What's toxic is when the masculine is out of balance with the feminine. When structure, force, and closure crowd things out because there is not enough flow, softness, and openness. Simply making a decision and acting on it is not in and of itself toxic. It's the inability to adjust later that is toxic.

> As a man seeking a female partner, if I want to be a homemaker who teaches belly dance part time, I'm going to be in for a really hard time, no matter how much personal agency I embrace.

If you say so, it will be so. If you write this code, you should not be surprised when running it achieves the programmed result. Whether you believe me or not, your statements are false. I spent time thinking this way, I suffered immensely, I put in deep effort to explore a larger perspective, and I am now greatly enjoying how incomplete was the field I saw before.

Women don't all want a provider. The trust of many has been damaged beyond that. They provide for themselves now (lots of men actually say we want that). What else can a man offer? Emotional support. The ability to make her feel like a fucking goddess. Being a homemaking belly dancer more aligns with that than doesn't.

You are right that women must participate too. They already are. It's men's attitudes that need to catch up.

We're here as a society because of mishandled social responsibility. Women have only started to take up their own personal care because they can't rely on established conventions any more.

We as individuals likely have not done much, if anything, to contribute to this social circumstance. Just like women as individuals have not done much, if anything, to contribute to it. It is none of our faults. Yet they are taking personal responsibility for their wellbeing in this situation anyways. They are "manning up".

Men on the other hand... are we just sitting around crying with our thumbs up our asses? Yes. Yes we are. That shit is weak. That perspective on the situation is what's hard to empathize with, not the situation itself. Change your attitude, take personal responsibility, and bask as love and empathy showers onto you.

We can do better than looking to others to solve our problems for us. It just takes seeing an example of how. They are in short order, but they exist if you dig hard enough. I encourage any men who resonate with this to dig deeper. There is sweet sweet fruit to be had if you do. And tons of pussy.

Find what motivates you in life and build your life around that. Capitalistic industry is fundamentally about profit. If not monetary then power and prestige.

The general mood matches yours. Lots of people are feeling apathy. Prioritizing of profit over people creates dehumanizing social institutions and drives mental health issues. It's really simple and obvious.

People who are too caught up in the glitter of shiny coins can't see the writing on the wall. Either we as a whole are headed for a big change or those who feel that way are headed for a big change in how they relate to the overall whole. Likely both.

There is something to be said for allowing "flamebait". What's flame to one may be a welcome splash of water for another. Matter of fact, it might be that people who espouse so much "flame" may have legitimate issues fueling that flame.

There is absolutely also something to be said for wrangling conversation so as to keep it constructive. It's the balance of the two that achieves a community that remains healthy over time and not just healthy according to the popular values of any given time.

I agree that if someone can't talk about why they're feeling stressed by their work environment then it's a deeper issue than just a personal one. I would point to leaders whose lack of understanding of higher order truths about humans, like that humans are different and space needs to be permanently held for those differences to be surfaced and coalesced, can cause their well intended questioning to come across as personal attack, thereby incentivizing the team member to stay quiet.

Trust is the end state of solving a communication problem. But it's a systemic quality and needs to be cultivated from the system as a whole, not any one member.

This deeply clicks with me and where I'm personally at in my growth. Technology is bullshit, and it is unsatisfying. The maximal emotional return I can get from creating industrial technology is the knowledge that I'm either dominating others or helping others be dominate. That's flatly garbage in comparison to the return I get from growing an herb on my counter and using it to make tea for my friends.

It's taken me quite some time to extricate my own personal wellbeing from the meatgrinder of western industrial life. As a matter of principle now, I can't really think deeply into how the wider world would ingest such a perspective, and whether or not it's ready for it. Such fruitless contemplations were the reasons for the depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues of my twenties.

This is happening in many spheres. Some call it spiritual awakening, others call it a mental health crisis, and yet more call it The Great Reset and seem to frame it in economic terms. Economy is pure human contrivance -- "logy" should be the root we use for the term we use to describe our relationship to the system we subsume, not "nomy".

All in all I agree -- this is by far the most interesting stuff and represents a distinct segment of growth amongst the intellectual body of western industrial humanity. I'll probably catch some neg for saying this, but all of this stuff is common sense amongst indigenous communities. They naturally have the correct context to automatically hold these perspectives.

> Marianne Bellotti

the author is a woman.

I used to not be able to code, and now I can. By that I mean I used to not grok the purely abstract domain of encoding meaningful computation and only the concrete domain of when I type a certain sequence of keys in ${languageX} and press some other stuff, stuff happens.

Now that I better understand the abstract domain the concrete domain of programming languages translate, I am much better able to pick new tools up and understand whether or not they should be picked up.

Agreed. Isn't this the majority of people though? And if this is in fact the majority of people, then doesn't it mean that stupidity is in fact expanding?

I don't think any of us are going to hit upon the end-all-be-all decisive proof either way, but I think there's value in considering how everyone perceiving it getting larger may be the definition of it getting larger.

All meaningful measures of human wellbeing are going down at increasing rates. We are making mistakes at a rate that outpaces our ability to learn from our mistakes and we doubling down on the strategy that got us here in order to get us out.

The line about us not knowing the future and needing to take the best guess we have and building more on it than we are confident in its correctness is illogical and clearly disordered.