The Last Psychiatrist is an increasingly-incoherent series of exhortations to Man Up and Marry the Chubby Latina. It's mostly discussed out of recession nostalgism, as a time capsule of how how Millennials want to be remembered - Slightly Dark but Lighthearted Subversives who exposed the fakeness of it all, but like, in a wholesome way. His most faithful acolyte and successor is David Wong.
TLP synergized well with the mindset of "elite competition" among hipsters. The defining mental dynamic of the hipster in my mind (maybe I'm using an idiosyncratic definition) is that he believes he's inherently, incorrigibly cool because he lives in a haute city, has lots of gross sex, and is accepted by a crowd just like the quirky characters in the gogglebox. That's the part of himself he brings to everything, whence the irony and half-assedness, because whatever he does he sees as just a bauble adorning this titanium skeleton. The hipster projects his own situation onto the rest of humanity and concludes that every intellectual stance, pursuit, etc. is reducible to a "type of guy" doing dog tricks for social conformity (corollary: Progress is impossible, it's evil to want anything but uggggh free health-caaare). He then arrives upon a morality resembling a perverted Buddhism: the only base desirable thing in the world is city + poosay; thus, all attempts to individuate through thought and expression are in vain; thus, the only moral use of intelligence is to disavow itself - you achieve Samsara by making constant concessions and intellectual defenses of normiedom. The hipster, out of stupidity, cowardice, and sunk-cost aversion, refuses to probe the supposedly-solid bedrock of his status from which all the other stances arise, namely his unthinking assimilation of things labelled "cool" by mass media. So it is with TLP. His prescription to act like a literal fucking NPC in a world of player-characters sounds like an Old Testament cruelty to anyone who isn't already in a state of Hipster Satori; it presumes every pertinent problem of life has been solved and all anyone needs to do is "stick the landing" so to speak. His surgical micro-scrutiny of individual behaviors and pop-culture knicknacks serves to affirm the broader superstructure (the hipster's bedrock) by taking its power as a given.
Take for instance his projection of the "American "class system"" onto luxury watch advertisements for Arabs; or when he invites the reader to join him in bashing this mofuggin' CHUD who thinks he's Tony Soprano lmaoooo while he himself self-inserts as the therapist - not Tony's therapist, but the mouthy, no-nonsense therapist the show NEEDED, the therapist he played in his head during the therapy scenes' dead air like he was retreading an argument in the shower. His attempts to tackle new culture (teh Internets) are laughable by comparison: his final post states that women are being PSYOPPED... by Capitalism... into relinquishing their online anonymity... so they'll write affiliate blogspam for free (I have a barely-literate aunt who writes blogspam for a living, even in the age of ChatGPT it's a roastie sinecure mill on par with public education). Within the assertion that something Dark has percolated into society through these trifling bits of the old mass-culture is the presupposition they STILL MATTER, which is the comfortable lie TLP sells you, along with his own genre-savvy character who can see the intention behind it all.
TLP synergized well with the mindset of "elite competition" among hipsters. The defining mental dynamic of the hipster in my mind (maybe I'm using an idiosyncratic definition) is that he believes he's inherently, incorrigibly cool because he lives in a haute city, has lots of gross sex, and is accepted by a crowd just like the quirky characters in the gogglebox. That's the part of himself he brings to everything, whence the irony and half-assedness, because whatever he does he sees as just a bauble adorning this titanium skeleton. The hipster projects his own situation onto the rest of humanity and concludes that every intellectual stance, pursuit, etc. is reducible to a "type of guy" doing dog tricks for social conformity (corollary: Progress is impossible, it's evil to want anything but uggggh free health-caaare). He then arrives upon a morality resembling a perverted Buddhism: the only base desirable thing in the world is city + poosay; thus, all attempts to individuate through thought and expression are in vain; thus, the only moral use of intelligence is to disavow itself - you achieve Samsara by making constant concessions and intellectual defenses of normiedom. The hipster, out of stupidity, cowardice, and sunk-cost aversion, refuses to probe the supposedly-solid bedrock of his status from which all the other stances arise, namely his unthinking assimilation of things labelled "cool" by mass media. So it is with TLP. His prescription to act like a literal fucking NPC in a world of player-characters sounds like an Old Testament cruelty to anyone who isn't already in a state of Hipster Satori; it presumes every pertinent problem of life has been solved and all anyone needs to do is "stick the landing" so to speak. His surgical micro-scrutiny of individual behaviors and pop-culture knicknacks serves to affirm the broader superstructure (the hipster's bedrock) by taking its power as a given.
Take for instance his projection of the "American "class system"" onto luxury watch advertisements for Arabs; or when he invites the reader to join him in bashing this mofuggin' CHUD who thinks he's Tony Soprano lmaoooo while he himself self-inserts as the therapist - not Tony's therapist, but the mouthy, no-nonsense therapist the show NEEDED, the therapist he played in his head during the therapy scenes' dead air like he was retreading an argument in the shower. His attempts to tackle new culture (teh Internets) are laughable by comparison: his final post states that women are being PSYOPPED... by Capitalism... into relinquishing their online anonymity... so they'll write affiliate blogspam for free (I have a barely-literate aunt who writes blogspam for a living, even in the age of ChatGPT it's a roastie sinecure mill on par with public education). Within the assertion that something Dark has percolated into society through these trifling bits of the old mass-culture is the presupposition they STILL MATTER, which is the comfortable lie TLP sells you, along with his own genre-savvy character who can see the intention behind it all.
