There has never been a better time in human history to be stupid
Alright that's enough Odyssey. Let's skip ahead to the next fucking thing. Unless you didn't read this piece yet then fine go do that but afterwards we're done.
Today Gareth Watkins returns to write about what a great time it is to be a hedonistic dumb guy. Even the stock market is for dumb guys now. He writes:
The highs and lows of gambling still exist, just as the visceral thrills of sex and drugs are still there for men like that, and it’s almost always men, but the context they appear in means that there’s no actual pleasure available. You aren’t Dean Martin in the MGM Grand putting it all on black with a showgirl on each arm, you’re some guy with an email job on an extremely hot leather couch taking out another mortgage so you can buy 0.88494844 of elon.moon.coin. Structurally there is no way to “do anything else except pursue pleasure,” and, structurally, there is no pleasure in pleasure.
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He previously wrote for Hell World about the proliferation of AI-generated "deepfake" pornographic images and the domineering masculinity of the "traditional" conservative family structure.
Luke O’Neil
The child of conservative parents grows up seeing that their father’s power is intimately connected to cruelty. And so he must be cruel to maintain his power and he must maintain his power in order to continue to enjoy cruelty. Whether that cruelty takes the form of emotional neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse, a female figure is almost always close, able to help but unwilling. When the conservative child is an adult, he will continue the cycle. It’s hard to imagine a world without power, and harder still to exist in this one while renouncing a simple way to have one’s needs met. That could mean expecting free domestic labour from a woman maintaining a “traditional” household, or feeling powerful by hurting somebody weaker than you. The child of conservative parents has no choice but to Be A Man, and will grow to fetishize male power and cruelty while despising the entire gender that failed to protect him from it.
After that a bunch more from me including a couple of new poems I really like, the saddest most beautiful thing I've seen all week, new song recommendations, and more News to Get Pissed off At.
There is no pleasure in pleasure
by Gareth Watkins
There has never been a better time in human history to be stupid.
Throughout much of our species’ existence it was required to have a certain level of baseline canniness. A subsistence farmer had no choice but to learn when to plant certain crops or what to do in the case of a failing harvest. Hunter-gatherers needed to know which plants were edible and which animal calls represented predators and prey. Elites were not immune either. Roman Senators, Samurai retainers and Borgia nobles all had to master the complex social systems of their milieu. One wrong gesture, one misplaced honorific, and they might be killed – often horribly.
Over time that has changed. At the start of modernity the world became much more hospitable to hooting morons. Advances in farming and medicine meant that many more had access to a safety net previously only thinkable for royalty. And like them the average person could become complacent. With mass populations came mass culture, and a good part of that mass culture was necessarily pitched to the lowest common denominator. In recent memory – in my recent memory – there was very clear dumb guy canon: nu-metal, the films of the Farrelley and Wayans brothers, most video games, Insane Clown Posse, wrestling. Today you have, as Dan Ozzi noted recently in Hell World, “unregulated brain pills, gas station energy drinks, Pornhub gooning, vape tricks, Worldstar videos, rap battles, Deadpool humor, and a certain intangible spiritual quality we’ll call Jokerfication.”
That’s all certainly true, but the spectrum of modern stupidity doesn’t stop at guys in Tapout hoodies and Crocs. Today even the stock market is for dumb guys. There’s quantum physics for idiots.
When I use words like “stupid” and “dumb” I’m not referring to an absence of the vague property we call “intelligence.” I don’t believe in IQ testing as being predictive of anything but how well a person will do on an IQ test, and I don’t think that a person can be either smart or “stupid.” There are some ferociously intelligent people, Slavoj Zizek for instance, who are just as “stupid” as somebody who can’t discuss Hegel and Lacan. One of the few ways to make good money with a philosophy degree is to pretend that you are teaching morality to Large Language Models. “Stupid” here instead functions as a shorthand for a habit of mind that I want to call Epistemic Hedonism. That is, using whatever intellectual capacities one has – maybe a little, maybe a lot, it doesn’t matter – not to try to better understand the world, but purely for one’s own base amusement.
The dumbest guys in 2026 have six 32 inch, 140hz computer monitors, at least one turned on its side. They are monitoring spreads and deltas. They have AI agents producing racially-charged vegetable microdramas. They are making eight-leg parlays. They’re Diamond Handing. It’s complicated stuff. Asinine, but vastly intricate, like the Tartaria Mud Flood videos they’re watching on one of their screens. You have to have a certain amount of mental bandwidth to absorb it all, but it’s not about producing any kind of real-world result. It sure as hell isn’t about making anything better for anyone. It’s just about having fun, because what else is there?
The century-long decline of capitalism has taken us to the point where there are no smart moves left to make. Learning a skill so that you can work from nine to five Monday to Friday just isn’t viable anymore. Work in an office and you can comfortably scroll through Excel spreadsheets and join a few meetings and that’s kind of it. Work in the trades and a big part of your day now might be recording videos about how We’re HVAC Installation Guys. Where does the money come from? Don’t worry about it. There seems to be a class of people to whom money just accrues like barnacles to a ship’s propeller and maybe one of them will let you have a taste of it to write their LinkedIn posts for them or dance in their TikToks.
In the absence of smart moves there are only dumb moves, and those dumb moves tend to be a whole lot of fun.
The term “Financial Nihilism” makes this sound a lot less enjoyable than it really is, but the more accurate term “Financial Depressive Hedonism” has a few too many syllables to catch on. It’s hedonism in the way that (influencer of some kind) Clavicular is a hedonist. The highs and lows of gambling still exist, just as the visceral thrills of sex and drugs are still there for men like that, and it’s almost always men, but the context they appear in means that there’s no actual pleasure available. You aren’t Dean Martin in the MGM Grand putting it all on black with a showgirl on each arm, you’re some guy with an email job on an extremely hot leather couch taking out another mortgage so you can buy 0.88494844 of elon.moon.coin. Structurally there is no way to “do anything else except pursue pleasure,” and, structurally, there is no pleasure in pleasure. It’s all empty calories. But it’s the kind of empty calories that are extremely likely to end in suicide.
This is perhaps best illustrated by the SpaceX IPO. Here, not just the usual retail investing bros, but the entire financial system succumbed to epistemic hedonism, putting aside any reasonable protections and even ignoring regulations that are in place for literally every other IPO except for this one. The result has been the worst stock debut since the 2008 financial crisis. That’s largely down to a hype-to-fundamentals reset: when SpaceX stock entered the markets on June 11 of 2026, it became the biggest IPO in history within days. That left shares trading for 84 times the revenue of the company, which is really several of Elon Musk’s companies rolled into one, many of which are not making a profit. The actual space launch business does alright, albeit less than a billion in profit, and Starlink is doing well, but the company’s AI interests are bleeding money, and that’s only going to get worse as the entire sector craters. (The conglomerate also includes the newly-launched X Money, which seems doomed to fail, not least because of its association with the already toxic X brand, essentially a fandom for Musk himself.) Because the NASDAQ bent their own rules to allow the stock to be listed on their exchange far earlier than it should have been, pension funds and ETFs that automatically buy the biggest stocks bought $SPCX on day one and are now eating the losses. Even if you did the smart thing of investing in a safe, boring, index-tracking fund you ended up losing money.
In the SpaceX IPO Prospectus, the company made the claim that they have a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion (the total GDP of the United States in 2025 was $30.7 trillion). This is all what Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff described as “Financial Fabulism” in their book Muskism, but a more interesting question is why anyone believes him. An even more interesting question is if people believe him. I’ve worked in finance, so I know that the people who make decisions about the allocation of billions of dollars aren’t any more rational than the rest of the population. They have political biases, and, more damning, they tend to like Elon Musk. They’re fully capable of epistemic hedonism, especially when fear of missing out is involved. That doesn’t mean that they’re stupid stupid. You can’t FOMO anyone into believing that Grok will one day be worth more than China or that data centres in space are physically possible. Being willing to invest clients’ money that you’re legally bound to try to protect into something like SpaceX when that company tells obvious lies in an important document speaks to a psychology barely different from our guy on the hot leather couch taking on a second mortgage to bet on Draft Kings because he “knows sports.” It’s giving up on the prospect of there ever even being a meaningful distinction between truth or lies, because playing along with fantasies is just so much more entertaining, even if you ultimately lose all of your clients’ money and your own.
Banning or at least heavily regulating online gambling and predictions markets, and regulating crypto and investing, would be a band-aid on a cancer patient at this point. Solving a problem like epistemic hedonism means asking the question of what we want human life to look like and arriving at an answer, and that is something that people who aspire to intelligence – the people who believe things only when they are true, no matter how they make them feel – have been notoriously bad at. We might also have to ask why it is that financial nihilism offends our particular sensibilities. What are the real alternatives to nihilistic ways of making money and experiencing joy and connection? If you feel that you are different to the men on their apps, the idiots losing their life’s savings just to feel part of something, then you will need to be able to say what a better life should be.
Gareth Watkins is a writer from the UK whose work has appeared in New Socialist, Tribune, The Fence, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Vulture, Commune, and MEL. He is one of the hosts of the podcast Death Sentence.
The sword situation
The sword dangling over my head had lowered a touch over night. Still not close enough that I was freaking out but I could sense its movement. I called my brother to check if there were any developments with respect to his sword and he said he could sort of make it out way up there if he squinted. I don’t know why everyone’s losing it over these swords he said. Then I called my congresswoman to ask yet again if there were any plans to tackle the sword situation as it were and the girl who answered said it was the official position of the office that the swords do not exist except in some rare foreign cases. I could tell she was reading from a script. Can you let her know that they most certainly do I said and she said that she would pass the message along and hung up. Outside some landscapers were at work trimming the neighbor’s hedges. Each of them with a gleaming blade perched inches from the back of their necks. Why didn’t they just grab it at this stage I thought. Why didn’t they just reach right up and grab it.
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