A few weeks ago I had a work-related conversation with a somewhat senior guy. After we were done with talking about business, and probably also because that dude did not have enough to do, he struck up a personal conversation with me. Among others, he inquired if I ever considered going to the US to further my professional career. He was from the US, so he seemed to have been biased. I told him that probably have missed that time window — I do not consider this a realistic possibility anymore — and with the state the tech industry is in, it will also only get more and more difficult. As I have been to the US, I also shared some of my impressions and that there are plenty of instances where Europe is probably preferable. Obviously, I did not speak about any of the social problems in the US. While Europe has them, too, this is a clear example of the US exerting their “soft power”, so there is a sometimes significant time lag. In Europe, we normally get the light versions of the full-on insanity the elites unleash in the United States.
The conversation became interesting when this guy winked and said, if you are a single guy, there is probably no better place in the world to be than California. Then he smiled and he seemed to enjoy a rather vivid recollection of memories for a few moments. As this guy looked as if he was in his early 60s, he sampled California sluts in the 1980s, enjoying free love. Probably he even got a few good years before the fake-AIDS went into high gear. There were way fewer illegal immigrants, much fewer homeless, and open defecation was unheard of. California back then was a much different place. Today, it is so bad that I do not even want to go there — I could have traveled to San Francisco professionally twice in the last few years and chose not to. Perhaps you kind of get used to or at least learn to tolerate living in a leftist dystopia.
If you work in tech as a white guy, you will easily find yourself in the minority, dealing with countless Chinese and Indians at work. I could not find good data, but I have come across countless stories of women having ridiculous expectations on men simply because there is a significant surplus of the latter. I bet if that boomer went back to working the Bay Area, he would get quite a shock. He would find that not only are there way too many men for the women, the women, even the ugly ones, will also be used to having their pick. Also, I would argue that working in the tech industry a few decades ago was probably a lot more rewarding. Today, you get a flurry of messages on Slack and email all day long. On top, there is HR bullshit, diversity hires, and infantilizing team rituals to keep you from getting any work done. Just compare pictures of tech workplaces back in the days to today’s horrendous open-offices. We went from tech being serious to a total clown show.
As much as I think that boomers are completely out of touch, I also have the premonition that we may end up in an even worse spot. Society is unraveling at a rapid clip, and I can readily imagine a world twenty or thirty years from now in which young guys who are banned from leaving their 15-minute cities tell us about how out of touch with reality we really are. To them, owning a car, not being forcefully injected with drugs, or having a sliver of online privacy may appear about as utopian as boomer fairy tales about their carefree lives, which included owning a home and banging chicks without tattoos and drug issues, appear to us.
Aaron,
“…if you are a single guy, there is probably no better place in the world to be than California.”
California was indeed a great place before the elites ruined it starting with Gov Davis. Now, Las Vegas, Nevada has taken over Cali. Las Vegas is actually a better place for singles.
Plenty of sluts from LA, Cali, and other states moved to Las Vegas…
Vegas doesn’t have state taxes…
Fake-AIDS? Surely you don’t believe that AIDS doesn’t exist? I remember you writing about how it started as GRIDS in earlier articles.
Yes, exactly. Originally, AIDS was called GRIDS and it was generally acknowledged that it only affected homosexuals. Afterwards, it was rebranded and promoted as a disease affecting everyone who has unprotected sex. Note that today, medical practitioners are a lot more non-PC than back in the days. In conversation, a doctor once told me that if you do not have unprotected sex with black women, there is essentially a zero percent chance of catching HIV. Similarly, he cautioned women to have sex with black guys. I don’t think this guy would have said this in public, but this was based on his decades-long experience in sexual health.
If you want to read more about GRIDS, I recommend The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy Jr. As it turned out, Fauci was a key figure in GRIDS research as well.
Well, it can affect anyone, but definitely homosexuals are at a higher risk. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out what will happen with a bloodborne disease in a group of people who are highly promiscuous and prone to have anal sex with each other, heh.
These days it mostly spreads among junkies, though, who engage in needle-sharing and stuff.
As for black girls, I remember reading that in the USA, slightly over half the black women have an STD. Not all AIDS, of course – IIRC herpes, gonorrhea, and chlamydia were the more common ones.
If you don’t have anal sex or share needles you won’t get AIDS.
Well, vaginal and oral sex with an infected can be a danger as well, but the risk of a straight woman having HIV or AIDS is close to zero as long as you stay out of Africa. Unless you enjoy, uh… “tasting the fruits of the jungle,” you’ll most likely be fine.
One thing I’ve noticed is that over the past decade or two, issues that used to be localized issues in North American cities have started to spread out, geographically.
What I mean is that cities used to have bad neighborhoods where people knew not to go. If you were in L.A., you knew places like Compton and South Central were ghettos, so you stayed away from there, and in doing so, you stayed away from trouble. Homeless people congregated on Skid Row. And so on.
Most cities were like that. San Francisco had the Tenderloin. Vancouver had the Downtown Eastside. And so on.
Well, those areas are still bad, but now it’s starting to spread. I’ve read about how homeless people are setting up camps in middle class neighborhoods, sometimes even affluent neighborhoods, in those same cities. Living among filth is no longer an affliction of the poor, it’s starting to become a curse on whole cities.
Have you been to Brussels? I went there a few times and even about a decade ago or so you saw homeless people setting up tents in some of the most expensive parts of the city. Fat African and washed-up Eastern European hookers also trawled these streets. On that note, the ugliest street walkers I have ever seen were in Brussels and Stockholm.
I have not, and upon hearing this from you, I think I shall not. 😀
That bad, eh? Being the headquarters of the Eurocrats, I would have imagined they’d keep it clean in their own neighborhoods. But I guess that’s more up to the city and the country than the EU.
Your boomer colleague reminds me of a boomer family friend I talked to a while ago… that boomer was shocked when I told him that women are hypergamous and go mostly for chads. Because in his world every guy got laid.
And the boomer is not a former Chad living in his Chad bubble. Instead he is very ugly but seems to have gotten laid regularly as a student in the 70s and then ended up marrying a decent woman.
Life in Boomerville:
1) Get a degree: enroll in any college, pay for tuition with a part-time job during summer (and have money left over). Oh, and back then apparently any degree was a good degree.
2) Get a house: use your leftover savings from those college jobs as a down payment.
3) Get a job: walk into any company and ask to speak to the manager. Give him a firm handshake.
4) Get laid: Ask any random chick how she is doing.
5) Get married: Call any of those random chicks back.
When the Boomers die, their punishment should be perpetual reincarnation into younger generations, so they can fully enjoy the world they left behind them.
@Aarron,
In Cali, college was tuition free for most of the 1960’s. Even elite universities like UCLA, and it wasn’t even hard to get in!!
Thanks for pointing this out. Then the boomers had even more of a leg up than I had imagined. Speaking of the boomer mindset, there is a YouTube creator I sometimes watch, Michael Bordenaro. He walks around Florida and talks about the economy, in particular the real estate market. In one of his more recent videos, a female boomer stops him, asking him what he is doing. They talk a bit and the woman boast about her intergenerational wealth and real estate being a fantastic investment. When that guy asks her what advice she would have for anyone who was not born into money, she says something along the lines of “work like hell, eight days a week”. When I look at the typical boomer, though, I don’t see someone who gives me the impression of ever having worked particularly hard in their life. If anything, the “hustle mindset” and b.s. about skipping sleep in order to work more and harder seems to be a relatively recent trend. It’s of course convenient to push this message because if you do not have a boomer-like gravy train coming your way, it is because you did “not work hard enough”.
@ aj
I was just this morning thinking about all of the “counter culture” propaganda shoved down my throat throughput my childhood. Movies, TV shows, documentaries, mini-series…….then came the college professors. All celebrating how this generation saved civilization with their self-important movements in the 1960s. Now we see the results of their bullshit. No wonder why they love talking about the past.
In Switzerland they had a referendum last weekend and the boomers happily increased the public pension by 8.3%. So Switzerland will have some substantial tax increase, hitting young workers. Of course, when boomers were working such referendums failed, because boomers would have paid for it.
Boomers were campaigning that they don’t have enough money to live. Reality is though that they have the highest wealth, highest home ownership and less financial troubles (source: https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/der-mythos-der-armen-alten-selbst-im-ruhestand-waechst-ihr-vermoegen-weiter-ld.1773924).
@ Aaron,
Exactly, the “hard work” mantra is played out. They are working backwards from their conclusions. It makes boomers feel better about themselves though. Plenty work their asses off and barely get by today. If it were all about hard work, those factory and mine workers in the early 20th century would have been LOADED lol.
@GLAS
I did the “work like hell, eight days a week” thing in my 20s. What I accomplished was to make my Boomer bosses rich(er). I’d inherited from my dad the mindset of “take care of the company and it’ll take care of you.” For him, it was true.
There’s a passage in “The Millionaire Next Door” where the authors mention interviewing a number of Boomers who inherited wealth and never had to work a real job (think Hunter Biden), yet described themselves as “self-made.”
Today’s crop of graduates seem to be a lot more cynical about work, and arguably rightly so. Personally, I follow a game-theoretic approach (“tit-for-tat”) in the working world. Initially, I am more than fair to my employer if I am treated well and do not even mind working the occasional extra hour. However, my tolerance for b.s. is somewhat limited, and if I get a bunch of b.s. thrown my way, I play hardball and do not even hesitate to lawyer up. It is quite interesting to see how quickly this leads to HR backtracking. Of course, I would not recommend this if you are not willing to walk away, and if you live in a country with labor laws that barely protect the employee I would not recommend this either. Still, talking to a lawyer does not hurt. It’s some of the best time and money I have ever spent.
Regarding your remark about supposedly self-made millionaires, I have noticed the same. I have run into people where it was completely unclear to me how they were able to live their lifestyle or get their business or career off the ground, and it seems that it is embarrassing to them if they have to admit that they got their start due to family wealth or connections. Examples are people who got put into a management position straight out of college, got funding for a business to the tune of millions, or went from a b.s. arts degree into a career in banking, only to become an equity partner at some investment company a couple of years later. Some of them even seem unable to process reality. I noticed this with some of the women I met at university. There were young women whose parents spent forty or fifty-thousand pounds a year on their boarding school, yet they told you stories about how tough their life was and the challenges they faced.
I agree with you guys about connection, inheritance etc, plus it goes back to what Aaron mentioned earlier about getting a living wage job anywhere back in the Boomer’s day. Back then if you were struggling it was literally because you didn’t work. Those people actually were straight up bums. Boomers misapply this concept to today’s economy.
“As much as I think that boomers are completely out of touch, I also have the premonition that we may end up in an even worse spot. Society is unraveling at a rapid clip, and I can readily imagine a world twenty or thirty years from now in which young guys who are banned from leaving their 15-minute cities tell us about how out of touch with reality we really are. To them, owning a car, not being forcefully injected with drugs, or having a sliver of online privacy may appear about as utopian as boomer fairy tales about their carefree lives, which included owning a home and banging chicks without tattoos and drug issues, appear to us.”
You do a good job acknowledging the positive signs (like Vice going under) as well as the dark signs. What makes you think the elites can sustain this for 30 more years?
I do not think they will be able to sustain the technocratic dystopia they are trying to build, at least not in general. However, I consider it plausible that there will be pockets of society that are complete hellholes, like the aforementioned 15-minute cities, and some people will get stuck in this. There are surely even people who will happily embrace this idea, just like they happily took one booster shot after another.
I firmly believe that anybody who wants to remain in the West should not live in a city. Covid has already shown what a bad idea that is. In fact, the temporary Covid regime made me move to the countryside. The biggest advantage is that people are too spread out to make efficient policing possible. In contrast, in a big city, you can easily cordon off an entire block and tell people to stay indoors for supposed health reasons.
That would mean that getting laid a lot like you did in your heyday is off the table, right? Although most people don’t have the looks for that anyway.
Also, for people who don’t want to remain in the West, what are the viable alternatives? I think it’s just a few East Asian countries: Japan, Korea, Singapore. Everywhere else things are still worse than in the West right now.
I have written a few articles in which I am quite critical of my past. While I learned a lot on my errant ways, my assessment is at best ambivalent. Getting some work experience at a well-known company in a big city can pay off handsome dividends, but I think that people should work on their exit strategy. Probably, the older you get the more miserable it is to live in a big city. Spending a few years working/studying and partying is probably not a big loss but this is not a permanent lifestyle.
I am also thinking of a few Asian countries. Depending on your age and background, you may be able to make use of “golden visa” or retirement visa schemes. On that note, while my personal sample is obviously highly biased, I have not met anyone yet who has left the West behind and regretted it.