Everything is Gooning

Anti social media diatribe and europa universalis 5 review

It’s important to get the nomenclature right. There is a big difference between jerking yourself off, jerking off in public, edging, and gooning. Luckily grok is here to help get us started.

The important distinction is between edging and gooning - for illustrative purposes. Edging is not very important, but we understand by way of negation, we understand what something is by defining what it is not.

Gooning is counter intuitive, and difficult to understand unless you are already familiar with vulgar niche Internet slang. And that is very unfortunate, because that is a large part of why you don’t think about all the ways you goon every day. You can’t recognize it until you understand the distinction.

Another simple word for it is dopamine depletion. People think gooning is about porn and masturbation, but both of these are merely means to an end. The “goon state” is just dopamine junking, no different than heroin or gambling. The only novelty here is in the delivery method, it’s neither a drug nor an activity, but something new that is neither and both. (especially) touchscreen based, computer technology is a novel delivery mechanism for an ancient human vice, and a monkey brain discovery that comes hand in hand with rudimentary self-awareness and Sentience: the knowledge and ability to short-circuit your own nervous system and brain chemistry reward systems. This is why religion bans masturbation btw, it’s about a deeper principle, it’s not just a random prohibition or a “pro social” noble lie that makes dumb monkey society run smoother (but You, an enlightened Philosopher, can just Jerk off if you want because you see the big picture) - the warning is against short circuiting your own brain, which you do and will do, there’s no way around it. It’s a mechanical necessity. That’s how it works. The philosophical discovery in us Naming the Goon, is exactly that: the medium is the message. We found out what was wrong all along, we didn’t discover a new Thing, we found a new, deeper perspective of a very, very old thing.

X, the everything app, formerly known as twitter, is Gooning. Everything we do, all so-called cultural products, all “content”, everything you see on a computer or TV screen, unless you are a weirdo hacker who uses Linux, is Gooning.

As grok so eloquently informs us, gooning is not about intensifying a climax, rather if anything the opposite. The desired end state is a haze, a blur, and any kind of climax is antithetical to that. The climax becomes the enemy, and you try to avoid that.

People have been posting the last couple of days about this one guy saying “nobody reads books any more”. Why is that? Because books have a climax, they end. And people don’t want to climax. They want the narrative and story to go on and on forever. Sound familiar? Why are we watching 70 hour “TV series” that we don’t pay attention to anyway, and watch while scrolling our phones every 45 minutes, instead of putting on a 2 hour movie? Why are all video games grind fests you play for hundreds of hours? Why are everyone suddenly obsessed with this strange motion of “lore”, rather than plot? Because we are not reading, we are word gooning. We are not experiencing narrative, we are lore-gooning.

There is no way out. You can’t beat the system on a technicality, you don’t get an out for having “figured out how the system works”. A wise man once told me, “calling it doesn’t change it”. Reading and understanding this message will not set you free, it will not deliver you, you will not be able to partake in Screen without gooning from now on, because now you can see the matrix code. The only thing you can do is limit the amount of time you allow yourself to waste.

The only way you can beat the house in a casino, is deciding how much money you are willing to lose. That’s the same principle with screens and media. Decide before going in how much you are willing to lose, and once you reach that point, leave.

I feel this in a very intimate and personal way lately. I’ve been out for a long time. And it really hits, when you haven’t been info-gooning for a while, you haven’t been playing video games or posting on x, the everything app, formerly known as twitter, regularly, because you’ve been busy with real life big boy stuff, and you turned your life around and traveled and had a big adventure, bla bla bla. Then after a big work month, you start up strategy wars 5 that just released,

And a month passes, then two months pass, and you hit it again for the first time in 2 years. The kind of tired that coffee doesn’t fix, because coffee is part of your strategy-goon ritual, the dopamine burnout. You chew nicotine and drink coffee and click buttons, the screen flickers and the casino sounds ring, and you never climax. That’s the beauty of paradox games, every click leads into a new system, there’s never a climax, it’s just continuous click click click. Everyone you click to solve one problem, that creates the next. You never finish a campaign, you just burn out. Famously no one ever plays a full campaign to the end date in any paradox game. There’s a reason for that.

Anyways it hits in a very personal way for me, because I’ve been so deep in it before, and I got so far out. I touched so much grass. And it came to me one day, suddenly, the words “wait a minute this is just dopamine depletion. This is equivalent to what they said ‘depression’ was, at least ten years ago, and we are all doing it self imposed”, as I was looking at the screen and feeling tired but unwilling to look away.

My mother in law asked me a while back, because I spending less time socializing, in a casual manner, “you doing all right?” - but then she followed up with, “you’re not depressed or anything?”. And it shocked me. Of course not, I’m not I’m having the time of my life? Right?

Question stuck in my head. She was worried about me, for my outwards change in behavior. And I thought, well, of course she’d think that. I’d think that about someone if the roles were reversed.

“if you act like you are depressed, and you walk like a duck, and you quack like a duck”. Am I having the time of my life?

But the real kicker is hindsight. If what I suspect to be the case, that gooning is just dopamine depletion, then I have been info-logic-puzzle gooning on computers since I was 10 years old, and, if playing Europa Universalis is chemically equivalent to depression, then, I think maybe my whole life everything I’ve thought was like, brain injury or life or betrayals and all that, maybe the reason I was so miserable and took so long getting my shit together, was because I was self inducing dopamine depletion every single day of my life. As an early adapter of technology.

And in the same way as before, these thoughts or insights or ideas do not liberate me, I am not suddenly free to partake in map games without paying the price, it’s not a psychoanalytical get out of jail free card. If I sit down and look at the screen for entertainment, it still happens. The dopamine still depletes. Because that was always the point. Medium is message, etc.

If you think civilization is going to last, then invest in egg timer stock, because to navigate the new modern world, we are all going to have to get one and set it, before we go on our phones.

All the talk about slob this and that that we see online, is a recognition of this state of affairs. We call it “slob” because you can keep eating it forever and never be satiated: food gooning.

Everything about the modern, contemporary world, is gooning. it is the defining principle of our era. all video games are 800 hour grind-gooning, all tv is 80 episode lore gooning, all movies, all streamers, all politics, all political commentary. Every activity is defined by its lack of climax, and inability to sate, and every activity is, on a biological level, just another variant of dopamine depletion.