Posted by surprisetalk 2 hours ago
Was this episode in childhood and now he is a young adult? Did he attend public school?
The association isn't new, see the related slur for gay people.
1. it's unfair that boys who chose to play flute got bullied for it
2. it's not good that his brother essentially took his choice from playing flute by reinforcing #1
3. #2 is actually simultaneously the way to minimize the negative effects of the authors choice of instruments
So in spite of those first two things individually being pretty shitty, they actually give you an optimal outcome (socially) in school. Ideally we get to a place where #1 stops happening, but you won't solve it by going against the grain, you'll just be a martyr for nothing.
The author got grief for playing the clarinet too, and from poking around at their other articles I think they'd have had a lousy time regardless of what instruments they might have chosen, if he hadn't got bullied about the flute he'd have gotten bullied about something else.
I think this is a piece by rationalists for rationalists that escaped the niche it was supposed to remain in.
There was a very interesting video? Article? About how the reason Twitter is so hostile is because it blends people who do not have shared contexts, so ideas are taken out or context and land poorly. This feels like that.
Intimacy is great, but you’re fooling yourself if you think that doing
slimy pushups against each other is the optimal way to produce it. It
may (sadly) be one of the best ways in practice, given what nature has
left us with, but that’s very different from saying “yes, this is
definitely how a good designer would have designed this system from
the ground up.”
A literal actual majority of the people I’ve talked to about this
genuinely claim to believe that yep, this is the right way for
intimacy and pleasure to be created, it’s ideal, no actually better
system could exist, any major changes would be worse.
And they are deeply confused. You are deeply confused, insofar as you
are (probably) a part of that majority.
I’m quite fond of orgasms, as it happens. I wouldn’t write them out of
the universe. I just wish they incentivized me to do something that I
straightforwardly want to do, rather than incentivizing me to:
- Sit alone tediously massaging a body part, instead of doing anything
actually interesting
- Try to convince some other cool and interesting person to drop all
of their cool and interesting activities to do some slimy pushups
with me
People want to have kids, more often than not. We want to socialize, we want to find partners, we want to find happiness, we want to indulge in hobbies. We are a social species, even when individuals might be deeply antisocial.
Yet we built a society that robs us of agency to try things in private, because we must be advertised to constantly. We built systems that prioritize labor over the health - physical, emotional, mental, social, and otherwise - of the organism. We built media platforms that demand attention, reward controversy, and punish learning.
Like the author’s sibling, we rob our younger cohorts of the agency to decide for themselves the life they want to live by forcing them into holes we deem appropriate and reasonable. Only certain jobs are acceptable, only certain employers have prestige, only certain careers are valid, only certain schools are worthy. Everything you do, everywhere you go, everyone you meet, everything you touch, everything you buy, everything you watch or read or listen to or consume, tracked and logged somewhere for profit-motives. Not safety, not security, not enrichment, not health, and not growth.
Just profit.
And then when those good souls try to build something else - federated social media to break algorithms, private economies to bypass advertisers and payment processors, social circles hiding within encryption to duck government surveillance and identity verification - the cult of convenience and base of power punches down. When a cohort raised on the borderless lands of the internet finds someone they wish to spend their life with, they’re beaten down by arbitrary national barriers and the various -isms and -obias that keep people separate. Thus isolation is reinforced, and withdrawal amplifies.
It’s easier to not search for that thing that interests you but you’re embarrassed about, because then you avoid ads for it. It’s easier to not look for love, because you might find it’s two continents away in a country that hates you or your country hates them, or just hates immigration in general and slaps huge fees on the process. It’s easier to keep your head down working for a Big Tech company because it’s a recognized name even if it hurts your soul to see what it does to humans, and who knows, you might retire from it someday.
It’s easier to choose known misery over the risk of joy. That is the core problem.