Even as a guy who is “normal person maxxxing” this isn’t really scalable advice. I can only imagine that you had a particularly unnerving experience with someone who thinks they’re special but really isn’t.
Surely it’s good advice for some individuals - but as a “told you so” after someone fails it’s usually kinda half baked. At a society wide level if everyone just was normal we’d all still be in mud huts rubbing sticks and stones together. Or there’d be nothing interesting to do on the weekends.
This is like when people tell a failed businessman he should have just invested in an index fund. Conveniently ignoring that that’s just offloading a lot of effort and risk, for someone else to do basically the same thing - build+run a business and try to generate value.
Yes, this essay brought Van Gogh to my head right away. By all the standards of this article he did the wrong thing. Made art nobody wanted, acted like his art deserved appreciation, refused to just get a job in a factory. Stupid STUPID Van Gogh we all wish you had just been a fishmonger bro. Same goes for all the Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka or Nick Drakes of the world etc etc. Okay maybe their lives would be better if they had been less brave…but would ours?
It’s like there’s a socially optimal proportion of mavericks willing to bet it all for a slim chance at glory. We know that most will fail, but we’re all better off that they tried because a few end up succeeding. And we wouldn’t expect the many who fail to do so gracefully, because delusional self-belief is what fueled their choices to begin with.
The larger question is, can we tell which side of the maverick-rate social optimum we’re on?
I'm gonna go further, it's terrible advice to anyone who isn't a psychopath. 90% of the normal and happy seeming people are not, and whether or not they know it, they're suffering profound psychological and spiritual damage from the life they, let's face it, have to live. Believe me, we are beyond getting over our childhood expectations of growing up to be a fire truck or whatever, it is the specific concept of normality which is damaging. To fully expect it, to welcome it as an achievement to be proud of is to become, well assuming this isn't fully deliberate bad faith ragebait, the OP, a smooth brained uncompassionate bafoon, incapable of even basic empathy despite probably not even having the hundreds of millions in assets that would do this to one involuntarily.
Family life is a fine goal, merely participating in culture, socializing, all fine. There is a projection along some conceptual axis which would forget the terrible things we find in this writing. But that's all been said a billion times. Remove the insidiousness and you have what a Mormon might have posted on Tumblr in 2015 before either getting chased off of finding themselves in spectacular fashion.
We all have agency in this life, we all make choices. I have currently chosen a career path that has lead to middle management at a food manufacturing plant with benefits and the ability to type this out while pooping on company time.
If you aren't devoted enough to your art to work at it while also holding down a normie job, you're probably not actually a creative genius whose art the world needs to see.
I know this post is simplistic in order to be provocative but the obvious answer to "cant you just.." is no. Usually people cannot just change their dreams or personalities or preferences. Even if they can they may not know how and they certainly won't want to. I dont think 'Normal' is the right word for what you are describing but If your advice is just 'adopt my preferences, aesthetics, and personality' most people won't/can't do that.
Oh I forgot to mention that this is the second job industry change because covid in upstate NY destroyed
the industry I was in up there and I sold our house at a loss to mive to Missouri for a fresh start. Damn good thing for keeping my refridgerator full that I am creative and unnormie enough to just keep reinventing myself because life doesn't care about your experience or planning...oh and did I mention the car accident that incapacitated me for some months.
Yeah like when the boat industy falters and 500 people get laid off from the collective factories in a small factory town and you have to move to be able to go far enough out to where there are jobs availanle. Granted I could have gotten hired in Minnesota or Wisconsin but I wasn't going to move back up north from Missouri to work for umbrella companies of the same risky corporation My son and I ended up changing industries because two and a half years later the jobs still aren't there in towns two hours out from where the layoffs hit. I'm a skilled machine operator with experience in metalurgy and I can run several different machines. I'm worth 20-25$ an hour as a machine operator. I currently get 650$ a month for 4 months twice a year to teach a university class as an adjunct with no benefits and no guarantees and substitute teach K12 for 15$ an hour, zero benefits or holiday or sick pay and have to rely on unemployment for the summer break. No, things don't go back to normal.
You do realize layoffs often happen at the departmental level, right? My dad has gotten laid off multiple times, and IIRC most of them had his entire department being let go.
Haahhaahhhaaaa, you obviously don't work in manufacturing or retail...where do you work that this isn't a thing? Are you 'in management' sure sounds like it.
- Take a very unusual path and realize that it's a high-variance approach to life.
Not a grown-up path:
- Take a very unusual path and freak out when it turns out the way it does for 90%+ of the people who take that path.
Early-20somethings in the latter bucket are forgivable because they're so young, but you gotta grow out of it and either accept the cost or go full normie.
I think this is the precise thing DW was getting at, and you can kind of see the number of people who fall into the last category in the comments being Big Mad.
Nobody says you can't be a starving artist, you just don't get to bitch to the rest of us about it.
My friends say I'm going to be a spiritually Jewish/Asian mom.
"Oh you think you're the one person who is too special to understand basic algebra? You think you're too unique for a job? You can't get on the Dean's List? fawtha was valedictorian. Kids at school are mean? There are people who needed the national guard to escort them to school."
Do you write your articles on company time? Getting a cushy part-time-work-for-full-time-pay is the only way this normality strategy works for someone creative.
Or, you could be really normal and get a normal wife who works part-time doing something basic and takes care of your normal house and normal kids, so you both have more free time in the evenings. The other option is clawing the 2.5 hours of screen time back from your phone, but we all know Drunk Wisconsin is addicted to Substack notes, so he's not doing that.
Defending the normies by going on the offense. I like it! You should have been a national security advisor to Biden when he thought he can impress the Houthis by just swatting at their missiles instead of punching them in the face.
I don't know, there's an appalling lack of ambition in "just be normal".
My father, my father's father, and my mother's father all started their own businesses. I'm currently trying to get my personal finances in order while waiting for a patent to get approved so I can launch a knife business. My little brother is trying to be a professional musician, but he's planning on making most of his income through private tutoring or working as a session musician rather than trying to make it big as an artist.
No, it's not. It's normal. Also, a lot of people have employers and get rich, and then have investments that create passive income, and they retire early.
Your dad/grandpas are not special. They were normal.
Only ~10% of the US workforce owns a business, and less than half of that actually employ others. That's hardly *abnormal*, at least not anymore so than having a post-graduate degree. It certainly doesn't fit in the established, highly risk-adverse sequence of success Drunk Wisconsin was pushing here.
This is the kind of lukewarm take that is perfectly calibrated to cause maximum outrage.
Even as a guy who is “normal person maxxxing” this isn’t really scalable advice. I can only imagine that you had a particularly unnerving experience with someone who thinks they’re special but really isn’t.
Surely it’s good advice for some individuals - but as a “told you so” after someone fails it’s usually kinda half baked. At a society wide level if everyone just was normal we’d all still be in mud huts rubbing sticks and stones together. Or there’d be nothing interesting to do on the weekends.
This is like when people tell a failed businessman he should have just invested in an index fund. Conveniently ignoring that that’s just offloading a lot of effort and risk, for someone else to do basically the same thing - build+run a business and try to generate value.
Yes, this essay brought Van Gogh to my head right away. By all the standards of this article he did the wrong thing. Made art nobody wanted, acted like his art deserved appreciation, refused to just get a job in a factory. Stupid STUPID Van Gogh we all wish you had just been a fishmonger bro. Same goes for all the Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka or Nick Drakes of the world etc etc. Okay maybe their lives would be better if they had been less brave…but would ours?
It’s like there’s a socially optimal proportion of mavericks willing to bet it all for a slim chance at glory. We know that most will fail, but we’re all better off that they tried because a few end up succeeding. And we wouldn’t expect the many who fail to do so gracefully, because delusional self-belief is what fueled their choices to begin with.
The larger question is, can we tell which side of the maverick-rate social optimum we’re on?
I'm gonna go further, it's terrible advice to anyone who isn't a psychopath. 90% of the normal and happy seeming people are not, and whether or not they know it, they're suffering profound psychological and spiritual damage from the life they, let's face it, have to live. Believe me, we are beyond getting over our childhood expectations of growing up to be a fire truck or whatever, it is the specific concept of normality which is damaging. To fully expect it, to welcome it as an achievement to be proud of is to become, well assuming this isn't fully deliberate bad faith ragebait, the OP, a smooth brained uncompassionate bafoon, incapable of even basic empathy despite probably not even having the hundreds of millions in assets that would do this to one involuntarily.
Family life is a fine goal, merely participating in culture, socializing, all fine. There is a projection along some conceptual axis which would forget the terrible things we find in this writing. But that's all been said a billion times. Remove the insidiousness and you have what a Mormon might have posted on Tumblr in 2015 before either getting chased off of finding themselves in spectacular fashion.
We all have agency in this life, we all make choices. I have currently chosen a career path that has lead to middle management at a food manufacturing plant with benefits and the ability to type this out while pooping on company time.
That's what I'm saying!
Yeah man it rocks
It's literally the dream.
Unironically yes
If you aren't devoted enough to your art to work at it while also holding down a normie job, you're probably not actually a creative genius whose art the world needs to see.
Yeah the reality is it isn't an either/or, it's both
This.
Women shouldn’t talk
I know this post is simplistic in order to be provocative but the obvious answer to "cant you just.." is no. Usually people cannot just change their dreams or personalities or preferences. Even if they can they may not know how and they certainly won't want to. I dont think 'Normal' is the right word for what you are describing but If your advice is just 'adopt my preferences, aesthetics, and personality' most people won't/can't do that.
Suck it, Wisconsin. Never gonna happen.
Says the gainfully employed man with a house and a wife and a garden and cats...
*Barely employed but I gamble on the market a little.
Have you tried being competent at your job?
Makes no difference when the layoff roll in.
This is also a normal occurrence for a normal job but if you keep making the normal decisions you can reliably get back to employment pretty quickly.
Oh I forgot to mention that this is the second job industry change because covid in upstate NY destroyed
the industry I was in up there and I sold our house at a loss to mive to Missouri for a fresh start. Damn good thing for keeping my refridgerator full that I am creative and unnormie enough to just keep reinventing myself because life doesn't care about your experience or planning...oh and did I mention the car accident that incapacitated me for some months.
Yeah like when the boat industy falters and 500 people get laid off from the collective factories in a small factory town and you have to move to be able to go far enough out to where there are jobs availanle. Granted I could have gotten hired in Minnesota or Wisconsin but I wasn't going to move back up north from Missouri to work for umbrella companies of the same risky corporation My son and I ended up changing industries because two and a half years later the jobs still aren't there in towns two hours out from where the layoffs hit. I'm a skilled machine operator with experience in metalurgy and I can run several different machines. I'm worth 20-25$ an hour as a machine operator. I currently get 650$ a month for 4 months twice a year to teach a university class as an adjunct with no benefits and no guarantees and substitute teach K12 for 15$ an hour, zero benefits or holiday or sick pay and have to rely on unemployment for the summer break. No, things don't go back to normal.
Most of the people who complain like this are slackers who endlessly piss and moan while doing the absolute minimum amount of work.
Is the world fair? Heck, no. But it’s fairer than many people want to admit.
If this doesn’t describe you, then ignore it.
You do realize layoffs often happen at the departmental level, right? My dad has gotten laid off multiple times, and IIRC most of them had his entire department being let go.
Haahhaahhhaaaa, you obviously don't work in manufacturing or retail...where do you work that this isn't a thing? Are you 'in management' sure sounds like it.
There are a few grown-up paths IMO:
- Take a slightly unusual path with some hedging.
- Take the normal path: education, honest work.
- Take a very unusual path and realize that it's a high-variance approach to life.
Not a grown-up path:
- Take a very unusual path and freak out when it turns out the way it does for 90%+ of the people who take that path.
Early-20somethings in the latter bucket are forgivable because they're so young, but you gotta grow out of it and either accept the cost or go full normie.
I think this is the precise thing DW was getting at, and you can kind of see the number of people who fall into the last category in the comments being Big Mad.
Nobody says you can't be a starving artist, you just don't get to bitch to the rest of us about it.
Probably consulting ones test scores would be helpful.
“There’s nothing wrong with normal just don’t date stupid.”
-my godmothers words of wisdom
Wise woman!
My friends say I'm going to be a spiritually Jewish/Asian mom.
"Oh you think you're the one person who is too special to understand basic algebra? You think you're too unique for a job? You can't get on the Dean's List? fawtha was valedictorian. Kids at school are mean? There are people who needed the national guard to escort them to school."
My apartment is NOT shitty and I will have you know the part of town I live in has almost no crime! Suck it
You're gonna have to have a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself if you're a writer with a job on the side or a jober who writes in the side.
It’s worth noting that almost every successful writer had a “day job” to support their writing.
I already know where I land
You are so Russian. You will never get it. We forgive you.
Do you write your articles on company time? Getting a cushy part-time-work-for-full-time-pay is the only way this normality strategy works for someone creative.
Of course!
True praxis.
Or, you could be really normal and get a normal wife who works part-time doing something basic and takes care of your normal house and normal kids, so you both have more free time in the evenings. The other option is clawing the 2.5 hours of screen time back from your phone, but we all know Drunk Wisconsin is addicted to Substack notes, so he's not doing that.
Who doesn't?!
This is the purest embodiment of the deindividuation ideology of suburban American nascent conservativism I've yet seen.
It's an incredible formula that works so well on paper. Until it doesn't of course.
Американский Мещанство
Defending the normies by going on the offense. I like it! You should have been a national security advisor to Biden when he thought he can impress the Houthis by just swatting at their missiles instead of punching them in the face.
The lady doth protest toooooooo much
I don't know, there's an appalling lack of ambition in "just be normal".
My father, my father's father, and my mother's father all started their own businesses. I'm currently trying to get my personal finances in order while waiting for a patent to get approved so I can launch a knife business. My little brother is trying to be a professional musician, but he's planning on making most of his income through private tutoring or working as a session musician rather than trying to make it big as an artist.
That sounds normal!
No, "normal" is spending 40 hours a week making money for other people. Being a follower is normal, being a leader is unusual.
No, it's not. It's normal. Also, a lot of people have employers and get rich, and then have investments that create passive income, and they retire early.
Your dad/grandpas are not special. They were normal.
Only ~10% of the US workforce owns a business, and less than half of that actually employ others. That's hardly *abnormal*, at least not anymore so than having a post-graduate degree. It certainly doesn't fit in the established, highly risk-adverse sequence of success Drunk Wisconsin was pushing here.
I agree it's not abnormal. That's what I'm saying.
Well its certainly not normal within the operative definition established in this essay.
Oh Jesus, you eat your own cum, don't you?
Lmfao, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you such a little weird pervert?
I'm not the cum-eater, Sean.
Whatever you say, pervert.