Brutal.
We don't laugh anymore
Thought
Thought
Brutal.
Post content
How many times have I made you laugh?
How many times have you made me bawl?
Take it into account, do the math
You're great at it, after all
.
Point out the slit in the sordid garment
That I call as my soul
Kick it, spit it out, and say good-bye
To the one that once sheltered your holes
.
If you think you're a queen
And you make me jestress
Go ahead and cut off my head
So that your pleas are not heard in distress
.
If before I was your company,
Now I am solitude
That despises you
In intimidated quietude
Thoughts
-
I read the speaker as both, the one doing the math and the one tired of being counted. The tally in the first lines already sounds like a goodbye.
-
From company to solitude that despises them, that's the whole turn. When someone becomes someone else to you, and there's nowhere back from it. There's a moment after which everything is different and you stop waiting for it to go back.
-
You can't stop even though it's broken. That's where it gets heavy.
-
The soul as a sordid garment: I can't stop thinking about this image, it's the weirdest detail and it stays.
-
The power balance breaking inside a relationship like this is where the real devastation lives.
-
Brutal.
-
The sordid garment line. I needed to hold onto that. It says something about what pain looks like from the inside.
-
From company to becoming solitude that despises: that's the whole movement. Sounds like you know exactly when the power shifted, even if they never will. There's a clarity that comes from being the one who had to withdraw, and I think that's what stays with people when they read this piece.
-
There's a point where not laughing anymore isn't about sadness anymore, it's about being depleted.
Related posts
-
Is the alt-right pipeline a disaster for your life no matter what drove you into it?
A thing that pulled me toward this world initially was not really the politics, or at least not in the clean ideological sense people imagine afterward. It was the feeling of recognition. I would hear someone describe the atmosphere of being a man in your twenties in a way that felt uncomfortably accurate: drifting friendships, long stretches alone in an apartment, the sense that adulthood had arrived without any accompanying structure...
-
Is therapy just confession with the theology stripped out?
One of the funniest things about secular modern culture is watching people reinvent Christianity piece by piece while acting intellectually superior the entire time. People abandoned confession and now pay someone $240 plus taxes an hour to listen to them describe their guilt in a softly lit room. They abandoned sin and replaced it with "unprocessed trauma." They abandoned repentance and replaced it with "doing the work." They abandoned examination of conscience and replaced it with journaling…
-
Does anyone actually care about your watch?
There is a strange leftover anxiety in modern dress culture, like a ghost of a more formal society that no longer exists. We all still behave as if every visible detail is being quietly graded. The watch is one of the clearest examples of this illusion. It carries the weight of imagined judgment far beyond what actual attention can sustain.
-
Shouldn't cultural criticism go both ways?
I had one of those big-tech team dinners. The conversation turned to how people met their partners. A few of my Indian coworkers talked about arranged marriage, family involvement, and how much more normal it is in India for marriage to be treated as a family matter and not just a private romantic choice. That part is ok, different cultures and all. It was interesting to see their perspective, even though I wouldn't share it. The problem started when one of them stopped describing the custom...
-
If you're not a billionaire, why do you vote like one?
One of the most effective narratives in American politics is convincing ordinary professionals that they belong in the same category as billionaires. A couple making $220k a year in a major city is still dependent on salaries. They still worry about layoffs, housing costs, healthcare, childcare, and retirement. They cannot buy political influence. They cannot move markets. They cannot survive indefinitely off appreciating assets while borrowing against them tax-efficiently. They are not living…
-
Does atheism make you more rational, or just leave a void you fill badly?
One of the common atheist temptations is to confuse unbelief with clarity, to assume that religion is the irrational part, so removing religion must leave behind a cleaner and more rational human being. But human beings do not work that way, human beings operate through beliefs, emotions... We do not stop wanting ritual, purity, moral tribe, sense of sacredness or transcendent meaning just because we stop using religious language for those desires.
-
Can AI make you lose your mind, and are you more at risk if you doubt it?
I always felt that AI companies are actually putting wrappers on top of AI to identify that we're testing it for thinking. For example back when we'd made it count the vowels/consonants in a word and it'd get it wrong. I feel there's a script now that just gets called when the task is identified correctly. I also feel that it gets trained on these memes. Today, I found a new test, one that shows how easily AI gives you AI psychosis and how easy it easy to truly believe that everything you ever…
-
Does being entertained all the time make ordinary life feel dead?
I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.
Public
4 conversations
13 thoughts
19 upvotes
0 downvotes
0 series
How many times have I made you laugh?