Petrarchive – tired of dealing with low culture people

The curse of the autodidact, born with taste but cursed to live in a lower sociocultural rung. The upper classes won't have you in their ranks, but you know what? In Anno Domini 2026 the sons and daughters of the aristocratic and bourgeoisie also have no taste. They are just as tacky and base as the everyone else. The only hope for people like you and I is to live in the past (like your picrel), and maybe, maybe perhaps try to lay the foundations for a cultural revival for our children's children.

why does this place and rs subreddits care so much about "taste". sure having better taste is good but idk id be a bit ashamed of being proud of it. it is consumption at the end of the day (even if you don't like that word!)

write stuff, make your own music even if it's bad and be ridiculed for that rather wish for praise for good taste

>> 10362

Because everyone has a taste and sharing that taste and discussing it and learning more from others like you is one of the most satisfying things in daily life. It is sad when you can't share that with the people in your daily life, and even sadder when people reject or dismiss your interests out of some stupid insecurity, no matter how often it actually happens. It also sucks to attempt to talk to people about these things and they feel uncomfortable or out of their depth. It's not about praise it's about being able to share something new with others and receive something new in return.

In my experience, people are at least somewhat receptive to your ideas if you don't sound like you think you're better than them. Sure, there's an endless supply of unthinking automatons, but you don't exactly have to talk to them past the superficial. Tangentially, it's always a bit concerning when boards/forums come to more comprise laments on the state of their discourse rather than valuable contributions. A reflection of the general cultural malaise of the times.

>>10362
I do agree obsessing over taste like it's some inert thing you just "possess" is silly, but to disregard all interactions with culture as mindless consumption is a ridiculous sentiment. If we can't derive meaning from culture, then there's not much that remains past sheer life-denying nihilism.

>>10363

I get that. and I'm sorry if my tone was harsh, it's just that I've accepted that im not going to meet people irl who have the same taste as me and I've made internet communities substitute for that. I think most people who don't watch the latest on Netflix or read y/a fall in the same category as us, regardless of what their and our tastes are. so it's kind of wishful thinking to be part of a community based on taste in books and movies. even before the internet I believe you'd be hard pressed to find someone who understands and shares your tastes if your tastes veer towards any niche. that's just the way it is.

I'm also cynical about this because I learnt my lesson a long time ago to keep what I I'm interested in to myself to not be judged for it. at some point I even tried to change what I read and watched to fit in with other people but I've stopped doing that now.

>>10362

What I found a long time ago is that "taste" just means "trying". When I talk to someone and they say, Oh my favorite artist is XYZ, and they cannot answer why or give me any reasons why I would care, then they haven't tried. They don't actually know.

This is the reason why gatekeeping around certain artists was (and still is) a thing. It's like saying, "I love electronic music" but not knowing who Aphex Twin is. If you don't, you haven't tried. And knowing who he is is not the pinnacle of taste (because taste never ends, trying never "ends") but everyone who has "tried" electronic music should know who he is.

Taste just means you bothered caring enough to explore and its painfully obvious to see those who don't explore -- they have literally nothing to say.

If you care what someone thinks about you, it means you see them as your peer on some level. I don’t care what low class people think of me because I’m lowkey classist.

>>10362
RS-sphere cares about taste because that's all rich arthoes have to offer, so it's all they care about, and thus regulates access to their pants. They're all desire, not creativity or things I really care about like compassion or wisdom.

My friends have watch parties and play games and we impose our tastes on each other that way. Most of them are Disney/Swiftie type people and that doesn't change the fact that I love them. I just try to sprinkle in some A24 or whatever. They will likely never change but they find value in what variety I bring to their life.

>>10362
Because taste is about half of making good art. If you can't see what's good or bad in other's works, how will you see it in your own?

People? Friends? Taste?
What?
I haven't left my cave in 7th months.
I haven't had a conversation in 9 months.

Shadow puppet gooner above me

>>10374

Getting serious shadow puppet gooner vibes from this one

>>10374
t. a person of low culture

They are probably right to call you performative if you're complaining on an anonymous forum that everyone is too low IQ (did the word 'stupid' disappear from your vocabulary?) to even begin to understand your depths. I don't like people who maintain a 12 year old's tastes for the rest of their lives, but you're just permanently arrested at the stage of a 2deep4u 14 year old instead.

>>10584
This is the most common retort the low-cultured individual makes. No, I'm not mentally arrested, I'm just tired of dealing with people who judge me for having taste beyond "normie".

I'll give you an example. I was reading a Nabokov book recently and was chuckling. A woman who is an acquaintance piped up and said, "oh, what's so funny?" I read her the passage and she said, "That's not laugh out loud funny." Then she made the comment, "There's no way you're getting anything out of that book, are you?" She said this because there's no way she would ever be able to understand the text.

Anyway, thanks for bumping my thread, low-IQ-kun.

>>10584
Your comment is such a good bridge to many other topics, actually. One good topic is the lie that having taste is a young persons' game. Taste should never end. The whole point of taste is to be able to have an actual opinion on something because you tried it. It's grating listening to someone denigrate something they've never tried, especially when there's sour grapes involved.

Disavowing the non-taste of someone who doesn't have the agency or the critical faculties to choose what to spend their free time doing or consuming is extremely appropriate, especially as you grow older.

>>10584
If he wanted to be performative then there are much better ways to go about it than coming to backwater anonymous forum with maybe 20 whole users on it.

>>10588

I can relate. I was reading Rene Guenon in class the other day and a girl next to me asked what I was reading. I calmly explained to her the subject of sacred science but barely 5 minutes in I could see she was losing interest. TikTok addled zoomers have no attention span for anything that isn’t love island discourse. I nonetheless continued in my explanation but I could tell she wasn’t absorbing any of it. What am I to do?

>>10591
Ha, I can't tell if you're just calling me an autist or if this was a genuine reply.

I can of course sympathise with OP, despite the fact that you can generally get an interesting conversation or two out of even the densest moron by simply being on good terms with them. In recent years, I've began the slow process of excluding myself from online spaces offering little value, and so am frankly left with the problem that if you expect only to interact with people on your level, as you learn and study, your pool shrinks until you emerge at the end of your life a brilliant hermit, whose knowledge inversely matches his impact on the world. I've left boards, chatrooms, forums, and now at the tail-end of this phase of the internet linger in these half-started spaces that themselves might be nothing but the pained bitter resentments of others like me who hope for something better.

>>10591
A little disingenuous. You don't think there's a general atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, particularly in the States, wherein you might be so rebuked by revealing even the slightest interest in something challenging? We softened our individualistic cultures for decades by telling people that they're fine just the way they are and that everything is utterly subjective.

>>10588
I'd wager a lot of us reading this in large American cities or less nosy parts of Europe can't easily imagine someone doing this. Once I thought of visits to the small town my dad grew up in I immediately could. Where I live people don't often share my interests — this isn't great but I think everyone has to deal with that a lot — but they're at least receptive to them if I'm to theirs in turn. Where are you located, generally?

A bigger problem for me personally is my more normative interests trending towards eliminating gatekeeping, which is noticeable both irl and online.

>>10591
The reaction is usually the same if you keep it to an elevator pitch. Maybe 90 seconds is the sweet spot.

And I've given plenty of reality shows a fair shake over the years for the sake of relationships with people in my life and Love Island is awful compared to anything from 2008-2015 Bravo/TLC and normie touchstones getting worse is worth complaining about. (And vice versa, high middlebrow prestige TV has improved a lot since 2022ish imo.)

>>10595
Certainly wouldn't blame you for dismissing anyone who'd seriously hold a mutual relationship contingent on appreciating Love Island; I'm sure you can do a bit better than that.
The immediate problem with online spaces I see is that everywhere that purports to be a higher-brow escape from the decline and decadence falls prey to the allure of social commentary. I'd much rather there exist a place rich with intellectualism and culture than a den of resentful losers whom society no longer accepts or benefits, q.v. every RS space.

>>10596
No contingencies, I give anything on screen a fair shake, I can't do "relaxed" watching. But a lot of women like to watch reality shows without paying much attention in the way men in my life watch sports or police procedurals. In turn they let me give rambling era rankings of the slop of choice.

Idk if all the cool smart people are hanging out without us every weekend or if they're all getting siloed into adjacent algospaces. My opinion is pretty close to a coin flip. Most of the people I spend time with are top 5% US income and in "respectable" careers (i.e. not tech or le chapo big red sons, doctors/lawyers/writers/low academia) and they are not pursuing intellectualism or culture more than the average incel. But I don't know what 1%/big-time academia lifestyle is like.

>>10597
All that noise is the same for all the addicts; anything to keep the silence out, to keep from hearing that pleading inner voice.
I don't think it's useful, anymore at least, to consider pure, unrefined intellect as the ideal, as most everyone is swept along in the digital flow, but rather him who actually manages to actively stand outside it more than most. I'm sure there are a hundred thousand inert geniuses drifting in such discomfort without ever managing a change. Volition's the real currency of this age.

Not that there are any easy solutions. Connective software has done nothing but sever connections en masse. None of our cultures particularly promote a keen interest in something for its own sake. Forums either represent a declining mean or nothing at all. There's a terrible malaise in the air and no one much believes in anything. Nearly everyone alive today has been indoctrinated to think that one thing cannot be greater than another; an individualism that never questions itself, or as Asimov wrote about ignorance v. knowledge. Even the "smartest" scoff at those who claim to know what's good or true, that there's some meaning in this world.

Sure but it's always been that way; I myself am focusing on exploring Pentecostal schisms until I revert and editing my fetish zine. Tar/gain clang.

Little aside, I tried to just explain to someone at least formally smartish the notion that one work may be better than the other, but to no avail. Neither Shakespeare nor Joyce could rise above subjectivity, not against the lowest self-help nor the the most rancid romantasy extant. This is what post-modernism has wrought. Standards, unthinkable, and nothing in the universe could ever be worse than the greatest to ever be. Nihilism is the way of the world, and your moral character itself is flawed if you suggest otherwise. Let people enjoy things, you brute, you classicist, you swine whose opinion nonetheless is worse than mine!

I understand where these people are coming from, but the issue is that this is everyone. No one in the world believes in quality comparative. No child's clumsy clamor could ever be eclipsed by Chopin or Liszt or Bach or Ravel. If it's made, it's equal, and so all culture is empty and history means nothing. Where does one go with that? At least around the middle of the 20th century, the notions of prestige and individual betterment existed in society. That you would question your own correctness before that of the systems you employ. I misspell: it's the dictionaries that must burn; I err in syntax: grammars are tools of oppression; 2+2=5: we ought consider what alternative systems of arithmetic could cradle our soft little selves.

Sorry—I got a little frustrated. I just want an ideal to strive toward, and a society that can agree that such a thing can fundamentally exist.

>>10601
I think we’re approaching this from different directions. I don’t know that postmodernism really “did” anything. The perfection of visual motif of the nude or resurrection is now applied to the texture of a film or the alienation of an abstraction. I’m dancing on Hockney’s grave with you but Cavallini does less for me than Pasolini. Hack/pass clang. Emotional response becomes more detached, is that your beef? Literature got a lot worse, I agree. But the same places that taught me about post-modernism also made me listen to interminable hours of classical music and I simply disagree that the atom bomb ruined everything. Hell I don’t even like Pet Sounds.

All the people saying 2+2=5 send their kids to $25,000 preschools, it’s been decades of this game. This is another thing where, like I said earlier, location and context is valuable. I talk to people who think religious art is the only kind with any value pretty often. They're still running from silence.

UHHHG, TELL ME ABOUT IT!
genius here.
my IQ is well over 900.
its lonely up here.
no one can appreciate me or my intellectual insights on india becoming the next super power

>>10603
it’s really telling when there’s so many interesting branches of conversation to comment on, but low-iq, low-culture individuals keep replying with nearly the exact same thing

>>10602
Alright, let's forget all the personal valuations and trends of an age, but then outmoded intellectual honesty and self-reflection, sacrificed to the virtue of being oppressed. The people don't believe in anything whatsoever but their inalienable right to degrade and flatten and stand above the heaps of what remains.

I just wonder if it's possible to build any spaces that could withstand, without buckling, the weight of public opinion, or if all we can really hope for is some friends to have a few drinks with and one or two enriching connections as we pore over what sends us to the end. I guess I'd be among a handful few ever to live if I didn't suffer some anxieties over finding meaning. That their worlds would fade from memory all the same. I just have this sense, lately, that the entire world is now populated by the person who will rebuke you with some trivial moral complaint over absolutely every piece art or part of culture. That the very idea of critical, dispassionate discourse has disappeared from the world. All now left, a tepid equilibrium of passionless pap passing undigested. Enjoyed, with a nagging, unaddressable voice strangled with a painful smile.

>is it possible?
I very much doubt it.
>is that all we can hope for?
It's pretty incredible to even get it tbh.

A few of your sentences sound out of the mouth of Durtal which lends scale to your complaints, no offense. I think culture will always seem to be decaying because we are.

You're dancing around some sentiment that I can't really parse but if you're reactionary: yeah, rich people from Europe thought we'd figured out the pathway to contentment and actualization and ^óyοc at the end of the last century and it turned out we didn't, now we have to deal with the fallout. It's only the fourth time in a row!