Thank you for this. I routinely joined the people horrified by the personalities presented on the Libs of TikTok account, until someone I knew cropped up. This individual claimed non-binary status when I knew her, and was the first I had encountered. Ironically, she (can’t say them - I really can’t make myself do it, although I did to her face) was in my home daily as a behavioral therapist for one of my sons with autism. I really liked her. We talked a lot. She let me in on her life story a little, and it was horrific. But I tried to make her feel safe and appreciated in my home, because I just knew that’s what she was missing. She inevitably realized that, as an incredibly broken person, helping others wasn’t what she should be doing and she left that job. But when I saw where she had spiraled to in the year since I saw her, I was utterly heartbroken. We can mock them all we want behind the safety of a screen, but these people are broken and shoved down and unanchored from anything that would actually help them. I’ve been thinking about how we reach these people a lot, too, and mocking their suffering, or entertaining their ridiculousness, is neither productive or helpful.
There are many millions of young people like this and they aren't going away. Disgust and rejection is understandable, but can't be the end of the topic.
I acknowledge that you are accepting neither. My position is more or less that the world can be quite convincing when met head on ...and the world doesn't tend to suffer fools gladly.
That's fine, but if they represent a sufficient portion of the working-age population- and this group is GROWING, to my chagrin- you do not want to experience the society-wide effects of social Darwinism, however philosophically satisfying it might be.
The underlying causes of this aberration need to be addressed. It isn't enough to simply shun millions of people as freaks, however rightly, and wait for them to self-destruct.
I agree completely. I like to listen to who you are, not what you are.
For myself, I have no idea what I am beyond a few not very useful labels. I’m clearer about who I am, in a way I haven’t been for most of the earlier parts of my life.
Great article. One book you might find relevant is 'Libido Domandi : Sexual Liberation and Political Control", by E. Michael Jones. His thesis is that such atmomized individuals are not simply the byproduct of sexual liberation, but the goal of it. A society of strong families able to support one another is harder to dominate than a society of fishselfs.
I'd like to register my approval of your stated intention to move past the mockery and disgust. It ain't easy. Residing in California, reading Twitter, with occasional peeks at TikTok sure can't make it any easier. The easy way is just ignoring these people and the pit they've dug themselves in. Move to Texas or Florida or Montana or hell, anywhere inland with affordable real estate. Writing off the blighted culture and avoiding it like plague it so clearly is. Maybe get religion?
But what kind of religion forsakes any hope of salvation for one's fellow man and woman? Can leftish urbanites be redeemed? Even a few? Can the political vessel be, uh, righted? Bailed out? If the ship's going down, are there lifeboats? Will the wreckage yield rafts? These are, to me, the vital questions. It's your struggle with this tension that keeps me reading.
"Can leftish urbanites be redeemed? Even a few? Can the political vessel be, uh, righted? Bailed out? If the ship's going down, are there lifeboats? Will the wreckage yield rafts?"
No.
See: Genesis 18:16 - 19:29.
I'll quote you just the punchline here:
24 Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. 25 Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land.
But Abraham's drawn-out bargaining with God like some kind of three year old, at the end of Chapter 18, becomes all that much funnier when you read to the end and - yup - when Abraham wasn't looking the Good Lord just summarily nuked the joint from orbit.
Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 11, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
As someone who routinely observes people but doesn’t understand people, it strikes me that there’s a common pattern of our “advances” untethering us from the biological purpose of a thing, with an endpoint being destruction of individuals.
-Food has been untethered from its biological purpose, and now obesity, inflammation, cancer, and all sorts of diseases of the body are rampant.
-Electricity has been untethered from its biological purpose, and it’s quietly destroying us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Few even see this as a real thing. I’ve only recently been convinced.
-Sex (the act) has been untethered from its biological purpose, and you get the forms of destruction that you describe in the article.
-Sex (the category) is going through the process of being untethered from its biological purpose, and so we’re witnessing cognitive dissonance while it gets sorted out. But make no mistake, it’ll have destruction of some kind as an endpoint.
There are some who view destruction as part of a cycle that governs all things, so it’s all good. But here, it seems the destruction is being crafted, rather than flowing. Like a wolf that separates a sheep from the flock. From outside, it seems as though it’s flowing naturally, so it’s ok. But from any one stakeholder in that sphere, it’s the destruction being created.
Before an untethering, individuals see themselves as a stakeholder. After an untethering, they see themselves outside the sphere and detach from the stakes. And so they don’t view the destruction as negative, but positive or neutral. The mistake, in my view, is that we’re always a stakeholder because we exist WITHIN the systems we’re untethering from. It would be like the sheep suddenly saying they’re not a stakeholder, when they so obviously are one. They will be destroyed - they just don’t know it yet.
Over 100 pages for the bibliography alone. I’ve looked into some citations, and I have only come away more convinced. One sign of truth is that testing it more only convinces you more, not less. That’s my experience with this book.
When I first heard about the topic right before COVID, I thought it was insane and I dismissed it entirely. But then a few months ago, I came across an excerpt from this book, randomly, that explained an experience I had in the late 90s. An experience that has never been satisfactorily explained before. So I bought the book, and I’ve found the case quite compelling. Weird to think that one excerpt from over 400 pages (not including the bibliography) was the one that made me receptive. Any other and I would likely have dismissed it out of hand as crazy talk.
In a nutshell, and overly simplified, electricity is all around us all the time, coming from interactions between the sun and the earth mostly. Living things need a little of it to be healthy and in harmony. Too much disrupts and destroys life.
Although we have a bunch of demonic octogenarians running the government, and the public school unions have been indoctrinating since I was in public school, it’s not too late for us 40,50and 60 year olds to start affecting change at the local level. Momsforliberty.org
"But it seems increasingly clear that a whole lot of people have walked themselves into a painful corner as a learned response to an endless stream of fashionable nonsense, not as an actual breaking out of a societal prison. I’m increasingly inclined to get off the mockery and disgust train, and try to figure out how to talk to people about a path out of call me by my fish pronouns to a life of stable human connection."
First, mockery and disgust are normal and healthy reactions. They help save you from going down with the ship. And the visible power of these reactions in you *might* help shake loose a few of the salvageable souls who are caught up in this.
Second - none of this is fundamentally new. Here's what I mean: I not a very spiritual person, but I am a big fan of organized religion. Literally thousands of years of applied psychology and applied sociology distilled down into wisdom and life strategies anyone can grasp, at least a little bit. It's hugely helpful and powerful stuff, which is why the cultural nihilists always go out of their way to denigrate it as 'semi-literate goat herder superstition', even though it plainly isn't. (Just the very act of compiling and preserving a text the size and breadth of the Bible, using ancient manual technologies, requires significant civilization-level resources.)
The path out of our present cultural ground-loop has been charted by those people who survived the turmoil of thousands of prior years of civilizational change and upheaval. Any of the great religious traditions that have enough overt respect for tradition will offer a workable path towards leading a life of stable human connection: Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, some of the more respectable Islamic traditions, etc. Sadly, most of the more liberal strains of Judaism, and a whole lot of Protestantism, will not serve for these purposes - their founding ideologies made them vulnerable to fashion and Wokeness and they are now too corrupted. And the jury's still out on Mormonism, Baha'i and Christian Science.
I am completely serious: for most people who are spiritually adrift and spouting harmful fashionable nonsense these days, probably the most effective and time-tested means for setting them on a path of stable human connection is to get them involved in an authentic and faithfully traditional religious denomination.
I live in Southern California. My friend's daughter is in the 7th grade at a public school. ALL of the girls in the 7th grade decided they were lesbians. They even have sleepovers to "become one". The VP of the school is lesbian and married and perhaps that is a factor.
My friend's daughter decided she would stay straight. The other girls told her that was fine she could be a "straight ally". That was fine for a while but then the girls became angry with her and started bullying her. That's when my friend pulled her out to homeschool her.
The school system is propagating this decline. There is no way that all the girls are lesbians. But they all decide things together.
There are a couple young women I know that have decided to transition into men now. They look like pubescent boys that never reach manhood. It's sad because they were strong confident females before but now they are weak males. Women need to have strong women ... we don't need them becoming men... especially when it will hurt their bodies... and they will never actually look like a man. But it's popular now. And both of these girls had absentee alcoholic fathers. They are just broken.
Parent of a middle-school girl in Southern California, here, with a friend who teaches middle school in a neighboring district, and paying very very close attention to exactly this stuff. The part where everybody turns lesbian together, or turns transgendered in box lots, is extremely telling. It's 100% not children being true to who they are -- it's pressure.
Great read! Glad I stumbled across your stack. "This is, I think, Great Reset sexuality. In a world that’s falling apart, sex is falling apart. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy about it."
"Own nothing and be happy", points out Catherine Austin Fitts, just means "mind-controlled slave". Being enslaved by desires that can never be fulfilled because they are completely unmoored from any human experience.... just part of the package.
The clarity of sense of self, ones place in the universe and the interconnected-ness of absolutly everything, that comes with experiencing nature regularly, shows society for the maladapted, twisted and sicked organism that it has become.
We are literally beings of light (see the refracting microtubules in our cells). We need sunlight, nature to function correctly. Deny sunlight on your skin and you don't make the hormones you need in the right quantities.
And society policymakers, politicians, and bureaucracy have created every possible opposite of what we actually need.
Corny but true. We are essentially plants with complicated emotions.
There's a cause/effect question here. Do leftist politics cause a breakdown in sexual biology, or vice versa? I could see it working either way. They operate in a sort of hideous symbiosis - the more sexually deranged people become, the more fanatical their devotion to leftism ... meanwhile leftist policies actively create more of the deranged. When you contemplate the totality of it, the leftist egregore rises to the level of Lovecraftian body horror.
This makes me think of Yuri Slezkine's "The House of Government," which tracks the Old Bolsheviks from their pre-revolution lives through the moment, decades later, when Stalin fed them into the meatgrinder. A whole lot of sexual instability and bizarre neuroses.
This reads to me like an important updating of Christoper Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism" in which he traced the connection of the (then) newly predominant personality disorder of narcissism to the dissolution of the family and traditional social norms. Congratulations! A brilliant, original, and profoundly important piece.
Much appreciated, and isn't it interesting how relevant Christopher Lasch still is? I started this Substack page, a few months ago, by talking about "The Revolt of the Elites."
Back in the dark ages, 1984, I had to write a research paper for my senior English class. My topic was a comparison of the decline of the USA to the fall of the Roman Empire. My main source was Edward Gibbons, an English historian from the mid 18th century. The reasons identified by Gibbons were primarily ones of moral decay, many of the details parallel our own nation's trajectory. The perplexing part is although we can identify it, we can't seem to stop it.
You are perfectly right and I also noticed that long time ago. It's the feminism ideology, the woke, the eco-climate, the politically correctness, the cancel culture, the gender and others. I have talked to this people, guys, girls, activists and what they really want is hug, friends, company, family and meaning in life. They never had it. Sadly their parents are divorced, they are alone, rich but have no meaning, no friends. So they copy what they see on social media, in TV, they travel extensively to escape this feeling and the more they run, the more they feel empty. The correct thing is to stop with the dept stuff, cut off money, let them work and let them have their own life. Find for them meaning and they will be happy. Being rich doesn't mean you understand how life work or know how to talk to people or make friends, love. Only real expirence can bring this kind of emotions, no TV, online app or product.
"...a free-floating bucket of subliterate shit."
My goodness, this writer has just described a bucket that floats and...has shit in it? This is what happens when we don't have editors, folks.
Floatworthyness depends on the level of shit vs the outside water level. Displacement and all that.. -ed
And also the level of salt in the outside water. A whole lot of shit can float in a sea of salt. 😉
It's not very heavy shit, apparently.
"Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?"
Really?! I thought it rather an effective turn of phrase. 😊 Separating you from the growing Substack grandiose literati.😂🤣 #keepitreal #authenticity
that line just suckered me into a paid subscription.
you are more generous than i to want to lead these wretches out of their corners.
Much appreciated -- thanks for doing that.
Must be eating from the air fryer
It's gonzo journalism ass hole. If you want to read Harper's and pretend it's 1960, do that.
Thank you for this. I routinely joined the people horrified by the personalities presented on the Libs of TikTok account, until someone I knew cropped up. This individual claimed non-binary status when I knew her, and was the first I had encountered. Ironically, she (can’t say them - I really can’t make myself do it, although I did to her face) was in my home daily as a behavioral therapist for one of my sons with autism. I really liked her. We talked a lot. She let me in on her life story a little, and it was horrific. But I tried to make her feel safe and appreciated in my home, because I just knew that’s what she was missing. She inevitably realized that, as an incredibly broken person, helping others wasn’t what she should be doing and she left that job. But when I saw where she had spiraled to in the year since I saw her, I was utterly heartbroken. We can mock them all we want behind the safety of a screen, but these people are broken and shoved down and unanchored from anything that would actually help them. I’ve been thinking about how we reach these people a lot, too, and mocking their suffering, or entertaining their ridiculousness, is neither productive or helpful.
Sweet, blessed nuance to this topic at last.
There are many millions of young people like this and they aren't going away. Disgust and rejection is understandable, but can't be the end of the topic.
If they are met with coddling and acceptance, it will only encourage them.
Please reread my last sentence. I am suggesting neither.
I acknowledge that you are accepting neither. My position is more or less that the world can be quite convincing when met head on ...and the world doesn't tend to suffer fools gladly.
That's fine, but if they represent a sufficient portion of the working-age population- and this group is GROWING, to my chagrin- you do not want to experience the society-wide effects of social Darwinism, however philosophically satisfying it might be.
The underlying causes of this aberration need to be addressed. It isn't enough to simply shun millions of people as freaks, however rightly, and wait for them to self-destruct.
I agree completely. I like to listen to who you are, not what you are.
For myself, I have no idea what I am beyond a few not very useful labels. I’m clearer about who I am, in a way I haven’t been for most of the earlier parts of my life.
The Underlying Cause of this is Jews. /pol/ is always right.
Nice reply...
Thanks!
Great article. One book you might find relevant is 'Libido Domandi : Sexual Liberation and Political Control", by E. Michael Jones. His thesis is that such atmomized individuals are not simply the byproduct of sexual liberation, but the goal of it. A society of strong families able to support one another is harder to dominate than a society of fishselfs.
This.
I’ve tried to explain this to my older daughter but she is away with this stuff & expresses support for it to be introduced to her children.
Our younger daughter is more traditional in her outlook. She had an extra decade of being around her mum & dad compared with her older sister.
I'd like to register my approval of your stated intention to move past the mockery and disgust. It ain't easy. Residing in California, reading Twitter, with occasional peeks at TikTok sure can't make it any easier. The easy way is just ignoring these people and the pit they've dug themselves in. Move to Texas or Florida or Montana or hell, anywhere inland with affordable real estate. Writing off the blighted culture and avoiding it like plague it so clearly is. Maybe get religion?
But what kind of religion forsakes any hope of salvation for one's fellow man and woman? Can leftish urbanites be redeemed? Even a few? Can the political vessel be, uh, righted? Bailed out? If the ship's going down, are there lifeboats? Will the wreckage yield rafts? These are, to me, the vital questions. It's your struggle with this tension that keeps me reading.
"Can leftish urbanites be redeemed? Even a few? Can the political vessel be, uh, righted? Bailed out? If the ship's going down, are there lifeboats? Will the wreckage yield rafts?"
No.
See: Genesis 18:16 - 19:29.
I'll quote you just the punchline here:
24 Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. 25 Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land.
But Abraham's drawn-out bargaining with God like some kind of three year old, at the end of Chapter 18, becomes all that much funnier when you read to the end and - yup - when Abraham wasn't looking the Good Lord just summarily nuked the joint from orbit.
Oh, I'm familiar with that story. There are other stories in there too.
As someone who routinely observes people but doesn’t understand people, it strikes me that there’s a common pattern of our “advances” untethering us from the biological purpose of a thing, with an endpoint being destruction of individuals.
-Food has been untethered from its biological purpose, and now obesity, inflammation, cancer, and all sorts of diseases of the body are rampant.
-Electricity has been untethered from its biological purpose, and it’s quietly destroying us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Few even see this as a real thing. I’ve only recently been convinced.
-Sex (the act) has been untethered from its biological purpose, and you get the forms of destruction that you describe in the article.
-Sex (the category) is going through the process of being untethered from its biological purpose, and so we’re witnessing cognitive dissonance while it gets sorted out. But make no mistake, it’ll have destruction of some kind as an endpoint.
There are some who view destruction as part of a cycle that governs all things, so it’s all good. But here, it seems the destruction is being crafted, rather than flowing. Like a wolf that separates a sheep from the flock. From outside, it seems as though it’s flowing naturally, so it’s ok. But from any one stakeholder in that sphere, it’s the destruction being created.
Before an untethering, individuals see themselves as a stakeholder. After an untethering, they see themselves outside the sphere and detach from the stakes. And so they don’t view the destruction as negative, but positive or neutral. The mistake, in my view, is that we’re always a stakeholder because we exist WITHIN the systems we’re untethering from. It would be like the sheep suddenly saying they’re not a stakeholder, when they so obviously are one. They will be destroyed - they just don’t know it yet.
Tell me more about the electricity?
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-invisible-rainbow/
You can also get it from Amazon or other places.
Over 100 pages for the bibliography alone. I’ve looked into some citations, and I have only come away more convinced. One sign of truth is that testing it more only convinces you more, not less. That’s my experience with this book.
When I first heard about the topic right before COVID, I thought it was insane and I dismissed it entirely. But then a few months ago, I came across an excerpt from this book, randomly, that explained an experience I had in the late 90s. An experience that has never been satisfactorily explained before. So I bought the book, and I’ve found the case quite compelling. Weird to think that one excerpt from over 400 pages (not including the bibliography) was the one that made me receptive. Any other and I would likely have dismissed it out of hand as crazy talk.
In a nutshell, and overly simplified, electricity is all around us all the time, coming from interactions between the sun and the earth mostly. Living things need a little of it to be healthy and in harmony. Too much disrupts and destroys life.
🎯... see also ‘uncensored’ Substack Frances Leader
Although we have a bunch of demonic octogenarians running the government, and the public school unions have been indoctrinating since I was in public school, it’s not too late for us 40,50and 60 year olds to start affecting change at the local level. Momsforliberty.org
"But it seems increasingly clear that a whole lot of people have walked themselves into a painful corner as a learned response to an endless stream of fashionable nonsense, not as an actual breaking out of a societal prison. I’m increasingly inclined to get off the mockery and disgust train, and try to figure out how to talk to people about a path out of call me by my fish pronouns to a life of stable human connection."
First, mockery and disgust are normal and healthy reactions. They help save you from going down with the ship. And the visible power of these reactions in you *might* help shake loose a few of the salvageable souls who are caught up in this.
Second - none of this is fundamentally new. Here's what I mean: I not a very spiritual person, but I am a big fan of organized religion. Literally thousands of years of applied psychology and applied sociology distilled down into wisdom and life strategies anyone can grasp, at least a little bit. It's hugely helpful and powerful stuff, which is why the cultural nihilists always go out of their way to denigrate it as 'semi-literate goat herder superstition', even though it plainly isn't. (Just the very act of compiling and preserving a text the size and breadth of the Bible, using ancient manual technologies, requires significant civilization-level resources.)
The path out of our present cultural ground-loop has been charted by those people who survived the turmoil of thousands of prior years of civilizational change and upheaval. Any of the great religious traditions that have enough overt respect for tradition will offer a workable path towards leading a life of stable human connection: Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, some of the more respectable Islamic traditions, etc. Sadly, most of the more liberal strains of Judaism, and a whole lot of Protestantism, will not serve for these purposes - their founding ideologies made them vulnerable to fashion and Wokeness and they are now too corrupted. And the jury's still out on Mormonism, Baha'i and Christian Science.
I am completely serious: for most people who are spiritually adrift and spouting harmful fashionable nonsense these days, probably the most effective and time-tested means for setting them on a path of stable human connection is to get them involved in an authentic and faithfully traditional religious denomination.
Love this. Very clear thinking. And a congregation is a serious partial answer to the problem of loneliness and social atomization.
I live in Southern California. My friend's daughter is in the 7th grade at a public school. ALL of the girls in the 7th grade decided they were lesbians. They even have sleepovers to "become one". The VP of the school is lesbian and married and perhaps that is a factor.
My friend's daughter decided she would stay straight. The other girls told her that was fine she could be a "straight ally". That was fine for a while but then the girls became angry with her and started bullying her. That's when my friend pulled her out to homeschool her.
The school system is propagating this decline. There is no way that all the girls are lesbians. But they all decide things together.
There are a couple young women I know that have decided to transition into men now. They look like pubescent boys that never reach manhood. It's sad because they were strong confident females before but now they are weak males. Women need to have strong women ... we don't need them becoming men... especially when it will hurt their bodies... and they will never actually look like a man. But it's popular now. And both of these girls had absentee alcoholic fathers. They are just broken.
Parent of a middle-school girl in Southern California, here, with a friend who teaches middle school in a neighboring district, and paying very very close attention to exactly this stuff. The part where everybody turns lesbian together, or turns transgendered in box lots, is extremely telling. It's 100% not children being true to who they are -- it's pressure.
ugh...
purposefully & intentionally broken by the criminal enterprise that is California
Great read! Glad I stumbled across your stack. "This is, I think, Great Reset sexuality. In a world that’s falling apart, sex is falling apart. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy about it."
"Own nothing and be happy", points out Catherine Austin Fitts, just means "mind-controlled slave". Being enslaved by desires that can never be fulfilled because they are completely unmoored from any human experience.... just part of the package.
Yes... I have been wondering if the "powers-that-be" (WEF, etc) are kind of "selling" this to young people because they are pushing transhumanism??
The clarity of sense of self, ones place in the universe and the interconnected-ness of absolutly everything, that comes with experiencing nature regularly, shows society for the maladapted, twisted and sicked organism that it has become.
We are literally beings of light (see the refracting microtubules in our cells). We need sunlight, nature to function correctly. Deny sunlight on your skin and you don't make the hormones you need in the right quantities.
And society policymakers, politicians, and bureaucracy have created every possible opposite of what we actually need.
Corny but true. We are essentially plants with complicated emotions.
"We are essentially plants with complicated emotions."
Love this.
my pronouns... leaf, twig, flower
Very true. Does anyone know any trans farmers ranchers or cowboys?
There's a cause/effect question here. Do leftist politics cause a breakdown in sexual biology, or vice versa? I could see it working either way. They operate in a sort of hideous symbiosis - the more sexually deranged people become, the more fanatical their devotion to leftism ... meanwhile leftist policies actively create more of the deranged. When you contemplate the totality of it, the leftist egregore rises to the level of Lovecraftian body horror.
This makes me think of Yuri Slezkine's "The House of Government," which tracks the Old Bolsheviks from their pre-revolution lives through the moment, decades later, when Stalin fed them into the meatgrinder. A whole lot of sexual instability and bizarre neuroses.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176949/the-house-of-government
This reads to me like an important updating of Christoper Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism" in which he traced the connection of the (then) newly predominant personality disorder of narcissism to the dissolution of the family and traditional social norms. Congratulations! A brilliant, original, and profoundly important piece.
Much appreciated, and isn't it interesting how relevant Christopher Lasch still is? I started this Substack page, a few months ago, by talking about "The Revolt of the Elites."
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/the-revolt-of-the-elites
I've only just discovered you Chris, courtesy of someone on Twitter. It's good to know there's a bunch of your stuff still for me to read.
Back in the dark ages, 1984, I had to write a research paper for my senior English class. My topic was a comparison of the decline of the USA to the fall of the Roman Empire. My main source was Edward Gibbons, an English historian from the mid 18th century. The reasons identified by Gibbons were primarily ones of moral decay, many of the details parallel our own nation's trajectory. The perplexing part is although we can identify it, we can't seem to stop it.
You are perfectly right and I also noticed that long time ago. It's the feminism ideology, the woke, the eco-climate, the politically correctness, the cancel culture, the gender and others. I have talked to this people, guys, girls, activists and what they really want is hug, friends, company, family and meaning in life. They never had it. Sadly their parents are divorced, they are alone, rich but have no meaning, no friends. So they copy what they see on social media, in TV, they travel extensively to escape this feeling and the more they run, the more they feel empty. The correct thing is to stop with the dept stuff, cut off money, let them work and let them have their own life. Find for them meaning and they will be happy. Being rich doesn't mean you understand how life work or know how to talk to people or make friends, love. Only real expirence can bring this kind of emotions, no TV, online app or product.
went back and read this amazing piece. subscribing now! thanks for this!