DailyJim: What the hell is happening to human culture right now?

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym this is the episode from monday july 1st 2024 i'm recording very late i had a flight uh i am currently in istanbul turkiye, um and today i wanted to talk about what the hell is going on with culture, or what the hell is going on with human culture these days um Um, so before I boarded the flight, I saw that the Supreme court of the United States gave a ruling on, uh, whether the president has immunity or not. And while I didn't have time to dig into the details of it, it, uh, the people who, um, I trust that we're reporting on it. We're saying that, uh, it is quite dire, um, quite a large change, quite a surprising, uh, ruling in favor of giving immunity to the president for any official act.

Um, yeah. And so, I mean, I could spend the whole episode talking about that, but what I really want to talk about is I don't think it's just happening in the U S I don't think, you know, now some people obviously in the U S would say, Oh, it's great that it happened, you know, and the president is facing all this harassment and everyone's out to get him and um but that's i mean that's the argument i'm talking about the argument that the whole world is out to get somebody um i saw some post and it was talking about a poll that was done right obviously this is giving you very vague numbers and who knows how accurate the poll is or whatnot um but curious just to explore this idea that some said that, I don't know if it was Republicans or GOP or Trump supporters or whoever that were in the poll, but said that they were in favor of giving immunity.

Like 70% in favor of giving it to Trump. But when asked the question of whether to give immunity to a president in general, it was like 40% or 50%. So I was just like, wow, there's such an attachment to this figure. It seems to be happening in a lot of different countries. It seems to be happening in a lot of parts of the world where what is happening to culture? We went through a whole pandemic and we don't talk about it. We went through a whole period where we literally told people to distance from each other because if we were too close to each other, we might die or we might give something to somebody else. And so people in some countries got locked in their homes forcibly in some countries they got told to stay home in some countries they didn't really do much at all nothing changed much and the impacts this had on whether people were living or dying the impacts on people's health but also the impacts on people's jobs on people's interactions i think just in general we as humans went, oh, pandemic, oh, this might kill us. Let's distance from each other.

Even if we're not distancing because of the air, we are distancing because of the disagreements that happened over whether the virus was real or whether the vaccines were not real, but whether the vaccines were helpful or harmful, whether the decisions to lock down were helpful or harmful, whether so many disagreements that I think brought so much conflict and people starting to distance from each other. And then on top of it, we have the plethora of social media. So many of us were at home doing nothing but watching news or be on social media and interacting in our bubbles um not reading a newspaper where we're subjected to multiple opinions i mean obviously within the same newspaper there's some agreement um but.

Being stuck more and more in these bubbles and then not even knowing what's going on in other worlds there's something i saw somebody post the other day um there was a country concert i don't know who it was i can't remember the artist but uh some person came on and this person was doing some the person who was known for saying some phrase i don't even know what the phrase was and the the caption for the the video was like we are living in a different world like this is a totally different world and i think i think culture is becoming more divided it in some ways. I think people, human behaviors around the world, we're starting to shrink into ourselves a little bit more. We're starting to avoid conflict more. We're starting to think that maybe we're starting to get into more conflict. And so therefore starting to think people are trying to hurt us. People don't care about us. And it's just, I think. Politics is the end ramification of such a thing like this. Politics are not the cause of it. Politics are often the result of it. The result of broken relationships, the result of broken families, the result of broken connections to ourselves, the result of suicidal thoughts, the result of numbing, the result of getting addicted to drugs. Drugs, and I think so much of that stems from this one belief that people keep saying, that nobody cares about you, your ex never cared about you, your parents don't really care about you, you know, men don't care about you, women don't care about you, white people don't care about you, black people don't care about you, Asians don't care about you, immigrants don't care about you, and I mean, you can pick any group, hey, the rich people don't care about you, hey, the poor people People don't care about you. You know, you can go like iPhone users don't care about you. We can separate it into any freaking group or any identity and say, oh, these people don't care about me or they're out to get me. What a miserable way to live life. How? What a miserable way to live life. Yeah, maybe it's the idea of, well, if I believe everyone's trying to screw me over, then maybe I won't get hurt. But I beg to differ. I think the people who say that sound like they are hurting non-stop.

It's not people who say that don't sound very happy and very fulfilled in life and very excited and chasing their dreams. They sound more like life sucks and then you die. And I'm so tired of hearing this message. And it may seem a little bit off message or off topic to talk about this when that thing, you know, that ruling came down from the Supreme Court, but.

From my opinion, laws are just codified culture. They are the value, the laws are written rules on how we behave. And then morals or whatnot are the unwritten rules on how we behave. The cultural norms are the unwritten rules on how we behave. And I think a lot of cultural norms are starting to go more and more of, hey, just let it go. Just leave them. Just disconnect. These people don't care about you. Why would you even interact with them? And I'm so tired of seeing that message be reiterated, not just by politicians, but by other podcast hosts, by people on YouTube, by people on TikTok, by people who write books, people who get up in front of, get up on stages and give talks and people who, man, like one on one family conversations, therapists saying things like this, man, it seems to be such a pervasive belief these days. And it's frustrating me so much because I want people to dream. I want people to love. I want people to feel excited to live. I want people to wake up and feel it all, to feel sad, to feel angry, to feel grateful, feel whatever they're feeling, but to feel it instead of pretending like we're not feeling these things, and to realize, man, most of us are trying our best. And even if they're not, believing that they're trying their best, believing that we are trying our best is much more likely to make us feel good, or at least make us feel instead of just operating in this kind of numb fear.

I don't know, I'm ranting because I'm definitely tired but also just very frustrated that I'm worried that I'm just going to sit back and let culture start shifting, continue to shift in that direction of just more misery and more apathy, more indifference more hatred towards others hatred towards ourselves, and that's not what I want I want people to have sparkle in their eyes I want people to I want people to, say that they love life, to appreciate the little moments even if the little moments are crying or even if the little moments are the anger that rises in the chest to appreciate these moments and to appreciate the people around us, and the efforts that they're giving and the efforts that we're giving.

Yeah I just this is not just happening in the US it's happening in many countries around the world I've talked to a lot of different people on these different projects in Europe and Africa and um.

I think if we don't do something to stand up and try to take culture in the other direction, it might just start slipping away and start going in the other and start just shrinking, retreating, collapsing on itself until, as one friend said on a project before, a guy from Ukraine, from the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine, he said, if we don't learn how to express how we're feeling, if we don't learn how to express emotions, they can often come out in very violent ways. And i am afraid that by letting culture just suppress more and more that eventually is going to come out in very violent ways and i don't want that i wanted to come out in very loving ways very uniting ways so i hope this helped some of you it's helped me a little bit i'm still feeling i think i need a day to process what happened and yeah frankly to let my anger push me forward Because I think movements, frankly, life requires some anger to get up and have some focus and determination in life and move forward. So I hope this helps y'all and look forward to hearing what y'all have to say. Take care.