I really do hope he currently thinks he can just resume streaming and immediately start at 3000 live viewers on the regular.
This is a real possibility.
Older posts from 2023 pertaining to Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome
speak of the reduced ability (or even inability) to create new memories.
@AnOminous even
referenced a documentary pertaining to someone who retained piano lessons from years past but had a severely distorted sense of time. Apparently,
losing the ability to properly absorb thiamine can essentially put one's life on pause and prevent them from mentally progressing past that point (though mental decline is always a possibility). Malnutrition can also aggravate thiamine deficiency, but I digress.
Another post from
@AnOminous has this to say:
One major thing with Wernicke-Korsakoff is confabulation. People with it aren't necessarily mumbling idiots, so they can fluidly invent stories to fill for the gaps in their memory.
If Nick is experiencing WK, it would help explain a lot of his behavior re: losing track of time
(blackout drunk streams and 2023 Vegas meetup/missing appointments and payments/neglected household), thinking he is still a successful YouTuber, and false memories (where he isn't actively lying or course).
Parts of Nick's haggard mind could still be chemically stuck in 2022/23 where his alcoholism would be compounded by harder drug use, and like someone with WK who can still play piano, Nick might think he is still too capable in certain areas to have a
real problem.
Even Nick's primary defenses rely on him being wet brained. Claiming that he can't be held accountable because he "can't remember" or because he "believes" something to be true amounts to memory-loss and confabulation. Nick's unwarranted ego and natural inability to learn from his mistakes in a meaningful way could have been chemically aggravated by decreasing thiamine absorption.
Still, given how much of Nick's already rotten personality complements these WK symptoms it is hard to say
exactly how much of his current condition is chemically induced. It's like trying to figure out how idiotic an idiot was before he drank himself into further idiocy.