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I often think of the economic ramifications when I see memes about single men's apartments. You can see the outlines of the pod, but the pod seems to be arriving quicker than AI will fill in the role of the mediocre men with their tedious infrastructure-maintaining jobs. If a third of young Gen Z men will never marry, and another third will end up divorcees with their wages garnished, and they're happy with a $499 gaming console and a $249 TV, what happens to the economy?
I guess the answer is the state will have to find some way to expropriate a larger portion of these men's wages to ensure they can only afford the pod if they provide a lot more surplus value than they used to, ensuring that incel pod guy must still seek technical certifications and work 40 hours at his lame construction job. Will they be able to squeeze blood from that rock is a salient unanswered question.
There was a good motte post awhile back about the ancient Mesopotamian origin myth of women luring wild men playing in the mountains down into the cities to farm. But in the 21st century, the wild men are slovenly gamers and the women are preaching harpies.
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Link by any chance? I would like to know more.
Not familiar with the original post, but this is one of the earlier scenes of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Essentially, King Gilgamesh is ruling over Uruk as a tyrant, subjecting his people to cruel forced labor and exercising droit du seigneur whenever a couple is married. So the gods create a wild man named Enkidu to stop him.
Enkidu initially lives his life among the animals in the wilderness, almost more beast than man, cooperating with animals on the hunt, etc. But the gods decide that Enkidu needs to go forth into Uruk to stop King Gilgamesh and join civilization. Thus, they send a priestess/temple prostitute to Enkidu, and they lie together for seven days and seven nights. But on the eighth day, when Enkidu goes to rejoin his animal companions, they all shun him and flee from him, now that he’s been changed by the civilizing influence of sex. He thus has no choice but to go down into the city, where it is inevitable that he’ll fight with King Gilgamesh (and afterwards, become his closest friend).
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very interesting poem, because in addition to all the timeless meditations on the mortality of man and whatnot, you also get an extremely rare and valuable look at how those who lived in history’s first civilized state understood and related to the development of the state—which, it must be emphasized, is a wholly novel, awesome, terrifying technology. Cities had existed for millennia before Homer’s Greeks, for centuries before even the Vedic Aryans. But the milleu in which the Epic of Gilgamesh was written witnessed the development of the very first cities; the world of Enkidu was all that was known prior. It’s thus no surprise that the poem both begins and ends with a meditation on the glory of the walls of the cities of Uruk, so many meters high, baked of clay….
I honor your generosity in sharing this.
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I do not have it, sorry. Pretty sure it was the old site.
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The state will not do that. It will run budget deficits for a while, and eventually import third worlders to work backbreaking labor for pennies. Really, how much effort has Italy gone to to push bambocini into the workforce? Argentina? Other countries with ridiculous youth unemployment rates?
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Why is a construction job lame? If you want more housing built, you damn well need construction workers.
I don't think the job itself is lame, but it does lead to a pretty undesirable lifestyle. Waking up before dawn, working outside in the freezing cold and boiling heat, giving you sunburns and chapped skin. Sweating and stinking, getting course hands and back problems. Lots of heavy lifting, but not in the way that makes you look attractive like a lean cut model, more just bulky fat. Lots of hanging out with other lower-class men drinking and swearing too much. Almost no women in the field at all. Then you have to go to bed super early so you can be up on time the next day. All of that is going to make it really hard to meet women.
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Chicks don't dig it. The story goes that regardless of income, women aren't interested blue collar men. I don't know how true that is.
Do you want to be the one telling all your friends you just met the nicest guy and he's a plumber? It's true
If I were at all inclined to marry, then a plumber would be a respectable occupation for any spouse. I'm not middle class, I'm lower middle class at best from rural working class roots. My paternal grandfather was a navvy in England during three quarters of the year, coming back home to Ireland for the winter months. My maternal grandfather was a farm labourer.
The people I know, the family members I have, a good trade like plumber or electrician are decent jobs and nobody is looking down their nose at "you can only get a plumber as a match?"
Were I middle-middle to upper-middle class where all my antecedents had been white collar workers, maybe that would be different. But it's not the case that I instinctively recoil in horror at the notion of "oh no, I have to tell my friends my fiancé is a - gasp!- manual labourer????" 😁
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