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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.

https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

A few thoughts.

  1. Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.

  2. I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff

  3. He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.

  4. Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.

  5. I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.

  6. Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.

Points 2 and 3 basically contradict each other. That is, there's the object level struggles of material providing, which therapy would not have helped with, and the irrational misperception that these issues were irreparably unsolvable to the point that suicide was the only way out. In-so-far as therapy and suicide prevention could have helped him figure this out, they would have been useful (in-so-far as some therapy and suicide prevention are lefty mental health stuff made of empty-sounding words that don't improve rational consideration of object level issues, they would not have been useful)

This is a fair critique and the issue with this particular case of me trying to use it to build up the issues I’m trying to discuss. He would seem to have reasonable exit opportunities that would be something like you don’t get to have your name on the wall anymore but now you need to work for Lennar as a project manager at a fairly good salary.

Cases do exists where the exit wouldn’t be as foreseeable like if your industry isn’t doing well and you were facing structural obsolescence.

Even then, I think people underestimate the quality of life you can expect as a poor person with an intact family. If his entire industry went under and he couldn't adapt and was stuck flipping burgers for minimum wage he could still provide for his family. They might have to downgrade their home and lifestyle expectations, but they're not going to starve to death or end up homeless. And I suspect that the actual quality of life for his daughter would be higher poor with an alive father than rich with no father.

If you have serious mental health issues rendering you completely unemployable, then the object level might be unfixable, but for everyone else it's more a question of lowering standards and struggling to do as well as you can and fix as much as you can even if you can never return to the wealthy lifestyle you were expecting.

Even if he would be willing to decrease his own QoL, his wifes feelings are something he has to keep in mind. If she would be be intransigent and proclaim she would find replacement husband, willing to provide her with the current lifestyle, he would be broke and on the hook for eyewatering alimony.

This was the point I was waiting for. Yes your family often leaves you when you fail. Seen it happen enough.

Sure for a functional adult you can go manage a Taco Bell and probably get 100k or more a year but your dating market prospects are awful.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell??

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

Think I’ve seen far higher than that. Like 150 advertised. But that’s still falling a lot in status.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell?

No, but IIRC fast food managers get paid mostly in the form of bonuses for hitting the metrics that’ve been set by some jackasses with spreadsheets at headquarters(health code, budget, drive through time, etc). So there’s plenty of individual GM’s who make good salaries if not 6-figure level.

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

But nobody wants to date Taco Bell customers(and Taco Bell customers probably skew very male and very lower income, so that’s predictable).

Tbh it seems like men who make good money at low status jobs do OK on the dating market, but usually have to date a bit below them on the class ladder.

Most managers at Taco Bell would do completely fine with women of their class and background. I suppose the rare formerly PMC down in his luck upper-middle-class guy who manages a Taco Bell might not, but that person is more likely to take a (lower paid) job as a clerk or paralegal or some other bottom tier office job than work for Taco Bell.

I’d guess the average fast food restaurant manager comes from a working class background and fucked around for a few years after high school, is somewhat smarter than their peers, works hard and rises the ranks over a few years until the franchise owner puts them in charge.