Oh please, it's blindingly obvious that you don't want to live the life you claim you do. Just like any whiner you complain and moan that your romanticized version of masculinity pushed by pulp novels and cigarette companies is rightfully buried. There was no fucking glamour to it, no matter what your action movie says. You wanna go live a life of constant danger? Simple, go to a 3rd world country and start hanging around the shady districts of towns with money in cash in your pocket. Because that's the type of stupidity and needless danger you're calling exiting.
How the fuck do you people think you would function in that society with this amount of whining? Because anyone can tell you, you would most likely end up worse than whatever bad fate you think modern life will give you.
You guys are also highly romanticizing now. You're treating now as if its better because we've 'progressed' as if the march of progression is eternal and it will get better overtime.
I do not agree with this guy's assertions, but your own are also incredibly flawed.
it isn't glamour, but a sense of purpose. we distinctly lack that in our modern age. i would rather die for something than live for nothing.
i know i would likely be killed, but it is the right to give it a shot and try that i think is missing. there's nowhere left for people of any walk of life to try and make their own.
there is no purpose going to the third world stacked with cash beyond trying to die, something fundamentally different from going to the unknown and seeing what happens. what you might see as stupidity and needless danger, another might see as a chance for something new. your way of thinking and preferred way of living is not the end-all-be-all.
How many friends or acquaintances have you had who have been killed by mountain lions?
Or the black plague?
Or dysentery?
Or sold into slavery?
Or died during childbirth?
Or died shortly after being born?
Or put into an arranged marriage and treated as subhuman?
Yes, the modern world sucks in its own way. Yes, the past few years have been shit. Yes, climate change is going to be absolute shit.
But there are SO MANY things that make today better than yesteryear.
Then go to the unexplored regions of the Canadian north.
Wildlife kills were highly exaggerated during the pre-modern era, mainly to spook children. In fact that 17 and 1800s were marked with a massive wave of extinction from humans slaughtering everything.
We have HIV and Vaccine resistant Super Bugs.
Slavery is still a thing, a huge thing that happens in Developed Nations in fact. Same with the arranged marriage and being treated as subhuman.
Yes, things are better now but please do not mis-represent the current or past.
i've lost friends, family, and acquaintances to suicide, drug overdoses, cancer, heart disease. i know people who work multiple jobs living paycheck to paycheck, essentially living in debt slavery. some things are not so much better than they were hundreds of years ago.
to me, if the positives of modern life come at the expense of our biosphere, then we are better off rejecting modernity. what we will see with climate change will be the most brutal and horrifying time period experienced by our species. we'll make it out alive but the scars will run deep.
but isn't that what you're looking forward to
I think the name "traditional masculinity" in itself is misleading. It seems to suggest there has been one type of masculinity which has always been. There shouldn't be one overarching concept when talking about masculinity, regardless if we're talking history or about contemporary times.
Modernity is pretty great. Sure the cities are full of trash, our political institutions are decaying, we're poorer than our parents, and the internet is run by datamining sociopaths who sell your information routinely while most of the stuff you can buy is manufactured by semi-enslaved children in China, Vietnam, or Bangladesh. Sure our ruling class literally outright hates us and wants us to all go die and wants us to get engaged in hundreds of pointless wars in shitholes for no seemingly discernable gain, that is true.
But you can at least play unfinished and badly coded videogames, or maybe identity as one of the new genders. Look at the bright side to all this! Amazon Alexa will lock your house for you and record your conversations and you don't even need to tell it to!
not particularly a fan of famines, genocides, and resource wars
Those are not modern ideas. The United States engaged in the first two against the Native people's of North America for the sole reason of resources. Every war in history has been over resources.
then the past is clearly not the place for you
of course, but the scales were smaller, though that could just be a consequence of smaller population all together.
It's soooo easy to say the past was so great, and completely ignore that it was only great for a few groups of people. Ask a slave if the 1800s were dope.
40% of kids died before reaching 5 yo on average in the 1800s.
Overall, the world is much better to live in now and the only people who have nostalgia of old times are thoses who ignore the experience of all the people who had miserable lives when modern medicine and human rights didn't exist, and human lives didn't have as much value. You can't point at the people who had a great life and ignore all thoses who didn't, that's exactly what romantisation is.
The issue is people's perception of the world conditionned by the type and amount of information they consume now, due to the internet and constant media exposure, not how the world actually is. Our brain isn't made to know every single tragedy happening in the world and every single dumb shit an idiot said online. Someone dying is newsworthy now, it wasn't at the time because life didn't have as much value.
i don't necessarily think the past was better or the present is worse, but that the world we currently live in is garbage and maybe some things from the past are actually preferable to what we have today. there are upsides and downsides to everything and frankly i don't think the upsides of modern life outweigh the downsides. we need something new.
Yeah, I never got the whole "things are so much better now so we will continue to progress into even greater times" attitude people tend to have. We have regressed before in history, look at the Roman Empire which had a bunch of advanced tech like sewers and stuff and then after it's collapse Europe regressed both socially and technologically for a couple of hundred years. Something like that could easily happen again, especially if we take climate change into consideration.
That's actually a fallacy as well, while true during the Middle Ages the movement of manpower and logistically resources wouldn't be seen until the Civil War and World War 1, Ancient Rome, Greece and the others were all capable and more willing to endeavour the same level of resources as we can now to fight. The Punic Wars alone were of the same scale and troop numbers of World War 1 in so far as those nations percentage ability to wage war.
Humans lives don't have any value now either, okay well they do but only in how much they spend on consumer products. That's about it really.
the internet and the constant media exposure is a good 60% of my concern
I also think that a better approach to this while issue is trying to push "positive masculinity" instead of whatever people nowadays consider to be masculine. I remember back in elementary and middle school there seemed to be this kind of push from the teachers to make us guys act more like girls, which I personally didn't mind since I like to do some "girly" stuff and pretty much hate all sports aside from martial arts and weightlifting but not every guy is like that. It feels like the whole discussion sometimes just boil down to making guys act more "girly" rather than just letting them be themselves in a healthy manner.
interesting, though i imagine they couldn't necessarily nuke anything i guess burning Carthage and salting the earth has a similar effect
We're still dealing with the ramifications of the industrial revolution imo. It dramatically changed human society at basically every level, in some ways good, some ways bad. some ways obvious and not so obvious.
The actual reason many US teachers were pushing boys to act more like girls isn't actually for a healthy reason. Its because female teachers can't stand boys, for instance, the idea that boys are dumber than girls? Guess what, just like men versus women in job applications, during several replicated studies researchers found that female teachers will grade boys work worse than girls even if both were completed by boys or both by girls.
Boys do not learn more slowly, they're not dumber, they don't take longer to develop. They just straight up learn differently. Its the same reason why ADHD manifests in girls differently from boys, they're just wired differently at such a young age(I mean biologically, not concepts of gender here). Young boys just drive teachers insane, so they grade them worse even when accounting for their own biases.
the industrial revolution permantly changed the course of our species, i fear to one where we constantly experience world changing new technological revolutions coming at greater pacr, never being able to actually adjust to what the changes entail before the next one comes along
This is just nonsense. There's issues with capitalism, but you can't pretend human lives have no value at least talking about the western world. We're in the age with the most individual rights, the most protection of human life, with the highest standards of justice and freedom.
Just look at how it was like in the early 20th century when working class kids and parents alike died in mines. Capitalism isn't a new issue, 20th century wars and authoritarianism completely destroyed the lives of entire generations.
Yes there's a lot of issues left to work on, new issues that are unique to the 21th century, but things are objectively much better now. You have to realise how the constant negative media cycle is doing on your view of the world now vs then.
Are we seriously having an argument about whether or not modern times are better than the past? Here's a graph of absolute poverty rates:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109916/2cb16587-5b78-4c11-b43a-2efbeda88324/image.png
Here's child mortality:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109916/71ab2071-405a-452d-954c-66d71de389c6/image.png
Here's life expectancy:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109916/5a47469a-f267-4139-9cc2-6dc8b8b8005f/image.png
Global Extreme Poverty
Child Mortality
There are things which suck about today which we should work to improve, but I'll take them over having a 43% chance of not making it to 5 years old, or people of colour being second class citizens, or LGBT people being forced to hide who they were for fear of death, or common infections being permanently scarring or event fatal. To re-emphasise: we have issues we need to address, but going backwards would just create more.
Also, we're not going to get exploring the great unknown back - once someone's been somewhere you can't be the first person to discover it (although a lot of the oceans are still unexplored). You can still have purpose - going off and dying for a cause isn't the only option (and it's still available if you really want to).
(an extra page has appeared while writing this - it took a while to find the graphs)
iirc the life expectancy of the past usually looks worse than it is due to the infant mortality lowering the average by a large margin..
i'm just sick and tired of this world we live in, and think things could be better.
Maybe you need to stop complaining and make a better life for your self. Go out in nature in your free time, take a second to marvel at the universe, start a project, build shit, there’s tons of things you can do to give your life meaning. You’ll just have to work for it.
That's completely valid - there are a lot of things in today's world which need fixing - it's just that going back 200 years would only make things worse. Instead, we need to go forwards and try to improve things as much as we can, both by personal changes and trying to enact societal change.
You'd be correct:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109916/b47306ba-e4df-4ed7-b512-81cf8c123c95/image.png
Life Expectancy
(I forgot to source that in the last one)
At birth it was around 40, but if you made it to 1 year old, it was about 45-50. By 5 it was 50-55 years old. That said, ignoring infant mortality separates the problems, but they're still both big issues.
i've already taken some of these steps for myself, and they have worked, but i still lament how The General Things are, you feel?
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