3/18/2023 0 Comments Red pill hari kunzruSince these characters belong to Gen X and came of age in the 1990s, they have little in the way of creeds-religious, political, or personal-to hold fast to when the crisis comes for them. And so their own crack-up is hard to distinguish from the one happening or looming in the wider world, whether financial, ecological, cultural, or political. And what do you know? The same is true of the society they live in. Instead, they tend to find themselves in precarious positions in midlife, personally on the cusp of or experiencing a breakdown. Though divorce may be involved, adultery is not the central concern, and characters don’t tend to find themselves afflicted by a stultifying prosperity. These books don’t partake of the usual clichés we associate with the midlife crisis. The people coming of age at that time were and still are called Gen X, and now, a couple of decades on, a literary genre is in full flower: the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel. It’s no coincidence that this novel phrase comes from a movie made in the 1990s, a time when stories about reality’s general fakeness ( Fight Club, The Truman Show) were as popular as Prozac and the idea that we’d reached the end of history. It’s a term commonly used by incels who’ve become convinced their loneliness will last until they die.Ĭonversion narratives are as old as Plato’s Cave or The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Being black-pilled means yielding to terminal despair. The slang then passed from the realm of hooking up to politics, where getting red-pilled means taking a reactionary turn, becoming unwoke, going deep into the weeds of politically incorrect “facts.” You can veer in the other direction, from an alt-right troll to socialist ally, and that’s called being blue-pilled. It was picked up as slang during the Bush years, an expert on the subject told me, by pick-up artists who learned that women would go to bed with them if they presented themselves as domineering assholes, negging their dates rather than adhering to an anodyne Hollywood version of charm in the mode of Paul Rudd. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) presents Neo (Keanu Reeves) with a choice of two pills, a blue one that will allow him to live complacently within the illusion he’s used to (a fake life as a regular Joe with a family and an office job), or a red one (it looks like a Robitussin tablet) that will show him “the truth” (he’s really in a pod hooked up to a tube that sucks out his life force-the sustainable energy of that fictional world). Just a single dose and you’ll never see the world the same way again. WHAT ARE THESE RED PILLS AND WHERE DO YOU GET ONE? They seem more potent than most non-metaphorical drugs.
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