TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
18d ago
Thanks, yes, it's a happy way to be. (Also props for preserving the formatting in the quote.)
When status corresponds with practical value (as it has to greater or lesser degrees in every society on Earth), more valuable work = more status.
Right, yes, I see your point now. One of the great, uh, anti-innovations of trad life is that women aren't competing with men for status. They certainly wish to display their worth before marriage, which is why mine has a degree, but after that she gets to check out of the status wars except in that we're functioning as a unit and rise together. The whole concept of women competing with men is toxic and imo a losing game for all involved.
I posit that modern housewives are less essential to the functioning of the household than they've ever been, and that this reduction in utility has resulted in a concomitant reduction in status. Women's work has been declining in utility ever since the transition to agriculture, but the trend became turbocharged with the Industrial Revolution; it's no coincidence that feminism began in earnest in the mid-1800s. This status reduction can be moderated with religiosity (as in your case), but not negated.
Disagree with the first part and will break it down into a few subsections.
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Modern education is generally garbage and homeschooling is king. Exceedingly difficult to accomplish without one stay at home parent. Men are almost always better-suited to earn, so it makes sense for this to be the woman.
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Modern childcare is also about as bad as it is unaffordable. Especially if you have multiple small children. My wife takes the kids to the park, does projects with them, reads, etc. This is vastly better than sitting in front of a TV all day eating processed snacks, which seems to be the norm in daycares.
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For food, you can pick any two of 'healthy, delicious, both people have jobs'. I'd like to put 'affordable' in there but we spend >$2k/month on expensive hippy foods so I'm really not one to talk. But for example as I type this she's bringing me water, making tea the way I like, and then will make a green smoothie for both of us. I could pay for the latter two, but they wouldn't be as good and they'd probably be shockingly expensive if there are even comparable options out there.
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Maintaining a household doesn't take anywhere near as much labor as it used to but this just enables maintaining much higher standards of cleanliness and pleasantness. Especially when we add in the gardening, animals, etc. Again all this could be outsourced but probably would cost a great deal for much less impressive results.
In summary, there's a whole level of lifestyle available with a non-working wife that simply can't be attained any other way. This lifestyle is high-status. When women living this way are concerned about status, they're comparing themselves to their counterparts, not to men. Who's house is better put-together? Whose kids are excelling? What do meals and family time look like? Much healthier.
TitaniumButterfly
18d ago
Don't want to be glib here. It's a serious question, I have a lot of sympathy, and wish to treat it (and you) with respect.
I can't imagine not having a business. When I was younger I worked some corporate jobs and found them soul-crushing. Not just for all the obvious reasons, but also because of the total disconnect between effort and reward. Working for myself I never know how much I'll make in a year -- and that's a good thing!
I know exceedingly few people who are making 'real' money (>$200k/year) except that they have their own businesses. Those few tend to be high-level FAANG engineers. The rest are tradesmen or some other kind of independent contractor. This makes sense. The purpose of a company is to generate profit for the owners. Ergo, unless you're an owner, you will be paid the precise minimum amount the management thinks possible, and will always be vulnerable to getting replaced or otherwise eliminated. The people paying you have many incentives to do that. Never mind the psychic burden of constantly having to play their asinine games to try to avoid the chopping block.
"Just go start a business lol" isn't helpful advice. But the fact remains that small (even personal) businesses have comparatively massive potential upside. If you find the right niche for yourself, every day is suddenly a golden opportunity for advancement. It's a much better way to live, at least IME. I recall reading somewhere that self-employed people are 1) much more stressed and 2) much happier.
Especially in the coming era of AI agents, finding any skill that you can sell independently is going to be worth looking into.
Beyond that it's hard to give advice. There are already many people in my life, whom I know well and care about, for whom I'm always trying to solve this problem. Brothers, friends, etc. Owning my business is high-status but working for me isn't, so I get in a weird bind with trying to give them a leg up. My profit margins are insane and I can generally pay favored people several times the going rate, but am reluctant to do so because that just gets them stuck in a position of dependence upon me which is not the goal.
Perhaps the only real encouragement I can offer is that I've never known anyone who was set on going independent who didn't ultimately make it one way or another. In many ways it feels to me like becoming an adult, striking out on your own, learning hard lessons, and ultimately reaching a sort of maturity.
This was certainly the case for me. I'm the typical 'dropped out of school to start a business' bro, and as is typical that business burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. But, yes, the fourth one stayed up.
If you want to pursue it, there are plenty of resources for small business education and usually some pretty good local networks. Online 'entrepreneurial' spaces are generally full of blowhards and grifters but sometimes yield good information.
I wish you all the best.
Is your wife's role in the family actually complimentary to you or simply a lower station?
Both.
Because it seems to me like if you swapped positions, you could do her job perfectly well (minus the pregnancy bit), but she'd have no idea how to run your business.
I don't want to divulge too much personal info here but she was making six figures in finance when I met her and graduated very high in her class from a fairly prestigious school (for the West Coast). She does help run my business. Personally I don't have much patience for jumping through hoops but she loves it and can do it all day. Also handles a lot of the bookkeeping.
I suppose that your relationship might be described as harmonious compared to alternatives, but you and other trad types have to own the fact that homemaking is a low status occupation and that many women won't be happy with that.
It is honestly adorable to me that you think this is a problem for us. We're not watching mainstream TV (which is blatantly satanic), we're not listening to mainstream music (which is blatantly satanic), our kids don't get phones until they're basically adults, and most importantly of all, the women in our parish do not care in the slightest what mainstream culture considers low-status. Have you seen mainstream culture? Everyone there is miserable. They think 'community' means fandom. They have kids out of wedlock, don't get married, and when they do, they get divorced. The men and women are utter failures as men and women and don't seem to have a single clue as to what either of those words even means. They murder babies and mutilate their children into grim parodies of the opposite sex. Why on earth would we care about their opinions? Who takes life advice from someone who's climbing into a suicide pod? And you think we look silly, backwards, and ignorant.
Magic happens when young people grow up worried about what Christ thinks instead of what the imaginary people on TV might think.
I tried this one weird trick called "going to church" and through that met a hot girl in her 20s (I was mid-late 30s) who was excited about homemaking and being a mother. Rolls her eyes at the word 'feminism'. More people should try it.
Her take is that I'm already working hard to support us and she's obviously biologically/psychologically better-suited to making babies and cleaning the house. Why would she expect that of me?
My mom taught me to never buy a household/kitchen appliance as a gift for a woman, as that would somehow be denigrating. But for Christmas I bought my wife the snazzy new vacuum cleaner she'd had her eye on and she just loves the thing to pieces. Vacuums the house twice a day.
Turns out women can be really happy to be women, and act as the natural compliment to men, when no one raises them to hate the idea. Our next baby is due any day now and I'm working hard to expand my business to more than cover all the new expenses that will bring. I can do this because she supports me as I support her. I come home to a clean (and pleasant-smelling) house, good food, thriving children, and usually a decent massage before bed. Really takes the stress of the day out of me before I fall asleep. Getting up the next day and rocking hard comes easy.
Meanwhile, last night, I was hanging out with a mixed crowd when a lonely, bitter, circa 35-year old woman I've been acquainted with for several years -- has a professional career and a house -- was crowing about some article she'd read regarding how men are feeling bad about 'falling behind' economically. The satisfaction in her voice was palpable.
Teach your children well.
Just saying, look! Turning away from Christianity has been a social disaster on a scale previously impossible to imagine. I'd rather be single than try to date a secular woman. Meanwhile the landscape is dotted with little islands of sanity where men, women, and families are still quietly humming along in harmony and deep cohesion. Isn't the protocol obvious?
TitaniumButterfly
19d ago
Well, at this point I think it's an observable truth that the history of colonialism is generally presented in, to put it charitably, the least-charitable possible light.
TitaniumButterfly
19d ago
the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo
Could you elaborate on this? I've been seeing a lot of arguments lately to the effect that the Belgians weren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be, e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop. So far when I look such things up I first find that the official story is everywhere, but when digging deeper it falls apart. At this point I don't know what to believe.
On the other hand (jeez no pun intended) I can very easily believe that it's massively overblown for to cast colonialism in the worst possible light.
'Anti-liberals use illiberal tactics' is a silly kind of thing to complain about.
But also, I don't think it's apples to apples. IME when people on the right are doing this it's often simply trying to get leftists held to any kind of sane standard at all -- saying 'kill all white people' should not be tolerated in polite society, but generally is. Whereas the left, again IME, is generally happy to ruin lives over much less, e.g. refusing to create art celebrating gay 'marriage'.
TitaniumButterfly
21d ago
I don’t mind being called “woke right”, if you can actually address my ideas head-on.
I do because it propagates a dangerous misconception about what 'woke' means.
'Woke' is having become awakened to the 'reality' that all differences in hierarchy are unjust, i.e. Marxism. If someone makes more money than someone else, or one group is healthier than another, or people from one neighborhood go to jail more often than people from the next neighborhood over, the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions. The explicit demand to 'heal' these 'historical inequities' is to feed the golden geese that are white (and sometimes Asian) males to everyone else until no distinction in outcome remains. That's wokeism. Unfortunately, in real reality, this victory condition is impossible and the whole thing is a road straight to hell.
In contrast, leftists would have you believe that 'woke' means 'interested in ethnic solidarity'. That's not woke. That's just how human beings naturally operate without a lifetime of indoctrination teaching us that preferring our own kind is evil.
TitaniumButterfly
22d ago
Well, if you're 'just trustworthy' (and able to provide) I'm confident that you'll be able to have and raise children. Maybe not your own, but...
I'm trying to imagine an independent organization which tests graduates of various schools after graduation to see what they actually know, and rates the schools accordingly.
EDIT: Guys the point here is a publicly-available ranking of schools beyond extremely niche industries
TitaniumButterfly
23d ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
TitaniumButterfly
23d ago
Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if universities were actually calibrated for that purpose.
TitaniumButterfly
28d ago
Amazing finish
TitaniumButterfly
30d ago
something like "Certainly! Here is the next page of the story, where XYZ happens." - for it to be definitive proof
Given the genre that could arguably be an intentional conceit.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I mean, boys are both stunted (obviously) and also on strike.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
It can be both.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
remaining sovereign and not ethnically cleansed.
The question is at what point this is recognizably not an option. Wales might have a thing or two to say about it.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
The idea is that if you were a Jew in medieval Eastern Europe, intelligence lead to reproductive success -- if you were smart enough to become a Rabbi, you would probably increase the frequency of your genes in the population.
This is not my understanding and IIRC the thesis has been studied and found to have poor support, not least because if it were valid it should apply to more Jews than just the Ashkenazim.
The thesis which seems to hold more water is that the Ashkenazi population was pushed into lines of work which required high intelligence, financial sense, and above all fluency in speech. This is much better-supported. Scott has an article on it somewhere but I've got a meeting in two minutes and probably won't bother afterward. I think it was the Hungarian high school one. Four parts IIRC.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
That would make sense to me, except I don't know a single leftist who thinks so. There's either a total blind spot in their memory or they insist all statements were made in good faith at the time, depending on whom I'm talking to.
Some will acknowledge that lies were told about masks, but for the greater good. Most don't want to discuss it at all. Again, IME.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Re: nature vs. nurture, my toy model is that nature is the foundation and education is the house. Can't build a nice house on a bad foundation, and just a great foundation isn't enough either.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
The question is how/if it could be enforced.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Could you get a PO box in a tax free state and then tell USPS to forward it?
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
— John Adams, Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798
Like it or not, our system was devised with this assumption in mind. I don't blame you for not liking that, but it is indisputably the case.
And those have their own negative consequences.
Negative for what?
Communism could work if we were all near-constantly on an MDMA trip type of immediate feelings of love
'Work' in what sense? I don't think that most if any of the problems with communism resolve to 'people don't care about each other enough'.
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance.
Probably going to need to define 'meritocracy' here because this doesn't make sense to me. Under that rubric, surely an even greater source of 'un-meritocracy' is allowing parents to even raise their own children? We'd all be on a much more 'level playing field' if children were taken at birth -- or, better yet, cloned en masse under expert supervision (some moms drink after all) -- and raised in batches by the state.
What sort of 'merit' are you trying to select for?
Anyway, I think the children of the rich are in aggregate substantially genetically different from the children of the poor and the two serve different functions in the societal organism. It's good for more-capable people to receive more resources, as this allows them to more fully develop their potentials, which benefits us all. Why we would want to change that, I do not know. It could certainly be improved, but I think we're much more likely to break important things in the process of attempting that, and it's still not clear to me what it is you'd be trying to accomplish in the first place.
'Meritocracy' as I understand the concept means that the more-fit are more likely to end up in positions capable of making use of their virtues, not that everyone gets an equal chance, which is an incoherent idea to begin with. What would that even mean? And why would it be a good thing?
The idea that both parents working makes a huge financial difference is overblown IMO. I read somewhere that something like 80% of the 'extra' income a second working spouse brings gets lost amidst taxes, additional expenses related to commuting, outsourcing domestic labor, and so on. Is the remainder really worth giving up all the wonderful things that come with having a stay at home spouse? We get to raise our own kids, eat fresh, healthy meals, live in a clean house, and so on. What's that worth?
To your point, most of the families in our parish (which is heavily blue collar) seem to struggle financially to maintain this lifestyle. In some cases mom works part or even full-time, but especially given the exorbitant cost of childcare (and the deplorable state of the schools) this is generally seen as something to be avoided if possible. It's simply a question of priorities. And, since the women are generally not working, they help each other out a lot with childcare and so on. It's truly a joy to walk into a home and find women sitting around a table chattering and having fun while preparing a meal, while kids zip in and out.
Almost every (secular) couple I can think of where both partners work full-time could easily downsize a bit and be much happier, imo. The main hangup is often (as in the case of my sister) that women have been so psy-opped into thinking this is low-status that they can't be at peace with it. This is monstrous and the people responsible should pay. As to my sister, she openly complains about how much she hates her job, misses her kids, and pays for daycare, but explicitly refuses to quit because she wants to set a 'good feminist example' for her daughters, who seem to spend most of their time on iPads and in front of the TV while eating junk food because both parents are so burned out all the time.
One I'd be really happy to field.
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