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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25229 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Points 2 and 3 basically contradict each other. That is, there's the object level struggles of material providing, which therapy would not have helped with, and the irrational misperception that these issues were irreparably unsolvable to the point that suicide was the only way out. In-so-far as therapy and suicide prevention could have helped him figure this out, they would have been useful (in-so-far as some therapy and suicide prevention are lefty mental health stuff made of empty-sounding words that don't improve rational consideration of object level issues, they would not have been useful)

How many therapists actually could solve that though? It’s a practical problem and one more likely to be solved by fixing the money problems than asking him to talk about how bad being broke makes him feel.

This is a fair critique and the issue with this particular case of me trying to use it to build up the issues I’m trying to discuss. He would seem to have reasonable exit opportunities that would be something like you don’t get to have your name on the wall anymore but now you need to work for Lennar as a project manager at a fairly good salary.

Cases do exists where the exit wouldn’t be as foreseeable like if your industry isn’t doing well and you were facing structural obsolescence.

Even then, I think people underestimate the quality of life you can expect as a poor person with an intact family. If his entire industry went under and he couldn't adapt and was stuck flipping burgers for minimum wage he could still provide for his family. They might have to downgrade their home and lifestyle expectations, but they're not going to starve to death or end up homeless. And I suspect that the actual quality of life for his daughter would be higher poor with an alive father than rich with no father.

If you have serious mental health issues rendering you completely unemployable, then the object level might be unfixable, but for everyone else it's more a question of lowering standards and struggling to do as well as you can and fix as much as you can even if you can never return to the wealthy lifestyle you were expecting.

Right, an intact family with 2 or 1.5 (ie mom in part time work once all kids at school) jobs of the kind that not-particularly-skilled but also not-addicts and not-pathologically-lazy people of average intelligence can get in an averagely prosperous part of the US with a few years of progression can provide a passable life for a family. Not a hugely comfortable one, but far from something most Americans would consider ‘stereotypically poor’.

Yeah. Failure case in most Western democracies right now is not that earthshatteringly bad. It's definitely tight, but it's not like he'd be forced to go homeless 48 hours after declaring bankruptcy. Especially when he's got the contact network he ostensibly seems to have had, surely there'd be a 6-figure sinecure of some sort available somewhere as a consultant or middle manager that'd allow him to be atleast medium competitive.

The question is whether you play out the unwinnable position -- go through the rest of your life as a failure who will never do any better than you are doing now -- or just give up the game as lost.

I suppose there's an argument for that, but I just feel like 'life utility points' aren't super tied to money in the West right now beyond a certain minimum spec. You don't want to be broke-broke, I agree, but the qualitative difference between making $100k and making $300k is pretty low as somebody who's bounced around the spectrum. My net worth/earnings took a big hit a few years ago in '2021 fantasy bull market dollars' terms which probably is gonna take me another couple years to get back to, but my day-to-day existence is essentially the same. Admittedly I'm probably more frugal than a lot of guys like that, but having experienced a lot of 'rich person stuff' it's the difference between a 7.5/10 day and a 8/10 day.

If you're not a spendthrift, the difference is between making $100k and working the corporate grind until you die to avoid dropping down to the $50k-or-less lifestyle, or making $300k and being able to get out at some point. If you are a spendthrift, the difference is obvious.

Even if he would be willing to decrease his own QoL, his wifes feelings are something he has to keep in mind. If she would be be intransigent and proclaim she would find replacement husband, willing to provide her with the current lifestyle, he would be broke and on the hook for eyewatering alimony.

As people on the right otherwise often suggest, it’s very unlikely the average, say, 47 year old woman married with three kids is going to get a ‘better deal’ elsewhere unless her husband is a truly incorrigible deadbeat and/or she’s somehow either immensely attractive for her age or has low standards (in which case the problem is less likely to arise at all). If she remarries at all, it’s likely to a substantially older man.

For a woman over 35 or 40 with children, things usually have to be very bad (or one’s dating prospects uncommonly good for a middle aged single mother) for leaving a broke husband to make financial sense.

The "better deal" is to take all the joint assets and most of any of his future income in a divorce, using his failure as the reason he should take nothing.

The point still remains that he’s much more likely to be able to find another partner than she is (not, like, a hot 25 year old obviously, but someone a few years younger and also divorced). In my experience middle aged women who initiate divorce are usually pretty desperate. The reason women initiate most divorces is because men are often perfectly content checking out of the relationship, maybe fucking around or having affairs, spending money on other women, then returning home to a wife who looks after the kids, probably does most domestic chores etc. This can go on for years before she finally decides to accept the humiliation of divorce. The only time it’s usually “worth it” for a man to initiate divorce in my experience is if he finds out she’s cheating, at which point masculine hatred of the idea of being sexually humiliated typically leads to an instant divorce. But provided there’s no (known) infidelity on her part, men tend not to divorce their wives because even if they dislike her, she’s a good deal.

This fundamental disparity leads to a lot of the discourse on divorce that argues women are screwing over men. In reality, it’s just that a bad marriage is today usually a much better deal for men than women.

This all assumes that she realizes this before abandoning her husband "to get a better deal". The women I know who have done this didn't give up their high standards until after they left and learned it the hard way. Choosing to leave a partner is often more an emotional decision than a rational one and a sudden drop in QoL isn't exactly conducive to rational thinking.

This was the point I was waiting for. Yes your family often leaves you when you fail. Seen it happen enough.

Sure for a functional adult you can go manage a Taco Bell and probably get 100k or more a year but your dating market prospects are awful.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell??

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

Think I’ve seen far higher than that. Like 150 advertised. But that’s still falling a lot in status.

You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell?

No, but IIRC fast food managers get paid mostly in the form of bonuses for hitting the metrics that’ve been set by some jackasses with spreadsheets at headquarters(health code, budget, drive through time, etc). So there’s plenty of individual GM’s who make good salaries if not 6-figure level.

And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.

But nobody wants to date Taco Bell customers(and Taco Bell customers probably skew very male and very lower income, so that’s predictable).

Tbh it seems like men who make good money at low status jobs do OK on the dating market, but usually have to date a bit below them on the class ladder.

Most managers at Taco Bell would do completely fine with women of their class and background. I suppose the rare formerly PMC down in his luck upper-middle-class guy who manages a Taco Bell might not, but that person is more likely to take a (lower paid) job as a clerk or paralegal or some other bottom tier office job than work for Taco Bell.

I’d guess the average fast food restaurant manager comes from a working class background and fucked around for a few years after high school, is somewhat smarter than their peers, works hard and rises the ranks over a few years until the franchise owner puts them in charge.

At which point the suicide would seem more understandable. Still not necessarily the best option, but I would find it harder to argue against. And maybe that secretly is exactly what happened and his wife was going to leave him. But frequently that's not the case, and people kill themselves based on the derivative of their quality of life, not the actual level after the decline.

But frequently that's not the case, and people kill themselves based on the derivative of their quality of life, not the actual level after the decline.

Or even just the fear that that's what his wife would do. Suicidal people often believe everyone else sees them as unkindly as they see themselves.

I would be curious to see the efficacy of therapy on reducing suicide rates among men in particular. I imagine it's tricky to disentangle selection effects: people who go to therapy are more likely to be suicidal than the general population, but suicidal individuals who go to therapy are probably less suicidal than suicidal people who don't go to therapy.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women. Enough to make it have no effect? Not sure.

Therapy-as-it-actually-exists does seem to be less efficacious for men than women

Is that true, or do women just actually like therapy?

Full disclosure- I think therapy works for trauma and phobia related issues, and is useful for management strategies on depression/anxiety issues, and maybe has some applicability to rarer issues(eg the vanishing penis syndrome Scott wrote about) or for managing mental health care when there’s 20 different providers, but is basically hokum outside of that. And functionally all hokum works on the basis of empathizing with the mark and then telling them what they want to hear. Women like empathy where men as often find it annoying. So women like therapy in a way men don’t, but it has the same effectiveness for both. And obviously that leads to women pointing to it as useful even when time and drugs/life changes did the heavy lifting, while men point to it as stupid and useless in the same circumstances.

I wonder what the overlap is between liking therapy and believing in other hokum (eg astrology, acupuncture).

I dunno. For people who don’t actually have a problem it seems like a one to one trade off with psychics, so I’d expect it’s actually negative.

Yeah, my understanding is that most of the therapy techniques were designed based on female patients, and therefore focus more on things like feelings rather than solutions to object-level problems. However competent ones exist, and will tailor their style based on the needs of their patient (or at least identify when they aren't a good fit and refer them to other therapists with a better-suited style). A suicidal man seeing Jordan Peterson isn't going to get a bunch of mamby pampy nonsense about "aw, I'm sorry to hear that, how does that make you feel?", they're going to get "that sucks, life sucks, but your life isn't over, let's come up with an actionable plan for how to make it suck less" and then having an actionable plan helps fix your mental state because you have a goal you can work towards (and once you enact the plan your life is objectively improved and that helps your mental state). Even a good therapist can't unilaterally fix your life for you, but they can help convince you to fix your own life and figure out how instead of wallowing in self-misery and inaction.

Why would therapy be less effective for men? I’ve heard moreso that men don’t want to start going to therapy for various reasons (associating therapy with leftism is a new one for me, which I don’t really understand) but it’s a very useful tool to have.

And there’s more than one way to practice it - cognitive behavioural therapy has been found to be effective for anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, and more, and I can’t conceive of a reason it would be less effective for men.

A couple factors. One major one is the gender of the therapist: therapists are something like 3/4 female, and trending more female. This leads to several issues. For one, treatment methodologies get skewed, in terms of renown, research, and funding, toward those that female therapists prefer. Therapists are more capable of empathy toward people like them, and oftentimes patients react better to therapists who have a similar background as them.

Another, more speculative angle is that mental health issues can be intrinsic (caused by how people interpret their experiences) or extrinsic (caused by the experiences themselves). This is a bit murky: e.g. if you're depressed and traumatized because you were in a war and saw your best buddy blown to bits, that's pretty extrinsic, but perhaps some interpretative work could genuinely help alleviate the pain. But I do think it's a meaningful distinction, and therapists would be better suited to intrinsic issues. If women's issues are more intrinsic and men's more extrinsic, therapy would be less effective at effectively addressing the average male issue than the average female one.

I’m not sure there’s a difference between how the emotions from how interpret the experience vs. the experience itself? Mental issues are by definition intrinsic. Not all soldiers develop PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event - there seems to be many variables influencing its development, such as age, pre existing conditions, support network, even genes (I’m reading that PTSD is 30-40% heritable). And there’s depressingly large amounts of women that have PTSD from sexual assaults and physical abuse - while only a small minority of men become soldiers in the west.

I’m also not sure what you mean by women’s mental issues being more intrinsic? Anxiety, depression, addiction and abusive relationships would be common reasons the average westerner would go to therapy, and I don’t see how there’s a difference in “cause” there when it comes to gender?

Why would therapy be less effective for men?

One reason might be that therapists consider masculine qualities and attributes to be pathological, and thus treat men like broken women.

Therapy culture is very blue coded. Therapy culture seemingly embraces fragility as a virtue.

That hasn’t been my experience. I did CBT and there it was quite focused on tracking my emotional state and finding actions to regulate it, and more ordinary talk therapy where I was pushed to be more assertive, recognise abusive relationships and be more emotionally resilient overall. therapy does encourage you to have more self-compassion and avoid emotional repression, but to me that’s the opposite of fragility. People who bottle up everything tend to be very brittle - seeming solid until it gets too much and they shatter.

Effective forms of therapy can exist while 90%+ of therapy sessions are useless or actively harmful.

A patient who is cured might only need 5 sessions. A patient whose condition doesn't improve may have 1 session per week forever.

In this model, even if half of patients are cured by therapy, something like 99% of sessions are a complete waste of money.

Therapy culture. Not all therapy. But also I think your assumption is people can either be emotional or bottle up emotions. Stoicism is another path.

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