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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   896 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 1, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I have been working as a contractor for a FAANG company as a Data Engineer for the last 3 years. And I really need a change of pace. I would like to ideally do work in AI Safety research, but barring that I would like to do Ai/SW Engineering where I work on a real product. Does anyone have advice on how I can break into those roles?

I wrote a larger explanation of what I want at a job on my substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154032964?source=queue But in general I'd love to get thoughts on how to make that transition.

I would like to ideally do work in AI Safety research

Maybe go back to school for a Philosophy PhD?

I can see how a Philosophy PHD would maybe help for a AI Research role, but I would assume those roles would be hiring more for CS or Stats PHDs no? Is there something about Philosphy PhDs I'm missing?

Also, I would like to avoid going back to school if I can. As I think I do already have a pretty robust skillset that could already be productive in these roles, I think it's more about the signaling game for me to find my way into these roles.

Sorry, doesn't answer your question, but would you be comfortable sharing how much your current job pays and how you got into it?

I work for Deloitte Consulting. Deloitte recruits pretty heavily out of the college I went to where I graduated with a major in Business Analytics and minors in Computer Science and Statistics. And I did a pretty heavy amount of personal projects in that time that I had listed on my resume. Some of which include:

  1. Kaggle Competition - Computer Vision Analysis on Cancer Detection through images
  2. Senior Project - Trying to predict crypto prices from news article's title's sentiments (This was prior to chatgpt being a thing)

Within Deloitte consulting they have a few a lot of different tracks they hire out of. But the recruiter I talked to was looking for 2 types of candidates, engineers and business consultants. Having my major be in business made me think they would want to hire me for the business major, but the recruiter looked at my resume and said, "no, your an engineer, we're going to try and hire you as an engineer". The interview process there wasn't too bad and I passed pretty easily. Although when I started working, I quickly realized that Deloitte doesn't have too many clients who hire for software engineers, and the ones that do, Deloitte passes the actual coding work off to a team in India to save cost. So given my goal was to find a role that would let me code and would be a role that didn't get outsourced to India, I found 2 possible clients who would let me do that.

  1. One of the FAANG Companies doing Data Engineering work
  2. Doing Cloud Integrations (AWS, GCP, Azure) projects for banks.

I chose option 1, and I've been doing that for the last 3 years.

As for pay, They started me at 80k, 3 years later I make 115k.

Another update to the situation.

The job situation is...meh. On one hand, the company fixed the issue of commission being unattainable by scrapping it in favor of a modest hourly raise. If I get the sort of overtime I anticipate (10 hours of OT a week) the new position will at least constitute a meaningful raise, hopefully one where I can start getting ahead even if it won't get me to pre-covid financial status. Mercifully, the company saw fit to send me home for the weeks of Christmas and New Year's and run odd jobs instead of marooning me out of town "training" during slow weeks.

On the other hand, the hours are not fun and training has not been going well. The devil's bargain in "You'll get a lot of hours" is "You'll usually do two hours of unpaid drive time a day, one there and one back.". It's a first world complaint, but I didn't get to have much of a NYE party because I'd worked over 12 hours (including 5 hours of driving there and back) starting at 6AM so I was done for by midnight. The company truck I drive has been this market's service truck since April of '22 and has nearly 150,000 miles on it, so I'm looking at driving a shade over 1K miles a week.

Training has not been what I was hoping for. There's been no theoretical/classroom type training or assigned reading at all (I suppose I should just start binge-watching Micro Matic's Youtube channel.). I feel like it took me far too long to learn what, say, a John Guest fitting is. Service call volume has been very slow in the training market so most of what we've been doing has been low complexity. The week before Christmas was a joke in which we barely averaged a call a day and I found myself organizing shelves in the warehouse. I came in hoping to address my weakest area (troubleshooting a malfunctioning draft system) and I feel like I've made very limited progress there (because we've done very little diagnostic work). What diagnosis work I have seen us do has been of mixed quality and has often struck me more as guessing and aiming the parts cannon. I've been sent on service calls back home and feel like an incompetent hack because I can't give a diagnosis that I'm confident in and/or take far too long on a given job because I'm doing things that I've never done before and spend forever rifling through the truck to find the tools/materials in the truck (I'm going to have to reorganize that thing because it's a barely organized ADHD hoarder mess and it's somebody else's mess.). I am aware that theses things will improve with experience, but I was really hoping to get more of experience during training. Here's hoping this last week out of town will be better in that regard.

Installing cooler units is technically simple but can be brutal if they're mounted high on the wall or in the ceiling. The one we did involved (after removing the existing 100lb) manhandling a 150lb cooler unit up a ladder with one assistant below onto a wall mount 8 feet off the ground, using adjacent shelving for assistance. The 100lb one wasn't fun but was doable. The 150lb one exceeded the limits of my upper body strength (which isn't great due to a half-useless arm from a football injury). Aggravating the problem, the new cooler was larger and didn't really fit on the shelf, and we lacked the tools or materials to revise or replace the mount, so we made it "fit" (The install looked like shit, the sort of stuff you'd take pictures of to post a bad review.). I have no idea how they're getting these things into ceilings on top of the cooler without some variety of mechanical assistance. The only silver lining I have on that job is that I was probably getting sick without realizing it at the time, which probably didn't do my my lifting strength any favors.

TL;DR, I'll make at this job and give it a fair chance for a few months out of training, but it's probably going to be another trip to the occupational drawing board.

Had a bad week, I am stable at 7 hours a day but hit that like 2-3 times at most. Had another therapy session and my therapist's only recommendation was to stick to my timetable, block out time, skip the blocks that I missed instead of replanning my day and just be consistent with it.

I also met some of my friends from the internet. These are people I befriended over the internet four years ago and soured things with this summer after my ex-co-founder doxxed one of our mutual friends during his doxxing spree. I am a little concerned writing about this here, too. I changed my username just to avoid getting detected by anyone online, as they do not know what threads I post in. Patching things up was amazing, they are visiting my state and spent a night here, I'll fix my other burnt bridges soon, never good to doxx or argue with people online.

I also did not work out at all for the past week and a half due to my back. I feel 70 percent now but won't deadlift. There is not a lot of progress in terms of progress. The next few weeks will just be me aiming for 7 every week and more. Math Academy has a running board of users, and I am in the top 8 percent after doing close to a month of it for more than 90 minutes a day.

How are you finding Math Academy? I was able to consistent for a while at the start, now I'm on and off and it becomes more and more difficult to get back into it

How to deal with demotivation around feeling too old? That is, the persistent feeling that there's no point in starting anything to try to develop a skill, complete a large project, or make an effort toward a large life-improvement goal, because before I can get anywhere meaningful enough to justify the effort, I'll be dead — there's just not enough time left in my life to get anything of note done, so all that's left is to sit down and pass the time waiting to die.

If you don't already: have kids. It's a new sort journey and one that doesn't end when you die.

Unemployed Alaskan men in their forties are not particularly considered a ‘catch’ on the U.S. dating market.

Luckily Alaska is also amply supplied (although maybe fewer per capita than other areas) with Large Ladies Deserving of Attention!

although maybe fewer per capita than other areas

Alaska has had the most male-skewed sex ratio of any state since before I was born.

Yes -- you need to pick up on the market inefficiencies lying behind this stat.

It sounded like a substantial part of the problem is finding a woman willing to have children together.

I'm 56 and just started a month or two ago an exercise regimen that has already shown results. It consists of 3/4 workouts per week, starting with purely bodyweight (ie no equipment needed though a bar to do pullups helps). I am revisiting French and have made progress such that recently I could have a conversation with two separate French people (not talking about Sartre, but still). I suck at piano but am learning some songs that sound halfway decent. My point here is "too old" is a term relative to your state of mind. I will never again outrun my son (but I'm not supposed to at this point) but I can still run, goddamit.

Meditate on the mundane truthfulness and wisdom of corny motivational poster bromides that you have to get busy living. That's it. There is no esoteric big brained intellectual construct that will snap you out of yourself, you just have to get so fucking bored of being yourself that you do something differently for a change.

The point of starting something else is that the alternative is continuing on the current path which demonstrated by your post clearly isn't satisfying, so even if the something else isn't satisfying either at least it's novel.

You said below you're writing prose and code. I suggest making something physical. I'm loathe to suggest specific projects because you take them too literally to more easily dismiss them but as an example, get a cheap block of modelling clay, cut it up into 5 pieces, then make five heads one at a time and try to make each one better than the last, 20 minutes per head. They'll suck, it doesn't matter. In fact that's the point. I know, you don't have modelling clay or an eye for faces so carve a large root vegetable into five different platonic solids, or whatever. Just do something very cheap and very easy that you can iterate on, see a measure of progress and then throw in the bin without feeling that the waste outweighs the practice. Something that you can take a before and after photo of the evidence of your action. The worthwhile projects you feel you are lacking are built on a foundation of shitty failed prototypes by necessity of not getting it right on the first attempt. Then pick a bigger project and start failing better.

If you need a less specific, more esoteric guide try something like Eno's Oblique Strategies or buy a copy of Wreck This Journal and give yourself a hard time limit of one week to fill it. You already have a limitations mindset so start using it to prompt some urgency and creativity. Feeling old should give you more motivation, not less. If you want to write prose or code give yourself one day to write something wilfully shitty and amateur, at least it will be finished. Writing is a procrastinator's luxury where you can always find another imperfection that can be endlessly re-re-rewritten. You don't have to abandon your big projects but take a break to recalibrate first because currently you're not actually hitting your own targets.

Meditate on the mundane truthfulness and wisdom of corny motivational poster bromides that you have to get busy living.

Or get busy dying.

The point of starting something else is that the alternative is continuing on the current path which demonstrated by your post clearly isn't satisfying, so even if the something else isn't satisfying either at least it's novel.

Or there's the third alternative: ending it all.

Maybe, but if you haven't done it by now, what would change to motivate you in that direction?

There are many alternatives.

You are asking about how to deal with demotivation. The implication is that you require some motivation to alleviate the feeling that you're too old and everything is pointless.

You have existing goals and you are losing time. You can choose to advance toward your goals or you can choose to remain static.

ending it all.

Stop thinking about ending and think about completion. "I'm stuck on level 7.2 and Mario has stopped moving. Should I throw my Nintendo in the bin?" No, just plug the controller back in.

I have spent half a decade publicly writing about my own life including the parts where I went to LARP as a founder at a failed from the beginning startup, being an orbiter for girls who look worse than me and fuckng my life yet i did fix some things in my life and have been constantly tryng to do better.

You can only go forward. No matter how good or bad life was, we cannot live clinging to those beliefs. I wish I had not done a lot of things. All my mistakes are public here. I just wish I had done all of it with 100 percent intensity and was consistent and mindful in doing what I did.

I am 24, not young by any means and have never had a job due to my failed attempts at starting a startup, yet i still do math and web dev stuff so that I can ultimately be a good engineer and tackle harder fields. More than that, the satisfaction in a good day's work beats most feelings in the world. No one does things of note, we will not care about Newton since at some point life as we know it will end. I was told 4 years ago here to embrace sun and steel over these sharp spikes in pleasure from things that I know are wrong, the guy who recommended it, standard_order was right, and I suggest the same to you.

I can sleep at night knowing that I am not wasting my life when I work, you may find my line of thinking valuable.

You can only go forward.

No, you can also call it quits and take the exit.

You can. But why not do something in the meantime? If you end up calling it quits, what have you lost by pursuing an interest in the meantime? If you don't call it quits, maybe you'll have achieved some of what you want in 1, 3, 5 years instead of just being 1, 3, 5 years older and still dissatisfied?

I am 24, not young by any means

It's funny... I said much the same thing when I was 25. I had a coworker laugh and tell me that I was, in fact, young. And so are you, although I know first-hand how hard it is to recognize it. Think about it rationally: assuming you live to 80 (a decent run, and you could have even longer if you're lucky), you are barely past the 1/4 mark of your life. That is young by most people's metric.

But that aside, my general realization has been that people are too worried about not being young any more. And that includes me! But I'm trying to get over that. I turn 40 this year, so I guess I'll officially be over the halfway point. But I'm trying not to worry about that, because every moment I spend fretting about my youth (or lack thereof) and mortality is a moment wasted. So I figure I need to try to spend those moments doing something meaningful (or at least fun) instead.

My perspective has to be warped because my life is defined by inaction and sloth, anything that can make me change courses is beneficial, having a sense of urgency would help a lot. For many the opposite is true. I can remember being 20 and posting here, I am not old and quality of life at 80 is not the same as that at 20, more than that I cannot find fun in activities I could because my destructive behaviors seep into everything else.

I don't want to come back to this thread again in a year and lament having wasted another year of my time here. Your perspective is totally valid, I am in the camp that did not care at all so more urgency now helps balance it out.

The good thing is that you are alive, everyone I meet who is 40 is dead inside, at least here, they are alive sure but they are dead in terms of their enthusiasm for live. I like this forum a lot, guys like you and the majority of this place is people older than me who still do things in life, good things. Before hearing about Steve Maxwell or former users like unearned_gravitas, I would not have believed that you could in your 50s or in Maxwell's case 70s and still be alive in a very real sense. It is extremely whitepilling.

Yeah I've known a lot of old people in my life. And it kinda varies widely what they are like. Some have physical issues and there truly is not much you can do about that. But aside from them, it seems like it truly does come down to a mindset issue. It's really cliche to say stuff like "age is just a number" (and rationally it isn't true, your body does objectively wear out as you get older), but the old people I have known who lived a good life all had that kind of mindset.

I think that it is one of those things where the human mindset is powerful, and can shape our experiences. If you allow yourself to feel that you're old and washed up, then you will be. But if you keep up a positive mindset that you can still have things of value to accomplish and offer, you will be able to. If you want to see an interesting example, look for an interview or something with Donald Knuth. Dude is 86 and still going strong, he has a bit of the old man tendency to ramble in conversation but his mind is still quite sharp. My goal is to try to accomplish something like that - I'm not on Knuth's level by any means, but I feel like I can at least keep my mind sharp and enjoy the things I do now even if I live to 86.

I don't expect that this will be helpful, but this honestly just sounds ridiculous to me. I know guys in their 40s running PRs, guys in their 50s lifting heavy, guys in their 60s doing cool projects. Yeah, some things are going to be gone to the sands of time when it comes to being the best you could ever possibly have been, but learning and accomplishing news things remains entirely feasible well into middle-age and beyond. You're going to wind up dead eventually either way, why would that dissuade you from learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu today?

You're going to wind up dead eventually either way, why would that dissuade you from learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu today?

Because for me "learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu" would be the project of many, many decades, if ever, given how poorly my childhood karate lessons went given the gross and fine motor skill problems from my Sensory Processing Disorder. (You know the thing that most people call "muscle memory"? Practically non-existent for me. You've ever heard it said of an uncoordinated person "can't walk and chew gum at the same time?" Yeah, part of my bad posture is that I'm always looking down, because I need to be able to see my feet and where I'm placing them to walk.)

Because for me "learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu" would be the project of many, many decades

You'll be decades older anyway.

I don‘t believe you can‘t do sports. Or that it would take you longer than your life expectancy to achieve anything else. I generally don‘t believe depressed people when they make grandiose claims of incapacitation, exceptional uglyness, unworthiness, being ‚too adhd to work‘, etc. The causation goes: you‘re depressed, therefore you think you can‘t do anything, not : you can‘t do anything, therefore you‘re depressed.

OK, I guess if I thought I couldn't learn anything physical, I'd just give up too.

How old are you and what are some projects you’re considering?

43. Writing fiction. Writing a non-fiction book (political manifesto). Trying to improve my programming ability (I've been "learning to code," as it were, since a was a little boy writing in BASIC on an Apple IIc. I took a comp sci class at Caltech where we had to write in Scheme). Fatherhood (which starts with somehow managing to get a date for the first time in my life).

You can definitely learn to code well if you were Caltech material 20-25 years ago.

How old are you?

Sorry, I input my age as a number at the start of my reply, and the formatting turned it into a numerical list point. Should be fixed.

My perspective on this was colored heavily by a now deleted video of survivethejive where he talks about the ideal of byron's "cultured thug", a man who combines good aspects you do not see together, a jock nerd for instance. I can comment on social life however and the simple answer is to say hi to everyone, go out more, cold approach more girls and if you really need it, ask for explicit help on this topic.

We also are far more online and live in a much faker world. e/acc is a LARP by people who have never read Land and lindy is quite solid about everything, look at Steve Maxwell. Also, you develop better instincts if you have more discipline. A lot of what we do is made of sub habits we are totally unaware of, for every scholar who works late at night, there were plenty who followed routines and rituals and were just as creative. David Lynch is a super creative director, one of the best of his times who lives by the same routine daily.

Not smart or successful so take anything I say with a grain of salt.

This is a very real concern, I apologise for my suggestions, I was unaware that you were married and had kids. Atomization of the individual is quite sad, I come here for similar reasons as people where I live just are not the best. I still try to say hi to everyone, irl or online and that helps me a lot.

I mean, the answer is that you’re probably not putting yourself out there socially the same way as your grandfather was. You can go to church and hang out and talk to other people afterwards, you can join the elks, you can talk to your neighbors.

These things still exist.

Long-time Motte / ACX / rat-adjacent lurker here. I am hoping to get some input from some of the many pro-family posters on the Motte to help me get out an increasingly deep rut I've found myself stuck in.

The general thrust of my thoughts is that I assign a high probability to my access to status and resources becoming much worse in the near future. I've thought about what this means for my previously held desire to enter a relationship and form a family and have come to some undesirable conclusions.

The most salient information about me:

  • Mid twenties, lower-middle class background
  • Midwit remote tech worker, upper-mid 6 figure net worth

Why I believe that the future is quite grim:

  • The current state of AI, while unlikely to cause 30%+ structural employment or ASI FOOM imo, seems likely to commoditize the majority of intellectual labor within one or two decades
  • For the subset of middle tier work where AI may not be capable of performing economically, unrestricted immigration policies and flight from the intellectual jobs seems likely to crush the income and working conditions of the remaining jobs
  • This means that the only real paths to accessing resources and status are going to be to either be sufficiently Elite Human Capital so as to be granted access to the moneyed class, or be born into money i.e the west economically becomes South Korea
  • As I'm not intelligent enough to win my way into increasingly narrow paths into the elite nor born into the upper class it then seems likely that my personal access to status and resources is going to plummet

It's well litigated on the Motte why South Korean TFR is rock bottom, but given this is how I model the future of the western world to look like as well, I also find myself struggling to justify forming a family under these conditions. Below are some scattered thoughts.

  • While it's often claimed that singledom is a luxury good, I think it's quite likely that a relationship and family would be a net negative on my resources
  • As I currently spend underneath the poverty line, I can probably eke out a low-status low-resource lifestyle for myself if single, even in most of the non-apocalyptic worst case scenarios
  • I think this probably goes out of the window with a family, any potential partner of mine would either have less resources than me and rely on me to provide, or be roughly in my economic bracket and would desire a much higher standing of living, even before the fairly significant expenses of childrearing
  • This is not a huge problem in a world where I can obtain above average resources through my labor, but is very stressful to contemplate when it's unlikely I'll accrue the neccessary capital to support an entire family
  • Attempting to do so has the real risk of compromising my own ability to maintain the neccessary capital to stay alive, which makes me anxious about whether such a huge sacrifice is worth it

  • Similarly to South Korea I expect the lives of children to become much worse than now, a striver rat race for largely zero-sum access to status and resources that I'd be largely powerless to protect my children from
  • The alternative is a low-status low-resource life, and from my upbringing I'm well aware of how fundamentally awful a low-status low-resource existence can be
  • While I am personally non-conformist enough to tolerate such a lifestyle in the event labor becomes devalued, I'm not sure I can accept the repugnant conclusion that it's better for my children to live barely tolerable lives of suffering rather than to not exist at all

To be clear, I would prefer not to hold these views - I want to be someone that is optimistic for the future and that is capable of providing for a happy family, but this seems increasingly out of reach for me based on how the world is trending.

TLDR: please try to convince this highly neurotic autist that either

a) current middle-class access to status and resources is unlikely to diminish within my lifetime.

b) a committed relationship and family formation is still worth pursuing even with severely diminished access to status and resources.

Similarly to South Korea I expect the lives of children to become much worse than now, a striver rat race for largely zero-sum access to status and resources that I'd be largely powerless to protect my children from

Semi-skilled blue collar work may be unglamorous but it pays a living wage. This is an effective floor on what you can access- and the deal keeps getting better for these people. Don’t be dumb. If your kids have to go into the trades or the army that’s fine and fertility trends will ensure this isn’t too terrible of a deal. You can just not have your kids do the extreme striver rat race.

Remember, the US is quite literally the wealthiest society in human history. The floor for competent people is quite high, even if you’re not the best of the best.

Semi-skilled blue collar work may be unglamorous but it pays a living wage. .... Remember, the US is quite literally the wealthiest society in human history.

This is true as of right now, but I'm not convinced that it will still be true in my child's generation. It seems likely some combination of AR/VR, robotics and immigration will eventually come for these jobs too, although definitely slower than white-collar ones. As I mentioned in my other comment though, it does seem unlikely that both blue-collar work can be economically unviable and that the west is insufficiently prosperous to keep everyone fed and housed at least, so I should probably be less neurotic on that point.

You can just not have your kids do the extreme striver rat race.

I think this is directionally true, but I think it's generally very difficult to suppress the instinct to want to give your children everything you can.

In some ways it was easier for my parents because they barely had anything and thus considered keeping me alive and out of prison a success, but now I have some level of optionality it's really hard to suppress the instinct that I should provide for my children as much as humanly possible. I suppose I did turn out wildly beyond my father's expectations despite everything so perhaps I should be less concerned about this.

Thanks for responding, you've given me some things to consider.

I mean, that’s fair- you want your kids to turn out well.

But PMC strivers seem to turn out badly? They’re miserable and lonely. Who says human flourishing has to be determined by the numbers in your bank account or the trips you take? America is a wealthy enough society that being mediocre is still getting by very well. There’s no need for a rat race to be in the top 5% when it ruins the rest of your life.

But PMC strivers seem to turn out badly?

While I agree that the QoL floor for someone reasonably competent in the West is in absolute terms a good deal, it seems quite obvious to me that the winners of the PMC striver game live, on average, relatively superior lives to those who lose such games and that this disparity is likely to increase with time. Real wages have been flat for decades in most industries, pretty much only PMC's have actually seen notable real wage growth. The fact that most people have decent lives is because the absolute pie of American prosperity is so large, not because they're getting similar percentages that they got in the past.

  • Working conditions are generally better for successful strivers: while the process of getting there is perhaps unenviable, there's many winners who end up in highly paid sinecures while the losers end up serving at the pleasure of their bosses in much worse conditions.
  • Those numbers in your bank account, even if never used for consumption, represent a level of material security that most people don't have access to. The modal American is fucked if they get a cancer diagnosis and can't work for a year: this isn't as much of a problem for a PMC with enough money to live off savings while doing chemo, and enough human capital to find another job after having sat out of the labour market for some time.
  • While I think luxury and conspicuous consumption is highly overrated, there's many life improvements resistant to the hedonic treadmill that are disproportionately available to the PMC class e.g positional access to real estate to improve the commute, outsourcing unpleasant labour, and access to elective healthcare procedures. While some of these will become more accessible as productivity improves, positionally desirable land and access to the time of other people is always going to be zero-sum and disproportionately available to those with more resources and status.
  • Status, while ghoulish to chase for its own sake, is instrumentally important: access to higher quality people and ability to influence the world is arguably even more important in a society that is likely to become more and more productive.

Yes, it's possible to over-optimize for striving: the stereotypical divorced and obese multi-millionaire MD is a sad outcome that I'd highly prefer to avoid. At the same time, it's not like the average non-striver is particularly happy or surrounded by friends in this atomised society we've created for ourselves, and there's plenty of strivers that end up rich and still have happy lives and families outside of work.

Perhaps you're right and the juice will eventually be no longer worth the squeeze: competition gets so high that it's no longer worth it to compete, and the losers still get tolerable lives in the end. That doesn't change the fact that the winners will enjoy the spoils and the proles won't.

It's good you're at least thinking about whether you want marriage and family in your mid twenties, rather than trying to ignore and put off the question as sometimes happens.

Midwit remote tech worker, upper-mid 6 figure net worth

Materially, you are better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. Maybe the next generation will do worse, maybe not, but unless something really apocalyptic happens, they will still be materially well off by historical standards. Even if you have to retrain into a more working class job, that's not the end of the world, or even your world. If you have a good and reasonable wife, she will work with you on whatever ends up happening. My father was a not particularly successful night baker and then cook, despite having a college degree from the 70s; these things happen. He still didn't have a bad life, and got to indulge his intellectual preferences in his books clubs and with his family.

I don't necessarily practice what I preach, but you and your (potential) family aren't simply pawns in the games of elites, but also actors who are subtly pushing civilization in some direction, to be determined by your own values. Shall we let the machines do all the email jobs, and pay other people to walk each others' dogs and raise each other's children? That seems like kind of a silly economy, but I'm sure I have ancestors who were household servants, and I guess if that's what my grandkids are doing, it's not ideal, but basically acceptable. Shall we enlist in the Butlerian Jihad? I'd rather not (and wouldn't be able to do much of the work), but it's probably better than just kind of giving up. Shall we join a cult in Alaska? Maybe! I had some friends who were doing something like that, and they formed this beautiful a cappella choir that was touring the country and some other countries, singing everywhere. Maybe it's worth joining a cult to wander around creating random acts of choral music! Yesterday, I visited Saint Anthony's Monastery in Florence, Arizona. They have 50 monks from all over the world, making an unusually beautiful monastery in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. They planted a new olive orchard, and built a small aviary. They won't have children, but it's so interesting that they're doing that, and the grounds are so beautiful! They have these Byzantine style mosaic icons with quarter inch glass tesserae. I want to be able to do that! They're so beautiful, and will continue to be beautiful for perhaps hundreds of years. Perhaps I should plant grape vines this spring, and a new apricot tree.

These are half baked thoughts, which I don't have energy to develop further just now. Basically, living a certain kind of constrained lower middle class knowledge worker lifestyle is probably just a tiny blip, sure, but you and your potential family can outlive it, and find other interesting and potentially beautiful things to do, even with a rather dull and low status day job.

Thank you: this was a beautiful post, I feel it has helped me a fair bit.

Materially, you are better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. Maybe the next generation will do worse, maybe not, but unless something really apocalyptic happens, they will still be materially well off by historical standards.

You're absolutely right, and I should make efforts to be more grateful for this. I'll confess I have some anxieties around being forced into poverty from being brought up by parents who grew up "third world poor" without adequate nutrition or modern healthcare and who passed down very similar anxieties. Rationally I do agree that outside of the really apocalyptic timelines I cannot control neither I nor my family are ever going to experience that sort of real material deprivation.

Even if you have to retrain into a more working class job, that's not the end of the world, or even your world.

This is true as well. I think it's easy to get caught up as thinking of your job title as your identity in modern society: internally I can't deny that a lot of my identity is centered around being a "tech guy", which is probably something I should work on. It does seem likely to me that either "I'm not competitive in the blue-collar labour market" or "my current capital is insufficient to support my family" are possible outcomes, but if I'm no longer fit to unclog a toilet likely society will be wildly productive enough to keep my children fed and housed at least.

Yesterday, I visited Saint Anthony's Monastery in Florence, Arizona

I looked up some pictures, and it really does look sublime. I'd like to visit some day as well, life permitting.

find other interesting and potentially beautiful things to do, even with a rather dull and low status day job

I think I would be happy if my children could find something they wanted to do, even if that does end up being joining a cult or a monastery. My father considered his job complete if I survived to eighteen having been fed three meals a day and without a criminal record, perhaps I need to take some lessons from him.

The new SSC post looks like something you would be interested in, even if it doesn't address family formation directly.

I did read it, but didn't find it too interesting. Speculating about space colonisation post-singularity is so far out of society's current frame of reference it feels largely like navel gazing. I find myself more concerned with the more realistic short-term outcomes that might occur.

New year's resolutions, motteizeans?

I intend to eat more vegetables. I intend to do this by ensuring I have vegetables in the house and including a vegetable portion in meal planning.

I intend to paint more, and especially figure out how to paint while the children are awake. I've been looking into cold wax and oil painting, and have bought supplies to make some. It's especially good for abstracted landscapes, and has a nice smooth body to it, that's good for scratching through layers and spreading with pallet knives. It is more child friendly than hot wax painting (encaustic), which I like a bit more, but haven't done in years, since I need an actual studio space and several consecutive hours, but has a similar wax finish that refracts light nicely, and allows similar carving techniques.

Keep adding entries to my log of things that I did each day that mark material progress.

17% body fat. Might have to resort to cryolipolysis, since I am a hard gainer and all my lifting gains have resulted in very little additional meat on my bones.

Isn’t that the procedure which basically destroyed a famous model? I would tread lightly

What's that?

It's a procedure that destroys your subcutaneous fat by chilling your skin. Adipose tissue tolerates cold less than other tissues and its cells die. The patented trick is finding the right length and intensity of chilling to both kill fat cells and not end up with a frostbite.

Is that safe? What happens to the dead cells?

It's 99% safe. The dead cells are reclaimed by the same processes that reclaim other dead cells.

In 1% of the cases there's a paradoxical growth of adipose tissue. This is what happened to Evangelista, as mentioned by @Corvos

I'm going to be more kind to my friends and knit a hat that looks like a frog.

Why frog

I like frogs.

Stick to my routine daily, that is pretty much it. Vegetables are great, you can blend them up to increase consumption, we consume far more spinach by just adding it to curries.

Stop smoking weed. It's not that I'm a big stoner or have ever been, but I dabbled in weed vapes a bit because they're by far the cheapest way to get intoxicated and it's just a waste of time. Aside from being high being kind of fun I can't think of any real positive. I tend to wind up staying up too late/sleeping poorly and get nothing done around the house/at all. I also really need to get a better job soon and pissing hot on a drug test isn't a restriction I can afford right now.

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