 social or citizen and saving lives. One of these things, those hilarious one-liners where it's like, you know, I never thought I'd be saying this, but, you know, in here we are, right, in sort of here we are, right? We got people with their bios on Twitter that have like the needle emoji, the mask emoji, the black fist emoji, the rainbow emoji. It's like, okay, so that's kind of first time dealing with it. Yeah, so people want to signal that they follow what is virtuous, what their peer group considers virtuous, what their community considers virtuous, what their social better is considered virtuous. That's an adaptive thing. Animal signal, people signal, it's an adaptive thing. It usually, people do it because it works. Describe it, not just. Yeah, it has nothing to do with nihilism, right? There's nothing nihilistic about virtue signaling. Are animals being nihilistic when they send signals? Right, women send signals when they want you to approach them. Women send signals when they want you to kiss them. Is that nihilistic? I believe in love. I watched Netflix recently, I came from China to find myself, but what exactly the name was? I think it's like something like the luckiest girl or something, it's like a me look, but it just came out, so I just watched it recently. And it was, it's essentially kind of an awful fever dream. It's about this girl who was raped by rich, frat guys, you know, a strange kind of blurry, alcohol-affused thing, and then also school shooters are involved, so she gets together with the misfits of the school shooters, obviously you can kiss them a bit fully, by these good-looking, chads-like, powerful masculinity type men who deny raping her until the end, but then she... Okay, and somehow Alex Casciuta survived watching this movie, right? She's okay, and I suspect pretty much everyone else who watches this movie, however depraved or depressing or left-wing or work this movie is, I suspect most people will be okay after they watch this. I suspect that life will go on for them. Here's Richard Ananya. Man needs sex and violence, not top-down meaning. A very provocative essay, like usual, from Richard Ananya, so he likes to troll. So he says, I'm extremely happy about how things have turned out. I never felt more alive than I did as a teenager and young adult, till I was around 16 or so, I would get into fistfights, right? So, yeah, fighting, often I'll provide meaning, and you don't have to just fight physically. I would fight with words. Men like to compete. So I grew up as some of the adventurers, they did everything they could to try to discourage fighting, to discourage competing, but I love to compete. It's part of having high levels of testosterone. So, yeah, competition makes people feel alive, particularly men. So, Richard Ananya would regularly get into fistfights. I avoid it because fistfights can escalate and they can do permanent damage, just not worth it. So, Richard says, today I'm fulfilling personal life, I'm a successful career, I still find myself trying to recapture some of the excitement I felt while growing up. I do this in part by trolling, or I just express my opinions honestly, which often amounts to the same thing. So getting people mad, my views on euthanasia or the impact of women on academia adds a thrill to my life, right? It's mostly saddened for smiling, but I still lack the excitement I felt as a teenager. So, I suspect Richard Ananya is not married with kids. If he was married with kids, he'd have all the excitement that he needs. So these thrill seekers, right, need to settle down and have kids. Okay, so he wants a life full of the realistic possibility of violence. Okay, that's stupid, right? You don't really want a life full of the realistic possibility of violence. You want an exciting life, which most people at your age would get through being married and having kids. And you want a sex with new people, not marriage. Okay, that's exciting, but it's gonna be increasingly difficult as you age. And then some orientations, it's a lot easier to get laid than other orientations. But after the first few decades, casual sex has got a pole mate. Loses its excitement. I rely on Twitter followers for rides to and from the airport. I literally recently suggested I take up jujitsu. Thought about all this reading Ross Douthat's recent article, Hootie and the Blowfish and the End of History. It's not Joy at the End of Humanity, writes Douthat exactly that defines the Hootie, DMB, Counting Crows, Aesthetic, but maybe it's what you might call a sense of ordinary life vices. It's a key stabilizing sentiment that you can have a rich human experience full of joys and sorrows without the extreme pre-modern or 20th centuries stuff. War and God and Utopia and all the rest without racial division too, the multiracial makeup that Dave Matthews ban and Hootie and the Blowfish is important. That you can be a fulfilled human being just through the highs and lows of normal seeming suburban American life and tropes of early adult male heterosexual experience like the yearning to be famous or the awesome girl who lets you down or hanging out with your friends and feeling a bit sorry for yourself. All sufficient is grist the strong feelings that make up an interesting life that when these feelings get you down you can be depressed in a way that's personal rather than existential. That's just about you other than about everything that's wrong with your life under late capitalism. So Richard Inani says, yeah, this speaks to me. Might have added that in the 1980s and 90s a common trope to movies, film would be a young boy getting beaten up by a bully. And the point was, he was supposed to learn how to fight back even if he didn't win, he'd respect himself and others would respect him for overcoming his fear. And Richard says, I think a good cultural script is sex and violence when you're young and then marriage and children went older. Yeah, that is a pretty good script. For most people, not much has changed since the 1990s. For most people, ordinary life is enough. Now, it's not enough for Alex Koshuta and this Athenian bloke on the podcast. But for most people, yeah, ordinary life isn't enough despite what you've heard from woke lunatics or new right types. Americans are not drowning in existential despair. There's barely any change in people's happiness levels from the 1990s. So for all the political and social development since the 1950s, you don't have much of a change in happiness levels not until masks and lockdowns. Yeah, that reduced people's happiness levels. But for most people, ordinary life isn't enough. So there's not much that elites can do to take away people's happiness unless they shut down ordinary life. Normal people are resilient and mental health indicators are rebounding as pandemic restrictions are relaxed. Now, of course, individuals and societies who have problems still have deaths of despair and deaths of exuberance killing a lot of people. They have an increased availability of pain medication which can be abused, opiates feel great. Some people can't control themselves. Social media is not being great for young girls but overall there's little to justify the doom and gloom has become a staple of American art and intellectual life over the last two decades including much of the content of Alex Cachuda's podcast. Even the recent rates of depression among teens and young adults appear to be overblown. Things don't really look so bad. So why are our intellectuals talking in such a negative way? Why are intellectuals so invested in trying to tell us how to live our lives? You know, what's wrong with us? How we need their top-down meaning? We need their top-down solutions? Life is pretty good. It's not really empirical evidence that life sucks for most people. That hasn't been much changed in how happy Americans are. We do see decline in trust in institutions. We see more negativity about government. More distrust of the power centers. Why does this have to be a crisis in and of itself? Politics really doesn't play that big of a role in most Americans' lives. They're not heading into civil war. If you feel incredibly distressed, it's probably not because of the reality of America or of Australia. So why are intellectuals so miserable? Why is there so much negativity about American life and institutions? So it's got a quote here from Matthew Iglesias about founding Vox. Most of the media trends, they deplore direct consequences of Facebook's influence over journalism in the mid-2010s. Had a huge shift in media sensibility. Hardcore identity politics. Simplistic socialism performed incredibly well on Facebook and on social media. So that got incentivized. So it doesn't mean the journalist started pretending to be so left-wing to get clicks. But people found that writing on certain topics got the most traffic. And early career journalists with authentic left-wing views were outperforming their colleagues. So you ended up with this whole cohort of discourse structured around, is Bernie Sanders perfect in every way? Or is it problematic to vote for a white man? That was the only possible lens for examining American politics and society. So the news media has a downstream effect on the rest of culture, but it mainly has an effect on people in the industry. People understand that the news isn't real. People didn't depend on Donald Trump to inform them that the news wasn't reality. People were able to figure it out for themselves. You beauty. So your ordinary life is enough. Just see Sydney Opera House set off against the sunset. So you're all into the circular key. So Australia is an incredibly secular country. Still the lucky country. Now there are some people who really do seem to need religion in their life, people like me. Other people seem to be getting along just fine. So the news media has taken a tremendous negative turn, but it's having a much bigger impact on intellectuals than on society as a whole. Most people pay relatively little attention to the world of ideas. So our elites are highly pessimistic. Americans, they're pretty happy. The elites want to propose all sorts of top-down solutions for Americans' misery, but the Americans don't need their top-down solutions. Right, our institutions have definitely become more feminine. So that's changing the kind of man who can succeed in our institutions. Right, Norman Mailer, the novelist would routinely get into fistfights, right? That's not gonna work today. Once he got into a fistfight, when a young man told him, his dog looked gay. So now we have more sanitized workplaces. Sexual harassment laws become less about equality between men and women. For say, instead focusing on seeing sex as a demonic force has to be purged from working life. So now we need the kind of man who can check his heterosexuality at the door. It's probably gonna be physiologically different from the one who can't. And HR has the strongest support of more established institutions. They're increasing female representation along with civil rights law means we're not only getting more women, we're also getting more feminized men. So these type of individuals would tend to be higher on neuroticism, which will shape how they perceive and interpret the world. So the 1990s is a unique moment in history and that a lot of ideas bad for both mental health and social functioning were clearly discredited, such as communism and egalitarianism. It's also pretty clear that liberals are consistently less happy than conservatives. So we have higher rates of depression in young people alongside the great awakening of the past 10 years. So it's not like intellectuals in the 1990s became inspired by the magic of free markets. The way their predecessors had fallen in love with central planning, but they were humbled. They had less of a prominent role to play in shaping narratives around American life. So in the 1990s, you had the demoralization of socialists and communists and black slaters that allowed more space for ideas that had been considered erratical before. And they now regain status. So this is the era of the bell curve, getting a positive review in the New York Times along with Jay Philippe Rushton. Now to move away from this optimism, all that was needed was the passage of time. Now in the 1990s, we managed to crush crime rates by putting bad people in prison for a long time. So do individuals need religion? Does society need religion? We've got left-wing institutions to become woke. Conservatives agree with the left-wing premise that there is something terribly wrong with modern society. They point to different causes. So masses need something deeper and more important than what they have. That's what both conservatives and lefties say. Charles Murray recently declared that religion is indispensable for moral society. Now, I don't think that Charles Murray is actually a religious believer. But in the long tradition of secular conservatism, Charles Murray thinks that religion is a social good regardless of any particular faith and whether it is true. So do individuals need religion to live happy, fulfilling lives? Does society need religion to function well? And Richard Ananya concludes, no. He looks at the statistics, looks at measures of religiosity and life satisfaction and finds a pretty weak relationship.