiled when I got a special treat yesterday morning in the form of two turkey hens with five chicks poking around my upper cow field. I collect today's eggs and open the chicken run so that the chickens can begin their busy day free ranging. I get a lot of joy watching my chickens just being chickens as they explore and eat bugs. I get a lot of joy making things out of wood in my shop as I listen to the radio. I get a great deal of joy beating the heat by standing in my pool reading a good book occasionally heading back inside to take a couple of tokes off a joint of Pineapple Express and refresh my mojito. I take pleasure in the simple joys of sitting down to a well-cooked meal in the evening, followed by more quiet time with a book.

I don't know why people choose to be angry all the time. But, as my wise old father told me before he left this troublesome world, "Fuck 'em and feed 'em fish heads."