Humanity Needs to Get Offline
Log on for some things. Stay off for most things
As await a coming financial asteroid, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni offers brain advice:
Thanks to cosmetic dermatology, wrinkled and saggy skin are on the run. Courtesy of Ozempic and its kin, love handles are in retreat. Maybe the brain is the new belly — in need of tending, in line for toning, in want of perfection.
I’d make a joke about this unironic proposal that we find a way to neck- or tummy-tuck the brain, but like a lot of things about current American culture, the idea is beyond satire.
Having been off the Internet for a bit (thanks for your patience again, Racket, I’m back to work) it’s been remarkable to peek and see how much existential terror about basic life issues is pouring online. There’s been a steady up-tick in op-eds in search of solutions to aging and death and increasingly fraught interviews with “experts” about what to do about everything from a worldwide decline in fertility rates to disillusionment with the “myth of marriage” to the benefits of “assortative mating.” Human beings are reproducing less, learning less, are more ambivalent about everything from having sex to starting families to pet ownership, and seem to have fewer tools than ever for dealing with big life questions, beyond panic-Googling in search of new products or scientific advice.
The most obvious answer to a long list anxieties is to get offline, but it’s ignored, purposefully:
