Please Don’t Spend Your Life Convincing Yourself That Love Or Joy Is Reserved For The Idealized Version

i hope lee know stays weird and annoying (affectionate) forever

there is something sooo embarrassing about everything i have done and will do

i still have no words

THIS IS CRAZY ENHYPEN 🔥

The "kids are on their damn phones all the time" conversation has changed in an extremely significant way and I'm not sure people realize it. When kids had flip phones, and even in the early days of smartphones, kids were using their phones to text each other. It was part of an active social life. Now they're using their phones more and more to consume content from influencers or other accounts. It's more passive and it's increasingly what people are doing instead of socializing with each other. This applies to adults too, I just keep thinking about high school students.

a few thoughts on the capitalism end-stage and what it means for us

the demise of humanity will not happen because we didn't know better but because we let abnormally rich, people(?) who literally don't care about objective truths rule the world.

herd mentality is real, us vs. them mentality is real and fearmongering is the rich and corrupts' favorite tactic to get everyone to do what they want.

that's why the US has a convicted felon and rapist in office for the 2nd time and nearly all of european parliaments are infested with neo-nazis. that's why there are wars in middle eastern countries that kill millions of innocent people every day.

we go in loops every 100 years or so, making the same or similar mistakes that cost millions of innocent people their lives, just because ignorant power-hungry maniacs want to have their way with the whole world.

they created a system that made us work for most of the day to survive, so that we are too tired to think about important things like politics at the end of the day.

they created tech that isolated us and tranquilized us so that we prefer to be by ourselves, scrolling endlessly for dopamine, instead of meeting our friends and community in third spaces or participating in actual hobbies.

that tech is now optimized to feed us misinformation that manipulates us into acting out of fear rather than reason. that tech is now beginning to censor certain words and ideas that the big leaders don't like. that tech that we had so much hope for even just 20 years ago is complicit in the erasure of our freedom, let that sink in.

they created the idea of wealth being the ultimate goal to strive for, stifling so many of our true dreams and personalities. they enabled a system that puts us at a disadvantage, because to them we are mere little cogs in their machine. people that work against that system are not useful to it. they will be silenced and/or eradicated.

if we keep allowing rich people to be in power of us we are never going to live in a society that benefits us.

all of us, including those who think they belong to the rich side (if you think having 1 million is a lot, i have news for you), are closer to being homeless than belonging to the top 1% that has accumulated such an obscene amount of wealth, they couldn't even spend all of it in 17 lifetimes.

the capitalism end-stage has arrived. the overton window shift to the right has almost been completed. if we stay silent and complacent now, we won't survive.

we need to become active in our local communities. we need to talk to each other. we need to talk to our local and regional politicians and vouch for them. we need to look out for each other and organize structures and systems to keep ourselves safe. and most importantly we need to keep making art, keep writing, keep researching, keep creating things that speak out against what is happening. never stop, especially not now.

Song, Allen Ginsberg

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Dongni Hou

Ariana Papademetropoulos (Greek-American, b. 1990)

Celestial Penance, 2024

oil on canvas