I’d argue gravitational force isn’t lethal. As long as you don’t arrive at whatever is pulling you & the gradient of gravity doesn’t change across your body length. You could be perfectly fine (for a while) orbiting a black hole at enormous speeds (assuming you don’t collide with matter in the accretion disc.
Wouldn’t a high enough force cause the gradient of gravity to differ?
Unless I misunderstood how that works. I’m picturing a downed powerline that causes large differences in voltage across the ground, which is why you are supposed to shuffle instead of taking a normal step. Would a high enough gravity cause a harmful gradient across the length of a human body?
Like if you were free falling into a black hole, the gravity forces would rip you to shreds long before you ever actually impacted anything because the difference in the force of gravity on the parts of your body that are closer to the black hole and the parts of your body that are farther away are enough to shred you like lettuce.
I have read popular scientific articles however according to which in a large enough black hole, it may be possible to fall through the event horizon before being inconvenienced by the gravity gradient, and even the smartest physicists do not know for sure what will happen beyond the event horizon. In theory, there could be the beginning of another universe there :) Like - the singularity at the center of the black hole could expand as a big bang into a brand new universe “on the other side”.
Gradient: the change of a value (here: gravitational force, or rather: potential) over a reference variable (here e.g. the length of the body)
No, the absolute value of the gravitational force does not matter for the gradient. Gravitational force (potential) is proportional to the inverse distance squared from the center of mass that exerts the gravitational potential. If your distance from the object R is large enough, then the gradient of gravity across the length of your body is negligible: In the worst case, with your body length being s, the gravity at the part of your body closest to the center of mass pulling you would be: F_max = F_min * ( R^2 / (R-s)^2 ), and with s << R, this becomes F_min, the force at the part of your body furthest away from the mass pulling you in.
This becomes problematic when you get “too close” to the body in question - and where too close begins, depends indeed on the absolute force. But for each black hole, there’s a safe distance at which you could fall around it, assuming no other factors killing you (like intersteller particles, or an accretion disc)
I’d argue against that. For one thing it is impossible to imagine a situation where there is no change in the gravitational gradient across your body over time. Your orbiting a black hole situation is a perfect example of a situation where the gradient alone would tear you apart. The conditions you’ve specified are tautological. There’s no way to maintain a zero gravitational gradient while also simultaneously having extremely high gravitational field. The two are mutually exclusive in any conceivable scenario.
It’s like saying a human being in a hypersonic wind stream won’t necessarily hurt you, burn you alive and rip you to pieces (not necessarily in that order) as long as there is no turbulence and you have a sufficient boundary layer – but you’re a non-aerodynamic human body in a hypersonic wind stream, so of course there will be turbulence and the boundary layer will not protect you at all, you’re going to die, basically instantly.
Does the change in gravity gradient across your body kill you right now? No? You are currently orbiting the supermassive black hole in the center of the milky way. You and everything else in the milky way aside from a few intergalactic objects just traveling through.
I am not an astrophysicist, but I do understand basic physics.
If the gravity were strong enough and the source close enough then the tidal force would absolutely be strong enough to simultaneously crush you and rip you apart. The same effect gives rise to tides on this planet, hence the name.
I studied Relativity at university as part of combined Physics/Maths degree, but please feel free to continue entertaining us with your popular magazine-based learnings.
Does the change in gravity gradient across your body kill you right now? No? You are currently orbiting the supermassive black hole in the center of the milky way.
It was implied by “accretion disc” and by the fact that we’re talking about gravitational gradients at all that we’re talking about a close orbit. Gravitational strength gets smaller with distance according to the inverse square law, so by the time you’re a few light years out from the galactic core the gravitational gradient is already extremely insignificant.
Can’t help you if you don’t understand what “ideal cases” are, when the real world examples are not practical to describe the underlying principle. The point is: gravity doesn’t kill you, no matter how high the absolute. Arguably, in a perfect gravitational field, you could even be accelerated at insane speeds without experiencing discomfort, because each atom of your body would be experiencing the same acceleration.
I think General Relativity is based on the idea that a frame of reference that’s in freefall is equivalent to one that in a gravity free region of space (at least that was one of Einstein’s Gedankenexperiments that led him to his theory of GR).
Having said that, in reality a sufficiently strong gravitational field will cause a tidal effect, which will crush you along one axis and pull you apart along another.
There was definitely something like that - I am not sure if free-fall and being accelerated in a gravitational field are the same though. It may be that GR is talking about moving along lines in space-time that have the same gravitational potential (orbits), and moving across potential lines counts as an accelerated frame of reference in which you wouldn’t observe the same as in a reference frame moving at constant speed.
the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, and Albert Einstein’s observation that the gravitational “force” as experienced locally while standing on a massive body (such as the Earth) is the same as the pseudo-force experienced by an observer in a non-inertial (accelerated) frame of reference.
Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.
All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.
Paracelsus, 1538
The word for poison in German is Gift?!
The word has been used as a euphemism for “poison” since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”). The original meaning “gift” has disappeared in contemporary Standard German, but remains in some compounds (see Mitgift). Compare also Dutch gift (“gift”) alongside gif (“poison”).
I thought about this a bit and concluded that it only applies to physical materials and forces.
For example: There certainly are lethal ideas, but most of them are not, and much like bosons they can overlap, so filling a person with multiple copies of the same (benign) thought has a diminishing effect.
But yeah, anything physical has a lethal concentration.
OP you clearly have no clue what you are talking about. Safety if number one reason, slamming the open-door in people walking outside the door is another. You can defend against someone forcing their way in, by using your body weight against door, something you can not do if it swings outward. Odor control is another issue, door swing outward will release the smell into next room, rather than contain it with the swing inward. Finally, this has nothing to do with architects or interior designer, this is a building code bylaw, as accessibility demand the door swing inward for people in a wheelchair so they can operate it.
slamming the open-door in people walking outside the door is another.
That might be true in a small shop, but in a lot of places the bathrooms are recessed into a hallway where nobody who isn’t trying to get into or leave the bathroom should be standing.
You can defend against someone forcing their way in, by using your body weight against door, something you can not do if it swings outward.
Is that really a concern…? The amount of conditions that have to be true for this to become a thing seems really long… boarding on the “your insurance policy covers you if an elephant falls through the roof on the first day of February” cartoon levels of specificity.
Not to mention if you assume a truck stop instead of a restaurant. It might be harder to use your body weight to keep a door closed, but with a proper door frame, deadbolt, and security hinges, it would be basically impossible for some hypothetical attacker to break down the door.
Odor control is another issue, door swing outward will release the smell into next room, rather than contain it with the swing inward.
Um, no it won’t? This is actually backwards the pivot of a door that swings back into a room, will force air out of a room with it swings out. If it swings out, when it closes it’s going to push air back towards the room.
In either case, I’d expect basically no observable impact on the amount of perceivable smell.
accessibility demand the door swing inward for people in a wheelchair so they can operate it.
They still have to get out…? It’s not our handicapped folks are getting stuck in bathrooms are they? And if they are, wouldn’t that be a reason to change this?
That surely doesn’t apply to the situations I discussed above where the bathrooms are recessed (and/or just generally wouldn’t be blocking anything if the door was open).
Soylent is way better than Huel. I’ve been consuming at least a serving of Soylent a day for the past four or five years, I’ve tried a few different brands including huel and they were all significantly worse than Soylent ready to drink or Soylent powder.
In my experience none of them taste great, but if you make them part of your daily flow you get over it pretty quickly. I’ve heard good things about the newer pre-mixed and flavored ones, but I got to a good place with my nutrition a few years ago and stopped using pretty much all meal replacements.
personally i want to get at least 1000 kcal a day in soylent, so that i’m sure i get SOME of my rdas. otherwise i eat a lot of bean and cheese burritos. they are maybe 1/3 of what i eat besides soylent. the rest is like… whatever my wife makes or fast food.
Honestly I never really got meal replacements like it’s basically a drink so you are still eating your just not chewing so what’s the point is the point to not cook is it that you just don’t want to move your jaw is this just something I can’t comprehend because I’m autistic what
That’s not funny. Seriously. I’m getting so fucking sick of “dark comedy” or especially “deep chararacters in an engaging story” that abuses shock factor by dead dropping child death.
It’s like whoever is offering up these names and convincing them to use them is trying to tell consumers and workers something in the countries they work and operate. That a rental service is literally named Hertz is pretty on the nose even without all the movie culture references.
Lawns, specifically, the western preoccupation with having little plots of land that should not have viable ecosystems or edible food grown on them, just rectangles of chemical-soaked and constantly-mowed fuzzy green conformity. grillman
It was to show off wealth wayyyyyyy back in the day. It was a message that said “I have land and I don’t need to farm it! I have peasants do that elsewhere.”
I have a friend who is extremely intelligent, endlessly curious and was raised in a locally well-established and notoriously generous and civic-minded family. So he was raised in that milieu of sincere kindness and generosity, and whenever he’s come across anything that interests him (which is seemingly something new every week) he seriously researches it until he understands it.
So it pretty much doesnt matter what the topic is - he knows something about it, but his personality has been shaped so that he’s attentive and considerate rather than pedantic and self-absorbed. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen him engage in obviously mutually enjoyable conversations with complete strangers over… pretty much anything.
I vacillate between thinking that it’s remarkable that he’s the way he is and that it’s remarkable, in a different sense, that that’s so uncommon.
Some of it might be age. I didn’t realize until recently what I wanted. Got a new co worker who’s only a couple years older than me (I’m 46) and after a few days of working with her, I told her she’s ruining my other friendships because I’ve realized how boring many of my friends are. She’s just very easy to talk to and we can cover tons of subjects. We always have something to talk about.
I don’t think you can expect someone in their 20s to really know enough about enough things to really be euradite about much. They also don’t have as much experience talking with people to be remarkably eloquent. That’s not to say that everyone younger than me isn’t worth talking to, but maybe you’re scouting in the farm league and don’t know it. Keep talking to everyone though: one day you’ll find someone you hope never stops talking to you.
It’s a volunteer and donation run anarchist collective that has been around since 1999. They have fought a number of legal battles against governments to varying degrees of success.
The people involved have close ties to basically everyone involved in Tor and should be regarded with the same level of trust (what ever that means for you). There’s also a lot of overlap with some core Debian contributors.
That said, I wouldn’t use them for P2P other than occasional use. Or if you do, consider making a substantial monthly donation. It’s a lot of resources to pull from a small organisation at the expense of people who need their services for political organizing, which is their primary focus.
Yeah that’s fair, I hope people realize I meant that you don’t have to pay to use the service, and not that I’m discouraging donations in any way. They deserve every penny!
I mean… On Linux you’re going to be running a bunch of open source applications that have been compiled for ARM specifically. A huge problem with Windows on ARM is going to be running legacy x86 / x86_64 applications. You’re probably not contending with this problem at all on Linux, and I suspect if you were you would be similarly unimpressed (you can get Linux to transparently execute executables for different platforms using binfmt_misc and qemu but it’s slooooooow).
Honestly the better question might be why the Mac transition to Apple silicon has been so smooth. Part of this is that Apple cares a lot less about keeping legacy software working and companies will make native versions of their software ASAP. But Apple also has a good translation layer with Rosetta for this, and has custom silicon (which Microsoft does not) and I would not be surprised if part of this custom silicon involves extended instructions which make running x86 applications more feasible, but I don’t know the details and this is just speculation on my part.
This is overall very true but the transition even for Apple was anything but smooth. There was a long period of time during which app support for ARM was pretty hit or miss. Happily that period is just about over and now everything is built for all archs.
I dunno, overall Rosetta 2 seems to be incredibly successful. It seems like most people were able to transition without worrying too much about whether their software would work at all or not, which I think is undoubtedly the smoothest an architecture transition like this has ever been.
In 2011 Microsoft released Windows RT, and it was specifically designed to run on ARM hardware. Everyone hated it, and it never really became anything. Well, you can’t blame MS for not trying. Maybe the time just wasn’t right for that sort of radical transition. Everyone was complaining that you can’t even install anything other than the handful of applications available at the store.
Microsoft has been courting ARM for decades (the 90s had WindowsCE tho that might have been more MIPS than ARM, see Vadem Clio for a product ahead of its time).
However like many relationships “the time wasn’t right” or “too busy for more than fun” so the courtship has yet to click beyond some neat devices that fizzled.
Apple designed the silicon to have an “x86 mode” for the memory model ordering, as well as an undocumented mode that makes certain arm instructions set flags similarly to x86. There’s a good write up of the reasons here: https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-fast/
Apple hit a sweet spot with this. x86_64 applications run at acceptable speed (making the transition easy for people who buy the hardware) while not being SO good that there’s zero reason for developers to start porting their software.
Small correction: the flag setting modes aren’t undocumented. They’re standardized extensions. ARMv8.4 added FEAT_FlagM, and ARMv8.5 added FEAT_FlagM2.
IIRC, the only nonstandard ARM extension used by Rosetta 2 in Apple’s processors is TSO, and that’s also implemented by other manufacturers. It’s also not a hard requirement to run amd64 under ARM. You can emulate it very slowly or restrict the application to a single core.
Apologies for the tangent, but I needed to make sure nobody could defend Microsoft’s prior failings by saying “but Apple has secret hardware sauce”.
It’s now been a while since I used Spotify, so no idea what it’s like now. I started to get Spotify inserted adverts when listening to podcasts. After a month or so of getting adverts I stopped my subscription and moved to other sources of audio entertainment.
I paid for Spotify primarily to get away from adverts, secondly it was more convenient than being on the wavey seas with my parrot, black flag, and wooden leg.
It’s weird to me that people use Spotify for podcasts, a free medium established 10-15 years before Spotify even added them as a feature. Why not just use one of the free podcast apps that actually are mature and also designed for podcasts to begin with?
That’s a seriously low amount of money for this. Most Presidents will make much more than this out of office in just speaking fees and the normal grifting and graft that happens around them. You’d be endangering your ability to make so much more money in the future if that was your goal.
An old restaurant I worked at hired a new chef. He came in, completely rearranged the kitchen, changed the menu top to bottom ON HIS FIRST DAY, and introduced a bunch of complicated specials. Dinner service hits, chaos ensues and dude disappears.
I was on expo watching everything fall apart when one of the line cooks is like, “get chef,I don’t know how to make this special because there’s no recipe or notes”
I go into the walk in and he’s haunched over in there and violently turns, around inhaling, all bug eyed. I told him we needed help. He doesn’t hide his annoyance goes on the line, makes the one dish in question and is like, “see, that wasn’t difficult” and disappeared again.
The line cook asked why I had the look on my face that I did and I said it was because chef was doing rails in the walk in. We both laughed, shook our heads and got through service eventually. Drugs are pretty common in the service industry but even that seemed extreme.
Anyhow we didn’t see him for the rest of the night. Next day, I get to work and the owner is there and he pulls me aside and told me what happened after. Owner didn’t even know he’d been snorting shit during the dinner rush
Chef continued his one man party and went into the booze closet and proceeded to help himself. When the prep cook showed up the next morning the kitchen door was wide open so she called the police thinking the place had been robbed. The police went in and found Chef semi conscious and incoherent, giggling in the office. He was fired and since he was a keyholder all the locks and alarm codes had to be changed
I’ve never seen someone self destruct that spectacularly.
To have been a fly on the wall when they called the other guy chef beat out for the gig and told him he could start immediately…
I think the dude could actually cook. He’d been a chef at a resort in the Caribbean previous to that… makes sense: he cooked somewhere out of the country and I’m not sure if the owners reached out to that place.
He was a pushy prima Donna chef with ego and swagger. Dude was a skilled bullshitter who talked over people and I immediately didn’t like him but I’m sure he knew how to sell himself when he was interviewed.
The guy who replaced him was also a total dick (what is it with chefs?) But at least he could hold it together. Amusingly you could tell he didn’t want to be there: it was a Mexican place and he put meatloaf and a seared ahi tuna sandwich on the menu. His concession was adding cilantro, chilies or something to them. I left that place a few months later and he didn’t last much longer
I am an actual licensed therapist and while there are a number of real actual creating barriers specific to men pursuing mental health treatment there are a few factors I’ve consistently seen that are ubiquitous across gender, race, sexuality, class, etc
Money, time, availability
Therapy is inaccessible. I am a therapist who mostly works with insurance companies. They pay me about 100-115/hr. My clients will often have a high deductible health plan which means they need to pay this $100-115 per session until they hit their deductible, which can be 5,000+ dollars. It’s a lot to ask someone to pay $100+ weekly. On top of that they still usually have a responsibility afterwards of (typically) 10-30% so $10-34.5 per meeting which is still a notable weekly cost for many people on the high end especially after shelling out $400+ a month for months on end.
Other clients have PPO insurance which is a fixed cost per meeting but this can vary wildly. More affluent clients have excellent PPOs where they might pay $10-20 per meeting which is not terrible. But that’s rare. We are often covered under the “specialist” copay and many PPO plans have tiered provider coverage now. So a copay for me might be $50 or more per meeting (the worst I saw was $125 which was absurd because it was actually $27 more than I’d get from the insurer in question).
So you have this on top of these plans taking hundreds of dollars out of each pay check. “Well budget for it”. Hard to do because the need for therapy can be inconsistent and many of these people are coming in fo(and specifically symptoms like poor money management). Then on top of that even if you do budget for it you have the inherent issue that the need for outpatient therapy is often not dire/acute so if something more pressing comes up (eg a serious dental/medical issue, car breaks down, short on rent) therapy might be the corner to cut if it’s already established because in the overwhelming majority of cases you won’t die without it; it will just lower your quality of life (sometimes significantly so)
Then comes the time portion. Even if you can get past the cost barrier you have the availability of the therapist and yourself. I’m a night owl and I work late but many of my colleagues don’t. I’m pretty nontraditional though, no kids and my partner is very career oriented themselves whereas many of my peers tend to value the traditional 9-5 much more so they can be home for their children and such.
So when you go to schedule with someone it’s often that you can only get seen during business hours. It’s one thing when it’s a doctors appointment that you have once every few months that you need to duck out of work for but a weekly hour long engagement is much harder to explain. This brings back in the masculinity issues - many men find this basically impossible to disclose to the workplace and basically wouldn’t even try to get an exception for weekly therapy. Even without explicitly saying so asking for 1 hour open a week consistently for a doctors appointment is going to be perceived as therapy by many. But stigma aside many of us simply can’t do that. I’m on the practitioner side and I know I’ve ignored my own physical health at times because it was inconvenient to schedule doctor appointments during my workday.
Our systems of employment (at least in the USA) simply do not provide or protect for medical leave, even when it’s very brief and especially when you are a low level employee (executives and admins tend to have less of an issue ducking out for doctors appointments in my experience at least). There is no legal right to paid or unpaid time off for medical appointments in the USA and that is completely disgusting in 2023.
The final piece is practitioner availability. I have a waitlist through October at the moment and am not accepting new clients. All of my colleagues are in the same boat. The old practices I used to work at constantly call me to see if I’ll take any referrals because their waitlists are so overloaded. The hospitals and clinics I have referral relationships with email me every week for updates. It’s extremely stressful. Every new client, especially adolescent, complains that they are happy to finally have someone after waiting 3-6 months. Even if someone wants a therapist they have to wait ages. It is not uncommon that I get someone and when I call them to start they say they don’t even remember why they called in the first place.
We need more people doing the work. Or ideally we need to make societal reforms so that there are less people experiencing mental health issues. I’ve been doing this almost 15 years now. I, and anyone who doesn’t exclusively work with the rich, can tell you that a significant degree of what we work with is people who lack resources and not proper mental illness. I mean, it is depression and anxiety, but it’s because they have been paycheck to paycheck for years or theyre under a mountain of student loans or credit card debt and the stress is just too much to bear. And their jobs won’t give them raises and there aren’t any other jobs out there that pay more. Not everyone is a software developer or investment banker that can jump ship to another 6 figure job with cushy benefits. Most people work jobs that pay 40-60k with shit benefits and little upward mobility.
To answer your question more directly:
In my opinion it’s a systemic issue based around that super fun phrase everyone loves, “toxic masculinity”. I personally do not subscribe to gender labels but I am amab/male presenting and get a lot of male clients as a result. Many of them tell me they hide the fact that they are in therapy from everyone but their partner. This is indicative of the problem; that being in therapy is weak. That being in therapy makes them a bitch, a wuss, all kinds of pejorative terms. It’s bad, is my point.
So part of the answer imo is not in having doggies and cool dude stuff in the office. Its far more complex and involves redefining masculinity to still including things like being a lumberjack or carpentry or whatever. From there though you need to shed the part where it means you have to be emotionally numb to everything, constantly display strength, embrace the fucked up misrepresentation of stoicism that has you shove all your feelings into your stomach, and glorify anger, rage, and violence as the only appropriate means of emotional expression.
this could also be extended to the stigma surrounding therapy itself and the tendency to associate therapy need with weakness. This is an issue that goes beyond therapy though; there are people who won’t see medical doctors for the same reason even though they’re in physical pain. Our pride is our downfall.
Tldr make therapy cheap and accessible, make protections for workers to seek medical care, increase the amount of practitioners (or decrease the need for them), and systemic reform to the societal concept of masculinity and pride. So probably gonna take awhile
This was quite simply the greatest ‘not rant’ I’ve read in a long time. Really well reasoned and I completely agree (although, in New Zealand we don’t suffer from nearly as much pressure).
One of the things that really keeps me repelled by conventional therapy in business hours is not just the time out from work, but it’s the emotional hangover that lasts hours or days in some cases. Fuck trying to pokerface my way through that one - one drop of verbal praise and it’ll be the ugly waterworks all over again…
God, emotional hangover, that puts it so well. I did three sessions and I was a complete wreck the whole week after the 2nd and for a few days after the 3rd. My therapist is now taking an extended leave of absence and I don’t know if I have it in me to try again.
There is no legal right to paid or unpaid time off for medical appointments in the USA and that is completely disgusting in 2023
Does FMLA not cover this? I had a coworker that was able to use that to call off basically whenever they wanted because their doctor put in for it due to stress.
FMLA is unpaid leave. This is a major oversimplification, but it’s so an employee can take an extended leave from work and return to their job afterwards. And even though it’s unpaid, there are still a lot of limitations on it.
Maybe the company I work for is going above and beyond then and just calling it that because there’s definitely a paid version of FMLA I’ve seen people use. Even for shorter periods and intermittent health problems.
Maybe the company I work for is going above and beyond then and just calling it that
That’s what it sounds like to me. Well, actually, it just sort of sounds like your company is calling normal paid sick leave “FMLA”. It’s nice to have, regardless of what it’s called, and very sad that it’s not a given everywhere.
That’s for long term medical leave, like if you need to go to rehab. I mean for being able to go to like a single hour long doctors appointment. There is no protection for that whatsoever. If you need to go to a doctors appointment during work hours your boss has every right to tell you to go fuck yourself; you are not entitled to time off for a doctors visit even if it’s unpaid
This is a fantastic response, and it’s good to see someone taking a practical view of time/money/availability concerns.
One aspect I haven’t seen raised much is a slightly subtler parsing of the whole masculinity thing. Perhaps it’s generational (I’m genx), perhaps it’s cultural (I’m not from the US), but I think perceived weakness is a misreading of the motivation, or perhaps even a more-acceptable out, for many guys.
Perhaps this might give someone out there an angle they find useful, who knows?
A chunk of it from my perspective, and as best I can gather for a lot of guys I know, isn’t about being seen as a pussy, it’s just… my problem to deal with, not something anyone else has control over or responsibility for, any more than they can go pee for me when I need to. The anxiety here isn’t jocks kicking sand in your face, it’s the sitcom dad asking what the hell you expect him to do about it, idiot.
It’s associated with and caused by cultural gender norms and the way we’re raised, but I think it’s a misleading oversimplification to suggest that it’s just about not appearing masculine enough. It’s not about being ‘man enough’ to tough it out, it’s that as men, they’re taught that the only resource they have is themselves.
And a second major facet is that for a lot of guys, losing control of their emotions in and of itself represents painful catastrophic failure. While guys definitely get punished and shamed for displaying vulnerability, the flipside of that is that they tend to rely on the resulting rigidity for refuge and protection. But especially since they get no opportunity to practice controlled, minor release of negative emotions, that protection is all or nothing; one good crack and the entire structure collapses. And that’s not the cathartic but ultimately healing purge people think of it as, but rather a terrifying, traumatic and destructive breakdown of everything that’s holding them together. And most guys I know would no more put themselves in that harm’s way than they’d shove their arm down a garbage disposal.
Again: caused by shitty gender norms, but the connection isn’t the one people usually paint. We’re no longer told during our upbringing that boys don’t cry; that’s a horrible relic of the bad old days. Instead boys are told that only babies cry. Crying isn’t feminised, it’s infantilised. The shame associated is not due to being inadequately male, but inadequately adult (but only if you’re male). This of course does women no favours; when men see crying in women as accepted and encouraged, what they hear is that women must be fundamentally infantile on some level themselves.
If we want to see better emotional resilience in men specifically, and better use of mental health resources by men, I think the most effective change would be a cultural shift creating a safer environment in which they can be vulnerable. There’s no use telling men that they should be vulnerable, in a society that will just hurt them for it; the ground needs to be prepared first. That means a hard, critical look at gendered expectations around emotional expression in children, and a significant change to how they’re raised. It means treating phrases like ‘man-baby’, ‘man-flu’ and ‘male tears’ as toxic and offensive on par with racial slurs, and a bunch of surrounding attitudes treated like the ingrained racism of boomer grandparents.
It’d be really nice if we could stop telling people how to do their gender altogether, and stop using gender-compliance as a proxy for admirable character traits. Every time well-meaning people promote the notion that Real Men Are (generous / honest / hardworking / etc.), they’re pushing the converse, that insufficiently-masculine people are (mean / shifty / lazy / etc.), and that makes the whole problem worse, not better.
This is pretty much what I meant by that fucked up misinterpretation of stoicism
Like you have the actual Aurelius stoicism which has some very good value; everyone should read meditations once or twice. But then it’s been cliff notes’d and perverted by a bunch of people into to lose the message entirely from “be in control of your emotions” to what you’ve described: horrific rigidity to keep it all in at all times until of course it doesn’t work anymore and you break down spectacularly. Like somehow the message has gone from “control” to “emotional numbness”
A similar dynamic has happened with nihilism where some the writings on it are not so bleak and terrible; that it is an expression of freedom. But over the years it’s been perverted into nothing matters, why bother
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