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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25168 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.

My guess is that straight men who do creative writing and screenwriting get laid much more than straight men who do software engineering or physics. Even political science, as @Bartender_Venator says below.

They're around (vastly) more women, will have largely female social circles in many cases, meet more women in the course of their professions and have jobs that women would (in many cases) like to speak to them about. That easily cancels out the engineer's larger paycheck.

If you want to get laid as a man, studying English literature and spending your 20s and early 30s being a bum in a band and working part-time bartending gigs in Brooklyn is far superior as a sexual strategy than literally any white collar profession will be. That isn't a recommendation.

The main problem with creative writing and screenwriting is how extremely difficult it is to get jobs in those fields. The average creative writing major should expect to get a mostly-unrelated job or need more education. The average screenwriting major should expect to essentially not get into the film industry at all.

And I'm talking about getting married and having kids, not finding sexual partners.

(Though, if you want to get laid as a man, getting married is statistically by far your best bet).

The average creative writing major should expect to get a mostly-unrelated job or need more education. The average screenwriting major should expect to essentially not get into the film industry at all.

But most people in almost every field except STEM, don't end up working in their degree field anyway right? A lot of white collar jobs are gated behind a degree, but it doesn't really matter what degree you have, as getting the degree is the signal. There simply are not many actual psych jobs or politics jobs, so most people getting any of these are going to end up an office manager or something similar. Might as well study something you are interested in at university level unless you have a very specific plan, and even in a lot of those instances there are simply not going to be enough jobs in that field and you will end up doing something else. And my experience (and I work in academia) is that applies to most of both men and women.

Once you realize the majority of people are going to end up working in a field unrelated to their major then creative writing isn't much worse off. The truth is the vast majority of graduates are going to end up in some kind of mundane office dronish position, unrelated to whether they want to become a writer or an astronaut or a journalist.

This might be true, but for most non-humanity majors, they have a degree that signals a marketable skill and therefore they can often get a job that pays decently enough without the need to go and take a second degree to avoid working at Starbucks or something. Humanities don’t teach you skills businesses need or want. And on the art end, it’s almost anti-career skills. Nobody will ever ask you to write a screenplay or make an oil painting in an office. At least the psych degree requires researching and producing reports, often presenting findings to the public or peers.

The other negative of an artist is that quite often they don’t understand just how unlikely success is in their field and thus some will spend a decade or more “trying to make it” and keeping a low wage job that doesn’t make demands on their “art”. I know a guy who was still spending hundreds every month booking himself studio time to make cds of his music into his thirties. He’d spend time on the weekends playing gigs for free as well. Everyone knew he was wasting his life on this — he’d never actually have a career even as a local artist. But at the same time, he wasn’t moving forward in an actual career until well into his thirties.

Most of the office people in my local government and private business days had humanities degrees, I think you underestimate how little most bog standard employers care about whether the degree is humanities or not. A degree is a degree (with the exception of STEM). As long as you can signal enough that you can sit down, follow instructions for 3 or four years that is good enough.

Now that is seperate from people who think they will succeed in industries which are famously hard to break into.

most non-humanity majors, they have a degree that signals a marketable skill and therefore they can often get a job that pays decently enough without the need to go and take a second degree to avoid working at Starbucks or something.

Depends on the humanities degree, doesn’t it? Like history majors are doing fine on the job market, and that’s a humanity.

Intellectually rigorous humanities study teaches skills which are valuable in the workplace (rapid assimilation of unstructured information, critical evaluation of qualitative arguments, persuasive writing). I learned to write in history class, not by writing lab reports as part of my physics degree, and definitely not from preparing for the compulsory essay questions in the capstone physics paper.

The problem is that humanities courses are the easiest to grade-inflate without it being obvious what you have done, so most students with high GPAs in humanities majors never actually engaged in intellectually rigorous humanities study. Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes. Harvard philosophy majors are as hireable for a MBB or Wall Street analyst role as the STEMlords.

Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes.

Again this may be true for very high end employers but for most all they look for is a degree and they don't care how rigorous that degree was. I did recruitment for both private and government organizations, and while the civil service did care, no-one else did, including blue chip communications companies and local government. And the reason for that is they are not getting to pick from Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard grads or wherever in the first place. Your middle of the road office manager type can easily get a job with a non-intellectually rigorous humanities degree. Sure they might not get into Wall Street or quant jobs, but they were never going to. Your point only applies for the very top slice of jobs, for all the others, just need to have a degree to tick a box on the form, you will be fine with a degree in basket weaving or creative writing or musicology.

Of course, but even if your failed-out creative writing major becomes an English teacher making a modest salary, he's still surrounded by women, many of them young and attractive. Even if they'd rather a doctor, an average-to-good looking male teacher won't have trouble dating or getting married. Male nurses are a himbo profession and always seem to do well with women.

I think creative writing majors becoming teachers is one of the good endings. More often I see them continue to pursue the dream of becoming an author long after it makes sense, only starting a family years down the line. I don't have creative writing friends but this is what is happening with my friends who went into film.

Of course you could argue this is due to the person and their goals, not the major. Maybe. I think people are happiest when they can directly apply the things they learned in college to jobs, and hit the ground running with some pre-built competence in their field. Making the pivot even to something like teaching can be a humiliating decision men especially aren't prepared to make right away.

In the era of contraception, getting laid is at best correlated with reproductive success; I suspect engineers have a higher TFR than roadies and bartenders, although probably not by as much as one would think.

With the exception of the very poor and very rich (which even most highly intelligent and conscientious people will never be), income and tfr aren't really correlated much among secular Westerners.

Sure, income isn't, but stability of income probably is. Male teachers make unimpressive salaries but probably have a good TFR compared to similarly paid servers(and high end servers routinely make teacher money in the US because tips, it's just not very steady). Every butcher I've ever met has had a wife and usually kids if over 30, despite unimpressive salaries, because it's a very stably-paid position. Roadies, bartenders, and other such drifters might have a far-above-average number of partners because they move from social circle to social circle regularly. But I'm skeptical that any of these partners have a kid with them.

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