their cynicism is perfectly understandable once you correctly identified the demographics (which you did), so I'm not sure why you're holding pessimism against poor people with a bleak future; like it or not that's far more anchored in reality than anything around these parts, as there are far more people with "bottom rung jobs" than software developers and VC investors in the bay area.
Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are not poor forever. I wouldn't call this a "bleak future". I was definitely poor when I was 18, but I wasn't pessimistic. Pessimism at such a young age is almost always a mistake.
I'd like to challenge that. Historical comparisons aside, looking just at today, if you're saying that social mobility is very good in the USA compared to most of the world, what are you basing that claim on?
I would think something like Gini combined with HDI and GDP per capita, on which the US only fares well on the latter. I found out there is something called Global Social Mobility Index, done by the WEF, and it places the US in 27th.
Also looking a bit more at the GSMI: a lot of those criteria are based on current social welfare benefits received by the population. Many of which programs are not sustainable in the long run.
Of course the US has less of a social safety net than Norway, a petrostate with trillions of dollars in a national oil endowment, and ~half of their GDP is from fossil fuels. I don't know that I'd want to move to Norway for the kind of "social mobility" that I'm after.
I'm basing on my assumption vast majority of the world's people would love to be 27th.
And this is borne out in emigration patterns and visa applications...
It feels like we expect to be #1 in every category and we're unable to recognize that the US has it pretty damn good in a lot of important ways. Envy is the thief of happiness.
You can develop pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook is, it's a conscious choice to not try to do better.
Being pessimistic about pessimism is individual-damaging and socially ruinous.
One can develop pessimism about pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook on pessimism is, it's a conscious choice to not try to figure out the different meanings of that word and how important it is for the proper functioning of democracy.
Maybe read Orwell for a glimpse of mandatory optimism:
"The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one...
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the
expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing
the telescreen.
Indeed most choices we think we "make" are unconscious choices due to our environment. That does not mean we cannot introspect and learn and consciously change them.
I am much more pessimistic generally than I was 20 years ago. But that's something I work on, not something I accept passively as a fact of life.
You mean most Redditors live in a country with a higher GDP than 90% of people on Earth. That doesn't necessarily translate into 'significantly better lives', especially in a country with wealth gaps such as the USA has.
It isn't necessary to identify the world's most unfortunate person to recognize that most redditors have privileged lives, yet choose to wallow in misery.
This is not the 1950s. Most American's have internet, where they can see average people living lives around the world. Their houses may be a bit worse, but their cars are normally newer, they have internet, they have FAMILY. They have vibrant COMMUNITY. They have free time.
More like the super rich have huge influence over politics and can buy media companies to push their preferred narrative. Elon being the most visible example.
I'm not a member of the richest most powerful group of people ever, and my government falls far short of the ideal I envision, therefore I cannot possibly enjoy my life.
See, that's just using the same measuring rod. If you measure quality of life by income, yes, even poor Americans live good lives compared to the rest of the world.
There are many other factors you could evaluate it on, though, and many of them are harder to quantify. Stuff like personal agency, status, leisure time, social life, community cohesion, etc.
it's definitely not and would be absurd to suggest otherwise, but isn't it also a very common way of illustrating the dilution of responsibilities among a very large group of people?
The actions of Microsoft leadership are not the same as the Nazi regime, but are similar to the industrialists that supported Adolf Hitler's rise. I ain't Godwinning this thread, we're well along the rise of the American Reich.
oh that's a pretty nice summary of the points in the article, and while it seems to have sprung a nice discussion about interesting topics, the whole thread seems to have not understood the author as clearly
It's always about that isn't it? Not getting the reaction you want, vilifying your interlocutor, then run crying with fingers in your ears screaming "lalala I didn't want it anyway" and declaring yourself a stoic is really indicative of the type of people who in the present day call themselves stoics.
This whole thread is just a long-winded version of redpill discourse, people who can see past minor adolescent romantic mishaps.
How pathetic is it to still model your whole life after women while pretending to be an isle of self-reliance? Men really are lost.
I didn't see any vilification of women. Women value sharing and emotional vulnerability. It's how they bond with other women, who make up the bulk of their friends. Men's experiences with other men, the bulk of their friends, often make them wary of being emotionally vulnerable. Hence, naturally, a disconnect when a man and a woman are establishing a relationship.
Women value sharing and emotional vulnerability, but typically not from the males in their lives. There is a significant disconnect between average women and genuine male emotions, and males are expected to show emotional resilience and self-control first and foremost precisely to bridge that gap and then allow the 'sharing' to occur unimpeded, though still in a somewhat controlled way.
Are men expected to do so? Male anger is more tolerated then female anger. Also, if you look at men who are popular or get far, they are super emotional - Trump, Musk, Tate heck even Vance and Hengensberg.
Emotions driven males are cultural and political leaders literally now.
this is the general insanity of today’s world, today’s leaders would be laughed at as weakest of the weak in vast majority of human history, just absolute weakest men imaginable are “leaders” now…
There is a saying in wealth management - ‘the first generation builds it, the second generation preserves it, the third generation smokes it’.
It’s hard to not see that playing out in a large sense society wise right now, if we assume the first generation was the post WW2 folks, and the wealth was the post-WW2 economic benefits from the US not being bombed into the Stone Age like most of the rest of the world - and if anything, being the only major economy still standing.
Where exactly you draw the lines generationally is of course up for debate. But we’re starting to have to relearn a lot of hard lessons now that the post WW2 (and depression) generations understood as basic table stakes.
And it’s not because people today are ‘weaker’ per-se. Rather, they’ve lived a (relatively) comfortable life. That generally leads to not having to learn the hard lessons (or being so miserable) that they do the hard things required to build that society. And there is no free lunch. And it was never ideal, then, or now, and will never be ideal in the future either.
But it can be better if we put in the work and take the risk.
Anger like any other emotion has its place. But it is better to channel it into something productive.
Trump and Musk are men who were born into wealth, and were boosted by mass media for decades, so I don't think they really count. Musk's main tactic has been to take credit for others' R&D.
OP blamed women for supposedly complaining that men dont open up. Men simultaneously have natural friendships with other men, but it is women fault men do not open up.
Por op, women are at wrong when they want men to talk (which is outrageous ask), but also cause of men not talking. Which includes men not talking to other men, which is also fault of women.
Yes, it's projection for sure. A large number of men appear to need validation from women. Pathetic. I guess from an evolutionary perspective it had to that way. Men who didn't need that validation worked themselves out of the gene pool.
Completely ignoring what everyone thinks and doing your own thing is a good way to get in a very dangerous situation from a basic-life-needs perspective. And with women being a bit over half the population, saying ‘fuck it’ to what half the population wants, especially if you’re picking fights with them, is quite dangerous - even if they are not 100%.
But you know who can handle dangerous, and doesn’t need validation from the population (in that form) to get what they want and have their needs met?
The actual king.
It’s a high risk, high reward (potentially) strategy. Better be good (and actually strong) if you want to not need to be liked.
What I think we’ve been seeing play out is entire generations of men who learned that the best strategy was to be liked by women so the women would do all the work to support them. Which seems to have worked quite well for many of them for awhile.
But now people are burning out, and the ‘easy wins’ from the prior approach (or just lifestyle creep/inflation!) is causing more real and visible difficulty - and the situation is indeed getting more difficult. We even have clear predators showing up and operating in the open, with no one stopping them.
There needs to be more than just vibes and following the rules for things to work out now, and a different approach is needed.
We’ll see what ends up shaking out, eh?
One thing is clear though - if society won’t accept someone stepping up and punching someone in the face or worse (even if it is to protect them), you’ll eventually end up with a bunch of predators who will do whatever they want without fear taking advantage of society.
> I think it's sad that performative emotions & vulnerability seem to be a popular thing to have to signal for acceptance.
You only think it's performative because you think people are signaling. They're not and performative anything is not required for acceptance, but people are not accepting of others who deal with their social interaction in these terms and your very language betrays where you stand. These imaginary requirements for affection are not what's sad here.
> You only think it's performative because you think people are signalling
You're correct that I think something because I think something else. You're assuming I'm unwilling or unable to tell the difference.
I don't see a betrayal to state that I think it's a shame that people that have copied a performative action, gotten nothing out of it and are then hesitant to try again because they feel they've already tried that avenue and had bad results. It's the same feeling of sadness I get when people have tried therapy, for whatever reason haven't gotten much out of it and then write it off as a sham.
I do get that you're saying 'aha ! I've detected your true intent through my clever analysis of your language' - consider your assumption "You only think it's performative because you think people are signaling. They're not"
They're not? You can state absolute facts with confidence about the people I've experienced in my life that you don't know anything about? That is either some amazing superpower or regular old conjecture.
It might help you to notice how many times I said I think or in my opinion, and how many absolutes you're willing to state.
Sometimes people do signal. I know people who do not cry and maybe need to, and others who can and do to try and get what they want. Some emotions are performative — look at the performative grief over Evita, Diana or even Stalin.
I don't think gaming is really bigger than windows. Gaming revenue is 23B in 2025 and Windows+Devices is 17B, so just in this metrics they're already close; but you have to factor how much of their 120B Office+Productivity line on their annual report only exist because people use Windows. If you take LinkedIn and Dynamics out of the equation you get approximately 100B in Office, Teams, SharePoint and stuff like that and people only use these product at scale because they're on Windows.
who is "them" referring to in this sentence?