It stems largely from technology eliminating the need to directly depend on each other and increasing geographic mobility that tends to disintegrate community bonds. It's also in how technology has been used to communicate, both in reducing in-person experiences and in how the mass media can influence populations. It also provides alternative entertainment compared to previous entertainment which usually included other people.
You put words onto page with which given a thousand I could not have equaled. We will all follow, in time.
"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlors, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colors and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting.
Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I'm given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too."
A lot of the same for me, down to reading silly non-fiction books just to read something as a child. This has become nearly vestigial as I've gotten older.
Books like Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Brave New World, 1984, Animal House, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea, etc. made much more sense to me than any of the Judy Bloom style books that are so prevalent. The last of those books I enjoyed was "How to Eat Fried Worms," and then, that only resonated with me because we were forced to participate in a school book dressup day and I realized I could coat crunchy chinese noodles with chocolate and bring them to class.
I was a kid of the 80s and 90s. I grew up outside. I played rough and got hurt and then played rough again. I explored. My parents existed to feed me, clothe me, and yell at me for not achieving enough. Any book depicting a parent who sat their child down to give them sage advice about life was completely foreign to my experience.
I am not sure if you've already experienced-and-disliked his work, but may I recommend Neal Stephenson? I have always appreciated his style of prose, and the way he describes characters. He writes in a nerdy way that I can't quite explain, and I always trust that he will weave separate-seeming narratives together in a way that is satisfying (even if I am often dissatisfied at the _endings_ of his books).
Everyone points to Snow Crash (which I liked too), but recently I also really enjoyed REAMDE and the first half of Termination Shock (I haven't finished it yet). I love the way he describes things. I'd like to say that I could read + enjoy anything he writes on any subject, but for some reason I didn't like his Baroque Cycle books (but don't understand why not).
Also big recommendation for Terry Pratchett. The books all seem silly on the surface but usually have some incisive commentary on wider social issues, as well as being filled with references and humor, subtle and un-subtle. Bonus, they are also a lot shorter than Stephenson's. ;)
> I was a kid of the 80s and 90s. I grew up outside. I played rough and got hurt and then played rough again. I explored. My parents existed to feed me, clothe me, and yell at me for not achieving enough. Any book depicting a parent who sat their child down to give them sage advice about life was completely foreign to my experience.
You might like Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" [0]. The prose style is idiosyncratic, but also arguably his most accessible. It's about a 16 year old crossing over into Mexico and with little else but the clothes on his back and love for horses, but not "juvenile" --- if anything the author elevates the teen's stumbles into love, adventure, and heartbreak, into a grand vision of the American frontier.
It's wide ranging. For example, when I was diagnosed with one of those things that requires a hematologist I told the receptionist jokingly: "I got the spicy diagnosis"
Yea like I've heard everything from "neurospicy" to describe neurodivergences to "spicy autocomplete" to describe GPT. My best shot at a concise usage definition is that it's like an especially flippant way to say "special" or "different" but there are places where that would fall apart
You also sometimes get it having a connotation of sexuality but that actually seems like a holdover of an older (maybe millenial?) idiomatic usage of the word
This is correct. I have an extremely rare leukemia <1 in 100k, and as said above, the only cure is allogenic marrow transplant. To put it bluntly, survival is at best a 2/3 dice roll - and that's if you're diagnosed before 40.
This is not something you're going to want for something as apparently treatable as HIV.
A good friend of mine was cured (knock on wood) of leukemia by CAR-T. She was one of the first people to get it during a clinical trial. She'd been through all the regular chemo, bone marrow transplant, etc as well as 3 other (failed) experimental treatments and was nearly beyond hope. It seems pretty certain that CAR-T saved her life. I went hiking with her not too long ago. Pretty amazing.
Anecdotal, but a former co-worker’s young daughter was just completely cleared of leukemia after several years of treatments that didn’t work followed by CAR-T
Anecdotal but I have epilepsy and my memory has started decreasing since I started having seizures. Even now thoroughly medicated, I'll still have moments where I completely lose my train of thought, and have to rethink how I arrived there.
I’ve wondered if the memory issues are actually side effects of the medication. I spent 6 months on max dosage of one medication and memory was crap and ability to communicate with humans (vs computers for the day job) was greatly diminished. I’m now down to about half the dosage of that medication but we’ve added a small dose of a second medication and I’m remembering more and social interactions aren’t as stressful as they were.
Primarily medication. Fasting has a long (ancient) history as a treatment for epilepsy, the modern revival and investigation of the ketogenic diet specifically relates to certain types drug-resistant childhood epilepsy. The Wikipedia article on the ketogenic diet is quite informative.
not parent but as someone with temporal lobe epilepsy, in addition to what parent describes, difficulty recalling words is definitely something i experience. Probably the most annoying thing that i have had to learn to deal with is people trying to fill in or guess what word i am trying to say while i pause. The hippocampus is located in the temporal lobe and is heavily involved in the processing and storage of short-term memory as well as retrieval of long-term memory, so it makes sense that if the hippocampus is a bit fried from seizures it would manifest as memory-related cognitive issues.
The only reason they could make all those tanks in the first place was because of American trucks.