Saved by Namita and
You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working fr... See more
Freddie DeBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.
Freddie DeBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
That’s the existential question for humanity in the 21st century. That’s the challenge in front of all of us. Will you shoulder the risk of pursuing real human connection, as hard and intimidating and discouraging as that can be? Or will you hide in your room forever, comforted by fast food and porn and opiates and therapy and TikTok, risking nothi
... See moreFreddie DeBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when t... See more
freddiedeboer.substack.com • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
Pop culture soothes and placates with a steady series of uncomplicated morality tales in predigested narratives where nothing ever really changes and so there’s no worry that the storyline will move in a way that hurts your feelings. Crowdsourced “content” is built on ephemerality.
Freddie DeBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.
Freddie DeBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
We’re decades deep into the helicopter parenting era. Children have never been healthier or safer, but then, American children have been remarkably healthy and safe for decades longer, there was never any real “stranger danger,” and improvements to child health are the product of improving medical technology, not ever-more-anxious parents.
Freddie DeBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever.
freddiedeboer.substack.com • You Are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.
Someone has to tell these kids, “wherever you go, you’ll find yourself there, and you have to start to do the work of accepting who you are, as much as you may not like yourself.” The stakes are high.