thought digest, 01.28.2025

A long while ago—maybe 2022—I pitched a story I never followed through on, and I still wish I had. It was about Adderall narrating the mood of our age: affectless, prone to mood swings, hyper-fixated, irritable, and asocial.

Pharmaceuticals have always shaped culture. The sixties had LSD, the seventies cocaine, the eighties crack. More recently, we’ve seen the rise of Adderall and SSRIs. Right now, we’re arguably in the ketamine age. As Freya India once quipped, “You’re not asexual; you’re on SSRIs.” In a similar vein, I often wonder: Are you actually autistic or have 14-hour screen time and perpetual stimulant use turned you into a rigid, hyper-focused automaton? Adderall and internet overexposure both condition the brain to fixate, flattening emotional affect and amplifying irritability. And if you’re actually taking Adderall, you get the bonus of mood swings. How many Culture War battles can be traced back to someone’s Adderall comedown?

Adderall’s cultural footprint is, of course, most visible in our writing culture. I keep thinking about how funny it is that the Adderall generation preceded generative AI. The timing is incredible. There was a whole cohort of millennial writers who didn’t become writers because they were literary. They became writers because they already were writing, and they were writing because you write on the computer. Writing on the computer—even roleplaying—is not the same as reading or writing literature. What emerged was a style once called “Asperger’s writing”: deliberately flat, mechanical, with little interiority. Deadpan descriptions of the world around you. Alt-lit minimalism, popular in the 2010s, embodied this ethos, reflecting the influence of both Adderall and the internet on our psyches.1

Recently, I’ve noticed a shift.

The affectless style characteristic of the 2010s has given way to a new form of writing, particularly present on Substack. These pieces are almost always all lowercase, confessional, breathless, and moralizing—and they’re always too long! I’ve called them “essays as objects,” because their creation feels more important than their consumption. It’s important that you wrote it at all. I also suspect they are only “read” insofar as people scan them for quotable, shareable, “relatable” sections. The virality, as opposed to a conversation, is its own reward. It’s a little sneaky.

I noticed this style of writing starting to simmer around 2022. Now, I feel like it’s everywhere. This shift makes sense in the context of generative AI. AI writing, like Adderall-driven writing, often feels hollow. Maybe it’s technically proficient but it’s emotionally thin. In reaction to both, we see a turn toward florid, impossibly long essays that perform authenticity.

Whether this trend revives a literary culture or merely postures as “literary” is anyone’s guess.

Cyborg babies. Here’s a question that might out me as the “r-slur.” Could humans ever have a child with a robot? I’m not talking about a metaphorical “child,” but a child whose genes somehow combine human DNA with synthetic DNA, to whatever extent the latter is possible. I’m not sure how it would work, but if anyone could talk me through something like this, reach out…

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ME AROUND THE WEB

Our Spiritual Machines (Or: Our Beautiful Animist Future)

Katherine Dee, sam buntz, and Gio’s Content Corner.

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Jan 25

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No missed connections or messages from the Dolphin Religion this week. 🐬

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