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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24512 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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I think the picket-fence life works better than the alternative for the vast majority of people, and that you should not gamble on being in the minority unless you have a very good reason to believe otherwise.

Christ I resemble this article. I do like the overall life lesson though.

You come at the King, you best not miss

You decide to have an MMF threesome with your wife you best not freak out when you see the other man's dick

If you're gonna be Napoleon, you best not be sick about it for six days

Generally: if you're going to claim the exemption, you best actually be exempt. One is not granted the exemption by merely claiming it.

Very probably true. I'd just rather not get too confident about the virtues of a life we haven't actually lived (if you're not one of the confirmed wife guys around here). Or maybe more precisely, even if it is the best life a guy could reasonably live, he might still expect to feel a certain amount of Bourdain-esque existential despair from time to time, if he's the sort of guy who's predisposed to feel that way. Wherever you go, there you are.

if you're not one of the confirmed wife guys around here

The purpose of the holiday I'm currently taking was to meet my future in-laws, so I suppose I am.

Not yet!

Good point. I'm feeling this one lately, though in terms socio-economic rather than romantic. Not that the romance is going all that well, mind you.

I've always been odd, first tried and failed to find an alternate way of life, then buckled down hard on trying to make it somewhat conventionally. And now, at the meridian of middle age, I suspect I'm meeting my limits. The conventional ways aren't working out. But there aren't any promising alternatives either.

I'll just let Comac McCarthy speak for me here.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes. The kid didn’t answer. The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn’t make it to suit everybody, did he?

I don’t believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it.

Are any of McCarthy's works translated into German? Just curious.

Apparently:

I hope not. I strongly doubt there's any translator who can do him justice. Frankly, I don't think it's possible at all. It's a piece of American literature written in English, and IMO needs to be read as such.

That said, of course there are. Translators were always desparate for work, and nowadays translations are practically free. Whether or not they live up to the original work - barely anyone ever bothers to think about it.

Literary translation, particularly for prestige authors like McCarthy, is not really "desperate for work" work. The money's not good, but you generally do it on a grant, so you have to plan the project and justify it and so on.

I'm feeling this one lately, though in terms socio-economic rather than romantic. Not that the romance is going all that well, mind you.

I understand why you feel the latter way. If you don't mind my asking, why do you feel the socioeconomic path you've taken isn't working out for you?

Chiefly, I suppose, because it involves interacting with humans, which I am not good enough at. I can muddle through with great effort, but I slip up too often and end up not being on the same page as my nominal peers. Not being aware of the same information as them, not sharing their implicit norms and expectations, and not pursuing the same goals as them, and thus communicating and cooperating poorly with them. Over time, this has compounding effects - alienating people, stalling career, running out of friends, failing to build up capital, dropping out of my starting socioeconomic class, which in turn makes it even more difficult to interact with people.

Even my supposedly very technical job is maybe 10% making machines do things, and 90% coordinating with others. The exact percentages may have varied depending on the company and position, but it's always been soft skills over hard skills. And my abilities as a programmer may be decent, maybe even above average, but certainly not good enough to compensate for my shortcomings in all other areas. Including my ability to learn to adapt, which isn't that hot.

So why do I feel that way? Because I'm just not much good at any area of life. I consistently make poor decisions and deliver poor performance, even when trying to adapt and improve. And it has always been that way.

But what alternate paths are there? I'm not creative or innovative or entrepreneurial enough to be the randian superman. I'm not cut out for the maverick rockstar influencer rebel life either, lacking the people skills required for it. Doing the hippie hermit self-sufficiency thing isn't viable either; I am ultimately a civilized, technology-dependent modern human with no agricultural skills and no land or capital with which to buy land. And the obvious route of becoming unemployed and living off of social welfare (which the current federal government intends to reduce, anyways) outright disgusts me; if I fail my fellow humans, then let me at least not be a burden. Then there's the option of just taking a menial job like delivery driver - but I can't realistically make do with a significantly reduced salary; I do have a family depending on me, and costs of living are high. There's not enough slack.

So muddle through I will, on and on.

A lot of the more eccentric socioeconomic paths fizzle as you get older. The old careers have dealt with the problem of people aging up, if even their solutions aren’t always well-suited to the modern world. It’s recognised that there are a bunch of 50/60 year old bankers around who aren’t hotshots and people have some idea what to do with them.

If you do something newer and weirder, like NFT transaction consultancy, then when NFTs fall out of fashion you have to pull a new career together for yourself while all the traditional ones are already full of the people working their way up the old fashioned way.

To a certain degree your NFT transaction consultancy kind of character will survive by just skimming the waves of whatever becomes new and hip. Obviously lots will blow up in the attempt but I know enough crackhead energy crypto types who manage to skid along on occasional lottery hits

Because he's living in Germany, I assume.

Partially, but not mainly. Mainly it's just me. Germany is making it more difficult for me in some ways because

  • Costs of living are high, as is the tax burden, and I can't just make do with less,
  • Germany may offer generous welfare for comitted parasites, but I refuse to take it,
  • Germans place great value in people's ability to conform to implicit and high expectations, which I am decidedly not good at,
  • It's very hard to become self-sufficient, the market and the law don't really support it, and
  • Even relatively technical jobs are, to a large degree, about conforming to buerocratic and social norms.

But again, plenty of people deal just fine with all that, and prosper.

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