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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   939 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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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.

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