They tell you, and I don’t know who “they” is because frankly nobody ever told me this but I somehow got the impression anyway—they tell you to get a job and have a career and make money and women will be attracted to you. “Men like looks,” they say. “Women like success.” It’s a common countercomplaint when feminists accuse men of objectifying women; the guy will say back “well, you women better stop objectifying my wallet, amirite?” The “take my wife, please!” of antifeminist arguments.
So you go out and get a job. You try to get into a good college and you study and you intern and you get a toe in the water of some status-y “career” field and you get up early and you stay late and you read work-related material after work and you network with work-related work jerkoffs and you suffer under some cruel old work prick who believes himself better than other human beings because of his work in some lofty status-y career field and you work and you work and you work and you work. And part of what drives this is the dread instilled in you when you read that in 2020 to put a kid through college will cost sixteen billion dollars and Social Security will have dried up and you better be sitting on a cash hoard of ten million billion trillion dollars conservatively invested because health care costs will have reached the level where only a class of feudal overlords can afford a tongue depressor. And there will be no “safety net;” there is literally nobody who believes programs like Social Security and Medicare will still exist in our financially post-apocalyptic future. We all know we are headed toward a Randian thunderdome where our old age will be spent guarding a 55 gallon drum of drinking water with a shotgun and removing our own tumors with steak knives. If you don’t want this to happen, you better sink a bunch of borrowed money into school, and then work. And you better not spend whatever pittance is left of the 22 grand your post-college job earns you on fun; you better save and invest, according to the 401k presentation the commissioned salesperson who gets a small piece of what they withhold from your meager check tells you, because if you don’t, at age 23, begin taking advantage of logarithmic growth to accrue a massive privately-invested nest egg, you will be cannibalized by gangs of cyborg Hottentots, and your bones picked clean. And your children. And your children’s children. Continue reading
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