It’s been a tough two years for most people on this planet:
Stress.
Anxiety.
Real need.
Loneliness.
Depression.
Mental and emotional breakdown.
While the average person is ready for life to get back to normal, there’s a zero percent chance that we’ll ever go back to how things were before the pandemic.
But it’s not going to happen.
In fact, it’s going to be the opposite. Society is going to get more lonely as we emerge from endless curfews, lockdowns, Orwellian surveillance systems, and restrictive locational controls.
Why?
Because the past two years have proven wildly profitable for the predator corporations that rule America.
The Great Lone-ification
Culture comes from the Latin cultus — to cultivate. Cultures form where people come together and are rooted.
Individualism comes from the Latin dividere — to divide. In contrast to cultures that are together and rooted, individualists are uprooted and scattered.
Individualism is an anti-culture.
Over the next generation, we’re going to see the mass-evaporation of cultures on a scale we haven’t seen since perhaps the Roman Empire.
Because there’s a new mono-empire in town: Corporatism.
It owns the Fed.
It owns Congress.
It dominates labor.
It controls much of the economy.
It will soon own all the houses.
And eventually, it will own everything and everyone.
Because a corporation’s legal fiduciary reason for existing is to deliver profits to passive extractor-shareholders, it will do whatever is necessary to stay alive. If individualism proves more profitable than communalism, hundreds of trillions of dollars will be invested to ensure that individualism prevails.
After all, divide and conquer is a great business model.
A state of ever-emergency
We’re stuck with Covid+ forever.
The Omicron variant already has thirty mutations.
There will be more.
We’ll do our best to create vaccines against them.
Some will work.
People will die.
Welcome to nature.
Corporations and their governments will use each new surprise — be it a disease, extreme weather event, supply chain shortage, mean tweet, terrorist attack, war, or rumor of war — to pump people with anxiety, make them afraid of each other, and make them terrified to venture outside the house.
If we keep on our current trajectory, here’s what America’s individualist-corporatist “culture” will look like in fifty years.
No more restaurants
Eating together is an act as old as humanity itself, but culture-making restaurants were already in trouble before Covid.
Chains like Starbucks were offshoring their profits and using the proceeds to crush local coffee shops.
Extractor land-lorders were draining wealth from restaurateurs via hefty commercial rents.
Social anxiety rates were on the rise.
Vampire companies like Uber were creating delivery apps so people could eat at home.
For the next few decades, restaurant monopolies will continue to destroy the little guys, millions will go out of business as real estate costs soar to unimaginable heights, and dark kitchens will proliferate around the world.
Soon, the only options will be app-ordered McDonald’s cooked up by robots, or bleary-eyed delivery drivers dropping ghost kitchen meals at the doorstep of your overpriced condo rental.
No more shopping
I spent my teenage life at the mall.
My kids and grandkids will buy everything they want and need online and have it shipped by overworked couriers and uninterested bots.
Or they’ll just print it at home with a 3D printer.
No more movie theatres
This goes without saying.
Cinemas were dying well before Covid, as binge-worthy content proliferated on Youtube and TikTok.
Plus, land-lorders will continue to drain film exhibitors of wealth via ever-rising rents; this is set against fewer and fewer people gathering in the flesh to enjoy a cinematic experience. It’s only a matter of time before even WallStreetBets shorts AMC.
And then there are the streamers. The CEO of Netflix says that their biggest competitor is sleep. That’s funny until you realize how sad that is.
The best thing that can happen to the streamers is for everyone to have an individual Netflix account, stay home, and never stop watching.
And people are doing just that.
No more sex
Or rather, no more meaningful sex.
Instead, a whole generation of children is being raised with porn in their pockets and getting wildly addicted, setting their arousal templates to pixels on a screen instead of real people.
Gen Zers are already having less sex than previous generations. Just wait until VR porn really takes off — and then see what happens when sex robots get good and go mainstream.
Real human bodies (and souls) just won’t be able to compete.
No more outdoor play
Fifty years from now, the world will be too hot to spend time with others outside.
Or it will be too cold — climate change means greater fluctuations after all.
Or there will be too much acid rain.
Or too much air pollution to breathe safely.
Or too much crime, thanks to poverty and a collapse in spending on policing and crime prevention.
Instead, people will just stay home and play in the metaverse, Ready Player One-style.
Alone.
Don’t get me wrong: restaurants, shopping, cinemas, and other places of culture will still exist for elites with the money to pay, but it’ll be far too expensive for the serf masses.
We’ve engineered our society for loneliness
Just take a look at all the biggest companies in the world.
Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Tencent, and the banks that finance them all have a vested interest in keeping us apart from each other.
They all profit from loneliness.
That’s why you don’t hear big tech companies complaining about draconian lockdown measures. They’d rather sell surveillance tech to governments to keep people at home and spending time and money online.
In the future, you’ll be “connected” constantly, and “socializing” digitally, but you’ll be lonelier than you’ve ever been. Because you’ll never be about to fool your glorious, physical, homo sapien body.
Your body knows that human happiness requires human togetherness.
We were made for each other.
And soon, practicing togetherness will be an act of resistance against the individualist-corporatist anti-culture.
Want to be a revolutionary?
Bring people together.
Turn off your phone.
Grab some friends.
Cook in the park.
Play soccer.
Watch the moon rise.
Light a campfire on the beach.
Skinny dip.
Sing and saunter under the stars.
Grab your family and go off-grid for a week.
You won’t miss a thing back in the “real” world.
It’s quickly disappearing anyway.
