Nobody wants to blame marijuana, nobody wants to blame psychiatric medication… everyone wants to blame the internet… but, to be fair, this video is more sincere and more well-intentioned than 99 percent of what you're going to hear from the mainstream media.
Is it really any surprise that people who start smoking marijuana at age 16 (or —gasp— even earlier) put shockingly little effort into developing "face to face relationships"? Is it really any surprise that drug addicts put shockingly little effort into preparing for the duties and drudgeries of marriage? It is a surprise, because so many of us wanted to pretend that we could grow up as drug addicts and incongruously end up developing all the same qualities of character that can only result from sweat-drenched stridency and sandpaper-dry sobriety.
And you do realize that neither strident nor sober has positive connotations in our language, leaving aside entirely the connotations of sweat and sandpaper: in the process of invigilating the translation of my book (Blood in the Snow) into so many different languages, I discovered that this problem crosses quite a few borders (and this was an especially baffling problem in the Hebrew translation —i.e., one that still remains unpublished and incomplete). Vae victis and in vino veritas: misconceptions about happiness and how to attain it are implicitly expressed, like a barely audible drumbeat, a thousand times a day in the languages we use to think and speak.
People are either sincerely or insincerely surprised, now, because they have some personal history of pretending that this wouldn't be a problem, either for themselves or others —possibly for their own children —possibly for their own parents. People perceive me as unusually mentally sharp (and they say this to my face), people perceive me as having an unusually high sex drive (and they say this to my face), and people perceive me as unusually highly motivated to create and maintain friendships —but perhaps all of this is just the shadow cast by sobriety itself. The vast majority of people who surround me have developed through each and every stage of their lives with a serious drug dependency —even if all the drugs involved were legal— and they neither know how to socialize without it, nor even how to to live alone.
Virtue cannot be taught. Love cannot be learned.
Original title: He’s right, she’s left: no wonder Gen-Zs aren’t having sex
Channel name: The Australian.