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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.

Generally agree with your post, but this is quite STEMbrained. If you pursue a degree which makes you more interesting and fun to be around, requires developing social skills, and gives you a status hierarchy to climb, you will absolutely have more romantic prospects than if you were just grinding for money. Your future house probably won't be as nice, of course. To take political science as an example, if you're a reasonably-put-together, educated man who can bring himself to tolerate libs, DC is one of the easiest dating scenes in the world, full of attractive women looking for commitment but happy to hook up. The real downside is that these careers and status hierarchies encourage a prolonged adolescence of sleeping with all the easily available women rather than committing to one (and really, everyone ends up losing - if you want to climb a status hierarchy in creative fields, politics, etc., a good woman in your corner will do far more for your success than just the motivation to look good to girls).

On the topic of marriage and kids, I don't notice a particular difference in career paths between the young people I know who are getting married and having kids and those who aren't, except that there seems to be a gulf in fertility and age of marriage between the ones who went to state schools and the ones who went to "elite" colleges.

Political science is a field I was very interested in before I looked into the career prospects. It sounded super fun so I guess I associate it with other "fun" majors like creative writing. I'm willing to believe there are some good prospects in the field, but everyone I know who went into it graduated with a Bachelor's and then got an unrelated office job if they were lucky. One of my wife's aides is a political science major. I think it's a field where if you're 2-3 SD's above average, which should be typical for people on this site, you'll do fine, but the average guy won't find much success there.

I definitely don't think DC is the place to look for a wife and children, though. A girlfriend maybe, but the DC public policy crowd has got to be super progressive, and the women consequently not in any rush to have kids, right?

I don't know any non-STEM graduates who are anywhere near marriage, while literally every STEM graduate I know is already married and starting to have kids.

Yeah, true that a lot of people with polisci degrees don't end up in politics, just in generic white-collar world. You do actually have to be able to climb those status hierarchies to make it worthwhile entering them. But my experience of DC libs is that they're big on "successful liberals live like conservatives". The end goal is absolutely 2.3 kids on a leafy street in NoVA/Maryland (paid for by Joe Taxpayer, you're welcome).

I guess if I had to pick a particularly marriage-minded demographic it'd be non-engineers in tech. Normie values and ability to get a partner young, tech-adjacent salaries. Lawyers, too, the ones who don't give up their 20s to the biglaw grind. Stability, I think, is very important, and the modern economy doesn't provide it in that many places.

What do you do with a political science degree? Go to law school of course…

That's fair. Everyone I knew wanted to be a government official though and ended up elsewhere.

I haven't thought about the major much in a while but it's still a bit embarrassing to have forgotten that path.

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