I have been of the firm belief that 2020-2021 and COVID made the world retarded. This belief is incorrect. This just happened to be around the time I got old enough to have enough of an ego to declare myself able discern the world around me wholly. The world has probably been retarded for much longer than I could put my finger on reliably. Regardless, 2020-2021 was surely the date I carved on the headstone for my hope for people. Now funny enough despite that I never really experienced a real shutdown outside of school. I lived in a town of 2000 and me, my parents, and all my friends’ parents really couldn’t care in the least. I actually remember that summer quite fondly, lots of fishing, first times getting drunk, walking onto golf courses after hours and just playing a few balls at a time, watching a friend kill 300+ seagulls over the year, quasi-dated (to the extent a 15-year old can) a cute neighbor girl with to this day the most ridiculous ass I’ve ever seen on a thin white girl, best kisser I’ve met too, it was good times had by all. Except for my grandpa who get diabetes, cancer, multiple infections in the kidneys, urinary tract, intestinal damage, the flu and covid at the same time. He lives to this day. Oh, and except for those seagulls, I guess.

So when people talk about this shift from 2019-2020, this shift from every day having the sun shine to samsara, I don’t really feel it. I guess I dodged basically all of it except it did make me remember iFunny existed, and therefore is the reason I write this today. I didn’t feel that change in the air except for one thing, the people both around me and on my screen. There was a deadly disease spreading in 2020, and it was loserdom.

The stats back it up. Looking at various estimates, I’d bet 10-15% of western young adults are NEETs. Screen usages have spiked since Covid and not fallen, 41% of teens report >8 hours on their screens a day. But do you really need numbers to confirm it for yourself? Using anecdotal evidence is like bad or something but if you are thinking that when I speak of my anecdotes, how about you kick rocks pal. And then get raped by feral gorillas.

I’m in the unique position to be able to spin yarn on truly the bottom and upper crusts of the little pieces of society I’ve experienced so far. I am lucky to have some friends who are what I would consider to be varying degrees of Chad. Guys who have had women threaten suicide if they did not fuck them, killed deer with screwdrivers, beat the shit out of people in fights, and flat out just never had a hard day in their lives because the world is easy to them. These are good guys to be friends with, because they make the world better around them. I can tell you that COVID didn’t slow any strides for them. They weathered it without so much as shrugging because it’s what winners do. It’s instinctual, it’s without any degree of self awareness, no thought is given into the act of success or succeeding itself, they just did things. It provided me a perspective of another world, a perspective I desperately needed to see because I needed to see good in the world.

You see, I was in speech, debate, knowledge bowl, and Civil Air Patrol in high school. Not as bad as theater, but speech had a lot of overlap with that crowd.

Speech was easily the most intolerable. If I wasn’t good at it, I would’ve never touched it. I did meet the hottest woman I’ve met on my speech team, which made things better, but that was a candlelight on a new moon night. I’ve seen faggots you people wouldn’t believe, crossdressers with lisps get bids to the state tournament. I watched fat gay niggers strike poses in all-white suits and dykes PDA near the judge lounge gate. All of these faggots will be lost in time, like most speech chicks’ eggs.

It was bad to the point where I really adopted a whole new persona in speech. I’m outgoing, my coach originally recruited me for humor. One week and I switched categories to the hardest, most autistic one I could find. Just like that I put on the character of a cold autist. Literally anything to dissuade chances of conversation with the worst people you could imagine. Mentally ill arthousers, redditoids, Indians, fat women, ugly women, the whole shabang. In this I avoided interaction but was still forced into observation. When they say there are whole other worlds out there, they’re not kidding. Every little thing was cause for hysterics from these people, AO3 was probably more commonly read than their scripts. Screaming their heads off when a teammate got a 5th place finish. Crying for various reasons. It’s like every little piece of life was this microcosm of the greatest trials and tribulations they could imagine, probably because by their standards, those were. I’d find myself conversing with people who in any other world were actual retards, but in the standards of who you meet in speech, were like frat brothers.

Debate was basically similar on all ends except now these kids were wannabe cutthroat lawyering you. I recall the session shooting down a proposed bill banning undersea mining, and the girl who wrote it storming out and sobbing violently for 20 minutes. We had to console her, and in her tears she just explained that she couldn’t believe we couldn’t see how bad undersea mining was. She was that enveloped.

Knowledge bowl was different in some ways. You know the outgoing nerd? The extrovert who really should probably hang his head a little more? Yeah, that’s knowledge bowlers for ya. Everybody there was always down to do things that were in spirit the same kind of thing as going to the barcade. Everybody wanted to be your friend. Now, knowledge bowl was probably amongst the best I saw in nerd world, there were actually competent nerds and the occasional regular dude. The women were okay too. Not so bad compared to everything else.

Civil Air Patrol was basically a daycare for homeschooled tools. It’s funny because there was some serious people in there, kids who are now flying jets or are nuclear engineers, but they were the 0.0000001%ers.

Albeit unlike the disingenuously accepting, socially (womanly, basically) scheming masses of speechers, these kids were actually good in the heart, just retarded. One of our barrack lockers still had a vape in it left over by a Guardsman and everybody was genuinely too afraid to touch it, or even go within 5 feet of it. When I threw it in the trash and said it wasn’t that big of a deal and that I have some friends who vape, I was told I need better friends. I don’t think I necessarily saw kids who were supposed to be failures by their nature, but their circumstances of obviously overbearing parents and being locked away from the world was going to make them get fucked over by adjusting to the real world a lot later than everyone else.

Now, am I a dick harping on nerds, the uncool, and the weird? Yes. I am kind of a dick. And I like to complain about people who unnerve me. But I bring these up not as actual examples of losers but as perhaps the most sobering, horrifying thought yet. Those kids I mentioned, utter rough masses, those fags, freaks, shutaways, etc., those kids went out and did something.

Everyone I’ve described has had hobbies, interests, initiative, experience in competitions or structured teamwork settings, all strong indicators of a non-loser. All these people tried at something, and even got better at something. You want to talk about there being separate worlds? Yeah, the world of the emotionally unstable pantsuit speech girls henhousing over 4/10 men is one far, far detached from you. But you know it’s there. You’ve been near it more often than you may realize. These types of people, they’re losers but not loser-losers. They’ll probably get jobs and stuff. There are worlds you never know of and it’s because there are people who have stopped existing. I can think of a few people I knew of who had/have no world to speak of as it is. People who don’t just not register on normal people’s radars, but anyone’s. People who have lost, who simply don’t know what a win is. A few suicides in my town have been these poor souls. Nobody knew em. They never made themselves known. They never made anything, and then they were gone. I fear we have more of those than we realize. I fear we don’t have an NPC or mentally ill public freak problem as much as we do human equivalents to the unenterable buildings that line the streets in GTA 5. I fear that so many souls were lost in the minute waves of COVID that didn’t realize they could just lift their head from the water.

You definitely see it online. Go to any comment/reply section on just about any media and you find hollow hordes. I’m not talking bots, either. COVID’s kill count will always be inflated. But honestly, it gets made up for by those who went MIA. I can only hope the world improves and maybe the nothings of the world can come forth, but there’s state of current things implies we shall see it only more than ever. Increasing unemployment and AI companionship come to mind. Lots a bullets are going to get eaten methinks. Make sure you’re not one.