The point is trite, since it’s been echoed since the 90s and 00s, and is and was much of Gen X’s cultural expression: The choice presented by @peppersky of being a suburbanite robbed of humor and youth, or a manchild, is a form of colonization of the mind via capitalism. Our unique selves buried under consumption of content and fulfilling social roles and goals determined by the capitalist system. (Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with either of these choices, but living like this also turns life into a purgatory of repetition and variation. It deprives life of color and purpose that become filled by junk ideology.)

Instead, we should be aspiring to be self-actualized adults with our own individuality and aspiration for life beyond checking milestones or consuming media.

Not too long ago there was a post on here, I can’t find it now, about some lady on Twitter saying that she liked Disco Elysium gameplay but didn’t like that it’s a game about a depressed guy walking around a depressing town talking to sad people. She proposed an alternate cutesy studio ghilbi esk game about a witch in Switzerland or something.

In a vacuum, yeah wanting a cool cutesy game about a witch is fine, but I and a lot of other posters found the tweet kind of grating because, there’s TONS of feel good, cozy games these days. So complaining that one of the best written, most in-depth and complex games of all time isn’t cozy and wholesome in an era where we have a dearth of cozy wholesome games just came off as really tone death.

So I think this nostalgia fixation and desire for comfort is causing some people to refuse to grapple with more unpleasant and challenging ideas in media, or in general. This is not to say you specifically have to like Disco Elysium but specifically saying you dislike it because it’s not sun shiny and optimistic strikes me as immature.

Edit: shouldn’t have typed this on my phone when I first woke up, damn there were some spelling errors