thejdizzler
23d ago
- Work. Back from Europe. Excited and motivated to wrap up the end of my PhD. Job interview in Germany went well, and have another one here in Baltimore in two weeks. Will probably make a bigger post on wellness Wednesday in a few weeks about my decision to get your guys' advice.
- Fitness: Mileage was fairly low over the course of the trip (43,43,51). Hoping for 55 this week. Came back to a nice surprise: I've lost 5-7 pounds, which is about ~50% of all the weight I wanted to lose. Unfortunately I currently feel terrible because of the jet lag, but I'm sure I will recover soon. 11 weeks until Chicago.
- Intellectual stuff: reading Foundation for philosophy book club and enjoying it. Actually got a lot of Spanish practice on the trip, and thinking I should preemptively switch my L3 focus from Italian to German. Otherwise am starting a few economics books (Great Crash 1929, Pocket Picketty) which I am excited about, as this is an area of weakness for me.
- Finances: work covered most of my trip-related expenses. I also got an unexpected $2k from a student loan law suit, my salary got bumped by about $150/month, and I earned about $500 in interest/dividends from my investments. So actually ended up being an incredibly positive (35+% savings rate) month. Thinking about giving 10% of my net savings each month away (either in the form of paying for substack subscriptions or increasing the amount I donate to my income sharing club), so would also appreciate any thoughts on this.
- Dating. Nothing. In too much of a liminal space in terms of careers to dedicate much time to this now.
- Tarot. Will have a session this weekend!
- Socializing: Was very social my first few days in Germany. Haven't done anything since I got back, but hard to do so when I crash at about 7:30 pm.
- Screen time: 3 hours, but makes sense given travel!
- Meditation: 5 minutes 3x last week. Hoping for every day this week.
thejdizzler
24d ago
Yes this exactly captures my discomfort with America (as a lifelong American, although with dual citizenship in the UK, I have always felt a little out of place). I just spent two weeks in the UK followed by a week in Germany, and both places felt just incredibly more real than America, even though they undoubtedly both have been infected by the consumerism and striving (especially. the UK). I think a lot of it has to do with the structure of cities, which are thousands of years old and build for people rather than cars, and also with a sense of belonging and place that definitionally cannot exist in the United States because we haven't been around for long enough and our national mythos is built on conquest, immigration, and progress, which makes it inherently unstable.
Interestingly enough, I feel like Europeans use social media way more than Americans. I post something on instagram maybe once a month, but my Italian lab partner for this course in Bath was posting constantly. This paradoxically actually seemed to make her social media use more authentic: she was just posting everything that came into her mind to share with her family/friends (I also noticed that these Europeans tended to have very few followers, maybe 100-200, within Dunbar number range) rather than curating to cultivate a certain image of oneself.
Pretty much everyone in my course (I was the only American) admitted that they had negative stereotypes of Americans and that I managed to break out of the mold by the end of the course. I've heard similar things from my sister, who moved to London in 2021 and had a rough first 6 months at her job where no one respected her. I find the reflexive dismissal of this stereotype by posters downthread to be a bit unhelpful. Pretty much all stereotypes have at least a kernel of truth to them, and rather than dismiss this one as Eurotrash bigotry, I think it is more helpful to examine why Europeans might feel this way. I think you capture that why incredibly well.
thejdizzler
25d ago
Are you a Baltimorean? Didn't know we had more than one on theMotte
Is it just me or has this latest wave of communications technology really homogenized the youth? Both German and Italian and Spanish (from my course in Bath) preteens seem to be dressing like American tik-tok sluts and acting like phone zombies?
thejdizzler
28d ago
Immigration isn't going to be a viable solution for much longer. Every country outside of Africa pretty much has a below 2.0 fertility rate. Even if it does work out it's just can kicking.
If we do somehow figure out how to raise fertility rates (unlikely) the generation that manages to do so is going to have a very rough time because of sky high dependency ratios (both more kids and more elderly people).
thejdizzler
30d ago
Traveling in Germany this week, no progress on any goals. Check back with me next week.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I was hoping for the Mamdani sighting, but alas this was all completely off.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Argentina’s tactics are extremely sketchy and dark arts which is the main reason I’m rooting against them. Also the spain team is quite white…
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Can anyone steel-man the Argentinian position re: the Falklands (Malvinas)? I got into a few heated arguments with an Argentinian women during my course about them, and the Argentinian position doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Argentine never actually had sovereignty over the islands, nor does the local population want them there.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Upvoted for a really nice McCarthy parody. Laughed a lot.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I don't believe that this is the case. The kind of violence present in Blood Meridian is very much not inherent to nature. Animals do not engage in the kind of orgy of killing that Glanton's gang gets up to.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I did not view Blood Meridian as suggesting that violence is inherent to human nature. The judge wants you to think that's the theme, but the judge is a liar. I think Blood Meridian also wants you to see how a system of social pressure allows people to commit violent acts without blinking an eye because everyone else is doing it. The judge claims that this is a property inherent to humans, but from the first moment we meet the judge he is lying to get people to do what he wants, so why would he be telling the full truth when he monologues to the reader (credit to my friend Emory for this realization).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
My B, I def meant A Game of Thrones.
I’m thinking of the series before book 5 where it goes off into crazy land. I like books 5-7 but i recognize that they are objectively bad, especially book 7 with its author insert and Spiderman 3 syndrome. I did genuinely enjoy the ending and I think the message genuinely resonated with me when I read the books. In terms of the focus on violence I’m really specifically thinking about The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, which capture the over the top violence and tarot symbolism of BM without the purple prose, and with dialogue marks and actual character development.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
The two towers? Never said anything about that.
With the gunslinger in particular, i see a lot of parallels between the judge and the man in black. The man in black through the whole first book is forcing roland to commit terrible acts of violence: murdering a whole town of people, pushing jake into the abyss, etc
With Game of Thrones I think the parallel is even more clear. There are specific characters who basically come straight out of BM (Gregor Clegane) and even characters who have some more moral complexity don’t hesitate to brutalize the peasantry in a way that Glanton’s gang would find very familiar.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
- Work. Still in this UK class, having a great time. Becoming Europilled.
- Fitness: Mileage suffered a little with travel last week but still did 40 miles and 1x tempo session! Back to normal this week I think. Saw the lowest heart rate I've ever record this week (39).
- Intellectual stuff: finished Blood Meridian finally. Terrible book, I think both Game of Thrones and The Dark Tower books do the theme much better. Learning loads of language/other stuff from my European colleagues.
- Finances: Not even thinking about this until the end of the month.
- Dating. I've very quickly redeleted my dating apps again. Not helpful
- Tarot. No session.
- Socializing: Been very social in bath
- Screen time: 2.5 hours, but makes sense given travel!
- Mental health: Pretty good, although lots of anxiety on this travel trip
I do not fantasize about castrating chad anymore. I was shown the errors of my ways.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
The idea that we need to regulate the sexual marketplace via tradition is definitely a conservative view. Not a libertarian view mind you, but libertarians arent really rightists.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Resident leftist here (at least on some topics: degrowth, veganism, openness to at least reading about things like Marxism). I don't feel like I fit in either of your categories (freshly educated zoomer, troll). I sometimes get dogpiled here, but my most severe dogpile came from a rather rightest view (castrate all chads), and I think that I have both learned quite a bit from this forum, and hopefully also done some enlightening myself.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
On the contrary, I think they're directly in conflict. Each rocket launch represents thousands of tons of carbon released into the atmosphere. I know climate change isn't a popular hobby horse on this forum (which I think is silly), but I believe it is one of the largest crises of our time, especially given the recent heat waves in Europe. Why risk even further climate destabilization just to push forward colonization a few thousand years when we're talking about billion year time scales.
In a similar vein, every engineer at SpaceX probably could have another kid or two if they weren't working so hard, which would be good for the gene people. And they could be working on more socially useful technologies. Although if I'm being honest, SpaceX isn't really the main problem in the sucking up talent space: it's finance.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
You're talking about timescales many thousands of times longer than the existence of human civilization or indeed of any human institution. How about we work on making those things actually sustainable over the long term before we worry about interplanetary colonization.
You might hand-wave this point, but it's not clear to me that we are doing this at all. In fact, there are many indications that we are outrunning our own carrying capacity here, or at leas our own ability to keep a complex society going (see climate change, 6th mass extinction, birth rate collapse). It seems delusional to focus on something so so long term when we can't even keep our population stable or stop fouling our own garden.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
The thing is I believe there is no accurate comparison to space colonization because it basically completely detethers us from our own ecology and biology in a way that transatlantic voyages did not. The kind of person that thinks that they want to colonize Mars (the cowboy/Lone Ranger archetype) is incredibly ill-suited to such a venture because of the extremely tight constraints that will inevitably exist in terms of resource usage and time allocation in the first mars colonies. The first mars colonists will basically be living under martial law in caves where they rarely if ever see the sun. This sounds much better suited to the corporate drones who already do very well in existing hierarchies here on earth.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
True, but Musk is responsible to his shareholders now (or at least partially). He chose to make spaceX a publicly traded company, which comes with expectations of profitability, at least eventually.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
- Work. At a class in the UK for the next two weeks, then vacation in Germany. Travel to the UK was a bit of a shit show (cancelation, missed connection, and finally a lost bag). Research environment in Europe is much more chill, but also very inferior to the US.
- Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions again last week and 60 miles. Weight is continuing to drop as I have kind of lost my appetite with the heat.
- Intellectual stuff: finished a blog post for this month, and working on my Spanish/Italian as usual. Almost done with Blood Meridian, but it's like pulling teeth.
- Finances: Not even thinking about this until the end of the month.
- Dating. My roommate convinced me to redownload dating apps, which I think was a mistake.
- Tarot. No session.
- Socializing: nice change of environment has got to me excited to socialized and meet people!
- Screen time: 1 hour!
- Mental health: Pretty good, although lots of anxiety on this travel trip
I think I will once your comp ends! Your posts are very high quality and I appreciate them a lot.
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