The Fuck Ass Bottom Line
We got your number, we’ll pull your card.
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I think this will be the year of the bottom line.
I had a moment of clarity last year when I said last year would be about reveals. I was right. But there were major elections around the world in 2024, and we never really stopped living in unprecedented times post-pandemic so it may be a little fraudulent to pat myself on the back too much. I could have said it was going to be the year of anything and it would’ve probably been true. So, this year will be the real test of whether or not I actually do have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.
But I still think I’m right. Why? Last year I had my moment of clarity after watching HBobmberguy’s expose essay in early December. You know what happened in early December 2024…?1
I’d hate to give away my methods but I believe in the free flow of information I guess. Besides, I’d rather make a bold prediction and stand by it than churn out one of those inane ins and outs lists littering my timelines. Some of them are just for fun, but it’s both amusing and annoying to watch people inflate themselves as informed tastemakers while they project their own personal gripes and insecurities onto the Notes App and call it insight.
That’s kinda what I’m getting at here: we’re tired of patronization, and it’s showing. Gen Z doesn’t want to be marketed to anymore. People want ads to be ads again—not influencers promising we’ll be just like them if we run to Target to buy the same powdered laxatives. If the U.S. election was any indication, we’re done with political placation and fearmongering. We’ve also wised up to the fact that the smart phones, that were supposed to optimize us to high heaven, are making it worse. How many posts did you see this year of someone patting themselves on the back for deleting or leaving an app? We’re tired of the stasis. We want to figure out the most effective ways to get to the things we want. We want it to be simple, even though we know it never will be.
As young people, we have been told to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, to get over it, that the world doesn’t owe us anything, and that we need to move on, get on with our lives. But if last year has taught us anything, it’s that the world our elders left us to inherit is depleted, and they’re shamelessly passing down its tatters.
But you really can’t piss on someone’s leg and tell them it’s raining. The way this generation is shaping up, if you catch the wrong one, they’ll probably chop your dick clean off.
Even young men, who are supposedly in a crisis of loneliness and helplessness, are getting in on the action. Three of the most prominent acts of defiance against the system have faces and names: Aaron Bushnell, Suchir Balaji, and Luigi Mangione (allegedly). These young men (all born in 1998…there’s something about the year 1998 and I don’t know what it is (that’s the year Rush Hour came out but that’s not it…at least I don’t think…) but once I put my finger on it you will be hearing from me) put their lives on the line to stand against mounting systemic cruelty. Bushnell, a US Airforce serviceman self-immolated outside of an Israeli embassy. His last words were “free Palestine.”
How did someone so young go so quickly from pledging allegiance to the U.S. Constitution to setting himself on fire in a radical act of defiance? How did someone who seems like they could’ve been genetically manufactured in a lab to be the perfect all American alpha male supposedly turn into America’s manic pixie dream martyr, switched on, tapped into the anxieties of any given person who’s had to deal with the American healthcare system? So much so that he allegedly carried out a radical act of violence? How did yet another young man with a promising STEM career, become crushed by the weight of the world he hoped to change, in ways reminiscent of Aaron Swartz’s tragic death.
These men are described as sweet, caring, happy and gentle. Not antisocial loners with incel manifestos and 8chan accounts.
Their stories highlight the bottom line: we are being systematically failed by those in power. The fuck ass bottom line is that we are fucked. Because we are being systemically fucked by people working with those systems. There is so much talk about how Gen Z is hypocritical and with that the cynical hope that we are just as selfish and apathetic as every generation that has come before us, but these examples—and the countless students physically and systematically beaten by Zionists, cops, politicians, and their own institutions for protesting on campuses—tell a different story. Many of us do care. Not just about ourselves but about others who are suffering too. The bottom line is we want it to stop and we’re going to do something about it.
Of course, these individuals might be outliers, they could also be signposts of what’s to come. The morning I started editing this, news broke of a Tesla Cybertruck being blown up outside Trump Tower. We’re living in Batman times, you guys.
As for the rest of us, we’re starting really, really small. We’re stepping away from social media or our phones, or screens altogether. Maybe this will be the year we stop talking about third spaces and fill them. We don’t need irony’s permission anymore. We can hang out without lookalike contests or needing to imitate anyone else. We don’t want to be influenced. We don’t want to press five for more options. Even celebrity lore is losing its grip on us.
Take Harris Dickinson’s intern character in Babygirl. Instead of Googling questions for Nicole Kidman’s high-powered CEO, he asked her directly. Why? the internet is full of misinformation and false narratives. Sometimes, you just have to go to the source2.
Like I said at the top, I hate the projection of ins and outs lists, so instead, here’s my earnest hope: this year will be about cutting through the noise. That means leaving behind internet logic and language. I hope therapy speak, Instagram feminism, and surface-level sociological takes lose their hold because people are outside, touching grass, or reading real theory—or both. I hope crypto bros sober up, tech evangelists crumble, I hope this is the year where we realize how badly we need the humanities and professionals who can give their professional opinions. I hope we gatekeep where absolutely necessary and that we call people both out and in. I hope we understand that we can’t discourse our way through to survival. The world is being bombed and burned; I don’t think we’re going to have a choice.
In looking for the bottom line, it’ll be really easy for grifters to traffic in their bullshit. They will of course adapt, as they always do, but I believe we’re learning to spot their tricks. I think the most prominent example of this is the post-election finger pointing, wherein rightwing grifters are pointing the finger at the “woke” (read people of color, specifically Palestinians, and the trans community) as the reason the Democrats lost the US election. But I think we can spot that for what it is.
We got your number, we’ll pull your card. And if we have to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, we’ll be doing it in the only way we know how.
With that said, I think we’re also going to have to lead with a unprecedented radical optimism and block out the haters and the naysayers. It’s really easy to look at all of the chronically online, cruel people in the comments section of a Tweet or Tiktok and conclude that world is burning and we can only sit and watch miserable, illiterate, degenerates throw gasoline on the fire.
But I rewatched The Matrix the other day, in which AI takes over the world and humans live in a simulation, constantly surveilled by deepfake Government goons, citizens completely pacified by technology. Sorry for the high school film club analysis, but my biggest takeaway from the film is that we do have a choice about the kind of world we want to live in. We can reject the simulacra, especially when it’s harming us in real time and will only harm us more in the long term. Right now, it feels like We Live In a Society where everything is fake and only love will save you. Corny, I know!
But this is a lesson I have learned so many times in my early adulthood. It is a lesson that was reinforced over the month of December 2024, when I spent time with friends and family. I had important, amazing, healing conversations, I made deeper connections and came to new understandings both in my relationships and with myself. None of that was done on that damn phone. My fuck ass bottom line? My motto for 2025? Everything is fake. Only love will save you.
I’m writing about American events from an American perspective as an American, if you have another, non-American perspective, I’d love to hear it in the comments below!
he also wanted…other things that we shan’t get into here