Alternative lifestyle choices work great - for alternative people

And it's important to know which one you are, before you mess up your life

Polyamory backlash

Ever since the emergence of the so-called rationalist community in the late 2000s, many of its most prominent figures have been conspicuous proselytizers for polyamory. Within this subculture, “polycules” consisting of a group of people in varying romantic configurations with one another are much more common compared to among the general population. In these circles, polyamory has been widely trumpeted as a viable alternative to traditional monogamous relationships, offering the “best of both worlds”: the stability and intimacy of monogamy, coupled (so to speak) with the variety, excitement and novelty of casual dating and promiscuity.

In recent months, there has been a visible backlash against this trend, not just in the culture at large but within the rationalist sphere specifically. Consider this tweet from Vivid Void, or this lengthy effortpost from Katxwoods which she posted on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it:

Poly causes way more drama

First off because it’s dealing with the main source of drama - humans with strong emotions. And poly brings up strong emotions.

Of course there’s the intense jealousy. Some of my worst emotional experiences have been being wracked with jealousy and shame for even feeling jealous in the first place.

Then there’s the strong emotions of falling in love.

Which would be nice, except you’re feeling jealous because your partner is falling in love with somebody else. But don’t worry, you just need to work on yourself. Obviously they won’t leave you for this new shiny person (which, btw, is a lie. This happens all the time. People are very bad at predicting their emotions. It’s one thing to promise they won’t leave when there’s nobody to leave to. It’s a different story when they’re in love).

It gets complicated fast. I remember once I had drama caused by my boyfriend’s wife’s boyfriend’s girlfriend’s girlfriend (my meta-meta-meta-metamour)

Me and my partner at the time decided to become monogamous for a bit, to protect our relationship till things calmed down… it was amazing. The amount of time I had to spend on relationship drama went down 99.9%. The amount of time that I had to spend processing my own emotions or helping other people process theirs went down by about 97%.

“Yes, it does look like a crazy lifestyle choice. And yes, I’m currently spending many nights crying alone in bed while my partner is out falling in love with another woman and having sex with her. But do you know what, I read in a book that if I just work on myself, I won't feel so bad. So yeah, I think it’s the right choice in expectation.”

Not meaning to poke fun, but I found the latter anecdote eerily reminiscent of the tweet below:

Text: “When you see two people are in an open relationship it’s like which one of you came up with the idea and which of you cries to sleep at night”

I cannot say that I am terribly surprised by this recent backlash against polyamory in rationalist circles, as it’s probably an inevitable result of the community growing to the point that it began to attract comparatively normal individuals. The first-generation rationalists like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Zvi Mowshowitz¹ were people who were quite weird along a range of axes: unusually intelligent and introspective, high-systematising, often on the autistic spectrum, unusually prone to living on plant-based diets, disproportionately likely to be interested in computer science, often gay and/or trans, and so on. They were, in other words, a highly selected sample, and profoundly unrepresentative of society at large.

Over time, the rationalist community has grown bigger and bigger, which inevitably means that the average weirdness of a given member has become diluted, and a greater proportion of the community is made up of “normies” (lest anyone think I’m using this term as an insult, it’s a category I’m happy to include myself in, at least when compared to the original rationalists). Polyamorous relationships may have worked very well for the first-generation rationalists who were a highly selected sample (perhaps even better than monogamy), but that doesn’t necessarily generalise to the broader population.

Within the rationalist community, Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten has occasionally discussed his personal experience of polyamory, explaining that it’s a lifestyle choice that works very well for him, and better than the alternative. [EDIT: This passage originally referred to Scott as a “prominent evangelist for polyamory”, a characterisation to which he objected. On reflection I agree that this was needlessly hyperbolic of me, and apologise for any offense caused.] Scott is also openly asexual, and I don't think this is at all a coincidence. Some poly people like to pat themselves on the back about how romantic jealousy is just a bad habit that they've managed to transcend, in favour of the warm, fuzzy feeling of vicarious joy associated with watching their partner fall in love with someone else (compersion, it’s called). But let's be honest: probably a significant chunk of what we call "romantic jealousy" is just sexual jealousy, and it stands to reason that a person who doesn't experience sexual attraction in the conventional way probably doesn't experience sexual jealousy in the conventional way either. To reuse one of Scott's own points,² you don't get any Virtue Points for "transcending" an unpleasant emotion if it's an emotion you literally don't feel, or if you only experience it at a vastly lower level than the average person.³

I suspect that, within the rationalist community, many of the early adopters of polyamory were asexuals (or at least people with atypically low sex drives) who erroneously assumed that the amount of romantic/sexual jealousy they experienced was about average, and were baffled when the people in their vicinity with more conventional sex drives seemed to be far more distressed by the sight of their romantic partners being intimate with a third party. “If I can easily overcome my (vastly lower than typical, if not nonexistent) romantic/sexual jealousy, why can't everyone else? Must just represent a massive character failing on their part." This is a bit like someone who doesn't even like drinking alcohol marching into an AA meeting and announcing "I just stopped drinking, what's the big deal? If you guys are struggling with this, it must mean you’re weak — it’s a skill issue". In other words, these polyamorous asexuals were committing the typical mind fallacy.

(Alternative/complementary hypothesis: maybe if you literally don't feel at all jealous when thinking about your girlfriend having sex with another man, it might mean that you don't actually love her as much as you claim to? Perhaps you even have an avoidant attachment style, and you're deliberately seeking out romantic partners who it wouldn't bother you to lose, as a defense mechanism? Just a possibility to consider.)

Meanwhile, all of the people with conventional sex drives being evangelised to about how amazing polyamory is — they start to wonder why they're really struggling with feelings of sexual jealousy in a way their asexual/low-sex-drive peers don't seem to be at all. In turn, they start to feel guilty and ashamed of themselves that they can't overcome this "moral failing", unaware that they're playing a completely different ball game to the asexual/low-sex-drive polys. I mean, Jesus, even puff pieces about what a wonderful alternative lifestyle choice polyamory is still make it sound miserable, toxic and even emotionally abusive:

[My girlfriend] started seeing this dude who was an absolute stud, having sex with him and having a great-ass time, and I felt totally lame and inadequate.

That was really hard for me, for obvious reasons. I felt like, I’m a hundred percent replaceable. It took a lot of conversations. She was like, There’s nothing wrong with you, this is going to pass, therapy will help. Lots of tears were shed. But medication helped me, talk therapy helped me

Just imagine feeling sad and upset that your girlfriend is having sex with another man who's more attractive than you, and thinking "Yes, obviously this is an unhealthy emotional response, I need to dose myself up with antidepressants".

To sum up, if you have:

• a low baseline of romantic/sexual jealousy (perhaps because you’re asexual)

• are unusually agreeable

• are unusually low in neuroticism

• are unusually conflict-avoidant

then polyamory might work very well for you — perhaps even better than a more conventional monogamous relationship would have done.

But if this doesn’t describe you — for your own sake, you might be better off sticking with a more conventional monogamous relationship, even if people in your vicinity are telling you that doing so is stodgy, conservative or old-fashioned. Caveat emptor.

Luxury beliefs

This whole discussion got me thinking about

Rob Henderson

’s theory about luxury beliefs. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective means of signalling that a given person is a member of the elite. When cars were so expensive that most people couldn't afford them, owning a car was a costly signal that you are rich, but when they became so cheap that everyone could afford them, the only way a person can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda is nowhere near as distinct as the difference between have and have-not.

Instead, elites turned to “luxury beliefs”: outré-sounding ideas or lifestyle practices which sound crazy to the average person, as a symbol of the individual’s culture and refinement. The main drawback of these ideas is that elites can live according to them without issue, but putting them into practice will carry devastating consequences for anyone who isn’t an elite. The reason these ideas aren’t devastating for elites is either that:

• while they may promote them in the abstract, they don’t practise them themselves e.g. Ivy League-educated people waxing lyrical about how marriage is an oppressive patriarchal construct and praising people who experiment with “alternative family structures” – while they personally waited to get married before having children, and have a family structure which would seem unsurprising to a time-traveller from 1950s America; or

• they do practise the ideas themselves, but their wealth and social status insulates them from the consequences that would befall a poorer person who practised them: it's easy to be an advocate for defunding the police if you live in a gated community

Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept (I know that

Yassine Meskhout

, for one, vociferously disagrees with the entire framing), I’m sure some parallels with the backlash around polyamory are obvious. Using highfalutin words that the plebs don’t understand like “compersion”, “metamour” and “polycule” is a great way to signal erudition; likewise engaging in transgressive practices like having multiple concurrent romantic partners. But it doesn’t quite fit. By all accounts, everyone in this debate (both rationalists who’ve tried polyamory and liked it, and rationalists who tried it and found it wanting) is an “elite” by the standards of American society: as noted by Scott, 85% of polyamorous people have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 30% of the general population — and I’m sure that figure is vastly higher when only looking at the subset of polyamorous people who are also active in the rationalist community. We don’t see the clear demarcation between “elites do it and it works great for them; non-elites do it and it’s disastrous for them”, as diagnosed by Henderson.

I’m thinking now of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example. Essentially, it boils down to alternative social practices or lifestyle choices which share the following traits:

• if practised by a person who is weird or unusual on a specific axis,⁴ it will work better for them compared to adhering to the status quo

• if practised by a person who is comparatively normal, it will be disastrous for them compared to adhering to the status quo

• weird and unusual people start doing the alternative lifestyle choice, find that it legitimately works great for them (much better than the “normal” thing they were doing before, or could have done instead), and become proselytizers for the cause, effusively telling everyone they know how much the alternative lifestyle choice has improved their lives and encouraging them to give it a try (optionally being a bit more cautious and responsible about this, admitting that it might come with downsides or acknowledging that it may not work for everybody)

• the alternative lifestyle choice takes off in popularity, but some people quickly find that it isn’t improving their lives as much as they were promised, or may be actively ruining their lives

• but because our society glorifies being weird and different, and scorns being conventional (using terms like “normie”, “basic” etc.), lots of people refuse to admit that the reason the alternative lifestyle choice isn’t working for them is because they’re a relatively conventional person, and keep trying to “push through” their initial discomfort in order to reach the point at which the lifestyle choice actually will improve their lives. This quickly leads to a sunk-cost fallacy, and by the time they realise they’re a normal person for whom the alternative lifestyle choice simply doesn’t work, the damage may be severe and irreparable.

Offhand, I can think of a few alternative lifestyle choices other than polyamory which I think meet this description, some of them less obvious than others.

Drug liberalisation

I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of a luxury belief, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole. But our society shamelessly glorifies drug use as exciting and transcendent, so lots of people who should know better keep doing drugs long past the point at which they know they’re in the normie camp — perhaps even, as noted by

Leighton Woodhouse

, consuming more cannabis to cope with the anxiety caused by their existing cannabis habit (and it’s not just the usual physical and psychological addiction causing them to stick with it, but also a whole host of modern messaging about how drug use is the way to open up your third eye, that people who aren’t “420 friendly” are squares etc.).

Sex-positive feminism

Closely related to the original polyamory example, there is a widespread set of cultural messages which present casual sex, kink, group sex, multiple concurrent sexual partners etc. as the path to female empowerment, and which encourage young women to experiment with them on that basis. While I have no objection to women engaging in these behaviours on moral grounds, and don't doubt that there are some women out there who derive just as much pleasure from casual sex as the modal man – nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his.

But because so much of sex-positive feminism explicitly or implicitly tells young women that being uninterested in casual sex is indicative of prudery (a message reinforced by every horny young man in their vicinity) and that regretting a one-night stand is indicative of “internalised misogyny”, “internalised slut-shaming” or similar — many women continue practising casual sex long past the point at which it’s obvious that it’s not for them and actively making them miserable. This was sadly documented by

Farha Khalidi

in her post about how she avoided losing her virginity in college, while all of her female friends were repeatedly used and cast aside by their male peers.⁵ As much as I might deride the silliness of the term “demisexual” (i.e. a person who prefers not to have sex with someone until after they’ve formed a strong emotional bond), I do understand that it might be the only way in the current sex-positive cultural climate that a young woman can express her preferences without being accused of being a “bad feminist”, or of indirectly slut-shaming her more promiscuous peers.⁶

Psychotherapy

A hobby horse Freddie deBoer has been beating for years. Ever since Freud, psychotherapy was generally understood as medical treatment, and going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick. But in recent years, the idea that everyone should go to therapy, regardless of whether or not they’re in acute mental distress, has been growing in popularity. Hand-in-hand with this idea is the more or less explicit denial that therapy can ever result in iatrogenic harm, a concept that everyone understands perfectly well in the context of any other kind of medical treatment. “Either therapy will help you,” such people will argue, “or at worst it will be ineffectual.” (I’m sure some people in the “everyone should go to therapy” camp would flatly deny that there exists a person, anywhere, who isn’t mentally ill: after all, if everyone has trauma, then by implication everyone experiences post-traumatic stress, and in turn suffers from [complex] post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be a weakman, but it is certainly not a strawman.)

In my opinion, we were right the first time around, and therapy should be understood first and foremost as medical treatment for people suffering from mental illness. Even being in mental distress isn’t in and of itself evidence of mental illness, as anyone recently bereaved can tell you, and the mental health industry’s casual conflation of the two is irresponsible and appalling. For people actually suffering from mental illnesses, therapy may be hugely beneficial. Most people, however, do not suffer from mental illnesses as generally understood, and hence do not stand to benefit from therapy. If you’re one of the many people who doesn’t suffer from mental illness, therapy is likely to have either no impact on your life at all (aside from being a huge waste of time and money), or actively detrimental to your well-being (obsessively analysing and ruminating on all the things in your life that make you unhappy doesn’t sound a great recipe for happiness) and/or the well-being of people around you (e.g. narcissists who go to therapy and learn lots of handy tricks and terminology for how to manipulate the people around them and rationalise away their own bad behaviour). But because our culture shamelessly glorifies mental illness⁷ and heavily implies that people with mental illnesses are more exciting and interesting than people without (the new term for people with autistic traits is “neurospicy”, for fuck’s sake), lots of people keep going to therapy long past the point at which they should know full well that they’re not mentally ill, and are just an ordinary person with ordinary problems whose origins are likely far more prosaic than an exotic dissociative disorder or nebulously defined “chemical imbalance”.

Gender transition

In spite of my undisguised incredulity towards many of the tenets of gender ideology and towards the hysterical claims about how medical transition is “lifesaving treatment” (and hence that denying it to someone who wants it is no different from denying chemotherapy to a cancer patient) – in spite of all that, I do believe that there may be rare cases in which certain people stand to benefit from medical transition, and may see an attenuation of mental distress and improved quality of life as a result. The operative word in that sentence being “rare”. In the West, the rates of people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria have skyrocketed over the past two decades, and even medics who work in this space are belatedly coming to recognise that, for many of their patients, medical transition isn’t the silver bullet they advertised, and may even exacerbate their suffering (a realisation they are struggling to rationalise away).

Over at gender:hacked,

Eliza Mondegreen

catalogues some of the mental gymnastics said medics will resort to, along with heartbreaking examples of people who’ve undergone some form of social and/or medical transition and found their dysphoria worsening and their psychic distress increasing – but when they turn to communities of like-minded individuals for help, they are inevitably gaslit about how it has to get worse before it gets better (and how detransitioners are traitors to the cause upon whom death is wished – you wouldn’t want to be one of those people, would you?). I feel comfortable saying that, for the majority of people who have medically transitioned in the past two decades, their quality of life has probably disimproved, whether marginally or drastically; while a minority has seen their quality of life improve.

“Follow your dreams”/do what you love

Sound advice, if you’re one of the tiny minority of people talented and/or attractive enough to make a living from acting/writing/music/sports/video game streaming/modelling/influencing etc., for whom working in a regular job would probably be a lot more frustrating and dissatisfying than it would be for a normal person. For most people pursuing careers in these areas, the erroneous belief that they are one of these rarefied individuals may result in them neglecting to develop productive life skills to fall back on in the event that they turn out to be a normal person with normal (i.e. unremarkable) levels of skill in one of the aforementioned domains.

But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,⁸ soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer. As documented in The Disaster Artist, there are few things more heartbreaking than a talentless wannabe actor still pursuing a career as a leading man well into his forties – and unlike Tommy Wiseau, most of these people don’t have millions of dollars from real estate investments tucked away in bottomless bank accounts.

This one is particularly interesting in that, unlike the previous examples, it has the appearance of a zero-sum game, and as such one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors, musicians etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more — tall poppies look all the taller when surrounded by short ones. This concept may be deserving of a separate post in its own right.

OnlyFans/amateur pornography

Sort of, but not exactly, a sub-point to the above points about sex-positive feminism and the entertainment industries. I doubt there are many women for whom making a living from amateur pornography is their first career preference, or who would say they love making a living from pornography — but certainly there are lots of women who have been, in my view, sold a bill of goods about how making a living from amateur pornography is much easier and more lucrative than doing so via a more conventional vocation. In the case of women who forgo developing real professional skills in favour of setting up an OnlyFans account under their own names, the outcomes can be particularly disastrous. In short order:

• they quickly find it’s a much more labour-intensive job than they were led to believe;

• they are quickly subjected to the rude awakening that they’re nowhere near as physically attractive as they thought they were (and therefore that all of their friends telling them that they were 10/10 bad bitches were just yasslighting them);

• they are quickly made aware of the diminishing returns inherent in the fact that a woman’s attractiveness is heavily determined by her youthfulness;

• they quickly learn that the more attractive women have the “vanilla” corner of the market stitched up, and hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts;

but on top of all that, images of their rectum paired with their name may end up splashed out across the entire Internet effectively forever, potentially curtailing both their professional and romantic opportunities for years to come. This latter point may also be true of women who succeed in making a living in (amateur) pornography: just because there are some women who make bank by so doing, doesn’t mean that it’s a globally sound decision even for them. My point is only that there’s no way someone like Lily Phillips could hope to have made nearly as much money from a more conventional job as she did from her pornography career, and hence that, from the narrow perspective of remuneration alone, the alternative lifestyle choice was better than the conventional one for her. For someone less conventionally attractive, following the same career path would be disastrous.

But because almost everyone thinks of themselves as above-average in attractiveness, and probably only a tiny minority of women have enough exhibitionist tendencies that they can produce amateur pornography for any significant period of time without any ensuing shame spirals — many women continue trying to make OnlyFans work for them long past the point that they ought to recognise they are unlikely ever to earn significantly more than the middle of the OnlyFans monthly income distribution, hundreds of dollars below even the lowest US minimum wage.

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What all these alternative lifestyle choice have in common is that, when practised by someone who is unusual on a relevant axis, they will work better than the status quo; when practised by someone who is comparatively normal, they will work worse than the status quo; but because the alternative lifestyle choice is glamorised as a more exciting and fulfilling way of life than the status quo, lots of people keep trying to make it work for them long past the point when they should have realised that they’re in the latter camp. This framework is distinct from the luxury beliefs concept, insofar as not everyone who stands to benefit from the alternative lifestyle practice is an elite, and not everyone who stands to suffer is a non-elite. There are many women from working-class backgrounds who could stand to make a great deal of money from pornography, and likewise many women from wealthy backgrounds whose reputations would take a hit were they to do the same. There are many people from working-class backgrounds who might benefit from therapy, and many people from wealthy backgrounds for whom therapy would only serve to make them more neurotic than ever before. There are even, as we learned at the outset, many educated and well-heeled people who’ve found that polyamory has made them nothing but stressed out and miserable (and presumably some people from working-class backgrounds who’ve found that polyamory has done wonders for them).

As such, before jumping feet-first into one of these alternative lifestyles, you should engage in some honest self-reflection, unclouded (insofar as possible) by wishful thinking, and really interrogate whether or not you really are an outlier on the relevant axis or axes. If you are tone-deaf or lack a solid sense of rhythm, you are unlikely ever to be able to make a living from music alone. If a qualified mental health professional has never diagnosed you with an actual mental illness, psychotherapy is likely to be a waste of time and money. If you’ve had three one-night stands and always felt unhappy the following morning, you might be better off giving the fourth one a miss. And as hard as it may be to admit it — while you might be the prettiest woman in your friend group or your workplace, that doesn’t necessarily translate into making six figures a year from amateur pornography.

Remember: while suffering from gender dysphoria or a mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, and being unusual on several of these axes is actively desirable (unusually attractive, charming, entertaining etc.) — there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a normal person with a normal job, normal physical traits, normal emotions and normal addictive pathways. Just as a moral system which indicts virtually everyone is a bad moral system — a culture which asserts that everyone who is normal and ordinary is therefore lame, cringe or “basic” is a toxic culture.

1. For clarity’s sake, while Yudkowsky explicitly described himself as polyamorous at least at one time, Mowshowitz explicitly discouraged it on the grounds that the drama and infighting it creates is incompatible with the rationalist community’s mission statements. I’m only bringing them up as examples of prominent figures in the rationalist community, not as evangelists for polyamory.

2

To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.

I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.

(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)

3. In her post, Katxwoods suggests that polyamory may work very well for people with a “low baseline of jealousy to begin with” but will probably not work for someone with a more typical baseline, which is the exact point I’m making here.

4. Not intended as a criticism or insult: per the expansive definition I’m using here, it includes people who are unusually intelligent, talented, physically attractive, fiscally responsible etc., but also includes people who are diagnosably and severely mentally ill.

5. Please be advised that, in addition to the content mentioned above, the linked article also contains detailed descriptions of sexual assault. For clarity, this aspect of the article is emphatically not what I’m talking about here: I’m talking about women engaging in consensual casual sex past the point at which it’s obviously worsening their lot.

6. I must here mention a favourite anecdote from

Holly MathNerd

, who learned about the term “demisexual” in a university lecture and explained it to her therapist:

Me: “Today I learned that I am deeply and profoundly oppressed by my status as a sexual minority.”

Therapist: (raises an eyebrow).

Me: “I in fact fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. A is one of those extra letters, and I am in fact a type of Asexual.”

Therapist, laughing: “What?!”

Me: “I am, I’ll have you know, an oppressed demisexual.”

Therapist: “What does that mean?”

Me: “A demisexual is someone who only experiences sexual attraction when they have formed a close emotional bond.”

Therapist (nods, several times, thinks for about thirty seconds.): “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”

7. No doubt there are many who come to believe that they are mentally ill in part because they are seduced by the idea that it relinquishes them of being held responsible for their bad behaviour, along with providing them with a convenient excuse for why their lives didn't turn out the way they hoped.

8. Based on a study which, like everything else in the ideologically motivated social sciences, failed to replicate. One can only assume the notoriously scummy and dishonest David Graeber was putting his thumb on the scale somewhere.