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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally.

I was pointing to the memetic desire of travel. A lot of women "like" travel because they think it is the right thing to like. A lot of men "like" sports for similar reasons (or any of a host of other domains, for both men and women).

You are, I hope, aware that there are some (presumably large) number of women who do actually have fulfilling, important jobs which give them a sense of purpose and self-actualization?

Here's the thing - No! I am not. That's kind of the point of a lot of these threads. It's the entire point of this Last Psychiatrist post.

Women (again, and Men) may self-report that their job is fulfilling and important. The argument I'm making is that this largely a cope. Most jobs do, in fact, suck. People do these shitty jobs because of the meaning they find elsewhere. That could be a "mission" oriented meaning (i.e. being a public defender because they believe in helping those who cannot afford an attorney etc.). It could be a means-to-and-end motivation (i.e I'll work the midnight shift at McDonalds because I think it'll show initiative and maybe lead to a path to manager). Or, most commonly, family motivation (Homer, from the Simpsons, has a famous episode wherein the camera pans over his desk at the power plant to reveal a photo of Maggie, his daughter, captioned with "do it for her.")

The point is that it is extremely unlikely for either men or women to truly believe that their primary job gives them a superabundance of transcendental meaning. A job can be part of that sense of meaning but there's usually something else.

Family is a really good "something else" for reasons I covered in my initial response. It's a really good something else for both men and women. Gee, wouldn't it be fantastic if there was a way for men and women to start a family and then agree upon a positive sum system for raising that family? That's what these threads are arguing for - that what makes people truly happy is very different from what current ideologies say makes people happy and the downstream negative impacts on society are kind of a big deal (to wit; declining fertility rates).

Dealing with that has made me quite a bit more sympathetic to the plight of a woman who is similarly atypical or who dreams of transcending the often unimaginable suffering endured by humans

Childbirth can be dangerous and is always painful. But calling it "unimaginable suffering" or a "horror" seems to be hyperbole to me. Hyperbole caused by motivated reasoning, is my suspicion.

It’s one of the things that elevates us above the beasts, who are mere slaves to their evolutionary programming.

I think I meet you half way on this one.

Evolutionary programming is literally a set of skills that has resulted in evolutionary success. I am very happy that I am a slave to "fire is hot don't touch it" evolutionary programming. I am very happy that I am a slave to "I can run upright for long periods of time because I am a low body-hair bipedal" even though that means I will never, ever, ever bench what a juvenile chimp can. The gift of human insight and introspection is wonderful for humans and a large part of societal organization is used to control unruly evolutionary programming, but that doesn't make or evolutionary programming or instincts fundamentally wrong. If you follow that slippery slope long enough, you get to gender / sex abolition and all of its accompanying WTF-ery.

And if - I get that this is a very big if - we can figure out a way to carry on the species without subjecting women to the horrors that this author points to

If we designate childbirth as a "horror" for all of society, we are committing ourselves to eventual species level slow suicide. Sure, sure, "artificial wombs" and Magic Technology Stuff will save us. It won't. Society is social and ideas matter.