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Notes -
Following up on this comment, I was recently working on an effort post that was loosely organized around "some people I have known." Specifically, I have been thinking about unenviable lives, people whose existence strikes me as excessively resistant to improvement of any kind, and how the way we structure society helps, hurts, or even creates such people. Some intended figures for inclusion were a man in his 50s who is a permanent American expatriate and recent convert to Islam; a woman in her 60s who lives in her car after burning through a six figure inheritance in the space of a single year; a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples. All of their stories have culture war implications, I think, but one of them is culture war all the way down. This is Lana's story.
Requiem for a Friend(ship)
Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend.
When I met Lana (name has been changed for all the usual reasons) she was a newly-minted attorney, freshly hired to the Office of General Counsel. A few weeks after being introduced at a university function, I ran into her at lunchtime. She was having a political discussion with another OGC employee and cheerfully invited my participation. This basic scenario played out again, intermittently, for several semesters, organically developing into a friendship that extended marginally beyond the workplace.
Over the years I learned that, when Lana first joined the OGC, she'd been married to another attorney--a family law practitioner of no particular reputation. They were religious Protestants but political Progressives. Lana's feminism was very 90s, in a way I find hard to describe today, but you can probably imagine it: makeup good, Barbie sus, "pro-child, pro-choice," but nary a mention of "patriarchy" or "rape culture" or "microaggressions." Critical theory was already a Thing, of course, but the battle of the sexes (as it was sometimes called) hadn't yet been racialized or radicalized in quite the way we see today. Anyway, Lana enjoyed--or seemed to enjoy!--that I was (approximately) an irreligious conservative. I think that, perhaps, by doubly violating her expectations (arguing against her politics without resort to Jesus, being unmoved by her appeals to Christian charity as a justification for bleeding-heart policies) I presented a novelty to her lawyerly (read: contrarian, adversarial) mindset. I appreciated her openness to discussion.
Eventually, Lana took a position elsewhere, but we occasionally caught up using whatever technology was in fashion. Email, Instant Messenger, social media. She proved to be an especially prolific Facebook poster after giving birth to a child and retiring from law practice to parent full-time (what she said then was that she never really enjoyed practicing law anyway--if memory serves, she was a literature undergraduate). Of course, social media is often a distorted lens, but what I saw was a pretty relatable mixture of joy and struggle, interspersed with the discussions of political interest that were the heart of many of Lana's friendships--including ours.
And then it was 2015.
It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband. The problems she recounted in her Facebook overshares must have been simmering for some time: husband pressuring her for sex more than once a month, being a full-time mother had cost her her identity, raising a kid seemed like an impossibly difficult and objectionably thankless undertaking. But long-running disagreements with her Protestant friends over same-sex marriage came to an apogee in June of 2015, when Obergefell v. Hodges was decided--ten days, if I'm counting correctly, after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That same month, Lana very publicly, very noisily separated from her husband--as well as her religious community, which she felt had taken "his side." The extended process of an acrimonious custody dispute began.
We sometimes speak of the "Great Awokening" and pin it to 2012 or 2014, but the first time I really noticed it influencing my personal life was during the 2016 election season (and aftermath). And what I noticed was not a vibe shift, but a shocking spate of relationship implosion. I had always thought of "blocking" people on social media as a tool created to weed out spammers, trolls, and perhaps the occasional stalker or abuser--not something anyone would ever do to friends, family, or even acquaintances, certainly not over something as trivial as political disagreement. But as 2016 progressed, Lana's Facebook posts grew increasingly vitriolic, and her tolerance for dissent all but vanished. "If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
Well, I wasn't a Trump supporter, so I didn't worry too much about it. At the time, I attributed this unbounded anger to Lana's personal circumstances, but by the time Trump won the election, Lana's divorce had been finalized for months. I suppose the official "end" of our friendship came in March of 2017. After months of watching Democrats scramble for any possible way to overturn the results of the election, from inducement to faithless electors to violent protests, I made a social media post highlighting several of the absurdities of the 2017 Women's March (in particular, its deliberate exclusion of pro-life women), and Lana put me on her block list.
I was sad about that, but by then our friendship had lacked an "in person" component for several years. I still had "in person" friendships with several mutual acquaintances, however, so I would occasionally get a second-hand update. At some point in 2018, Lana remarried--this time, to a woman. She had a couple of bad starts at getting back into law practice before finally settling back where she'd begun, doing lawyerly work for a (different) university. She gained two hundred pounds (ten of that in piercing jewelry), stopped shaving her legs (and started posting pictures of her unshaved legs to social media), shaved half her head instead, and colored blue what remained. Her Facebook posting, I was told, never slowed down, but became a stable mixture of "#NotMyPresident" and "I'm having another mental health crisis today" posts. (COVID-19 apparently heightened the amplitude in predictable ways, but in substance changed little.)
Then, not long ago, I got a message from a mutual friend asking if I knew of any way to contact Lana. They pointed me toward a post (now removed) on a subreddit I'd never heard of--a "suicide watch" subreddit. It is apparently a place for people to post their suicidal inclinations and get "non-judgemental peer support ONLY," whatever that means in the context of an anonymous internet forum. Under a pseudonym I recognized from our Instant Messenger days, Lana had posted that after a year of non-stop fighting (again, mostly over sex), her second marriage was coming to an end. All her friends had abandoned her and all she had left were online discussion groups with internet strangers, where she constantly faced accusations of being an awful spouse, awful mother, and all-around awful person. Our mutual friend was seriously concerned for Lana's well-being, but had been unable to get a response via social media, texts, phonecalls, or otherwise.
My first thought was that maybe I could find a way to get in touch with Lana--surely I owed her that much, for the years of friendship we'd enjoyed? Perhaps she was still active on one of her old accounts. But my second thought was that even if I could get in touch with her, there was a good chance I would only make her feel worse, in any number of ways. That put a damper on any inclination I might have felt to make any heroic effort on Lana's behalf, which in turn inspired some self-recrimination. I had to wonder: was my reluctance down to schadenfreude? Am I such a culture warrior that I would turn a blind eye to the suffering of a friend? After all, at minimum I could roll a fresh reddit alt and just... drop Lana an anonymous message of support. Would she see it? Would she care?
I won't tell you what I did, in the end. The point of this post is not to solicit advice, much less to inquire, with fluttering eyelashes, "AITA?" I will say that if my choice had any meaningful impact at all, I've never learned of it. I do have it on good authority that Lana is still alive, her second divorce final, and another same-sex romance underway. I can honestly say that I hope it works out for her.
Boo Outgroup
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, in a way that is difficult to discuss anywhere but the CW thread of the Motte. Lana is a person, but Lana also instantiates a personality. She is not the only friend I lost from 2015-2017, but the further we get from those days, the more closely their lives come to rhyme. I have a comfortable life, and often I think that's a g-loaded task (so to speak), but by and large these are not stupid people I see, setting fire to their lives in pursuit (or as a result) of ideological purity. I would say "status games" but they don't seem to be accruing any particular status! Swap out "lawyer" for "analyst" or "educator" or similar and much of Lana's story could be told of a dozen of the relationships I've enjoyed and lost. A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
Of course it can't--conservatives top themselves, too, after all! And this is, like, prime culture war fodder, "boo outgroup" of the most aggressive sort. I don't know whether it's "mistake theory" or "conflict theory" to assert that people who believe differently have a disease of the mind, but--
Seven or eight years ago, I had a somewhat surprising interaction with a colleague at a conference. We were having dinner and discussing politics, and it gradually dawned on him that I was not just being entertainingly contrarian--that I was honestly defending some views, mostly libertarian but some downright conservative, which I actually held. His response was presciently forecast in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Well, okay, to be honest, he didn't actually accuse me of being insane. Rather, he refused to believe I am actually conservative. Weirdo contrarian libertarianism he could understand, but conservative? Never. In fairness, probably a lot of conservatives would refuse to believe it, too; my views on speech and sex and God and the like definitely put me on the outs with the diehards, but nevertheless I'm far too pro life, anti woke, pro federalism, anti public employee unions, etc. to ever fit in on the Left; it is a little difficult for me to even make a plausible bid for "centrist" without appending a caveat like "right-leaning." Even so--I simply was not believed.
That conversation got much less surprising by the fourth or fifth time it happened--most recently, just last week. I don't think I'm hiding the ball, here. I don't aggressively share my viewpoint in professional settings but neither do I bother to code switch for the benefit of others. And I have learned, over the years, that people really do just see what they expect to see. I'm a professor; once they know that, they make assumptions about my ideological commitments which even my own direct protestations are insufficient to counter. And this repeatedly inspires people to insist that I am putting on the affectation of conservatism; that I am clearly too smart, too educated, and too obviously sane to possibly see any value in right wing politics. Well, there's a lot I don't like about right wing politics! That's fair to say. Even so, I'm pretty conservative, especially as radical Leftism continues to push "classical liberalism" to the right of the recognized spectrum.
The obvious weak man here is just, you know, reddit commenters in default subs. These days it seems I can scarcely doomscroll for five minutes without encountering an entire thread of "no sane person can be a Republican" and "Republicans are all murderous sadists" and "I used to think tolerance was important, but there is no saving MAGA, we need to round these psychos up and put them out of our misery." Radical left wing violence is a thing! Presumably at least some of these posts are coming from Russian and Chinese botfarms, but most strike me as just the products of American public education.
Is there a forum for progressive cat ladies out there somewhere, where Lana is writing about her old friend, the professor? The one who used to be a mild-mannered contrarian scholar but who was radicalized by Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic and now moderates a forum for explicit wrongthink? I feel like, objectively, I've got the preferable outlook; I'm not suicidal, I haven't torched any marital or familial or professional relationships. I feel pretty sane, honestly. But I'm increasingly concerned that (1) I struggle to see sanity in my outgroup and (2) my outgroup struggles to see sanity in me.
In 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.2 million Christian Greeks relocated from (what is now) Turkey to (what is now) Greece, and about 400,000 predominantly Muslims relocated the other direction. There was a lot of force, and no small amount of death, involved in the process, but even so, the ethnic cleansing of the region (two regions?) has proven... surprisingly uncontroversial. Mostly forgotten, in fact. The "Cyprus Problem" is downstream from that conflict, of course, but even featuring as it does in the occasional Russian oligarch psychodrama, probably very few Americans have the first clue what a "Cyprus" is, never mind the finer details of the resolution of the Greco-Turkish War.
I do not think the United States is likely to be ideologically partitioned in my lifetime. But I am increasingly concerned about why that is the case. Greenland (population: 55,000) apparently warrants sovereignty and self-rule--but not California? Not Texas? (Not Taiwan? Not Israel? Not Palestine? Not Ukraine?) I think mostly that American citizens, fat on bread and satisfied with our circuses, are unwilling to sacrifice. Actually starting a war with the federal government of the United States would be suicidal, but I don't think the threat of military action is the primary deterrent to schism movements here--at least not yet. Rather, our prosperity is in part the result of our outsized global influence. While far behind China and India, we are nevertheless the third most populous nation in the world, an economic juggernaut despite the recent ascent of various others.
What will happen, if that changes?
What will happen, if it doesn't?
It's a problem for future generations, but at the same time I feel the desire to act, to do something about the rift that I see, to "reach out" and bridge the growing divide somehow--even though, if my actions have any meaningful impact at all, I am unlikely to ever know it. Talking about the problem (as we so often do here) doesn't seem to make it better. Not talking about the problem doesn't seem to make it better. Maybe if I were a billionaire, or a movie star, or a successful politician... but I'm not.
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn. An acorn is not an oak tree; a sprout is not an oak tree; a sapling is not an oak tree. And yet the oak tree is within those things, somehow. If we think of the bronze age as the sprouting of human civilization, and the renaissance as perhaps a sapling, then we begin to grasp the idea of our species progressing toward Hegel's "Absolute." The primary disagreement between Hegelians is whether we are each individually just along for the ride, or whether there is something we can do to accelerate the growth of our collective oak tree toward its final form. I am not much of a Hegel scholar--mostly I am aware of his work in connection with its influence on others, notably Karl Marx--but if I were a Hegelian, I think today I would side with those who suspect we're just along for the ride. Voltaire's Candide suggests we each tend to our own gardens, to not seek influence in the wider world. The older I get, the more I think that is probably good advice. But once Lana had a role to play in my particular garden, and now as a result of her own intolerance of diverse viewpoints, she does not. And, good or bad, inevitable or not--that makes me sad.
Any chance you could drop a couple lines about him? It's an odd setup.
Sure--let's call him Dylan. Dylan is the son of a colleague, who I met briefly when he was in town visiting his parents. Long, sun-bleached hair, deeply tanned skin, very "beach bum" aesthetic. But not in a "manic homeless" way--he was clean and taciturn. I asked him what he does, and he said he picks pineapples in Hawaii. I asked if that was a year-round thing, he said "kinda." So I asked him what he does when he's not picking pineapples, and he said "play games I guess." Any games in particular? "Older stuff, my laptop is pretty slow." RTS, FPS, RPG? "Some RPGs, yeah. I play Starcraft, too." Well, I game, I played Starcraft (more than a quarter century ago, now...), so the rest of our discussion was about Starcraft. He never gave me the impression that I was getting the brush-off, or that he was especially reluctant to talk--just that he didn't have a lot to say. He seemed nice!
His parents later told me that, after finishing high school, Dylan enlisted with the army. He'd only been in for a couple of months when another soldier assaulted him, put him in the hospital. Dylan says the guy just had some unreasonable beef; whether that was Mom being cagey, or Dylan just never explaining events in detail, I don't know. The assailant faced charges, Dylan got an early discharge. Moved back in with his parents, got a job as a night clerk at a gas station. Soon after got a girlfriend, moved in with her. Split his time between working at the gas station, and getting high with his girlfriend--marijuana at first, harder drugs later. They have a scare and decide to get clean together. Six months later, six months clean, he comes home from work--she's had some old friends over. They brought drugs. She died of an overdose--some time in the early 00s.
Dylan moves back home, largely refuses to leave his room for months. Parents start talking about getting a diagnosis, maybe disability. Then one day, he says he's going to Hawaii. What's he going to do? "Pick pineapples." Where's he going to live? "They've got dorms and stuff." He takes nothing but a duffel stuffed with clothing and some personal tech.
His parents went out to visit him once, and as far as they could determine he was at that time living in a hammock strung between some palm trees. He doesn't date. He doesn't socialize. He doesn't use the Internet. He plays video games on an old laptop, which he charges whenever it's convenient. He doesn't read, or surf. He must hike, at least sometimes, because that is the activity he took his parents out to do. He'll come stateside to visit, occasionally, if his parents buy him a plane ticket. While glad he's independent, they can't help but feel a perpetual simmering concern. As long as he's not starving or doing hard drugs, they don't want to press the issue. "He's been through a lot."
I was fascinated by the story, because on one hand, it kind of sounds to me like drugs and tragedy just fried this guy--that he's a walking husk with no ambition, no particular concern for his own well-being, just barely functioning enough to earn enough money as a laborer to keep himself alive. On the other hand, I can also imagine him a sage of stoicism, someone who has so thoroughly embraced minimalism and detachment that he has transcended the weight of social expectations entirely. No wife, no children, itinerant labor, apparently homeless, but not entirely without places to go. I poked around the Internet a bit and all the references I could find to pineapple picker dormitories are dated to the 20th century; I also learned that pineapple picking in Hawaii is a much smaller industry than it has been in the past. This tempted me toward wild speculations--is this all a ruse? Is Dylan involved in secret government operations, or organized criminal activity? His parents seem confident that his girlfriend's overdose put him off drugs extremely decisively--he only, they claim, ever used with her. But maybe they are kidding themselves?
Then I remind myself--just because I have trouble imagining the life of an itinerant laborer, does not mean they don't exist. Just because a life sounds mind-numbingly dull to me, doesn't mean it's not someone's life. But he's been at it for nearly two decades, and it seems unlikely that he has been saving for retirement. He can't pick pineapples (or whatever) in Hawaii forever. Can he?
Itinérant laborers exist. The roustabout class is declining, but it’s still there. There’s men, trucked up from not Mexico but the countries south of there, who will come do whatever for cash- no particular skills, but they’ll work until it’s time to start drinking. There’s people a bit like your friend. There’s homeless guys who alternate between working some minor, low-skill job(painting or the like) and doing drugs under a bridge.
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The man's expenses are probably near zero. Between savings and social security he may be ahead of the modal silicon valley striver living paycheck to paycheck between mortgage, property taxes, and private school.
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What a payoff, thanks for asking, @butts!
This guy reminds me a lot of a younger version of myself. I suppose stoicism is a skill - I certainly attempted to reach inner peace with a combination of weed and videogames at some points, but was driven to try at life by a desire for women. It sounds like this guy was "scared straight" from engaging with the world.
This guy honestly sounds accomplished to me in his own way. He really learned to tend his own garden! I wouldn't trade my life for his, but if I was a NEET, I can't think of a nicer setup.
I wonder if his parents could have done anything differently, or if this is just the way it goes sometimes.
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This is the kind of guy they make uplifting youtube videos about. "This man has been picking pineapples for 30 YEARS, this is his story.".
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I've met a few examples of this of his age, and a lot more in mid-twenties to early-thirties. Doing just enough to sustain one's gaming in a bottom-tier job and that's essentially it. Not even Hikkimori or obese anti-socials, just... bare-minimum minimum-wage work and gaming or another hobby like Bouldering or Jiujitsu.
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I worked with a guy like that at a locally owned version of doordash in a college town, one of many characters we employed (Our long-term staff from ownership down were ground zero of the male loneliness/failure to launch epidemic, referred to as "the lost boys" by one of the more clever among us or "the expendables" by the owner.). I don't know his specific story, but he's in his early 40s, single, lives with roommates, etc. such that he has insanely low overhead. He doesn't really drink/go to bars, doesn't do drugs other than weed I guess, and is into Marvel and videogames and that's it. If his car craps out there's always another relative with a cheap Toyota, but otherwise he's self-sufficient. Nice guy and perfectly competent, but infuriatingly lazy, truly dedicated to working as little as possible with the bare minimum of hassle necessary to meet his expenses. We jokingly refer to him as something of a monk, in contrast to the suckers who grind and spend insane amounts of money on bar tabs for the illusion that they might gat laid, or at least have a pretty bartender remember their name.
Yeah I just think a decent chunk of men are gravitating towards this existence. My wife's youngest brother is essentially this in his mid-twenties. Games and maintains a hospitality job, but no interest in further education or really building anything. He's 'productive' in the sense that he covers his own expenses but he just doesn't really have any ambitions beyond a gaming laptop, discord etc. I'm surprised your example's in his 40s, but I know quite a large population of late-teens to early-thirties guys who are essentially this. They're not unhappy, just kinda... dudeist. They're not buying into society since they just can't really be incentivized unless they randomly hit it off with a girl one day (which has been the catalyst of the majority of times I've seen somebody right the course in their mid twenties)
I think the messiness of modern dating might be part of it, since IMO a large part of what drives low-motivation men beyond this local minimum is either attempting to get laid or the pressures of a significant other.
In theory this could have been me, once upon a time. I was more inclined to go the "Save as much as possible, invest, move to a low cost of living country" route. I had spreadsheets once upon a time with some rough calculations of how much I'd need to save to live in Romania without any dependents for the rest of my life. I'd more or less given up on women, my girlfriend having left me for another man the day before my father died.
Tangent, that was almost 20 years ago now. Sometimes I actually forget that I was seeing a girl around that time, and she had in fact dumped me the day before my father died. All I remember anymore is the day he died. When I do remember that lady, it's almost like a curiosity. Some weird anecdote that happened to someone else. Not me, happily married with a kid.
Back on point, when I was in my 20's I was an asshole. I mean, I still am an asshole, but in my 20's I was a major asshole. But when I think back, everyone in my 20's was a major asshole. We were high off youth, and whatever minor achievements we'd made. Maybe our brand new degree. Maybe some job that seems like hot shit to us at the time, but was really just another job. A lot of women loved showing off engagement rings for marriages that have long since collapsed. May have had something to do with them also bragging about how short a leash they kept their husbands on, or how "well trained" they'd gotten them. Sometimes I cite 25 as peak cockiness. Something about that feels about right to me as the apex of youthful exuberance. It doesn't fall off immediately after that. But if bad things haven't humbled you yet, they probably start to.
I don't know how you get two assholes to pair off and endure each other until they stop being assholes. I don't know how you get 25 year olds to not be assholes. I don't know how you make the whole experience of having your ego sandblasted off by other assholes so demoralizing you don't tune out of society all together. I have no idea how any of this used to work, or what other generations experienced. I was raised on self esteem and main characters like Zack Morris, Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis.
Wild speculation but I think accidental incidental pregnancy in the days before birth control plus getting shepherded into the workforce at a younger age probably helped mitigate a fair bit of the natural trend towards assholing. Also prior to women entering the workforce there was more of an impetuous to atleast present a pretense of meekness and agreeability in order to escape the household.
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Lowers helmet
Keep firing, assholes!
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
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I think dating is a big part of it. There is no motivation for me to grind or hustle or finish my PhD fast because I don't see girlfriend/wife opportunities coming very easily.
Yeah or if they are gonna come it's more going to be about solving the dating app metagame than simply hustling on making yourself a productive member of society.
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