By David Futrelle
Alt-rightish PUA blogger Heartiste seems to be transforming before our eyes into the internet equivalent of a cranky old man from a 1970s sitcom who’s forever grousing about how you can’t tell the boy hippies from the girl hippies because they all have long hair.
In a recent post, Heartiste laments what he sees as the rise of “cultural hermaphroditism,” that is,
a strange and creepy merging of the sexes in America toward an androgynous unisex of masculinized females and feminized males.
But Heartiste doesn’t see this alleged new androgyny as simply a matter of style. No, he thinks that women are becoming mannish and men are becoming womanish biologically, with more and more women sprouting angular “manjaws” while men’s hips grow broader.
“While research is scant, I believe based on what I see happening around me that this cultural androgynization has a biological component as well,” he contends, suggesting that the lack of actual evidence for this alleged biological trend is the result of the evil forces of political correctness making it impossible for scientists to get grants to study such things as “the enlargement of women’s jaws or the narrowing of women’s hips.”
Naturally, as an aspiring cranky old man, Heartiste is most horrified by what he thinks is happening amongst the millennials, declaring that
the androgyne phenomenon is getting worse, and goes beyond desexualizing or uni-sexualizing fashion statements. Something profoundly disturbing is going on with the bodies of, in particular, American Millennials. Sexual dimorphism is flipping; the sexes aren’t just converging on an asexual norm…they’re swapping body types!
First with the avocado toast, now this! Damn Millennials.
I see so many 20s and 30s women with the broad shoulders and narrow hips natural to men, and so many men with the narrow shoulders and broad hips natural to women. It’s as if the sexual market turned upside down and switched sexes.
Even if we were to accept that the “sexual marketplace” is a real thing, how on earth could it cause literal changes in human bodies over the course of a single generation?
Well, don’t expect an answer to that from Heartiste, who’s got his thesaurus out now.
Manjaws lumber cityscapes on africanized pelvic fulcrums as their cantilevered shoulders cut swathes through cowed crowds. Their vaginas seem misplaced on them.
As unsettlingly, soyboys swish and swivel on bulbous pear-shaped haunches, supporting droopy unmuscled flesh that recedes upwardly to strangely child-like clavicles and diminutive shoulder spans, upon which soft rounded heads jerk fearfully out of the way of the manjaws with snapping vaginas.
This is the worst David Cronenberg movie ever.
Social conditioning can’t do this to bodies.
Wow. A rare acknowledgement of reality from Heartiste.
Something evil lurks in our environment, in our ecology, that’s responsible for the sexual polarity reversal.
And we’re back into the land of mystical conspiracy-mongering.
I suspect that the same evil is responsible for the xenophilic anti-White virtue sniveling insanity currently gripping the White Left, and which left unanswered and unchecked will mean the end of America as a nation distinct from the vast dirt and dystopia fields of the Hued World.
So there’s, what, a chemical in the water that causes women to grow “manjaws” and men to grow wider hips? And it also makes people mad at racists? Like the sort of racists who refer to countries that don’t have majority white populations as “the Hued World?”
If the March of the Manjaws and the Mewl of the Micemen proceeds apace, what consequences can we expect to see unfold in our society?
Whatever they are, I just hope they’ll lead to fewer people writing like this.
Heartiste is convinced that the future armies of “masculinized women” will combine the worst characteristics of “both men and women.” They’ll be “stridently aggressive and competitive like men but lacking the instinct of loyalty, cooperativeness, and duty of men.” Yet they’ll also be “cruelly subversive and passive-aggressive like women but lacking the nurturing vulnerability and intoxicating femininity of women.”
And yes, he’s predicting all this because he’s convinced himself that there are more women walking around with square jaws than there were a few years ago.
But wait, what about the men with the wide, childbearing hips?
Somewhat the reverse applies to feminized men, who have the submissiveness and avoidance mentality of women hitched to the single-minded focus of men, and the indiscriminate nurturing of women weaponized by the tribal boundary patrolling of men.
Is it just me or did that sentence just lurch its way into complete incoherence there at the end?
Within a few generations of this grotesque circus side show we will likely see society eating the last of its seed corn as once-admired institutions succumb to abject corruption, in-fighting, vapid credentialism, even more vapid moral preening, and finally systemic breakdown of basic civilizational functions.
Amazing what you can deduce from seeing a few women with square jaws on your way to work one day.
That incel daiting site is scary. As many of the commenters are saying, it’s a good way to pare women with the men most likely to murder them. Except that I suspect an Ashley Maddison type scam. 99.9% men, 0.1% desperate women and a lot of bots pretending to be female to keep the men paying up.
I don’t spend my time dreaming up the perefct scam, but incels are just about the perfect mark for that kind of thing. They’re desperate and they have an astonishing ability to close their eyes to the obvious. Even if they eventually catch on, they’ll find some way to blame women rather than the site’s organisers and/or thei own gullibility.
ETA: since this comment is an exact duplicate of my previous comment, I’m deleting it. :/
In a manner of speaking, that is.
At least the Man Cave this guy is whining about is actually IN the house in question. The female equivalent ‘She Shed’ is an actual shed out in the back yard. For those who are fortunate enough to have a decent-sized back yard, that is.
Sunk cost fallacy is something all people are prone to to some extent… If you’ve already invested, time, money, energy or other resources into something, it’s just psychologically hard to go “ok that turned out to be shit and so all the resources I have spent already were completely wasted”. It doesn’t have to be that it’s hard to admit that you’ve done something stupid, because maybe it wasn’t stupid, maybe the thing you spent resources on really looked good initially and there was no way of knowing that it would turn out to be shit in the end. We still don’t like to admit that we’ve wasted resources. So you wanna defend the thing and tell yourself that if you keep spending resources on it, it’s eventually gonna turn out to be worth it.
I felt this super hard myself once when me and Husband were out hiking with heavy backpacks, and we realized we had been going the wrong way. I knew perfectly well that the urge was irrational, because there was nothing for us in that direction so we had to turn back, but I still had the urge to keep going the same direction just so we wouldn’t have wasted both time and muscle effort.
There are also interesting and way more dramatic examples of this in “Secondhand Time” by Svetlana Alexievich, where she interviews loads of Russians who lived through the Soviet years. Some miss the Soviet era for completely understandable reasons, like they’re even poorer today than they used to be. But there are also some people who were falsely accused and suffered horribly in Soviet prisons and gulags, and still lament the fall of Soviet – because if a communist utopia had eventually been reached, all that suffering would at least have been for something, but since Soviet fell, it turned out to have been completely for nothing.
@Surplus
My heart goes out to you. Here in Northern Ontario, we aren’t likely to go conservative, but Southern Ontario has far more seats than we do, and Ford seems designed to appeal to the wealthier big city types who don’t care about us on the lower echelons as long as they get tax cuts and (supposedly) lower gas prices. I can’t count the number of times a Ford “pay 10 cents less per litre” ad has appeared before a YouTube video, and on tv the cons had an ad specifically targeting the ndp by misquoting and misrepresenting some things they’ve said (they seem to be targeting quotes critical of military culture, like Ford would actually do anything for people in the military other than pay lip service).
Is it just me or is this provincial election feeling like a litmus test of whether Trump-style politics/conservatism will make headway in Canada?
Yes. It is feeling like that.
Now how do we fix it?
@Violet:
Disembark from my fertile greensward.
Ha. I am so totally swiping that.
@Surplus
I wish I knew. I know one group is trying to identify certain ridings that are sort of battleground areas to know where strategic voting can be useful – https://www.leadnow.ca/stopford/ – but other than that, I wish more groups, unions or progressives with disposable income, would put out ads of their own to tear down Ford’s bs. That’s certainly not me, I’m on odsp and get the occasional shift at the lcbo.
There’s always volunteering with a local candidate, but that unfortunately won’t get to the heart of the matter – greed and apathy imho. I don’t know how to fight that in my own area, let alone in more conservative parts of the province.
And the Ontario campaign just got even weirder, as Kathleen Wynne conceded this morning that the Liberals won’t win. That’s the kind of thing that no one does, even if they think they’re going to get stomped.
Volunteering won’t help me. For that matter voting won’t. This riding is one of the safer Tory ones. 🙁
I wish the proportional representation referendum had passed a few years ago. Instead, domino by domino it seems like my life is drawing to a close. And yours, too, in all likelihood.
(TL;DR: you may as well just skip the rest unless you have time and are really really bored.)
I don’t know what options I have here. But I doubt it’s much. The four walls around me are probably the last home I’ll ever know. The only reason I can afford *those* is rent control. I can’t possibly move without my rent doubling (and then it will approach, if not exceed, my entire income), so if I ever am unable to stay where I am, my next digs will be a cardboard box. I can’t, to my knowledge, make money on the side without it simply being deducted from my benefits — so if I want to actually increase my income, rather than simply donate free labor and time to someone, I’d have to find a gig that netted me at least $15k a year. A part-time McJob certainly won’t do that, let alone make-your-own-hours freelance or gig work of any kind.
Oh, did I mention the sleep disorder that pretty much precludes my having any kind of scheduled work, let alone an ordinary 9-to-5 job of the sort that increasingly seems to be a mythological beast in our tales of the past, like dragons and fairies? Also precludes splitting the rent with a roommate since we’d necessarily end up driving each other crazy — and that’s if I could hope to find a possible roommate whom I’d trust with unsupervised physical access to my computer, which is more or less my whole life these days.
There’s plenty else that might get me before a Ford government drove me out of my home and into the loving arms of hypothermia or starvation, of course. Obviously I can’t afford a car, and the nearest grocery store is a more than 30 minute walk away. If age or injury made it impossible to walk that far (and then back wearing a heavy pack) I’d starve no matter how much money I had left. Resorting to taxis would only delay the inevitable, since adding an extra twenty bucks or so to the price of every trip into town would bankrupt me.
Sometimes I get the distinct impression that the people of Ontario, the people of Earth, and the universe itself don’t really want me around but just can’t quite get up the nerve to simply shoot me either. But a quick consideration of my history mounts up the evidence for such a thesis pretty darn fast. Besides the whole “slowly circling the drain” thing, there’s the fact that in every room I’ve ever walked into, outside of gatherings of immediate family (and sometimes then too), I’ve been a fifth wheel. If I make any kind of overt bid for attention most people treat me as an annoyance, and if I don’t I get ignored completely. Only online or with a handful of family members do I even occasionally get some semblance of what I gather to be normal treatment, and even then it’s as if there’s a shoestring budget for such, and I quickly exceed my monthly allotment. If I post something I think is pretty nifty anywhere, I’m lucky to get an upper single digit number of likes and/or one single comment. If I participate in a site or forum, usually one of three things happen: I get mostly ignored, someone picks a fight (and then the moderators invariably take the other guy’s side), or the entire place dries up and blows away like a tumbleweed (this place seems to be busily in the process of selecting door #3 as I type this). It’s as if I’m emitting some kind of subtle repulsion field that works on a subliminal level … and somehow is conveyed even over ASCII-text online channels, so no it’s not something wrong with my personal hygiene. The impression I get is that I’m simply so bland and uninteresting that the only way for me to get noticed at all is to intentionally make an ass of myself or something. Hence my assessment that few people will miss me once Ford and the balance of the citizenry of Ontario are done freezing me into a corpsicle by the most cowardly and indirect route possible …
The most sad and painful thing, perhaps, is that I feel I could contribute something … if only anyone wanted me to. But being ignored by just about everyone all the time sends a very clear message, and that message is “fuck off”. That includes slaving over a technical degree, while dealing simultaneously with that sleep disorder, graduating and making the dean’s list in the process, and then getting not a single response of any kind when subsequently applying for jobs in my field. That field? Computer science! Where did I apply for the jobs? The place considered at the time to be Silicon Valley North! The self-evident verdict of the titans of said industry? Surplus to requirements …
For what it’s worth, the people here have shown a greater degree of not-ignoring-me-or-else-being-annoyed than most places. I expected to outstay my welcome within a month and it’s been four or five. But then, see above re: door number 3 …
That jerk Wynne not only conceded, but implored Liberal supporters to vote for her anyway, rather than to vote NDP. She might have just handed that fuckhead Ford the province on a silver fucking platter with that stunt!
The best way to think of the sunk cost fallacy is… have you ever been waiting for a bus, where you *could* potentially walk there and get there in a reasonable amount of time, but the bus is supposed to be there soon, so you wait?
And the bus is late, but the longer you wait, the more you say to yourself “well the bus really *should* be here any minute now, so I might as well keep waiting”? And so you end up waiting much much longer than it would have taken you to walk?
It’s that.
@surplus
That… is the most baffling thing I’ve ever heard.
As in, I’m not making much sense? Or as in, what happens to me doesn’t seem to make much sense?
P.S. Anyone else finding Firefox to be buggy and glitchy in recent versions? Independently of the thing with comment forms here. Ever since somewhere around Firefox 59 I’ve had to restart the browser frequently because it starts getting … wobbly. Scrolling starts to render incorrectly, with big blank expanses (usually black, or failing that another solid color, but sometimes a background image or something) scrolling into view in place of what’s supposed to be there. So here for example I might have the top edge of the window halfway through a comment, scroll up, and instead of seeing the whole of that comment, I still only see the bottom half, above which is a sharp horizontal border and then just black. Scrolling back down and up again gives it another chance to correctly render the area that was out of view, but it never used to do this before about version 59 or so. Switching tabs gets wonky at the same time. I’ll often switch from a tab that is just sitting on a page (not still loading anything, no throbber activity or anything) to another tab, then back again after a bit and instead of where I was before somehow the first tab is now on a loading graphic page of the sort sites like Facebook that serve dynamic AJAX content use. Switching away and back a few times usually suffices to recover the original destination of the tab — and weirdly it won’t have reloaded from the web site, it can have been hours stale and still be hours stale with a ton of changes if I hit refresh, despite the fact that according to the browser that tab was navigated off that page to some loading-graphic somewhere and then back again, which navigation would usually fetch a more up to date version of a page. Restarting Firefox makes it behave normally again for hours to a day or two (scrolling and switching tabs behaves exactly as in every older version of Firefox) but then these new glitchy behaviors begin creeping in again when scrolling or changing tabs and get gradually more frequent and annoying until I restart it again. It also eventually starts to get balky/sluggish to respond, and prone to excessive CPU usage, when left running a long time, but that has been true for years, whereas the glitchy scrolling and tab navigation is new.
Oh, and the bogus “loading screen web page” switching to a tab that shouldn’t have navigated there or anywhere else? It’s identical no matter which web site I was at. If the oddly-behaving tab was at Twitter I don’t get a Twitter styled loading page switching to it but the same generic-looking one that I get anywhere else … including here, a site that doesn’t even serve loading graphics! It’s as if there’s a loading page in the browser itself, except that there shouldn’t be, other than the throbber icon for when a page is being downloaded and isn’t finished yet, and that hasn’t changed since Firefox 58 and, as is the norm, doesn’t cover the whole view, just the site’s favicon.
Has anyone else been seeing these glitches, or anything similar? And does anyone know of a workaround or a setting of some sort that will fix it? The scrolling bug looks a lot like a hardware accelerated graphics issue, but I didn’t change any settings relevant to hardware acceleration … and I don’t see how hardware acceleration issues could possibly cause tabs that aren’t even focused in the UI at the time to spontaneously navigate to some page with nothing but an animated GIF on it and back again. (Which mystery page, BTW, never shows up in the history anywhere, e.g. from holding down the “forward” button.)
Every time I see some bilious screed about what a murderous ideology socialism/communism/Marxism is, I think about what post-industrial capitalism does to Surplus and so many others. There are respectable elected officials here in the United States who would cheerfully chuck me and my son in a bin marked ‘useless eaters’*, and they are taken seriously by the ravenous plutocrats whose bidding they do.
*Or ‘lebensunwertes leben’, take your pick.
Maybe that’s because Fartiste is actively LOOKING for “evidence” to support his daffy theory of…Goddess only knows what. Because I’m pretty sure that that body type has always been quite common among women, though not as common as the other. (I know it was when I was in high school, and often self-consciously comparing myself to the other girls, thinking my actually-average hips were way huge compared to theirs!)
Oh STOP. Even in cartoons, people don’t look THIS exaggeratedly ridiculous.
And what the fucking hell is a “snapping vagina”? Because while it IS made of muscle, a vagina doesn’t actually ever snap. At most, it just…expands and contracts, and sometimes squeezes. But most of the time, it just sort of sits there, minding its own business. Like I wish the Shartiste would, because his prose is so purple it’s making Prince look pale.
@Surplus to Requirements – I’m sorry you’re going through a bad time. I might be not useful here, but I want you to know that I care.
Ugh. This is why our current welfare systems are rotten. Always clawbacks of some sort. It’s time for minimum income or at least something that a) doesn’t discriminate against those who can’t work or can’t find work while b) not discouraging those who would like to find work by clawing back on benefits. The chance of those two coming together seem slim – even more so if Ford gets in power.
The ODSP website seems a mess, but the page with a list of resources links to a service search directory that might be useful.
OPIRG Toronto has a specifically leftist perspective. I don’t know if any of its events are near you.
I’m also linking to a phone help directory – like anything, it’s not a sure bet, but usually you can find someone who you can talk about your anxiety with and who doesn’t go, “OK, not immediately suicidal, let’s not bother” (which was my perception of helplines at first).
I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with you, or that your reaction is inappropriate somehow, but your list of worries struck a chord.
It’s like how I feel when I’m worried about things: let’s say I’m worried about 4 things, and then I assume things are going wrong with Thing 5 and Thing 6. When Things 1-4 are huge worries, they cast shadows on everything else, even though Things 5-6 might be OK (in this case, I think the website problem is a temporary blip, not a downward spiral; WordPress comments are acting weird, which has happened before).
I don’t think a help line is going to be able to solve such obviously non-psychological problems as (if Ford wins and starts to slash’n’burn like his predecessor Mike Harris) rent+food+utilities-income > 0, unless I luck into getting a wish-granting genie moonlighting at a call-center from the phone-automation roulette wheel’s spin. Even less one located in Toronto, which would be a toll call from here … but thanks anyway.
(But just in case … 1. A billion dollars, not in cash which would simply be inflationary and amount to stealing a few pennies each from everyone else, but in some directly useful (and saleable) form thus creating overall wealth — maybe a Star Trek replicator? Could both use it and rent its services out; 2. A successful worldwide socialist revolution and not ending in some twisted half-assed failure mode like the Soviets did; and of course 3. More wishes.)
Part 2 of comment – sorry this is long.
When I graduated, I had a MA in English Lit and was also anxious because of things that had happened during my degree. I couldn’t find a full-time, longer-than-a-season kind of job for three years. It was just luck that I happened on an English tutoring job at a local centre and the next term got to be an admin assistant (at times that was kind of terrible, but now I’m in a more stable position and doing less admin and more tutoring – which pays better anyway).
You also wrote
or I would ask about comp sci tutoring, since on an hourly basis it can pay well, but this is probably me being “if all you have is a hammer, everything seems like a nail”.
At the place I’m in, we’re looking for more tutors in this subject, but that’s no use since it’s in Montreal. Shit. I wish I could be more useful. 🙁
Still, if you want someone to talk to, I am xylitolcyclone on Twitter (with the at sign, of course) and the same name on YouTube and the website linked in my username (at that last one there’s no option for PMs, but it’s a quiet space where people can write pseudonymously, no sign-in required – just a captcha to go through if it’s 24 hours since you last wrote something).
If you want to talk about Ontario-specific things, I have a friend living in Windsor who’s in a superficially similar situation. He has a sleep cycle disorder that prevents him from working so-called normal hours. (He does some music recording to get by). If you get in touch with me I can ask him if he’d mind sharing his email address.
Whatever you do, stay strong. Remember these immutable facts: You are valuable and valued and the word “immutable” is funny.
@Surplus to Requirements: I also had a second comment, but the mammoth ate it, I guess. 🙁
I talked about my own problems finding a job, asked tentatively if you’d considered comp-sci tutoring, which is a very hammer-and-nail situation because I randomly found a job as an English tutor that led to my full-time (sometimes), usually tolerable position. You can safely ignore this.
The next part was about contacts. If you want to talk about anything, I recommended the website linked in my name which is quiet, but pseudonymous and doesn’t require sign-ins, there’s just a captcha. If you want to send me a message I also have a YouTube account in the same name, and a Twitter account under xylitol cyclone (one word, with the at thingy first).
But I’m in Montreal. For Ontario-specific things, I have a friend who lives in Windsor. He has a sleep-cycle disorder that means he can’t work so-called normal hours. He does music recording things. If you get in touch with me, I can also ask if he wouldn’t mind me sharing his email.
In reply: I haven’t found any phone genies, but I talked to someone from Microsoft recently who actually helped me. It was very shocking. 😀 But see if OPIRG has any good links. From my experience with QPIRG, it’s kind of clustered in downtown around universities, but they have a strong social justice outlook (if those words together make sense – I’m tired)
WordPress, you confuse me. I thought my second comment got deleted, and now it shows up but the third one doesn’t. Well, if the third one appears, sorry for being redundant.
Warning. Rant oncoming.
Well, nothing to do with Ontario, but there’s a Democratic presidential candidate running on a platform of UBI and Medicare for all. Andrew Yang.
https://www.yang2020.com/
I didn’t click through all his policy positions yet, so I can’t guarantee there’s nothing objectionable in there, but from what I did look at, he’s very progressive. He was interviewed on MSNBC earlier today.
I’m pretty excited about this. I’m assuming his chances of getting the nomination are slim, but at least this will bring the issue into the spotlight and take it out of fringey pipe dream territory. Wages are not growing despite low unemployment rates and about half of the jobs currently being performed by humans could be automated with the technology we already have. Something needs to be done to make sure people can actually live decent lives. Even the wealthy should want this as civil unrest happens when people are desperate. Plus, automation shouldn’t be seen as an evil thing we should be dreading. It should be seen as a positive thing. Why should humans have to do physically difficult and/or mentally numbing or crushing jobs when machines can do them instead?
Globalization is here to stay, automation is not going to be stopped and high rates of unionization are not going to happen again. It’s time to face that and deal with the current economy in a different way.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
*Eyes light up at Asian American candidate that’s pro Universal Basic Income*
Agree wholeheartedly. I went through the typical big ones like lgbtq+ rights
So far he’s good on my book.
@surplus
Your comments about yourself and how you come across to other people made me feel really sad for you.
I have sometimes felt similar myself and it is a cognitive distortion. There is nothing about you that could put people off over the internet on every forum you post on. It’s not possible. I think a lot of people’s posts don’t get replies – it might help to go to a forum you frequent regularly and count up how many other people have made a post with no replies. I guarantee it’s not none.
I don’t know how you come off in real life, but considering it’s pretty unusual for someone to be dismissed within minutes by every single person they meet, I’d hazard a guess things aren’t happening like that outside your head.
I’m not surprised you feel like this though. You have a very difficult illness and you are worried about the future. Be nice to yourself for a little while, you’re under stress, now is not the time to worry about what others think of you and why.
If you have a sleep disorder, are you getting treatment? Would your doctor also look at getting you therapy? Such illnesses are emotionally debilitating and lack of sleep is linked with depression.
Sometimes it helps me to make a “worst case” scenario too if I’m facing the possibility of something awful. OK so suppose your benefits do get cut off. I know you don’t want to deal with that prospect, but one email and a couple of Google searches now could make things easier down the line. Is there a local charity that could rehouse you, or a local food bank or soup kitchen? What does your local council do about homelessness? Who’s your electoral representative at a local level (obvs not this ford guy) – email them, they might be able to intervene on your behalf or have some ideas about where to go. What about family, friends, could you sofa surf? (not brilliant, but not a cardboard box). Is there a charity associated with your particular sleep disorder? Night shelters? Temp accommodation for the homeless? In Britain we have the citizens advice bureau where you go in these kind of circumstances, is there anything like that?
I don’t know of any of those things, and my area’s representative in Parliament is (likely to be) a damn Tory, so, useless.
Sofa surfing, etc. … I don’t really know many local people well enough for that and would surely outstay any welcome fairly quickly. But there’s a bigger issue … pretty much my entire life, including creative output, is in computers, desktop computers. Those kind of require a fair amount of space and to have one’s own roof to keep. If I couldn’t keep them anymore, it would be the end of me. Anything after that would be “surviving” but not “living” and if I ever (somehow) had a roof to call my own again someday I’d have to start over basically from scratch. (And don’t even think of saying “cloud backups”. If I could afford the monthly fees for things like non-free cloud services I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.)
The sleep disorder isn’t to my knowledge one there’s particular help for. I seem to have a longer than normal, and not entirely regular, circadian cycle. So it goes in and out of phase with the actual daytime over a period of weeks. It’s certainly incompatible with a job I can’t schedule myself, and it’s pretty much incompatible with any kind of living arrangement that involves other people, too, since I can end up needing 9 hours of quiet undisturbed time in the middle of the day and be wanting to watch TV or do other things in the dead of night. In an apartment that’s manageable, with most people at work during the day the worst noise is in the morning and evening but there are big quiet blocks most of the rest of the day and night, and low volume and/or headphones can be used to avoid disturbing the neighbors at night. I don’t think that would suffice with people in the same apartment with me, though.
As for the social isolation, part of that is definitely lack of money to spend on transportation or any activities or places that cost money, but part is definitely that I seem to be boring to most other people. Worse, they tend to be boring to me much of the time. I have no idea how to keep a conversation going with most people much of the time: hi, how are you, fine and you, fine … and then what? Not much happens in my life. Most of what happens in someone else’s tends to be stuff I know nothing about. “Sophie said something funny the other day” … who’s Sophie? Don’t recall and may in fact never have heard of her until now. Something something at work today … maybe if I’d ever managed to hold down a normal job for a significant time I could relate. There’s almost never anything I can contribute to the topic but umm-hmm and ah. The reverse seems to apply as well, since my interests mostly run to the technical. Even media stuff in common is scarce. It’s as if almost nobody actually watches TV anymore, and the TV they do watch is from another planet entirely, because the shows people talk about are mostly ones I never even see flipping through the channels I get. Video games that get much discussion are current, often expensive online monthly-fee things, or at the very least need a recent game console or a PC more recent than several years old. And there we’re into the overlap with “no money” interfering with having a social life again.
Maybe there’s just some knack to conversing I never picked up but maybe it’s just not possible without having at least a somewhat similar life trajectory … and mine seems to be nearly unique. Or else the others with similar ones are equally isolated, and there’s no way to discover one another.
It gets worse if a conversation has more than two participants. It seems almost instinct on everyone else’s part to exclude me in such cases. I will usually not be able to get a word in edgewise if I feel I have something to contribute, and by the time there’s an opening everyone else will have drifted to some other topic, usually one where I can’t relate at all. Worse, there’s often someone who manages to monopolize most of the attention of the others while somehow avoiding being perceived as an asshole for doing so; I have not figured out how to do that, so either someone else monopolizes most of the attention, or I get perceived as an asshole.
There is a unifying theme to all of these problems though, and that is that I can’t compete. This is a world that forces us to compete in dog-eat-dog fashion, for money or scraps from the tables of the one-percent, for attention online on social media, and for attention in groups face-to-face, and I don’t seem to have what it takes in any of those arenas. I get a skilled degree in an allegedly in-demand field but never get called. Other people monopolize most of the attention online. Other people monopolize most of the attention offline. Always there’s some variation on the theme of a 1% getting most of everything while I get almost nothing and am expected to be grateful for that much. And how does one get to be part of that 1%? By amassing some form of capital, monetary capital, real estate capital, social capital, conversational capital of some sort even. And to do that you have to already have some to parlay into more. If you have none you can’t get a foot on the damn ladder, not anymore. Everything is rigged to shut out the new people and keep everything circulating inside an existing population of, mostly, Baby Boomers.