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Meritocracy is unsustainable. The idea that one could skip competing in life and get a low paying job and have kids ignores the fact that you would likely end up with an unattractive partner. A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder. You aren't getting an iq 120 woman with a beautiful body and high general factor of personality if your life is mediocre.
In traditional societies, people didn't have to worry about competing to the same degree. If your father farmed you farmed, if your dad was a blacksmith you became a blacksmith. Instead, we spend 20 years fighting a zero-sum game for who can post the most travel photos in tropical countries, get the most educational prestige, get an attractive apartment etc. If you can't get into a good college, you can get a master's degree. If you didn't get the top job after graduating, you can become a middle manager at a mediocre firm and outrank the junior at a good one. By trading time for status in a zero-sum game, people are incentivized to push life ahead of them and not settle.
Eating disorders are a lot rarer in traditional societies. Lip fillers, overtly sexualized social media and obsession over appearance are having a ruinous influence on women's mental health. Instead of marrying one of the guys next door, they are either going to absurd lengths to compete or having poor self-esteem for not looking like a tiktok model. Instead of giving people a place in the world and treating with them respect for filling the role that place fulfills, we have a race in which we judge people's worth and moral value on their place in it.
Fascinating assertion. How many bay area tech wives have you met?
If they were working at gamestop how would their dating life be?
Anecdotally? Not as bad as you might think.
My first Serious Girlfriend was a cute goth chick who was working the pretzel stand at the local mall while I was working at the video store across the way.
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Not true in the real world. There are plenty of senior devs with master's degrees at respectable firms in expensive apartments who aren't getting any at all. At best, they'll get a 36 year old polyamorous woman, and this incites burning rage in Mottizens.
Meanwhile, plenty of fit, funny, socially-skilled guys who stayed in their home town to work at the hardware store seem to have kids, often with multiple women.
Yeah. I've heard lots of tales of fit multimillionaire virgins in Silicon Valley.
Pretty sure you're an order of magnitude off.
Yeah. Although I'm a bit surprised that said senior devs can't find gold diggers willing to hold their noses for the money.
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Sorry if this comes across as edgy, but have you considered the possibility that the "travel photos in tropical countries", or at least that which they are a proxy for, are not zero-sum because travelling to tropical countries is actually enjoyable for many people? Personally I'm also partial towards apartments that do not come with black mold in the bathroom and an air-blowing heater-cum-AC that has the noise level of living next to a busy airport like the first one that I had to live in in the US did.
I often see the internet right work off of a model of humans that leans in the general direction of "the serfs would still be happily plowing the fields while wearing potato sacks; anything more they get is useless for them and just part of a zero-sum competition for status". To the extent this claim is not just an unfalsifiable value assertion that denies agency to vast numbers of people, it is sufficiently at odds with people's self-reports and intuition that it needs more evidence than vaguely pointing at eating disorders and Instagram anxiety and claiming that these are sufficient proxies to compare the all-around utility of the present unfavourably to that the past.
If you ask those questions of me personally, the answer for most of them is "yes", based not just on what my understanding (through reading the occasional old text) of medieval peasants but also just comparing myself to members of my parent generation who have still inherited an older work ethic, scarcity-oriented life philosophy et cetera. For the general population, I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced that these are the right questions to ask either - is self-report actually the end-all measure of utility, or could we look at two equally happy people and say that the happiness of one of the two is actually more legitimate?
More importantly, even if we find no difference between the peasant and the modern youth in all of those criteria (or even a difference favouring the peasant), symmetry remains broken in the other direction in that scarcely a modern youth would be happy to trade places based on a description of the medieval life but almost any medieval peasant would be based on a description of the modern one. In fact, we can surmise (based on experience in the Cold War and social inequality within modern countries) that the mere presence of those who live the modern template causes any zeal, excitement and eudaimonia of those who live a life of back-breaking work to feed themselves to evaporate.
Considering that, doesn't it seem facile that theories such as the parent poster's always single out a form of society that just happens to align with their aesthetic preferences as the one that actually makes people happier? Communists also have a good case that the life of occasional deprivation and abuse under a planned economy - especially coupled with the occasional drives for purpose such as a push for space colonisation - would have been superior to our abundant anomie, and that the people living under it were merely rendered unhappy because the Capitalist West gratuitously flexed its abundance in their faces. In fact, in this way, perhaps the West is really to blame for the unhappiness of serfs anywhere, be they communist, feudalist, or the underclass in a capitalist society! Following down that train of thought may lead you to a very socialist place.
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I mean, maybe, maybe not for the peasants who made it to 60, but there are billions of people alive today who would've either died in childbirth, of some random disease, or been sent off to die because some noble wanted 9 more square miles without a choice, and so on, and so forth.
Also, I just think people who think peasants were dumb, happy proles are kind of ignoring the actual history of medieval Europe, where not only did medieval peasants actually gain economic power because of plague rats, but there were multiple peasant uprisings and the like.
I'm just fundamentally against pastoral nostalgia for medieval times, whether it comes from edgy right-wingers who hate capitalism and think peasants in 1450 were happy, religious serfs or edgy left-wingers who hate capitalism who think peasants were happy laborers who worked less than they did.
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I would much rather the life of a peasant, but it's not possible to live such a life now. They ate well, had well made (if fewer) clothes, and largely happy lives. But such prosperity depended on the existence of the commons, from which peasants could obtain firewood, fish, trap small animals, etc. Once enclosure made these illegal, the common people chose to move to the cities and become wage slaves. It was preferable to attempting to be peasants under the current private property regime. Given that they had direct experience with both realities, I trust their judgement that I would not want to be a peasant without access to a commons and a traditional community.
Said peasants also buried half their children because they didn't have germ theory, vaccines, or antibiotics.
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I mean, I'm pretty sure most of us here are self-aware enough to not hold "happiness" as the supreme/only metric for measuring the worth of one's life, and even those who claim otherwise don't usually act that way.
Taken to its logical extreme, that point of view advocates for wireheading, or at least doing as much fentanyl as you feasibly can.
I'm quite sure that I'm not alone in having values more complex than mere happiness, I value freedom, comfort, luxury, knowledge, health and myriad other things, all of which are certainly in better supply today than a medieval peasant could hope for. These might not reflect on my mood, because humans are cursed to run on hedonic treadmills, but they are still strictly superior to not having them.
As such, I can't even say that people are behaving irrationally (with reference to their preferences) when they prioritize their lifestyles over having kids, it's more of a coordination failure on a societal scale than a personal one. Sure, most women when polled want something like 3 kids as opposed to 1.5 or even a replacement 2.1, but how many of them would actually trade an upper middle class lifestyle for that?
I know I start sweating thinking about cost of living when my girlfriend wants 3 kids in London, but I don't really worry too much because society will likely be in utter turmoil by the time we have our first, let alone the third.
(I think I'd be pretty miserable as a peasant, all else said and done)
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