Bruh. I finally finished your LAST interview with Noah Revoy, in short commute chunks over two weeks, and now there's another one? At this rate I'll be caught up with the podcasts I currently want to listen to around the time you're celebrating Episode 1000.
Interesting that job stacking is the subject of the followup, because I noticed that work was the throughline of your previous discussion. The two of you talked a bit about sex and game, but much more about jobs and income. You know this already, I assume, but I'll say it explicitly: since pussy isn't a big deal once you're actually getting some, teaching Zoomer boys to be agentic and effective in their work and financial lives is the biggest long-term value add that you can give them as a mentor.
I've been thinking about this recently in the context of your piece about the five-to-ten year gap and how young men are wired to learn best from guys slightly older than them. (That piece works well as a standalone essay, glad it's unpaywalled.) It seemed self-evident to me as a teenager in the 90s that work was a coldly transactional arrangement where you gave your time and energy to a hostile entity in exchange for money. I watched my dad devote his life to Megacorp for thirty years at the expense of his relationship with his wife and kids, and I didn't want any part of that. But the adults in my life all told me I was being cynical.
They didn't have any good advice, just Boomer platitudes and credentialist path-dependency. Neither did the 90s neocon right -- they had their own non-actionable platitudes about bootstraps and entrepreneurship. But unfortunately for me, the Gen X left definitely DID have answers.
No generation in human history will ever be as coddled as the Boomers, but the core Gen Xers ten years older than me, who I took as role models, had it easy in their own way. Rents in the big cities were cheap before gentrification, so you could get a low-status but low-stress slacker job, cultivate your favorite subcultural aesthetic, and enjoy the cultural and sexual opportunities of city living without having to run the capitalist rat race. I got to have a little bit of fun in my early 20s, just as this world was vanishing, but by my mid-20s it was gone for good as the economy changed. The guys in that world who had the highest status, and pulled the most tail, were the guys who'd managed to exit the system entirely as working musicians and artists. (There was a time when you could do this without a trust fund.)
But the changing economy put an end to all that and left me scrambling to catch up financially. And a pirate beats a dropout; I wish I'd known at a younger age that you can be hostile to the system and still make money off it if you cultivate your own agency and take a mercenary/piratical attitude towards your employers. My own advice to the younger generation all boils down to "don't do what uncle Torposting Casual did, kids!"
The problem if you live in Europe like myself is that you just can't get away with job stacking. I know a guy who tried this at a previous organisation I worked for and they got rid of him pretty swiftly. Because of the 48 hour working regulation, a company has a 'duty of care' to make sure you're not overworking or they might get in trouble. If you do something like that you usually get found out and dismissed pretty quickly.
What other options would you propose for someone like myself (135 IQ, moderate agreeableness, high openness product owner) for whom job stacking is not a realistic option?
Bruh. I finally finished your LAST interview with Noah Revoy, in short commute chunks over two weeks, and now there's another one? At this rate I'll be caught up with the podcasts I currently want to listen to around the time you're celebrating Episode 1000.
Interesting that job stacking is the subject of the followup, because I noticed that work was the throughline of your previous discussion. The two of you talked a bit about sex and game, but much more about jobs and income. You know this already, I assume, but I'll say it explicitly: since pussy isn't a big deal once you're actually getting some, teaching Zoomer boys to be agentic and effective in their work and financial lives is the biggest long-term value add that you can give them as a mentor.
I've been thinking about this recently in the context of your piece about the five-to-ten year gap and how young men are wired to learn best from guys slightly older than them. (That piece works well as a standalone essay, glad it's unpaywalled.) It seemed self-evident to me as a teenager in the 90s that work was a coldly transactional arrangement where you gave your time and energy to a hostile entity in exchange for money. I watched my dad devote his life to Megacorp for thirty years at the expense of his relationship with his wife and kids, and I didn't want any part of that. But the adults in my life all told me I was being cynical.
They didn't have any good advice, just Boomer platitudes and credentialist path-dependency. Neither did the 90s neocon right -- they had their own non-actionable platitudes about bootstraps and entrepreneurship. But unfortunately for me, the Gen X left definitely DID have answers.
No generation in human history will ever be as coddled as the Boomers, but the core Gen Xers ten years older than me, who I took as role models, had it easy in their own way. Rents in the big cities were cheap before gentrification, so you could get a low-status but low-stress slacker job, cultivate your favorite subcultural aesthetic, and enjoy the cultural and sexual opportunities of city living without having to run the capitalist rat race. I got to have a little bit of fun in my early 20s, just as this world was vanishing, but by my mid-20s it was gone for good as the economy changed. The guys in that world who had the highest status, and pulled the most tail, were the guys who'd managed to exit the system entirely as working musicians and artists. (There was a time when you could do this without a trust fund.)
But the changing economy put an end to all that and left me scrambling to catch up financially. And a pirate beats a dropout; I wish I'd known at a younger age that you can be hostile to the system and still make money off it if you cultivate your own agency and take a mercenary/piratical attitude towards your employers. My own advice to the younger generation all boils down to "don't do what uncle Torposting Casual did, kids!"
I can't even begin to describe how every single aspect of this conversation resonates with me.
Thats fantastic. I hope you had some valuable takeaways from it.
r/overemployed has a lot of tips as well
The problem if you live in Europe like myself is that you just can't get away with job stacking. I know a guy who tried this at a previous organisation I worked for and they got rid of him pretty swiftly. Because of the 48 hour working regulation, a company has a 'duty of care' to make sure you're not overworking or they might get in trouble. If you do something like that you usually get found out and dismissed pretty quickly.
What other options would you propose for someone like myself (135 IQ, moderate agreeableness, high openness product owner) for whom job stacking is not a realistic option?
Highly interested in learning this skill. I want to get rich!
Nice work
Make me rich!!!