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Having a wife is a job in itself - my coworker every day.
I guarantee you your coworker goes home to his wife and bitches about you/his job all night long.
You have a coworker who is just a bitchy wuss of a person. You can identify this by all the bitching he does. You should exclude his bitchy opinions from your mental map of the opinions of capable people.
In fact, you should do this with more people that you meet, even online. Bitchy whiners should be ignored. If they can express a solution, even a crazy solution, that’s different, but if all they do is whine, ignore them.
Anyways, to countersignal your coworker, my wife and I have our ups and downs for sure, but she is not a “job in herself.” She’s the best part of the day, for which, through the struggles, I remain grateful.
You and your fellow 'wife guys' need to focus on what the argument is rather than circling the wagons around your own marriages.
Is this what the argument is?
Almost. Here's the tidbit I replied to and my reply:
Now, maybe that connection wasn't clear to people, even if I directly replied to that short comment, thinking it did not need a quote to be clear. So I clarified in this comment chain:
Is it easier having a wife than a paid assistant if you are a billionaire? (Maybe if that assistant has a termination clause of 36 billion dollars.) Queue the wifeguys talking about how great their personal marriages are and how good of an arrangement it is for them. Now, was I to assume they are billionaires or middle class joes when interpreting their comments?
I wouldn't really care but I get the feeling of... I don't know, groupthink and fallacy? when getting a reaction like this:
This sort of internet tough guy talking coming out of thin air just seems like a silly overreaction to me. Like... You don't know my coworkers. Same with some other comments. What are these people trying to prove and why? I don't see the reason why one would assume that marriage was a necessary or hold the same or similar utility for people like Bezos compared to the average joe.
Look, maybe I’ve wildly misinterpreted the character of your coworker. It’s possible.
Maybe he’s a genuine stoic and competent and successful badass in a way that an internet tough guy such as myself can only dream of.
Unfortunately, I only have the anecdotes you provide, and which you are using to bolster your argument, and you don’t paint a flattering picture of him.
Maybe these are different guys, but I’ve never met someone who complained about one thing as often as you allege this guy complains, who wasn’t just a generally bitchy loser at life. Telling you what it looks like from outside of whatever pre-existing relationship you have with this guy is a suggestion, a blunt but fair one in my opinion, to take stock of the amount of credibility you give this guy.
Because the male winners of the world are clearly finding something in marriage that is valuable enough to keep going back for it. A quick glance at the world’s 10 richest men tells me that they are all either currently married or have had multiple marriages. Larry Ellison, 80, has had 6! He clearly thinks his current 33-year old Chinese fuck doll/trophy wife is bringing something to the table that he couldn’t get from a rotating stable of prostitutes and 3 additional assistants. Even Elon, who seems most willing to break the mold, appears to pine for marriage in general and Grimes specifically.
The richest men who ever lived, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of kings and potentates, easily able to move to Thailand or Dubai and have more concubines than Solomon, are still choosing to get married. So maybe “wife guys” are more directionally correct than your coworker, because his constant griping does not appear to bear out in reality.
Maybe to you I’m just another internet tough guy loser. That’s fair if you want to think that way! But Bezos isn’t. Shit, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un aren’t. These are guys who are still ruthlessly having their opposition beheaded or AA gun’d to death.
So maybe “wife guys” are more directionally correct than your coworker, because his constant griping does not appear to bear out in reality. Maybe he is just the male version of:
Which is the same as my argument, except mine had more rude words, I guess. Although I want to reiterate; you paint a very unflattering picture of your coworker.
You paint a picture of my coworker in your head based on two lines of text. It holds no value to reality beyond whatever delusions you need it to hold in your own mind so that you can express yourself.
To make a long story short: you don't need a marriage to find genuine love and affection. To insinuate the alternative to marriage is prostitutes is inane at best. And if someone has had more than 6 marriages then I'm not sure what the institution of marriage even means in relation to this argument, beyond being some hold over that men gravitate to because they tend to feel affection for inanimate objects and ideas.
On the flipside, there are a lot of losers getting married every day. And they outnumber the winners. Not that this is a terribly relevant thing, as I don't see the relevance in your argument towards anything I've said.
Beyond that, people having issues with marriages is not a thing that exists within the confines of my workplace. There are examples of this all around us. If you want to ignore that fact and pretend my workplace experience is unique or unrepresentative go ahead. But I think most people can understand the utility of having billions of dollars to employ people who can solve most of the problems in your personal life so that you can spend your free time doing something with your loved one that you both like doing, rather than saddling them with household chores or whatever.
I would quibble with this. The picture in my head is the picture you have painted! You are using him as a witness to bolster your argument, but you still haven’t given me any other description of him to change my impression that your witness is weak and unreliable. If he has other laudable qualities that might change that opinion, what are they? Because you make him sound like a loser, and based on that picture you are painting, I am suggesting to you that you shouldn’t listen to losers.
I don’t think I’ve said anything to imply that your coworker or your workplace experience of men griping about their wives is unique or unrepresentative? I have heard plenty of guys who constantly gripe about their wives. These guys are just always very unimpressive.
Look, if you’re going to bring your coworker in as evidence for your case, don’t be mad when a competing lawyer looks to dismantle your witness. That’s the whole point of Internet autistic debate club.
Which brings me to me final point.
You have an axiom, expressed above and you are arguing in favor of your axiom. So far, so good, that’s what we’re here for.
A useful analogy here is that we are discussing a box. Your priors, your axiom say that the box must logically be black. But the evidence of your own eyes indicates that the box is white. Rather than reassess your axiom, you insist that something is wrong with the box.
We are discussing marriage. Your axiom says that marriage is a materialist, utilitarian contract that is not of any utility for a billionaire. But the evidence of your own eyes is that very nearly every billionaire on Earth appears to find some kind of utility in it. These are, rationally, men who are smarter, more ruthless, and more charismatic than probably any “wife guy” you’ve ever met. They’ve very likely had any number of utility function thoughts regarding marriage run through their heads, and their revealed preference continues to be for marriage.
I am saying that the box isn’t wrong, your axiom is. There is something more than material utility that billionaires are finding in marriage, because marriage is about more than ameliorating material problems.
P.S. I went back through your older posts to get a sense of your philosophical foundations.
The last part of that last sentence is (paraphrasing), something that I have said to my wife and we are still married. Men have been getting suckered by women and letting them out of the circle of protection (or abuse) to make poor choices ever since Adam. I (strategically) proselytize this message in real life as much as I can.
I just take a similar or related stance to you from a starting point of non-material axioms. Marriage is a gift from God that reduces the unpleasantness of this world, and in a way above materialism, makes two into one. So when the box is white, I’m not surprised. The evidence fits the axiom! Billionaires are finding something materially inexplicable in marriage. The evidence fits the axiom!
I mentioned my coworker as a shorthand for the pervasive phenomenon of people complaining about their marriages in relation to a pontification that marriage was easier than having an employee as a billionaire. To that extent you're not even elevating a point by imagining things about my coworker, just bloviating a cope.
'Some kind of utility' is not relevant as a point of comparison between whether or not delegating a duty to your wife or an employee is an easier way to go about organizing your lives together. The post I replied to gave examples of the utility of having a marriage. I asserted that these examples and others categorically like them are not relevant for a billionaire and are therefor not arguments in favor of marriage for a billionaire.
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