I'm reading Time Out of Joint by Philip K Dick. Then on the side I read a few pages of Nightcrawlers by Robert McCammon. The thing these stories have in common is they portray people who are social and outgoing. Normies if you will. Time Out of Joint begins with two neigbor families hanging out together in the home, playing cards. Nightcrawlers begins with a policeman entering a mom-and-pop diner, the same one he eats at every day, and they start cooking his meal before he even ordered because they know what he always gets. Then the policeman starts talking to the waitress about his friend whom he's been trying to make her go on a date with for some time. When I read these stories it feels very foreign to me. Do people like this exist today or is this a thing of the past? Why do some of us live a much more alienated atomized life than this?
This is a TV series episode based on the short story Nightcrawlers.
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I'm reading Time Out of Joint by Philip K Dick. Then on the side I read a few pages of Nightcrawlers by Robert McCammon...
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>Why do some of us live a much more alienated atomized life than this?
It's done by design
Elaborate. I think it's both by design and inevitable. I've seen antibullying stuff being pushed, that's an example of the former. Mom-and-pop businesses being replaced by big chains, people spending a lot of time in front of screens, those are examples of the latter. But probably both mechanisms are connected.
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>be the change you want to see
Yeah, there is plenty of life like this around but there is a war against it.
It's D&C until eventual enslavement. It may turn out the Amish were right all along.
Sneed
of course they are. what's the alternative? globohomo? wow pretty cool. what a cool life and cool world. very cool.
it's completely normal here and common to do both of those things
Gypsies are pretty interesting in this context. Might be the only race where all of them don't go to school. You pretty much have to be homeless to stay outside the system. It's kind of remarkable how they managed to stay outside of the system for so long. Muslims it takes one generation and they're completely assimilated into this trash culture.
I guess America has a higher percentage of Christians than Europe too. Perhaps a less alienated society.
> Time Out of Joint by Philip K Dick
The Truman Show is based on that one, right ? They recreate a city in the 60's for a schizo who can predict where the nukes from the space rebels will hit earth. That's the one ?
Don't think it's based on the book but the book is mentioned in the wiki article as being similar. I'm just a few chapters in. Yeah it's something about a parallel reality or simulation, they're in the 60s I think but they find a magazine with Marylyn Monroe and she seems famous yet they never heard about her. They begin to think they are being duped.
Everyone in Sweden has been socially distancing centuries before Covid struck.
You will never have a prime minister who wrote a 1984-type book titled The Sleeping People. Jokes aside I think alienation was part of what it was about, it's been years since I read it.
That is why ISEKAIS are all that matter, they are made for people like us, the only stories where you can actually imagine yourself being there.
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I guess I'm getting old, but that's what life was like for EVERYONE, even social outcasts had social lives in the 70s--just unhappy ones.