I feel you bro. I've felt that same way and I have empathy. You have solid points and a valid perspective. You could also really use an attitude adjustment.
We're here as a society because of mishandled social responsibility. Women have only started to take up their own personal care because they can't rely on established conventions any more.
We as individuals likely have not done much, if anything, to contribute to this social circumstance. Just like women as individuals have not done much, if anything, to contribute to it. It is none of our faults. Yet they are taking personal responsibility for their wellbeing in this situation anyways. They are "manning up".
Men on the other hand... are we just sitting around crying with our thumbs up our asses? Yes. Yes we are. That shit is weak. That perspective on the situation is what's hard to empathize with, not the situation itself. Change your attitude, take personal responsibility, and bask as love and empathy showers onto you.
We can do better than looking to others to solve our problems for us. It just takes seeing an example of how. They are in short order, but they exist if you dig hard enough. I encourage any men who resonate with this to dig deeper. There is sweet sweet fruit to be had if you do. And tons of pussy.
"Taking personal responsibility" is always an option, and it's usually the best option in terms of maximizing personal wellbeing.
At the same time, it's important to recognize the social forces that constrain different groups and limit the power that personal agency can exert over outcomes. The masculine gender role is extremely narrow, and if you deviate much from it, society will punish you: so-called "personal responsibility" plays the role of telling men to shut up and fit their role. As a man seeking a female partner, if I want to be a homemaker who teaches belly dance part time, I'm going to be in for a really hard time, no matter how much personal agency I embrace.
That also ignores the shittiness that even people who do manage to fit neatly into the masculine gender role still have to experience.
It's worth calling out these things in the hopes of driving social change, and it's something both men and women must participate in if we want to see a change.
> The masculine gender role is extremely narrow, and if you deviate much from it, society will punish you.
> As a man seeking a female partner, if I want to be a homemaker who teaches belly dance part time, I'm going to be in for a really hard time, no matter how much personal agency I embrace.
If you say so, it will be so. If you write this code, you should not be surprised when running it achieves the programmed result. Whether you believe me or not, your statements are false. I spent time thinking this way, I suffered immensely, I put in deep effort to explore a larger perspective, and I am now greatly enjoying how incomplete was the field I saw before.
Women don't all want a provider. The trust of many has been damaged beyond that. They provide for themselves now (lots of men actually say we want that). What else can a man offer? Emotional support. The ability to make her feel like a fucking goddess. Being a homemaking belly dancer more aligns with that than doesn't.
You are right that women must participate too. They already are. It's men's attitudes that need to catch up.
I'm a highly emotionally-available, bellydancing bi guy who's dated both men and women, so I have a reasonable comparison point. Men are far, far more open-minded about the gender roles their partners inhabit than women are. It's not even close.
It appears that you're defining masculinity in and of itself as toxic. Masculine and feminine function as yin and yang, as dualistic complements. The masculine is simply structure, force, or closure. The feminine is flow, softness, and openness. Each human moves with a balance of both.
What's toxic is when the masculine is out of balance with the feminine. When structure, force, and closure crowd things out because there is not enough flow, softness, and openness. Simply making a decision and acting on it is not in and of itself toxic. It's the inability to adjust later that is toxic.
To become conscious of all things a person must look for that which they are unconscious of rather than focusing purely on that which they are already conscious of. Most people prefer to see themselves as competent, but to be a master one must always see oneself as a beginner.
+1. Personal roots always lead to the environment around a person. How someone responds plays a role in the result, but that absolutely should not obscure the fact that the circumstances are an enormous factor.
It's not just you. I feel this way too. My personal values don't align with those of the industry. Plenty of people feel this way. Lots of them make a career change.
Find what motivates you in life and build your life around that. Capitalistic industry is fundamentally about profit. If not monetary then power and prestige.
The general mood matches yours. Lots of people are feeling apathy. Prioritizing of profit over people creates dehumanizing social institutions and drives mental health issues. It's really simple and obvious.
People who are too caught up in the glitter of shiny coins can't see the writing on the wall. Either we as a whole are headed for a big change or those who feel that way are headed for a big change in how they relate to the overall whole. Likely both.
Heavily agreed. Our psychologies are becoming unrooted from our bodies' physical needs. Years of evolving towards the mental stimulation we seek these days is detaching us from our bodily sensations, and often we can't feel the bodily consequences of our choices until a complex chronic health problem arises. We're burning ourselves out on a global scale.
It is indeed a difficult balance to strike between keeping things cohesive and keeping them from becoming an echo chamber.
There is something to be said for allowing "flamebait". What's flame to one may be a welcome splash of water for another. Matter of fact, it might be that people who espouse so much "flame" may have legitimate issues fueling that flame.
There is absolutely also something to be said for wrangling conversation so as to keep it constructive. It's the balance of the two that achieves a community that remains healthy over time and not just healthy according to the popular values of any given time.
The problem with that argument is it doesn't take into account the existential risk. Sure a few flames may be stimulating but at some point the house burns down.
You have adapted your emotional processing towards the belief that work/financial success supersedes all else. This belief, and the set of beliefs underneath it, are reasonable, though incomplete. Being completely adapted to an incomplete set of beliefs is what leads to emotional/existential distress. Just add to your belief set and adapt yourself to a more complete set of beliefs.
The author explains it well IMO. Mentally computing an appropriate response to present to another human takes energy. The more different that human than you, the more energy. There'll be some outliers that are inordinately drained by pairing.
I agree that if someone can't talk about why they're feeling stressed by their work environment then it's a deeper issue than just a personal one. I would point to leaders whose lack of understanding of higher order truths about humans, like that humans are different and space needs to be permanently held for those differences to be surfaced and coalesced, can cause their well intended questioning to come across as personal attack, thereby incentivizing the team member to stay quiet.
Trust is the end state of solving a communication problem. But it's a systemic quality and needs to be cultivated from the system as a whole, not any one member.
Humans are fundamentally meant to interact and collaborate with other humans. Technology has obscured this by empowering us each to be resourceful alone. In the long term, we indeed do operate best collaboratively.
I haven't read this book, but I intuit that its point is that we're to awaken to the fact that all our industrial contrivance is to blame for all our misery.
This deeply clicks with me and where I'm personally at in my growth. Technology is bullshit, and it is unsatisfying. The maximal emotional return I can get from creating industrial technology is the knowledge that I'm either dominating others or helping others be dominate. That's flatly garbage in comparison to the return I get from growing an herb on my counter and using it to make tea for my friends.
It's taken me quite some time to extricate my own personal wellbeing from the meatgrinder of western industrial life. As a matter of principle now, I can't really think deeply into how the wider world would ingest such a perspective, and whether or not it's ready for it. Such fruitless contemplations were the reasons for the depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues of my twenties.
This is happening in many spheres. Some call it spiritual awakening, others call it a mental health crisis, and yet more call it The Great Reset and seem to frame it in economic terms. Economy is pure human contrivance -- "logy" should be the root we use for the term we use to describe our relationship to the system we subsume, not "nomy".
All in all I agree -- this is by far the most interesting stuff and represents a distinct segment of growth amongst the intellectual body of western industrial humanity. I'll probably catch some neg for saying this, but all of this stuff is common sense amongst indigenous communities. They naturally have the correct context to automatically hold these perspectives.
We're here as a society because of mishandled social responsibility. Women have only started to take up their own personal care because they can't rely on established conventions any more.
We as individuals likely have not done much, if anything, to contribute to this social circumstance. Just like women as individuals have not done much, if anything, to contribute to it. It is none of our faults. Yet they are taking personal responsibility for their wellbeing in this situation anyways. They are "manning up".
Men on the other hand... are we just sitting around crying with our thumbs up our asses? Yes. Yes we are. That shit is weak. That perspective on the situation is what's hard to empathize with, not the situation itself. Change your attitude, take personal responsibility, and bask as love and empathy showers onto you.
We can do better than looking to others to solve our problems for us. It just takes seeing an example of how. They are in short order, but they exist if you dig hard enough. I encourage any men who resonate with this to dig deeper. There is sweet sweet fruit to be had if you do. And tons of pussy.