Latest / Cobra Lily / Croc Nation

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Croc Nation · Cobra Lily

• Cobra Lily: Decorum is ascribing meaning to something that maybe is meaningless, like, well, I'm gonna wear this certain outfit to go get dinner. Maybe it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but you're deciding that it does matter. That's why I like it. That's the difference between nihilism, which is nothing matters, and existentialism, which is nothing matters, but I can decide that it matters for XYZ reason. And I feel like you say you're nihilist, but I think you're really talking about existentialism, like Abert Camus type shit. Which is nothing matters and that's that's awesome. It would Hey guys, this is Ella. Before we get into the show, I would encourage you to follow my art and literary zine Cobra Lilly at Cobra LilyZine on Instagram, which will be linked in the description, along with my website. I self-publish and print my essays, poems, collages, and a new volume of the zine every few months. And I also accept submissions of any kind of artwork from the public over Instagram DM. I also use my Instagram as a pop culture archive and somewhat of a personal account if that interests you. And you can also find me on Substack or TikTok, which I will link in the description. And I'll follow you back. All right, let's get into it. Hello, everybody. My name is Maria, and this is the Cobra Lily Podcast. How are you doing today, Ella? I'm doing wonderful, Maria. How are you? I'm doing so good. I'm glad that we're finally doing this because I know we've been talking about it for a while. I am so excited. Yeah, I am too. And this podcast, by the way, is an extension of my Zine, Cobra Lily, which you can follow on Instagram at Cobra LilyZine. And it's been a long time coming. Yeah, it really has. So just because it's the first episode, I'm gonna tell you just a tiny bit about me and Ella. we're both started as social workers and we were interns together. We first met, we did not like each other because we had very, very different ways of thinking. But our values we got to know each other and come to know our values are very similar. And we'd always have these long conversations about Our different beliefs. So it just kind of spawned this podcast and we're finally doing it. Yeah. Let's make this shit happen. Absolutely. So today we're talking about decorum. And I know this is something you're really passionate about, Ella. So why don't you go ahead and define it for us? Decorum is basically just manners for whatever situation you're in. So there's certain decorum you have when you're in the grocery store. There's certain decorum that politicians are supposed to follow. There's certain decorum for the club. Like there's there's decorum for any situation that it's not set rules. It just basically appropriate behavior for the given context you're in. And I think that over the last five or six years since the pandemic, there's been a major decline in decorum and an overall sweat pansification of society. And I have things to say about it. ⁓ yes. ⁓ yes. I know you have examples. Yes, okay, so I I really started thinking about this last fall because I drove by a funeral that was taking place and I saw two girls right up near the casket wearing these fashion nova dresses that were showing were showing cheek. Showing cheek at a funeral on a Wednesday. It wasn't even lunchtime yet. And I don't have an issue with thought wear, but could this have waited until The body was lowered into the ground. Did you have to take advantage of this person's last few hours above ground to draw attention to yourself? I just found that to be very disrespectful. And from there, I just started getting hit to that confirmation bias. I was seeing it everywhere. And I'm just gonna run through some quick examples of which would be people playing TikToks loudly on their phones in public or FaceTiming really loudly. On the train. I see y'all. sweatpants and messy buns at restaurants. I work at a restaurant. I see it all the time. Grumpy, rude baristas. I mean, I don't think that's a new thing, but I feel like it's a little more commonplace that you have like a negative interaction with someone in a customer service setting. I would say just general club wear or athleisure everywhere all the time. I actually have a really I have a whole thing about athleisure. I would also say overhearing people loudly discuss sex or bodily issues in public. I was behind people in line at the bar one time and I'm hearing them loudly discuss their gastrointestinal issues. And I was just like, ⁓ my God. And the time I was walking down the steps outside at the Richmond Art Museum, and there was a lady doing jumping jacks with wrist weights on. At the bottom of the stairs, and everyone had to squeeze by her to avoid getting clocked by one of her five-pound wrist weights. And she had the giant like autism headphones on, so you couldn't talk to her. And since I couldn't talk to her, I just gave her a nasty look and said, Excuse me, to try to signal lady a move. I feel like I maybe should have said something. And then maybe the most damning of all happened only a a month ago, I would say. A guy at my restaurant took off his shoes and rested his feet. On the table, curly black toe hair and everything. He had his dogs out in front of God and everyone at the restaurant. And I just find that unacceptable. And ⁓ bonus, I will say the amount to which people let their kids act insane in public. I know kids are always rowdy, it's always a gamble. But I see my restaurant become basically like a daycare on the weekends, and people will hang out with their kids for six or seven hours. And we're basically babysitting the kids. The kids are like falling and running into stuff and screaming. I got like one of them ran into ran into me and almost knocked me over while I was carrying a bunch of beers. I'm not even gonna open up the whole gentle parenting box, but I think that also needs to be brought to the table. Yeah. No. No. And I love hearing you talk about these examples, Ella, because what my brain immediately does is connect it to your values. And I know we're gonna talk about this later. We're gonna talk about authenticity. We're gonna talk about blurring public and private spaces. We're gonna talk about how the rise of just being yourself is like low-key leading to people into these spaces where they think they can behave however you want. But for me, my examples of decorum are a little bit less focused on like fashion and beauty. And low-key, let's be real. A little bit of religion too, because like, you know, when I think of seeing that funeral, I'm just like, maybe the deceased was a hoe, respectfully. And maybe that's what she would have wanted. But like within like the decorum says, no, that's something you say for a private wake. Private wake, you, you know, shake ass for the deceased. Wonderful thing. But, you know, if you've got a widow crying next to you because, you know, her husband died and you're like shaking ass over the cast it, that's a little bit rude. To the woman whose husband just died. It wasn't over the casket, but it was adjacent to the casket, you could see cheek. Well, like, okay, you know, cheeks by the casket aside. Like my examples of decorum are very much like, okay, these are things that you obviously should not be doing. How people behave in movie theaters is really upsetting to me too, because this is a place that people specifically go. For the experience of a movie. They have speakers, they have surround systems. This is all designed to create the best movie watching experience, which is involved quiet. And people are pulling out their phones, people are talking loudly. And I'm sitting there like, you know, respectfully, why don't you do this at home? You know, that's completely okay to do it at home, but why are you entering a private space that's designed around quietness and good lighting and fucking up the lighting and fucking up the quiet? It costs like twenty-two dollars go to the movies now. Like it better be fucking quiet in there. Yeah. I don't want to hear it. A big one for me, okay, so I won't go too much into it, but there's a restaurant near where my family lives. It's a couple towns over, it's called Neutral Ground. And it's all about like when you come to this bar, we don't discuss politics. And I thought that the fact that they had a need for something like that to be crazy. Because when you go to a restaurant and you sit at the bar. It is my personal opinion and I think it's just a general good practice to not be discussing topics that could distress the other person. We're social workers, right? If I have a particular topic that's upsetting me, upsetting me that day, it's like, ⁓ you know, it's very difficult to, you know, deal with, you know, sexual assault in the setting knowing what I've been through or something like that, right? That's not something I'm gonna be discussing at that bar because I don't know who's sitting next to me. Same thing with like Geopolitical issues. I'm not going to talk about which ones, but let's just insert geopolitical issue of your choice, right? I'm not going to be discussing that super intensely at the bar if it's highly controversial and highly sensitive, because I don't know the like geopolitical standing of the person sitting next to me. And this actually happened, and I won't go into the specifics, but I had a very close friend in grad school who was a part of an ethnic group that was really marginalized, and there was a political upheaval specifically around that group. And she said, I don't feel like there's a single place I can go where people aren't talking about it. And I can't even say anything because it seems like, ⁓ well, you know, you're not being real. We have to advocate. And she would say, I my family's in danger. And I just want to have one place where I can go and not be reminded of that. Can I just have a hang? Like, ⁓ my God. It just adds this layer of solemnness to the bar or restaurant experience, which is supposed to be Kind of an escape. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think people have a good idea of it's not about you when you're in a third space. Like, don't like for respectfully too, like, you know, I love when parents can look at their kids and it's just a look and the kids are just like, mm, right? That look of like, hey, we're not doing this in public. Like when we get home, we're gonna have a talking to you about it. Yeah. I don't want to hear you screaming at your children at a public place. I don't want to hear your kids like screaming loudly, which to be fair. You cannot control your kids. Right. But there is a there is a very clear thing that you can see where parents are just like, I'm just gonna let them do what they do. Yeah, they don't seem to feel like they owe it to their, you know, fellow citizens in that space to manage their children. As a like a waitress, they turn it on us to manage and placate their children as if we're being paid for babysitting. The problem is not that their kids are being annoying. It's that like they don't seem to feel any kind of pressure to curb that at all. Yeah. No. And that's and that is difficult. And it is annoying. And I feel like we use the word, I don't wanna say we use the word Karen too loosely because that sounds ridiculous, but there is this trend towards like we just wanna be authentically ourselves everywhere we go. Right. And if you push against that, you're like looked at as Impressive for enforcing certain norms, right? And it makes me of this one example. I was on a train in Germany, and you don't put your feet in the seat of the train in Germany. You do not do that. People don't put their feet in the cut on the cushion in front of them. And I had it just barely touching the cushion on the railing in front of me. But I was just sitting there and a woman made eye contact with me. And I and then I looked at her and she looked at me and she looked at my feet. And then mean mugged you. Yeah. But like so politely. She wasn't like scowling. She was just like drawing attention to it. And then I she looked at me and I looked at her and she looked at my feet and she looked back at me. And I very gently put my feet down and she gave me the gentlest little nod of approval. And she went back to staring out the window. Damn. And I was like, That's a woman. And it was. And I'm like, you know what? Like, had she come to me and be like, you know, it is so inappropriate. That would be one thing. But like, Gentle social correction should be encouraged. And I won't go too much into it because we'll talk about it later. But like that's the thing I think is missing. We don't really have a good sense of this is how you act in public because you're being considerate to other people, but it doesn't mean you can't act how you want in private. And there's a difference between being authentic and being an asshole. And yeah. That's kind of the top. Which I think is kind of why we have, I mean, there's other reasons, but I think that's kind of why we have Karen's, because it's you can have no opinion about how anyone acts in public ever, even if you get bad service, or you can Karen out and like it's like zero to a hundred. Like there's no what that lady did was like a nice medium. She's just kind of gently correcting you with just a look. And we don't really have that. You either say absolutely nothing or you crash out about your almond milk or whatever. And we need to find a middle ground. Not to be a centrist. and before we get into all this, I wanna briefly state that obviously the pandemic and these damn phones are major factors in all this, but we're not gonna focus on that because I feel like that's pretty obvious. the general impression we're getting is that people are more rude and more standoffish now. I think that has something to do with everyone wearing AirPods. I've definitely been that person who's kind of hard to approach because of the AirPods. ⁓ did you wanna add anything to that before we get into The real discussion. Yeah, no, absolutely. I really love that you mentioned that about the AirPods too, because again, I think when I am in my headphones mode, I am in my own private space and I am tuning out absolutely everything. And I think that's a perfect parallel to kind of where we've been at, right? Yeah. Like we're just shutting out everything because we're exhausted and we're also just like, I don't even care what's going on around me. I'm gonna create my own little world, which I think is what the pandemic forced us to do. Right. It's like we have to create this perfect little word for ourselves because what's going on is so shitty. And I think that kind of leads us into like where we used to be and where we are now and like what's kind of changed. So that's I think what we should go into now. Yeah, there's all this discourse about how there are no third spaces now. And there's plenty of systemic reasons for that. But I think genuinely part of the reason is third spaces are less pleasant to be in. And The the sonic landscape of the AirPod is the third space now. Like now everyone has their own third space, but it's like a bunch of atoms just bouncing up against each other. We're not interacting with each other while we're in that. And you know, it I I do love a walk and a podcast. Like it's great. Like I do love it. I'm not gonna be stopping that anytime soon. And I'm not saying I've never been guilty of any of these things. I've definitely walked out looking crustyana. looking crustyana as fuck. I've definitely like Been a little bit standoffish in an interaction with the barisa in which I'm having a bad mood. Like I've done all this stuff. I'm just saying that I am seeing a widespread increase of it. And obviously, COVID and obviously technology have a lot to do with it. But I feel like that's we would just want to take a different perspective on it. No, absolutely. Like I'm definitely guilty. Like as a chronic overshare, I absolutely am guilty of all this stuff too. I think the biggest problem is not like, hey, we're breaking social values and norms, but we don't even really know what they are. We don't even know when we're breaking them. There's like a consistent lack of awareness. And gosh, there's a word for it. It's like homogeneous, something like that. There's no consistent. Yes, something like that. Thank you, Ella. Thank you for the word. But yeah. Yeah. And there was a time in which there kind of was. That's a nice segue, actually. ⁓ so The United States was founded on individualist ideas. And right before we started recording, you were talking about manifest destiny, which I think you could we could loop that back in later. But ⁓ despite the fact that we were founded on individualistic ideas, which we'll flesh that definition out more later, we used to have a much more collectivist culture up until the mid to late 20th century. So this writer and journalist David Hoffman did a series about social mores in the 1950s. And he compiled all these books and PSAs about etiquette. They had these corny titles like Our Manners Important? Improve your personality. And the PSAs have these cute little goofy skits where people act out common social interactions. And the narrator literally tells the audience how to behave in each scenario. And no one would watch this now, but I feel like we low-key could use that. The narrator concludes this one video I was watching called How to Improve Your Personality. With this statement where he says, Yes, you can get along better when you concentrate on the other person, when you think of helping the other person. Can you do it? So back then there was this idea that the quality of your personality was directly correlated with how you made other people feel. And I think now people would call that being a people pleaser. But people really did understand themselves as interdependent with each other rather than as these unique independent entities that are. Completely different, like snowflakes. And it kind of reminds me of the way that the self is written about in some Eastern spiritual text. Like if you read any book about Buddhism, there's this idea that there isn't really like a firm core self that is completely unique and self-sustaining. It's like you're always kind of in flux, depending on your environment, depending on who you're with, depending on what role you're occupying. And it's a very modern capitalist concept that we have these completely unique self sustaining selves. And I I think that's causing some problems. Something like this PSA would never be taken seriously today. And the parting message kind of contrasts with modern day discourse around small talk and people pleasing. And I've seen all these TikToks of people lamenting the burden of smiling at strangers and making small talk. But all that stuff really does have value. And I think we used to recognize its value more. Yeah. No, I definitely think it's a baby with the bathwater situation. Yeah, the collectivism, I think, was aided by the fact that there were so many stay-at-home moms and they just had the time and disposable income to organize. They really did community organizing. And that's not me trying to say that everyone needs to go back to the home. But the post-war surplus of economic value in the United States was so massive, not for everyone, but for the middle class and up that we had the time and energy and disposable income and resources to start bowling clubs and stuff. There's this book called Bowling Alone about how like in the 20th century, like Americans were involved in so many more like civic activities and social clubs and stuff like that. And that's really gone down. and there was just this huge economic boom after the Second World War that allowed people to have time to start a tennis club and stuff stuff like that. But in the background, as part of the red scare, the United States government was like systematically promoting individualism. President Herbert Hoover, I think in the twenties, he used the term rugged individualism to describe the strategy to defeat communism. So the seeds were being planted for all this. the West actively funded, like, there's this thing called the Congress for Cultural Freedom that marketed personal. unconstrained self-expression. The state was basically systemically starting to plant the seeds for individualism, despite the fact that we had a more collectively minded society. I think that that c ties into the American ideal of like, ⁓ you can have absolutely everything, right? Because like what you were saying, like it's an economic boom. It was this idea that we have unlimited resources. So you can chart your own course and at the end of the day, you will still have enough resources to give back to your community, even after you've charted your own course. Yeah. And that used to genuinely be more true. I mean, there's like a really imperialist undertone to that whole idea, but that this was back when we really were top dog. Like this was America at its geopolitical prime, which is not to say that there wasn't a ton of racism and misogyny and oppression going on beneath the surface, but I'm just talking on like a cultural capital level. Like the only way was up, basically. A perfect example of the idea of self-exploration, self-actualization of individuals. How it took root in the 60s. Because like we were right, like we had all this stuff, but there was so much under the surface. There was misogyny, there was war, the civil rights movement was just beginning because of all the rampant racism. We saw we had all these resources, but we could see all the problems, right? And this is when the baby boomer generation were rebelling against the conformity of the 50s. We have all this, like we're focusing on countercultural ideas and individualism, right? Like, don't be a part of this well-mannered, like Christian majority and choose something a little bit different, right? Yeah. And this is where I get walk on the wild side, baby. Exactly. Exactly. And that's where Maslow really started to become a big guy, right? The human potential movement in the 60s, right? The human potential movement arose out of the 60s counterculture and it introduced people to the idea that there was this extraordinary untapped potential that lied dormant within each person. Who I mentioned before, Maslow, that is Maslow of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And Carl Rogers, which you may know from a lot of humanism and the shadow self, they rejected the pathology-driven frameworks of psychology and embraced self-exploration and self-love. Up until then, the Freudian psychoanalytic system, which is, I mean, you know I love Freud, but is very focused on pathology. It is very like accusatory. ⁓ it is very critical of the patient at times and doesn't really focus on growth. And they were countering that whole like Victorian model of understanding the human mind and the therapeutic process by saying, What if you could actually surpass the the limits of your life or the decorum and the morality that's been imposed upon you as well? The boomers spearheaded the sexual revolution. They were the ones protesting at against the Vietnam War. They were the ones spearheading the civil rights movement. And I also think just seeing the atrocities of the Vietnam War, seeing the police response to civil rights protesters, for example, really kind of broke the idea of America's exceptionalism to a lot of people and America's like inherent moral superiority, which naturally leads to questioning the rules and mores of a society that is not what it says it it is, I guess. So The kind of meta-narrative of the human potential movement as excessively optimistic as it was at times was that the development of a one's own potential would make them more likely to help others and inspire others to do the same to develop their potential. And that wouldn't result in some collective vibrational shift, basically. This collective increase in creativity, happiness, fulfillment across society at large. It's like I said, very idealistic, but at least there's this idea that. The fundamental fabric of society will improve if we all look inward and understand what we truly want out of life. And nowadays I hear the same language in like modern therapy speak. You you can't pour from an empty cup, like help yourself first. But it doesn't even really seem to pretend to be about a larger collective improvement in the quality of life. It just seems to be about self-gratification. It feels kind of masturbatory. The human potential movement for the good things that it did. It also laid the groundwork for the explosion of the self help movement. And I think that too is driving the lack of regard that people have for others in public and in online spaces now. Ooh, I'm so excited to talk about this more because you know that I'm much more individualistic than you are, because when I think of Carl Rogelows and Maslow and the self help movement, I get really excited to think about that because I I'm assuming Don't quote me, but ⁓ what I see when I think about the sixties is these people that sell, hey, we have so many resources, but we are confining it to very a very specific subsection of people and a very specific way of life. Let's expand past that. And it does get to a point where it becomes a little bit focused on self-gratification because if you look at the sixties, there was a lot. Hedonism. A lot of self-gratification. There was a lot of self-gratification. But there was also a lot of okay, like how do we help our fellow man? Right. There did it and that that did start that did rise out of the original individualist movement because it happened because they were trying to fright like oppressive systems. I mean, has individualism gone too far? Absolutely. But honestly, we're gonna have to define that before we start talking about everything with individuals. No, I like the human potential stuff. I mean, I do kinda play around with those if I wanted to already have it, manifestation concepts. I do like that positive thinking stuff, but I think that it very quickly bled into like an epidemic of narcissism. Honestly, a lot of those hippie baby boomers ended up kind of selling out from their ideas. But I I do look at the sixties very nostalgically, especially as As an artist, I I dream about like 60s New York all the time. I love looking at the pictures of the girls in their mini skirts and stuff. It was cool. I think the Black Panthers are sick. There were great, amazing things about it. There was so much good art out of that period of time, but it it seems to have gone awry. ⁓ and that's where I guess we'll get into individualism. How would you define individualism? So I think it's basically a philosophy that prioritizes. the qualities of an individual over the collective. And this can be moral worth, your autonomy, your independence. This is more important than collective goals. It's about self-reliance, having personal freedom, and pursuing whatever is is individually important to you, right? And this is usually a lot of like limited government, limited institutional interference. I don't want to say libertarianism, but it's a little bit of libertarianism, right? It basically started out of the Enlightenment, right? Because back in the day before the Enlightenment, it was really a lot more about the church and the influence the church had, right? So human beings were just subjects to like the church, to their kings. And John Locke was really a big in that he said that individuals have liberty and you don't own anybody, right? But Individualism, and you know we've talked about this a lot too, it tends to be really associated with high income, really secular places, right? With the exception of like maybe the more rural south, right? More individualist countries tend to have more resources. And that makes sense too, because if you have enough resources, you don't need the collective to survive as easily, right? So, like places like the United States, places like Switzerland, right? In a lot of loneliness studies, places that are highly individualistic, they store the highest. Especially in men. And that's a whole other thing. Yes. A twenty twenty-one study, I believe, that we looked at found basically all the loneliest countries are individualistic, capitalist countries. ⁓ collectivism is a social, cultural, political philosophy that prioritizes the goals and the well-being and the cohesion of the group over individual desires. So it emphasizes interdependence. rather than independence, shared responsibility, and group consensus instead of personal identity or achievement. So rather than thinking of yourself as an individual atom in a sea of other individual atoms, people in collectivist cultures tend to define themselves through their social networks and familial or like tribal ties. Because in collectivism, the core unit of society is not the individual and it's not even the nuclear family, it's the group. and While people in in collectivist cultures they do report lower rates of social isolation and anxiety, they're also given a lot less freedom to express themselves or divert from the group. I wanted to add collectivist cultures place a way larger premium on shame, which as we know is a reaction to or an anticipated reaction to judgment, while individualist cultures are more predicated on guilt, which is an internal experience. And there's this amazing book called Chrysanthemum and the Sword that came out. I think in the forties and it was like an anthropological study of Imperial Japan and it creates this dichotomy between shame cultures and guilt cultures. And I would say that the United States is very much a guilt culture. Would you would you agree with that? Not really a shame culture. Absolutely. I see that so often just being a therapist too. People are always struggling with guilt. But if they come from like more traditional cultures, they struggle with shame. And that's the whole individual versus collective. Like, Do you wanna feel bad because of who you are and who how you think of yourself? Or do you want to feel bad because you don't fit in with the group? Right. And I think that's like the You're gonna feel bad regardless. Yeah, you are gonna feel bad regardless, right? But you're also gonna benefit regardless. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We kinda have different views on individualism versus collectivism. You know, we've talked about this, and I act like I'm an individualist because I'm a social worker, and that is really such a big part of person-centered therapy. Like I will say it every time I have anyone in my group my under my my clients. If I'm working with somebody, I am not a guru, I am not a shaman, I am not your priest. It is your life and you get to decide what to do with it. Right. Like, and personally, I'm very nihilistic, right? I think that. All of the ideas within collectivism are mostly arbitrary and a way to maintain social control, right? And that social control has led to oppression in a lot of collectivist cultures because it's also no secret that these collectivist cultures they have higher levels of homophobia, higher levels of racism. There's much more intense like judgment and punishment, right? Like there are still countries in the world where you can get executed for homosexual activity, right? Yeah. There is a There's a member in a K-pop group last year who got caught smoking weed and she was publicly shamed to the point where like her family wouldn't speak to her and the media was like, we are disowning her. It was insane. I I'm not a proponent of that, obviously. Yeah, but that's the thing too. Like that's one of the that's one of the negatives of collectivism. It's really easy to talk about the negatives when we're steeped in an individualist culture, which is very like American, right? Like I was saying earlier about Manifest Destiny, it was this idea that you just go out and you chart your own course. But and it was, of course, bullshit because individualism is very naive in a very different way than collectivism is. It's assuming unlimited resources and it's assuming that you are not going to be influenced by your environment, which I think is very dumb. Yeah, or that your pursuit of these resources will not impose on other people's resources, which it always exactly. Exactly. Or you will not be affected by that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I wouldn't say I'm an individualist or a collectivist. I have a lot of sympathies toward collectivism and I'm a democratic socialist, which is basically a collectivist ideology. We don't need to get into whole like splitting of hairs with that. But basically, I think that if healthcare Housing education was not privatized. And we had way more public investment and stronger regulation of private markets. And society would be less individualistic. I think the desperation of our lack of a social safety net in this super capitalist stage of the United States that we've reached is making people more selfish. Everyone kind of feels like it's Black Friday because everyone knows, ⁓ I'm two Miss Paychecks away from losing my car. So there's that. ⁓ And to start, I I am an amateur artist. I don't take for granted the fact that I get to express my unique experience and my selfhood and my art. I cherish my individuality. I cherish the freedom I have to cultivate my individuality, but I am very like weary of thinking too much about myself and other people thinking too much about themselves. And I think it's a major problem that isn't discussed enough. And I do think that capitalism plus individualism equals widespread narcissism. ⁓ the other thing I wanted to say about the the aesthetics of it all that you kind of brought up earlier. I declared personal jihad against athleisure in 2021. The main reason athleisure and decorum and all this stuff bothers me is not because I want to return to a conformist Christian society where we all dress up for church on Sunday. I'm not asking for that at all. I just really love And care about beauty, and I want things to feel like they have meaning. There's such a weightlessness to living in this secularized consumer culture where everything from love to friendship is presented as a just this product for self-gratification, and it really strips it of meaning. And there isn't this larger meta-narrative that for all of its faults, religion did give us. I think secularization has been a positive development many ways, but secularization plus unfettered super capitalism. just makes for this very empty, atomizing culture. That's why athleisure to me symbolizes something more than just athleisure. It symbolizes this kind of collective bargain we made as a society to choose convenience over everything, basically. ⁓ and that and that makes a lot of sense, especially knowing you too. Like for me being so nihilistic, I think about like when I see that emptiness, I think of like a level of joy to it because I'm like, wow, like people really are able to choose their own path. But I do agree in that we're losing a lot of the beauty of our collective spaces, which does make me sad to see. Yeah. Right. Individualism only works if you have enough resources because it's like you chart your own course and if you have extra, give back to the collective. And that's the difference. Collective is like you give to the community and whatever's left goes to you versus individuals. Like you give to yourself, whatever comes left comes to the goes to the community. Right. I think what we're experiencing now is a very high levels of like individualist fatigue because we have beaten this horse as far as it can go. Right. Not just with our like thoughts, but like what you were saying with capitalism too. We've pushed individualism with the economy so hard that we're all exhausted and burnt out. Like I would love to hear you kind of say more about that. Well, I would say that capitalism is the economic doctrine of the individual because it does away with limitations on how much money you can make, how much you can build. There would be no Elon Musk without capitalism, is my point. Capitalism creates false scarcity. My last job was in community mental health. So you're working with people who are borderline homeless or homeless and there's never enough money to do literally anything. And yet we're seeing Elon Musk fund these programs to make robots breakdance or whatever. We do have the resources. We do have the money for this stuff. It's just not being distributed equitably. And the idea of democratic socialism is to force people in power to distribute this so that the collective well-being is raised. ⁓ I'm gonna go on my Freud tangent. There's a Freud book that no one knows about. It was, I think, the second to last book he ever wrote called Civilization and Its Discontents. And he basically described civilization as this ongoing negotiation between the instincts and desires of the individual, and society's demand that he repress these instincts for the sake of a larger group. So civilization naturally is. A regulation of people's behavior. He said that the element of civilization enters on the scene with the first attempt to regulate social relationships. If the attempt were not made, the relationships would be subject to the arbitrary rule of the individual. He wrote this in 1930. He defined the discontent of civilization as the hostility that we all harbor towards society for placing limits on our pursuit of individual desires and urges. Like kids want to scream and kick in public, but their parents need to tell them to quiet. He has this just banger quote that I need to read. It's kind of long, but he says, the liberty of the individual is no gift to civilization. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions. The urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization, or against civilization altogether. A good part of the struggles of mankind center around the single task of finding an expedient accommodation. One that is that will bring happiness between this claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group. And one of the problems that touches the fate of humanity is whether such an accommodation can be reached by means of some particular form of civilization or whether this conflict is irreconcilable. Well, I love that. And one of the things ⁓ gosh. And we'll talk about this in the He was cooking with that. He was. And God, it really just and we'll talk about this in their podcast, like because I have so much to say about like how do we solve the problem of in groups versus out groups? And I look at it and I'm like, can we? We can edit it. But like I love the idea that he's like, I don't think those things are reconcilable, truly. I think we will just have to do like a certain level of shifting throughout the years. Like, do we go towards one side versus the other? Right. Yeah. Like I don't think that we're ever gonna be able to fix that. But I really wanna hear you talk about neoliberalism because of the government systems have been limited. So please tell me all about that. Neoliberalism is something I'm pretty annoying about. I bring it up a lot. But I think people conflate capitalism and neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is an economic doctrine that uses state power to remodel the government, the market, and society itself in the image of the corporation. So these market principles like efficiency and competition bleed into all areas of life because everything should be about increasing efficiency, because that'll supposedly raise the overall GDP, which will supposedly raise the overall quality of life. Whether or not that has panned out, you can be the judge of that. ⁓ there's this Korean philosopher, Byeong Chao Han, BCH Love You Queen, who describes it as a mutant form of capitalism that diverts tax dollars away from social services, such as public education, healthcare, Toward the strengthening of law enforcement, the military, and corporate conglomerates. And it weakens restrictions on corporate political spending. So stuff like the Citizens United Act that allows any individual to dump any amount of money into campaigns. It's beyond the free market. When you talk about liberalism, like 1800s liberalism, that's free market. Whether or not the market was ever really free in the United States is a whole other debate, but Neoliberalism is saying we actually are not going to do free market. The government is going to work with corporations to line both of their pockets. There used to be antitrust laws to prevent this from happening. Like this was a big thing that FDR was on about, basically saying politicians can't get in bed with these corporations and can't accept money from them because that's infringing too much on the political process. And neoliberalism says, no, it's actually slay when when corporations and politicians work together because There's this economic utopia that they're talking about is gonna happen. The reagonomics idea of the more rich we make the rich people, the more money will trickle down to the masses. So basically, neoliberalism is reagonomics. It's let's work with private equity companies. Let's permit tax cuts to be written with input from the very corporations that they're supposed to regulate. Let's privatize everything. The faces of it are Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in, I think, the 80s and 90s of the UK, and maybe even longer than that. Reagan was present in the 80s. And they really agreed on like what to do about the dissolution of the Soviet Union. What are we going to do about Libya? How are we going to reunite Germany? And they brought forth these really profound changes to the international economic order. And they Teamed up to squash communism, social democracy, fascism, all these competing 20th century ideologies. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters and phone calls between them. And their ideas merge into what became known as Reaganomics and Thatcherism. And there were plenty of other factors that led to the development of neoliberalism, but they basically established it as the dominant world order of the 80s. And it's been that way since if you think about policies that weaken labor protections. If you think about the erosion of labor unions, the rollback of pro-worker laws, the destruction of small businesses and local commerce in favor of super conglomerates like Amazon, the steady decline of wages adjusted for inflation. Basically everything that's happened that's made the middle class disappear and made the wealthier class more robots at breakdance. Just gonna say that like this what this makes me think of every time you've talked about it is This kind of false idea that has been sold to people. We're not gonna focus on the average person. We're gonna take away your ability to live, but we're gonna open up the opportunity for you to become one of the super rich and the super wealthy. You see that idea everywhere. Every single YouTube advice video is about like how to manifest wealth in your twenties, like how to become rich, how to be an entrepreneur. And another thing Byeong Chou Han is always on about is neoliberalism has made everyone think that they're millionaire waiting to get rich because it has taken away all these rights and privileges that the average worker used to enjoy and in its place it's just given us this fantasy of being wealthy when I think our treatment as workers should be good enough that we don't need a fantasy. Well, I think that like it's the idea that we're living off imaginary breadcrumbs. Right. Because like this idea that like you somehow closer to a billionaire than you are to being homeless is absolutely ridiculous. It's been bastardized because they're completely taken over by these corporate interests and the ability to advance has completely I I don't want to say it's zero, but like being able to advance in the socioeconomic ladder is pretty much impossible. And that's what's contributing to like this intense burnout that people are experiencing. Yeah. So Nick Hanauer estimated 2020, that the upward redistribution of wealth since the 80s when neoliberalism started has cost middle class American workers $50 trillion. And I don't think I need to explain the affordability crisis. I think we're all feeling it. Like Yeah. It's not that you can't advance, but we are not as socially mobile as we used to be. I think the millennials were the first generation that failed to surpass their parents in wealth and were worse than the millennials, and Jen Alpha is gonna be worse than us. All of us are getting further into debt. It's getting harder and harder to afford basic necessities. And people are losing their faith in institutions like college and marriage and the government and the military. And for good reason. And and I think there's this widespread burnout because these life milestones like homeownership are increasingly out of reach. Did you wanna expand on that? Absolutely. Like I think that that's kind of the reason people liked individualism in the first place. People enjoyed it because there was this idea that if I worked hard enough, I'd be able to surpass my peers. I'd be able to do better than my parents, but that doesn't really exist anymore. People are starting to realize that, ⁓ my God, like what I have been sold was a bill of sale. Like there wasn't there's no ability for me to actually advance. Yeah. And there was some truth behind the idea that. If you worked really hard, you would succeed back in mid-century America. A working class wage could get you a respectable life. You could support a family on a carpenter's salary. And now that's like laughable. I'm not trying to ignore the fact that there's always been people in poverty in the United States, but overall our upward social mobility really has decreased and we we don't own anything. Our generation and most of millennials don't have any assets. And lot of people who are doing well, by the way, are being largely supported by their parents and or in massive generational debt to get there. There's people who on the surface look like they have everything, but they're $120,000 in debt from their graduate education. We did have debt slavery in the way early United States, but it seems like we're almost kind of coming back to that. Yeah. Like I think about this as like the second kind of gilded age. Right? Like this rise of corporation. ⁓ my god, Taylor Swift's wedding, dude. Misgiving Marie Antoinette. Like that to me was very much giving second guild age. No. One thing they also had the benefit of too is people had the ability to kind of move through when they had something to believe in, but people don't believe in God and people don't believe in capitalism. And I think it's contributing to the burnout. I know that's like a very small tangent, but No, I think that's huge. I think because life milestones, like Homeownership and being able to see an end in sight to your career, having real retirement, are becoming so increasingly out of reach. There is this feeling of why dress up for a job that isn't even paying all the bills? Why put my best foot forward at work if I'm going nowhere? Why try at times? And I even feel like that sometimes, even as a really motivated type A person, like I even get this sense of what is this all for? The good thing is I have my religion to. keep me going and stuff, but there's a widespread sense of meaninglessness and just exhaustion at the lack of a meta-narrative for all this. It's like, when is this supposed to get better? When is this supposed to pay off? If we don't believe in the afterlife and if the present life is really so much of a struggle for no reason, why put on the nice clothes to go to brunch or whatever? No, I agree with that completely. And Like this is something I've seen a lot at work too, is like this idea like don't work too hard at work because if you do, they're just gonna put more on you. Like the more that like if you actually get put your best foot forward, if you if you become too reliable, people will like take advantage of you. And that's an idea that's always existed, right? But I feel like with na Now it's like, okay, well, you have to have enough energy for your side hustle. You have to have enough energy for your family. You have to have all this energy to do so many different things because you can't just focus on one thing that doesn't exist anymore. Like everything we talk about is like work-life balance, work-life balance. And as a therapist, absolutely work-life balance is huge. A balanced life is huge. But part of the reason we're talking about balance so much is because it is impossible to sustain yourself by. actually putting your energy into an institution. Like you just like back in the day you worked a 12 hour shift, absolutely awful, but it paid your bills. You had a wife at home to take care of you. Well paid your bills and more it supported a family. Yeah. And people don't want to just pay bills. Like they want to own something and they want to be able to support a family andor like or you know have disposable income to have fun or whatever. We're all living to just pay bills, it feels like. And that's not really living. Yeah. It's so funny what too when you say that too, like my brain just freezes for a second because the idea of actual ownership feels so foreign to me. Like I'm just trekking along just to exist. And I love what I do and I'm lucky to love what I do. But if you don't actually give a shit what you do, like what is the point of anything? Decorum like the last bit of energy you got, right? Like in our individualist culture. In individualism, you give to yourself and whatever you have left, it goes to decorum. And you know what? We don't have anything left. We're not living in a collectivist culture. Like I think if we America was more collectivist, it's like best foot forward, but you treat your f like you treat the people closest to you poorly, but you but like you appear good for social graces. That's what that makes me think of too. Wait, what do you mean? Like I think about the fifties, right? When I think about like ⁓ it's like, ⁓ men used to not talk about their emotions and I'm like, Well, they didn't talk about it in public, but then when they got home, they'd submit their wife. Yeah. But I think that has a lot more to do with patriarchal values changing and stuff. That's true. But what I mean is like I think in collectivist cultures, like you give everything to the collective, but for the individual, you don't have anything left. And the people who are closest to you are an extension of you, right? Versus like we're now in an individual culture. Why? So in a collectivist culture, decorum might still be really strong. But here we're individualist. So we give to ourselves and then whatever we have left, we give to the rest of society. And it's contributing to this burnout too, because we just don't have anything left to actually put our best foot forward anywhere. Yeah. Like ain't nobody got time to put a cake inside jello like they used to. Like we just I can't even conceive of doing that. And this is partly because we're both in our twenties and I would like to think we over time will accumulate more wealth and figure things out. But like the idea of like hosting a dinner party is so crazy to me. I'm like, I have to buy all these ingredients and I have to pay for all this stuff. Like, and that used to be normal. Like our our parents at our age like had kids and were going to their neighbors' house for dinner parties. And I don't actually envy that lifestyle, but it it does say something about the lack of bandwidth that people have now, which I also think has a lot to do with the overstimulation of the internet. and we're both kind of skirting around the internet concept right now because it's like a whole other topic. But Byeong Zhou Hon has another great book called The Burnout Society. He's describing American culture. He's talking about the crisis of burnout that's been happening, I think, since like 2018 or something is when he cited it. But he was talking about like how we're working more hours for less money. People have less and less PTO. People don't have like paid vacation time like they have in Europe, structural economic stuff. But then he's also attributing this crisis of burnout to an excessive positivity in American culture despite all of this. There's this huge premium placed on building your brand and believing in yourself and like starting a business and having side hustles and side ventures and moving cities and meeting new people. And there's all this encouragement to like optimize yourself and your time on earth. And it's not really gelling with the material reality of people's everyday lives, which is that they have less time to do all this stuff. Like we're working more hours than our grandparents did and we're still being told to start a h side hustle and to be happy about it. The language and the messaging is always so optimistic and it doesn't really acknowledge the very real time and systemic barriers to this endless expansion of yourself as a product, as an entrepreneur, as like a consumer. Does that make sense? ⁓ it absolutely does. Like And I think that I talk a lot about like toxic posity in Yeah, that's kind of what he's saying. Yeah. Like, and I think that like something that you said earlier that's a little bit less about toxic positivity, but about like what we were kind of taught from our grandparents. I think a lot about how if w because like we're all so exhausted, we don't even have we're not even remembering the knowledge. Cause when you think about dinner parties, like I love a good dinner party, but like and when you and because I love a good dinner party, I know to bring Something to somebody's house if they're hosting. We're losing that knowledge. We are losing the information from our elders. And it's being replaced with the toxic positivity internet talk. We're not learning from our elders anymore. We are learning from the internet. And that's such a big part of burnout because you talk about toxic positives, and I think a little bit of just the pure outrage culture, stimulation culture. It's just this mess of absolute. lights and colors and bullshit everywhere. And it's like Deep. Lights and colors and bullshit. I like that. Yeah. Everything feels like Times Square. It's so over stimulating. Just like the sheer amount of apps and passwords you have to have to like exist in society today. I had to download five different apps to start my job at a beer garden. Are you for real? Yeah. I I I've had to make so many emails for like so much bullshit. And at the end of the day, I'm not even getting paid enough to support myself despite working full time. And this is hopefully just like an interim job between when I go back into social work, which I think will happen soon. But going back to the service industry really like kind of slapped me with the lack of decorum just from observing customers and slapped me with the with the reality, which I already knew, but it it like really Force me to look at it like hard work does not necessarily e equate to more success, grandpa. That whole idea is like, I think kind of a way to invalidate the working poor. Like like the poorest people I know have three jobs. And that was already problematic. And it's becoming even more problematic because that's becoming everyone now. Yeah. That's the middle class now. The middle class is the working poor. Yeah. This is kind of making it worse too, because it's like grandpa, like, you know, you don't just need to work hard. Like, we're not really listening to our elders because their world doesn't gel with our world. And we're replacing that with all of this information that's actually not helping us at all. Like because it's too disjointed. It's because everyone on the internet has their own opinion, it's like individual ism fatigue times a thousand. It's like, do whatever you want. Live whatever you want. And there's some benefits to that. Like we've gotten to be able to highlight like subcultures and communities that have been traditionally oppressed for a very long time. And that's a beautiful thing. But at the same time, we don't get old information from our families anymore. And the internet thrives off of outrage culture and newness. So we're gonna lose all those traditions that we've always the ball knowledge, dude. It's so sad. It is, and like. I know this is something we were talking about too, but like when I think of individualism fatigue, that's what I think of. I think of like we are genuinely so exhausted and we've lost our communities. And I think I like to think about it like slightly politically, nothing too crazy, but just like I think about like the the left too. And I think about how we find culture through like sub-communities. We're putting more identify Fires on things like mental health. We're exploring different political views. We're exploring queerness. We're exploring all these different facets of ourselves and we're using that to find community. But on the right, we're actually experiencing this massive like shift back towards traditional values, right? It's like, let's just go back to the way we were before. And we're both kind of exhausted by this idea that it's all about the self because we want community and we threw it out. Because community isn't just something you can find. It's honed over generations and you have to have the skills to find it again. Yeah. Yeah. I really agree with that. And I I think we didn't even just intentionally throw it out. I think the demands of people having to move for their job ⁓ over the past 60 to 70 years have a lot to do with it too. People used to just stay wherever their family was. Like they would just stay around the place where they grew up. Partly for the purpose of childcare. And that all changed when a lot of people were being asked to move for work as like the internet made people more interconnected and people in Austin could do business with people in Oregon. and that was, I think, kind of an inevitable part of acceleration. But as far as it relates to decorum, when you're surrounded by people who are your family and friends, you were Gonna act more in line because you're being perceived by people who to whom it actually matters. And now you're encouraged to move to a big city and like start a new life and find your community. But it can sometimes really feel like you're just an atom floating in this like sea of other atoms. And for that reason, you're not really accountable to other people because no one knows who you are. You're just a drop in a pool. So you can act however you want to at Cracker Barrel because you don't know anyone at Cracker Barrel. Like, You know what I'm saying? I don't necessarily desire the encroaching like surveillance of like an extended family in my life all the time. I don't want that either. But there is something to be said about the influence of others kind of guiding you toward better decorum and us having lost that because people don't live near their families anymore. Yeah. And they don't know how to act because they don't listen to their families, because their c families are disconnected from the reality of the situation. No one knows. No one knows how to actually live a good life. No one knows how to actually succeed in our society. Like we're all a little scared and miserable and discontent. And that's why that's why I care about decorum. Like for a lot of these things, like they feel like drops in the bucket. But just the fact that we don't have any idea how to really behave with each other and really connect with each other, that makes me sad. And I think it should make all of us sad. Yeah. I mean, just quorum is ascribing meaning to something that maybe is meaningless, like, well, I'm gonna wear this certain outfit to go get dinner. Like maybe it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but you're deciding that it does matter. That's why I like it. That's the difference between nihilism, which is nothing matters, and existentialism, which is nothing matters, but I can decide that it matters for XYZ reason. And I feel like you say you're nihilist, but I think you're really talking about existentialism, like Abert Camus type shit. Which is nothing matters and it's that's awesome. And I and I am Catholic, but I also do subscribe to that idea to some degree. It do not matter. That's why it's fun. No, and I and I like that too. I just think that we all need to collectively have a reason to care. I think we're getting there. I just think that we don't know where to come back and connect again, which is why there's been this massive divergence, right? Like you have very different spheres of ideas or how to speak. collectively solve like the crisis of people not connecting with each other. The lack of a third space, the lack of community. And then there's all these people who want to, you know, just drive people further apart for the sake of views, the internet, outrage culture. But I think in general, there is a general level of exhaustion, which does give me some hope at least. But yeah. Yeah. I am quite critical of the right and their like fake trad thing that they're doing, which I find troubling. ⁓ but at least they're telling people this is how you return to meaning and like live a good life. Whereas I feel like the left, which is where I find myself, isn't really telling people what does a good life look like? What does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to be a family member? What am I seeing in the news about being a family member? Cut off your family. Dating advice, so much of it is just like dump him. Everything is about like you just need to embrace your singleness and like learn about yourself. And I don't really think that's ever going to satisfy people. I think we need to find some secret third thing that I don't have the answer for. Yeah. When I think of how the values that are promoted, I think of like not just individualism, like, okay, how do we be inclusive? How do we be non-judgmental? How do we stay true to ourselves and our values? Right. And that is that is individualistic. And it is those are the things that I like about being a kind of a part of the left. But I do feel like I have a hard time connecting with other people, especially those people who have different values than me, because I'm like, I don't feel like there's a bridge to connect me with the people that I care about too, if that makes sense. There's not like a general sense of like, hey, let's all like connect because we're all one people in a society. There's a lot of like, ⁓ well, like just fuck those people if they don't agree with you, if that makes sense. Which is an individualistic way of thinking. And like that's what the market. I mean, this sounds a little conspiratorial, but I do feel. feel that the market wants us to be isolated and angry. Like I think like there's a lot of systemic ways in which the male loneliness epidemic, for example, is being perpetuated. It's not just people are on their phones too much. There are systemic reasons why, why, for example, like your algorithm is showing you things that make you want to throw your phone at the wall and scream at your neighbor. It doesn't have to show you that. There's intentional reasons for all this stuff. So I mean We used to have in person things like church and like the schools that all of our kids would go to that would f force people to interact with each other, and we don't have that now. A lot of like community building is happening online and through fandom, which can be heartwarming and can get kind of out of control, as we've seen. but even when I look at like crazy Swifties, I'm like, you know, they're looking for community. Like they're at least they're putting their they're putting themselves out there. They're trying to talk to people and bond over shared interests, even if their their fervor for it is kind of like odd or off-putting, like they are reaching for that and like at least they recognize that that that's a need. Instead of being under this illusion that like I don't need anyone and I'm just gonna build my empire or whatever that shit is. Yeah. No, I agree, girl. Honestly, I think that so much of it comes from just the fact that we are not forced to be in person with each other anymore. Yeah. And I wanna say everything is so insane geopolitically right now. And we are, because of climate change and potential nuclear war, people are really looking at the end of the world. Like it it seems that we've run out of future. Like so I understand why people are acting up. I'm not trying to come at this in like a super judgmental angle. I am gonna judge you for putting your dogs out on my restaurant table because You should. That's out of pocket. But I do understand that we all are facing like unprecedented times right now. And I get why people are showing up to brunch looking a little crazy. Okay. ⁓ well, thank you for listening to Cover Lily Podcast. I'm so excited for this project. Thank you guys for giving us your ears and your time. We really appreciate it in this in ye old burnout attention economy robot nightmare that we're living in. ⁓ thank you for listening and we will see you soon.