RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
19hr ago
Maybe his father did Elon-style parenting before it was cool.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
1d ago
Same here. Unfortunately, the latter part seems to be his intended focus. He could be a decent "straight" fantasy writer, but wants it to be a philosophical work that subverts expectstions, but he lacks the nuance for. I finished the book, but mentally checked out at the rape-icorn.
I'd strongly advice against any kind of one-track lifestyle. No matter what you do, things can always go bad in a way that is not really your fault. It's good to have fallbacks, ideally uncorrelated ones, that you can be happy about. If you have a reasonably fun job that pays reasonably well (but is not amazing by either measure), have a partner, have friends, have family you're on good terms with, have kids, own a house that you deliberately made your own, and maybe some other things like hobbies or volunteer work or local community stuff, then it's pretty hard for your life to get completely ruined in a modern western society.
Work in particular is imo one of the easiest and most tempting one-tracks to get into, and thus the one you should be most careful about. This has a bunch of reasons, in no particular order:
-I'm hardly a communist, but they are correct that bosses are very eager to get you into this. It's just not about capitalism, it's simply very beneficial for anyone in a hierarchy above you if you have nothing else on your plate. It's extremely easy to talk a young unattached girl into unpaid overwork for a job she loves.
-Because of the way aging works, a lot of the other things will only get harder as you get older: Well-adjusted people will already be paired of and have kids, and they will already have enough friends so that even if they like you, they'll probably put no work in to turn this into a friendship, for example.
-This only applies to you if you have a "fun" career: Work is fundamentally the stuff that needs to be done, but which is not fun enough for people to do for free. It's also normal to get paid badly at the start of your career. And there is this pervasive idea that you need to "find the right work" that "fulfills" you. This leads to an interesting dysfunction in modern times: Extreme competition around fun jobs that people are actually willing to do for free. I've seen more than one person get completely burned out on something where they think they just need to "focus more on their career", except everyone is doing this so you can't get ahead; The fundamental problem is that supply outstrips demand so much that only a tiny sliver of ultra-competent can earn anything at all.
-Work has a tendency to become drudgery over time, moreso if you have nothing else. There are unfortunately large differences between "sounds good", "is fun (at first)" and "stays tolerable over long time spans". Worse, most people only find out once it happens to them.
-Contrariwise, especially on a partner & kids I've seen a noticeable tendency where people think that they don't need or even want it when they are young, but they nevertheless become unhappy and regretful once they're too old and it's too late.
-The great majority of work is ephemeral, even the work you think isn't. At some point you'll realize that you left almost nothing behind for the future. Are you ready for this?
-Finally, to hark back to the general criticism of one-track lifestyles, work is especially susceptible to outside influence. You boss leaves and the new boss sucks. Or the entire field isn't doing so well so you're getting chopped. Or politics does something stupid that impacts your company negative. Or some of your favorite coworkers leave and the atmosphere turns bad. Or the world changes in an unpredictable way that makes your job far less fun (to understand what I mean, see the complaints from programmers who like programming itself but hate supervising and double-checking AIs who do the actual coding).
Disagree. Teaching currently sucks pretty hard because of culture. Students come in with a mindset that they deserve whatever degree they're going for, and it's your job to get them there. The university admin doesn't care about standards, they just want you to pass as many students as possible bc it's pure $ for them. Politics is still dominated by boomers who believe that more years of education automatically means people get smarter. As a teacher, absolutely every incentive pushes you towards just passing everyone while barely even bothering to go through the motions. Which makes the students become even more cynical & entitled: If even plenty of the teachers clearly don't care, why should they?
Likewise, it's pretty hard to miss this development, so the opinion of teaching among faculty goes down. Less people WANT to do teaching, so the only ones doing it are those who get it pushed unto them, which further erodes the quality of the teaching.
It's a pretty impossible doom-loop consuming the universities. The only exception are electives, which are organized by genuine researchers for the purpose of selection, which means that they actually have an incentive to care about standards.
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