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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1136 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 1, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Long-time Motte / ACX / rat-adjacent lurker here. I am hoping to get some input from some of the many pro-family posters on the Motte to help me get out an increasingly deep rut I've found myself stuck in.

The general thrust of my thoughts is that I assign a high probability to my access to status and resources becoming much worse in the near future. I've thought about what this means for my previously held desire to enter a relationship and form a family and have come to some undesirable conclusions.

The most salient information about me:

  • Mid twenties, lower-middle class background
  • Midwit remote tech worker, upper-mid 6 figure net worth

Why I believe that the future is quite grim:

  • The current state of AI, while unlikely to cause 30%+ structural employment or ASI FOOM imo, seems likely to commoditize the majority of intellectual labor within one or two decades
  • For the subset of middle tier work where AI may not be capable of performing economically, unrestricted immigration policies and flight from the intellectual jobs seems likely to crush the income and working conditions of the remaining jobs
  • This means that the only real paths to accessing resources and status are going to be to either be sufficiently Elite Human Capital so as to be granted access to the moneyed class, or be born into money i.e the west economically becomes South Korea
  • As I'm not intelligent enough to win my way into increasingly narrow paths into the elite nor born into the upper class it then seems likely that my personal access to status and resources is going to plummet

It's well litigated on the Motte why South Korean TFR is rock bottom, but given this is how I model the future of the western world to look like as well, I also find myself struggling to justify forming a family under these conditions. Below are some scattered thoughts.

  • While it's often claimed that singledom is a luxury good, I think it's quite likely that a relationship and family would be a net negative on my resources
  • As I currently spend underneath the poverty line, I can probably eke out a low-status low-resource lifestyle for myself if single, even in most of the non-apocalyptic worst case scenarios
  • I think this probably goes out of the window with a family, any potential partner of mine would either have less resources than me and rely on me to provide, or be roughly in my economic bracket and would desire a much higher standing of living, even before the fairly significant expenses of childrearing
  • This is not a huge problem in a world where I can obtain above average resources through my labor, but is very stressful to contemplate when it's unlikely I'll accrue the neccessary capital to support an entire family
  • Attempting to do so has the real risk of compromising my own ability to maintain the neccessary capital to stay alive, which makes me anxious about whether such a huge sacrifice is worth it

  • Similarly to South Korea I expect the lives of children to become much worse than now, a striver rat race for largely zero-sum access to status and resources that I'd be largely powerless to protect my children from
  • The alternative is a low-status low-resource life, and from my upbringing I'm well aware of how fundamentally awful a low-status low-resource existence can be
  • While I am personally non-conformist enough to tolerate such a lifestyle in the event labor becomes devalued, I'm not sure I can accept the repugnant conclusion that it's better for my children to live barely tolerable lives of suffering rather than to not exist at all

To be clear, I would prefer not to hold these views - I want to be someone that is optimistic for the future and that is capable of providing for a happy family, but this seems increasingly out of reach for me based on how the world is trending.

TLDR: please try to convince this highly neurotic autist that either

a) current middle-class access to status and resources is unlikely to diminish within my lifetime.

b) a committed relationship and family formation is still worth pursuing even with severely diminished access to status and resources.

Similarly to South Korea I expect the lives of children to become much worse than now, a striver rat race for largely zero-sum access to status and resources that I'd be largely powerless to protect my children from

Semi-skilled blue collar work may be unglamorous but it pays a living wage. This is an effective floor on what you can access- and the deal keeps getting better for these people. Don’t be dumb. If your kids have to go into the trades or the army that’s fine and fertility trends will ensure this isn’t too terrible of a deal. You can just not have your kids do the extreme striver rat race.

Remember, the US is quite literally the wealthiest society in human history. The floor for competent people is quite high, even if you’re not the best of the best.

Semi-skilled blue collar work may be unglamorous but it pays a living wage. .... Remember, the US is quite literally the wealthiest society in human history.

This is true as of right now, but I'm not convinced that it will still be true in my child's generation. It seems likely some combination of AR/VR, robotics and immigration will eventually come for these jobs too, although definitely slower than white-collar ones. As I mentioned in my other comment though, it does seem unlikely that both blue-collar work can be economically unviable and that the west is insufficiently prosperous to keep everyone fed and housed at least, so I should probably be less neurotic on that point.

You can just not have your kids do the extreme striver rat race.

I think this is directionally true, but I think it's generally very difficult to suppress the instinct to want to give your children everything you can.

In some ways it was easier for my parents because they barely had anything and thus considered keeping me alive and out of prison a success, but now I have some level of optionality it's really hard to suppress the instinct that I should provide for my children as much as humanly possible. I suppose I did turn out wildly beyond my father's expectations despite everything so perhaps I should be less concerned about this.

Thanks for responding, you've given me some things to consider.

I mean, that’s fair- you want your kids to turn out well.

But PMC strivers seem to turn out badly? They’re miserable and lonely. Who says human flourishing has to be determined by the numbers in your bank account or the trips you take? America is a wealthy enough society that being mediocre is still getting by very well. There’s no need for a rat race to be in the top 5% when it ruins the rest of your life.

But PMC strivers seem to turn out badly?

While I agree that the QoL floor for someone reasonably competent in the West is in absolute terms a good deal, it seems quite obvious to me that the winners of the PMC striver game live, on average, relatively superior lives to those who lose such games and that this disparity is likely to increase with time. Real wages have been flat for decades in most industries, pretty much only PMC's have actually seen notable real wage growth. The fact that most people have decent lives is because the absolute pie of American prosperity is so large, not because they're getting similar percentages that they got in the past.

  • Working conditions are generally better for successful strivers: while the process of getting there is perhaps unenviable, there's many winners who end up in highly paid sinecures while the losers end up serving at the pleasure of their bosses in much worse conditions.
  • Those numbers in your bank account, even if never used for consumption, represent a level of material security that most people don't have access to. The modal American is fucked if they get a cancer diagnosis and can't work for a year: this isn't as much of a problem for a PMC with enough money to live off savings while doing chemo, and enough human capital to find another job after having sat out of the labour market for some time.
  • While I think luxury and conspicuous consumption is highly overrated, there's many life improvements resistant to the hedonic treadmill that are disproportionately available to the PMC class e.g positional access to real estate to improve the commute, outsourcing unpleasant labour, and access to elective healthcare procedures. While some of these will become more accessible as productivity improves, positionally desirable land and access to the time of other people is always going to be zero-sum and disproportionately available to those with more resources and status.
  • Status, while ghoulish to chase for its own sake, is instrumentally important: access to higher quality people and ability to influence the world is arguably even more important in a society that is likely to become more and more productive.

Yes, it's possible to over-optimize for striving: the stereotypical divorced and obese multi-millionaire MD is a sad outcome that I'd highly prefer to avoid. At the same time, it's not like the average non-striver is particularly happy or surrounded by friends in this atomised society we've created for ourselves, and there's plenty of strivers that end up rich and still have happy lives and families outside of work.

Perhaps you're right and the juice will eventually be no longer worth the squeeze: competition gets so high that it's no longer worth it to compete, and the losers still get tolerable lives in the end. That doesn't change the fact that the winners will enjoy the spoils and the proles won't.

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