Why People Today Are Weirder Than Ever Before

This sentiment from Zuby is actually pretty common these days. You hear variations on this same theme all the time:

I think this meme that was put up in response to that speaks to how a lot of people would answer that question:

However, I’m going to tell you something different than that. People today are weirder than they have ever been before in all of human history.

You might say, “Wait a second, bro, societies have gotten pretty weird before.”

True.

The Mursi Tribe in Ethiopia walked around (and some still do) with giant lip plates:

I’m a Christian, and even I think snake-handling Pentecostals are a little weird:

Some cultures, like the Mayans, used to elongate their skulls:

Of course, if those cultures could look at us today, they’d probably say, “We’re weird? You people spend all day staring at boxes. You look at or talk into the small box in your pockets 40 or 50 times per day, look at a bigger box for 8 hours per day at work, then go home, sit in your living room and look at an even BIGGER BOX. That seems pretty weird to us!”

Fair.

But we’re talking about a different type of weirdness - people who deviate from societal norms in strange or bizarre ways.

Like furries. Transsexuals. Incels. Pronoun people. Sovereign Citizens. Otherkin. Freegans. Flat Earthers. Lyndsi Clancy, Karmelo Anthony and Luigi Mangione fans. Modern feminists. Body modification addicts. Anti-natalists. Alex Jones and Candace Owens fans. Satanists. Mukbang influencers. Body positivity activists. Adult baby subcultures.

We could go on.

However, as a starting point, it’s worth noting that there’s a single, central factor behind every one of these movements.

That’s the Internet.

In fact, this takes me back to one of my all-time favorite pieces, a column by a liberal named Zack Parsons on the now-defunct humor website “Something Awful.”

“Something Awful” was a truly massive website at one point that specialized in mocking weirdness on the Internet. Today, the man who made the site a success, Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, died by suicide, and the site is basically a forum. As you read these insightful comments by Zack Parsons that apply to so many things happening today, keep in mind that it was written all the way back in 2004 (!!!):

Since I took this gig writing for Something Awful almost three years ago I have encountered an increasing volume of perversity on the Internet as part of my job description. I’ve gone from randomly encountering it, to actively seeking it out for the purposes of mockery. I’ve found individuals and groups that have sexualized things like sneezing, farting, popping balloons, inflating latex or rubber body suits, and most frequently, I’ve encountered furries.

I won’t bore you with the complete history of the furry culture, but needless to say it is relatively long, convoluted, and owes the p*nis-sheathed lion’s share of its popularity to the Internet. It has gradually transformed over the years from a slight fixation with anthropomorphic characters to a lifestyle choice that involves donning elaborate costumes and awkwardly humping in convention center hotels. The bottom line is that furries would basically be nonexistent were it not for the Internet. They would be thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of healthy and relatively well adjusted people with maybe a slight fascination with Gadget from ‘Rescue Rangers.’ In other words they would be ‘Mundanes’ as the furries call the rest of us with hilarious derision.

Unlike child molesters, furries aren’t hurting anyone or anything beyond maybe their parent’s dignity, so why should we care? Because, furries are perhaps the best example of the uniting power of the Internet gone wrong. Composed almost to a person of outsiders, nerds, and the generally disenfranchised, furries went from a sort of dorky support group to a hardcore, aggressive, and somewhat abrasive sexual identifier in a matter of a few years. IRC rooms, websites, and even the presence of furries in various more normal Internet locales have attracted those who have difficulty finding their place in this world. There can be no convincing argument made that their lifestyle is genetic, necessary, or anything but forced. They have latched onto the lifestyle purely out of desperation and a need for acceptance.

Once they are a part of the furry lifestyle they devote all available energy to it almost without exception. They draw furry art, write furry stories, attend conventions of likeminded individuals, and in extreme cases don the aforementioned suits and commence humping. Some even go to the borderline psychosis extreme of acting out a “fur” identity at all times by using their furry alter ego and its fictitious behavior in an almost spiritual sense on a day to day basis. For some being a furry is roughly analogous - in terms of the impact it has on their life - to being a member of a cult, although I’m not even suggesting that I expect furries to consume poison Sunny-D en masse any time soon.

Furries are the most obvious example of a pervasive trend on the Internet for spontaneous, almost unexplainable, and definitely bizarre sexual identities to be created from scratch. From there they are enabled by the Internet to snowball out of control, picking up the debris of society that might have otherwise found a respectable or positive way to contribute to our culture. I hate to admit it, but there are a few really f*cking talented furry artists, and it saddens me to see them sh*t away their skills drawing anthropomorphic reptile p*nises because they shackled their identity to an Internet-based cultural phenomenon. I can’t really struggle through reading much furry erotic fiction, but I’m sure there are some genuinely talented writers buried amidst the whale v*gina insertion stories and sexualized cannibalism yarns.

I’ve talked about how the Internet enables pedophiles, furries, and others to congregate and share ideas, but I only briefly touched on the most important aspect of this. In the endless expanse of communications the Internet is, probably the greatest and most terrible gift it offers to furries, pedophiles, and others, is the ability to shut themselves off from the mainstream. They huddle in cloisters that are virtually unassailable by the outside world and whisper encouraging things to one another that would be nearly impossible to say in real life. Free from the pressures of society to conform to a boring standard they go in the exact opposite direction, externalizing things that are roughly as far from ‘normal’ as can be expected. Then, within their protected virtual enclaves, they declare these things to be the norm. By declaring their perversions, mores, and general imbecility to be their own status quo they have simultaneously validated their own existence and demonstrated the inferiority of outsiders.

A sense of belonging and community is disturbing and sad in the hands of furries and downright dangerous in the hands of pedophiles. Nonetheless, this is what the Internet has given to these groups, and it can be both a peril to the members and, in the case of menaces like pedophiles, a peril to the rest of us.

You see this EVERYWHERE now in modern society.

There have always been people who were a little strange or had a few odd ideas, but in the past, nobody around them would have supported them declaring that they were Polygender today and their pronouns were Snailwolf and Snailwolf-self. They would have just gotten bullied, called the “weird kid” at school; their parents would have told them to, “Stop acting like a weirdo,” and they would have eventually switched to a new high school where people didn’t realize they were such a freak and started over while trying to be more normal.

But, today?

They go on a forum, meet 10,000 people who tell them that it’s their constitutional right to be a Snailwolf, that everyone who disagrees is a Nazi, and that if anything, they should probably wear a furry snail shell everywhere from now on.

Multiply that across endless numbers of weird little tangents, and you get armies of strange people whose identity and sense of belonging revolves around some bizarre little corner of the Internet full of damaged, anonymous weirdos with spotty grips on reality that go further and further away from reality to impress each other. This can be a huge problem because the longer this goes on, the more it can harden into a separating point between them and a successful, or even just NORMAL, life.

It’s also a problem because the Internet has turned a MUCH LARGER share of our population into weirdos than previous generations had to deal with. In fact, there are so many of them that it is increasingly becoming a problem for the rest of us.

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