2024 has been a great year for Twitter bickering, with one of the year's most heated arguments bleeding into 2025 in the form of "Treatler discourse." Those in the know might remember rousing arguments between people who think that food-delivery services like Doordash, Ubereats, and Instacart should be more affordable, and those who think that such services are a luxury and not some fundamental right.

Now, the latter crowd has created a questionable nickname for those overly reliant on poorly paid gig workers for delivering their groceries— "Treatlerite," a charming play on the words "treat" and "Hitlerite." Here's where the new slang term originated, and why you might be seeing more of the word in the coming months.

Where Did The Term 'Treatler' Come From?

The cost of Doordashing food has risen drastically in recent years, leading to a fracture between those who wish they could still comfortably afford it, and those who think that such industries are inherently exploitative of gig workers and should either not be supported or be considered a luxury service.

This sentiment led to jokes about people wanting a Private Taxi For Their Burrito instead of making the effort to go out and buy one in person. Such discussions eventually led to sprawling debates about disability rights, and whether having food delivered for cheap right to one's doorstep should be considered a fundamental right for disabled people.

"Why don't they sell individual slices of cheese, lettuce, bacon and tomato?" pic.twitter.com/5WjDBpniFU

— Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 (@JeremiahDJohns) March 21, 2024

By June 2025, someone finally came up with a word that encapsulates the sentiment of wanting one's treats more than wanting to alleviate someone else's suffering— being a Treatler.

How Did The Terms 'Treatler' and 'Treatlerite' Spread?

Discussions about "Treatlers" and "Treatlerites" continued to gain traction into December 2024, as seen in the responses to a now-deleted December 2nd tweet by X user @carbdiem, who wrote, "Idc if this makes me a Karen, if your UberEats profile picture shows that you're a woman and my delivery person shows up and they're a cis man then I will report every time and so should you!!!"

The tweet received widespread backlash and support, with some people saying that being "deceived" by their driver trumps whatever economic disadvantage they might have. One such X user tweeted about "expecting a polish blonde lady to be delivering your food to your house only for a MAN to turn up to your address," prompting people to call them a "Treatler."

By late December 2024 and early January 2025, the terms "Treatler" and "Treatlerite" had caught on, with X user @YourSilvrFriend posting an edit of Adolf Hitler wearing childlike accessories and X user @punishedgothgf posted a "Hitler Particles / We Agree" edit featuring a fatter "Adolf Treatler."

On January 5th, 2024, X user @dennismhogan posted about the term "Treatlerite," calling it "one of the more useful recent internet coinages."

For the full history of the terms Treatler and Treatlerite, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.

Generational trauma is a recurring debate on social media in which users share how a negative family history can have a major impact on future generations.

As is often the case, the internet has a mix of humor and sarcasm to comment on such stingy topics, in this case, the prominent meme that has emerged is known as "It’s Up To You To Break Generational Trauma."

This meme, using a webcomic or cartoon as an exploitable, turns the stable of a powerful message about trauma into a hilarious scope of image macro and creative texts related to all kinds of addiction, fandom culture or simply mocking the original intention of the artwork.

Here's a quick breakdown of where the original comic comes from, how it started becoming a meme format and how it's evolved over the years since it first emerged.

What Is The 'It’s Up To You To Break Generational Trauma' Meme?

The "It’s Up To You To Break Generational Trauma" meme, also known as "Break The Cycle" or "It's Up To You To Traumatize Your Child," is a motivational catchphrase paired with a cartoon that illustrates the generational trauma dynamic of parenting.

In this artwork, multiple fathers are shown yelling criticisms at their sons, creating a lineage of negativity with their actions.

First shared on Instagram in June 2021, the original motivational cartoon quickly gained traction on platforms like Facebook and Reddit as numerous users recaptioned it into various ironic and exploitative templates.

How Is The Break The Cycle Meme Used Online?

The "Break The Cycle" meme gained traction as an exploitable image macro format on social media in the 2020s, serving as both a conversation starter and a source of mockery for individuals grappling with familial trauma.

For instance, the Facebook page Fathers Matter uploaded a version of the meme with the top cation, "It's up to you to break generational trauma" (shown below, left), which was later reposted on Instagram in early November 2021 by the meme page stalememesfornormiehasbeens that recaptioned the text to reference Big Chungus, thus becoming the earliest known page to re-edit the template for another joke (shown below, right).

Many cartoon iterations inspired by the original artwork were shared on social media over subsequent years, typically following the family dynamics of reinforcing negative comments to the following generation. The Instagram page motivationsspace's version of john_lee_official's cartoon became the more notable exploitable template going into 2022.

For instance, in May 2022, the Instagram page femcelincelalliance posted a version that replaced the bottom text with, "It's Up To You To Traumatize Your Child" (shown below, left), which was later recaptioned by the Instagram page pairofkingspod to reference the clothing brand Chrome Hearts (shown below, right).

For the full history of "Break The Cycle," be sure to check out Know Your Meme's entry for even more information.

I ran into the following economic dictum at Paul Krugman’s new Substack. The author is Rudi Dornbusch, who formulated it originally in the context of monetary policy and financial crises, but it clearly has wider applications:

The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.

This is reminiscent of Mike’s description in The Sun Also Rises of how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

I was thinking about these insights in the context of the economic future of higher education in this country. I’ve spent all but three years of my adult life in academia, first as a student and then as a faculty member. For the last quarter or so of that 47-year span, I’ve been wondering how much longer this thing of ours could keep going in the direction it’s been going, certain in the knowledge that the answer was “definitely not indefinitely,” but also unclear in my mind, or the back of my mind, when it would become clear to everyone that our methods were unsound.

Here is the change in the total revenues for degree-granting institutions of higher education in America over the last four decades, per total full-time equivalent enrollment, converted into 2022 dollars:

FY1980: $26,417

FY2001: $39,141

FY2022: $49,749

How did this happen? The answer has a lot of components, so let’s take a look at some of them, in no particular order.

(1) America as a nation is a lot richer than it was 40 years ago, and the growth in higher ed revenue reflects this broader economic growth pretty closely, as both figures have roughly doubled over this time.

(2) Some costs in higher ed are necessarily much higher than they were 40 years ago. The most obvious is IT, although this raises the question — not begs the question, raises the question — of whether and to what extent the cost savings to institutions generated by IT should cancel out or exceed costs of IT itself (I would think the answer would be “by a lot” but I’m no expert).

(3) Colleges and universities are expected by pretty much everybody involved with them to be far more full-service sorts of institutions than they were 40 years ago. This is true in both serious (mental health services) and relatively frivolous (the infamous climbing walls and lazy rivers) ways.

(4) The professional incentives of upper administrators in higher education are perverse. Essentially, upper administration is evaluated and rewarded in terms of a hyper-capitalist model, in which the prime directive is always more growth, especially of revenues. Obviously, the parallel between the economics of the university and those of the larger society is not coincidental.

(5) An extremely clear example of the perverse effects of this model is provided by comparing the change in compensation between faculty and upper administrators. The average salaries of all FULL TIME university faculty essentially didn’t change between 1970 and 2022, going from $96K to $98K, in constant dollars. But the PERCENTAGE of faculty that was full time changed from 78% to 52% over this same time frame, which means that faculty salaries have gone down very sharply over the past couple of generations, if you count the half of the faculty that does two-thirds of the teaching in higher ed as actual faculty, which I realize many a chaired professor doesn’t, for reasons that are too obvious to belabor.

Meanwhile, compensation for upper administrators has exploded. 40 years ago, hardly any university president was making more than $300,000 per year in constant, 2022 dollars. Today, dozens of presidents make many multiples of that, but what’s even more relevant is that literally thousands of other administrators have larger salaries than the highest-paid university presidents did a generation ago. And the sheer NUMBER of upper administrators has proliferated, for both good and bad reasons. The good or at least arguably good reasons have to do with the demands that universities be full service institutions in ways that they weren’t, referenced above.

The bad reasons include the fact that the very highest administrators will strive to unload their putative job responsibilities onto underlings, who will perform the actual work that the Lord High Chancellor of Synergistic Interdisciplinary Synergies is in theory paid to perform. Also, as the professional administrative class has been increasingly hived off from the faculty into a separate career track/social caste, its members naturally come to consider administration to be the most central and important and valuable thing that happens at the university, as opposed to research and teaching and other stuff that members of the professional administrative class no longer do, because they have achieved academic escape velocity.

(6) It’s difficult to overstate the corrupting effects that pseudo-evaluative ranking rituals have had on higher education. US News and its various imitators have, over the past generation, created a ready-made pragmatic excuse for what upper administrators want to do anyway, which is to constantly spend more money. This is because these institutions are rewarded directly and indirectly for spending more money, as a proxy for the quality of the institutions themselves. This is, from an economic and social standpoint, very obviously insane, but when sanity collides with the social and economic self-interest of the relevant decision makers, sanity is going to lose.

(7) A critical factor in regard to how all of the above happens is the extremely weak and inadequate governance structure at so many institutions of the higher learning in America. I can from personal experience state in the most polite terms that I can muster that, for example, the regents of the University of Colorado don’t have the faintest idea about what’s going on at my employer, let alone any clue how to go about managing whatever that might be. This is not, I hasten to add, because of any character flaws on their part as individuals, but rather because the combination of the regents’ professional backgrounds and the essentially total control that the upper university administration exercises over the information available to the regents makes anything resembling an independent check on the administration’s self-dealing — which, again, is structurally overdetermined down to the last turtle — all but impossible.

For various economic, demographic, and political factors, these dynamics are hurtling American higher ed toward a reckoning, that is even now approaching gradually, but will one day arrive suddenly.

Until that day, the motto of the powers that be in academia is exactly the same one that governs the behavior of the masters of our increasingly plutocratic universe: I’ll be gone; you’ll be gone.

The post The crack-up appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

ironykins:

self-loving-vampire:

“Skepticism and the scientific method are the tools of white men, women and brown people (nobly) rely on superstition and vibes instead. I am progressive.” is truly one of the worst takes of the year every year.

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

madammeouff:

flaminbeast:

theconcealedweapon:

THIS. For example, someone else recently observed on this here app, and I fully agree:

Right wing people talk more about trans people, than actual trans people themselves. And they are so much louder about it.

This paranoid fixation on a notion that the “other” has an agenda that threatens their very way of living, when all that is happening is that human rights are(were?) extending to more people than them, and this makes them defensive and uncomfortable.

Conservatism is innately self destructive and that’s why they’re always so angry. Their own ideals keep failing and ultimately always end up ceding ground long term to the left.

Right now. They’re obsessed with trans people because patriarchy and capitalism are busy devouring each other.
Cishet men and cishet women are being driven apart by what I call, the gender industrial complex. Men and Women, but increasingly men. Are having impossible, satirical ideas of what an ideal man or women should look like. Having their insecurities and vulnerabilities exploited in order to get them to spend more money on meeting these impossible gender standards. It all results in men and women both being made more toxic to each other and carry all these completely unrealistic ideas of what a relationship should look like. So men and women grow to hate each other more, which causes the birth rate to collapse and capitalism as a whole to come under threat. And the increasing toxicity of patriarchal gender makes more people want to find alternatives.

So really, its all a crab bucket situation with these transphobes. They utterly hate what patriarchal gender norms have turned into. But have also internalised it to such an extreme that they can’t imagine things being different. So they lash out at people who do try to break out.

Things will start improving again eventually. The self destructive nature of conservatism all but guarantees it. But they can put up a hell of a fight trying to beat their own shadow to death in the meantime.