Monks in the Casino

We are taking a brief intermission from poetry this week to discuss a Substack article that HE2 pointed out to us. Please read the piece in full for an exploration of gooning, gambling culture, and isolation.

We believe the author raises valuable points to consider for anyone thinking about contemporary brainrot.

"While I know that some men are lonely, I do not think that what afflicts America’s young today can be properly called a loneliness crisis. It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-consantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them."