Amphetaminutes and cybernetic lock-in

The time-pressure and increased tempo of modern life is wildly under-discussed. Insurrealist has done a beautiful job of breaking through and laying down some interesting observations.

https://insurrealist.substack.com/p/amphetaminutes

>Am I running late? I look at my micro-universe, that cursed slab of obsidian, my smartphone, but it’s out of charge. I’m tired, but there’s no time to lose, it feels. Deadlines, fleeting opportunities, investments of a relational or professional nature that with brutal hunger demand to be nurtured, and all the mere drudgery and chores of life, not to mention the relentless petty thefts of attention siphoned by that very same little concentrated smart shard of sweet promise and bitter disappointment. Next thing one knows, Time has crept up behind, with all the weight of age, but don’t look back, he is a stalker and his face is just the muzzle of a gun. What hero among us can beat the clock?
>I draw another pill. 8 to 12 hours of decent work. I claim for myself another bundle of amphetaminutes, time compressed and straightened away from branching distractions, by alchemical means. Time roars, time urges.
>Despite monumental if not outright fantastical technological achievements that accumulate as insistently and ferociously as time itself, leading to a considerable reduction of necessary labor time, one would be hard pressed to find an even just moderately well-adjusted person in the developed—and increasingly, also the semi-developed—world that feels satisfied with their allotment and management of free time.

I feel this dissatisfaction pretty intensely, I observe my friends and family feeling it too, and I see it in totally normal people all the time. I believe it's upstream of many of the psychological woes that one sees in the wild on social media. But no one really talks about it because it feels like admitting personal failure. To discuss it openly would be to say, 'I cannot escape my phone and my laptop, I cannot help enslaving my body and my time to the hive-mind'. And yet that is the case for most, if not all, of us.

The dissatisfaction is more salient in younger people, but I think that's just because they became enslaved to the hive-mind at a far earlier age. The hive-mind didn't truly emerge until sometime around 2010, and is contemporaneous with the arrival of magical light-emitting pocket rectangles. Anyone who had exited adolescence by 2010 probably doesn't feel the dissatisfaction as strongly. In any case the fact of the matter in modern life for people below a certain age is complete and utter cybernetic lock-in. This is underappreciated, especially in discussions like >>3572, >>3479, and >>3681. What do you think addiction on this scale does to the soul of a people?

A disparate observation: all of the modern synthetic nicotine variants (zyns, vapes, etc) and other stimulants like adderall and ritalin are used most heavily by the same demographic slice. One of the leaders of the whole El Segundo scene once proudly declared his 3 year adderall supply and 180mg daily nicotine intake via zyns to me. Why would he do such a thing? Well, to flaunt his wealth of amphetaminutes. As Insurrealist notes, these stimulants are essential tools to compress and straighten time in the face of cybernetic attachment to a hive-mind where the state and actions of the world are transparently available to all.

I want the zoomers hanging out here to 'feel seen' with respect to this stuff, and remind them that it is going to literally be a matter of life and death for them and their friends to combat cybernetic lock-in to the hive-mind. Luckily the way out is pretty trivial: touch grass. Touch grass even if you don't want to. Touch grass to save yourself, to save your future children, to honor all of the ancestors who struggled to make you exist. You have to cultivate a Gondola-like practice of enlightened wu-wei, of relaxing, of letting the mind build crystalline structures out of the raw materials and observations you imbibe.

My natural inclination is to touch grass but my immediate goal is to generate enormous amounts of income. The commercial world is at this point in time far removed from anything representing, or serving, nature. Is it then a surprise that one would want to de-nature one's natural pace, leisure, blunt one's zest for life? (these substances will do this) for at least a period of time, in a certain situation?

The later zoomers at least, if they are curious at all, should be in awe at the pace of technological advancement. It leaves one always wondering if this month, that year, our present decade is the last chance to "lock in" most humans will have.

"The increasing dwarfing of man is precisely the driving force
that brings to mind the breeding of a stronger race—a race
that would be excessive precisely where the dwarfed species was
weak and growing weaker (in will, responsibility, self-assurance,
ability to posit goals for oneself). The means would be those
history teaches: isolation through interests in preservation that
are the reverse of those which are average today; habituation to
reverse evaluations; distance as a pathos; a free conscience in
those things that today are most undervalued and prohibited.
The homogenizing of European man is the great process that
cannot be obstructed: one should even hasten it. The necessity
to create a gulf, distance, order of rank, is given eo ipso--not the
necessity to retard the process. As soon as it is established, this
homogenizing species requires a justification: it lies in serving
a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former and can
raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master
race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of
life, with an excess of strength for beauty, bravery, culture, manners to the highest peak of the spirit; an affirming race that may
grant itself every great luxury"