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User ID: 2039

100ProofTollBooth


				
				
				

				
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User ID: 2039

This also points to the extent context and expectation have profound impact on even basic human habits. Nobody expects the hunting camp to smell good. No one on deployment cared about how anyone smelled. We all knew beforehand that it was going to be smelly and gross.

What is scarce today is proportionate authenticity in positivity and negativity.

A question I like to ask with my bi-coastal over-educated early 30s cohort is "Yes, of course Orange Man was very very bad, but how did you life get appreciably worse between 2016 and 2020, barring anything related to COVID?" As almost all of my cohort got into manager+ levels of mostly tech corporate work, completed a masters, and/or got married ... they can't really come up with anything concrete beyond "well ... my anxiety...blah blah blah." But that's just the point - negativity (in media sources or elsewhere) doesn't seem, to me, to be about real proportionate evaluation, but a kind of circular mood-affiliation. Even the less emotionally charged WSJ frequently has articles along the lines of "workers are worried the economy is real bad and whatnot." The body of the article amounts to "a bunch of online surveys indicate people are worried ... in general ... here's a few interviews with people who are worried ... in general."

Now, flip the coin the other way. Anybody here who routinely uses Slack or and other chat app in a corporate job will be familiar with the "EVERYDAY AMAZING" hyper-praise that a lot of front line managers HEAP on their employees for ... doing the basics. "Timmy and Janey ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED THEIR STANDUP THIS MORNING!!!!!" Followed with dozens of emoji responses. First, I think this is maybe the number one issue with career development today - front line managers are turning into weird cheerleaders until annual performance reviews where they absolutely gut these same folks. Consistent and honest feedback is really hard to come by and it's nearly impossible to calibrate the relative strength of feedback when you're getting the above (OMG YOU SHOWED UP TO WORK) on the one hand, and a muted "Hey, I think you could've delivered that report better..." on the other. Wait a minute, did I fuck up or not? If I did, how do I improve? What's the most important part of my job?

I know I mixed some topics up above here, but I don't think they're that unrelated. I think about this a lot as somehow who's moved into the Senior Manager / Director phase of the career and, looking down, see a lot of individual contributors who truly don't trust the feedback from the system. As a citizen who reads the news, I see something similar happening with your average man-on-the-street who's looking around and seeing "THE END IS NEAR" on a daily basis, but who goes home, orders from Uber Eats and isn't worried a stranger is poisoning his food.

It's odd to me that she's made it this far on what's really, really common schtick. Go to any literary-debate club or half-serious political discussion group at an Ivy-Or-Similar school and there will be at least half a dozen girls making an absolute killing doing the exact same thing.

I think in the context of Heavy Metal, it's important to make the (usually unimportant) distinction between atheistic and nihilistic. I'm willing to make the generalization that most US/UK dedicated metalheads were drawn to the music because of a sense of frustration, anger, and general outsider-ness, and because metal directly helped assuage those feelings. Metal doesn't wallow in those feelings (unless it does, see below) but provides a sense of "yes, you're weird and different, that's ok, lean into it and go out and accomplish something." This is seen in some of the biggest names in metal being really accomplished at other things - Bruce Dickinson was a World Cup Fencer, for instance. To me this is also one of the big dividing lines between metal and punk. Punk tends to spend a lot of time dancing in circles with unfocused rage and weird fatalism. In the UK punk scene this had/had a lot to do with the suffocating class structures of British society. In the US punk scene, I think it's weaker and mostly lends itself to substance abuse or just slacking (NoFX's song The Separation of Church and Skate has a maybe-maybe-not self-aware line about this "The kids who used to live for beer and speed / now want their fries and coke")

What about when metal is nihilistic? I'd say you get the two BEST examples of the world's worst metal. So much so that many, many metalheads don't even consider them to be part of the overall genre; Norwegian Black Metal and Nu Metal. Original, old-school Norwegian Black Metal (Burzum, Mayhem, Darkthrone and close associates) have lyrical content that is almost completely misanthropic and nihilistic. Hell, Dead killed himself because ... he wasn't really doing anything else at the time. These bands and this genre of the early to mid 1990s is also fucking goofy as hell. Pure Cringe, as the kids say. If the church burnings and murder of Euronymous didn't happen, I don't think anyone cares about this subgenre whatsoever. For anyone who wants to make the argument that they had important anti-Christian, pro-Scandinavian folk religion messages, I think you find better examples if later "blackend death" or certainly Viking Metal like Amon Amarth.

American Nu Metal - AKA the shitty dirt weed that we picked up in 8th grade before we knew what we were doing. Yes, it's responsible for a huge portion of Millenial metalheads, but we don't hold on to the Slipknot and Mushroomhead CDs even for kitchy keepsakes. This music sucks because a lot of the central lyric content is "I feel feelings, don't know what to do about it, but here's some screaming." Cathartic as it may be, it leads nowhere. And, like Norwegian Black Metal, everyone hates it because of its cringeyness as well. My point is that they're fundamentally the same - they offer no solution to what are normal feelings of atomization, isolation, etc. What's worse, their lack of solution-offering is done in some of the goofiest and cringiest ways possible. Sure, the dudes in Slipknot have masks that are kind of neat and remind us of 1970s slasher flicks, but there's an ocean of difference between wearing those on stage at Ozfest and being the kid in oversized UFO pants who knows the album-by-album lore behind each set of masks. Contrast this to an old HS buddy who was really into the highly technical death metal stuff, learned how to shred on a 7-string guitar, started lifting, ended HS by dating the Pretty Girl and now works on Wall Street (I might not necessarily call that last part an accomplishment, but that's personal bias. If nothing else, those banks do select for relentless adherence to a standardized system of "performance.").

Music is one of the more pure-emotional types of art out there. Well, certainly professionally produced post-WW2 music. Classical, I think, could make an argument it's more cerebral or intellectual but I don't really know because I don't ever listen to it. The themes in top 40 Pop music, rightfully maligned, are still mostly positive (you'll find love one day, you feel good right now, literally "don't worry, be happy", JUST DANCE!). More introspective and flat-out sand songs can still have the same healing and development properties of a novel or depressed film. What you can't have is a purposelessness set to a tune.

The post that made me (eventually) create an account.

Couldn't agree more. A conversation I've had over and over with my close male relatives always starts pretty much the same "The day you really start moving from boyhood to manhood is the day you understand you're going to be judged on your performance forever. There will be people who "love you for you" but you are going to be judged by society (and by those loving people!) based on what you do and can accomplish." A lot of guys sort of zoom forward from there to "get a good career." While that should be a goal, I think it's far more effective to start with something personal that you can commit to daily: physical exercise within a martial context. The results really do permeate every aspect of life; social capability, overall confidence, (controlled) risk taking, career performance. Not to mention basic health and energy levels (side note: the wealthiest guy I ever could call a friend ALWAYs would say "health over wealth. I'd trade it all to have my knees back"). However, I think that this impact is actually seriously under-realized by guys who workout only for cosmetic reasons (obviously) but even those who workout with legitimate fitness goals. In my mind, this is because even if you're trying to PR on your squat, or get your mile time below howevermany minutes, or climb a 5.14 route, you aren't competing with the other members of the species directly. So it all gets blunted. Maybe there's some grey area here if you're doing it in a directly competitive context (an organized footrace, a powerlifting meet) but I still think it's miles away from training with the idea of "I can use this to deliver violence when necessary." As a military-adjacent dude (never served, but did contracting for a long time) I really see this in the actual badasses (combat arms, SoF dudes) who leave the service and still really train hard on guns. It's partially habit and partially them keeping up a readily available social network, but the ones who keep themselves in shape, do a combat sport, and do meaningful range drills really do walk around with that cliche "cool confidence" that's impossible to fake. For folks into Gun YouTube - compare the general attitude of GarandThumb to BrandonHerrera. Ultimately, unless you are career military (and even then) you do have to craft capability beyond Being The Biggest Badass In The Room, and that is important to realize and a big downfall for a lot of the Joe Rogan types who might sort of dabble with BJJ but never develop something else. Even The KingOfTheBros mixed MMA with comedy before he was the biggest podcaster in the metaverse. Still, the highly-personal and immediate satisfaction of daily training within a martial context, to me, needs to underpin life for males without serious medical issues (i'm talking mostly chronic, birth-related things, not mild obesity or asthma).

— What opportunities have I missed? What will I miss if I don’t wake up and smell the coffee?

To me, this is a cousin to the expression "the more I know, the more I know I don't know."

"The more I do, the more I think about other things I haven't done but should do/ want to do." The book 80,000 Hours is above-average self-help screed, but it does drive home the point that "you will accomplish an extremely small percentage of everything that is capable of being done in a human life." Bucket lists might as well all have "visit several hundred million different stars" on them. It also gets interesting as your interests and values change over time. In my 20s, I had a job that took me to interesting places all over the world. It made me feel interesting and like I had "really experienced life." Now, I am super jealous of the guys I hunt with who have been to Wyoming, Montana, Idaho with rare/expensive lottery tags in their pockets. But hey, Dubai was cool, right?

I'm of the opinion that enduring satisfaction with life really only comes from mastery and knowledge of the self. I don't mean this in some woo-woo Zen master way. I mean figuring out truths about yourself that make sense and that you don't want to change. I went hard on the personal organization kick for a while really thinking that a super-interconnected note taking and reference system would lead ... somewhere. I think, to an extent it did, but you know what I found out as well? I really like handwriting in notebooks. It's a tactile orgy for me. So, I still use the Markdown Monster I created for career related stuff, but I start each morning scribbling pre-coffee jibberish into a spiral notebook.

Separate from any of the parent comments, this seems off to me just looking at the diction alone. This reminds me of those funny fake history quotes people like to shitpost for a quick laugh; "Just like, don't be a dick, lol" - Jesus or "Bitches ain't shit" - Eleanor Roosevelt. The dissonance between the assumed diction and the diction in the quote is the funny part. Here, why would some who seems to be genuinely using language like "my soul is joyous, I am nourished" combine it in the same sentence with "got railed" -- which is a fairly vulgar, slightly violent connotative phrase? I realize I'm way over analyzing a tweet here, but this seems to me to try and play both ends of the spectrum - one the on side is the sort of new-age "sex is a divine experience" aspect and the other side is "whoo ya be a proud slut!" I'm not trying to judge either of those, but I don't think they mix so fluidly? What's the rub? Who's the rube?

Articles like this one (from the Guardian, no less) would point to a pretty direct connection between BLM and overall law enforcement policy (which is even more enduring that personnel shortages, changes in tactics, etc.) You quite literally had DA candidates for one of the biggest metropolitan jurisdictions in the US interacting with BLM activists.

Genuine thanks for that. Wasn't aware of the meme and now the "was railed six times..." tweet comes across an admittedly pretty funny one. Learning has occurred.

To my mind, most of the big trends in popular music in the last ten years have prominently featured a conscious embrace of ugliness and poor taste, whether it's the ear-splitting sonic assault of drill music; the self-aware tackiness and excess of hyperpop; the bored, amelodic, disaffected repetition of British and Irish sprechgesang bands; or the deliberate minimalism of modern trap and SoundCloud rap.

I don't see this as a fundamental lack of positivity and retreat to nihilism or misanthropy. At the risk of engaging in some serious "old man yells at clouds" style activities, I can't really emphasize enough how "irony" seems to have become the central social feature of Gen-Z. "Ugliness and poor taste?" No, I have great taste because I'm wearing this ugly outfit and my soundclap rap is mumbled gibberish. Kanye (before he want to planet Kanye) did this explicitly with one of his Yeezy lines that were specifically intended to look like dilapidated homeless people clothes. And have $1500+ prices per article.

But, wait, it gets worse! I'm seeing trends of irony-upon-irony. The embodiment of this is Pete Davidson who has made a career off of 1) Having a firefighter dad who died in 9/11 2) Joking about it 3) Talking about how it still makes him anxious and depressed 4) Making a horrible movie where he mixes both of these concepts 5) Being the heir to the Jimmy Fallon "I'm always breaking" role on SNL and 5) Dating megastars in Hollywood. That guy is incomprehensible to me because he doesn't ever seem to be serious even when he is professing huge sincerity. Again, the maybe-maybe-not self-awareness of that Taco Bell ad he's in where the extra says, at the end, "are you riffing or is this part of the bit?"

In my mind, I think pop culture, since about 2015 and the rise of real Gen-Z meme culture, has had a crisis of authenticity. It's now a rare commodity and, therefore, hard to reliable find and produce. The easy way is to double down on irony / sarcasm ... which further pollutes the message and so we get stuck into multi-layered cyclic irony. Trust disintegrates, people aren't sure if their emotions are common and understood or bizarrely unique personal hallucinations.

I think an interesting approach could be making National Guard membership way easier with different cores of seriousness. You're an aimless 25 year old who smoked weed all through high school and is now semi-employed. Great, you're going to PT a lot and learn basic discipline. You're an IT dude in his 30s who's looking for something like a Mannerbund connection and also want to serve? Awesome, you're now part of a Cyber Protection Team. You're former active duty SF, but your knees are weird from too many jumps and you want to actually see your kids? Permanent Training cadre.

The problems here are that

  1. The Military still makes Reserve/NG just as difficult to join as Active Duty. Endless paperwork, multi-month delays, weird waiver requirements for tattoos etc. Age limits are also weird. If you're 35+, in good shape (to where you can crush the PFT), and have no medical / criminal record it's still bizarrely had to join.

  2. Goldwater-Nichols while overall extremely good for the professional force, did make the place of the Reserve/NG a bit of a head-scratcher. Combine this with that fact that doctrinally, the Army still goes to war with Reserve/NG.

Mostly for the better, imho, the military is now a professional bureaucracy. And the American way of war is a lot more overwhelming logistics and material advantage than "warrior spirit" (expect for tiny elite units). Again, this is a great thing for running a technologically advanced super military that needs to be always ready for nation-state conflict. Culturally, however, that means the military is a lot more distant for men who just want basic feelings of purposeful camaraderie.

I'm pretty sure I read it in another thread on here and I apologize for not citing ... but someone said "Traditional male roles have been torn down over the past 30+ years. Good or bad for society is up for debate, but what isn't is that no replacement have been provided."

Starting Strength. Has a YouTube channel and a few related books.

Important caveat: Stick to the program, but adjust at the margins based on your own feedback loops. Rippetoe gets dogmatic and I understand why [^1]. Do your thing ... but also be aware of the extent to which you've drifted from the program. Bicep curls are the devil.

I would recommend against the marathon. It occupies this place in western pop-fitness as a great symbol of overall health and fitness when it is, in reality, a hugely specialized performance. For overall fitness, resistance training is the base and cardio should be varied but mostly below 45 minutes in terms of duration. If your 5-mile time falls below 35 minutes, then you can go train for a marathon, which will mostly be a lot of boring long runs.

[^1]: Rippetoe exists as the anti "amazing new fitness routine" anchor of the world. His entire career is "do the basics right and consistently for years." Which is what is appropriate for >95% of people. When Muscle and Fitness publishes an elite bodybuilder's routine, it make no sense for the average lifter because that bodybuilder's routine is designed to move him or her from the top .1% to the top .07% of lifters. They're extreme because they're at the very limits of diminishing returns. Most people will never get there, so using it as a starting point is useless. Where Rippetoe fails, imho, is in letting people who have put in a baseline of work with the basics tweak based on their own feedback loops.

Anything referencing Things Fall Apart gets an upvote for me forever. You know Achebe was a powerful author when a nerdy white kid from the burbs is yelling "THIS YAM FARMER GETS IT" in 9th grade English.

Responding the original question: Practice comfort in uncertainty and paradox. Life is ultimately pointless and chaotic, but it's better to attempt to set order to it than to simply lean into the chaos. You will fail, but the trying also guarantees victory.

Gotta head over to my copywriting job at the fortune cookie plant...

Point taken. And I'm not bashing the marathon as a silly goal. I just don't see it as a good measure of general fitness. It's not well-rounded.

Genuine question; What's more impressive; traveling 26.2 miles quickly a la a Marathon, or traveling 26.2 miles with 30% of your bodyweight in a sack on your back?

Won't go into details (nice try, NSA!) but I went to a public citizens militia field day thing once with a buddy.

That shit was Call of Duty: Renaissance Fair. Dudes who had to bring lawn chairs with them to a makeshift range so they wouldn't pass out while reloading mags. Trading weird Confederate memorabilia the way I traded Magic Cards in the 8th grade. Dude's with sub-MOA $5000 ARs who couldn't hit minute-of-basketball.

There have to be enforced standards. Those are hard to rigidly enforce when your membership may also be the way you finance the organization. "Rick weighs 400 lbs!" "Yeah, but his toilet repair company paid for all the ammo and his wife makes great Frito pie!"

This is why my idea (sort of reluctantly) falls back to a Federal org i.e. the National Guard. The other alternative are the for-profit tactical training / security orgs. There are a million of them and, perversely, the ones that are largely bullshit have huge Social Media presence and the actual hitters have zero profile and names that are beyond forgettable. Cue Lil Wayne: "Real Gs move in silence like lasgana." Also, they're for profit and usually at the price points that only State/Federal agencies can afford (or maybe multinational Oil and Gas companies). It's not like me and my buddies can pool together an extra $150k for a weekend of training.

Any workout is a Navy SEAL workout if you fix your hair in the middle and then write a book about it.

"Operation Glute Force: My War in The Squat Rack"

Agree. I think something that's also worth highlighting is that the 'Waffle House Wendy' girl, in her YouTube video, makes a short remark about "that's how it gets at night" and "so, I grabbed the sugar shaker." Part of Laptop Class elitism (of which I am a member, full disclosure) is a lack of recognition of the normalcy with which blue collar works face direct threatening confrontation. This is mostly due to time pressures and face-to-face customer or coworker interaction. If I don't want to talk to my boss via a Zoom meeting, I can weasel out of it ("Hey, putting out a fire, can we resched?"). If that one annoying client keeps e-mailing, I can ignore it or send a non-answer to give myself a day (or two, or three).

Not the case at Waffle House. 2am and a table of 10 obviously hammered people come in? Start flipping bacon and hope they ain't rowdy ... but be prepared if they are (top off that sugar shaker, I want some heft behind that fucker if we go kinetic!).

Blue collar / Laptop class work is usually divided around education and money. I think this is the wrong dimension to analyze. Some of the most common types of "millionaries next door" are plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and trucking owners who largely started in doing those trades themselves. The right dimension, to me, is "speed of life." What's you average turnaround time from meeting a customer to delivering a product or service for them?. A plumber measures it in days or maybe a week, a hair dresses in an hour, and a waffle house cook in 15 minutes. My last SaaS company had an average sales cycle time of 56 days.

Careful to note that I'm not going to fall into the Bruce Springsteen trap of exalting Blue Collar work to a mythical level of important here. As the one and only branch of a family tree that largely never made it out of that life, I can tell you it's largely due to repeated and obvious poor life decisions.

I read HN daily and have found some of its threads to be incredibly important for understanding how organizations work. That being said, it gets hilarious consistently on two fronts:

  1. When the largely Software Engineering (SWE) crowd comments on something larger and complex outside of their domain of expertise. I can't think of a good example of late, but it always goes the same way -- the SWEs analyze the problem as a linear system to be optimized, point to the stupidly obvious inflection point and go "lol the normies are too dumb to fix it" while blindly missing all of the second and third order implications of that change to the system. This hints at their cavalier attitudes and, frankly, to a certain laziness. I've seen SWEs who should know better bork production systems because of some off-the-cuff optimization. The default response is always "Oh, shit, yeah, sorry ... here, here, that's an easy fix." Well, then we're playing a game of fix one bug and cause 3 more. The hubris is real.

Which makes the second thing odd:

  1. So, so, so many of HN posters have had negative experiences that made them deeply permanently insecure. I'm not trying to be cute when I say this - they're all literally nerds. Somebody bullied them in high school, or the cute girl in their philosophy class friendzoned them. It's weird how often personal attacks and highly emotional reasoning are levied in there, what with them being a self-avowedly "rational" crowd. Everyone's a human and everyone has emotions. You're allowed to feel however the hell you want, but life gets easier if you control how you act. There's a childishness.

The other thing I've noticed reading HN daily now for close to a decade is that the typical individual contributor software job, even at FAANGs, is a shitty bill of goods being sold. For a really precise timeframe, about 2005-2020, the "rest and vest, work 20 hours a week" strategy worked and did make multimillionaries of state-school slackers. Those days are over - for everyone! New CS kids are (a) oversaturating the market and (b) not actually competent. The greybeards are encountering the fact that ageism is real and they never learned how to actually work with people, so trying to step up to a manager role is really fucking hard for them. And, the low hanging fruit has all been picked. AdTech and basic social network building is either done or dominated. The new problems are harder and require way more end-to-end thought and not lazy hot fixes. There was a thread maybe a month ago asking what being a professional dev was like in the 80s and 90s .... all the dinosaurs who came out said shit like "compiling took forever and we couldn't really snapshot-and-rollback the way you can today .... we had to test the shit out of our code and think through corner cases. We would have day long whiteboarding sessions where we ended up worse off than we started."

Tangent-to-a-tangent below.

The Dr. Squatch adds are part of a certain streak of marketing that can be described as "tongue in cheek hyper-masculine." The other ones that come quickly to mind are the various, heavily-punned male grooming devices (Gronk did a couple of commercials for one), and beef jerky. The themes of the adds are all fundamentally the same "be a manly man by buying this product ... here are a bunch of pun-ny dick jokes and comic book illustrations of masculinity; chopping wood, wrestling a bear, etc." They stop far short of any actual violence, and the entire air of the ads are always meant to be comical.

So, it's safe-for-kids masculinity. It's not actually genuine or earnest. It's the little boy wearing his dad's work shoes and pretending to "go to the business factory." And this is why a lot of these ads are not-so-secretly hated by traditional masculinity oriented men - because they infantilize the men in them and the men who would buy the products. I'm trying to picture my WW2 vet Grandfather coming home to his wife and saying "look, honey, I bought the MAN soap!" I can, however, easily picture a Laptop Class San Franciscan showing off his "Warrior Berkenstocks" with genuine pride ... because I saw that happen in 2016.

Tin-foil-hat me sometimes thinks this is part of a radical feminist agenda (I told you I was wearing that hat at the beginning of that sentence!) That these advertisers want to create a "dress up pretend fund time" version masculinity that lets husbands and fathers feel like men ... but never, ever lets let actually develop self-assured independent traits that could break them out of the matriarchal dominance of the wives / mothers (often the same person functionally).

Then again, I'm waxing philosophic about men's soap on the internet. I'll go outside and fuck a bear now.

Zoom out a little. The problem isn't with dudes not getting laid per se. It's a problem of managing unmarried young men. This is a problem societies everywhere in the world have always faced forever. In fact, human society has spent millenia designing and improving a roadmap specifically for how boys ought to navigate - military service, occupational development, expectations in (usually but not always) monogamous marriages.

Over the past 20 years (with antecedents out to 50) western societies have systematically destroyed all of these institutions for young men and offered no replacements. Say what you will about "traditional" male roles (and there are good reasons to want to change those notions) ... but an absence of roles and demonstrated paths to responsibility / status in society is absolutely catastrophic. This is for one simple reason; most of society's violence is perpetrated by young men. Murder, rape, assault, robbery ... 90% - 95% of all perpetrators are men between 18 and 35 (maybe extend that to 40, whatever).

"Incel" is just a part of the elephant that seems to be fun to grope recently (yes, I wrote that on purpose). The bigger issue is what to do with all these young men. But the climate is such that, right now, any political / social leader who stands up as says "Let's talk about the plight of young men" is ridiculed into oblivion.

Well, okay, we can continue to do that and continue to watch young dispossessed men murder random people on Twitch (literally that happened in the Buffalo shootings).

I think the concept of parasocial (self) relationships applies here. People, disproportionately those with an underdeveloped sense of self, can develop "relationships" with characters or other mediated personalities. Almost be definition, this is a very imbalanced relationship as the viewer / audience has strong feelings of attachment, connection, and attraction to the character. This can range from a relatively benign situation ("Beyonce and I would be best friends) to crippling dependency (camgirl addicts who over-invest into the parasocial camgirl relationship to the level of personal financial ruin).

In terms of your alternate definition of "gender identity" I think there's a case to be made that trans/non-binary folks have created a parasocial relationship with an idealized version of themselves. Falling in love with who they think they want to be. To me there's some circumstantial evidence to support this; the disproportionately higher rate of schizophrenia and other psychotic features in the trans population etc. When the sense of self is severely warped or underdeveloped, bad, bad things happen. Remember, simple isolation and prolonged solitary confinement is recognized as torture. To remain healthy and mentally stable, humans need reinforcement loops with other humans. If you've substituted your own self-perpetuating and idealized feedback loop within your own head ... wearing funny clothes is the least of your concerns.

I hope this doesn't violate any rules, but I want to slide in with a big old "consider the source." Hersh used to be the pinnacle of deep investigative journalism ... and then something happened? His coverage of the Bin Laden raid was the marker for me of him really falling off.

Plus one. And it is frustrating because it is so often divorced from reality and build upon the (non)premise of "No, this is how I feel. You can't argue with how I feel."

The counter-intuitive thing, in my mind, is that a well developed sense of self is often easier developed within a group or community. Major upfront caveat - not in a group/community that is completely dedicated to developing personal senses of self. Let me explain. Say you're part of a gym group - crossfit, traditional powerlifting, MMA, cycling, rock climbing, whatever. That group is there for the activity; developing the skills, trading advice, swapping stories. The purpose is beyond that of the group members themselves. This same principle applies to non-physical organizations as well. I'm in a professional society - let's say I'm a professional cake baker so that I don't doxx myself. I go to meetings and conferences, I know some folks. I've learned better cakery along the way. The important part in terms of sense of self is that I have these stable groups wherein I can place myself. I'm a batter cakerist than John from Cincinnati, but not quite as skilled as Mary from Hershey, Pennsylvania. I can lift more than Steve, but less than Don. We all get a long. I have confidence in what I can do, and a healthy humility regarding what I can't, and the group itself doesn't castigate me for my relative skill level.

Contrast that, first, to groups who are only about the preservation and boosting of the ego. These are largely online communities that sometimes get together in meatspace. What's the reward system there? Either a) be the loudest person in the group in terms of over-the-top unconditional support for the others (these would be your "yass queen, slay" types) or b) be the loudest person in the group in terms of victimhood identification. There's no other place to be within those groups because there would be no point. Again the whole point of those kind of groups is to boost individuals within them, there's no external goal/purpose/motivation. That leads to very quick sprints to the extreme.

But rewind the tape a little. What if I'm not in any of the above? I'm just a very online person who strongly identifies as something or another. Well, then we get into what I consider to be pretty dangerous territory. Absent of any meaningful community or group affiliation, people overcompensate be either super-inflating their own egos to fill up that void, or letting that crushing loneliness compress them into a neutron star that explodes. The outcomes vary. On the one hand, you have Gen-Z tiktokers giving rageful speeches about weird new pronouns. On the other, you have displaced loners killing themselves and, sadly, often other people. My theory is that it largely comes from the same primary source - lack of a sense of self and the resulting hyper-compensation. The cure isn't pop-psychology mindfulness, ill-defined "self-care", or, of course, hormonal modification. It's developing bonds within a structure larger than yourself to develop a stable self.

Liked this post. Two additions for consideration.

  1. Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges. I just tried to find the report on this that I'm thinking of, but wow is Google really trash theses days. The report I'm thinking of mentions that a reason for this is that graduate education programs, even among the social sciences, has a particular resistance to, well, evidence. Think about it. If you're trying to compare the long term outcomes of a particular teach style, you have to track children over several years and then somehow control for cognitive ability, parental involvement, and personal preferences (Alice likes math naturally etc.) This is impossible almost from the jump. Therefore, a LOT, of the courses taught in graduate education courses are one step away from woo-woo bullshit. I had a family friend who, already quite liberal, shifted his graduate program to education technology (basically finding better ways to catalog and use online materials in public schools) because he was aghast and the low level of rigor in the teaching instruction courses.

  2. It's worth looking at who teachers used to be and who they are know. Fun fact; there are more active duty Navy SEALs than there are male pre-K teachers in the US. The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted. This is now starting also to happen to women past 40. Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else. Pair this with administrator's inability to really do anything with disruptive students, and classroom order and discipline is DESTROYED. Then, it doesn't even matter what the instruction style is. Repeating words, guessing them based on context - none of it matters when have the class is filming a TikTok and the most the non-binary double masters grad at the front can do is loudly clear her throat.

This post got longer than initially intended, but you caught me mid caffeine stream. There is no viable path for public education in the US for the close to mid-term. COVID was the last nail in the coffin. Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.

100%. And it's particularly bad in humanities where over-subdivision is ridiculous. I think the British University's still have PPE as a sort of default humanities major - that's politics, philosophy, and economics. Which, when you stop to think about it, are all intrinsically related and, therefore, necessary to be taught together. In a sort of dark hilarity "intersectionality" is a weird bottom-up recreation of ... sociology (which, to be clear, is anthropology without the field work and economics without the math).

Part of this has to do with the relentless credentialism. I went to a fancy kid college and there were classmates I had who wanted to take STEM courses from genuine interest but worried they would struggle and their GPA would fall. The idea of college GPA is absurd to me because it can be hacked and demonstrates ZERO proficiency at anything. Take the courses you want, attend however you feel. Senior year should be an independent project that you publish publicly ... employers can make their determination based on that.