I made the mistake of interacting with Obsession tweets on Twitter so now the algorithm is showing me "movie twitter" and the current discourse seems to be "Curry Barker didn't actually direct Obsession because he's only 26 years old," and "Kane Parsons didn't actually direct Backrooms because he's only 20 years old." I'm guessing some of the people saying this are just baiting, but behind such ill-spirited bait there's always a nugget of truth. One of the saddest lessons I learned during my 20s was the degree to which people are driven by envy. I'm not naturally like this, so finding out came as a genuine negative surprise about the nature of human beings.

I have had this experience many times now: I meet some guy, he's friendly, we get along, but after weeks, months and in one case years of interactions, I slowly realize just how driven by envy he is, just how much he focuses on the other and how it warps his perception in unproductive and self-defeating ways. Envy as a driver is not always bad, some people can make positive use of it to spring themselves into action, but those are exceptions. I also think this orientation is especially bad in men, because you kind of expect some of it in women, right, but it goes completely contrary to what men should aspire to be.

The problem is also that people learn to mask this quite well, for obvious reasons, which means it can take a while to figure it out depending on how socially skilled or smart the other person happens to be. It's just really, and I mean really upsetting to me to find other men in the wild like this, it's truly one of the few things that genuinely bothers me when interacting with people in real life. Sometimes I can get over it, sometimes I can't, it's my fault in the end in a way for not being "chill" enough. I need to take a chill pill, I need to have a good one, I need to not take things so serious, I just need to become goop and melt with the flowing stream of decay that we call this earth, yes.