James F. Richardson's Blog, page 2

The Modern Cruise Experience Will Exceed Your Snarky Expectations

An essay for normies…not twits…

Harmony of the Seas- AquaTheater -Aft

The modern literary writing corpus on the cruise ship experience is as needlessly voluminous as it is awful in tone. The authors who write these sarcastic, holier-than-thou missives make no attempt to see the experience from the inside. Not the slightest attempt. That would require good faith interviewing. And research. Such bother.

But the real problem with this homogenous genre stems from the fact that the authors are the least predisposed possible cruisers; male individuals who attend as singles against their lifestyle instincts and, then, shockingly, discover the most suspicious of findings: they were right all along in their disgust.

Their predetermined finding, which I also shared for most of my adult life, is that the cruise ship is “Vegas at sea.” Not the gambling so much as the focused desire for maximum hedonic bliss per calendar day. Excessive drinking. Screaming. Whatever a highly introverted, over-educated, misanthropic ‘writer’ can not in any way personally relate to - going alone into a large crowd and ‘working it.’

I have read David Foster Wallace’s piece - a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again https://g.co/kgs/fQUPwGV. And, more recently, the much more self-indulgent whining in a 2024 “whin-ary” by Gary Shteyngart at the Atlantic (I refuse to cite this disingenuous piece even though I am a subscriber).

There is a truism where I come from in cultural anthropology- with our small sample sizes and limited access, you should favor the insider point of view with minimal critique. You don’t swoop in with elitist criticism resting on bullshit empirical foundations. You take the side of your audience and perceive things as best as possible from their point of view.

So, here are my ‘trenchant’, empathetic and honest observations as a good faith, paying cruise ship attendee on board with my family for a week on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas.

We had mediocre expectations but wanted to be surprised.

1) The Bubble Within the Floating Bubble

It’s visually obvious that a cruise ship is a self-contained world. Look at the thing. It’s also a fully resourced social bubble supplied with everything it needs for the entire voyage. Virtually no ships onboard anything at ports of call. Not even water or fuel! Royal Caribbean (RCL) does not set sail and run out of fuel at the second port like your ADHD Uncle ran out of gas on that famous, multi car family vacation in ‘93. Nope. Royal Caribbean and most cruise lines forward buy their diesel using a business process called “hedging.” And they store it at their massive source terminals.

Yet, the most interesting thing about cruising I can ascertain is that most people overwhelmingly book in groups. Singles are a radical minority. And everything on board works towards ending any temporary alienation. In the U.S., only 10% of passengers are traveling solo.https://cruising.org/-/media/clia-media/research/2024/2024-state-of-the-cruise-industry-report_updated-050824_web.ashx

The preponderance of groups involve families, family reunions, grandparents plus kids plus grandkids, college friends, post-college girlfriend groups, you name it.

Cruise ships are ironic vestiges of all ages group fun in a world where youth culture and the labor market have estranged grandparents from their grandchildren, older generations from the youngest.

Yet, the mostly two-person staterooms allow everyone a bubble to retreat to from their de facto group. Your tiniest bubble could be solo or duo.

You can scale up and scale down your group socializing on demand very easily. The ship is designed to allow lots of hiding and lots of manic engagement. And without the cross-town trips a normal urban vacation would require to accomplish this.

This does not happen by accident. I’m sure it was designed this way, though these ships appear to be more simplistic in design than they actually are.

2) Masters of Inclusion

Honestly, as an introvert, I feared most the potential for sensory overwhelm and extroverted suffocation as I boarded. So did my wife. But, Royal Caribbean’s megaships are masters of design for sensory inclusion.

The rooms are so incredibly soundproofed, we could not hear our boisterous teens through the adjoining wall, only when we stood right next to the door. So, the quiet introverts can easily retire to their staterooms for a nap or quiet time and recharge. We do this at home all the time, but intentional ship design is crucial to making this happen. The large ships are also amazingly ADA accessible, far more than your average hotel property.

RCL also manages to have onboard music everywhere at just the right genre and volume to motivate ‘action’ and with omnigenerational music (not easy). But, if you want to walk around with airbuds in, no one will stop you.

In the 18+ Solarium, there is only ethereal instrumental music playing. It’s basically Enya to the max. Perfect for talking and reading. Lots of adults reading here. Young introverted couples also hang out here. It’s never been full except the first afternoon (when no one knew how to make use of the ship).

In the Aft you find loud hip hop and popular music booming to keep those 3-17 year olds moving (and exhausted later!) on water slides, Flowrider venues and in the splash pools.

The two sound zones never mix. At all.

There is also enough culinary diversity inside every dining venue’s menu to satisfy a newer, multicultural, beyond-steak-and-potatoes crowd. The specialty dining charges a steep premium for culinary snobbery, as it should. We did it twice!

See Figure 3 for the bizarre, lushly landscaped row of specialty dining venues on our ship. We even got our kids to wear pants, which is a miracle for any parent who lives in Tucson. Pants?!

Figure 3 - Specialty Dining That Does Not Fail

3) Reliable Hospitality

Prior to boarding, I had assumed that real hospitality from energetic, motivated staff was pretty much dead in my lifetime outside of $500 a person restaurants. My expectations are that low today in the U.S. restaurant world. Management treats these folks so poorly on average that it’s a miracle wait staff can even muster a smile at your average sit down restaurant (I.e. Applebee’s). And the folks that used to provide amazing table service have far more lucrative job opportunities in their 20s and 30s. Usually.

As I correctly hypothesized before boarding, RCL at least operates at the standard of Disneyland when it comes to hospitable staff. Seriously, better than Disneyland.

I realize that the U.S. Cruise ship industry depends heavily on foreign crew and staff. Thank God they do! I would pay double for what we received in terms of service.

For the first few days, I struggled to understand how RCL pulls it off beyond its own incentives and work culture. Then, it hit me, the vast majority of the staff you encounter are from the Philippines, India and SE Asia. These are cultural worlds where hospitality, including faking it well, is an ancient art form and a source of high social status. Being very hospitable is how you perform elite status in the countries. It’s how you distinguish yourself from the ‘rude villagers.’ Rude, obnoxious people can succeed in America because we are hyper-individualistic and reward non-hosting professions so well. Just look at Elon Musk for a prime example.

Modern cruise ships may offer the best behaved staff of any possible vacation scenario for a well-heeled American.

I have seriously seen only one depressed staff person (who may be in the wrong industry?)

This is critical, not because the average guest is an entitled wanker but because you have to interact with so many staff people in a service-dense cruise environment. You would go crazy if they all had the attitude of a local diner waitperson (who should be depressed BTW).

4) Remarkable Attention To Detail

No. Not a throw away header. Let me share but one of many design elements that reflect nuanced thInking. Push button bathroom doors on the top decks (i.e. open to the wind)

On the lower right of Figure 1 - notice the open door button. I’m guessing this is an ADA feature, yet it is NOT marked as such. And, when at sea, you discover how hard it is to open these swing doors with a) AC suction from the inside and b) 20 knot winds outside keeping the door shut. Hard even for an adult who lifts weights. After yanking on the door twice, I converted to push button open (from both sides)! Another example of inclusion as well for the elderly and kids. I did not stand there to count, but I did see kids struggle with these massive metal doors. Until they found the buttons with their Gen Z technophilic vision.

Figure 4 - Exterior Bathroom Doors w/Push button opening

Other examples included: showers preset to a comfortable, not-hot temperature with a simple rotating tab, very high quality beds, stateroom cabinets/shelving that does not bang and clang, carpeted double stairwells with gorgeous art to invite you to walk up/down 2-3 floors instead of clogging elevators, and on-demand soft serve ice cream cone stations for nine hours a day near the kiddie zones!

Cruise ships are probably the most well thought group spaces in modern civilization it would appear. Why can’t our local governments match this standard?

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5) Disney-grade hygiene

The number one stigma of cruise ships among my upper-middle-class set would be - “They must be filthy! Norovirus! Ahhh!”

And yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Not since Disneyland have I seen so many staff constantly, and I mean constantly cleaning…everything. The sun decks. The pool decks. The bathroom floors. The buffet dining areas. The interior carpeting. The everything.

Just when you notice dirt and want to find someone to inform, he-she appears. Feels like magic but it’s just a product of detailed planning and service intervals.

They are so good at just-in-time cleaning on our ship that you can not leave your buffet table for even 10 seconds or your dishes will be collected! Only happened once to us though. Do. Not. Fuck. With. The. Cleaning. Not sorry.

Figure 5- Nonstop Cleaning

The key standard they observe on RCL and similar ships is to train staff to look for filth and jump on it. The use of lithium battery-powered cleaning packs is genius because it has eliminated cord tripping by guests!

And, they have hand washing stations at the entrance to ALL the buffets!

Figure 6- Nurse-approved hand washing stations!

I can’t understate the hygiene joy I experienced when coming onboard with very low expectations (of me hiding in my stateroom out of filth terror).

Epilogue

My wife was the most nervous about the crowds, filth and sensory cuckoo we might find on a ship housing 6,000 plus guests and 2,500 staff. Yet she has converted so hard to cruising, that we spent time in the RCL sales office on board exploring a Japanese itinerary! True to the marketing savvy of cruise ship companies like RCL, the sales office is called Next Cruise, not “Sales.”

For families today where you want to multiple rooms for privacy between you and your kids, the value per person per night of modern cruising is hard to find anywhere else.

Modern travel with individualists is annoying and stressful and prone to argument because every element, every move, must be planned to incorporate divergent preferences. Every day is a battle over meals, destinations, timing.

PITA.

A modern cruise ship allows your group to segment as needed according to its individuals’ preferences and reform when preferences converge. Miracle!

All you do is select from a short list of curated options. It’s called forced choice in survey design. Ironically, it forces productive family coordination and increased group dining, something lost from many households in America today.

Don’t believe the misanthropes.

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No, Most of You Would Not Last Six Months Living Abroad - Part 2

You will be corrected often after you become fluent and trusted…

Like several million kids in my Gen X cohort, I grew up listening to Curious George at bedtime. Not once did I find it odd that I admired a smiley monkey who stole, broke, and vandalized things….all for the sake of public art. (The floating newspaper boat parade was pure genius).

George was excessively curious, and it generally got him in trouble on a routine basis.

Curious George is a very American archetype of the rule-breaking entrepreneur, artist, and activist with a ‘good’ objective. His curiosity gets the better of him, but he is forgiven. And, so, the curiosity gets rewarded. Most kids identify with the rebel side of George very quickly, partly because they wish they could break all of Mom and Dad’s annoying rules, too. [Kids also like rebels because kids are society’s most disempowered age group].

I fear that more kids take away the American rebel theme from this iconic series than the theme of unwavering curiosity.

And it is curiosity that ultimately determines how well you adapt long-term to a foreign culture. Not IQ. Not money. Not even language fluency. Language, after all, is just a tool. It takes curiosity to suffer through the language learning process.

In last week’s piece, I discussed how learning a country’s native language is critical to building normal, high-trust relationships with local people. Without some fluency, you can not enter local social networks (except through marriage) because they will never fully trust you. In many cultures, lack of fluency will mark you as “stupid,” even if you appear well off. This is very true in the U.S.

However, gaining access to social networks through fluency is one thing. Once you gain access to proper relationship formation (i.e., friendships), the awkwardness and complexity of crossing a cultural boundary ratchet way up.

Things get more challenging for you, not easier.

The first nine months I lived in Tamil Nadu in 1997, I was in an American-backed language institute, where we spoke too much English during class, ate breakfast and lunch with Americans, and you get the picture—too much of an expat bubble. Most students did not intend to become orally fluent (they often intended to study Asian literature or history).

As I mentioned in last week’s piece, it took me over a year of hanging out on the streets at night to develop my conversational fluency. It sucked speaking Tamil like a drunk, stammering four-year-old at first. But I persisted, staring at the long-term objective of social access in front of me. And the language fascinated me, honestly. It makes your brain think differently. Speaking Tamil will change your personality.

After nine months at the American Institute for Indian Studies, I returned to the U.S. to obtain my research visa and then flew back to begin fieldwork.

After returning to Tamil Nadu, I was totally alone, renting a house inside a local suburb with no other foreigners. No more daily temptation to speak English. No more expat lunches. And, in six months, I became really depressed. My atypical neurology aside, part of the issue that confronted me (and anyone else who gets to this point living abroad with fluency) is that local people are now criticizing and correcting you as a local and at a furious pace. And yet your relationship with them is not super deep yet either. But much deeper than any tourist will experience.

Part of you will want to scream, “For crying out loud, I just got here!!!”

And, because you are linguistically competent but still culturally incompetent, you will be getting quite an earful. There is no real way to avoid this transitional awkwardness as an immigrant. And, ironically, your admirable fluency is what has earned you this ‘prize.’ More trust in you means locals now evaluate your behavior as if you were a local, not a silly tourist (i.e., a walking bank account from whom to extract the maximal amount of cash).

This period of maximal awkwardness is when your intrinsic level of human curiosity will either save you or send you rushing to the nearest international departures lounge. This happens even to graduated students.

Here’s one example of where something fundamental gets screwed up by Americans all the time where I lived in India.

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The Art of Saying Goodbye in Tamil Culture

I want to use a straightforward human behavior to illustrate how living abroad is about more than language fluency. It is about understanding more subtle codes and values. These codes are the beating heart of human cultures, if the concept has any analytical value.

Tamil speakers use a verb compound, a phrase, to say “goodbye” to each other. They do not use the dictionary translation for the English word “goodbye.”1

“வரேன்.”

It literally means - “I’m coming.” It is only one word, because spoken Tamil uses verb endings to indicate the subject, so pronouns are optional. Very efficient.

And this word is short for the “schoolyard” Tamil version of goodbye which I often used-

“போயிட்டு வரேன்.”

Denotatively, this formal phrase translates as “I’m going and coming.”

If you’re confused, welcome to Tamil Nadu, where people ensure you know they are “returning” as they depart your presence.

Why is THIS so polite in Tamil culture? It signals that the relationship between you and your audience is highly valued. They value it, so they want to signal their return, i.e., this relationship continues. Leaving a conversation at a coffee stall or someone’s home requires you to validate the status of the relationship at a minimal level. That’s how important relationships are in Tamil culture.

If you ever say something Americans routinely say, “I’m going now,” or if you think “goodbye” and say the Tamil verb for “I’m going” as a substitute (very common mistake), you’re not signaling what you think you are.

“I’m going” in Tamil is an utterance that breaks a relationship. It is the language of estrangement. It is incredibly disrespectful if you use it with a parent or other family elder. It is a verbal slap.

Instead, Tamils saying goodbye to a friend or loved one or respect person, always say “I’m coming.” It means - “I’m coming back for sure. We’ll talk again soon.” But it does this in two phonemes using one present tense verb.

This level of linguistic efficiency and deep coding is shared only among classical world languages, most of them being Asian languages, born of cultures accustomed to incredibly nuanced relationship management and advanced social skills. You will not find it in English, but someone is welcome to challenge me here.

From a Tamil point of view, American English speakers saying “goodbye” routinely dishonor their closest relationships with sloppy language. That’s because we rely on a departing hug, a gesture, to really indicate the relationship’s value. And not always.

Does it matter if you use language or gesture to validate a relationship that matters to you?

Yes. I’m going to say it does in human cultures. Because disrespectful language is rarely forgotten when deployed. Saying “I’m going” is just rude in Tamil culture in a way it is not in American English. 2

No one in Tamil Nadu will forget someone who says the following to them, often in a disgusted tone,

Rough translation: “What kind of person are you (disrespectful form) My God! You useless fool. I’m outta here.” Notice how many fewer phonemes it takes (in my recording) than in English to tell someone to ‘fuck off’ without swearing.

An American hug can be perfunctory. Who knows what it means?

But telling your friend “I’m going” won’t be ambiguous to her. Nope.

Why Curiosity Matters in Adapting to Foreign Cultures

Your reaction to being corrected for a social faux should be, “Wow. That’s fascinating. I won’t do that again, sure.” You must treat the local culture like a dynamic puzzle you need to decode. Then, your curiosity accelerates your learning because mistakes become a positive learning process.

If you see faux pas abroad as humiliating, annoying, and frustrating, you won’t be staying very long. Your inner “George” is probably dead. You simply do not have the muscle to adapt. Even if you are fluent, you may still leave.

Most who try to live abroad fail to meet this crucial curiosity test, in my experience. Whatever curiosity they have is not enough to withstand being culturally incompetent like a child—the constant corrections.

You have to be comfortable with a lot of awkwardness. A lot.

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1

This word is highly formal and I only heard it used at bureaucratic functions by VIPs.

2

The one vestige of this kind of relationship emphasis in English is found in using informal phrases like “bye” or “see you soon” instead of “goodbye.” The latter is pretty formal and dose signal the relationship is either formal/hierarchical or just plain weak.

No, Most of You Would Not Last Six Months Living Abroad - Part 1

Wait! I have to really learn to speak French? Like, for real?

In the late 1990s, I lived in India for nearly three years, studying Tamil and conducting immersive field research in a large temple city. I never intended to settle there, and my opinion did not change before I left. I was happy to return to the U.S. in December 1999 and end my voluntary celibacy (i.e., only white women had free, safe sexual ‘options’ in conservative Indian towns back then, and I watched them pair off repeatedly!).1

South India in 1997 was a highly unfavorable space-time target destination for an upper-middle-class American single male. Just about everything was working against you. At the time, I viewed it as a monastic boot camp, akin to a Catholic missionary living at a fur trading outpost in 18th-century Illinois. My intent in going to such a cultural place was not to have “fun.” I went there to learn and explore. Curiosity was my primal intent.

Ironically, settling in India to work made it significantly easier to adapt. I expected it to be arduous. And I had considerable incentives to generate goodwill. Curiosity also made it easier to swallow the many minor humiliations of being culturally incompetent.

Overall, I give myself a B for adopting local norms—I did enough to avoid being driven out of town by a mob and sent packing to the Chennai airport. But I pissed people off with American moves and assumptions. Absolutely. I was not incentivized like an actual immigrant.

How Fluency Yields Social Access

If there’s one piece of advice I can give anyone considering resettling abroad, it is this: treat it like Basic Combat Training. The first ‘test’ in your training is becoming fluent in the local language. You will tire of being treated like a tourist without passing the language test. Then you’ll have to decide between loneliness or hanging out with the jingoistic Americans of your choosing (often your American expat colleagues). You’ll be trapped in a tourist-heavy, English-speaking limbo that loses its charm quickly. Rick Steves’ admonition to interact with local people with some tourist speak is nice for a two-week vacation, but does not make you any friends. Sorry. Rick has bilingual friends all over Europe because he revisited the same places dozens of times as work—an irrelevant data point.

If you think being a couple helps you withstand your linguistic isolation, all I can say is that you would need to be a very ‘special’ anti-social couple to put up with this level of disconnection—the kind who reads books all day long in retirement. You won’t last more than six months before one of you becomes severely depressed.

You do not need to be able to riff slang with the local teenagers, although that is a fantastically useful standard to set for yourself. You would impress everyone if you can achieve that degree of adult fluency. But you need to be damn good conversationalist within two years at least. That’s your deadline. Ready?

Learning a local language well is not about permitting interpersonal communication. It’s about signaling trustworthiness to local people. If someone can not fluently converse with you, how can they pretend to know you? That’s why a language barrier prevents deep trust formation. Humans need language to probe each other’s origins, values, motivations, etc.

It’s shocking how much you can communicate with basic hand gestures and facial expressions across any language barrier. I could have even done most of my Indian fieldwork by speaking English and supplementing where necessary with an interpreter. Easily. But this would have killed my access to people’s real lives and feelings. The interviews would have sucked. It would have vastly reduced local trust in me.

One of my local friends once told me, “People only tell you things because they respect that you learned Tamil, James. Otherwise, they wouldn’t tell you anything.”

The correlation between verbal fluency and trustworthiness is one of the least discussed aspects of moving abroad to a non-English speaking country. Even when many educated locals in your destination country know English, refusing to learn the local, dominant language will still prevent them from giving you access to their lives. Popular travel shows orchestrated between media networks and local ‘experts’ give a false impression of how easy it is to access local social worlds with English. You won’t get far beyond the most transactional forms of retail or government offices. Even most of the fluent English speakers will keep their distance.

The inescapable link between fluency and social trust is no different for a new immigrant to America. One of the most disabling features of being a working-class, poorly educated, non-English speaking migrant to the U.S. is that you will gravitate very quickly to a community/neighborhood/social network that enables your ongoing inability to learn English. Not great for your income.

For an immigrant to America, acquiring English fluency is more powerful than anything, save a college degree, when it comes to opening up opportunities to generate real income and provide for yourself. The alternative is an ethnic trap.

Believe it or not, even the most globally curious American reacts differently to immigrants fluent in English (with an accent) versus those who can not string a basic English sentence together correctly. I am not here to encourage snobbery or judgment. The dark truth is that we tend to assume the poor English speaker is stupid or even a bad faith person who does not care about fitting in. Americans are unusually prone to these flawed assumptions because most of us are not bilingual.2 We have not been through the second language acquisition process, and have no idea what is involved cognitively and emotionally.

How I Became Conversationally Fluent in Tamil in 18 Months - Ready to Do This?

If you think you want to resettle abroad, read about how I gained verbal fluency in Tamil. Are you ready to do this…

Never one to shy away from an absurd goal, I gave myself a year to become fluent in Tamil in time for my fieldwork. It took six months longer than this primarily due to the total lack of structural overlap between English and Tamil. “Street Tamil” also varies massively from written Tamil, more than the English language crossing from written to spoken word.

I had already spent two years studying the language in the U.S., where I also supplemented course work with vocabulary cramming. Anyone who knew me in 1996 and 1997 would have seen me constantly burning through hand-made Tamil flashcards to boost my working vocabulary. I carried four or five big, rubber-banded stacks in my pant pockets wherever I went. I crammed Tamil vocabulary at the dining hall, in the coffee shop, at the diner up the street, before class started, or whenever I had an hour of downtime and nothing to do. I crammed Tamil as often as you scroll feeds on your phone today.

But once I was in the country, I took the obsession even further. I set a policy of not socializing with Americans, avoiding them like a criminal gang. I knew the temptation to socialize abroad would be too great, including falling into relationships with American college women on year-abroad programs. That would have been a disaster for language acquisition time. In other words, being single and aloof from local Americans was a massive advantage to immersion.

I also deliberately chose to live downtown in a monolingual, working-class neighborhood. This placement ensured that virtually no one would saunter up trying to develop their English with the local white man. If I let myself become a free English Tutor, it would be like finding an American girlfriend. Your brain does not want to dance between languages, even though it can. It would prefer to nestle within one all day.

Every night until 10 p.m., I hung out on the busy downtown street at the end of the alley I lived on. There was a constant throng of passing motorcycles, bikes, cars, and rickshaws to keep you from falling asleep early. A steady stream of pedestrians supplied numerous shops, street vendors, and sidewalk food stalls with customers. People were constantly hanging on the sidewalk and retail stoops—dozens and dozens of them, next to their uncle’s store or their brothers’ shoe stall. All day. Almost all of these folks were monolingual Tamil speakers with at most 10-30 words of English to deploy. They were relieved and overjoyed that I wanted to speak Tamil. Otherwise, they would have never met me. 

The one asset a foreigner has learning a local language in India is that so few ever try or pull it off, that you become a truly remarkable human being to them. You have shown them massive amounts of respect they don’t expect from a white person, not in a former British colony.

No one in Europe will give you this much credit (and applause) for becoming fluent in their native language. They couldn’t care less, honestly. When I traveled through Germany during the summer of 1993, I got no love for speaking broken German with anyone, just lots of irritated looks and corrections. Or indifference. I lost motivation.

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Reflecting on Gaining Fluency Abroad

This is a ton of work. You may have time as an empty-nester or retired person, sure. But can you handle the identity regression when you speak a new language like a two-year-old? For months on end? Or will you hide out with an English-speaking partner in your downtime and throw away thousands of opportunities to immerse yourself? Do you have the monastic self-discipline to sustain constant immersion when Americans are found everywhere, even in Lesotho?

Unless you are exceptionally gifted at languages, you will need at least a year of waking-hour-immersion to become conversationally fluent in a new language. 3Verbal fluency is very difficult, but it gets harder and harder the more remote the target language is from your native tongue. Consuming media only in the local language will help. This means you have to deliberately not speak English to anyone or spend time on English language newsfeeds. The total immersion is not just for bragging rights. It’s about forcing your brain to think in the new language and stop the process of thinking first in English and then translating to the target language. The latter is NOT fluency. Learning to speak a new language takes massive amounts of repetitive use. And lots of correction early on.

While a year of immersion seems like an incredibly long time, it’s really fast and assumes you are an average or above-average language learner. It takes human children 6-12 years to achieve adult conversational fluency in their native language. Anyone good at languages who arrives with grammar and ~1000 essential words in their head can do usually do this (unless it’s Class III or IV language). Still, a year is a long time to be an awkward, child-like communicator for a grown adult. This regressive quality to language acquisition is much easier to handle emotionally when you’re 16 or 25. Not at 55.

If your intent to resettle abroad is to flee Trumpistan, you are not motivated enough to put yourself through a regressive process of language acquisition that five-year-olds have no choice but to live through. No way.

And no one will trust you if you strap a phone to your face and turn on Google Translate. Sorry. You’re always welcome to try.

Further Reading

In the past few months, a flurry of really well-done Substack pieces on relocating abroad has emerged, inspired by the dark turn in American politics. Most of these pieces focus on the difficulty of resettling to Europe, the one place most naive Americans assume would be relatively easy.  has the most insightful piece to date, well worth reading.

Living ElsewhereAre You One of the Few Americans Who Really Could Move to Europe?If you are considering moving to Europe, I want to offer you ten questions to ask yourself before you decide…Read more4 months ago · 1022 likes · 307 comments · Gregory Garretson

Next week, I’ll explore why moving to Europe could be as challenging, even more difficult, than moving to India. We must dive into subtler cultural dynamics that make resettling or living abroad challenging for Americans.

We have unique cultural handicaps few of us recognize.

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NOTE: If you still can not understand how something like Project 2025 gets written and implemented in the Executive branch, you should dive into my new book. A society that privileges lifestyle diversity by making individual autonomy a sacred value will protect both conservative and liberal lifestyles equally. That is how we get to where we are right now. America protects the scientologist, Amish, and atheist, which only leads to greater and greater values incoherence. It is a slow unraveling process.

1

White men who screwed local Tamil women invited a quick violent response from male relatives and the lifelong guilt of destroying her marriageability within her social class. On the other end, Indian prostitutes were top vectors for AIDs in the 1990s. Exciting options. I was once offered sexual access to a business owner’s niece, but let’s just pretend I did not hear him. Yeah.

2

78% of Americans age 5 and over speak only English. The bilingual population is less than 22%, since there is a considerable monolingual non-English immigrant population here. Source: US Census, ACS 2023.

3

According to the Foreign Service Institute, Tamil is a Class III language for English speakers. It promises a tough slog toward fluency but is not as painful as learning to speak Mandarin or Korean.

How We All Got So Rude and Cringe

White Lotus Series 1 Cast - all cringe, all the time

How did we reach a point where incivility, rudeness, and the self-absorption required for each are as likely to come from the old as from the young (who have the excuse of immaturity)?

It’s not reducible to “selfishness.” Selfishness is simply an outcome that restates the problem of weakly connected, low empathy societies (often those recently devastated by invasion, colonialism, or war).

And American civility weakened from within, without a violent civil conflict.

Much of the blame connects to how we think about age and aging.

Let me explain how I got here.

In my 2022 research on older Americans, I learned that age strongly aligns with classic notions of individualism and the primacy of individual agency as the real prize of modern life. ‘The more empowered you are to do whatever you want, the better’ we have been told for generations now (and my grandparents would disagree). The 20th century, in many ways, was the launch of overlapping liberation movements, most of which are still ongoing. We are drunk on personal autonomy.

[Insert grumpy anthropologist].

Growing older has lent men (and many women) maximum relative agency in most human cultures (i.e., relative to their youth). In subsistence-based societies, this was a pure age-based status within resource-sharing clans and had little to do with wealth or income accumulation. However, most human societies also encumbered those elders with more significant obligations as they aged into elder status. One of the most central obligations of the elder has been to enforce social norms and coach naive youth in relatively slow-changing adult behaviors required to contribute to the group. This requires spending time with youth, observing them, and carefully intervening. It required extended copresence. Elders in most societies once lived enmeshed in the lives of youth, not forced to ‘catch up’ twice a year on holidays or less frequently or, in tragic cases, never at all. You must also be trusted as an elder, or no one will listen.

But what if society morphs into a loose association of social network CEOs who are primarily interested in their personal lifestyles rather than social norms?

Then what?

This norm of no-norms has prevailed since the Boomer generation aged into elder status, and it is at the root of most local—and national-level political problems we are dealing with right now. The last generations, who honestly believe in deep intrafamilial obligation, are primarily dead or gone. The usual social variables are not really at play in this shift. It is a naked, societal obsession with lifestyle curation with minimal social obligations. We all love it. Let’s be honest. This truth is so uncomfortable that we refuse to face it, let alone imagine a different way of living together across the ages or simply in broader, tight-knit networks of mutual obligation that we choose.

One reason that older Americans voted for Trump in such large percentages is their obsessive belief in the power of individual autonomy sans the slightest interference from the state. This old demon in America is rooted heavily in the history of our violent frontier and the small farmer’s “off-grid” homestead. Yet, for a long time, even this suspicion of the state did not conquer the bonds of family. Family was too crucial for survival until the mid-20th century. By then, we had rolled out massive federal and state entitlements as safety nets for the poor, weak, and elderly. Now, family was optional as a survival tool.

Once family becomes optional, the elders become optional members of our social lives. And the state becomes more crucial, ironically. The state essentially replaces the old people.

And more than one anthropologist will back me up when I say that once elders are optional, you have hollowed out the entire spinal cord of interpersonal respect in any society. It will only thrive in two forms - the peer-to-peer gang and the bureaucracy. If you can disrespect an elder just for being older and “cheugy,” you have a modern form of social unraveling, not one born from the usual suspects: famine, plague, or war.

America has created an aging process that undermines our most basic forms of relational coherence beyond the romantic couple and the parent/child dyad. As we empty the nest, retire, and experience spousal death, each stage reduces our net total social obligations at the individual level. The primary exception is the aging family business patriarch or matriarch. In its place, older Americans put leisure activities and media consumption (much more than any other age group but teens) ahead of socialization, often unconsciously and with a fair bit of regret. Others love their 55+ rec centers and Netflix.

As I explain in my recent book, modern youth culture has sustained ‘youth contra elder’ age-based social segregation since the 1940s for no reason other than the demands of education-based income growth, labor market evolution, and the consumption both facilitate. Maximizing individual autonomy delinks people from all temporal constraints on personal lifestyle provided by traditional, time-intensive social obligations. It enables lifestyle-based over-consumption (i.e., the engine of GDP growth in modern societies).

As a market researcher who conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of baby boomers early in my career, I can not easily describe to the non-Boomer how much the average Boomer hates their parents, at least one of them. This hate is not for the usual reasons but because of their parents’ values and value system. And I mean real hatred and disgust, not just annoyance or irritation. This intergenerational parent/child malaise has significantly improved with younger age cohorts because modern parents are better adapted to a world of rapid change (i.e., they know that the rigidity of conservative societies is maladaptive).

Readers may agree or disagree with the long-term societal value in the Boomer rupture of traditional values. Still, their generation set in motion a perpetually reproducing, mass youth culture of norm-rejection that seems normal and progressive to many but has been a crucial muriatic acid on local communities.

This age-based segregation is carved into our lived landscape. It is geographic (or perhaps residential). It has created two Americas - one with less empathy for youth and one with less respect for elder wisdom. As Boomers aged, their individualism simply ran free and wild as they retired, disconnected from any proper understanding of their grandchildren’s world.

A broader age cohort of Gen X and Boomers exhibit high rates of childlessness (i.e., they never raised any children) or only had one child, contributing to relative disinterest in youth issues.1 This only ensures that millions of elders are both disconnected and have little reason to connect with youth.

Some grandparents try harder to understand the reality of today’s youth and do, but no one surveys this tricky, intangible behavior. Grandparents’ physical segregation well beyond a 30-minute drive from their grandkids ( a distance my research has shown is essential to intra-family visitation) makes it implausible that they can meaningfully surveil and intervene in their grandchildren’s lives (and many parents do not want this ‘dated’ advice either).

If you grew up like my maternal grandmother in a large working-class family, lived at home until marriage, then raised a family and took care of your ill spouse, the increasing ‘agency’ or freedom from social obligation you received as a widow may have been enjoyable, even ecstatically so. But she never yearned for this or expected it. Ironically, the Greatest Generation was among the first to experience this bizarre decline in social responsibility as they aged (even though they were raised in a different world).

Now, we consider it a civil right.

The problem that America’s aging process feeds is excessive autonomy. Yet, freedom from social obligation is ultimately a trap. It hands you enormous amounts of leisure time, sure. By itself, this autonomy will not make you happy or happier. We know that functional relationships of mutual obligation make humans happiest.

Decades of living with radical autonomy will also make the inevitable temporary period when you suddenly have to deal with a painful family obligation, like care for a dying parent, all the more strange, stressful, and perceptibly onerous. You may realize that your social responsibility muscle is weak and atrophied (or it never developed, which is my case). You feel guilty that the family obligation annoys you (or you are accidentally callous). And the aging adult with a family obligation intruding on their personal life has far less real help with that family obligation today due to everyone’s precious ‘schedules.’

We are not taught to prioritize this fundamental social fitness because America worships autonomy and agency, not social obligation. The latter is a “drag,” a “cramp in my style,” or whatever today’s teens call it (I looked in slang dictionaries but could not figure this out).

The great challenge of the 21st century in America will be to talk ourselves back into tighter relationships of kin and nonkin that slowly heal us from the adolescent autonomy we’ve turned into an adult way of life.

This is not about returning to the past.

It is not about joining mystical, violent religious movements like the New Apostolic Revolution.

Check out my new book (click the banner below) for more on the 20th-century slow creep of modern individualism as a civil and consumer right. It’s a story-driven, data-rich tour through everyday American life, with many tangents and side branches.

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1

My 2022 national survey discovered that 27% of adults now 50-79 never raised kids at home. n= 2983 adults with a high school degree or older.

Exorcising the Academic Curse

Note: This is the final piece in a two-part essay. See Part 1 at this link:

When I received my PhD in February 2002, my perception was that most doctoral students in ANY field wanted to settle down in an academic research position. At least initially. This was the high-status goal for most of us when we started our programs in the 1990s.

As far as I know, no one collects data on doctoral students’ intended careers when they start out. However, federal data on PhD recipients’ immediate plans indicate that the percentage of people who have lined up an immediate academic or postdoc position has shrunk dramatically (from 63% in 2003 to 35% in 2023).1

The universe is NOT rewarding kids like me who naively dreamed of becoming a Professor of Something. And it has not been doing this for some time. It appears that doctoral students are figuring this out earlier in their programs than I did.

Academia’s Abdication of Responsibility

Over the last thirty years, almost 1/3 of all PhD recipients have no clear commitments upon graduation. The data has slipped magnetically around the 30% mark in the past forty years but does not want to escape it. The percentage is especially high in the fields that the private sector does not desire openly (e.g., the humanities).

How the hell do we let students wind up in this situation in such large percentages? These are not stupid people, needless to say. They are more resourceful than the average Joe, especially if they closed on the degree.

Whether you are floating in this anti-climactic phase after graduation or have decided to leave an academic position that is killing you or a family move forced you to abandon tenure, here is what it feels like to say goodbye -

Instead of heading off to a new post, our family moved back into my parents’ basement. It was an anticlimactic end to my academic career and, frankly, one of the hardest periods of my life. Many professors don’t appreciate how difficult leaving academe can be on their students who expected to be professors. It can be a devastating loss of purpose and identity.2

The psychological devastation hinted at above may seem trivial to anyone who grew up in a working-class home, an inner-city home or an abusive, broken home in any social class. Boo-hoo, some readers will cry sarcastically. Yet, that’s the strange thing about the inner life - our assessment of our social status and psychological safety occurs first inside our minds. And this assessment is entirely relative to our original objectives.

Our misery can persist with no external validation of it—a true curse of the human imagination.

As adults, imagining ourselves in a future state we know nothing about and registering our feelings there isn't easy. Humans are more sophisticated at adaptation than squirrels or mosquitoes, but…we have limits, too.

It is even harder to imagine a happy future state beyond academia when NO ONE TALKS ABOUT leaving academia. When your peers never ‘return’ from beyond the cult to inform you. When the cult abandons you silently, my advisor never followed up after graduation and the final round of recommendation letters she wrote in 2001 (before I jumped out of the castle tower window).

Should I have been surprised? No. And I wasn’t. After all, this person had confessed to me in my early years that “I originally wanted to be a writer, but I have to pay bills!” My advisor wanted to be a novelist but ‘settled’ for tenure in academia, where she ‘advised’ the kid who wanted to be a Professor of Something since he was 16. Richard Russo could have used that conversation in one of his satirical take-downs. I didn’t think it was funny at all, of course.

Academia has always been a vestige of medieval guilds, such as the artisan trades, medicine, law, and architecture. If a Master accepts an Apprentice and the Apprentice does the work, there is a straightforward process with which to advance. The path is laid out. The steps are known. You knew about most of them when you applied to your doctoral program. The goal - tenure - is absolute security in which to do your work.

What you didn’t know, perhaps, is that, unlike a medieval guild, the people in authority today in academia are not committed to everyone’s fate. Their commitment is to drive revenue, supporting their department’s budget and salary. Instead of a protective guild, each step on your journey is a chaotic weeding-out phase with no clear support - and not just during the normal weeding-out phase before being advanced to candidacy.

The first weeding out is no longer structural. It occurs inside the noncommittal relationship between you and your advisor. If this relationship does not spark more or less erotically, however figuratively this transpires, it is very unlikely your advisor will advocate for you like you need them to when it counts.3 You will not become the ‘anointed.’

If you also do not commit to following up on their work, you’ve thrown away the essential tool of flattery. Your advisor formally handed you your dissertation topic in previous eras, and you accepted. The system ensured alignment with the advisor. Smart. By the 1990s, though, America’s culture of lifestyle choice flowed into topic selection, creating the essential permission for advisors to abdicate responsibility for the students they agreed to train. “Hey, that’s not a topic I would pursue” is rarely spoken in a false, noncommittal advisory relationship. Not when everyone could use your tuition dollars.

At the other end of the career ladder in academia, budget cuts and the bizarre circus of ‘cancel culture’ assure PhDs that tenure is no longer permanent.

Academia has become no different than the private sector startup world.

You, the candidate, are the startup. Everything else is negotiable. Everything. You are supporting yourself in a market of oversupplied talent with little obligatory vetting or support from those in authority.

The guild has closed. Capitalism finally broke it.

How to Exorcise The Academic Demon

Today, there are more resources for PhDs who need or want to escape the academic clown show, even though they, like me, made this decision at the end of their doctoral journey.

The key to making this work is to embrace being a startup in bodily form. Become that startup hustler you probably once despised as ‘crass’…and…you will ultimately conquer all the petty resentments of doctoral training. Maybe.

As a solopreneur and bestselling business author, I now have more interpersonal, financial, and emotional autonomy than I imagined I would receive with tenure. All I had to give up was an extreme definition of intellectual autonomy. I never enjoyed teaching much, so that was easy to let go of. Looking back, it’s crazy that I fought this change for so long in my head. 

“Become the CEO of your life and career” - Our Canadian Friend (see quote above).

Superb advice, but easier said than done for a group of adults who skew highly introverted, suck at networking, and have traditionally gravitated to highly structured settings (i.e. a Guild environment).

There are at least seven kinds of PhD labor. Each has an internal status hierarchy primarily based on the prestige of the host institution. I won’t waste your time mapping that out for you.

The key is that each path demands one or more of the four trade-offs I introduced in Part 1. Some trade-offs are more severe than others.

Trade-Off #1: Intellectual autonomy is inversely correlated to making a lot of money

Trade-Off #2: Collaboration versus working alone.

Trade-Off #3: Intellectual idealism versus highly pragmatic concerns of the real world.

Trade-Off #4: The content of your degree may have very little to do with your new career. You have to become an expert all over again.

I leave it to you to see which of these doctoral clans suffers the ‘worst’ trade-off mix and who benefits the most. I’m too biased. Clearly.

The Intellectuals—This was my original objective and the objective of virtually all doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences. They are the super-opinionated ones who often hate teaching. They engage in vicious intellectual debates for sport and honor. They won’t discuss their ‘work’ with mere plebians. They are obsessed with intellectual purity and have difficulty trading this off in pragmatic work outside the academy. Very rarely, an Intellectual like Jonathan Haidt will write a nonfiction bestseller and morph into the Intellectual’s most highly resented form - the Media Intellectual. They will then quickly trade off many Intellectual friends (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould) and find new ones (desperate to get into the media themselves). These PhDs toil in total obscurity, often with barely grateful students. Even their University Press books rarely sell. Their intellectual labor is for a nanoscopic tribe, frequently highly critical and resentful. Their pay has eroded substantially to the point of outright insult.

The Teachers - This important clan gets paid the worst because they work in non-research positions in nonprofit institutions. Tsk. Tsk. Despite the financial trade-off, the Intellectuals look down on them for obvious reasons - they produce no intellectual output. They transmit the Intellectual’s output to students and savor the feeling of remaining an arbiter of ‘powerful knowledge.’ But the other clans just feel bad for their shitty salaries. If they do not engage in serious hypergamy, their life involves trading off income and prestige in their field. ‘Marry a surgeon or banker’ is my advice. Teachers LOVE their students. Seriously, they do. At my old private high school, these folks even write books to achieve some form of intellectual catharsis. Good for them. We Knowledge Workers pity their salaries but envy their ability to savor the Intellectual goods daily.

The R&D PhDs - These folks work in corporate labs or as mathematical modelers on Wall Street. They are ‘evil sell-outs’ to the Intellectuals, Teachers, and NGO clans. R&D labs are where the reliable money is for PhDs, especially if you can eventually run your own laboratory department funded by a major corporation (or, even better, by rich angel investors). Think of lab scientists in leading-edge labs at Pfizer, 3M, SpaceX, etc. - these PhDs often engage in era-defining research and are paid accordingly. But, there is also an army of corporate R&D PhDs in the less glamorous worlds of consumer goods, industrial manufacturing, and packaging. This work is crucial to the business models and cost containment of companies that make essential goods (e.g., groceries, steel girders, Post-It Notes). These PhDs can also easily point to their ‘work’ in the real world and be proud. Their invisible work becomes visible, unlike the work of the Teachers and Intellectuals. This can be very satisfying, more satisfying than much of the work done by the next clan I want to portray.

The Knowledge Workers - This is where soft social science and humanities folks like me end up. These firms or agencies have ways to use creative and highly analytical brains for all sorts of corporate purposes, from market research to strategy consulting. But they earn a wide salary range. The problem is that an enormous amount of this “work” is what David Graeber describes in his bestseller - Bullshit Jobs. I’ve never seen so much meaningless PowerPoint as I have in the market research sector. When you have to pretend to have a debate with an ad agency twit about human behavior, it’s infuriating and insulting. The Teachers have far more daily fulfillment than these folks and experience less weekly status humiliation. My experience is that the more a Knowledge Worker secretly cares about being an Intellectual, the more they will flounder in rage and the less they will advance and earn in the private sector. Once you can sell knowledge to clients by taking their analytical needs seriously, you can start making good money. Of course, if you are that good and client-focused, you should consider becoming a self-employed consultant. This took me way too long to realize and then execute. Very few of us pull this off. I wrote a book to do it. Not everyone has that opportunity. The worst thing about this clan is that almost all of them do permanently invisible work that leads to nothing in the real world. Maybe a package design on a food product. Maybe. Knowledge Workers make the most trade-offs until they can work for themselves. Because of this, I suspect they are grumpier on average than the Teachers but less so than the poorly paid Intellectuals.

The Startup PhDs - These are the genuinely sexy PhDs, the folks lending their degree halo onto all sorts of entrepreneurial ventures, from on-demand therapy apps to meal replacement nutrition products to SpaceX. They work closely with management and may even be co-founders. If you want a public face and many media opportunities, this is the opposite of the R&D folks toiling in corporate obscurity. I suspect the narcissism index is a wee high among these PhDs. They often make a lot more than the R&D clan, so it tends to be where more experienced, ambitious R&D people go. They are also satisfied with performing visible work worldwide, unlike the Knowledge Workers or Teachers. I’m not sure many feel that they reduced intellectual autonomy because there is a strong alignment between their doctoral work and what they now do. I suspect my elder son may wind up in this clan.

The NGO PhDs - Many of my non-academic anthropologist peers work in international development and foreign aid. They often enter doctoral programs intending to do this. Honestly, it is a more thoughtful approach to your entire program than thinking you’ll be the rare diamond who earns academic tenure. They work in : elite global organizations (e.g., WHO), mega-funded philanthropies (e.g., Bill Gates Foundation), famous NGOs (e.g., World Wildlife Fund, Doctors without Borders), and invisible NGOs (e.g., why would I give you an example?). NGOs perform invisible work mostly abroad, but recipients are grateful for the most part, like recipients of missionary schools and hospitals in prior eras. These folks are not super well paid, but better paid than the Teachers and Intellectuals. I suspect they experience few trade-offs because they are often not interested in Intellectual autonomy or financial glory. I suspect many equally well-paid Knowledge Workers envy the sh*t out these folks.

Government PhDs - This clan gets paid well from the start, better than many Knowledge Workers. But they do have to let go of the desire for intellectual autonomy. Quickly. If they intended to wind up here (and some in Sociology do), then it can be very satisfying and secure work. Government work also leads to more visible public outcomes than the Teachers, Intellectuals and Knowledge Workers experience. These folks can have real authority inside federal agencies where their PhD often confers daily status in the workplace. I can not say the same for the Knowledge Workers or Intellectuals. One other trade-off his clan makes is long-term salary upside. It is entirely dependent on limited promotions. Hence, the most ambitious continue to leave for the private sector (including the NASA to SpaceX parade).

Many career paths involve trade-offs, but the PhD experience is pretty extreme in large part because this degree magnetically attracts a combination of maniacal focus, stubbornness, and intellectual idealism. This is both a weakness when change is necessary (we react slowly) and an enormous superpower when the way to make your PhD work for you long-term is to become the “CEO of your own career.”

PhDs today are used to institutional neglect and indifference, which is precisely what the modern workplace feels like for many. Bring it!

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1

https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-...

2

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice...#

3

Without trying, I collected at least five anecdotes of women fucking their dissertation advisors. I’m willing to bet they all got to tenure-track positions. Needless to say, unless you are a gay male, this approach is unavailable to men (who are rarely attracted to women 10-15 years older).

Status Ironies of the Doctoral Degree - Pt. 1

“I have no idea what I’m going to do for a living now,” I said to my temp working peer as we ran simple kinesiological tests for prospective TSA security workers in 2002 at the Grand Hyatt near Chicago O’hare airport.

“Yeah, James, but at least you have a real education,” he replied, referring to my newly minted PhD. Dave was more than a year out of college. The tech stock bubble had burst just as he graduated, so he could not find any meaningful work for a white-collar salary, even at the entry level.

His praise for my PhD was the first signal from the broader public since I had received my degree a few months earlier that a PhD confers some nominal social status. I was not the complete loser I felt after receiving 20+ job rejections in the fall. That experience and other personal factors would soon lead me to leave the tenure-track rat race before it even started.

My un-American philosophy of life was starting to form - when your chosen career track is destroying your mental health and promising no meaningful income, you have to quit early to retain control of your life. You must quit before you are desperate (emotionally or financially). You must quit when your confidence is still strong. This attitude would serve me well again fifteen years later.

But, where was I headed? I had no earthly idea. Anywhere beyond the academy.

Some Doctoral Facts

“They seem to give out PhDs like napkins these days,” one of my now-retired former colleagues muttered in contempt of a peer whose mind he did not respect.

Yes, there are a lot of us. 5.6M American adults have a doctoral degree, and about 4.1M have not retired yet.1 One out of a hundred American adults is a working PhD-holder. What? Yes. We’re four times more common than physicians with MD degrees. Only 1.1M doctors are practicing today in the U.S.2 But, don’t worry. The massive pile of PhDs is not due to an outbreak of English literature disease or a pandemic of concern with medieval Anglo-Saxon literature. Not at all.

2023 U.S. Survey of Earned Doctorates - The National Science Foundation

America has grown its annual production of PhDs sixfold in the past sixty years - from 9,000 in 1958 to 59,000 in 2023. That’s a visually significant increase in this chart, but, more importantly, this annual production grew three times faster than population growth during the same period (i.e., from 174M to 334M). And 90% of this increase in annual PhD granting has been in science and engineering, not my sad, low-status world of the humanities and social sciences.

As PhDs graduate, the humanities and social sciences continue to have the worst immediate employment records.

2023 Survey of Earned Doctorates - The National Science Foundation

When 35% of newly minted Ph.D.s in a field can not find jobs (presumably worthy of the degree), we are either overproducing them or not preparing them intelligently for employment. Universities are abdicating their responsibility to throttle admissions and set up applied tracks in return for lazily harvesting tuition income. I can assure you that MBA programs would get shut down if their immediate employment record was this bad. They shoot for 99%.

But the story gets weirder for those who chose PhDs in low-status, chronically under-employed fields.

The percentage of all PhDs going straight into private sector industry jobs is now 50%, more than twice what it was in 2003, roughly when I graduated. And the chronically under-employed social science fields are still the lowest producer of PhDs headed into the capitalist beast. Most of “us” work in government, NGOs or teach. The lack of movement from school into the private sector is not structural. It’s not a resume problem. I can tell you from direct immersion that a PhD recipient not going into the private sector originates in the personal hang-ups of the PhD holder. They simply can not escape the ‘cult.’ Luckily for me, I was never fully ‘captured.’

As humanities and social science PhDs continue to be overproduced and avoid private sector work, the PhD has slowly become a lucrative, mostly corporation-inspired degree, heavily weighted toward the hard sciences.

The dominance of ‘intellectuals’ in any field of doctoral study is long gone.

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The Financial Prize of a PhD

The most basic and all-American definition of social status is annual personal income. If you’ve ever gone through a considerable income loss (even due to a career switch you otherwise wanted), you know how much that income loss can haunt you mentally. When my wife saw her first paycheck as a high school nurse, after being a highly paid customer success executive, she described it correctly as “insulting.”

Highly educated Americans tend to be salary-strokers because it’s costly to live here and because chasing higher salaries means we can consume more. Consumption, not work, is our national religion and our most sacred obligation. We may mask our consumption with lifestyle activities of a higher purpose (e.g., trail running and $300 trail-running shoes), but it’s still there. So, aligning our identities firmly with our salary is part of life here.

Coming from the lowest-earning segment of PhDs (those with humanities and soft social science degrees), I can attest to thousands of my peers who earn little in academia, journalism, and high school/college teaching. Some are pretty happy. Most I suspect are not as happy as they claim at Thanksgiving. Not really. They swallow their failed intellectual dreams every night when they go to sleep. And they’re tired of the bitter kale taste of their low salaries. Not caring about money has a certain status glow when you’re in your 20s. By 40, you just look sad. Here’s an extreme example to ponder - A Ph.D.-holding physics professor who is now homeless because his department won’t provide a living wage for a single adult in the local area.

@209timescaUCLA Physics Professor Says He’s Homeless Due to Low Pay In a viral video with over a million views on TikTok, UCLA professor, Dr. Daniel McKeown, says only being paid $70,000 a year by the state of California has left him homeless. His video is made outside of a storage unit he put all of his belongings in because he says he lost his apartment in Westwood and now is staying at a friend’s hours away. As a result he has to teach virtually online. He says he asked for a raise to $100,000 a year so he could afford his rent, but was denied by the university. He also calls out the administration and asks others to protest with him stating that, “tuition is being stolen” because it’s going to administration and not professors. Both the CSU and UC systems have continued to raise “fees” in a system that was designed to be tuition free for California students. The Newsom administration has done nothing to curb the rate hikes that are part of the California government. McKeown says in a separate video that his rent was $2,500 a month. According to online real estate sources, the average rent in Westwood is $3,700.. The average cost to attend UCLA is $34,667 for in-state students with the cost of tuition and fees alone costing $13,225. This is a problem not only happening at UCLA, but statewide at other universities in the CSU/UC system from Chico and Sac State in Northern California to UC Merced and Stanislaus State in the Central Valley. The rent and tuition is too damn high and the pay is too damn low! #losangeles #LA #sacramento #merced #chico #sacstate #ucla #csula #stanislausstate[image error]Tiktok failed to load.

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He looks like and sounds like Steve Jobs. And, I presume, only a tenured (or insane) professor could openly attack his boss by name on the internet. That Monday faculty meeting must be fun.

Like him, many doctoral students do not originally care much about money. Many have intellectually intense research desires. I was the same way. Yet, in aggregate, PhDs correlate with very high incomes typical of most post-grad educated adults. And at 52, after many twists and turns, I am a perfect example of this.

My Dad clung to this hope without any data supporting it as he floated my rent in 2002. It turns out that he was mostly correct in his optimism.

Here’s what the 2024 annual CPS survey from the US Census reveals about the financial power of the average PhD:

IPUMS CPS database of 2024 CPS data collected every March; this chart covers 185M working, underemployed, and unemployed adults; retirees were filtered out to tighten the accuracy

The chart above anchors the earning power of a PhD in a broad national context, including high school dropouts. The bars are not equal income jumps. They are multiples of U.S. personal median income (i.e. $45,000) to expose the pattern better. Green = those who earn at or below the median personal income (i.e., 50% of Americans earn below $45,000).

Here’s what it shows:

85% of PhD holders earn more than the median personal income.

65% earn more than twice the median.

30% earn more than four times the median!

By the time PhD holders hit their 50s, 36% earn more than four times the median income.

The PhD, in general, pays off…eventually…quite well. On average, it’s as good as a professional degree in boosting your income. But not for everyone. In a loosely regulated labor and higher education marketplace, America is more than happy to let a minority fall right through the cracks and shrug out shoulders. The reality of an early-twentieth-century PhD holder, almost certainly an academic with secretaries, staff, and an excellent salary, is long gone. That clarity of elite social status is just no longer true for all of those who slog through a doctoral program.

Around 5,000,000 adults with only a high school degree earn more than 2X the median personal income - more than 1.3M PhD holders (including tenured professors)!

35,000,000 college graduates with no advanced degree make more than 2X the median personal income, crushing the incomes of 15% of PhD holders. Yes, these people sometimes bump into each other (often at kids’ soccer games!)

A master’s degree is almost as effective in raising your earnings as a PhD, mostly because MBAs dominate this group.

The percentage of PhDs earning low incomes (the green bars) only drops from 14% to 10% as we shift from younger to older PhD workers. 11% of PhDs in their 50s are still under-earning their peers and have been for quite some time.

I could have been one of the latter ironies. I came pretty close. And it was more than an issue of a low-status anthropology PhD. Let me explain.

When I started in corporate market research in 2003, I earned $45,000 or $78,000 in today’s dollars. That put me above the median personal income at the age of thirty-one. At the same time, I had college roommates earning twice as much. But, I had escaped the nightmare of touring rural America to grab visiting college teaching positions that paid around $20,000.

Joining the market research sector doubled my earnings immediately.

But get this. When I was interviewing for the market research job I eventually took, I was also three days away from flying to DC to interview for a Leadership Analyst job at the Directorate of Intelligence inside the CIA. Because the federal government has automatic base pay based on your educational attainment, even for an entry-level worker, a newly hired PhD traditionally confers immediate GS-11 status. I remember using federal websites to calculate my Virginia-based GS-11 minimum salary at around $90,000 in 2003.

So, in the span of a few weeks in February of 2003, I scanned jobs offering $20K, $45K, and $90K for the same PhD in Cultural Anthropology! Um, that’s a lot of variance, folks. From ‘ineligible bachelor’ to ‘attractive chap.’ At least, that’s how my lonely brain processed these numbers at the time. How can nine years of work, including three of mildly dangerous fieldwork, yield so much differing value? This variance then puts an enormous responsibility on one’s shoulders. And it also invokes a complicated set of trade-offs outsiders have a hard time understanding.

Almost 1,000,000 PhD holders today earn less than the median personal income for all that hard work, with all that debt. In 2003, I was hellbent on NOT being one of these people.

But how do I select a career I know nothing about and within which I know absolutely no one at all?

I remember thinking, “It's crazy that I’m making this decision almost entirely by myself with so little information.”

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The Awkard Trade-Offs In PhD Employment No One Discusses

Trade-Off #1: Intellectual autonomy is inversely correlated to making a lot of money with your PhD. Not until you are elite enough in your field to set up your own institution (most never get this chance). If you did not intend to work outside the academy, this is a big psychological issue you must overcome. To regain intellectual autonomy, you must become an expert a second time in your new industry. After 5-9 years of slog, this is very bitter, raw kale to chew.

Trade-Off #2: Collaborating in tightly managed work teams will also pay better (e.g. corporate labs or consulting firms), though you, the PhD, may prefer working alone. Again, this is very true for those in the humanities and social sciences (a refuge for many a bright introvert).

Trade-Off #3: Intellectual idealism runs into highly pragmatic bureaucratic concerns of the real world…and very quickly. For example, being asked to do specious, low-quality research due to a client’s temporal expediency and political nervosity is not uncommon in market research.

Trade-Off #4: The content of your degree may have very little to do with your new career. This is most true for humanities and social sciences PhDs. The PhD has become mainly a labor market symbol of a rare combination of traits: high intelligence + strong work ethic + advanced critical and imaginative thinking. Translation: we’re superb, intrinsically motivated individual contributors in an ocean of externally motivated, average-IQ worker drones. I used to think this last bit was just snobbery until I entered the American workforce. Oh. My. God. No wonder I got promoted five times. And I always hired people with strong work ethics as well. That honestly matters more than raw intelligence to anyone managing a team.

Like most Americans, PhD holders view their degree’s status power based on how the following variables play out: how much income they receive, the prestige of their institution in their social world, the deference they receive at work, and the general prestige they have in public.

Most PhDs do not earn 1% incomes, work at high-prestige institutions (e.g., Yale), have elite media brands (e.g., Jonathan Haidt), or have high status in their workplace; virtually none have all four. When I was at Harvard in the early 1990s, the late Stephen Gould’s colleagues did not consider him a serious biologist. He was a media sell-out to them. His books are excellent. Gould provided an outstanding public service during the back half of his career by making evolutionary biology exciting and accessible to everyday readers. No one remembers his jealous, snide colleagues. Status incongruity even for the “celebrity professor.”

In Part Two, I’ll explore how different career paths involve different trade-offs that my PhDs generation was unprepared for.

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1

US Census, CPS Basic Monthly January 2025.

2

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indic...

Lifestyle Contempt is Not Academic

America’s growing political polarization has divided families, workplaces, schools, and friend groups. These social worlds traditionally force us to bridge differing lifestyles and practice tolerance as a lived reality.

I fear we are losing this ability rapidly in the 21st century due to our American brand of noncommittal, hyper-individualistic lifestyle fragmentation, especially lifestyle fragmentation among educated adults. Americans are not even committed to our lifestyles for that long (in a culture of personal growth and constant adaptation). And yet, we are overly proud of all our transient lifestyle choices, a pride born of deep insecurity.

Is this the best fitness activity to become the very best version of myself?

Here are some examples of lifestyle fragmentation with a dark potential to divide:

The fitness geeks we mocked for years are now our buddies after our first major heart attack.

The Mike and Molly crowd we grew up with and ‘left’ by going to law school.

The foodie whose close friends are curated to be equally discerning

Americans have invented an incredible number of new ways to look down on others and show contempt (for not joining us). Some of us struggle to meet anyone we can not condescend to for some lifestyle choice they’ve made. Even Baron Grey of Downton Abbey would be exhausted by it all.

When the Baron tells you to lighten up, you have a real problem.

Petty lifestyle condescension quickly becomes contempt when we lack proper social coordination and cross-cutting social connections (e.g., church, Elks Lodge). Recently, I wrote an entire book on how our everyday lives work against the latter—a massive set-up for civil conflict of any kind.

Arthur Brooks wrote a perceptive piece right before the pandemic accelerated our social disconnection in new ways. In this piece, he discusses psychological research on “motive attribution asymmetry.” Psychologists define it as:

— the assumption that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate —

Needless to say, this is a marriage-killing situation. Contempt is the muriatic acid of marriage, love, and any strong social bond.

Yet, showing contempt for any manner of lifestyle ‘we don’t like’ is incredibly common in our country. Perhaps you disagree. I see that too many social elites are seeking happiness through lifestyle differentiation and performance. And, often, they show contempt for the outcomes of divergent lifestyles of others. Many of our chosen lifestyles have a dark, oppositional foe - aggressive fitness culture versus being a lazy fatass like Uncle Jack.

“What a lazy fatass…” is a modern form of elitist contempt based on an urban lifestyle segment. I was once in an office full of people who spewed this contempt under their breath. And more.

Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential election mainly because of her off-hand “deplorables” comment aimed at the uneducated American masses. This is what casual contempt looks like, and it deleted more than enough voters for Trump to win the Electoral College (even without foreign social media interferences).

Yes, contempt in American life often flows along class lines, but the most dangerous is the contempt of the upper middle class for the middle class. This contempt used to be based on educational attainment but has morphed into a mass rejection of the entire lifestyle matrix of ordinary Americans - how much they exercise, what they read, the media they consume, etc.

Here is Professor Brooks challenging us to acknowledge the contempt within -

People often say that our problem in America today is incivility or intolerance. This is incorrect. Motive attribution asymmetry leads to something far worse: contempt, which is a noxious brew of anger and disgust. And not just contempt for other people’s ideas, but also for other people. In the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.1

Until I did research in India across all social classes in my late 20s and then market research across America in my 30s, I harbored lots of un-self-aware contempt for most Americans. I still struggle with these attitudes because they are deeply ingrained.

I have written elsewhere about America’s Real Elite Problem, contributing to the country’s dangerous, simmering stew of interpersonal and intergroup contempt. The contempt problem in America is much more profound than Brooks’ discussion of political polarization.

It’s a blade-sharp contempt flowing from professional elites to other wealthy people who are not well-educated professionals and high achievers. These are the folks, like me, who Trump most angrily opposes—the post-graduate degree-holding professional elite. We are an incredibly, disproportionately large minority of the country now. We can isolate ourselves in a way that was just impossible in my grandfather’s generation (born 1900-1920).

And many of us have been spewing contempt at less well-educated rich people like Trump for decades, to be brutally honest. Look at Obama’s 2011 teasing of Trump at the White House Press Conference.

Contempt often motivates an angry response.

And contempt will motivate an insane response if the target is already mentally unwell and living a life of petty, adolescent grievance stroking.

I’ve seen this in workplaces and Home-Owner’s Association fights I’ve been caught up in. If you accidentally contemn a bully who believes he is your equal, watch out.

Contempt is virtually impossible to resolve at the relationship level. Marriages consumed by contempt rarely heal. The individuals need to separate and heal by themselves before moving on.

But intergroup contempt at scale can also ignite a civil war. Consider Rwanda, a country ruled by an ethnic Tutsi minority and placed in authority over an invented nation-state by its former Belgian rulers. These were not ethnic groups historically living in an agreed-upon social status hierarchy; they were neighboring tribes who formed beyond the realm of complex social structures. Contempt between social groups who do not agree that they exist in a status hierarchy can cause explosive instability in any society. Rwanda certainly exploded in 1994. Educated, middle-class Hutus did unspeakable things to their lifelong Tutsi neighbors, not from some dark-skinned savagery but from simmering human resentment at long-held Tutsi elite contempt, which the social order had neither addressed through reconciliation nor acknowledged.

One of the most interesting aspects of Indian society in the late 1990s was local elites' remarkable tolerance of wildly different lifestyles and community members. While some may have been disgusted or disapproved of the collective behavior of other castes or low-ranking social groups, there was a sense that “it’s what they do.” You don’t interfere or make snide comments.

I call it “quiet condescension.” It is very different from open contempt.

Quiet condescension is typical of ancient feudal societies, where subordinate individuals do not question their place in the social order very much. I witnessed the broad tolerance of elites’ quiet condescension everywhere in India. For example, it was common for educated social elites in a local community to attend a working-class or ‘lower’ caste person’s wedding but never, ever socialize with them or have dinner in their home. And when they condescended to be wedding guests, they were very civil, polite, and generous. They did not smirk or make snide comments under their breath.

Indians can handle this kind of ancient interactional subtlety - quiet condescension -within an agreed-upon status hierarchy because the belief that all people are equal is not indigenous (even though it is growing in popularity among educated and upwardly mobile people).

America’s problem with contempt is that we have an elite divided by lifestyle (My Pillow Guy vs. Professor Brooks), much like Rwanda’s urban middle class was divided by a lingering Hutu-Tutsi ethnic boundary. Arthur Brooks’ portion of the elite engages in loud condescension toward the rest of America. Or, at best, they avoid them at all costs. They avoid marrying them, befriending them, etc.

I shudder to think how social media ranting may have poured acid on the entire country by allowing the brutal contempt of left-leaning educated elites to get way too much reach. And vice versa.

There is no inevitable reason why a corporate attorney can not civilly interact with a plumber and respect what they do for a living without judging them for not trying to become a project manager with a laptop. In the history of human complex societies, this specific historical form of contempt is just weird.

Instead of functional, quiet condescension, in which we publicly respect the social contributions of others in lifestyles we deem less prestigious, we ignore them or, worse, show open, Hillary Clinton-style contempt.

I’m from northern New England, so my instinct is not giddy optimism. I fear it may be too late for America because we missed the signs of intra-elite contempt in the 1990s. We had a chance to nip this in the bud.

Instead, as did I, too many highly educated people focused on curating lifestyle worlds that won’t matter in a broad civil conflict.

We will look like fools.

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1

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/op...

The Evolution of Tragedy - From Premature Deaths to Urban Disasters?

Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, Aug. 8-16, 2023

High infant mortality and maternal mortality before modern prenatal and postnatal medicine. Smallpox, measles, polio, influenza, food poisoning, and tuberculosis before vaccines and antibiotics. Child malnutrition. Farm accidents. Death from heart attacks, strokes, and injury blood loss before 911 services. Rampant organized crime in urban centers. Cancer that was undetected and largely untreated. Severe mental illness that led to incarceration and unexplained holes in family trees.

Before WWI, this was the reality in one of the world's top three wealthiest nations (GDP per capita). America was wealthy but infused with a steady flow of tragedy in most people’s social networks. The U.S. mortality rate was 3.3 times higher in 1900 than today. The chart below shows the long-term decline in age-adjusted mortality (the rate of annual deaths per 1,000 people) caused by advances in infectious disease containment through World War II.

On the left, you can see how the early waves of the Spanish Flu created a massive mortality spike in 1918, long before intensive and advanced respiratory care became available at most local hospitals.

This was the world in which my maternal grandparents came of age—a world of frequent premature death in family networks. My grandmother lost a sister to the Spanish flu. Her husband lost his first wife to an infectious disease and became a single Dad for several years in the 1930s. These tales are familiar to every family from this era if you were lucky enough to gather them up decades ago.1 Not only were deaths in 1900 disproportionately caused by infectious disease (the top three leading causes), but 40% of these infectious deaths were children under the age of five.2

The key social fact I’m pointing to is the much higher frequency of premature deaths in this era: the deaths of children and working-age adults needed by their families. An 85-year-old dying of old age is not really “tragic” for most of us. It’s sad, yet expected. But, in 1900, your average social network had both children and the elderly dying at much higher rates than today due to the specter of infectious disease.

When you consider that Americans tended to have tighter family networks and people living nearby during this era, it almost guaranteed encounters with tragedy (i.e. premature death) multiple times a year. In 2023, YouGov determined that only 37% of American adults had been to a funeral in the past year. Suppose that number includes people who went to just one funeral and that it was most likely not for a tragic premature death but simply for grandma. If true, death itself, let alone premature death, is unlikely to be a frequent reality for most Americans (who live outside of our most violent neighborhoods).

Death once spanned the entire age continuum. And you never joked about it, let alone the death of someone you knew. This ancient human rule still exists in poor communities worldwide, such as in rural India and Africa. It’s just not funny when a home’s primary earner suddenly disappears. Or when a future earner, a 2-year-old, dies of cholera. In the world circa 1900, social networks received routine, devastating wounds that families had to overcome.

Most importantly, premature death (as an ancient form of tragedy) makes local community bonds more critical. When I say ‘community,’ I’m referring to family and neighborhood-based resources - labor and cash - that allow grieving survivors to recover by covering for lost wages and offering domestic labor as individuals recover emotionally. If your family was broken or had alienated too many locals (i.e., through alcoholism or criminality), however, the premature death of a father often led to tragic dissolution and children winding up in state orphanages and child asylums.3

Here’s the thing. Even though premature death (and death overall) was more everpresent in the pre-WWII era, individuals still had to have a strong emotional bond with that individual for it to register as a tragedy (versus more sad news on CNN). A tragic, premature death that hurts is tricky to operationalize for a survey because defining an ‘intense emotional bond’ is very squirrelly. We might say that we experience tragic death in proportion to the social intimacy we have with the prematurely dead. These are the people we spend the most time with every week (minus those we hate at work), the people with whom we were socially intimate earlier in our lives, influential mentors and leaders from any point in our lives, and VIPs in our social network that we know.

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The Banishment of Death From Everyday Life

Not only has America witnessed a massive drop in premature death from infectious diseases, but we have also banished death itself to the statistical margins of everyday life. For many, death is something we primarily experience as we age and our social network starts dying. In other words, the first 50-60 years or so can be shockingly death-free, especially premature death.

While very challenging to measure precisely (i.e., per capital funeral attendance trends do not exist), we can infer a decline in experiencing death in everyday life based on a few facts we do know -

significant decline in mortality per capita (death is simply less widespread)

decline in family intimacy (we most likely have strong emotional attachments to fewer family members than in prior eras)

decline in the average adult’s close friends in the last quarter century is pronounced

I am 52 years old, and I have been to just one funeral - for my maternal grandfather. I’ve experienced just one premature death in my social network of friends and family. Just one tragic death in the universe of individuals I have spent a lot of time with in my life. That individual was a tenure-track professor of anthropology who once taught me Tamil at the University of Chicago. Just one premature death of someone I knew closely.

Death has mainly become a phenomenon experienced by older Americans due to poor lifestyle choices and causes related to age itself. Why is this? One primary reason is the intensification of modern youth culture that separates youth from their elders and weakens their relationships with those most likely to die within their social network in any given year. Younger Americans live in a social network of middle-aged to younger folks, with sporadic contact with elders. Young people may go to the funeral of grandparents and perhaps their siblings…maybe. But, generally, they do not know their parents’ friends or have distant relations with their grandparents or parents.

In our society, not unlike Japan, we have physically segregated elders into apartments, 55+ communities, retirement homes, and nursing homes; the elders’ deaths are also far less visible in public spaces due to funerary laws that control the processing of the dead. In India, the dead are still processed right through the streets as a form of public announcement on the family’s way to equally visible and public cremation sites. There is no habit of using hearses where the identity of the dead is double-sealed from view. You may or may not ‘know’ the deceased passing by you on the shoulders of their relatives. Still, Indian funerary processions cause you to ask and inquire, further cementing community self-understanding.

Hindu Funeral Procession - Nimtala Ghat Street - Kolkata 2016-10-11. Wiki-Commons.

In modern America, not only is death less part of ordinary life, less likely than ever to be considered ‘premature,’ it is also primarily invisible and heavily concealed from the public.

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Have ‘Natural’ Disasters Replaced Premature Deaths?

Our ancestors once used the phrase “Acts of God” to describe natural disasters. You’ll still see this old colloquial phrase in legal contracts (where many archaic vernacular language lives on). Solid evidence shows that global natural disasters increased rapidly in the late 20th century and occur at a sustained high-level today (mostly floods and hurricanes).4 And the impact on the built environment in terms of financial damages has been increasing steadily here in the U.S. when we look at inflation-adjusted data.5

Interestingly, the death toll from natural disasters has been going down in the U.S. due to increased public planning, media alerts, and a public that is financially capable of evacuating with a minimal heads up (1-2 days).6

The tragedy posed by natural disasters is less the death toll and primarily the destruction of our built environment. In a highly materialistic society like the United States, losing your home and its possessions is arguably a more devastating hit than it would have been to my grandparents in 1900. They owned little, and rebuilding a small, simple wooden house back then - a home with almost no modern amenities- was vastly cheaper.

In today’s urban world, we face increased risks of floods, storms, and wildfires taking away our physical home (and sanctuary) and neighborhoods. These rising Acts of God do not discriminate by social class any more than infectious disease did in 1900. They may strike the Pacific Palisades OR Altadena.

The jarring reaction of Palisades residents is understandable. These fires overtook neighborhoods in a matter of minutes. While most appear to have escaped, the tragedy occurred in the built environment. Very wealthy people lost everything, along with their middle-class neighbors. The wealthy Palisades elite also had more valuable ‘stuff’ to lose. Given how much more we fetishize our homes than our less materialistic, more family-oriented ancestors, the emotional intensity of natural disasters as tragedies has a very modern ring.

The experience of natural disasters today may become one of the most tremendous external forces (outside of war) that could bring communities back together and make them more cohesive than our 20th-century affluence could accomplish.

But will we come together and rebuild more physically resilient communities? Or will many just flee the state while the 1% quickly pay to rebuild fire-proof concrete mega-bunkers?

I am not sure.

After all, the known preventative urban wildfire prevention measures involve tactics that most homeowners are unlikely to observe—clearing plants and vegetation from a large radius around their house and spending tens of thousands to re-design their siding and rooflines.7 Setting the proper radius often runs up against your neighbor’s home, making population density in single-family home neighborhoods a considerable part of the problem in rebuilding resilient communities in a disaster-prone America.

Our individualistic fetish for separate, personally landscaped oases versus living in large concrete and steel congregate dwellings is staring right at us. Today's flood, storm, and fire damage points awkwardly to our obsession with high-density single-family home neighborhoods and our individualistic entitlement to ‘do whatever I want with my property.’

If we could overcome some 20th-century entitlements, such as extreme individualism, there could be a fantastic urban dwelling revolution in the next quarter century. One that hardens us against a rising occurrence of super-destructive natural disasters stoked in part by ongoing climate change.

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1

To be fair, there is simply no statistically valid measurement of the frequency of death in adult social networks, let alone one in the past to which we could compare. So, I’ll be using basic inference to make my point.

2

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwr...

3

The era of elaborate individual entitlements (i.e., unemployment insurance, WIC, Medicaid) had not developed.

4

https://www.visionofhumanity.org/what...

5

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/bill...

6

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/i...

7

https://www.firehouse.com/operations-...

What I've Learned Sharing A Car With My Teen

The used car in question…which has front-end collision avoidance braking…for teens…

What? An entirely sane American adult individual living in the suburbs gave up his vehicle…voluntarily?

Send in the anthropologists to study this strange creature! At once!

An Unreliable Narration Concerning How I Got Here

When parents spend 16 years chauffeuring their child to and from roughly 10,000 appointments, sports activities and supposedly-fun events, it takes no social scientist to understand why they will potentially spend a lot to get the teen moving independently in her own very separate vehicle.

“Drive yourself, damn it! I’m having a second Margherita!” says the voice in every father’s head -

image courtesy of PBS

It just so happens that Oscar the Grouch is my oldest mentor. Now, in my defense, I was under the false impression back in 1976 that ALL characters on Sesame Street were adult role models I could choose freely to emulate. Ah, yes, early training in American-style individualism. Pick your own media hero. Yet, I should have known by that tender age that the immaculate state of “Mom’s house” meant I might not emulate someone living in a filthy metal trash can. Oops.

Per the Code of Grouch, handing my teen a vehicle only rewarded my curmudgeonly irritation. It handed me back ten hours a week, at least. I mean, what do I do with myself? Ten entire hours!

Well, per the Law of Inevitable Parental Frustration, I won’t be using my ten extra weekly hours to drive this:

Nope. (Cue the sound of a weeping middle-aged male). (Sob).

“But it purrs like a kitty cat when you press the accelerator,” I cry.

Tough toodles, Oscar. Pick your battles. Share the car and focus on the ten extra hours.

Yes, you read all of this correctly. A well-paid American adult male voluntarily traded in his sports car so his 16-year-old son could get a used Subaru AND then agreed to share the used car with the aforementioned teenager. 

Enter the Barney-ization of fatherhood.

So much for the gritty realism of 1970s Oscar. And so much for the entitled patriarchy of Father Knows Best. Nope. As a delightful contrast to my current situation, please note that I never drove my Dad’s Chevy Caprice Classic in high school once (because it never occurred to me to ask for such verboten privilege and possibly also because my own used Caprice vehicle played James Taylor and the Doobie Brothers, not an endless loop of Rachmaninoff, Mozart and Brahms).

But, dear reader, this 21st-century father tragically born in the 20th-century can not justify paying insurance and payments on three cars (like my father did for years), not in this highly rational era of parenting where we ever diligently save for retirement and massively overpriced college educations. $1500 per month for all that diligence.

Back to the MINI, I no longer drive. (Sob).

“It’s just a toy,” my 20-century father-in-law said dismissively when he first saw my Mini Cooper four years ago, refusing to take as much as one joy ride. Ouch. Refusal of the gift and mockery? Double ouch.

And in that biting dismissal lies the truth I could not avoid as my teen approached driving age. Not when I calculated what it would cost to insure three cars with a teen driver on the policy. Don’t ask. It’s very triggering. Even the insurance on two cars keeps going up every six months when the policy renews, like some mafia extortion racket. Another $500 annually, Mr. Amica? Sure, cut off another finger. No worries. I don’t have to drive him anywhere!

But wait a minute? I work from home full-time and have no commute. So, why all this internal drama about losing the sports car? Why would I assume that I even need a car? How could any personal vehicle now be anything other than an utter “toy”?

With the MINI gone and the teen empowered by my ‘sharing,’ I could feel Tom Selleck glaring at me from the seat of his Ferrari 308 GTS.

“So disappointing, James.”

I was caught between Oscar and Magnum, two randomly acquired media mentors and their deeply held priorities.

Send in the cultural analyst! Or therapist!

The Ideology of Automotive Autonomy is Just Silly, Even in the Suburbs

The American suburb was built around the automobile. Until the spread of white-collar remote work during the pandemic, low suburban population density, and long distances to the office required a car for a mature, working adult to be deemed ‘civilized.’

While urban Millennials claim to have introduced the ‘no car, no problem’ middle-class lifestyle in the 2010s, I lived it from 1994 to 2000 in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. During graduate school, I walked, took the bus, or biked to wherever I needed to go. I was so busy studying that I did not miss having a car. Not dating anyone also helped. How? No one to impress. Back then, you see, you weren’t a legitimate dating partner in your 20s, if you were a male who didn't have a job or car. You were a loser, both culturally and in terms of evolutionary biology.

And only those also pursuing a long, post-grad program with no income understood the dating limitations of this poverty-grade, all-consuming lifestyle. So, you dated only within your miserable, alienated tribe of postgrads. Or not at all. It was messed up because both women and men generally did not want to sacrifice their professional careers to follow the other around. In other words, the only people you could feasibly date were unlikely to partner up with you for a long time.

[NOTE- I believe the modern, pragmatic “hookup” culture took off in this graduate school cohort out of structural desperation].

Growing up in the 1980s, it was so assumed that your adult identity ties directly to a specific VIN that, decades later, we 20th-century types just keep hanging on to a car even after we started working remotely and after e-commerce started bringing 50% or more of our shopping straight to our homes. We became habituated to chasing shopping impulses even though the car was mostly a way to get to work. The irony is that the flow of ‘jump-in-the-car-and-shop’ impulses did not stop as e-commerce took off in the 2010s. Those of us with cars still went out in our cars on impulse, ad hoc, whenever we wanted. We just needed to do this less and less and refused to accept it.

When I relinquished My Lady last January, what was the first thing that plummeted in frequency? Starbucks purchases. I had silently acquired a habit of jumping in my MINI convertible to grab a Nitro cold brew, which gave me an excuse to drive the MINI! Only a therapist could unravel this tautology to determine its starting point. (Sob).

For the three years I owned My Lady, I enthusiastically raised my hand to do random errands for the house… “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Me! Me! I’ll go get the milk!” Suspicious enthusiasm from a husband, yes. Very suspicious.

Despite what some non-generalizable, elite Millennials living in Manhattan, D.C., and Boston claim, the concept of a personal vehicle is alive and well. 92% of U.S. households have a car available. And, while we only have 98M registered vehicles for 260M adults, yes, of those who commute to work, 80% still drive their own vehicle alone.1

The notion of a personal vehicular need has erased a need to share a fundamental daily resource - transportation. Only the extreme costs of insurance and car loans over-ride the American desire for a personal vehicle. At some point, the cash flow sputters and debt runs out.

Or Oscar’s voice whispers in our ear - “It’s just a stupid toy.”

So, what really changes, when a grown-ass father shares a used car with his teen?

What I Had to Do To Share a Car With My Teen

Accept that the Subaru is primarily the teenager’s car. What?! I know, I know. It’s a shocking inversion of the most ancient status hierarchy - age. I accept this because the kids need to get to and from school five days a week. As an internet-based consultant, I don’t need to go anywhere.

Determine when I need a car on any given day at the beginning of the day (or the night before)

a day when I have multiple errands at a time stacked up

or a trip that could not wait at all (e.g. doctor’s appt).

Accumulate errands before asking for the car. Get your entitled A.S.S. organized. Side note: it’s tough to convince your loved ones that you have organizational troubles when you hold a Ph.D. in anything. If you closed on that degree, then you can plan your f’ing errands.

Be willing to drive the kids to school to ‘obtain’ the car for the day. (Wait! I got him the car so I wouldn’t have to drive his skinny ass there and back!) Deep breath in. Deep breath out. It’s OK to backslide 3-4 times a month. The space-time continuum will remain stable. The Earth will continue to rotate. Sigh.

Find out if the ‘teen’ needs the car after school hours and then drop it back off at school and take a Lyft ride home ($16-18 a trip). This requires conversing with your teen, sharing information, and compromising. My God! Oscar did not anticipate this. If the patriarchy is dying, folks, it is dying in these very Barney-esque conversations.

Accept that, on average, 3-4 Lyft rides a month are far less than a third car plus insurance. Oh, yes, they are, if the trips are 10 miles or less. 

Accept that Starbucks was always a) overpriced and b) an utterly unnecessary affordable luxury. Coffee out is not supposed to be a habit. This cultural pandemic originated in Seattle.

Enjoy not driving yourself to/from the airport for business trips! Make the client pay for it! Yeah! Stiff’em! (Oh wait, some of them are reading this publication. I need an editor.)

Enjoy more time with your dogs who resented all those Mini Cooper trips to which they were not invited!

Resist the urge to re-calculate home cash flow/budget to justify the impulsive purchase of yet another MINI!

The drive that spoiled the Beagle forever…

Not sharing was way more fun.

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Don’t forget to grab a copy of my new book, which will explain how “fun” became such a dominant American concept, leading to needless drama when relinquishing one’s MINI cooper convertible out of monetary common sense.

1

U.S. Department of Transportatin State Motor Vehicle registration data; U.S. Census 2022 American Community Survey - My analysis of most recent data available (2022)

Why LA Fire Victims Grabbed Their Pets At All Costs

Photo by Umut Sarıalan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-pett...

Let me start with a case study of tolerance in human-pet relationships.

My dogs never refuse a rub, a pat, a craniosacral treatment (see picture), or a neck rub, even when it goes on too long during the morning meet-and-greet. Nope. They stand or sit there and wait and wait and wait until it's over. Patiently. Even if they have to pee badly.

'Yeah, so what? They like it,' you say, 'That's not tolerance. That's Pavlov, a conditioned response based on sensory pleasure. A toad might hang around if you gave it a back rub too.’

OK, smartass. I can prove that dogs will let you pet them even when they don't like it anymore and would frankly like to move on.

At bedtime, I drag my Beagle over to cuddle on my bed very frequently. He does not like this. Not when he's curled up elsewhere already and ready to snore. Usually, he reminds me of this by uttering a soft groan (of irritation).

Yet, he calmly puts up with me as I drag him over. He endures the rough belly rub only a human can deliver and waits for my hand to go limp so he can stand up, shake it off, and walk back to his 'spot' where he can lie down exactly where he had been before being so rudely interrupted.

During this 'annoying' interruption, he doesn't bark, growl, bite, or try to force himself out of my grip.

Why?

Because he's tolerant of his owner's weirdness (or my need for some cuddle love), and he knows I’m dominant in the relationship: tolerance and a clear status hierarchy.

And he indeed sees the bigger picture.

The good food. The excellent furniture. The nice people. AND the 'magic fingers.' The what? The magic fingers (see picture above). Human hands, people. Come on. Very few animals on Earth have ten super flexible fingers on two, count’em, two huge paws. And these magic fingers do things no dog could ever do for another dog. Not even your canine buddy's most fabulous ear lick can compare to the magic fingers.

We bred domestic dog breeds to bond intensely with us. So, the above 'tolerance' examples should be familiar to everyone. Experts call it docility. The magic fingers were a silent but critical part of the process—docility in exchange for access to those fingers. Anyone who gets massages weekly knows what I'm talking about.

But tolerance goes both ways.

We humans generally tolerate our dogs coming up to sit right next to us (most of the time), which they prefer, even though it violates our personal space standards. Even when they come way too close, such as the unwanted 'attack kisses' in the mornings, we still put up with them. We tolerate them draping their bodies across our legs or thighs. Some of us even tolerate doggy licks (and ear cleanings). Receiving the ear-cleaning is how you know you are incredibly dog-tolerant (or weird). My Staffordshire Terrier mix is convinced that there is honey in human ear canals (i.e., mine)! Or at least it seems that way, based on the frantic tongue jobs he gives. If I present my ear, the response is instantaneous and manic.

Dogs, specifically, are constantly annoying the crap out of us. So, there is no shortage of annoying habits to choose from if we want to complain:

They drop their hair and fur everywhere. And we clean it up.

They poop outside all over the place. And we clean that up too.

They chew on our dirty socks and underwear. And we buy more.

They climb counters looking for food. And we forgive.

They bring dead rabbits and frogs into the house to show us. And we laugh.

They roll in the dirt and track it all around the house. And we bathe them.

They drool all over our custom-made furniture. And we Bissell it clean.

They eat shoes, remotes, trash, books, magazines, toys, and homework. We yell. We scream, and then we shrug it off.

“They don't know any better”

“They can't clean up after themselves.”

“It's not their fault.”

“It's just how dogs are.”

Isn’t it fascinating how quickly we utter these very accepting phrases vis a vis our pets and how infrequently we utter them to describe supposedly close humans in our lives? Like family and friends?

Uncle Larry? He can't come over any more after he ranted about Trump that time.

Aunt Sally? I'm tired of her nitpicking about the dust in my house and the passive-aggressive recommendations for house cleaning services.

My friend Bob? He says weird sh*t that pisses off my wife, so I meet him at Gastropubs now, not at home. She can’t stand him.

I'm sure you have examples of people cutting other folks off for less than ‘nuclear’ offenses, especially friends and extended family, due to some perceived irritating habit or slight. Most of us have done this at least once because discarding relationships in modern America is easy! There aren’t any consequences in most cases. Why put up with annoying people when you don’t depend on them for anything? When no habitual, daily, or weekly acts of reciprocity bind you together?

Virtually all social science research on tolerance centers on intolerance of racial, gender, and sexual orientation differences. These are the hot-button axes of hate. Here's a classic social science definition of tolerance I found (while the authors argue for something different):

"Therefore, to tolerate someone or something, one first needs to experience disapproval or dislike, and then despite these negative sentiments exhibit permissiveness or acceptance" 1

I have not seen a statistically sound methodology to measure tolerance of interpersonal foibles and flaws. It's easier to create a survey instrument to measure orientation to extreme intolerance (i.e., extreme prejudice) because people who are that intolerant will admit it on an anonymous survey (or through their de-identified Google Searches; see Seth Davidowitz's fantastic book on the latter). It’s trickier to measure the middle ground of intolerance (e.g., being fed up with a friend’s sarcasm), which causes us to cut off a relative, a sibling, or a friend. We don’t acknowledge these micro instances of annoyance (except when discussing our kids and partners).

Right-wing thugs beat up transexuals for simply existing. That’s bigotry (maximum intolerance). On the other end, we dog owners put up with ALL of our dogs' behavioral transgressions in return for soft, furry cuddles. That is maximal tolerance.

I don’t see us being that tolerant of anyone except our children and spouses. Not even with our parents or siblings in some cases. We have unbelievably narrow circles of high tolerance these days.

And one of the reasons for this is buried in the text above. When there are no habitual… acts of reciprocity binding you together…

Hmm….

We are not bonded in a normal human way with the people we discard so easily. This is mainly because we do not spend time with them regularly. Repeated, interactive presence does lead to bonding. Eventually. So, we happily bond with our dogs, who annoy us, because we spend hours and hours with them every week or even every day (i.e. as we work!). And we happily bond with our children, who definitely annoy us regularly. I wrote recently about what real human bonding looks like beyond our immediate loved ones. Blood relations are NOT required for this to occur.

Another factor in our modern culture of intolerance, I believe, is our increasing view of ourselves as the self-appointed CEOs of our deeply personal social networks, curated per our desires and preferences, customized to our most inane criteria (e.g., I don’t like people who don’t dress well or who have too much ear hair or who don’t read the New Yorker).

As lifestyles have fragmented and multiplied, there is more superficial ‘difference’ to be offended by or to add to our growing list of peccadilloes.

Maybe we should all chill.

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Hjerm, M., Eger, M A., Bohman, A., Fors Connolly, F. (2020) A New Approach to the Study of Tolerance: Conceptualizing and Measuring Acceptance, Respect, and Appreciation of Difference Social Indicators Research, 147: 897-919 Access here - https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get...