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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30542 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I'm a doomer on the U.S., and I want to know what you guys think, in general, will be the trend for the next decade or further on. Here's my theory for how all this ends:

  • Politically, conflict theory has totally won. Extremists from both parties keep trying to outdo each other. This can lead to outright civil war or government breakdown down the line. Democracies all around the globe host more and more unhappy populations that, no matter which politicians they vote in, never seem to get what they want, leading them to vote in more and more strange and radical candidates.
  • Government spending will never recede. Too many groups need to stay satisfied with their welfare, otherwise the party that cuts them will never win an election again. This will lead to an eventual collapse, someday, with more and more economic pain as time goes on and as less productive people exist to support the invalids and growing number of leeches.
  • Dating sucks and gender relations are likely going to get worse as the social media experiment continues, to South Korea levels. It can only get worse from here.
  • As someone mentioned downthread, I could easily see status becoming harder and harder to get, as the players in the game optimize towards the most awful way to live: constant striving in every arena. Anyone left playing the game is a tiger mom. This is the one I'm least sure about, but it could change rapidly as economic circumstances shift.
  • I have no idea if the country will fail slow or fast, but it will likely decline in the next decade by a noticeable amount.

My friend is more of an optimist. Here's his theory on the first one:

  • Eventually, one party is going to realize their extremists never win races. They elect a moderate. Things normalize, politically.

Unfortunately, I didn't quiz him on all the rest of it. But now, somehow, it is making me wonder about the outlook of most of the Mottizens. I certainly see the doomer take on things pretty often.

I see a factoid sometimes that says conservatives are happier with their lives than liberals. Maybe that's a factor of rural living, maybe that's a factor of less thinking about serious issues, and less reading. I am pretty sure that conservatives on this site, on average, do not live in rural areas and, on average, think a lot more about serious issues, and read more. So maybe some bad, anecdotal science testing on The Motte is in order.

Are you a doomer, or a "bloomer"? What are some factors that lead you to your conclusion that the country is trending downwards or upwards? Please explain yourself, and please fight it out with everyone who thinks you're wrong.

I would consider myself heavily blackpilled, but no, not remotely a doomer. Mostly because personally I still get to enjoy life. I had to scale my ambitions back heavily and lower my standards, but I've been able to get small carveouts of joy.

There's something I experience as true in my own professional life; people will do the right thing, after first exhausting literally every other possible option. That things suck is not evidence of failure, it is evidence of how far we have left to fall. We suck so much because we can get away with it.

There are significant parts of the human experience denied to me, but for most of human history they were denied to most people as well, so my experience is not hugely different. Of all the tragedies I feel most fiercely is our inability to write fiction for the mass audience (and to have it actually read and understood) that isn't atrocious. I am willing to sleep on park benches and eat the bugs if we would just produce better fiction.

I would consider myself heavily blackpilled, but no, not remotely a doomer. Mostly because personally I still get to enjoy life. I had to scale my ambitions back heavily and lower my standards, but I've been able to get small carveouts of joy.

Nice bit of humblebragging there. (Some of us are not so fortunate.)

It just comes down to appreciating the small things.

I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I've had the pleasure to observe some of the senior programmers at work who are deeply in the hole and have hundreds of dollars worth of specialized coffee equipment at the office just for the sake of getting a slightly better cup.

This strikes me as insanity, but over time I've learned to appreciate both the ritual that they go through and also the massive chain of events that led to that equipment being developed, built, procured, the coffee being sourced, grown, packaged - all of it.

Working in logistics has given me a deep appreciation for how the supply chain works at all, given how much of a mess it frequently is. All for the sake of delivering these small miracles we don't even think about.

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