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Notes -
A long time ago @Lewis2 made the following accurate (I think) sociological assessment:
It caught my attention back then because the first sentence is a perfect description of my father, even though he technically counts as a more or less solidly middle class suburbanite. It made me think about the everyday lives of the plebs and the various ways this life trajectory is markedly different from that of the classes above them in the social hierarchy. I’ll offer some arguments about this here, as I don’t think this would be valid content in the culture war thread.
One sociological observation I’ve read on dissident blogs is that the plebs and their rulers have radically different notions of retirement and leisure. Middle-class and upper-class youths are conditioned from early on to have low time preference, so they generally have at least a vague idea that a proper life goal for themselves should be a comfortable retirement spent travelling and doing other fun stuff after a long and fancy career. This, on the other hand, entails that their youth is to be focused on studying, busting your ass, networking, building connections, learning marketable skills, keeping up appearances. It’s obviously no fun, but it’s still necessary.
For the pleb, such considerations don’t appear, one obvious reason being that high time preference is the norm for him. The argument that he should plan ahead for a long and happy life would seem laughable to him and doesn’t even occur to him. The lives of plebs are uncertain and messy. As far as they’re concerned, the time to have fun, feel unburdened and do what you want is in your youth, because you cannot be sure about what comes later. In other words, their lives are generally front-loaded.
If you also consider that the only jobs available to the plebs are the shitty menial jobs, whether they entail physical labor or not, this means that the plebs doubly exploit themselves: they perform shitty jobs that heavily tax either the body or (in the case of shitty office/cubicle desk jobs and the like) the mind while at the same time routinely endangering their health: eating crappy processed/fast food all the time, binge-drinking, using all sorts of shitty illegal drugs, abusing prescription drugs, smoking, staying up late and not having enough sleep in general, partying, developing addictions etc. The combined effect of all of this is that the pleb turns into an overall wreck by the age of 50. What does this mean exactly? Your knees and back give out, and your liver and heart are all fucked up. Just moving your arms around can be painful in itself. In general, you’re in constant pain, and can call yourself lucky if you don’t get addicted to painkillers. Even if you have a nice garden/backyard, you can no longer cut firewood, paint the siding, clean the gutters, mow the yard, garden, do carpentry etc.
You never had much intellectual or spiritual curiosity to begin with, and the goyslop/prolefeed you’ve been watching all your life on the TV or your phone has rotted your brain as well. And when you stop working and retire, you lose the one source of daily stimulation and sense of direction and purpose you still had. This is the thing that explains “long afternoon naps and constantly falling asleep in front of the TV”. Never in your life did you read literature or had any interest in history, culture, arts etc. and it’s not like you’ll start to do this when you’re old already.
You become bitter and irritated, staring into the void of the abyss as Nietzsche described it. Most of the friends you used to have are now dead, crippled or sick and require regular care. Once you retire and your children reach the age when they no longer need to be looked after and it’s no longer necessary to organize events where they can play and hang out with other kids, you no longer have much of a reason to interact with your acquaintances of the same age, and your social circle erodes and eventually disappears. This is why elderly male social alienation/isolation is a big issue.
Again, all of this experience markedly differs from that of the middle and upper classes. I assume many of the regulars here belong to these classes and yet not have a general awareness of this, which is why I posted it here. (I don't think it belongs to the culture war thread.)
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