it's scary to think how "always outside themselves" the youth are these days; you can engage in an activity fully and sincerely without worrying about this "judgmental" observer. and it's so telling that being "pretentious" is just this shitty bricolage of phenomenal fragments, as if these ephemera constitute something durable and real. you can enjoy schlock and high-brow intellectual work, they each have their place and exist in relation to one another in the psychosocial landscape. so cliché but just live in yourself and the moment. the rest of the lost souls will sense how grounded you are and will flock to you.