I agree, also going off the summaries posted here I'm really curious how someone like Contra would explain concepts like friendship, camaraderie, or really any platonic human interaction. I actually don't think it's a coincidence that he doesn't seem to actually have any friends: his cynicism about romance probably extends to all human relationships.
imo cynicism is not really the problem — the problem is that Contra is
deeply romantic, i.e. hung up on the thrilling, the mysterious, the ideal, and longing always for the intensity of fiction over the steady grind of the everyday. This is bad for friendships and long term relationships, which are built on the regular maintenance of bonds even when you hit a hard stretch.
Romance is something else. Romance is a dramatic genre — an ideal — that has, for many people, expressed and shaped desires adjacent but not equivalent to the brainspace given to the realization of actual romantic relationships. In this video Contra tries to reconcile the ideal and the real, but it's a lopsided thing. Contra 100% prefers the ideal. The point is not to interrogate romance qua human interaction but to rhapsodize about romance qua ideal and to salvage this dream as much as possible from the smoking ruins of material exploitation.
Contra doesn't have supercharged mystic fantasies about friendship and so wouldn't be compelled to defend an exploitative expression of it. It's easy to support equality and tenderness in areas that don't make rich mythology of power differentials in the first place.
he's one of those people who mistake love for the feeling of falling in love. the kind of person who only appreciates the honeymoon phase, and doesn't understand that love is a choice you gotta make every day.
The video tackles head on the difference between limerence/eros and the quiet commitment of LTRs. Contra gets it intellectually. It's just that intellectual understanding has never dragged the passions of a drama queen down to earth.
It's not a mistake — it's a clear eyed choice to chase the elusive and ephemeral and to suffer grandly for it. That most people would choose differently (most people want to be happy) doesn't mean that any given dissident has misunderstood the options. Contra just happens to value passion over comfort, romance over love, melodrama over naturalism, glory over happiness. These are inconvenient and probably unhealthy values to have, but values held deeply don't melt away just because reason asks them to.
Every video that Contra uploads nowadays sounds like a new cope for living with his transition.
"Am I unhappy because I keep investing into this sunk-cost, huge life mistake I have made? No, it's shame. No actually it is cringe. No it's envy. No I'm unhappy because of alcohol. No wait, actually it's some thing I just thought of while reading Twilight."
Nick, what are you going to do when you run out of solutions that have not fixed your life?
Contra was a melancholic overthinker with addictive tendencies pre transition, too. Certainly transition hasn't fixed anything, but these problems are problems of personality, not the direct results of that choice otherwise avoidable. Would Nicholas Parrott have been happy sulking around his house all day, doing drugs, reading excessively, surfing the web, shunning sunshine and exercise as a man? I doubt it. Some people just love to be unhappy. I don't even think Contra is reaching for a solution now so much as enjoying the process of extracting meaning from that long unhappiness.
)) " and says nothing meaningful about porn addiction, detachment from reality, hostility towards the outside world (in particular women), unrealistic ideas about sex, relationships, gender, your own self-image, etc.
