by David Kordahl
After the first Cub Scouts meeting of the new year, I stood outside the Scout hut chatting with two other dads, both of them doctors. I am also called “doctor” at work, mostly by premed students who are enrolled in their required physics course, but it’s not the same—for many reasons, but only one that I think about.
It was dark outside, and chilly. Shreveport had experienced a week of snow, during which our unprepared city had shut down. We discussed what each of our families had done during the pause. Two of us had stayed home, venturing out only to sled, but the other doctor revealed that he had missed the entire ordeal.
He had been on vacation in Madagascar, after a short stop in Paris. He took out his iPhone and showed us how he and his wife, the surgeon, had posed with the tigers lounging harmlessly on the grounds of their resort.
First, a disclaimer. As a newly tenured professor at a small college, I do fine, but I’m not wealthy. My family’s winter trip had me, my wife, and our three children trekking up to Minnesota in a Toyota minivan. My household income is right around the American median, which makes me something like a global five-percenter. In objective terms, it’s unreasonable to complain about this.
But the doctor’s pictures got me thinking. When I was myself a college student, my mom, like many parents, had hoped for her son to become the right kind of doctor. I steadily refused. I sneered at the premeds, whose intellectual attitudes seemed to me boringly pragmatic. They were the dull drones, focusing on rote memorization and grade-grubbing, while I, dear reader—I was an intellectual.
Of course, one part of “being an intellectual” (and, of course, I would have never put it that way, back when I thought I really had a shot at it) is not to care too much about creature comforts. Consider Paul Erdős, proving theorems out of his suitcase, or Simone Weil, laboring in a factory to understand the working class. A certain level of self-abnegation should be tolerated for a decade or two.
Yet now, as I approach midlife (forty in October), I find myself having built no great theory, having written no great book. I am a respectable member of the local establishment, a reliable component of the academic infrastructure.
And I have to ask: what the fuck am I doing here?
This thought came back to me a few weeks later as I was grading papers in front of the television. (Note: “TV grading” has come up twice before in my 3QD columns, further evidence of my thrilling life.) As I pulled my eyes across lab reports, I listened to Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, one of those documentaries where a Brit comes over to see what the Americans are up to now. The basic structure of the program had Theroux speaking with a series of internet influencers, young men who had cultivated their mostly male audiences with a lumpy mix of redpill philosophy, get-rich-quick investment scams, and the simultaneous censure and promotion of OnlyFans models.
It’s sort of like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, if the hideous men were a little dumber and hated not only women, but also Jews. And maybe “hated” isn’t even the right word. Theroux argues that when these influencers are at their most incendiary (e.g., “I dictate when I want to put dick in you, bitch!” or—less creatively—“Fuck the Jews!”), it may not be out of any firm ideology, but may merely be a strategy to cultivate fans who can be squeezed for cash. The influencers’ attitude seems to be that if young fans pick up bad views from such clout-farming—well, their parents shouldn’t have let them watch.
This made me look up. I had already been thinking about money in terms of one rigorous professional path vs. another, but the story here was quite different.
A refrain echoed by several of the personalities from Inside the Manosphere is that men have no intrinsic value, and that they gain value only by earning and providing—a fairly bleak message, though not an uncommon one. I have to admit, with my own gnawing questions about whether my professional pursuits have been reasonable, I’ve been wondering what advice I would give my son about such matters. (He’s just one year old, and possibly still pliable; my daughters, the Scouts, are older, but it’s hard to imagine them taking my advice.)
Let me come clean about something. Thinking about money this spring hasn’t done me any good. I started out optimistic that I might be paid more elsewhere, and I went so far as to get hired at another institution, only to find out that I would earn exactly my current salary, to within a few hundred bucks a year. The market has been efficient, and I am priced almost exactly at my own true value.
Or am I? I suspect that the redpilled take on me would be damning. I’m 6’2”, reasonably healthy, reasonably smart, and yet here I am at the American median, an underperformer who has squandered my natural gifts on all the wrong things.
So how will I advise my son? The real answer is that I probably won’t. I value the activities I imagine to be my main sources of influence—activities like leading Scouts, doing research, and writing these little essays—but my default assumption is that they aren’t likely to earn me much. Maybe my son will inherit this gray-collared attitude from me, just as I inherited it from my parents.
Even now, as he toddles around the house, I wonder what he will eventually think, watching me grade lab reports. He will grow up in a world shaped by men who believe that the point of life is to win, and he may notice that sometimes I agree with them. He may see me as a cautionary tale. I can see how it looks.
Whether this was virtue or failure, I suppose he’ll eventually get to decide.
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