Living With Catastrophic Innovation

It is not a secret to anyone here — probably — that I’m a fan of classic science fiction and even more so a fan of Robert A. Heinlein. When I read him as a kid, the dates were already a bit impossible, but I used to think maybe we’d catch up in 20 years or so.

… Am I salty we didn’t? Well, somewhat, if with it we could also get his universe, with habitable Mars and Venus. But also, I suspect that his universe would be easier, in many ways, psychologically. Unless of course it’s his universe in Friday, which frankly, we might have missed by a whisker if in fact we did miss it, and thank heavens. Because radical greens forbidding all internal combustion and needing complex security for any decent private home is for the birds.

But the future of his juveniles was, in a way easier. Sure, things would have developed crazy fast, for us to have fully developed cities on the moon by now and — even with habitable planets — functional human colonies on Mars and Venus. (Part of the problem is that our population never exploded anywhere near enough for that.) But it was a future we had a model for and understood. One in which the big interactions stayed more or less intact and the model followed was that of the colonization of the US, particularly the journey westward.

What we got instead —

Yesterday on X I came across what had to be bait — had to be — talking about how girls are not dating and for the boys to be worthy of these girls they had to do all these things.

Half of those things were already crazy in my day. I know because my husband did one of them and freaked me out. He gave me a dozen red roses when we weren’t dating, just for my eighteenth birthday, and I didn’t know how to handle it at all. (I’d convinced myself he didn’t like me and…)

The other half were at best unlikely to work. Honestly, most of what I’ve found works for finding someone these days is either matchmaking by friends and family or knowing someone a looooong time as friends first. Gaming groups seem to be a hive of couple formation.

Of course the comments were also full of the idea that all these women were sleeping with every other man, except our putative pure-hearted hero, and that all women are sluts and don’t want to settle down. Again, I don’t think it’s true. In talking to young women I’m often more startled than not by how INNOCENT they are. They are desperately trying to follow the rules. They do want a husband and kids and are somewhat ashamed of wanting them, but do nonetheless, it’s just they can’t find the road to get there. But even those who have had a complex sexual history are weirdly, heartbreakingly innocent when you least expect it. Like thinking if they just stay another year with their “fiance” of five years who has already fathered three kids with her, he’ll finally trust her enough to marry her.

On the other hand, on the other side, there’s the guys thinking that these girls are in it pour le sport, and just want sex and money, and then relying on that stupid survey and even stupider influencers saying that if you aren’t six feet tall and making six figures don’t call them. I definitely advise not calling anyone who SAYS that, but don’t put their words in the mouths of women who never said it, some of which would do the biblical end times thing “I’ll support myself, just call me by your name and remove me from his oprobium” (I don’t remember the wording, but you get the jist.)

So the comments were stupid too, but reading the post on how to get a girl, reminded me of my parents not able to figure out why I didn’t have a “boyfriend.” Or rather I didn’t KNOW if I had a boyfriend. In their time it was very easy. The boy asked if the girl wanted to court. If the girl said yes, they were courting. If the courting went well, eventually the guy asked to marry. If the girl said yes, there was just time to get everything arranged to get married. That was it. Simple.

In my day we had… ersatz dating. You were dating, because you were seeing each other every weekend, but you had absolutely no idea if you should be exclusive or not. Actually talking about it was the zenith of uncool, and if you asked, he’d probably never call you again. If someone else asked the answer was “We’re just friends.” After some years of these stupid games, everyone assumed you’d get married, so you kind of went along with it, and eventually did, but marriage, when and where I grew up was very discredited. It was after all “just a piece of paper” and didn’t make any difference. And did you really still believe in all that medieval stuff?

In a way I think I married the way I did (reconnected with husband on the phone, wrote and called a lot, but because of the distance, everything had to be super-explicit) because it was easier for my mind. We couldn’t just casually drift along if I had to apply for Visas and come over and I definitely couldn’t say if we didn’t get married in a timely manner. So everything was clear and explicit. As in “If we’re going to continue calling each other all the time, do you mind telling me where this relationship is going?” etc.

I mean, sure, this is worse for me than for the average person, because I don’t pick anything up by context. I kind of need to be told. But honestly, looking at all the women with 5 ‘fiances’ in their past, and at all the men who assume every woman is sleeping with ten guys a week, I don’t think I’m the only one who needs more structure.

And yes, I’m aware that the nuking of the family and the relationships between men and women wasn’t the fault of technological innovation, but the fault of Marxists who broke all the rules, so that everyone is free-forming it, thinking the worst possible of the other and no one knows how to get to the place they’d like to be.

But technological innovation does plug into that too, from easier travel creating families dispersed over hundreds of miles, to the attendant prosperity which allows us to stay “juvenile” much longer than previous generations. I mean, dad didn’t because he was studying, but it was perfectly normal fifty years before I was born to go to work in your early teens. Now we’re prosperous enough and regulated enough (weird, government regulation is not something Marxists ever fight to abolish. Only social norms.) that no one under 18 can be hired without jumping through crazy hoops. And then they have no experience in anything and their start in life is much, much harder than previous generations’.

Again, for the young people reading this: You’re not precisely the lone ranger. My generation by and large started late, and came out of high school into the hangover of the Carter economy.

As that guy on X, my inlaws kept giving my husband and I advice for a vanished world: how to find the job you’d stay in for the rest of your life. When I considered starting a craft business, because my degree had no easy application where I was, my host-mother (the person I lived with as an exchange student. The relationship is closer than it sounds) told me I was better than that. I had a degree. I finally stumbled into a job that fit my degree, but not at the level I should have been, and it soon became evident I’d never get there. (Which is when we made the sane decision that if I was going to be an underpaid secretary but in reality an overworked translator, I might as well try to get published. Which worked. Eventually. Still underpaid, but at least doing something I loved and able to do the housekeeping, since I worked from home and not 16 to 18 hours in an office.) But a lot of people my generation, particularly those with the type of degree I had, literally never made it.

Academics? By the time we came in, someone else had the tenure and we were only 10 years younger. A lot of my peers are still underpaid “lecturers” or contract lecturers. And I mean UNDERPAID. They make less than I did in the years my writing crashed and nothing got published. … A lot of people with humanities degrees became programmers. Heck, for a while there everyone was programing, it seemed. Then it receded and a lot of the next wave got stuck in retail hell. And a lot of us do non-standard things, mostly running small businesses and trying to get by.

How much of this is unchecked immigration and importing a foreign workforce while Americans have to scramble, I don’t know.

But I know that a lot of it is how fast things change and have changed. Most of our friends not only aren’t working at the thing they trained for in college, but they never even started working there. (I worked in the field I trained for for maybe a total two years of a 41 year working life. Eh. I found out I didn’t like it much.)

It’s not even those with humanities degrees. It’s everyone. Including those with highly specific training. The average is a new career every fifteen years, sometimes in fields so different it makes your had sping.

We’re now starting to talk retirement. It’s not real. I mean, I don’t think either of us can “retire” in the traditional sense. For one, we come from looong lived lines. Yeah, perhaps we’ll be the exceptions, but if we’re not, we’re around and probably compus mentis and capable of looking after ourselves (however creakily) for another thirty five years or so. And that’s way too long to take a vacation. For another the money won’t extend and no, neither of us trusts social security. We’re frankly surprised it’s still around. For a third, we’d go insane. My dad’s first retirement lasted six months, and then he went back to work as a contractor, because he was bored. So, it’s not “real” but there’s the idea of “retiring” and working at other stuff. Oh, oh, not me. Don’t panic. This is pretty much my retirement job. No. But Dan being free of the nine-to-whenever (we had dinner two hours ago, it’s eleven at night) is an exciting idea. It would make our lives more flexible. We’ll probably still work too much and eventually go with our hands on the keyboard.

But– what I meant was — we’re kind of contemplating one of those transitions. At our age. When in the past most people were really retiring. That’s the other catastrophic innovation: people living longer. It hits everything from our politics, to our marriages to… well the job market.

If I could convey a thing to those of you who are younger, it’s this: yeah, it’s … very complicated right now. There are no guarantees. But there have been no guarantees, ever, save for one brief shining moment after WWII for Americans, and honestly you don’t want that, because it means the rest of the world is in rubble. But other than that, the times and places when there were “guaranteed jobs for life” and you could work just one thing and be secure came with ideas of vassalage and patronage, of caste and rigid social structures.

And I don’t mean rules for dating. I mean “you’ll be a tailor, because your father was a tailor, and we don’t care you hate sewing.” I mean “who do you think you are to write poetry, when your father is a farmer.” This is not natural in America, but it is in Europe, and it was secure. And strangling.

So, you’re going to have many spicy times in your life, when one job disappears, and you don’t know what comes next.

I’m not going to give you the boomer “if you eat at home and never take an uber ride, you’ll have three million in your retirement account by the time you’re my age.” That’s not true. you know that’s not true. Or at least it was never true for us, and I doubt it is for anyone else.

And I’m not going to tell you if you work hard and do the right thing you’ll never go hungry. You will. You’ll also scare yourself to death at times. (A handful of flour, a mushroom and an egg in the fridge. And two days till paycheck.) And I’m not going to tell you to deny yourself all luxuries, and stick to a strict budget. My parents managed that for a while, but I’ll say their temptations were smaller, too. If you try to live by denying yourself everything fun, at some point you’ll lose your mind and blow your entire pay check on lottery tickets, or lucky charms cereal or a glorious outfit you’ll never have a chance to wear anywhere. In fact, I’m going to pass on Robert A. Heinlein’s dictum because it worked for us: when things are very tight, budget luxuries FIRST. Now depending on how tight things are, the luxuries change. If you’re medium tight, then a date night a week to somewhere mid-price is fine. But if you’re really on the edge of ruin… well, we’ll just say when Village Inn had free Pie on Wednesdays (I THINK) we would go and have a glass of milk each, and a slice of free pie, and it was the nicest thing EVER.

What I’m going to say is the way there is a mess, but some of the old things still work. You’ll be better off if you get married and stay married. I suspect this is because you don’t face those sudden upheavals alone, and two people climbing up the ice wall by their bleeding fingernails can at least help each other. Have kids, if you can. Look, it gives you something to fight for. Yeah, it will bring you to times of one egg, a handful of flour and a mushroom, but note that happened only once. Because you scramble harder when it’s not just for you. And besides, it truly is the best thing you’ll ever do. (Trust me.)

Scramble. Scramble really hard. Yes, you’ll find yourself in the outer darkness at times, but if you scramble like hell, instead of laying down and dying, something eventually gives.

And on the catastrophic innovation thing? be flexible. I don’t know how to tell you HOW to be flexible. We’re still coping with this ourselves, every day, but just be flexible. Okay, so this thing you’ve done for fifteen years is gone. What can you do with what you learned?

In fact, if you’re young enough this matters: right now I don’t advise going to college. Look, it’s a temporary thing. Some form of “formation” will come back. but right now it would be expensive and stupid. But don’t wed yourself to a manual skilled profession either. Sure, sure, we have a shortage (kind of. That too has a lot of competition from “immigrants”.) and it pays well, and… but I hate the idea that you’re going to confine yourself to manual labor for the rest of your life whether you want to or not.

Perhaps society is incapable of anything but rigid prescription “EVERYONE TO COLLEGE” then “EVERYONE TO TRADE SCHOOL.” Then–

I’m going to tell you, yeah, learn what you have to to earn enough to support yourself and the family you’ll hopefully have. But stay flexible. Keep learning. In your trade? Maybe, or in something else.

The technology that is destroying established fields is creating other fields. Read widely enough to be aware of what those are and find a path. Heck, pave one if you have to.

And if colleges come back in some usable form, and going to one is germane to what you want to do, do that too.

Just don’t think you’re going to do one thing for the rest of your life. Don’t marry yourself to that. it will leave you broken when it fails, and it’s not worth it.

Yeah, I’ve had mostly ONE career but it sure doesn’t feel like it. And trying to wed myself for ten years to one part of it almost killed me when that failed. Don’t do that. Stay flexible.

Stay ready to jump.

Remember when the Titanic sank, one of the survivors was floating on the grand piano. There’s always a grand piano. (Or the cook who was so drunk he didn’t get hypothermia.)

Most of all — look, I remember being young. It was just yesterday. Everything feels so urgent. Every defeat is crushing. Every victory is forever. A year short on funds is the end of the world. A relationship that failed and you’re going to be alone forever.

It’s not like that. The future is a very long time. And people are living longer all the time. And in that time there’s space for a lot of reverses of future.

If you want rules: Deal plainly; work honestly; learn as much as you can when and where you can; be ready to decamp at the change of a circumstance and find another job, another place; and keep at it. Don’t give up. The future is a very long time, and it contains good times as well as bad.

When your heart breaks, make a new heart out of your gut, and go on.

Yes, you live in confusing times. Yes, things are screwed up. But before you say my generation screwed it up, ask yourself how much control you have over the screwedness of the world for the next generation. You don’t. It’s a vast, chaotic system. Blaming others is satisfying but futile. And loses you people who might lend a hand.

Look we lived in confusing times too, every generation does. Maybe not times that change as fast. But that’s both good and bad. There’s hope — and wealth — in change.

So, on the count of three, step off the sinking ship and onto the grand piano. It’s an adventure. And if you don’t give up, you won’t sink.

Look at it as a game. Don’t let the future defeat you.