1.

Disneyland exist in order to hide that it is the real country, all real America that is Disneyland. (a bit like prisons are there the hide that it is the social and its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as a imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, where is all fusses, and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order into the order of simulation. It is no longer question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing, the fact that the real is no longer real, and saving the reality in principal.

The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true, nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. When the debility of this imaginary, it's infantile generation. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the real world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere – that it is out of the adults themselves who come here to act the child, in order to foster illusions as to the real childishness.

Baudrillard: The Precession of Simulacra

I detest both Adulting and Imposter Syndrome. The first for its definition and implementation, while the second has been instrumentalized so far away from its definition—the definition of which I have no problem with. But both promote a stasis in the progression of the self, feeding infantile generations and cultures. Allowing stasis to sit in. As suddenly all insecurities that in more than some occasions, were just simply climbing the eclipse of self-awareness and were very fair critiques of the self. Now these very real genuine worries that you’re not _______ enough, become okay to maintain. The critique and solution of this isn’t the opposite end of this, thinking happiness or anything comes from the completion of a goal pursued. But it is the maintenance of it, the belief that negative emotions and experiences are fundamentally traumatic and wrong. It takes a certain amount of privilege (and capital) to come away with the gall to publically express your feelings of imposter syndrome in a high-paying corporate job, or even as a university student. This is not monolithic; contextual events affect its use and those who identify with it. It is not an impossible feeling, but it is a shockingly common feeling expressed everywhere. Maybe the 40-year-old whose only book they’ve read this year was Spare should feel shame for the disservice they’re doing to themselves. And the undergraduate student that watches anime in class, or spends the whole time on Discord, should feel insecure about their actions. But the self-labelling of adulting and imposter syndrome does nothing to promote growth, it simply promotes an acceptance of their lack of ambition, their lack of even attempting to change. There is nothing wrong with feeling insecure unless it borders on the prescribed-psychiatric level (A point that, much like almost everything I write, I am not qualified to argue for). But it is the way one treats insecurity, do they choose to be soothed and comforted by their inabilities, or motivated and attempting to change.

Maybe the issue with the term is that it is so easy to latch onto, as just the two words of imposter syndrome can have a definition pulled out of them just from their combination. Maybe psychological terms should never be allowed to be reduced to less than 8 words in tandem, the answer to the ease of mimetic reproducibility could be aided by a more long-form version of self-victimization. Adulting is so inherently sickening that I feel I don’t even have to describe why I find it so reprehensible. The embarrassment one should feel for dropping adulting should go up to the highest level once used over the age of 22. And even that is pushing it, but it should increase for every year gone up. Those above the age of 30 institutionalized.

These are the societal consequences of being subjected to hyperconnected social communication. Influenced by the technology of seeing lives in front of you, lives much better, and lives much worse than yours. But never yours. And those who aim to present their lives project the idealized self. The opposite: presenting an ironic dramatized self projects still, not the self. Steer away from idols and models of behavior and life, the medium is not capable of accurately expressing so authentic a takeaway. And is certainly not capable of expressing an authentic act of reproduction either.

2.

After school, my father seats me by the rightmost corner of our tan sectional couch. “How was school?” interrupts my empty dome. And before responding with an empty “OK,” with the aim of ambivalently ending a conversation to a question that would be immediately skipped over before I even respond—the query gets tossed aside before the escapist-intending words even leave my blistered lips.

“Let’s watch a film, I can’t been around so much lately.” He suggests as a grammatically incorrect solution, seeking to alleviate the stinking systemic familial failure that seeps in every nook and cranny of this slop-stained 2-bedroom house. The word home, which comes harder and never appears instead of house.

“This movie really makes you feel the real thing, son; it made me a better man. It… I really th—it’s the best”. His portly hand fumbles for the remote, eventually grasping it. His chip-stained thumb toggles the power on, and as the Blu-ray disc starts to shudder and whirl, Monsters, Inc. comes on.

“No one does it like Sully!” “Mike Wazowski has done it again!” “Classic Mike!” shatters through my head like a sentient dental drill rebelling against its blue-gloved doctorate master. My 9-year-old Wazowski-beaten eyes slip down under their lids, and recede into my head hoping to escape—at least visually—the hell of this bloodtied paternal connection. The only way this end-of-the-disney-pipeline man is capable of expressing anything real, any emotion, through a comedy for kids that is revered and treated as a solution. A medical gauze. But underneath that gauze is a tumour no gauze can cure, but it can hide. It still expresses that its person is sick or in pain, but obfuscates the extent, obfuscates the sight. And he wants to hide it—his brain is just too infantile and numbed to articulate the understanding that he wants to hide it, only capable of understanding the world, family, and life through the medium of children’s movies.

How do you grow up in the Mickey Mouse Slop House? You simply treat the slop as level-uppable tools. You want edgier and hard versions of the content you watched as a kid. It’s why Star Wars, Marvel, or any other fans of their respective pig slop want more adult forms of the same content. But with the characters they already know, the ones with whom they’ve established an insane level of trust. I’ll grow up wanting to see Sully and Wazowski grow up with me, going through puberty, watching their demon parents divorce and fight over a custody they both aim to win, but deep down are fine with losing. Sully and Wazowski should help me understand how I feel, how I should see the world at the age I feel I should be at.

And, lo and behold, Monsters, Inc. University comes out! Now I know what my university experience would be like. And as I sit in my childhood bedroom, twirling my dustmited blinds down to their windowsill base, I laugh to myself, looking forward to the future. Where me and Wazowski can drink and play beer pong. Me and Sully urinating in public spaces, me not snitching and my monster friends for roofie-ing their fellow demons. Sully blackout drunk and taken advantage of by a purple lizard in a truly monstrous display of toxic masculinity. Man, it sure can’t be harmful to build my worldview on that.

But to that poor kid in a household where you don’t know any better, arrested development is the only rite of passage, and possibly the last rite of passage. And when that poor kid logs onto the internet, he won’t learn any better either. As the pig-slop industrial complex functions and dominates public discourse and popular culture in its entirety.

3.

But all this sexual, psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which proliferate in california, belong to the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contact thepray. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everyone one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food.

One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga.

Baudrillard: The Precession of Simulacra

All these things that people no longer do to each other or themselves, there are now media for that. There is entertainment for it. Especially the permanent underclass, who cannot even think of affording these sexual, psychic, and somatic recycling institutes (which are already a failure of humanity).

One reinvents parenthood to be done through the process of media consumption. One reinvents an emotional moment into an infantile display of sincere self-flagellation. It’s also the ultimate radicalization of a Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) sentence, where he states that people no longer talk, discuss, or truly communicate with eachother—we entertain each other. The reproduction of self in everyday life needs a new Erwing Goffman for the soma-pilled slop-filled contemporary reality. For the sake of the poor aforementioned fictional kid, who frankly, never had a chance of becoming anything other than his father. Forced into slop and to grow a snout, in a process of ecological subordination to their environment.

These situations where a Disney-obsessed adulting-imposter syndromed adult financially, emotionally, and genealogically harms themselves and those around them are due to themselves being victimized. Whether it is being emotionally neglected as a child, attaching their only hopes of happiness to the parks, to the media they consumed alone as the sounds of neglect roar throughout the house—a child fending off the taloned soundwaves penetrating beneath the doorframe. These adults that aim to extend their childhood indefinitely will reproduce the same cycles of neglect and violence done to them, just in a different, more infantile manner. Although I say this very dramatically, Imposter Syndrome is akin to a gateway drug towards this process. The process of infantilization of the self.

And don’t worry this never happened to me! At least not yet. I worry it happened to you.