Do You Feel Transported To a New Dystopian Reality?

Is this a Gen X thing or is it just me?

Based on the rising popularity of the idea of infinite universal timelines being something we can jump to and out of, I think it’s not just me who feels like something went wrong with ours.

I don’t believe in infinite timelines (which could exist) being something we can jump around in by the way. I wrote (under Quantum Leaping Into New Lives):

A lot of people who use this technique literally believe they’re being shifted into other dimensions via quantum leaping. They believe there are infinite parallel realities and they can simply leap into another one of their parallel self’s life. I love the TV series Quantum Leap from the early 90’s but I don’t personally subscribe to the belief that we would leap into another life, mostly because of the question, “Where would that other person go?” I don’t see it as fair and I do believe the universe is built on ultimate fairness. I don’t know what all their explanations might be for that question. I believe they may have answers, but it’s not something I’ve gotten into deep study into.

I also see the idea of “leaping” out of your own life into another dimensional life as an act of someone who sees this reality as “bad.” It has a bit of an escapism tint to the belief.

The belief in Quantum Jumping (and even the Mandella Effect) is a symptom of the times we live in. In other time periods, people wouldn’t even consider it a possibility, and it’s not like they didn’t have time-travel fiction showing how a timeline could go wrong. But people saw that as fiction. It took a real dystopian world to make people consider timeline-jumping a realistic endeavor.

Is this a Gen-X thing? It feels like it started with us, but since I’m a part of it that makes it difficult to know. My perspective is too close to the subject. Maybe people from other generations can leave comments about their thoughts on it. Is it continuing in the younger generations? If it’s continuing with the younger generations, then I would say it’s because it’s become more popular a belief due to GenX (or earlier).

My Theory About Gen-X

I was born in 1980 and grew up watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street, etc. This is a good video clip of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood that showcases some of what I am talking about.

Imagine having watched Mr. Rogers while growing up and feeling like this is the worldview. Believing that boys stay male and girls stay female is a foundational belief. This is not something that is questionable. And then around 2020 (after seeing people behave seemingly uncharacteristically insane), politicians started calling males “women” and suggesting if you don’t then you’re a transphobe who should be fined or jailed as if we don’t have free speech.

Well, of course, that’s another one. We were taught about free speech and the importance of it. We were taught about the US Constitution and all the rights the government was going to protect for us. And everything seemed to be thrown out the window so quickly it gave us mental whiplash.

Also, racism was ceasing to exist. We had plenty of sci-fi shows that acknowledged racism in the past (like Quantum Leap) to futuristic shows where race wasn’t an issue. The Cosby Show touched on it a bit, but not much. You can read this quick article about that.

What I've Learned from The Cosby Show

We had a mindset that racism was disappearing. Ending. And it was. To go from pretty much everyone getting along regardless of race to colleges segregating again 20 years later, it’s no wonder people think to themselves this isn’t the correct timeline, something went wrong.

What Happened?

It may be that the earlier generations wanted the mainstream beliefs that I was taught to be the picture of where the US was going. We were taught the ideals as if they were facts, so we believed them. Was it real or was it propaganda? Some would say that The Cosby Show not touching on racism was propaganda. Turns out there is actually a book called, “Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream,” that seems to align with that view. Here is part of one of the review comments (from JW’s review):

…The primary objection to the show is that it presented a guilt-free experience for white America; they could see a professional black family and believe that racism was over and any African American family could accomplish what the Huxatables achieved. But of course, that's not true for the vast majority of black families. There are more and more black attorneys and doctors and they do occasionally marry each other but the majority of black workers are in non-professional jobs or unemployed; they're struggling, trying desperately not to drown when the strong current is running against them.

The authors believe that white audiences are relieved to see such a nice black family; it alleviates their racially tinged worries about crime and the rage of the impoverished and maltreated. Not only does it assuage their fear, it makes them forget their responsibility to eliminate discrimination and prejudice. The idea that racism no longer limits the lives of black people in America is absolutely erroneous. Check out the statistics on unemployment, high school graduation and college graduation, homeownership, income levels, and incarceration rates: the racial disparity is undeniable.

Proponents of the Cosby show argue that the program showed that there are black professionals and happy, functional African American families. The Cosby/Huxtable family is the proud standard bearer for black families, proponents maintain, and an opportunity to build tolerance in the white community. I read a book about Obama (What Obama Means by Jabari Asim) that said he couldn't have become president if other black entertainers, sports figures, preachers and politicians hadn't crossed over to gain acceptance in the white community. In this case, it could be said that Bill Cosby/Cliff Huxtable paved the way for President Obama to be elected with 48% of the white vote. And now, in an "art becomes life" moment, Americans and people around the globe, watch a black lawyer and her husband, the President, another black lawyer, live in a happy family with their two adorable daughters and the wife's mother at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All they're missing is Theo.

I don’t doubt that it is part of how Obama got elected. Let’s not forget what a great character Senator Palmer in the TV Series ‘24’ was, and how he became president before Obama. The media that a generation consumes matters. Either way, whether it was propaganda or just the way the creators felt, it shaped our foundational beliefs of the country and world we lived in. That in turn shaped our view of what the future would look like.

Bizarro World

Our future looked nothing like this. Nothing. This is bizarro world. We’re living in a bizarro world, where people are acting as if their beliefs are normal but they’re 180 degrees flipped from what we thought our future would be like. What we took for constants (like males being men) are discussed (and in some ways enforced) in the completely opposite direction. And it only took 20 years.

It’s not a shock to me that it was GenX who voted heavily for sanity (Trump) in the 2024 election.

We grew up not getting so easily offended and Trump was in our media all of the time and he was loved during that time period. This was The View show I remember. They loved Donald Trump.

Why Is It Not the Same For Other Generations?

Older than Gen X?

First, for the older generations, I think it’s because their foundational beliefs about what this country is and could be were very different than what GenX grew up with. There was more real racism in the older generations. A lot of the older white women in particular seem to like playing “savior” and championing minorities they see as “victims.”

I think that is the only explanation I can come up with for why they are going along with thinking children can change their sex. IMHO, They just want to feel like a social justice warrior again. Maybe that’s because it gives them a feeling of purpose, a meaning to their life, after their children have left the home (or maybe they never had children to begin with).

Younger than Gen X?

For the younger generations, they grew up with different media. And with the internet, they were able to have completely different media than some of their peers. I think that with the algorithms giving them more of the same media people were able to get into echo chamber silos.

Getting Siloed Into Parallel Realities

I think that our colleges and Hollywood were also turning more and more progressive/leftist and were putting into practice the things they believed. So they made our books and media lean in the same direction.

Generation X missed out on college and university brainwashing (for the most part) but was too young to think of racism as a present problem like the older generations. This generation got along with each other and was for the most part color-blind.

We’re Not In a New Timeline

I don’t think we jumped into a new timeline. I don’t think someone screwed up our destiny on purpose. But, who could blame you for thinking we’re in the wrong place? Who wasn’t thinking about this scene in Back to the Future during the lockdowns and the George Floyd Riots?

9/11 Traumatized Us

The biggest thing affecting our world was the terrorist attacks on 9/11/01. We got traumatized by it. Unless you deal with your trauma, facing the fears that come up, they will keep repeating with exponentially increasing intensity until you finally face them.

I believe that is why so many people have this free-floating fear that they project onto Trump. They’ve demonized DeSantis as well (when they thought he might be the presidential candidate). They’ll demonize Vance and anyone else whom they view as a threat to their safety. It’s not just Democrats. It’s everyone who is not dealing with their fears.

But, I will say that more Republicans than Democrats believe in personal responsibility. So, obviously the ones who believe in taking personal responsibility will deal with their emotions more than those who believe it’s other people’s responsibility to make them feel better.

I think that if we all started to heal those wounds, by figuring out ways to feel safe internally, rather than looking to the government to make us feel safe, then we could get back to the future world we were looking forward to. I miss it. I feel a sense of loss, that my future was stolen from me. Do you feel it?

We need to feel these feelings. We can’t cover them up. But I won’t live like a “victim” either. The longer people ignore these feelings and scapegoat them on someone else, the more intense the situations that will come up.

People are feeling really great about Trump’s executive orders to recognize that males are men and not women and that discriminating by the color of your skin is wrong. I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but so long as those are just executive orders, the next President can take the same action to reverse it all.

I hope, for all of our sake, that people start dealing with their emotions of fear and anger internally. Until they do, they’ll keep attracting more intense situations (triggers) to get them to face it. We don’t have to be completely affected by what other people are attracting - for instance, I didn’t get affected by the lockdowns and could freely get groceries without wearing a mask, so long as I avoided the state of Minnesota.

So long as we focus on healing ourselves we can attract a better life for ourselves and not mind too much what other people are doing with theirs. But since it hurts to feel vulnerable and feelings of terror, most will ignore it until they hit rock bottom and can’t do anything else. So they’re in for more craziness.

Of course, what that ultimately means is that the future we were looking forward to is coming. This is great news. People will hit their rock bottoms and wail and gnash their teeth, then they’ll decide they need to make a change because they want to feel better. It’s the “wailing and gnashing of teeth” times I’m not looking forward to.

The future I was promised may not be seen by my eyes in this body. But I think it’s coming. To get to greatness, you need to be tried and tested. I think that’s what our country is going through right now. I think that’s part of what Trump went through. He had to go through the purificatory fire (including the assassination attempt).

Comparing Trump to Jesus? Blasphemy, but...

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I still think Trump has drama-triangle tendencies. One of the first press conferences was about this AI project Stargate which I recently wrote about. But, if a president is loved by the media and is not put through the wringer, he can get away with being spineless and ineffectual because he’s not getting stronger, he’s getting weaker.

Whereas, when you put a person through the wringer, and everything they do is criticized, they get sharper and stronger. Although, the Boy Who Cried Wolf story would teach us, when you start making things up you can end up ignored. We don’t want the media to go too harsh and make things up all the time because that would lead to a person being unchecked as well.

It would be nice to get back to having media that believed in fact-checking themselves. That’s another thing I was taught in school, by the way. I was told not to believe anything on the internet because people can just make things up. I was told to always check the source material to make sure it’s accurate. So I watch the actual videos, and I click on the links to learn more. That’s how I knew our mainstream corporate media was lying to us.

The older generation did not have to be warned about that in school, so they just continued to trust the mainstream corporate media. The younger generations apparently were taught to trust the mainstream corporate media as well, rather than to be critical thinkers.

Do you Agree?

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree that it’s a Generation X thing? Or have I missed something? Please let me know in the comments.

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