Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Does anyone else here have random, fledgling thoughts on the culture that are too vague for the CW thread? Maybe we should have a thread for them.
(This post is almost definitely too long for here, my bad)
Like today, I was on Youtube and ended up watching video diaries from Japan. Out of nowhere, this 5-second clip of a girl spreading butter on toast sparks something in my brain, and fuses together an enormous amount of things into one simple realization: Being a kid in Japan must be absolutely incredible. Of course it's amazing everywhere, but in Japan it's simply better.
To explain why, I want to set up a quick and dirty dichotomy: Active and passive. These are roughly your classic A- and B-Type personalities. The A-Type is energetic, strong-willed, risk-prone, grabs life by the horns, and tries to wrangle reality into becoming what he wants. Your B-Type is lethargic, unambitious, risk-averse, and will only make drastic moves in the face of extreme pressure. Internal vs. External locus of control, you've all heard this before.
Generally, childhood sucks for the active kids and it's amazing for the passive kids. The active kid is always moaning about how everyone talks down to him, he can't buy liquor, too young for gym, too young to drive, etc. The passive kid meanwhile never really complains about this stuff. He'll sit in his room playing Grand Theft Auto and be stimulated out of his mind, in total bliss. What he doesn't realize is this is potentially the peak of his life. Once he reaches adulthood, the days of carefree living are over, and yet he doesn't care for anything "adult" so his quality of life simply declines. The active kid though may become an entrepreneur, or an athlete, or what-have-you. Could he totally crash and burn pursuing whatever dream he has? Yeah. But at least he has a chance to peak.
Japan is interesting. It's a nation with powerful impetus towards living a passive life, having no dreams, and joining some company. And yet ironically, this passive lifestyle is somehow or another going to hell. Job security? Dwindling. Family? Good luck. Home ownership? You're stuck in some cramped box in a metropolis. To say nothing of the economy! Japanese people treat aging like a 100% death sentence, because for their life path it simply is, man. What does an old man possibly have to look forward to in that scheme? Playing pachinko all day?
It's happening here too. 30-somethings who watch anime all day; no wife, no cool hobby, not even a dog. These guys are either going to evolve into active men or they're going to be absolutely crushed by the next few decades. "They should get a job." They already have jobs -- that's the point. Living like their parents did simply doesn't work anymore. There is, unironically, no happy normal anymore. To be happy in 2024, you need to be a shark. In 2002, this joke was great because obviously you can just be a normal dude. Now? The minimum for "comfy and secure" is getting a tech job, which is borderline shark behavior. C'est la vie.
P.S. I posit some kind of axis whereby societies trim down on our freedoms to the benefit of a "passive" lifestyle, e.g. "nanny state", but that none of this matters if the bedrock for a passive (read: trad) lifestyle is dead and gone, and your nation's men just sit indoors and watch anime all the time.
Was, uh, was that a question?
I had to check if this post was made by one of our resident depressionposters, but I don't recognize you as being on that list.
I don't really think this is true. There's plenty of well paying careers outside of tech. Will they ensure a comfortable life in the most expensive zip codes in the country? No, but there's more to life than living in VHCOL.
Also, getting a tech job is at once not that hard and not that secure. You don't need a postgrad degree, you don't need a fancy school. Plenty of people (especially in big companies) are just putting in their 40 hours a week and plenty are working even less. You may also be laid off in the next round for no apparent reason (although you'll probably find a new role in a reasonable timeframe).
Yeah, it is pessimistic -- maybe overly so, since it's drawing on personal experience. I grew up lower-middle class, and all my friends' families were trapped in these clearly unhappy situations which ended in divorce (against the background of 2008), and the whole lifestyle that our parents aimed for simply didn't pan out. I knew one family who were smarter than average, and conservative, and they weathered the storm & they're still close today. The rest of them? Divorces. Kid goes off to college, never talks to his parents anymore. Kid moves in with his grandma, gets involved in a bad crowd, it goes downhill. These are middle class families that won't replicate.
Conversely, the upper-middle class families I saw in that same time weathered the storm far better. They had failure states too, like dead bedrooms or emotional distance, yet they never lost the basic ability to function as a family. What the lower half has can't properly be called family. It's like a Mr. Potato head doll -- I knew an anxious white woman living with 2 sketchy middle eastern men, I knew an autistic teen with a single mom dating some guy that was never around, I knew a half-filipino kid who never saw his white father, teen with single mom who moved to Florida and ended up on worldstar, house of 5+ black kids getting raised by a single grandma. It is so on-the-nose, you'd call me out if this were fictional, but all of this is real. Normal American suburb in the 2000's.
Only two families in my neighborhood turned out well. One was the trad set I mentioned earlier. The other was a short kid who moved into a much nicer suburb by high school, and lived in a big house when I last saw him. So far as I know, both are doing great to this day. The rest? Not so well. Hopefully that explains where I'm coming from.
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There's another axis though - cunning. Suppose the anime-obsessed shut-in bought bitcoin back in the early years? Or DOGE? Or Shib back in 2021? Or NVDA in late 2022? There are many low-effort pathways to becoming comfy and secure that merely require being ahead of the curve. IDK if you define that as shark but I visualize sharks being the kind of people who grind up leetcode, who produce a portfolio of passion-projects, who learn paragliding to get in with that VC funder - whatever it takes.
Obviously it's best to be the hustling, cunning ubermensch and worst to be the stupid, lazy loser. But the middleground between the two is contested.
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I am so not looking forward to the next decade.
It sucks, but at least we see it coming. Things will probably get rocky in the coming years. Not in the sense of violence, so much as a mass realization of what's happening accompanied by a quick scramble for whatever gains are in sight, overwhelming some systems. America's still an easy country to get ahead in with a bit of brains, but I suggest we get where we want to be soon, because that can always change. Of course... maybe nothing happens. It would still be wrong to ignore the weird vibes in the air. I'm not the doomsaying type, but those vibes are there.
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