As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.
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2. Sissyphus was a stupid allegory.
Doing something useless, and especially for which you get no praise, is not as soul destroying as people would have you believe. If you like rolling a rock up a hill and having it roll back down, it's actually huge fucking fun if you just embrace the irony and the fun of rolling a rock, building up a sweat, and then letting that sucker go tumbling down.
Corollary: you don't actually need praise. Just enjoy what you do, and try to do it well
@screwturn This is indeed the point of "The Myth Of Sisyphus" by Camus. Well done.
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7. The "Alpha Male" schtick is a leaky bag of bullshit on stilts. There is no science behind this, it doesn't survive a scrutiny, and the guys who claim the title are always insecure, overcompensating, grifters. Allways.
It is also obviously bullshit. You can't possibly be top dog in everything, and the more you are top dog in anything, the narrower that specialty will be, and the shorter the time before someone better comes along. All that trumpeting actually tells you he's an insecure numpty
8. Trying to BE an "alpha" is an exhausting, fruitless, time suck. People who actually are leaders are typically stressed, exhausted, and miserable, and find out that their actual power is very narrow and always comes at a steep price. Rather just be a comfortable and useful "beta". In fact, be a fucking delta and use the spare time to be useful and do things YOU enjoy. Let other overzealous morons bash their lives apart on the crags of merciless fortune
Rather learn to juggle, whistle, or cook
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8. Trying to BE an "alpha" is an exhausting, fruitless, time suck. People who actually are leaders are typically stressed, exhausted, and miserable, and find out that their actual power is very narrow and always comes at a steep price. Rather just be a comfortable and useful "beta". In fact, be a fucking delta and use the spare time to be useful and do things YOU enjoy. Let other overzealous morons bash their lives apart on the crags of merciless fortune
Rather learn to juggle, whistle, or cook
9. There are no exclusively "masculine" jobs or pastimes, and you will enjoy life far more if you give that whole story the middle finger.
If you like Barbie Dolls, cooking, or knitting, fucking go for it. Don't let some narrow-minded and insecure scold put you off your thing. Do your thing, mix with others who do thing, and help the less skilled do thing. If you sucked at thing but enjoyed it, master small slices of it, and show others how you did that and how you fuck up. You can be that guy
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9. There are no exclusively "masculine" jobs or pastimes, and you will enjoy life far more if you give that whole story the middle finger.
If you like Barbie Dolls, cooking, or knitting, fucking go for it. Don't let some narrow-minded and insecure scold put you off your thing. Do your thing, mix with others who do thing, and help the less skilled do thing. If you sucked at thing but enjoyed it, master small slices of it, and show others how you did that and how you fuck up. You can be that guy
10. You don’t have to "leave a mark", "go down in history", and you sure as shit won't "put a ding in the universe". Just be a person, live your life being as helpful as you can, and enjoy what you can of the journey. 100% of those remembered by history weren't much like the history, and everyone is much more Ozymandius than King Arthur
The universe is one fucking huge and weird place, and a million Steve Jobs holding hands in a chain would neither be noticeable to the universe, nor interesting
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10. You don’t have to "leave a mark", "go down in history", and you sure as shit won't "put a ding in the universe". Just be a person, live your life being as helpful as you can, and enjoy what you can of the journey. 100% of those remembered by history weren't much like the history, and everyone is much more Ozymandius than King Arthur
The universe is one fucking huge and weird place, and a million Steve Jobs holding hands in a chain would neither be noticeable to the universe, nor interesting
11. On the whole, women have had a raw deal for the entire history of the species, and the reason you aren't getting as much physical attention or getting a great job or a nice house is not their fault. Be nice to women without expecting to be compensated for it. They have more than enough shit on their plate, so be understanding and helpful, and try not to get in the way or make things worse for them
Make more women friends, you might be surpised at how nice that is
Also, women aren't a prize
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As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.
Please boost this if you think it will help
1. Your voice doesn't need to be heard. In fact, realizing that you don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything and voice opinions or ideas in meetings or social gatherings, is amazingly liberating. You can actually just shut up, and relieve yourself of all that effort and stress. Let Bob utter his embarrassingly dumb idea, let Shirley have a say. You can just let it be for the most part
@screwturn The goal of every internet conversation should be to make sure that the other person has the last word.
I don't always manage it, but it's actually much more satisfying when I do.
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As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.
Please boost this if you think it will help
1. Your voice doesn't need to be heard. In fact, realizing that you don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything and voice opinions or ideas in meetings or social gatherings, is amazingly liberating. You can actually just shut up, and relieve yourself of all that effort and stress. Let Bob utter his embarrassingly dumb idea, let Shirley have a say. You can just let it be for the most part
Also almost 70. Also learned the same lessons (mostly the hard way).
So I'm just dropping this to say, "Listen to this guy." I don't know him, but he's talking sense.
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8. Trying to BE an "alpha" is an exhausting, fruitless, time suck. People who actually are leaders are typically stressed, exhausted, and miserable, and find out that their actual power is very narrow and always comes at a steep price. Rather just be a comfortable and useful "beta". In fact, be a fucking delta and use the spare time to be useful and do things YOU enjoy. Let other overzealous morons bash their lives apart on the crags of merciless fortune
Rather learn to juggle, whistle, or cook
@screwturn "People who actually are leaders are typically stressed, exhausted, and miserable, and find out that their actual power is very narrow and always comes at a steep price."
In autocratic systems, yes.
In healthy, leaderful groups, leaders care for themselves, better or at least know where they aren't & are working on it it
. They get leadership includes being real about capacity (including their own), and try to adjust what they say and what they do so they match.And lead together.
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11. On the whole, women have had a raw deal for the entire history of the species, and the reason you aren't getting as much physical attention or getting a great job or a nice house is not their fault. Be nice to women without expecting to be compensated for it. They have more than enough shit on their plate, so be understanding and helpful, and try not to get in the way or make things worse for them
Make more women friends, you might be surpised at how nice that is
Also, women aren't a prize
I'm impressed with your thread. ... and thank you! 🫶
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11. On the whole, women have had a raw deal for the entire history of the species, and the reason you aren't getting as much physical attention or getting a great job or a nice house is not their fault. Be nice to women without expecting to be compensated for it. They have more than enough shit on their plate, so be understanding and helpful, and try not to get in the way or make things worse for them
Make more women friends, you might be surpised at how nice that is
Also, women aren't a prize
I am an old guy too, but I think I am going to download this thread - print it out in 100pt fonts, and put it up on my walls..
The condensed wisdom of the universe, right here. Thank you
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As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.
Please boost this if you think it will help
1. Your voice doesn't need to be heard. In fact, realizing that you don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything and voice opinions or ideas in meetings or social gatherings, is amazingly liberating. You can actually just shut up, and relieve yourself of all that effort and stress. Let Bob utter his embarrassingly dumb idea, let Shirley have a say. You can just let it be for the most part
@screwturn this is pretty great
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11. On the whole, women have had a raw deal for the entire history of the species, and the reason you aren't getting as much physical attention or getting a great job or a nice house is not their fault. Be nice to women without expecting to be compensated for it. They have more than enough shit on their plate, so be understanding and helpful, and try not to get in the way or make things worse for them
Make more women friends, you might be surpised at how nice that is
Also, women aren't a prize
@screwturn Modern world. Archeology has been showing that women were warriors, etc.
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As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.
Please boost this if you think it will help
1. Your voice doesn't need to be heard. In fact, realizing that you don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything and voice opinions or ideas in meetings or social gatherings, is amazingly liberating. You can actually just shut up, and relieve yourself of all that effort and stress. Let Bob utter his embarrassingly dumb idea, let Shirley have a say. You can just let it be for the most part
@screwturn Thanks for this entire thread. 60+ here also, and I'm applauding every post.
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As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.
Please boost this if you think it will help
1. Your voice doesn't need to be heard. In fact, realizing that you don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything and voice opinions or ideas in meetings or social gatherings, is amazingly liberating. You can actually just shut up, and relieve yourself of all that effort and stress. Let Bob utter his embarrassingly dumb idea, let Shirley have a say. You can just let it be for the most part
@screwturn Amen, brother.
Freedom of speech is not the same thing as demanding to be heard, and more people (young or old) should realise that.
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4. Most "Heroes" are just selfish and insecure arseholes. Write down 10 guys who are supposeldly big heroes, and then actually research them. Eight of them will turn out to be total shitheads - greedy, selfish, and pompous fucknuts, and also mostly sex pests
Ergo. Stop looking for heroes, and immediately be suspicious of anyone who claims to be or who other people say is a big hero. This counts for almost exactly 100% of online influencers. They are 100% flogging you scams and grifts and lying
@screwturn along those lines, most kings and emperors were miserable fools whose compulsive power seeking led to constant paranoia and violence, even towards their their immediate family (and regularly towards cousins).
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I pity your ignorance. You’re also rude and vulgar, but I forgive you for that. You can’t help it. Rudeness and vulgarity stem from ignorance.
Ignorance can be cured. Start here:
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I pity your ignorance. You’re also rude and vulgar, but I forgive you for that. You can’t help it. Rudeness and vulgarity stem from ignorance.
Ignorance can be cured. Start here:
But wait. There’s more:
Female hunters of the early Americas
Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern. We present an archeological discovery and meta-analysis that challenge the man-the-hunter hypothesis. Excavations at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa reveal a 9000-year-old human burial (WMP6) associated with a hunting toolkit of stone projectile points and animal processing tools. Osteological, proteomic, and isotopic analyses indicate that this early hunter was a young adult female who subsisted on terrestrial plants and animals. Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate WMP6 as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with nongendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.
Despite such theoretical considerations, some scholars have been reluctant to ascribe hunting functionality to tools associated with female burials (20–22). Concerning the Paleoindian Gordon Creek burial, Breternitz et al. (23) grappled, 'Since the burial has been determined to be a female, the inclusion of a projectile point preform has been difficult to explain. However, if the artifact had been used as a knife or scraper, typically women’s tools, then its inclusion with the burial is a more consistent association.' Nelson (24) challenged a DNA-based sex determination at Toca dos Coqueiros (25) partially on the grounds that '...[t]he presence of inferred funerary offerings in the form of chipped stone points and other tools and flakes appear to support [male estimation]....' On the one hand, such reluctance may reflect a degree of contemporary gender bias r ethnographic bias. On the other hand, ethnographically informed models of gendered subsistence labor remain plausible as quantitative phenomena or given the multiple pathways by which objects can come to be spuriously associated in the archeological record. Toward resolving the question of gendered big-game hunting practices among early hunter-gatherer populations in the Americas, we report the discovery of two Early Holocene [pre–8 thousand years (ka)] hunter-gatherer burials in association with big-game hunting paraphernalia and place these findings in the context of Early Holocene and Late Pleistocene burial practices throughout the Americas."
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11. On the whole, women have had a raw deal for the entire history of the species, and the reason you aren't getting as much physical attention or getting a great job or a nice house is not their fault. Be nice to women without expecting to be compensated for it. They have more than enough shit on their plate, so be understanding and helpful, and try not to get in the way or make things worse for them
Make more women friends, you might be surpised at how nice that is
Also, women aren't a prize
@screwturn can't agree with you about sex, it's been one of the best things about my life, but everything else, yeah.
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But wait. There’s more:
Female hunters of the early Americas
Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern. We present an archeological discovery and meta-analysis that challenge the man-the-hunter hypothesis. Excavations at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa reveal a 9000-year-old human burial (WMP6) associated with a hunting toolkit of stone projectile points and animal processing tools. Osteological, proteomic, and isotopic analyses indicate that this early hunter was a young adult female who subsisted on terrestrial plants and animals. Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate WMP6 as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with nongendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.
Despite such theoretical considerations, some scholars have been reluctant to ascribe hunting functionality to tools associated with female burials (20–22). Concerning the Paleoindian Gordon Creek burial, Breternitz et al. (23) grappled, 'Since the burial has been determined to be a female, the inclusion of a projectile point preform has been difficult to explain. However, if the artifact had been used as a knife or scraper, typically women’s tools, then its inclusion with the burial is a more consistent association.' Nelson (24) challenged a DNA-based sex determination at Toca dos Coqueiros (25) partially on the grounds that '...[t]he presence of inferred funerary offerings in the form of chipped stone points and other tools and flakes appear to support [male estimation]....' On the one hand, such reluctance may reflect a degree of contemporary gender bias r ethnographic bias. On the other hand, ethnographically informed models of gendered subsistence labor remain plausible as quantitative phenomena or given the multiple pathways by which objects can come to be spuriously associated in the archeological record. Toward resolving the question of gendered big-game hunting practices among early hunter-gatherer populations in the Americas, we report the discovery of two Early Holocene [pre–8 thousand years (ka)] hunter-gatherer burials in association with big-game hunting paraphernalia and place these findings in the context of Early Holocene and Late Pleistocene burial practices throughout the Americas."
And . . .
"Early Women Were Hunters, Not Just Gatherers, Study Suggests
Regardless of maternal status, women hunted in almost 80 percent of recent and present-day foraging societies in a new study
People have long said that in prehistoric foraging societies, labor was divided by gender: Women gathered and men hunted. But now, a new study adds to the growing body of work challenging this idea, suggesting that prehistoric women were just as skilled at killing game as men were.
'We’ve had scattered reports here and there about women’s hunting,’ Vivek Venkataraman, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who was not involved with the research, tells Science’s Bridget Alex. But the new research 'pulls a lot of these things together.'
In the paper, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of international researchers identified 391 foraging societies across the world, from the 1800s to present day. (Scientists use modern foraging societies as a window into past human behavior, reports NPR’s Nurith Aizenman.) Of these, they obtained data on hunting from 63 societies.
'We were reading papers written by people who had lived with these groups and had studied their behavior,’ study co-author Cara Wall-Scheffler, a professor and co-chair of biology at Seattle Pacific University, tells Live Science’s Jennifer Nalewicki. 'They were looking at people and recording what they did.'
Their analysis revealed that regardless of maternal status, women hunted in 50 of these societies—or about 79 percent. And more than 70 percent of female hunting appeared to be intentional—rather than opportunistically killing animals while doing other activities, per the study. In societies where hunting was the most important activity for subsistence, women participated in hunting 100 percent of the time.
'The hunting was purposeful,‘ Wall-Scheffler tells NPR. 'Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.'
The researchers also found that women played an active role in teaching hunting, and they used a wider variety of weapons and hunting strategies than men did. For example, while men tended to hunt alone or in pairs, women hunted alone, with a man or with groups of women, children or dogs. Women hunted small game in 46 percent of the studied societies and took down medium or large game in 48 percent of them. In 4 percent of societies, they hunted game of all sizes.
While previous research has found that women may have rivaled males when it came to taking down big game, historically, scientists have dismissed females’ hunting prowess, possibly because of researcher bias, per the paper. But recent studies have increasingly shown women as hunters: In the Americas, a 2020 study found that females likely represented up to 50 percent of prehistoric big game hunters, suggesting the practice was gender neutral.
And the remains of women, like men, have been discovered buried alongside hunting weapons. Yet, while researchers presume stone projectiles found buried with men are hunting tools, they are “'ess persuaded when projectiles are associated with females,' per the new paper.
Wall-Scheffler tells NPR that stories of gender differences in our ancestors have percolated into our society today, which can lead people to assume dividing labor based on gender is a more natural way to live.
‘It can be damaging,’ Nurith Aizenman reports for NPR. ‘They use that to argue that gender roles should be more rigid today.’"
