My ex-wife’s parents are both therapists and whoo boy do I have stories that can only be told at a bar.

I’m not qualified to make diagnoses but my real fear is that most “mental health professionals” probably aren’t either.

I think that’s probably too dismissive of a cultural shift. Every generation makes a hard break from the past that the previous generation can’t come to terms with. You can read about that in The Fourth Turning. I spend a lot of time with teenagers and I see it firsthand, and it’s I don’t think it’s a phenomenon that can just be labeled an illness. Personally, I take a live-and-let live approach, but I do think parents who allow their kids to take hormone therapy are the ones who need mental health intervention the most.

Have you been on a college campus in the last few years? This generation of 20-somethings has fully adopted it. It breaks my brain to use the word “they” as a singular pronoun, but I don’t think it’s ever going back.

Here's one that comes up for a lot of people I know:

Job requires you to list your pronouns in your email signature.

Cool or not cool?

Yesterday, I announced and did an experiment to only like (🤙), and not send or receive zaps (⚡️), though some of you got some ⚡️ in before I unconnected my wallet (🙏).

I did this experiment because I saw that people were starting to turn against likes, now that we have zaps. The zap maxi was being born in front of my eyes and I wanted none of that.

The results of yesterdays testing, for me at least, is that zaps are here to stay. All of yesterday, I wanted to zap notes; it’s still new and fun. I was also asked to accept zaps. Value 4 Value is here for good and is now social.

As for likes, they still felt great and seemed to serve a purpose beyond just feeding an algorithm: proof of existence, read receipt, shared experience… put simply, online connection. Likes are bone deep in social and will be hard to ever abandon as they are low cost, quick, and are still meaningful for so many.

With nostr, we can now choose the client that doesn’t show us the algorithmic feed because we liked something. It’s safe to like with abandon and not have our feed curated for us anymore by black boxes. Data miners gonna mine though, and your nostr advertisement profile will be created and sold. However, these marketing efforts can now be suppressed for the first time ever with the the nostr protocol and the new social clients that are being built for it. We will have to support these new clients ourselves though, if we want to keep our feeds free of weeds. It’s still a garden, but the walls have been torn down.

And finally, I still prefer to reply with 🤙 and other emojis (🫂⚡️😆…) as a connection point when I can, to be more clear, and as a reminder of when things started to get more active around here.

Thanks for reading.

Keep liking, keep zapping.

🤙⚡️

Is it possible to be respectful of people who suffer from gender dysphoria without redefining everything in society?

Does this pregnant man 🫃🏼 emoji help or hurt people?

Should we be so inclusive we allow men in women's sports where they absolutely dominate?

Or women's prisons were they rape and impregnate?

Maybe on Nostr we can have a civil discussion about it without getting banned by woke twitter moderators...

Nostr fixes __________

CONFORMITY IS THE JAILER OF FREEDOM AND THE ENEMY OF GROWTH. -JOHN F. KENNEDY

“When I see their happy faces…”

Where is that coming from?

I don’t know who and I don’t know where, but I know that someone out there will be watching 7th Heaven today all day to celebrate block 777777.

Good morning and PV!

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