Sorry I haven’t written in a very long time. I have actually been putting my writing efforts into a screenplay(s). Maybe I’ll do a reading this summer, we’ll see.
Other updates include:
Lost passport
Started an indie improv group with some friends from UCB. Name pending.
Realized I’m so younger sibling pilled. Whenever Someone is doing something I want to do it too. Gabby is in Spain and all I can think about is traveling.
My parents came and we ate so much food it fucked up my stomach in a good way.
Been job searching with no luck, they really hate my bitch ass!
Saw some movies
Novocaine - Surprisingly fun!
The Ballad of Wallis Island - so good, please see!
Death of a Unicorn - sadly mid!
Minecraft movie - Literally a 2 hour tik tok cringefest
Warfare - actually a horror movie. Very upsetting. One of the most unique films I’ve seen in a while. I get the hate tho <3.
recession
Anyways, I just had a thought about society that I thought I’d share.
Just today, this Instagram reel (that’s really just a screenshot of a tweet) showed up on my feed today.
Apparently Barclays is giving out some crazy Mortgages that are incredibly bad deals but will bring in people who don’t understand debt. The clip up top (if you’re not aware) is from The Big Short, a great movie about how the 2008 financial crisis happened. This meme pairs well with some other stuff I’ve been seeing. The burrito bubble is particularly funny to me. Recently Doordash and Klarna have paired up to allow you to pay for food in installments. One $30 Burrito delivered to your house can magically become 4 payments of $7.50. I looked into it and although there are some pretty strict rules about borrowing (including not allowing people to take out more than one loan at a time), it seems like it’s gonna fuck some financially illiterate people up. This and DraftKings are effectively going to gut what’s left of the American Middle class (Along with our healthcare system, price gouging, student loans, and in-app purchases made by your children).
Another interesting trend I’ve seen are the “recession indicators” that fashion influencers are discovering, long skirts, brown undyed hair, and Dunkin Donuts closing a store to name a few. Of course this has spiraled into memes and bits and trends that are partially to poke fun at the concept of indicators but really to cope with our impending economic doom. The whole trend makes me think though, have we really managed to commodify going through a recession?
What used to be byproducts of the economic conditions have now become aesthetics that people can preempt, mock, and ultimately purchase. The whole thing has been making me feel like we live in a post-modern hellscape that doesn’t allow us to experience anything authentically. We’re two weeks away from a t-shirt that says “My ass is a recession indicator” or a mug that says “skibidi tariffs”. It’s as if we’ve self-analyzed ourselves so hard that nothing really seems to “happen” anymore. Rather than a major economic event, a recession feels like a Friends reboot or a McDonald’s toy release - it’s so predictable that it can be bet on in Polymarket. Seems like more and more things are commodified, digitized and memeified into oblivion instead of actually existing. I heard someone online say that everything feels like it’s made of vapor. I couldn’t agree more. The best analogy I can think of is about Marvel movies. Remember when stuff used to matter in Marvel movies? Tony Stark was stuck in a cave in the middle east, could die at any moment? The political messages felt clear, the things they did felt concrete and conceivable. If you compare that to something like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Magic, nothing seems to make much sense anymore. Every character just fires beams at each other, defeats and victories mean nothing, everyone is destroying the world but you’re unsure if it matters in the scheme of the multiverse. Everything is kind of just vapor.
And everything is starting to feel like this, even elections and pandemics. I don’t know if it’s that we’re analyzing everything too much or using our phones, idk. This brings me back to the Big Short meme. In 2008, were subprime mortgages common knowledge enough for there to be not only a meme but an online vocabulary to joke about them? Enough so that it’d get thousands of likes? Am I wrong in saying that people have never cared about politics as much as our society does right now. Everyone knows about hundreds of global conflicts, how impeachment proceedings work, filibusters, international trade. Maybe it just happened to coincide with me going to college and growing up but it doesn’t feel like people ever knew and cared as much as we have. The other day I saw a 13 year old on tik tok making a video about how tariffs were saving American Manufacturing and actually a long term plan to fix our deficit.
Anyone else feel this way? Where is permanence? Where is reality? And is anyone willing to loan me $30 for dinner tonight?