In What Year Is Your Brain Stuck?

Or: Diagnosing Disco Stu Syndrome

I attempt to live, as much as is healthy, in the present. This is not out of some self-help pablum about mindfulness or getting the most out of life. Rooting my experience within the present moment is not intended to optimize any particular feature of my human experience. I am merely a lifelong day-dreamer. My attention is always drawn inwards. Therefore, when I come up for air, I attempt to do so on or near the current date and time. Failure to do so means I risk falling irrevocably out of step with the rest of the human race and while that would likely make me more interesting to some of you, I also fear it would make me unemployable. For the moment, this isn’t really an option. Ergo, I try to keep my feet on the ground to buy myself a little leeway to keep my head in the clouds. It’s worked so far. The appearance of seriousness grants me a surplus grace with which I can be unserious.

However, more and more I notice people out of step with the current moment. In the typical fashion Genius of Loathe readers may have come to expect by now, this is wholly unscientific and entirely observational. Allow me to elaborate.

First, allow me to quash any fears that this is going to be some broad rebuke of “nostalgia.” That’s a far more general phenomenon than what I’m talking about, and I don’t really have any specific criticism of it to offer. The urge to look back is reasonable and understandable. As Blur¹ informed us all the way back in 1993; Modern Life is Rubbish. Much like other numbing substances, nostalgia can be fun and even beneficial when used in social settings. The oft-observed male behavior of sitting in a circle and naming guys who used to play sports when you were a kid is basically a non-narcotic blunt rotation. However, if one indulges too often or too heavily they risk losing touch with not only the beauty of the present and the promise of tomorrow but also the painful lessons of the past they idealize. I’m not saying anything here you don’t already know.

What I’m talking about is a more specific kind of arrested development. A failure to move past old modes of understanding the present that was, or to reckon with new information and incorporate it into one’s belief system. This phenomenon will need a name. I propose we call it “Disco Stu Syndrome,” after the venerable Simpsons background character.

If these trends continue…. Ayyyyyyyyyy.

Let’s attempt to define this syndrome through specific examples. I would say, in the current year of 2025 there are four major varieties of Disco Stu Syndrome observable within the mainline American public. While this is an individual phenomenon and therefore can have a functionally infinite number of permutations, I’ll be focusing on these four for simplicity’s sake. They are as follows: 2012 Brain, 2016 Brain, 2017 Brain, and 2020 Brain. We will examine each of these in turn and hopefully draw conclusions about this condition, its causes, and its potential resolution. It is my belief that these varieties of Disco Stu Syndrome can be bundled into two basic categories of two each. We have The Traumatics (2016, 2020) and The Culturals (2012, 2017). We’ll begin with the Traumatics.

Are you familiar with the concept of the fight or flight response? This can be understood as the body’s alarm system, a state of hyperarousal in response to suspected bodily harm, compelling the individual to either stand and face the threat head on or get away from the threat as fast as possible. Chemical and emotional compulsion of this sort can have negative long term effects on the body, and it’s not unreasonable to draw a link between repeated fight or flight reactions and post-traumatic stress disorder. Hence, The Traumatics. In response to historical events which permanently challenge our perception of ourselves and the world we inhabit, some people’s natural response is to lock up and fetishize the experience for an indefinite length of time. Just as millions of baby boomers know exactly where they were when JFK was assassinated and millions of Gen-Xers were irrevocably changed by the 9/11 attacks², uncountable millions of people have had their worldview calcified by the 2016 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving past these experiences has proven difficult and so we ought to practice empathy when dealing with people such as these. Let there be no ambiguity about this; I do not write to condemn those with minds out of step with modernity or to fear-monger about them. I merely wish to observe and speculate. Treat people well, especially those who annoy you, and you will do better than most.

The subgenre of Disco Stu Syndrome patient with 2016 brain is likely known to American readers of this newsletter even if you’ve never considered it in the terms I have. You know the markers. A fixation on cable news, a constant parade of new magic bullets (some legal, some more literal) to make the bad man in the white house go away, wide-reaching Sorkinite platitudes about how “this isn’t who we are” and jokes that are now a decade old are weren’t funny to begin with. If you or someone you know reacted to news that the Philadelphia Eagles would not be visiting the White House in recognition of their Super Bowl victory (Go Birds)³ by suggesting that Jalen Hurts didn't want the CHEETO IN CHIEF to serve him COVFEFE and HAMBERDERS with a side of LIES then you may be dealing with a case of 2016 brain.

While 2016 brain is ripe for parody due to its hyperbole and tendency towards magical thinking, 2020 brain is something altogether more tragic. The ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic have never really gone away for many, resulting in both the nebulous phenomenon of Long COVID as well as the more insidious, psychological scars of that mild spring of 2020. A kind of credentialized, clinical agoraphobia and hypochondria has taken root in some unfortunate souls. Online forums like Reddit’s r/ZeroCovidCommunity serve as living records of the sad, lonely lives of those with hard-stuck 2020 brain. While I’m generally in favor of individual responsibility as a pillar of public health efforts, there is a point where the fear of the disease becomes a disease in and of itself. There is a healthy middle ground between attacking the movie theatre box office clerk for wearing a surgical mask⁴ and not going out to eat for five years, that’s all I’m saying.

While The Traumatics can often seem in equal measure ridiculous and tragic in their attachment to long-departed tides of history, The Culturals are often harder to summon sympathy for, at least at first glance. These are the truer Disco Stu’s. The people showing up to the parties years after the lights have gone out, seemingly unaware of their expanding guts, their thinning hair, and the fact that everyone else has moved on.

Let me put it to you this way. You’re on Substack, you’re a culturally literate type of cat. You ever been cornered at a party by a guy who needs to recite a video essay to you in its entirety about how Wokeness Ruined Star Wars? That’s 2017 Brain, baby. That dude is hard-stuck in the moment he walked out of the theatre after Last Jedi. He craves the video essayist like the lab chimp craves the wire mother. Shit’s bleak! The 2016 brained at least have legitimate and pertinent concerns about the state of their nation. The 2020 brained can justify their fears with the bodycount of a global pandemic. The 2017 brained have very few excuses for why they outsource the work of having an opinion. It’s very Pareto Principle. 80% of the opinions come from 20% of the YouTubers. I don’t have the energy to summon sympathy or invoke decorum. Let’s move on.

In a lot of ways, I feel the 2012 brains are the most tragic. Do you know that one kid you went to high school with who never left your hometown? The one who still gets really excited for new Eminem projects in current year? Who still lives with his parents and buys Madden, NBA 2K, and Call of Duty every year despite doing nothing but complaining about their decline? The one who isn’t necessarily doing badly, but just kinda seems stuck? That’s the one. That’s 2012 brain. I could have theoretically picked any year between 2010 and 2015 for this particular distillation of Disco Stu Syndrome but I went with 2012 because that’s the year Borderlands 2 came out and therefore seems, to me, to be the apogee of that particular cultural moment. A moment some of my peers seem to have never really left.

But again, I do not come to scold. While failures to launch are not a phenomenon unique to my generation, I would point out that often the failure to depart one’s adolescence is a reflection of economic realities as much as personal development. The shrinking of possibilities has been a very real feature of life for these people. Guys with bad grades, bad interview skills, and simple bad luck may quickly find themselves alienated from the hiring practices of white collar America. They work service and retail or drop out of the workforce entirely, joining the townie class and never quite achieving the agency that once seemed like the kind of thing an American adult could take for granted. More than any other category on this list, the 2012-brained are symptomatic of our national decline.

So what do we take from all of this? What is the lesson? It’s one thing to say we should live in the present but to actually do so can be a more complicated question. After all, modern times will eventually become incomprehensible to all of us, if the senior citizens of the present day are anything to go by. Perhaps the archetypes we’ve covered above are the more mature ones and we’re stuck in arrested development. But I think not.

Langston Hughes, “Harlem”

The great American poet, Lansgton Hughes, asks us in one of his most famous verses to consider the fates of dreams deferred. In this, I feel, we may find an emotional answer to why some shrink from changing times. Disco Stu Syndrome is ultimately a manifestation of an individual’s discomfort with the onward march of time. Change brings discomfort and the present moment means the destruction of all the presents and futures which could have been, might have been, should have been, if only, if only, if only. In the face of this pain, the pain of possibilities reduced, of dreams deferred, we seek a bunker against the tide of history. Whether they are spurred on by factors political, biological, cultural, or economic, the Disco Stu’s of our world are not hiding from reality, no, they are a response to it.

And if these trends continue…. Ayyyyyyyyyy.

-JW

1. Pulp > Blur > Oasis btw. Not an invitation to debate.

2. I suspect that if I were not suffering from the condition of “being a child” during the Bush years I would have more to say on the subject of 2001 Brain. Alas.

3. I am a Colts fan, but Pennsylvania Uber Alles. “Go Birds” is just fun to say in the same way “Roll Tide” is fun to say.

4. Not to Lib Out or anything but a bunch of you really were babies about that stuff.