And to close out the day on a spot of good news from a reader:
This is brilliant, and I support this strategy completely. We need to play these bastards like a violin because they are neoliberal and annoying.
Good News Q&A
Lonely Women
Here’s an article about the terrible loneliness of single, childless women in middle age:
Gen X women are the loneliest generation of adults right now because they’re the first group who were promised friendship would be enough
I’m glad the article exists but the framing is strange. The passive voice is doing a lot of work in the title. “They were promised”, by whom? Who does this kind of promising? Who takes such promises seriously?
An adult person is fully responsible for their life strategy. If you make a decision to stay single, you own the decision. The article is right in that a single, childless life is different at its core from the life of a married parent. And it’s not about people remembering your appointments or having names to put on the emergency contact form. Here’s how the article puts it, and it’s completely mistaken:
What partnership gives is something different: the person who knows how Monday went because they were in the next room for it, who asks about the appointment without being reminded there was one, who witnesses the ordinary days and not just the significant ones.
Seeing things this way is a tragic, tragic mistake, and I don’t use this word lightly. You can’t treat people like objects, like consumer goods that are supposed to give, give, give. It’s not about what people can give you. It’s about what you can give them. As a wife, a husband, a parent, or an unmarried friend, the whole point is the enjoyment of giving. If you made a decision to organize your life outside of the regular arrangement of marriage and parenthood, it is your task to conceptualize your own life.
The article never abandons its stance of pouty, aggrieved passivity. Here’s another example:
What they’re starting to let themselves want isn’t complicated or dramatic. It’s mostly the ordinary things a primary relationship provides quietly—someone to come home to, someone who asks, someone who is just there for the ordinary version of them and not only the version that shows up when there’s something to get through. They were told they didn’t need those things, that wanting them was something they’d outgrown or never needed in the first place.
Again, here’s the idea that “a primary relationship”, which is a clunky way of saying “marriage”, is supposed to “provide.” Again, there’s the passivity of “they were told” by some unnamed forces that, seemingly, control these supposedly independent women to an extraordinary degree.
A small child is a raging maw of need. There is never enough love, attention, and care that you can give them. There is always room for more. You fill your child with love like a seemingly bottomless vessel. It is only gradually that a child accumulates enough of this fuel to start to learn to enjoy giving. An adult who sees their role primarily as somebody who needs to be given instead of somebody who gives will not be happy whether they are married or single. Because such person is not really an adult.
Female liberation somehow turned into being liberated from adulthood. I observe this in fiction, and we can clearly see it in this article. Friendships are the most important thing in life to a child between toddlerhood and adulthood. What the article describes are extremely infantile women. Singlehood is not the cause. It’s an effect. Mind you, I’m not saying this about all single people. I am speaking specifically about the type of women described in this article.
The article discusses an existing phenomenon. It fails, however, because the author is incapable of locating the real reason for what she describes.
Widget Mentality
People see themselves as completely alienated from their bloodline, heritage, culture, and history. They believe that they are mass-produced and interchangeable widgets. No wonder they have all these mental health issues. This is an approach that guarantees great psychological discomfort.
Expensive Dating
Why specifically for Millennials? Why are Millennials still dating? And if they are, why are expensive mating rituals needed when you are past 40 and not looking to procreate?
As for the cost itself, this is not an average restaurant. It’s an expensive restaurant. Unless you are an alcoholic and need 10 drinks to relax, in which case you won’t be dating much because you’d be too worn out for it.
The Worst TikTok Dancing Routine
The most ridiculous TikTok dancing routine dropped. In it, Russian women pretend that their sons and husbands are dead and dance around the supposed corpses:
Whatever problems we think we have pale in comparison with several generations of women fantasizing about the deaths of their men.
Mother’s Day Banquet
There was so much fried chicken at the church Mother’s Day banquet that I won’t be able to look at anything but salad for a week. Great fried chicken, by the way. The new priest did the smart thing and got catering. Usually, it’s the mothers who cook the whole thing and miss the sermon about the importance of mothers, which kind of defeats the purpose.
Has anything interesting happened in the world while we stuffed our faces and celebrated?
Need for Masculinity
Girls who identify as boys are very successful at dating. They all have extremely devoted girlfriends. I think it’s because it’s very important to them to enact masculinity. Actual men are actively discouraged from enacting masculinity so openly and aggressively.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Happy Mother’s Day, everyone! Whether you are one or have one, it’s our day to celebrate. We are at a church banquet and then going to the mall. You just can’t get any more American.
Life is good.
An Exotic Occurrence
I wasn’t going to go to the graduation ceremony because I’m tired. But a student who is blind asked me to help her walk across the stage, and of course I agreed. I’m very glad that I went because something really exotic happened at this graduation. I have now been to probably over 30 of these ceremonies, and I never observed anything like this.
The valedictorian was a white male student who started his speech by saying that the most important thing in his life is his Christian faith.
Yes, really. I’m completely sober and wide awake. It really did happen.
This valedictorian was such an all-American young man. A star baseball player, from a large family, deeply religious, and graduating in mechanical engineering. He said that we should not look for the meaning of life in material possessions, worldly success, or academic achievements. It is in our faith in God and in our love for our family that meaning can be found.
No, I’m not crying. You are crying.
Talking About Movies
My Ukrainian colleagues attended the woke film festival organized by my department. The very first movie they showed was a slobbering, badly made documentary about how cruel it is to report illegal immigrants. It was completely dumb and failed even to try to make a coherent case.
The Ukrainian colleague was stunned to see that the viewers were in raptures over the movie. One professor said, while almost choking on his tears, that it was one of the most powerful experiences of his life. The Ukrainian colleague was confused because she knows this professor as an intelligent man with a good taste. So the next day she approached him in his office.
“Professor, can you explain to me what you liked about the movie? Because I honestly don’t get it,” she said.
“Oh, the movie is crap,” the professor answered.
“But you spoke so positively about it at the showing. Why do that if you didn’t like it?”
“Well, this is American academia,” the professor explained. “We are supposed to agree on certain political points and say that loudly as often as we can.”
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