I have no idea who that guy is but he looks genuinely happy and I only wish I had the same sparkle in my eyes. I wish him all the best loving being who he is. Thank god there are happy weird people sharing joy in the world!
I evened out by getting into esoteric religion. Now I can tell you which angel to pray to when you need some imagery to focus on while you meditate about why you shouldn't fuck your ex. The virtue of chastity is here for you from the middle order of angels to help remind you to not think with your little head you horny dumbass. But I also know which lubes go with which types of toys so its not like I'm sex negative either.
I see your five paragraph long greentext post about forming pacts with deities from pagan occultism to charge your J.O crystals with long forgotten rituals requiring blessed lube on /x/, and raise the ante by sharing six paragraphs of my personal tales using heroic doses of magic mushrooms to experience ego death, astral project, and telepathically communicate with divine cosmic consciousness using trees as a medium!
Nope. At least not for some. It's like those quirks and oddities that you found fun or entertaining in your peers when you were school- or maybe college-age get set on a slippery slope, sometimes on a skateboard with a tailwind. Extremes of politics, weird beliefs in things like anti-vax or flat earth, pseudo- or bro-science, fundy religion, prejudices, addiction... age amplifies the fuckery in some peoples' heads and makes them completely resistant to anything contradicting that. When whatever guard rails there were when these people were kids - teachers, parents, whatever... - disappear, they're off the deep end.
idk adults said that to kids when i was younger. if you mean "young people" as in "young adults like under 30", then maybe. "it's just a phase" was also common. (the "phases" turned out to go like 20 years with most ppl i knew)
Everyone kept telling me that I would become more conservative with age, and that once I got a job in the "real world," and started paying taxes, then my priorities would change (presumably to lowering taxes?).
I remember most older people appearing "normal" when I was younger. But now that I'm almost 40 most of my peers seem unapologeticaly unhinged. Not fitting into what our parents thought as non-weird at all.
Actually, maybe kids these days see me as "perfectly normal old guy", and it's just a generational divide.