Is it normal 1984 moments?

I think it's normal for everyone that has read 1984. The situations and events in that book were really extreme, but seeing the similarities with real people is really easy to the point where everyone does it. I don't even think it's dependent on where you live.

I'd be more surprised if someone read 1984 and then put it down thinking "huh, good thing absolutely none of that is happening where I live, so I'm totally not concerned about heading in that direction."

I don’t like Orwell.
I think he’s regularly misinterpreted, but I also think a lot of his messages are relatively shallow. I think he is one step away from understanding things fully in many instances.

What Orwell does is he puts the spotlight on negativity every single time, to the point it makes you think you’re seeing the “hidden truth”, so you get excited and pat yourself on the back for your “intellectualness” when in reality you’re just being a pessimist at least and a conspiracy theorist at most. He pulls the “big scary authoritarian society” card too often.
A little too hand-holdy vibe too.

In 1984 the tv watched them. This isnt even conspiracy its confirmed they can and do watch ppl through their TV if it has a camera. They can also watch you through your phone. The NSA doesnt even dispute it has the technology and uses it to track everything you do and theres keywords you can say that automatically flag you and you go on a list to be looked at. So if you say outloud "I want to bomb w a s h i n g t o n D C" that could trigger them to look into you a bit to clear you. Who knows what words cause the triggers. Snowden leaked it and said its so simple he could type anyones name in and had access to every email, text, video, location, and could even watch them through their phone camera from his desk at the NSA.

It's more like Brave New World than 1984.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it will probably go on for some time. How long was Christianity the hegemonic religion in western countries? Several centuries. Now consider that Wokeness only really started to take off in the twentieth century. And it has almost everything going for it. It has institutional backing and you have population genetics changing so that people have more alleles for collectivism and group think. Moreover with new medicines and technologies (eg. brain implants) basic instincts like racism will be pathologized and “cured.”

Not financial advice but one thing I’m doing to protect myself is buying foreign dividend stocks, because I don’t feel comfortable being long in the US markets where companies care more about their Woke religious beliefs than maximizing profit for shareholders.

Yes, it's normal. That was always the end-game. I think what we're seeing is more akin to Brave New World though. Both are gay though. It's only going to get worse from here with the rapid development of AI, the WEF's coming great reset (realistically we're in the midst of it playing out now), coming planned economic collapses for a more centralized and globalized world, and the ultimate plan to wipe out the 'useless eaters' of the world. There are too many people for their ideal scenario. They'd want something closer to 500 gorillion.

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I think that 1984 was Mr. Orwell's view of society, if it progressed down the path that he saw it going in. I've read it, and I found it to be fantastically written. You could see the protagonist, Winston, have his tone and demeanor in writing change ever so slightly, as he got brainwashed by Big Brother, which made it feel relatable to one's own ever-changing mind.
Anyway, we obviously don't live exactly like the people in the book, at least not yet, but as you said, there are far too many similarities to ignore. He didn't predict the future, he was making an observation about the current state of society, and wrote an openly extremeitized version of it, as a kind of meta commentary, which just so happens to align with today, as all politics slowly becomes more extreme and pervasive, as it goes along.

Yeah I definitely agree. On the one hand, the book 1984 was so extreme that to say nowadays is like 1984 is a huge exagerration. So it'd just make people roll their eyes and dismiss you when you say that. But because 1984 was so dystopian, if anything from today even remotely resembles 1984 then we should be seriously concerned. And a lot today does resemble 1984.

You don't think we will "ever" reach a situation like the book? Why?

It's pretty normal, of the left in politics, I was thinking I should support the left, when the centre left couldn't sink any lower, creating a wealth tax. I think this monitoring what you're thinking is the bullshit of dictators, but let's face it, Americans can think any way they want, it's a free country. I'm stuck here in Australia trying to diss false patriotism, trying to get Australia back, and the world goes clinically insane with its strange reactions, songs and that and pseudo-futurism of the Bible, all because the authorities in charge aren't happy with the way things are.

I've never read the book so I don't really have anything to go on.

And a lot more PKD to come also…