Defective Altruist

First of all I’m no expert on economics, but I always end up at logical paradoxes within capitalism. When you do proofs in mathematics, everything can be derived from axioms and the logical conclusions arrive at full your heart with joy, and you can hold those truths close to your heart knowing they can be translated a million ways and still hold their cogency.

The first problem I have is the inherent disconnect with profit existing at all. The theory behind capitalism is that rational consumers will choose the cheaper option between two identical products. Thus assuming infinite competition, a company that generates profit would get outcompeted by an identical company that simply lowers prices instead of extracting that profit. Instead we see profit margins increase decade by decade, markets consolidate into oligopolies, and less and less competition.

How can we point to a system that inherently trends to consolidation and market concentration and claim that capitalism drives innovation through competition. I think I need to read more books on economics honestly…

My motivation for learning languages is bad. I have unshakable yearning for understanding humanity and ever person that has ever lived. To this end when I was rather young I told myself I should learn the most useful languages to be able to communicate and the understand all the world, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic. The problem is that I’ve been stuck on Spanish as my first foreign language for about 10 years, and honestly I’ve probably regressed after leaving school.

In order to learn a language (in the modern way), you should do both a lot of deliberate practice accompanied with many many hours of passive exposure to the language. The problem I stumble into is that I’m just not particularly interested in much Spanish-speaking TV or youtube. The reason is obvious, which is that I don’t really have a particular interest in the language outside of the utilistic aspect, which is not nearly enough motivation to power through the countless hours necessary to approach being conversational.

There is alternative ways to fix this problem, which is simply drop yourself in a place where you’re forced to use Spanish to communicate, but that requires a large commitment. A more practical answer is to push myself a little harder to stop ignoring the cultural output of nearly half a billion people and truly find something I’m interested in.

Oh I and I’ve never kept it as a consistent habit in the first place. Time to roll the boulder up the hill again I guess.

We live in an age of infinite opportunity to share yourself. The primary method people have of interacting with the world in 2025 is to produce, consume and distribute “content”, which is a vague enough to describe literally anything. And yet I’ve always felt a discomfort in the idea of sharing myself over the internet. I’ve been a terminally online user of the internet since the ripe age of 12, but I have spent 99.99% of that lurking. Maybe it’s because of early indoctrination to not reveal you’re a kid on the internet, but more likely it comes from both laziness and and a lack importance placed on what I had to say.

It’s somewhat self-aware to realize as a kid that you don’t know much about the world, but you grow up and realize everyone’s just pissing their thoughts and identities everywhere. The internet town square is polluted with bot armies, the beautiful uniqueness of strange humans and everything in between.

This leads to the other conclusion, which is that even if you were to make something share your thoughts, you’re screaming into the void hoping somehow people will be spit back out.

In reality, maybe you’re just making “content” to share with your friends and family. The real promise of the internet though in my mind is that you should be able to find like-minded individuals through it. The promise of a recommendation algorithm is that it will find the people most likely to enjoy the thing you made, but it seems to work in a way that emphasizes parasocial relationships rather than facilitating social life between equals.

Anyways I’m hoping I’ll get better at sharing myself and meet cool people along the way.

I often wonder what my future wife is doing right now. The person who I will entwine my fate with is living a life somewhere, completely unaware of my endless curiosity about her. When I bring this up to my guy friends, they respond that she’s probably getting railed by some other dude. Thanks guys. Real helpful.

I imagine the feeling of her hugging me from behind, the moment where the weight of a quarter of a century of loneliness finally billows out of me. I imagine her head resting in my lap as her eyes grow heavy, and I think at least for a moment I’ve reached the eye of the storm. I imagine touching my forehead against hers, knowing that there once existed someone that understood me better than I understood myself. I imagine holding her, hiding the outside world from her view.

It feels as though those of us that have lived their lives relatively alone live across a canyon from those who have spent most of their time in one relationship or another. Most of us one day jump across that gap, to stay on the other side at least for a little while. Every day I wake up, hoping this is the day where I can find my fellow traveller. Maybe she’s been there before and knows the way. Maybe she’s never been close.

Sometimes I find myself chasing false images of the truth. I don’t know where to look for the real thing, so I heed advice from friends and foe. I carve my body in a naive emulation of a Greek statue. I enter into portals of the dating marketplace, saying things that don’t sound like me, obsessing over a presentation that no one looks at. I try older methods, but she’s definitely not going to be there. I don’t even know why I’m there. Sometimes I tell myself that desire is the root of all suffering, but I fail to unclench my tight grip.

I have infinite flaws. I’ve hacked away at them over time, while trying to preserve their beauty all the same. An impossibly hard dance that we all are forced to perform. I’d like to hold you still for a moment, to return the innocence of childhood expression for a single person who existed for a sliver of time on this tiny dot in the vast universe.

The main goal of many startup founders is to build a product that could vaguely threaten one the major tech companies enough to be bought by them. This is termed a “successful” exit. Everyone gets their bag, and any possibility for technological change is crushed. When people say there is innovation under capitalism, this is what they mean. A large company becomes a larger and larger behemoth constantly swallowing up even the smallest prey. If we’re even luckier, it might merge with another sprawling corporate entity, creating a shiny new conglomerate.

In the early to mid aughts, graduates from prestigious institutions were shoveled out to consulting and finance in droves. Supposedly intelligent people were encouraged to abandon any pursuit of pushing the human project forward, in favor amassing greater amounts of capital for the already wealthy. As the decades have rolled by, the people who plan their life from the age of 10 have shifted their goals from finance to technology. The unambitious set their sights for a spot at Google or Facebook, knowing that they will be satisfied with their life’s work being a minor contribution to one of their thousands of products. The more cunning realize they can squeeze these companies for more on the outside, rather than from within. Neither profess their love of the computer, for they never had any.

Advice columns used to be part of the quintessential newspaper experience. Along with comic strips and crosswords, advice columns are low cost media that draw people in and help pay for the actual loss-leading journalism. As the internet was born, people went from calling into radio stations and writing into newspaper outlets to submitting their life stories online. With the death of the phrase “you’re on the air”, came niche forums where you can ask advice on your particular hobby or lifestyle, which could never be asked to your local radio station or newspaper. Of course forums died as well (in the West), as the centralized social media conquered the forum model of the early 2000s.

The result of these hyper-niche communities is that people can identify themselves by a singular aspect of their personality, and find like-minded peers who share in their passion. This can lead to extremely beneficial outcomes, take the scenario where someone teaches themselves car repair directly from auto maintenance forums, and creates a livelihood from that. Truly a moment where the internet has democratized education as promised. Though these forums lack the hilarity of the Magliozzi brothers in “Car Talk”, their crowdsourcing nature means even the most obscure carburetor issues will be covered in great detail. On the other hand, internet forums also serve as a vehicle to reinforce negative self-beliefs to the extreme. The rise of the internet-dubbed “gender wars” are specifically engendered by forums that convince users that they don’t need the other gender, and provide strategies for manipulating the opposite kind. A unsuspecting person who is seeking advice on dressing a little bit better can quickly fall down the rabbit hole of insular and toxic beliefs.

If a collection of internet strangers aren’t to always be trusted, and newspaper advice columns are flashes from a bygone era, than who can we go to for advice? Maybe the answer is not in a collective echo chamber, but in reputable person that is approved of by many people. In walks the aptly named influencer. A quick search on YouTube can lead you to an immensely popular and credentialed plastic surgeon, who will tell you exactly how a surgery will work and the possible outcomes. The consumer is more informed, and the surgeon gets to advertise that their clinic does things right. Of course, corporations did not take long to notice the rise of the influencer. If someone is trusted by a following of ardent fans, renting their reputation is the easiest way to produce guaranteed sales.

Suddenly one must weigh the financial incentives that are at play with free advice. An influencer who has had a positive experience with therapy will justify that a sponsorship promoting online therapy is a win-win as it aligns with their beliefs. But in doing so they may over-endorse the positive aspects of therapy and the specific online provider. They are being actively discouraged from independently verifying the actual effectiveness of both and presenting a balanced perspective due to monetary reward.

Recently a new challenger has appeared that wants you to ask it for advice. An unbiased source of truth with a slightly unfortunate habit of hallucination. Every investor in Silicon Valley is pumping every last dollar they have into language models that can spit out amalgamations of all the answers us humans have been posting to the internet for free. These investors of course want to reap significant returns off of the collective human knowledge that has been deposited on the vast plains of the internet. If the prophecies of people eventually completely relying ai assistants ring true, what happens when people stop posting their questions and answers on forums? Will these bots cease to function, or are they actually able to deduce novel answers from a set of solved principles the way a human does?

I was a happy child. I often daydream about when I will have kids and providing them a childhood filled with joy, excitement and curiosity. This isn’t some exercise in self-adulation, but an sincere expression of how much value I place into bringing other people into this world. Maybe I sound foolishly optimistic, the world is going to shit, why would you want someone to experience the ills of late stage capitalism they say. No one can be certain how the future will unfold, but I liken my unwavering optimism to the mindset of an athlete.

Every (good) professional athlete believes he is touched by god himself to be the best player of their sport. If you ever competed in anything, you know you have to believe you’re the best and that you’re going to win. Even humanity is a 100:1 underdog to the threats that loom over us, the collective has to believe another world is possible and follow through by continuing the human project.

Before I sound like one of those pro-natalist freaks that wants to have as many kids as possible, I find that equally irresponsible as how could they possibly provide adequate bonding time, nurture and education with several kids. Well they don’t, they simply outsource that labor. Take the situation where couples (or their companies) will pay a much poorer woman to bear their child, a complete commodification of the body. Once the baby has born it passes from the surrogate to a nanny, who feeds the physical and emotional needs of the newborn. This cycle is continued throughout childhood and this person is thus denied one of the most important human connections not out of the unfortunate circumstances of life, but rather the capitalistic excess that incentivizes careers before child-raising.

Every month, headlines pour in about South Korea’s declining birth rate and it’s governments hopelessness with dealing with it (it’s currently 0.72). When the underpinning of any modern economy is the prophecy of endless growth, the natural inversion of the demographic dividend is a fear shared by every OECD country. One solution is to allow for immigration, but the incredibly homogenized societies of East Asia and Europe fail both politically and socially to make immigrants feel belonging to that country. Another solution is to simply be okay with degrowth. Even if we can expand throughout the universe for eons as techno-optimists believe, entropy is irreversible and there is an inevitable point where we must accept finitude.

Its easy to point to the reasons why people aren’t having kids, and remark if that we solve them then birth rates will come back. Having kids is incredibly expensive, and governments like Hungary will spend 4% of their GDP incentivizing people to have kids. More women in the workplace leads to more woman not wanting to stymy their successful careers by the proven cost of leaving the workforce for raising a child. Even if a couple wants to have a child, in overworked countries like Japan or Korea they may not have the time or resources. It takes a village to raise a child, and there are no longer any villages. We live farther from our relatives and family, and so the only option to shift the responsibility of child-rearing is to daycares and schools (if you’re wealthy enough). Many a teacher today will complain that they simultaneously raise a child while trying to educate them.

Nowadays, who actually gets to raise their own child? It’s certainly not the financial elite, who extricate themselves from any responsibility for their children. It’s not the destitute, who have to work multiple jobs in order to simply provide for their families. It’s not the middle class, who are having fewer and fewer kids. There might be incredible couples out there that can balance the pressures of life while also spending adequate time bonding with their children, but that seems to be a smaller and smaller proportion of the population.