Hard to argue with. I'm 28 and work at a warehouse and the guys I'm friendly with on a surface level just to kinda be personable will say some shockingly homophobic and misogynistic things if you listen to them talk long enough. Like I can't be friends with these guys, not really.
Conversely, I met this really cool guy the other day at a rockhound meet up who was super chill and left. He goes diving for jade in Big Sur and was super into scallops so I traded him some marine shell fossil conglomerates and lapidary slabs and polished agate nodules for chunks of jade and some weed. Me and my partner just vibed with him and his buddy and it was great. Guys that cool are few and far between unfortunately.
some shockingly homophobic and misogynistic things
I don't think this has gotten substantially worse since the 1950s or whenever there wasn't a "male loneliness epidemic".
Edit: missing preface being that you’re probably right but there used to be a satisfying if not effective form of redress to make them shit the fuck up
It used to be socially acceptable to fight a man if one felt he was crossing a line. These days that’s still true in some cases. Not enough.
Like, honor societies had many many problems, but god damn I have some chuds coworkers I would legitimately duel for things they’ve said about women and me (fully closeted at work, present fully masc and don’t discuss dating at all).
Being able to legally fight is not a good call. It's really dangerous
You’re right, of course. I’m just venting. It would be satisfying though daydreamcloud.jpg
Nm, I was wrong about thought I said duel for some reason. You’re right, getting beat up sucks I’ve had that before and didn’t care for it. Luckily these dudes are unhealthy af. Like not making it to 65 unless they make changes.
I'd make it legal for you to fight those guys. I'd just wanna close that door after. If anyone can fuel anyone, at least one of them may have a grandkid thst would vendetta you and you'd have to make him sail to America and become The Godfather.
I welcome the blood fued, I don’t plan on having kids. Send me your descendants Chud! /joke
Thanks for the cool headedness/ letting me vent a bit. I need the job too much to do/say anything really and it sucks
A non lethal blood feud would be kinda fun. Like you keep ordering food to the other person's house or doing a drive by water balloon right when they're going into work. I've also always wanted a nemesis for similar reasons. I'd like my problems to mostly come from one person who's nsmr I can yell while shaking my fist in the air like a Hannah Barbara character.
Thats a fun idea. Especially if it’s not actually a deep seated or one sided thing. Like a give and take where one day they ruin a minor thing and the other day you come out on top. Never actually serious shit like cuttting brake lines.
Maybe under socialism we can have a consensual tinder app for friendly rivalries.
Chuds actually think they could survive 5 minutes, let alone actually win, a civil war. The second they have to run into cover, they're dead.
Ignore the cover, this man in question is 3-4 inches taller and 100+ pounds heavier + he smokes + he has a meat heavy diet (works in the deli and gets lots of freebies). He’d have a coronary trying to run the same mile as me let alone a combat situation
as a former geology nerd and still stoner damn that meetup sounds cool af
Oh it was so cool. It was the 48th annual Stoddard Wells Rockhound Tailgate put on by the Victor Valley Gem and Mineral Club in California. 3 days of buying, selling, and trading rocks, gems, minerals, and fossils out in the Mojave Desert. You don't even have to vend you can just camp and hang out. Look at cool rock collections during the day and smoke weed around the camp fire under the stars at night. Can't wait to go again next year
Conversely, I met this really cool guy the other day at a rockhound meet up...some weed
i don't think i understood a word of this after 'other day', and that fucking rocks. the dudes are alright, if they're into... uhhh geology i think
Focus on the cool guy and drop the chuds like dead weight on a sinking ship.
the guys I'm friendly with on a surface level just to kinda be personable will say some shockingly homophobic and misogynistic things if you listen to them talk long enough
One of the biggest reasons I quit my job in a male-dominated trade was the casual racism and sexism that they would drop like it was normal. Like we'd just be talking about whatever random bullshit we were on and they'd just spew some racist bullshit and continue on like nothing. I was cordial with the guys there but I still happily took a massive pay cut to work in a less male dominated workplace
The four discussion topics of young men:
- Watching sports
- Superhero who would win debates
- Stories about playing video games
- Which women might possibly give them a scrap of pussy
The four topics of middle aged men:
- Their kids' sports
- Their failing bodies
- Their parents' failing bodies
- Bowling
I am both excited and horrified to learn the four topics of old men.
We can also just get drunk and break things. Or watch re-runs of Seinfeld.
Okay, for 2 a co-worker and I play Deadliest Warrior where it's like that Simpsons joke of who was better, Muhammad Ali in his prime or anti lock brakes and then do a but together where we improve the entire episode. I've found I can get around this stuff by being really good at doing bits and incorporating others into them, usually with really weird hypotheticals like 'what would you do if you were invisible but only to animals?' 'How long do you think you would survive if cars were legally prohibited from stopping for you specifically?' Or 'what if you could read minds but only when people were thinking negatively about you?'
Men will literally only open up about their deepest feelings to some guy whose name is pigfucker69 in a voip call while playing a game called fascist space guy simulator 9000
I am older than you. I have unfortunte news about my peers. They are still losers. Material conditions are garbage and about half of all people will always be below average. Despite this we know there are conditions that produce happier healthier people.
Material conditions are garbage and about half of all people will always be below average.
isn't that how averages work though
Depends on if there is a skew and the type of average. Median, by definition, will have half up and half down, but mean doesn't unless distribution is symmetrical.
Kinda. Legit it is hard to make friends as a guy though. 24 you are still young but it gets harder and harder as you get older. The way that things are at least in the USA, men are basically expected to be in competition with eachother constantly. I mean, when I came out as trans I started making a bunch new friends. Idk. Lots of loser men out there though so you're not wrong
Not doing the weird competitive man stuff and just being fun to be around can still easily make you dude friends as a dude. It doesn't take much to be pleasant tly disarming cause they're sick of being armed.
25 here and I agree. Most people in general kind of suck in my experience. Like most of my friends just smoke and play games and parrot dumb shit they see on Facebook. I've discovered more and more recently that some of the stuff they say teeters on chud territory. They're like your average South Park fan, I guess.
It just sucks because... is this all adulthood actually is? At least for me? Did I fuck up so badly?
It is pretty much all it is and it's not just you and you didn't fuck up. Adults are just older children and most people have absolutely no curiosity
This is one of the most frustrating things I've realized as I've entered adulthood. It's so boring. Like it's easy to make fun of Funko guys, but most people aren't fundamentally any different.
You gotta find a non loser scene to get involved with like salsa, yoga, mountain biking, board gaming, rock climbing, kayaking, whatever. Everyone will be like 32 but what can you do.
board gaming
One of these is not like the others.
Like fr, there are some really fucked up people in the board gaming community. Many are cool, don't get me wrong, but the fucked up ones are very deeply fucked up.
I want to do this but I worry I'll stand out as a weirdo in the crowd. I still feel like a gangly teenager and people that do that type of stuff seem to be relatively well-adjusted. The anxiety talking, I know, but I already feel like the weirdo in my current group.
Actually only weirdos do hobbies the social people just hang out. All rock climbers are spiritually gangly teenagers.
At the age of 25 you haven't fucked up. You still have plenty of opportunity to change your destiny and surround yourself with wiser people.
Once you get a few years older it becomes more reasonable to start asking more of your social circle, but if they're too incurious they wont be responsive to that. If you're on this site you're familiar with the concept of 5-year planning, it's totally doable socially too.
I think a lot of managing through the shift from teenager to young adult to 30+ yr old guy is all about that filtering of relationships. When you're younger in high school you meet lots of guys and over the years learn some you were close with suck and those you didn't know so well are pretty great. Then college happens and that friend group scatters while you make new college or work friends and the whole thing repeats. Adulthood is really about those existing relationship networks and maybe a select few folks you meet through hobbies as a fully developed person. At the end of this you have lots of old relationships and acquaintances, but are only left with a few dear friends.
Honestly it shakes my faith as a socialist a bit. I wanna blame it all on capitalism and propaganda, but damn I meet people almost daily who suck so hard I'm like "I'm pretty sure you'd still be an asshole even if you were born under FALGSC". How the fuck do you organize socialism when so many people are irredeemably dickish? Idk maybe Lenin was just good at putting up with assholes, he did work with Trotsky.
We're fighting for everyone and not just the people we like. All we need from them is they fall in line adequately when the time comes. The revolution will not get rid of jerks or assholes and I doubt anything really will.
"I was expecting you to say communism won't work because of human nature... I wasn't expecting you to be so ass you convince me it's true."
People suck because they imitate authority figures. Like with covid, if a ramdom person sees the goverment does not give a shit. They dont give a shit either. Then again even in china some asholes were protesting against quarentines, so i guess there are some people who should get the wall, but overall, most of the assholes would be ok people in a different system.
I think that's all true to a degree but that still means a lot of people are really shallow and suck at doing any critical thinking. And again I wanna blame it on education but I've met people who went to good school, are well read and seem pretty knowledgeable about various things who will still drop the absolute worst fucking takes about certain things and I'm just like, I don't think any amount of reeducation is gonna help you bro.
I agree education is not as important. Most peopple learn by imitation. And the system edges us on towards certain paths, again during covid they made it hard to keep proper behaibiours lile mask use. So people gave up. Once enough people stoped masking being an ashole became the new normal due to imitation. But in some countries were their goverments paid more atention people are still masking. Not everyone but a majority or at least a large plurality.
This and then there's the stigma, taboo & hegemony of it all. Just saw a post where a person who would call themselves aware and progressive stated having "the weirdest flu" for two weeks and then went on listing all the textbook covid symptoms from sore throat to sob.
It's like people choose to be programmed to ignore the obvious, it's infuriating.
This same repeats in everything: I got into an argument with an environmentalist the other day who first ranted about the right wing & fascism and then his blog post had overpopulation brain worms in it. I asked him about this and provided several links on how he is in fact promoting ecofascism and as the dude refuses to denounce capitalism as a system, he was entirely unable to see the issue.
The sad bit is that this is most people. But tech bros are still the most annoying for me. Regardless of age.
Or say its allergies. Because of this i think long covid is way more common than reported but people just ignore it because admiting it would be too much of a psychological burden.
As for techbros, its like a cargo cult. They sure are anyoing. And that is one set of assholes that are entierly a product of social conditioning.
how does not organizing socialism fix this though?
under not socialism, good behaviour is discouraged and bad behaviour is incentivized.
the act of organizing teaches people (including you) new ways of relating to each other they never even thought of. struggle changes everything.
Have you ever read Wages so low you'll freak by Mike Pudd'nhead? It's online at that link.
Fair, sorry working retail with petite bough customers and CHUD coworkers just puts me in a sour mood for solidarity.
I feel you so much on this. I find the most heinously inconsiderate bullshit almost every day. A half empty wine cup placed on the shelf in an unsteady manner, people just rummaging through the shelf I got all nice and organized, opened packaging (not even stolen, I can respect theft) that I have to run damages for now, and it goes on and on. Am I the only person who thinks it wrong to fuck up somebodies workplace just because they don’t have a choice in unfucking if they want to stay employed?
The majority of Americans seem to be less mannered than actual hogs because at least it’s meant to be in the hogs nature that it’s dirty and a pain to be around.
Hey now hogs are very clean and smart animals. They only roll in mud to cool off. And like any other animal in captivity (including humans) they only become filthy when given no other choice. Don't give into the propaganda animal ag has spread!
Ok, I wouldn’t want one in my workplace either way.
On second thought, it might be an improvement.
Feel this. Live in a really rural community. People I work with are ok but I have to commute 30 minutes south and most of them commute 15 minutes north froma a city.
When people ask me why I don't do more to organize in my community it's because if you get more than like 3 of the average people from around her together they'll just start telling each other jokes where the punchline is a slur and then start talking about how minorities (none of which live within 30 miles of them) have it so easy compared to middle aged white men. Then talk about how the democrats are going to make it illegal to eat hamburgers and they're going to take away your boot jacks.
My circle of acquaintances are basically the only decent people in town and I do volunteer where I can but it's pretty disheartening to be working at a meal site, give somebody their food and they respond "hopefully Trump wins because if that commie Biden wins he'll give all this food away to a bunch of slurs who don't want to work."
Yea my last boss was about the dumbest fox New Maga asshole youncould imagine, I mean would stop at job sites and talk with his friends for 45 minutes at the end of the day about whatever fox told them to be mad about that day.
Near us is a big vacation destination in the summer with a hotel that's booked all summer so it's almost impossible to rent a place because everybody just rents them as air bnbs all summer. Had a couple friends who had to move because their landlord just told them they weren't renewing the lease and they had to get out.
So the town passed a law saying that you could do rentals for less than a month to try to Crack down on it.
My old boss insisted it was the hotel buying out the politicians so they didn't have any competition. I really tried to patiently explain that wasn't it, the hotel was already totally full all summer so they didn't need more business and it was almost impiss8ble to actually find a place to rent. He told me that made sense.
Then 30 minutes later one of his racist friends came in and my boss was smugly telling him about how the hotel bride the local politicians so they wouldn't have any competition.
His business shut down shortly after he started putting a stipulation in his contracts if you didn't support the 2nd amendment he wouldn't do business for you and refused to go into any bad or even gas station that wouldn't let him wear his gun in them.
Idk if he realized it but he was the most cowardly pathetic man I've ever had to deal with.
Cut throat dog-eat-dog capitalism mixed with Westoid individualist ideology is a surefire recipe for assholes. If someone is always in survival mode and someone is always out to fuck them over, that reflects on their personality.
Socialism is the answer to both of these, but how you impose socialism except at the point of a gun is a question I'm not qualified to solve.
once you get married it gets easier, since you can hang out with other married couples. men who have passed the (honestly, minimal) filter of convincing someone else to spend the entire rest of their lives with them are somewhat less likely to be total shit.
I'd counter that all of the most sexist, racist, homophobic etc men I know are married with kids.
Feel like I'd have to put myself in a closet to date women again. And never touch on my eggish self again. So usually the women have good company when comes to homophobia, etc.
Debatable, as evidenced by all the shitty divorced dudes out there. Crowder, Musk, Alex Jones, to name a few.
Well clearly they didn't convince someone to spend the rest of their lives with them.
still invalidates the heuristic unless you only intend to make friend with 90 year old couples
Domestic abuse rates unfortunately means that isn't a good metric
Even if the guy is cool, their wives can still suck and be downright mean to your wife for no reason other than she doesn't play games with gender stereotypes.
But usually you find out the guy isn't cool either, just didn't know him well enough.
The male loneliness epidemic exists because we were all socialized by chronically online nerds. Execute steve huffman and it'll go away in a generation.
I kinda respect the misanthropy in this thread and I understand why people come to this but I refuse to give up on the potential in the human spirit and inside everyone except in the case of certain individual people
If that ever happens I'm probably gonna
myselfAt a certain point the line between "I'm not condemning everybody just individuals" and "I've been immediatly disappointed in 95 out of the last 100 people I've interacted with" becomes fairly indistinguishable
When your day to day is: Oh boy, new contractor, let's not judge a book by its cover maybe this guys decent
"Hey man how's it going"
"Be a lot better if it weren't for all the n-words taking all my money through taxes and that c-word taking the rest of it through child support"
You get beat down fairly quickly
Idk it's not indistinguishable for me. That sounds fucking awful though. I don't know what kind of work you do but I wouldn't take contractors you meet as representative of all of humanity. People are so varied. I've worked in retail so I've had lots of similar experiences but I think it's a mistake and also hurts a lot to generalize what people are like in that specific context to the entire world
Even in retail I met so many good, sweet seeming people who were that way in spite of being abused constantly by management and customers and the capitalist system in general
I don't go into any social situation (at least not anything like a Nazi rally or something lol) expecting to hate everyone I meet but I don't go in expecting to find saints either. I just try to meet people where they're at and find genuine connection
We live in a particularly bad era. I don't think being a shitty person is inherent to anyone. People are also very complex and dynamic social beings and it's usually one-sided to consider anyone as primarily good or primarily bad forever unless they have committed some kind of exceptional acts. Maybe in better conditions we can create (not even just revolutionary conditions but also just being around for people) there is hope for everyone
Maybe I'm just coping because I'm not exactly a paragon of goodness lol
Interactions with people in retail give me hope in humanity but paradoxically reduces my hope in civilisation.
There are still good patient people out there who are doing their best to put up with the bullshit, treat everybody without preconception and trying to make life better for everybody.
Our society has placed them on the lowest rung possible and we regularly get people smugly declaring they don't think they deserve to be paid enough to survive, while those same hateful assholes get to drive home to their gated community and get patted on the back by a bunch of other people who have never done an honest day's work in their life and completely agree with them those workers are lazy and entitled.
And then on the other end I go back to my poor small town community and go by a bunch of "fuck your feelings" flags being flown above confederate flags by people being ground to dust by the same system and never for a second thinking to lay the balme at the feet of those rich useless assholes and instead agreeing with them that we should fuck the working class harder because in their mind that means punishing minorities
Yeahh it's fucking awful
But we do live under the boot of the most evil empire in history (in my case I live inside it even
) so it does make senseReally fucking hope we can pull out of this civilizational death spiral lol
I feel like you have to interact with those gated community hateful assholes a lot lol
I did for a long time then got to my dream of being able to move back home to that poor rural town.
The people still suck, despite the fact theyre materially the polar opposite of the gated community assholes but now I can wander into the woods and avoid people for a couple days a week.
Also highly recommend finding some good-weird guys irl, like some furries or something, maybe you'll like them more and find them more interesting
It's worked for me and a even a few non-furries I know
i'm a 30 year old man and i know i'm definitely a mentally unstable and emotionally fragile loser. also like 98% of the people around me have the WRONG TAKES on stuff like palestine and ukraine and usually trans people and feminism. expressing sympathy for people you don't know personally is like, taken as a sign of weakness or insanity or something, and not just by men. i hate alcohol, sports, travel, outdoor activities, and live music as well so like who could i even ever relate to. every single profile on tinder for example is like 'i like country music, harry potter, alcohol, and football, and also i want to go on a lot of expensive vacations all the time.' i'm a communist in a very conservative suburban area and am functionally broke all the time so i've just resigned to dying alone. sometimes i wonder if i'm not more gay than i think i am or if i'm aromantic or something, i just don't get along with the vast majority of people, we have no common interests and mine are very specific.
yeah, and ironically it's mostly by men
men hate men
(i can confirm)
