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https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/when-you-know-youre-impressive-just
FdB has a really interesting substack post up today about people downplaying their success after they got it. He is putting the irony and self-deprecation as a sort of humble brag, as a way to say “yes, I’ve achieved money and success and a family, but it’s all a joke.” I don’t quite agree with his thesis on why it happens that all of these rich and successful individuals are treating this sort of thing as a joke, something that doesn’t matter.
I’m suggesting that this meme might well be an attempt to protect oneself from others. And it serves two purposes. First, it paints the picture of a person who might well be on the loser’s side on things. After all, I get that I didn’t really earn that, so I’m not one of the stuck up people who think they’re better than the working class people who are not getting theirs. This is much like the old noble classes choosing to wear less ostentatious clothes and holding less decadent galas and parties. The losers, whether they earned the fate or not, are easily convinced to see displays of wealth as a target. It’s often good for the family longevity to avoid sending wealthy person signals.
The second reason is to create a layer of cultural mulch around the pathways to success. The truth is that nobody actually gets success without an extremely strong drive to strive for it. If you want your college degree to not be a very expensive but useless poster on your wall, you have to strive to form social networks, strive to get excellent grades, and strive to get work experience in your field to get into position to apply for a good job. And even after, you have to strive to get and keep a good job, or to get a business off the ground. You have to strive to keep up with the skills you need, and if you’re working for others, you need to be constantly looking for ways to upgrade your skills and get a better job. But here again, the meme suggesting that striving is a joke appears to be adaptive. If it’s all a joke you’re a fool to earnestly strive. And if you don’t strive, you’re not competing for the jobs. And they of course don’t need to worry that you will be the one applying for the next position they want. I think this is also why the media doesn’t like Tiger Mothers. Those women and their kids unironically believe that striving is good and that puts them in competition with their betters. The Asian kids who study more than you are trouble. And if white parents start doing this as well, it’s a problem.
I'm going to sound very foolish and even basic here, but...
I kind of don't care?
Freddie's post describes an attitude that he finds irritating. Um, well, good for him? He's perfectly at liberty to be annoyed by anything he likes. But I don't think that should be normative for anybody else, or that constitutes any kind of insight into 21st century American culture, or anything else like that. Freddie is annoyed when successful people are self-deprecating.
Okay? Good for him?
This is almost all of Freddie's posts lately. He's a generally miserable person who's reached the "kids on my lawn" stage of life. Now and then, like Scott, he still knocks out a banger, but he's gotten old and soft and he's mostly defined by what annoys him. He seems particularly annoyed by successful people. (I sometimes wonder if Taylor Swift ran over his dog, with all the essays he writes about how much her popularity annoys him, not that he cares...)
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I'm going to disagree with Freddie on this one. Not about the two specific people he alludes to--for all I know his description is accurate there--but for his general observation of a trend in self-effacement among successful people.
Success is very, very relative, and the more successful you are in some way, the more keenly you are aware how much more successful some other people are in that same field. Unless you're literally the apex, and who knows even then. The inner view of being successful is very different from the outer view.
When I was studying math in grad school, I was keenly aware how much faster and more prepared some of my fellow grad students were. (I paid much less attention to the students who were slower and less prepared.) When I got my PhD, I was successful (in getting the PhD). And yay for me! But I also understood just how much of a near-miss that success was, and that among my cohort there were other newly-minted PhDs who had much more impressive accomplishments under their belts.
Then I got a tenure-track position at my first choice (a small selective liberal arts college). Again, yay for me! But I understood how much that depended on the very generous bump I got being a woman (which was even more pronounced back then). I got that bump in getting the interview (I know the other candidate, also a woman, which was statistically unlikely). I got the bump when I got into my PhD program--that was right around the time when all the math departments started getting serious about recruiting women. I got the bump earlier when, as an undergrad, I went to an NSA-funded summer program literally for women considering mathematics as a career, which generously funded travel to reunions every January at the Joint Math Meetings. The networking opportunities were so good that I got a network even though I suck at networking.
I could go on through other milestones, but I hope that by now I made my point. Yes, I succeeded, but I have an internal view of what that success entails, and how it compares to others in that same field. So if someone is impressed that I was a tenured math professor, my natural inclination isn't to run a victory lap.
PS. I do not have an impostor's syndrome. I figured that if I got accepted / hired / tenured and I wasn't up to stuff, that's their problem. If it didn't work out, I can always go make money.
Maybe this is just the experience of persuing a career in math, but your experience aligns closely with mine, just replace "woman" with "minority". I will confess though that I did suffer imposter syndrome in the beginning but that just became the motivation to go the extra mile, be more prepared, and now I am at that stage in my career where jobs interview for me as much as I interview for them.
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My friends and I talk about this all the time.
"The only true privilege of the poor is hating on the rich. Therefore, it is the moral responsibility of the rich to hateable."
No, don't be relatable. Don't denigrate yourself in front of me. Don't be physically embarrassed of your stature. You've spent your whole life trying to not end up like the poor. You have a visceral dislike for that life. You go live in your world, and us hate on you like it's their god given right.
If I ever end up super rich, I'll be sure to fulfill my responsibility.
This seems like a terrible attitude to have. What do you think you gain by making the world around you worse?
Doing good things and being hated aren't mutually exclusive.
First part of being hated is about optics. If you own a Bugatti, then drive it with the entitlement of a Bugatti driver. If you purchased a Manet, took it off a Museum shelf and popped it in your living room.... then don't act 'terribly sorry for taking it off the shelves'. Own it. Be hate able for doing hate able things. This is especially annoying when rich people disguise themselves as poor people to avoid judgement. They sneakily avoid the challenges that inter-poor camaraderie authetic. You don't struggle to make rent, don't act like you empathize.
Second, it's about saying the wrong things. You're rich enough to not be fire able. Say the annoying things that gets normies cancelled. It makes you hate able, but is in line with your values. It may even result in good outcomes, but it doesn't make you likeable. You can be the person who gives hard truths to the young, because it doesn't affect your stature in society.
So yeah, it's about living authentically. Just doing that will make you hate able.
As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people wealthy enough to both be visible and actually do this (Musk, Thiel, Rowling would be at the top). Being richer than the culture war is a very high bar.
As for me.... I try to drive my sports car like a sports car, but the local police will bust me for it the same as the poor slop in the clapped-out Toyota.
It’s not just being rich, it’s being rich and useful and disagreeable. What do Thiel, Rowling and Musk have in common? First, that they do not care particularly about being part of mainstream Anglo-American ‘high society’ socially, and therefore don’t sweat some missed invitations on the basis of their politics. But secondly - and much more importantly - they retain enough of a use to the former group that they can’t be fully put out in the cold. Musk is useful to the state department’s foreign policy aims, and to NASA (although they don’t have much of a say). Thiel is important to defense. Rowling can’t be truly cancelled in Hollywood because against the ongoing comic book movie collapse Harry Potter is Warner’s most valuable franchise and prints amusement park revenue for Universal, and she has an absolute veto over any use of the IP so they literally can’t afford to say anything that could annoy her in any way.
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I don't think this is true, although i guess it depends on what your criteria for "extremely strong drive" and "success" is.
I know multiple people with only a moderate drive for success that have become dollar decamillionaires and two that are dollar centimillionaires.
The people with extremely strong drive for success are doing very well too of course but not necessarily as good or better. At some point it seems that drive and intelligence hits sharply diminishing returns and you end up with somewhat luck-based results. This goes for both career and startup success.
You need enough drive and intelligence to get a seat at the table but once there you get to roll largely the same dice as the rest of the guys there.
Once again I disagree. I think people don't like Tiger moms is because they engage in zero sum crab bucket behaviour, which if generalised pretty much amounts to torture of the youth, without material or spiritual benefits on the group level. IE. their zero-sum behaviour becomes (very)negative-sum if generalised.
I’m not sure how deliberate it is, but I find it kinda weird just how often the values of the elite just so happen to be things that are absurdly destructive when practiced by lower class people. Not getting and staying married, not working hard and striving at every chance, not avoiding drugs and alcohol, behaving wildly in general, and so on — all of these things will make it much harder for a poor person to gain wealth.
Its not weird at all. First off, money is a great insulator against the consequences of poor behaviour. Secondly, those aren't really the values of the elite. The higher your class the higher the likelihood that you stay married, people don't strive at every opportunity and people in over-consume drugs less.
Finally the things listed makes it harder for everyone to gain wealth (except striving), but the already wealthy do not need to, which is another reason why they can have a degenerate lifestyle without as disastrous consequences.
The elite value the freedom to do what they want and don't care about what happens to other people (or rationalise their preference as an improvement for everyone, damn observable reality), unfortunately if you're poor and without strong willpower you're more more vulnerable to the available vices than the elite. Which of course doesn't make things better, it's arguably even worse.
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There's some truth to this, but it's overstated. The cathedral's message to poor women isn't "have your kids out of wedlock" it's "don't have kids, focus on your career and education". This is dumb because poor people are usually not good at school and have careers they are indifferent to at best, so they won't focus on those things. Likewise the message to the poor is, literally, don't do drugs- and this works about as well as the just say no campaign as a whole, but the media pushing back on that message is invented by poor people!
Isn't this the message to all women, and the poor are just poor responders?
The ladies that respond the best to this message and spend years in rigorous study are likely the women it would be best for our civilization to marry while young enough to maximize their fertility.
Kind of. Pop-country has the opposite message and it’s eleventy-bajillion times as Astro turfed and corporatized as anything else coming out of the entertainment industry- it’s just not aimed at the actual poor. Likewise public schools push birth control hardest in dirt poor urban districts.
As someone who once unwittingly had all his car radio stations tuned to country FM stations, I am surprised that more of The Motte hasn't embraced its "be like my elders: buy some land, marry someone you love, raise some hell, then some kids, and go to church" aesthetic.
As for me, I would describe it like root beer: "insidious, just like The Federation".
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This article annoyed me, because Freddie has had two non-fiction books published by major American publishers, routinely flexes about how many prestige publications he's been published in, and has mentioned on several occasions that his combined annual Substack and freelancing revenue is in the $250k range - and then he has the nerve to turn around and say that he's "never been in the position" to say that he's successful and he knows it?
This is not being humble or modest - this is literally word for word the exact behaviour he wrote an entire article decrying. I would have called him out on it but the comments are only open to paid subscribers.
The difference between him and someone he considers "successful" is that he can't stop. Elon Musk, Carlos Tavares, or even Taylor Swift can wake up tomorrow and say to their reflection in the mirror, "you know what, fuck that, I want to switch to goose farming" and do just that. Their families will not be harmed by this choice, but de Boer must constantly tread water to earn his $250k. He might decide he doesn't want to work that hard and scale down his earnings to just $125k, but he can't just stop writing, he's not a capitalist.
It's hard to say, but the article seems to be about other PMC professionals he went to high school with in Connecticut, not robber barons. Depending on lifestyle, a nutmegger lawyer or consultant can't stop and grow beets in upstate NY any more than Freddie can.
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The eternal struggle of the rich Marxist...
I dunno, this one is just one more on the list of "times FdB almost got it, but stopped just short of the obvious conclusion." The people being criticized here are, to a statistically significant degree, all rich, urban leftists. Freddy is also a rich, urban leftist who writes exellent articles taking 95% of the piss out of a group he knows very well, but that last 5% will not happen until he realizes the system he supports is the same one he criticizes.
I see a similar tone, though not so close to almost getting it, in many of Scotts SSC and ACT writings. I predict the "are we the baddies" meme has a bright future.
Any particular ones you have in mind?
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I actually just caught him being excerpted approvingly in the "Notable and Quotable" section of the Wall Street Journal. Now that's being close to money.
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