My hypothesis is that in like 10 years gen z is gonna have a big cult boom the way the boomers did in the 70s
It’s already happening on tik tok. There’s a fun new thing going round that’s citing common symptoms of depression and anxiety as signs you’re about to have your awakening and that you are actually an alien and the reason you don’t feel right is because you’re home sick for your own galaxy. So that’s fun.
agreed, and i don’t mean this in a “haha gen z is so dumb they’re gonna join a tiktok cult lmao” i mean that conditions are perfect for the formation of cults right now.
high unemployment and a lot of underpaying, pointless jobs = people are looking for things to do with their life, a purpose
skyrocketing cost of living = most young people will not be able to live on their own, meaning some will end up in a group living situation with people interested in recruiting them
it’s a time of great cultural and political upheaval, nothing feels real, people are desperate for meaning and human connection. cults promise that
there is a new wave of acceptance and understanding for ways of life outside the norm, which is great! …except for when cult leaders tell you abusive and controlling practices are just their culture, their religion, their lifestyle, their beliefs, their tradition, and if you disrespect it you are the problem
social media influencers have already shown us how easy it is to build a cult of personality and attract people from anywhere in the world who are interested in the exact brand you are selling
spirtuality is having a boom, as are things like astrology, crystals, tarot, meditation, energy… those things aren’t bad on their own but they are often used as tools of cult spaces
wellness. i think a lot of people are already in wellness cults. you can make people do a lot of things in the name of “wellness” and a big factor of maintaining a cult is keeping members in a state of decreased cognition….. like say, with regular fasting
i think people are just unaware in general of how cults function, especially because the satanic panic was a big stupid false alarm that convinced the youths that dungeons and dragons or doom were gateways to cults, which are scary evil child murdering, satan-worshipping gangs. people don’t know how to spot them in real life.
[ID: Spongebob wrestling meme format. Buff Patrick labeled “predatory cult” flexes and growls in a wrestling ring at a stern, buff Spongebob labeled “my intelligence”. In his corner Mr Crabs is labeled “my education”. Final panel shows Patrick and whistling Spongebob walking out hand-in-hand, both labeled “rationalizing why this isn’t really a cult” /ID]
(This is actually more relevant here than standalone.)
Our popular media has tended to portray people in cults as ignorant or as losers when that’s really not how they work. Cults don’t want dead weight they have to support; they want talented, clever, energetic people they can exploit to siphon wealth and labor out of.
Some are religious, but some are political. You find yourself moving into a house full of Maoist revolutionaries because capitalism really is that awful and ecological collapse is imminent—but for some reason, the leader of the self-crit sessions is also the person everyone else in the house is in a polyamorous relationship with, and they can’t see anyone else outside of the house without her approval. Or you need a little extra money and you get told you’d be so good at selling Keto products. You’re a natural, and after you get through these first tough months, the leg under you will be developed enough you only have to work if you wanna hit bigger goals. Etc.
Loneliness, a lack of purpose, and desperation all make you susceptible to cults no matter how smart you are. In fact, your very clever brain is also extremely capable of redirecting your thoughts away from realizing you’re being exploited and abused because, after all, you’re not some idiot, are you?
We’ve got a ton of very clever young people fully aware that they’re going to have to suffer through decisions of the selfish dead, and they’re going to crave salvation of all different kinds because the future is going to suck, and it won’t have been their fault, and they won’t be able to do anything to stop it.
I love how all of the Batman villains are like “ah he’s not at the manor, it’s defenseless! and then alfred just racks an AK-47 and is like pull up bitch
Batman’s Villains: The butler will be easy prey!
He’s just an old man…he doesn’t have any of the Batman’s gadgets or training or fighting skills!
Alfred: Oh my you’re right
There’s something else of Master Bruce’s I don’t have as well
(Cocks a shotgun) A CODE AGAINST KILLING
Batman’s Villains: Wayne isn’t here to save you old man!
Alfred:
Alfred is the original “Call an ambulance — but not for me”
You ever see something so funny you bypass laughing entirely and go straight for crying?
always reblog
I fucking HATE how this has almost one million notes and ive NEVER seen this. I have missed out on life. This was the best study break video I have ever seen. I’m dying. I most def sharted.
I never know which version I’m going to get when I see this video.
I feel like practicing any skill would be way more fun if I could have a lil level increase thing that pops up in front of me every time I do good like in Skyrim
“Push ups increased to level 5”
“Writing dialogue increased to level 37”
“Coping mechanisms (healthy) increased to level 18”
Every 10 minutes that pass, the exoskeleton attached to your body will drain 1 liter of blood out of you. Or, wait, like a quart. To remove it, you will have to travel along this 3 kilometer road while your blood is slowly being drained. That’s like 2 miles. There, you will find the key to save your blood and your life. But watch out for the centimeter-long nails along your path, they could lead to more blood loss than you can handle. Wait no. Like half an inch? God, the metric system is great for engineering but like none of my victims understand it very well.
NPC season…The liberal stooges have received their marching orders.
Liberals are largely supporting Israel. Also kill yourself.
This isn’t very sensical. Who are they receiving orders from? Whose interest is it in for such a thing to even happen?
Also it’s factually incorrect as well, due to the “media propaganda machine” lots of liberals support Israel.
Everybody was talking about Ukraine regardless of political beliefs. And everyone agreed! Do you know any politician that didn’t support Ukraine? Of course not, America has to reinforce it’s imperialistic power.
Also literally everyone in the world wore masks properly, but America, where this was a political issue for some reason, just so happened to have way more deaths and difficulties handling things.
This post is based on an extremely warped worldview.
oh my god it’s laika day everyone drop what you’re doing… we honour a little dog who was sent up into space 65 years ago today. she was found as a three year old stray mongrel wandering the streets of moscow. her ability to endure hardy conditions got her chosen as the candidate for a journey she was never meant to survive. she passed away seven hours after liftoff. I hope she died dreaming of chasing rabbits up in the stars I love u laika forever and ever
Never forget, she was loved
She was not killed as an act of cruelty, or simply neglected. People cared about her, and the many space dogs who survived proves it
She was loved
ALT
ALT
great ritual for honoring Laika’s memory (from another thread)
overheard an old man talking about how he got a great deal on a bouquet of flowers and is excited to give them to his wife whose in the hospital rn because they’ll make her “happier than a faggot in boytown”. insane thing to say
i am often broadly pretty negative / cynical about the impact of the internet on society but i do have to say that there is something very good to be said about how deeply it undermines the ability of the bourgeoisie to control media narratives in the way they could since basically the beginning of mass communications
like you can see in real time all the pro-israel lines that broadly worked on a population who only had access to corporate TV news completely crumple up and fail against actual footage of what is happening in gaza and what israeli officials are saying on live TV
“israel is just defending itself” doesn’t cut it anymore when you can go on twitter or tiktok or telegram and see palestinian children being pulled from under rubble and netanyahu and ben-gvir going on television to say “this is totally a genocide and we love genocide and bombing civilians”
Sometimes you gotta pick a cat up just to set them back down somewhere nearby. Remind them who calls the shots in your house. Oh you thought you were lying on the floor? Dead wrong fool you’re standing on the couch cushion now staring up at me waiting for an explanation. You’ll never get it. I’m gone. I’m walking away. I’m already in the next room before you can so much as mutter a confused “meow.” later son. you’re reexamining your place in the universe all by yourself. Consider my power in a empty living room
[ID: Tumblr post by @/natashafromfallout that reads “Asserting dominance over my cat by slapping the red dot and turning off the laser pointer. I can kill it just fine, sounds like a skill issue little buddy.” /end ID]
what the fuck is going on this year. january through june didnt happen. july is a distant memory. august and september were the longest months of my life. october ended in 5 seconds. why is november here already this isn’t right
It’s the season erosion from the climate crisis, combined with a hyperindividualistic and stress-bound society. It warps your sense of time.
smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud
this is gonna make me sound very Old Man Yells At Cloud but i just hate how many things in my life assume i will always have access to a quick, reliable internet connection and almost cease to function without it. Obviously certain things Have To Have An Internet Connection, but i want to be able to listen to music if my service is bad. i want to still watch movies if Netflix is down. i want to have a working map when i can’t get a cell signal. nearly every tech product these days bears the fingerprint of the extremely internet-rich places they are developed, high rent offices in Seattle, San Francisco, etc.. I think often the idea of the internet not being available is so remote to them it doesn’t even factor in to development. i remember when the Xbox One was debuted and Microsoft was almost mockingly like “if you don’t have reliable fast internet, then don’t bother buying this”, and there was such backlash they completely went back on so much of that. But now that attitude is just the tech norm.
And so it begins: Israeli media outlet Jerusalem Post has now labeled some of the most prominent and visible Palestinian journalists inside Gaza as “Hamas’ Propaganda Team”.
As I’ve been saying all along, when you can just label everything and everyone as Hamas, you dehumanize them and provide the moral justification for their targeting and killing.
The same tactic has been deployed against hospitals, refugee camps, bakeries, churches and ordinary people…
And for those who were still unsure or on the fence, this is your sign to stop listening to anything Israel says. Literally anything is H*mas to them if it provides them with justification for bombing with impunity.
surrounding myself with a bubble of diversity and self love and body positivity online and then being exposed to normies who actually care about conventional beauty standards feels so fucking bizarre. like you people just live like this??? are you not tired???
The bubble web graph thingy for posts like the sebamey RP look so cool since its just you and one other person reblogging the same post back and forth 😍
Some people have “fuck you” money. You know, that amount you have in the bank where you can look at someone, say “fuck you, I quit” or “fuck you, I’m leaving” or anything like that.
This has now taught me that some people have “fuck you” time. and I could not be any happier with this knowledge.
A Palestinian lawyer wearing his official robes kicks a tear gas canister back toward Israeli soldiers during a demonstration by scores of Palestinian lawyers called for by the Palestinian Bar Association in solidarity with protesters at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, near Ramallah, West Bank
You’re not creating real people, you’re creating the illusion of real people. You don’t have to mention their favorite food if it doesn’t come up, you don’t even have to know it, though if they were actual people they’d have one. You can throw plot events at your characters to force them to take certain actions, or you could just rewrite the characters to be the kind of characters who would take those actions anyway. Your characters have a life of their own in their own little world, but don’t be afraid to play god to get what you want out of them.
In the vast majority of cases, a character’s strengths and flaws should be the same thing. There are exceptions (you can have a character be clumsy for the lols without needing to find some way that it’s an advantage), but for most character traits, the difference between a flaw and a strength is the situation at hand and learning when to indulge it.
desire is the source of action, so your characters should WANT things. all of them should have something they want that’s good for them, something they want that’s bad for them, and something that’s just a little silly, for spice.
If companies didn’t forcibly switch their free trial to a payment plan immediately after the free trial ends so that I have to be extremely cognizant in order to not be taken advantage of, I would actually do free trials and have a better chance of deciding to buy their subscription or whatever. But because I have to be on constant alert to make sure I cancel the free trial before they use my forcibly-given credit card information to charge me money without my consent, I never do the free trial that they believe will convince me to pay for their product.
Posts that remind you how pirating becomes the norm
A Palestinian lawyer wearing his official robes kicks a tear gas canister back toward Israeli soldiers during a demonstration by scores of Palestinian lawyers called for by the Palestinian Bar Association in solidarity with protesters at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, near Ramallah, West Bank
autism screening quizzes will be like “do you take things too literally” and then ask fifty of the worst-worded questions ever dreamt up by man
one time one of my friends found an autism quiz on the internet in class and everybody around started taking it and i watched as all of them were given the all clear by the quiz and then when i took it i got the exact diagnosis i was given as a child and everybody saw that and then “huh thats weird” before moving on
suzanne collins is such a genius… the cultural phenomena of her series leading to the hanging tree house remixes, mockingjay being milked for two (bad) movies, the capitol-inspired makeup palettes, the halloween costumes, the explosion of the market for dystopia, the butchering of her characters and removal of disabilities, disfiguration, and racial tension + representation to sell more tickets, the extra gale scenes to fuel discourse, and the audience showing up to cinemas to watch what was pretty honestly marketed to them (the jacob vs edwardification of the symbolic love story and also to watch children fight to the death) it’s just so ridiculously ironic i would say you can’t write this shit, but she did write about it… in The Hunger Games published 2008
individual environmentalism gets a lot of flak in the face of corporate pollution but picking up litter makes a significant, noticeable impact. I spend about an hour a week picking up litter from around my dorm complex and I’m literally outpacing my community’s litter production. Just an hour a week from one person is enough to offset nearly 200 people’s worth of littering.
it would take less than 100 man-hours of labor per week to keep my whole college campus entirely litter-free. If you got two classrooms’ worth of people to spend two hours per week each picking up litter, the whole campus would end up spotless and they’d straight up fucking run out of things to pick up.
If you’re looking for some way to make a noticeable and positive impact on the world around you, go pick up some litter.
