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Maybe better suited to a Wellness Wednesday post, but I think there's a significant culture war angle here too.
To what extent is the current competency crisis in government, academia, etc. caused by an inability to spend time by oneself and actually put in the work? I've lamented in the past the decline in the social landscape, at least in the United States, but among the social environments that I have been finding recently in Baltimore, there seems to be almost a pathological fear of spending time alone in order to put in the work to actually improve at the thing that we're supposed to be doing together. For example, I've recently been going to a Spanish Happy Hour group at a brewery Thursday evenings after work. There are usually at least a few native speakers there, but aside from them, most people are at a quite elementary stage with the language, and aren't doing anything outside of the happy hour to improve. For some people this makes sense: they're mainly there to socialize not to learn, but for others, like the guy who organizes the group (Alex), the lack of progress is baffling to me. Alex started the group to improve his Spanish so he could communicate better with his girlfriend's family. And yet he seems unable to find the time to practice outside of happy hour (with reading/TV/shows/flashcards). I see the same thing with my new roommate, who is absolutely in love with the country and culture of Spain, and goes to happy hour with me, but won't put in the solitary effort to actually improve at the language. I see the same thing with running: people only going to run clubs to socialize and then expecting to run fast when they don't put in outside mileage on their own time, and even within the philosophy book club that I run where people seem unable to do the 30 pages of reading we discuss every other week.
I see this with myself as well, especially in my PhD. I know what I need to do to be successful: read the papers and do the experiments I have planned, but instead I find myself goofing off with labmates, texting/calling friends while I do busywork, or on this forum posting. Phones may have isolated in some ways, but at the same time, the current media environment seems to have created a constant yearning for companionship that I don't think is conducive to actually growing in competence and skill in areas outside of socialization.
People are tired. The idea that one can put in endless effort for as long as one is awake is an idea that I slowly grew out of in my twenties. There are a few people who seem to be able to do it but I don’t think they’re physiologically or psychologically normal. The rest of us just about get by at our job and then are mostly pooped and have to slip in bits and pieces of effort where they can.
Now, I think that modern media hasn’t helped with this. I’m playing Elden Ring at the moment and I’ve noticed that it can pretty much perk me up even when I’m basically dozing off, which of course means that it’s overdrawing my reserves when I really ought to be resting. It’s also harder to focus on semi-interesting skills when very-entertaining stuff is available instead, but everyone knows that already.
I hate 9-5s. With a burning passion.
Back in India, most of my jobs involved me working for 24 hours at a stretch, two shifts a week. There are places where 24 hours can be utterly grueling, such as ICU or ER jobs, but when I wasn't there, I usually managed to wrap up the bulk of my work by the evening and could look forward to a decent amount of sleep at night on average, if the nurses weren't overly neurotic. Wake up early, make sure nobody is likely to die before the next shift, write a handover, then scurry away back home.
This isn't a regular option right now, best case is a few 24 hour or 12 hour shifts a month, with 9-5s for the rest. This sucks, I come home drained, and barely have the ability to recuperate before the next day, let alone manage normal life admin or indulge in my hobbies. I miss the previous flexibility I had, why can't I just go and get a haircut at 3 pm on a Tuesday? Get hammered with friends on a Thursday night?
Not to mention the additional wasted time when it comes to traveling to and from work. That adds up when you're doing it 5 days a week.
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Good observation. I also agree that the hustle-culture memes aren't reflective of how people's efforts can actually be allocated. A common failure mode I see in myself is over-scheduling things in my down-time and not doing any of them and gaming/scrolling instead. I really should be resting during that time.
Partly explains why people can be so flaky about attending events (or dates) that they in theory agreed to.
They overschedule and end up more tired than they expected when the time comes.
Maybe. But there's an increasing trend of social anxiety making people just not want to go to things at all -- and of course the internet rectangle makes it easy to develop parasocial relationships or social media addictions and spend time on those instead of actual people. The flakiest people I know are the least busy.
For instance, I have a friend who wanted to hang out and I haven't texted him back in 3 days (but to be fair, it took him 4 days to get back to me). And my girlfriend is in the other room and I'm typing this right now. I'm choosing you over snuggling, face
h-less internet person! Something has gone wrong there.I saw a t-shirt at Target the other day that read, "Canceller of Plans." And I know the rush that comes from cancelling plans. But it's still pathological avoidance.
Yes, the sheer rise in anxiety disorders is testament to that deep problem.
I still feel it, sometimes, when it comes time to turn off the computer and dress up and leave the house the "ugh field" activates. But I know I'll be happier if I take the opportunity.
I've also noticed in myself the tendency to not wanting to show up somewhere unless I can expect there to be decently attractive, possibly single women attending, likely dressed in cute clothing. My guys nights and board games are fun, but I really just want to be able to interact with women more, its the only aspect really missing from my otherwise ideal routine.
And women, of course, are markedly more anxious and flighty these days, so its harder to get them to come out consistently than ever. Ask me how I know.
I’m beginning to suspect that screens are a hyper stimulus you can have “relationships”, but they’re only the good parts and you don’t have to work at them, you don’t have to make time for them, you don’t even need to put on pants. Games are much more stimulating than doing the actual thing, they give more rewards and with less effort than real life
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The "Attention Economy" is just BRUTAL, b/c it really is an utterly zero-sum game (you can't produce 'more attention' very easily, only reapportion the amount that currently exists), and thus there is strong incentive to try to drag attention out of people even when it is objectively unhealthy.
"Of course I can watch one more episode, Netflix, how thoughtful of you to queue it right up!" (looks up 3 episodes later to see the clock says "1:38 a.m.")
No, fuck off. Give me the app that values my attention approximately as much as I do, and will actively start discouraging me from expending it too much in one place. "Here, you have time for precisely one (1) episode of Tulsa King, then we're cutting you off. I've already set the lights in the room to dim slowly, and your favorite ambient sleep noises are cued up as soon as you get into the bed."
I've heard from anonymous sources that there's a whole service economy for the ultrarich, based around this sort of thing. The basic idea is that their time is very valuable, so they'll pay astronomical prices to avoid ever having to wait or be distracted by petty bullshit. The extreme example might be having a private jet/helicopter to help them travel faster, but it exists for all sorts of minor things too. So they might have a personal assistant who's job is to cue up just one episode of their favorite TV show, then slowly turn down the lights and help them sleep. or whatever else they want.
Obviously some of that is a privilege that only the very wealthy can afford. But it does seem like, to some extent, we should be able to pay for services that help middle class folks do that too. it's odd that we can't. If anything, it seems to be going the opposite direction, where like, even if you pay for premium, it will still insist on showing us adds and doing that sort of attention-grabbing addictive bullshit. It feels like I'm going to a restaurant and the owner is telling us "yeah I don't care how much you pay, you must sit in the smoking section and smoke at least one cigarette. i'm not letting you enjoy my food without a little nicotine on the side."
Yeah, I'm desperately curious as to the sorts of lifestyle accommodations one unlocks when they pass, at a guess, the $50 million net worth mark.
For me, yeah, I think if I could have a dedicated personal assistant, which I'd guess would cost $50k-70k/year for a decently competent one (just googled it, I was almost exactly right), I could cut out SO MUCH CRAP that wastes my time and focus on the highest leverage, most productive, or fun, stuff that I WANT to be doing.
But man, how do you get to the level of wealth quickly if you're merely climbing the corporate ladder? If I start pulling down $250k/yr then it might start to be justifiable (in my mind) to splurge on a dedicated assistant to handle this stuff. And have to try to avoid lifestyle inflation to some degree. But BECAUSE I currently complete many of those tasks myself, I'm somewhat stymied from doing the work that might speed up my progression to higher incomes.
There's got to be an efficient frontier on the curve that I'm not quite hitting. Hmmm.
Wait wait wait, I just realized, under idealized circumstances that approximately what a spouse can help achieve, if you marry well and have a good, cooperative, teammate relationship. That was probably the secret for middle class couples leveraging into higher income brackets.
And your realisation there is what annoys me about the commentary post Bezos divorce about MacKenzie getting all that money for nothing. Jeff was the guy who made the billions, she was just the wife, what did she do to deserve this money?
Well, let's see: first, she wasn't the one who blew up the marriage by hooking up with the thot next door. Second, back before Jeff was Mr. Mega-bucks, she was working a job too and contributing to the household income while he got Amazon off the ground. Third, all the support that faceh mentions that isn't explictly 'a paid job' - running the household, nurturing relationships (business as well as personal), raising the kids, being there for Jeff in the ways spouses are supposed to be there for each other. Being willing to be seen out in public with him when he was still a googly-eyed nerd before he buffed up and got work done to fix his googly eye.
But sure, none of that matters, she's just a parasite who got undeserved riches in the divorce settlement.
That really depends on what you think the goal of divorce law/alimony is.
Giving them $250 million should set them up for life and is almost certainly sufficient to pay for their 'services' during the marriage. Or if you want to assume the value of their services is inherently equal to his,(as partnerships go) then sure, start with that assumption.
Just understand you're creating an incentive for men to avoid marriage as a institution since it takes most of the control of their wealth away from them at the drop of a hat if they get married before they build their kingdom.
As usual, though, the point is less about billionaires and more about men who enter the marriage expecting to get some level of reliable partner, then realize that under the current legal regime the woman has no obligation to pull her weight, to act respectful towards him, or to even sleep with him, and yet is generally able to file for divorce regardless of how well-behaved he was during the marriage.
Its an inherent asymmetry.
Some of the comments about women and marriage on here are also creating incentives for women to avoid marriage. Even relatively tame, like "The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire."
Yes, gentlemen, I hope all of you are telling the women in your lives (mothers, grandmothers, aunts, female cousins, sisters, daughters, wives) that you don't consider them equal partners, that you are the superior person in this relationship because you are the breadwinner and her little job (if she works outside the home) doesn't count. Working in the home only? Absolutely does not count for anything, she's replaceable by a coal-miner's wife because being the spouse and mother for an upper-middle class household doesn't involve any kind of extra work at all, and maybe even less work because you're rich enough to hire help. If you do decide to dump her, she deserves maybe ten bucks and a pat on the head, but certainly nothing more. Not one drop of your vast wealth (should you have vast wealth), even if that share does not, in fact, leave you penniless but you retain possession of the majority of the vast wealth.
Why, with such examples of how respected they are, why aren't women jumping at the notion of not getting an education and a career of their own and instead getting married as soon after high school as possible then producing a few kids as rapidly as possible? And if hubby gets tired of you after a while, well, you can probably find work somewhere scrubbing floors or something, automation and AI hasn't yet taken those jobs away!
Women - such ungrateful bitches, to turn down a wonderful offer like that!
I don't consider myself a misandrist, but some of you guys make it tough going, and more and more I am grateful to the Lord God Almighty for making me without the wiring to desire and need love and romance, because blow me down, I'd be fucked if I had to rely on a guy for anything from emotional validation on up.
I made the statement:
To be clear, I agree with none of these statements:
I think it would help for you to understand where I'm coming from:
[EDIT: PERSONAL DETAILS REDACTED]
Can you see why I'm a little dubious of the idea that if you marry someone, credit for your achievements should be always and automatically be spread equally?
Of course this is only an anecdote and I don't intend it to be applied to all relationships. I am sure that there are a lot of traditional couples who have a much more equitable relationship with a more even share of responsibility. I do note however that:
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That's a bit of a trick.
"Equal Partners" in the sense that both are contributing to the household. But how does one measure the value or even magnitude of each contribution when they're inherently different in their nature.
If the guy builds the house, builds all the furnishing in it, and does the actual maintenance work on it over the years, (i.e., it ONLY exists thanks to his own labor)...
It is REALLY fair that the woman would get the house in a divorce scenario?
Well, we acknowledge she was the one who was 'keeping house' and doing all the day-to-day work that makes it a pleasant place to live and keeps it from falling into neglect which leveraged the value the man already provided, creating something better than what the man alone could achieve.
So we've got 'unequal' contributions by each side, but each has contributed value to the whole.
The actual contributions are usually not accounted for in a literal ledger. So we often end up with a guy who thinks he's being shortchanged because he created all of the necessary preconditions for a happy, successful marriage, and pulled his weight, and yet gets screwed over for trusting that he would be 'repaid' by his partner with her love and esteem and, eventually, a kid, and yet he's still getting screwed over when it ends.
In short, how does one balance material contributions with, I guess, mostly emotional and intangible but still valuable contributions?
Since the material contributions are legible, those are the ones that end up getting parceled out by the court. So the wife gets a cut of the material contributions made by the husband, but the man doesn't get to take away any of the emotional, intangible elements contributed by her. So he loses both the material wealth AND the intangibles.
You can imagine that this feels unfair.
I mean, I've pointed it out before, women end up marrying a corporation (for all pursuits and purposes) and it turns out that is pretty much a dead end for their 'emotional validation.' Eventually the biological clock ticks over, and the corporation will never be able to provide her with kids and the actual long-term loyalty that a good husband would grant.
But men have to match up to the corporation's material benefits while seeking a partner, anyway, because those factors are intangible and rarely counted in the calculus.
Its always and forever a question of 'compared to what?'
I don't think women are doing the math on what they'll get if they stick with MegaCorp for 25 years, laboring dutifully under their manager's eye, then what they'll get if they stick with a Husband for that same period, laboring dutifully under 'his' roof.
It becomes a bit annoying to have to justify men's contributions to upholding the entire edifice of civilization.
On the flip side, women, by dint of bearing and raising children, are obviously and constantly glorified for their contribution. As well they should be.
So men, demanding a little bit more leverage and control of their wealth so they can actually achieve good outcomes for themselves in the world they built seems utterly fair to me.
My actual point is that Divorce laws should really, in actuality, be designed around encouraging marriage and family creation and maintenance of a long-term bond. And OBJECTIVELY they are simply not doing that.
Billionaires getting divorced and splitting 10-12 figure households are a symptom of this, and a particularly noticeable one.
And guys who notice "wait, even the billionaire couldn't keep his wife, what actual chance do I have" are a lot more common than billionaires.
The incentives are simply not aligned. A guy wants a partner, a homemaker, and someone to bear and raise children.
No-Fault Divorce penalizes the guy by forcing him to give up his accumulated wealth and support the wife regardless of how well she actually behaved during the marriage. Whether he got a kid out of it or not.
So he is pretty damn motivated to try to keep the marriage afloat to avoid said penalties.
Divorce penalizes a woman by... ?
What is a woman actually losing out on by initiating divorce?
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Unlikely, in that no significant number of women who haven't already made up their mind are reading them.
Anyway, "How dare you talk about this in a way that doesn't put all the onus on the man and put the woman on a pedestal?" is not going to be an effective tactic; it's so ubiquitous already that anyone still talking about the subject is obviously already inured to it.
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The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire. If anything, the latter has more professional assistance, although she’s also expected to be slightly more personable. (I don’t think Amazon was really that kind of business though.)
I don’t think many people think the wife should come away with nothing in such affairs, only that scaling it directly to the husband’s business success is pretty dubious.
The work of getting a business off the ground doesn't differ that much whether your business becomes a trillion dollar company or goes bust. The labor theory of value is wrong.
Mackenzie was also working at Amazon in the early days, doing accounts, packing orders, etc. So I find it entirely reasonable that this made her rich.
The labor theory of value is wrong, yes. I think you're missing a step or two between that and the Washington State Divorce Court being the proper way to assess that value. The correct question is 'What rate of pay would Jeff Bezos and his wife have agreed to in return for her assistance?' Which is unfortunately impossible to answer given that no such negotiation took place.
I suppose you could argue that he married her with the understanding that, should they divorce, their assets would be divvied up according to that process? That's technically valid, but it'd be just as valid if that process were anything else, provided those terms wouldn't have prevented their marriage; also impossible to say, I suppose. Still, I think this is the best supported position.
On the other side, one can consider what he'd have had to have paid someone else to fulfill those same responsibilities -- certainly far, far less than he ended up paying her, even if he'd had to take out a loan to do so. It's certainly possible she did something for Amazon no one else could have done, but neither accounts nor packing orders meets that bar. He likely wouldn't have taken out a loan to pay someone else to do those things (at least not very early on), but that's not actually relevant so long as the court would have forced him to pay her for her labor regardless of the success it engendered -- her compensation was guaranteed, so there should be no risk premium. But that's not what the court would do, and they both knew that at the time, so maybe a risk premium is fair.
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Because low-skill compensation in the west has been rising astronomically, personal touches like that have been getting more expensive, not less. Fast food is paying $14/hr now- for front of house(restaurants tend to pay their kitchen people more because it's harder work). Day laborers used to be $100/day, plus lunch. Now it's $200.
Tipping everywhere probably has this as a big chunk of the explanation. It is simply far more expensive to hire someone to take orders and pour coffee and putting some on the customers even if it annoys them makes more sense as a tradeoff.
As for why that is, I blame weed making some people unemployable and doordash convincing a bigger chunk that they can strike it rich being their own boss.
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I tried to make this, combining smartwatch data on heart rates and variability to detect energy levels and combining it with an LLM to generate useable recommendations.
It was surprisingly difficult for multiple reasons: your heart doesn’t differentiate between ‘low stress’ and ‘depressed heart rate because you’re recovering from a massive exertion’, or ‘high stress’ vs ‘happy drinking with friends’.
Then it was even harder to do anything with the data. Obviously LLMs don’t integrate with anything meaningful without lots of extra work and the moment you get into health they just start relying on the teams of feel-good bullshit in their training set. No, I would not like to do an hour of yoga followed by a gratitude exercise.
Does your smart watch track heart rate variability and blood oxygenation? I think my garmin watch is pretty decent at knowing when I'm stressed emotionally vs when I'm stressed metabolically. Of course, the little suggestions it gives me are kind of useless ("take a breath", "go on a walk", buddy if I was the kind of person to do those things I wouldn't need you to tell me to do them.) But I think the problem doesn't lie with either the sensors or suggestions, but with a lack of an effective punishment/reward scheme.
...okay, I'll admit it. I just want a robot mommy that pats my head when I'm a good boy and spanks my ass when I'm a REALLY good boy.
It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?
Yeah, this was basically my big problem as well. I think it can work, it just needs to accept that mood management requires more than a ping and a condescending message.
HRV should give a decent indicator of stress levels.
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I wasn't, but by my estimation the built in software features accurately figure out the state of my body. Maybe the software has just been updated since you tried your experiment.
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Great observations. I wish there were tools that could do this. Cold Turkey sort of approximately gets close to this, but it's very very crude and requires a lot of upfront effort/willpower.
That's one of the reasons I prefer using TheMotte in general vs. most other sites. Aside from the Quokka popup, it doesn't actively try to drag out your time spent on the site, or use dark patterns to keep you engaged.
And of course it isn't centered around ragebait or fueled by whomever can get the most replies and attention (some might disagree).
Speak for yourself, buddy
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It's also quite difficult to use TheMotte in a way that encourages low effort. My best performing posts are ones I spend time on, which is usually a form of deep work. There really isn't enough content on here to doomscroll, and reading comments is actually usually pretty high energy.
Yeah.
I often start off a post intending to just make a quick, lowish-effort reply, then find myself drafting a mini-essay just so I can fully justify the point I'm making.
Effort feels like it is rewarded because people will usually respond with similar effort rather than just troll or dismiss you with a joke.
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I definitely doomscroll The Motte, and find it more addictive than social media.
One thing that is handy about having the weekly threads so self-contained, at least you can reach the actual end of it, there's no infinite algorithm.
If I'm really disregulated, I can just keep refreshing this and DSL over and over (operator error, I know).
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