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-- Gambling. I thought when my state legalized gambling, what's the big deal? It's legal in Atlantic City and Vegas, plenty of people travel there to gamble, and everyone knows someone with a poker game or buddies who keep a pool of NFL bets going. Why not keep that revenue in the state? I miss the old equilibrium. When one had to take, at least, a two hour trip to Atlantic City to gamble, there was at least a certain occasion to it, now there are guys gambling away their paychecks to a video poker machine in the back of a truck stop. And don't even get me started on phone gambling. The idea of people losing huge sums of money without ever leaving their house or talking to anyone is horrifying to me. All the old forms of gambling that lead me to view it as harmless had strong social elements: your local poker night was really everyone hanging out together, the office super bowl pool was a bonding experience, even the casino in Atlantic City had the advantage of travel and adventure and glamour. Legalizing it in every state removes the glamour of the destination gambling trip, and turns it into just a straight suck of money from the foolish to the pockets of casinos. If we're going to have sports gambling, we should just make it a state monopoly like the lottery, and shuffle all the profits into the education system.
-- Aging. When I was a teenager I bought into the Sex and the City-era framing for how the first half of your life path was supposed to go: a series of romantic adventures, serial "serious" monogamous relationships, and then at 30-35 getting "serious" about settling down. Plenty of time! People getting married later was treated as an unalloyed good in the media, and I should note that my own parents married late and had me late. Now, a few days from 33, great Odin's raven how did no one tell us how fast we were going to get old? The number of single friends I have who got unbelievably fat or have aged out of their looks! I talk to my friends, and especially my wife's friends, and they have these romantic problems, and the sad grainy truth is that they should have made hay while the sun shined and hooked someone ten years ago when they were still hot. There are girls we went to college with, and they were reasonably in the same league as my wife at the time, and now they're completely unfuckable, to the point where effort will never get you back where you were.
And it's blackpilling, because there's no advice to give them on their relationship strategies that doesn't run back up against that cold hard fact: you're fat now and there's nothing you can do that will deliver what I would consider good results for them at this point. And I knew that there would be some point where that would be true, but I thought it was 40 or 50 or after the third kid. Not 32. It hits women harder, but hits men too, the curves that online dating sites show men getting more attractive only in relative terms. The media told us at 32 we'd just be hitting the peak of our hotness, not that better than half would have fallen off.
Somebody needs to warn the youth, we need to be sending our freshmen to college this fall with a copy of Princeton Mom as required reading. In media I felt like the point at which one really aged, in the sense of looks, was at least 40. Certainly, though I wouldn't watch the show until after I was married it was just in the air at the time culturally, Sex and the City's girls dealt with the idea of aging in their 30s and 40s, but they didn't even have friends or side characters who got fat, or were completely aged out of attractiveness in dating. There's a huge number of women, and a decent number of men, in my social circle where I look at them and I'm like wow you've already missed the window. It's not "over" for them, after all they might find each other, but their championship window has closed and that's indescribably sad for me. I can't imagine not being hot at your own wedding, that should be near the hottest you've ever been, and some of the weddings I've been to lately it's a joke. And these people are only in their early 30s! You have a narrow window to really maximize your talents in looks, narrower if you don't take care of yourself. Pick ye rosebuds while ye may!
-- Donald Trump (on foreign policy). I voted for him in the 2016 primary after he got up at the debate and said that Iraq was a big fat mistake. While I'm a bit more of an internationalist, I bought into his America First isolationism as at least reasonably peaceful. In office he mostly got captured or railroaded by neocons in his administration, or turned out to lack the temperament for peace. Continued most of the bad policies of his predecessors, while adding a few new ones of his own, and reducing the reliability of the USA as a global partner around the world.
-- Dress shoes are dead, and my decade of resistance has been pointless. No one wears them anymore.
-- Church. I sort of thought church would always be there. That I could wander in and out of religion as I chose, and there would always be other people who kept the place going while I figured my shit out. Now we're seeing churches die out in my town and it's dawned on me that I, me, personally, I'm responsible for maintaining these things. That if I don't do it no one will. I'm back at my church, but even then it makes me sad seeing the parking lot at the historic lutheran church near my house and knowing that they're dying. And it's not like I can do anything for two churches at once. There's got to be a German word for the sadness at seeing things that you didn't like die out? These assumed bedrocks of our lives just aren't as secure as we thought they were.
-- Marijuana, from the opposite direction. I didn't use weed until I was married, and I didn't get it, I was a straight edge teen. Legalized marijuana has been a Good Thing. Notwithstanding my immense dorkiness, when I was a teenager, I could get pot more easily than I could get alcohol. I knew guys who dealt pot from the Boy Scouts or from basketball or from debate club, it was normal to know someone who sold pot. Because the marijuana distribution system was already illegal and underground, so they weren't exactly checking IDs, and a teenage could go buy a half pound and chop it up and sell it, where alcohol had to be stolen from an adult or a store. Now, marijuana is mostly distributed through legal channels, so you equally need a 21 year old willing to get you weed or beer, and fewer teenagers can swing that. And we've seen that decline in youth drug use. See attached image. Youth drug and alcohol use has continued to drop during the process of marijuana legalization. The kids are, by that standard, alright. Further, traffic deaths have not correlated with weed legalization driving high is probably bad, but it's not as bad as driving drunk so we see a replacement effect.
In general, Marijuana is and was normalized already, even before legalization. And I'm of the opinion that there is a deleterious impact on civic fabric from ordinary, law abiding citizens being anti-cop, in the sense of breaking the law and hoping not to get caught by the police. The policeman should never be the enemy of the citizen, the citizen should always see the policeman's presence as a positive. That's why I'm also in favor of more reasonable drinking age laws. There should only be laws against things that the average person would find morally blameworthy. Laws that over-reach and criminalize the conduct of ordinary citizens set up a conflict between the state and the citizen.
And, for that matter, I use thc these days, and I think done right it is the conservative family drug. The effects are, in context, ideal for relaxing after a hard day with people you love. Alcohol leads people to get into fights with their family, to sleep with people they shouldn't. Marijuana leads to hanging out with people who annoy you and just laughing it off, it makes sex with your spouse better but sex with anyone else unthinkable.
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Re: Aging, I find it very odd to attribute ballooning in weight to "aging". It's not aging doing that, it's eating.
Now in some sense that's true of most things, because being alive longer is more time for things to go wrong. If everyone played brutal high-intensity sports all their lives to the point where they accumulated new permanent injuries each year, then one could believe that it's normal to become functionally immobile by your mid-20s. But I still wouldn't attribute that to age. Even if all aging is accumulated damage/entropy, I think there's some sense of "reasonable wear and tear" which should apply.
Not arguing against your main point which seems decent enough, although "lock it down early so you can then bloat into a cave troll" seems unfair to your partner. I don't think there's any shortcut that lets you avoid taking care of your body, especially since you're the one who's stuck inhabiting it.
Speaking of that, the biggest take-away I noticed is that people diverge a ton they get older. Two eight year olds will have a lot in common just because they haven't had much time to accumulate the effects of their good and bad choices, genes, injuries, luck, etc. The gulf can be massive.
That is basically the dynamic of aging and weight gain because (pre ozempic) essentially no one loses weight in a significant way. So if every year there's a certain chance one gets fat, then every five years multiples that chance, and it catches most people eventually unless they're working to minimize it.
Maybe this is idiosyncratic to me, but in my mind being in a good relationship is encouragement and support to avoid bloating into a cave troll. My wife and I encourage each other to work out and stay in shape, both directly and indirectly. We hold each other accountable, we teach each other things, I go with my wife to get her an exercise bike off Craigslist. And because my wife is hot, I feel like I have to keep it tight if I want to keep her.
While I see a lot of bad relationships take a very crabs in a bucket mentality. One of my best friends from college got a little fat, started dating a guy who was a little fat. Now every time she tries to work on basic diet and exercise, her boyfriend (now husband) talks shit on her and sabotages her. And they've both only gotten fatter.
It’s also heavily weighted by social class and region. Among rich people in Manhattan being fat is unusual (especially for women, but also men) well into one’s forties and fifties, sometimes later. Obviously many of the women have some work done, but many haven’t and obvious TV license accounted for the cast of SATC broadly reflect the average hotness of many single women in that age and class bracket in NYC then; arguably it’s better now as subtle facelift and filler techniques have improved since the early 00s, see eg. Anne Hathaway at 41. By contrast it seems like in parts of the Midwest and South people give up almost universally at 25, the men usually after they stop playing sports after college, and the women when they get married or have their first child.
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Good news, I wear dress shoes five days a week! I have three pair, depending on the suit and level of wear (brown, black, cordovan). Of course I am not in the US.
I would also suggest re: hotness and rapidly diminishing, to borrow your term, fuckability, it really does depend (and to channel Rodney Dangerfield: "on what I have no idea.") I see women here (in Japan) who keep their looks and figures well into their forties (though even they are not blindingly hot in the same way as younger women) although I believe many of them, certainly if they are still single, seem to have an almost visible cynicism and contempt regarding men, as if the veil of Isis had been pulled back for them long ago, and if they ever did end up coupling with a man it would be with the resignation of a Circe looking at a particularly muscular swine and thinking, ah well....
As for my acquaintances back home any woman my age who still lives there has ballooned into an almost unrecognizable caricature of her younger self. I can think of two exceptions. The men fare little better, perhaps not better at all I'm just viewing them with different criteria.
It seems pretty obvious that taking care of yourself, avoiding putting on weight, are pretty simple and straightforward.
True. Also I think genetics has something to do with it as I would never suggest most Japanese people are particularly rigorous in their exercise regimens. Certainly diet and, so far, the lack of a culture embracing fatness has something to do with it as well.
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This was one of my major takeaways from my trip to Japan, though more of a confirmation than a surprise. East Asian women retain their youthfulness for a length of time unimaginable to most white (and nearly all black and Latina) women. I would look at Japanese women and think, “She could be 22, or she could be 40.” The neoteny is very real, and very appreciated.
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I agree about marijuana, especially the point about cops. I think the fact that for so many years, cops would harass or even arrest people for making a personal choice to put a substance in their own bodies, helped to lead to the current widespread distrust of cops and the overall rise of extreme leftism. When you're an impressionable 18 year old, the idea of some cop arresting you for using weed naturally makes you distrust the entire system, and especially law enforcement. I think that many young people have been drawn to leftism by this over the years, to our detriment. The drug war helped to create several generations of people who had a natural and substantial reason to distrust and oppose civil order, law enforcement, and the legal system.
I disagree about women/attractiveness in some ways. In my experience, aging by itself takes a very long time to degrade a woman's looks substantially. 90% of the problem is simply obesity. The overwhelming majority of women who are hot in their 20s are still going to be very attractive in their 40s, as long as they do not get fat. They will probably have some subtle wrinkles and lines in the face, but they will still be attractive. If they take really good care of themselves, they will still be attractive even in their 50s. Maybe your standards are higher than mine or something, but in any case, this is how it seems to me. The key purely physical aspects of a woman's attractiveness - facial beauty, breasts, butt, legs, etc. - do not really change shape much with age until quite an advanced age, assuming that the woman does not get fat, although the skin does get less smooth. Out of those characteristics the face starts changing the quickest, probably. But even then, a woman who had a pretty face at 20 is still probably going to have a decent face at 45 as long as she does not get fat.
I don't know why that would be the case any more than they would have that same reaction for any other thing that they clearly know is a crime. Are you positing that impressionable 18 year olds just don't understand what the law is? What it does? They certainly were aware that it was illegal. Does an 18 year old getting into legal troubles for underage drinking and driving naturally make them distrust the entire system and especially law enforcement? I have to imagine it would only do so if they were extremely stupid. The only other explanation is that they'd simply drank the 'first principles' "drugs are my human right" kool-aid, but that's more a problem with the dumb propaganda than it is with the law, itself. If some dumb 18 year old gets arrested for assaulting an officer in their anti-police riot, I'd say that the blame for them possibly turning even more ACAB is the fault of the stupid propaganda that led them to believe stupid things, not laws allowing for riot control.
Most Americans drink alcohol before they turn 21. A slim majority have tried pot at least once. The other major category of crime I'd put here is speeding, most Americans speed at least some of the time. And even people who don't commit these crimes themselves know people who do, who are normal and fine upstanding citizens. As a result, most young Americans experience of police is as someone you watch out for, a threat to your fun, rather than as a protective force of order. When society makes things that most people do illegal, they set up a conflict between the police and the citizenry. The police are in a relationship of distrust, rather than one of cooperation.
Police should only get involved where there is a clear distinction to be drawn between criminals and citizens. Tomorrow I'm going to my niece's sixth birthday party. If I told people there that I was going to the MNF game this week, and I planned to sucker punch someone in a Falcons jersey, as I do every time I go to an Eagles game (GO BIRDS), everyone would kind of edge away from me, and certainly mark me down as a bad person, not normal and not to be trusted. That should be the reaction if I tell people I plan to commit a crime!
Contrast. If I told people I was going to get my BMW up to 100 on the drive home on the turnpike, people might roll their eyes, they might think it's lame, but nobody would look at me and say "That's wrong, that's criminal!" More likely, someone would tell me to watch out for cops.
Weed is probably a little less accepted than speeding, but a certainly a lot more accepted than punching a stranger. If I told a stranger I smuggled my penjamin into the MNF game, and that I was going to get a little buzzed, how would the typical American react?
My opinion is that weed laws, drinking ages, and speed limits should be set up in such a way that most people would view breaking those laws as a bad thing, and view someone who admitted to breaking those laws as outside the norm. I contend that currently, those laws are set up in such a way that breaking them means nothing to most people, either for themselves or others. As a result, the respect for law as a whole is reduced.
Russ Roberts talks about how explaining basic economic ideas from his libertarian perspective "causes people to edge away from you". When you even ask about science on some topics, people edge away from you. In both cases, they will mark you down as a bad person, not normal and not to be trusted. So, this heuristic is pretty terrible for distinguishing anything real.
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No, there is a big difference between various kinds of laws. A blanket principle of "always obey every law, simply because it is the law" makes no sense, since many laws are stupid and/or immoral, and that is even more the case in authoritarian countries than in the US. The law, in and of itself, has no moral authority. So one must pick which laws to obey. The law against, say, raping people makes sense to obey because clearly, raping people is immoral because it seriously harms others. Using marijuana, on the other hand, does not harm others, so the law against doing it is stupid and immoral.
Making laws against things that do not harm anyone except the person who does them is a quick path to raising generations of people who feel contempt for lawmakers and the legal system. And then you get more leftism, because some of those people who feel contempt eventually go down the rabbit hole of starting to believe that the entire system, rather than just part of it, is fundamentally wrong, and that it must be overthrown and so on.
Good thing that this is not what I said. I said that your particular statement makes no sense unless you're extremely stupid, not having any idea how law works, or drank the propaganda kool aid. Yes, dawg, you will be arrested for something that's obviously illegal, even if it's a dumb law. This happening can't possibly shift your position, unless you were really really dumb/naive.
Many teenagers are naive, or more charitably, they think of the people around them naturally while the law is not a natural thing. In the natural world, you either face the consequences for an action with some degree of certainty (therefore it's a bad thing to do) or do not (therefore it's an okay thing to do); there is no "as long as you don't get caught", or rather, the ones doing the catching would be fellow members of the community, not faceless distant "authorities". When they're faced with a dumb law, their naive expectation is that no one would really put you through the wringer over such a dumb law, come on. Everyone does that. They'll just give you a slap on the wrist unless you do it so stupidly openly that the authorities have no choice.
Then they learn what cops are and conclude that cops, too, are not natural, hardly human.
Up to this point, all of this is relevant to all law.
This beggars belief. What kind of childhood did you have? Did you literally never get in trouble for something that seemed dumb? That happened to me allllll the time.
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Great, deep post. AAQC'd.
Some thoughts I have:
Regarding churches: I have certainly felt the same thing about sadness at them dying off. And I am myself part of a relatively small cohort of under-40s at the church I attend now. However, I do think this is creating some healthy pressure on them to adapt. I have spoken to pastors at some declining churches and asked them what they are doing to try and recruit new members - I have never gotten a response that indicated they even think about it seriously. That is not good enough. Sincerely, I believe that churches with that attitude deserve to die out. Meanwhile, I am indeed aware of some churches in my area that have retrenched, come up with some new ideas, and are expanding. I think my church "makes a great product," for lack of a better way to put it; we have something good to offer, and we should capitalize on that. I may look to start a committee about that in the new year where we members can work on that.
Regarding aging: this is just really true, and I commend you for pointing it out. In particular, it makes me think about "bubbles." I have been awash in "self-improvement culture" for many years now; I don't know if I started seeking it out, or if the algorithm presented it to me, or if my involvement developed from my own ideas, or what, but - I have internalized the idea that, to be a desirable partner, you have to improve and maintain yourself. You must meet standards of physical wellbeing and style; cultivate yourself into a person that others would like to talk to and be around; achieve adult levels of life stability.
To me, that is so clear that I can't imagine not doing those things. Conversely, as you mention, there are some people for whom these ideas make up no part of their thinking. I genuinely do not know what they are thinking about instead. I am not entirely judging them; perhaps they like their way of life better. But the outcome is that there are a surprising amount of young-ish people in my extended circle, who are not legitimate romantic prospects for anyone. And these may be people in their age-based "prime;" it only gets worse from here if they don't shape up. Or they may, as you say, be people who spent their entire prime in a totally unviable state, and are now declining even from there. As you say, it makes me really sad. Personally, if I died relatively soon, I have a couple of decades that I can look back on very positively. I made the most of what I was given, more or less. It's very, very painful to think about someone looking back on having failed to do that.
That's pretty much where I'm at unless I'm in court or similar. I went through a strong thrift-store #menswear phase in my 20s, and I put together a pretty great collection of Allen Edmonds and Alden etc dress shoes. But more and more, I found that there wasn't really anywhere one could wear them without being overdressed. A casual leather shoe is more than good enough in the vast majority of situations these days, anything more feels costumey.
Probably they deserve it, but it still makes me sad in a way. The Lutheran church was supposed to be there! I didn't want to go there, but if I wanted to go there, I expected them to be there to welcome me, and somehow it's sad to know that they aren't.
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From my own personal experience as someone who has never been able to bring myself to give two shits about "self-improvement culture," object-level stuff, mostly. Work and whether I should apply to a new job or try for advancement at my current employer; the Napoleonic Wars or whatever other period of history has grabbed my interest recently; the podcast I am listening to; whether my favorite baseball team would be better or worse if they traded for someone or called up the hot prospect du jour; how to reply to the latest interesting post here; whether my car needs an oil change, etc.
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As someone who mostly wears retired running shoes (Altra, not New Balance, and generally more muted colors), do you have any recommendations for finding durable, comfortable, and good-looking shoes?
I have two pairs of Thursdays and once they are broken in they are comfortable and will last for a long time. They have a line of leather sneakers with sheepskin interior lining: https://thursdayboots.com/collections/mens-sneakers-low-top
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SAS shoes.
One pair will likely last you a decade, if not longer.
These mostly appear to be hideous.
Shrug. I like them. Don't know what more to say than that.
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My honest-to-God answer to this is that for daily use, I just buy simple, conservatively-styled Rockports, and replace them when they wear out. Like this. Yes, it's just a basic-ass black shoe; but it feels and performs very well, and it looks okay.
Real shoe connoisseurs will not be impressed by this, but the man on the street or the lady from Inside Sales might. And after all, I live in Ohio. People's expectations are easy to exceed here.
I do believe that durable, comfortable, good-looking true dress shoes exist, and I also think there are some Mottizens who will be happy to chime in with recommendations. I feel like I've seen them talking about it before.
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I wouldn’t go that far, but I’ve been open here about my own change in opinion on this. Very little that weed critics say is wrong, but society needs its vices and it seems to me obvious that weed - a drug that mostly makes people friendly, docile, jovially hungry and relaxed - is better than most alternatives.
And I also think that as you grow up you realize that hangovers really suck, and that many of the more competent and successful people you know (who are also healthy and aren’t destroying their liver etc) consume THC regularly.
Getting absolutely sloshed with your family, who you find annoying: you'll get in a screaming match with them, say something hurtful that you'll regret, worst case maybe get into a physical fight.
Getting shit-ripped on a 20mg edible with your family, who you find annoying: you'll giggle a lot, eat a bunch of snacks, love watching an old movie with them. This is basically exactly what my mother in law wants from me when I visit.
Weed is the perfect drug for easing the frictions of ordinary interactions between family and friends.
Maybe, but I think this only works for intentionally superficial interactions.
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If THC replaced alcohol, it would definitely be a positive for society. If we can find good evidence of that happening, I'll be glad to be wrong a second time.
My gut feel, however, is that consumption of almost all drugs, including alcohol, is up.
For my own self, I drink more than I want to. I don't really ever use marijuana, although I enjoy it. My worry in consuming THC, is that I would simply develop a second habit.
Isn't consumption of all drugs, including alcohol, way down for young people? The only thing that's really up is public opioid use, but not use in general.
People stay at home and consume digital media instead of getting intoxicated.
I may be wrong but I feel like I've read a lot of articles talking about this.
IIRC, marijuana use is way way up. Especially habitual use.
I wouldn't be surprised if youth drinking (under 21) is down, because that would require one to leave the house and have friends. For the population at large, I couldn't find good data for alcohol consumption. What I did find cut off in 2016 or 2019, which is too early to capture marijuana legalization.
When I went to look I found that drug use among Swedish youth is down, especially among boys, but only alcohol use is really down.
Perhaps it's different in other places and only alcohol use is down everywhere. I might have conflated English language articles about decreased alcohol use with Swedish articles about general decline.
Weed is still really unacceptable in Sweden in a way it's not in the Anglosphere, right? I know teenagers in the US are less likely to drink but much more into pot.
Define unacceptable. I'd say that most younger people who aren't shut-ins or teetotalers have at least tried weed at some point. Habitual use among respectable adults is very rare and you most certainly wouldn't smoke with colleagues even if you might get drunk with them.
I'd say it was really unacceptable in the 90s, somewhat unacceptable and naughty in the 00s and almost whatever from the mid 10s and on, among younger people anyway.
I think Sweden might be at the late 00s level of American acceptance?
America sees it as kinda meh outside of pillarized religious or deep rural pockets, or a few blue collar bubbles where marijuana is a big no-no for professional reasons(cops and truckers mostly), pot is a resounding meh in the US(which is much more pillarized than Sweden), even if the olds don't like it. Certainly not surprising to anyone if a respectable adult uses.
So maybe late 00's/early 10's.
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The widespread legalization of sports betting, and to a lesser extent the ubiquity of fantasy sports, have largely ruined sports media coverage. You can’t watch ESPN or listen to a sports talk show or podcast without seeing or hearing numerous gambling ads. Most networks have at least one show dedicated to gambling. Even normal sports coverage (NFL Sunday and similar) is constantly scrolling lines and prop bets as they talk about each team.
It used to be that just some people would talk about it, and they always seemed insufferable. Now it’s a major topic of sports talk, to the point where the actual games and outcomes are largely considered secondary to the lines and the spread.
I have actually had multiple people - a neighbor and a coworker - try to talk me into making wagers on sporting events via apps. Not just telling me about their own, but actively trying to convince me to do it myself. It's the first time I can remember being peer-pressured as an adult.
To be fair to them, I think this is because they'd get some sort of referral bonus, not entirely because they want their decision validated by me.
The gambling thing is really bad in the US because gambling was so strictly prohibited and regulated for so long. In the UK where there’s been a sports betting store on every street corner (in some places literally) for a long time online gambling has come very well but has not led to the same cultural shift, in the US a lot of people don’t even seem to think it’s gambling™️.
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