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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Tyler gambled and lost.

With that you essentially concede the argument. If he just gambled and lost, you can't blame kids these days for running the numbers and deciding the game isn't worth playing.

He gambled and lost which men do all the time. How many young men get drawn into bodybuilding circles and end up turning into bloated, bald, acne-ridden losers who get heart attacks by their early 30s? Not a huge number, but then again, not a huge proportion of soldiers died in the GWOT.

I think it's pretty explicit in the rest of his post that most people who make that gamble are big winners.

Kids aren't 'running the numbers', they're sitting on their phones waiting to be given stuff.

I think it's pretty explicit in the rest of his post that most people who make that gamble are big winners.

The starting point has to be considered, though. I lead a pretty comfortable life. Getting a billion dollar would still be life-changing - but I value my current life enough that I wouldn't play Russian roulette for a 5/6 chance at a billion. If you're already doing fine, how big a win does it have to be to justify taking even a small chance of ending up like Tyler? I don't think free college tuition cuts it.

True. These days the lifestyle value of money hits massive marginal diminishing returns quite quickly. Even those who are fortunate enough to secure enough money to secure a good life in perpetuity tend to hedonistic treadmill themselves to death

These days the lifestyle value of money hits massive marginal diminishing returns quite quickly. Even those who are fortunate enough to secure enough money to secure a good life in perpetuity tend to hedonistic treadmill themselves to death

These statements are contradictory. If you can run the hedonistic treadmill high enough to exhaust arbitrarily high amounts of money, either running it higher is actually getting you significantly more (so returns aren't diminishing quickly), or there's something wrong with human nature such that we chase ever-smaller pleasures -- and human nature isn't new, so it's not a matter of "these days".

Those are separate issues. I believe the gap between the lifestyles of the middle class and the top echelons in Western society are closer than they essentially have been at any point since feudalism. Most billionaires spend just as much time as you do scrolling their phone, etcetera.

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