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This is probably a bit, but this kind of thing is what I mean when I say people pathologize everything now.
(hexbear.net)
A less wild example I can think of is that someone that is antisocial and had their nose in books used to just be called an introvert or a nerd, but now such a person would probably accused of using escapism to avoid the real world. A harmless personality trait is now considered a concerning problem that an individual should be shamed for.
Not everything outside of reproducing and generating capital is cope.
This is a half-baked thought but I'm kicking around the idea that this hyper-pathologizing urge is the opposite side of the normative coin whose obverse is grindset culture.
The grindset is an extremely narrow and rigid concept of what's "acceptable" in society and I feel like the shadow that casts is that therefore everything else outside of it is inferior or bad. Throw in that weird online tendency to weaponize therapyspeak which has been on a massive upsurge in the past few years and it feels like the natural consequence of that coupled with the grindset normativity results in everything outside of the grindset being turned into a pathology.
Idk I think I need to take this idea out for a spin a bit more before I decide whether it's actually accurate and maybe grindset isn't quite the right term here but I'm sure you get the kind of culture I'm trying to point at with the term. It's like some sort of cultural phrenology or something.
Yeah, it's the internalization of neoliberalism. People need to be perfect cogs in the societal machine as like a product. You see this on dating/relationship/dating app advice a lot about how you need to be a perfect candidate free of all dependancies and issues before you're even allowed to date someone else.
Also just anti-art and solipsism because you see this weird productivist idea that making art is good but experiencing art is bad from grindset/Randian types all the time. I think mostly because they think Marvel movies are the height of culture and associate that with mass-consumerism and think art's value is just how much money you can make with it and you're basically scamming other people to care about it in a zero sum way.
Also these might be Tumblr (?) trolls doing a joke in the screenshot.
It's made me completely isolated, imo. I know I have my issues, but this perception that you need to be perfect and 100% confident all the time has made it so hard. The autism hasn't helped either.
I choose to believe this in order to keep my ailing faith in humanity on life support but the fact that it's probably just an exaggeration is concerning.
I checked the the last poster's account and they're definitely joking. They appear to be a trans leftist of some kind. Although they didn't post any music suspiciously.