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Notes -
Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.
A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:
Edit: typo
I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.
I ended up going into technology, because it was the only sufficiently merit-based thing I could find in which I could sort of force open the door. Even there, I think I got a senior role just in time, as I hear the entry level is very very bad these days. I've had conversations with my wife about what we might advise our future children to do with their lives, and I've mentally prepared to tell them that certain dreams are just impossible, and some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them. Maybe it's been a good thing, in that I was forced to keep some things I love as just a hobby, and so I never got burnt out on them by trying to make them a career.
Yeah I had a similar path, wanted to go for a history PhD but all my professors told me it was hopeless as a white man. I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.
I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry. I have to say. I wish there was a more constructive movement to end this shit, very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.
I always find myself thinking about how people in our position handled this drastic narrowing of our scope of opportunities. I was very influenced by Rod Dreher's Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, as well as Aaron Renn's The Negative World, which, rather than addressing the racial and gender aspects of this, deal with the anti-Christian nature of the current cultural moment; all of these books, in different ways, basically advise you to focus hyper-locally, to keep your internal locus of control alive, and build what you can in the little domain that you are actually able to influence. So I've done that. I've just been elected to a two-year term on my church's leadership board; I managed to get published in a little local history anthology by a small press; I settled down, bought a house in the Midwest and am trying to start a family.
Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality. I had dreams of being a popular novelist. I probably don't have the ability, but because of the cultural headwinds, I also gave up on that before I tried to reach my maximum potential. You might have been a great professor, or maybe you would not have; but people like us, with even greater ability than us, also got pushed into paths where their potentialities are never realized. I am reminded of Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, a mid-century novel about a girl who dreams of becoming an actress, and ends up shattered by the experience of continual failure. (And of course by encounters with an infamous cad.) Her outcome: a quiet, happy suburban life, but one in which her initial dreams are forgotten. She makes her peace with that, and I've mostly made my peace with what I couldn't do, and of course I can console myself by saying, "Well, that was just my attempt to be special, and I probably wasn't special anyway in the end." There are failures and mediocrities in every generation, but I would've at least liked to try on a more level playing field. Part of this is just growing up, but obviously part of it is that we were frankly cheated out of a fair shot; and it's only so much compensation to say, "Well, I made a great network engineer."
Indeed, you get it my friend. I also just took on a leadership position at my local parish, and am volunteering in a broader capacity with my larger church body.
I think that the best we can do is simply bide our time, spread awareness, and grow our social capital, our virtue, while supporting our side of the culture war here and there. Store up treasures in heaven, where moths can't destroy and thieves can't steal.
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