I love my parents and I think they did a very good job raising me, especially in comparison with my cousins and some of my childhood peers, who were spoiled rotten and remain rotten as young adults.
But one of the things my parents did that fucked me up for life is making me have a job all the time from when I was of legal age to work (and even before) in high school. It started in the summer after ninth grade: my father got me to work part-time in the mailroom beneath his office. It was easy, simple work and the idea was that it would instill in me a good, healthy work ethic. It did, and I also earned some pocket money, though at 15 years old and without a social life to speak of, I had no opportunity to spend it.
Then after I turned 16, they made me apply for jobs in restaurants. I got hired in a crappy sub shop / ice cream parlor and worked there for about half a year – in the evenings after school and full-time during the summer. I was actually the last person hired before the summer, which meant I was the low man there and did all the lousy, crap jobs – washing dishes, washing floors, washing the bathrooms, washing the equipment, washing the windows – and if I ever managed to finish all those things in a shift, the dishes would be piled up and waiting for me all over again. This job was also for minimum wage, which at the time meant I was taking home a cool $4.85/hour before taxes.
In my junior year of high school, I had a pretty cool after-school job that I’d rather not discuss except to note that, in the late 1990s, I already knew all about a guy named Osama Bin Laden, who’d come to the attention of most Americans a few years later.
Then in my senior year of high school, I had to get more hours, so I switched to a job at an insurance company, where I was earning a pretty impressive $7.50/hour before taxes. Also, it was right next to my school, so I didn’t have to pay to commute to it. Unfortunately, being next to the school meant that every day at 2:30 as I trudged across the high school parking lot toward my dreary insurance company job, I’d pass groups of my friends who were, naturally, chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and shooting some b-ball outside of the school (by that time I was popular and had a great social life, so I really felt it). And then for the next few hours, I’d file papers for the agents and collect and distribute all the company’s mail, while staring out the insurance company’s windows at my friends while they had fun. It was miserable.
That summer I kept the insurance company job part-time and also got an additional part-time job as a research assistant that I can’t really go into except to note that I have seen archival Holocaust information that would blow you away if you – as a person who knows a bit about the Holocaust – would also see it. But you won’t.
I’ll not make the whole account my various college jobs so tedious; suffice it to say that I worked all through college.
Suffice it also to say that almost none of my friends had jobs during high school and very few did during college or in the summers. They also all got cars from their parents (I didn’t), which was the big thing that everyone requested, demanded or expected. Why did my parents make me work? It wasn’t because we needed the money. Actually, if I had to guess, I’d say my parents earned just about the same amount as most of my friends’ parents. Making me work was all about giving me a lesson. And all through this period of my life, I appreciated that lesson. I didn’t try to make a point of it with my friends, but I also didn’t ever stop it from becoming a point that I couldn’t always go out because I was working, that I didn’t always have money to spend because I was working for it, that internships and things of the sort were elusive to me because I had to work at paying jobs.
Based on Mencius Moldbug’s caste system, I’d say that my family straddled the border between lower Brahmin and higher Vaisya. My father’s background was definitely Vaisya and my mother’s family was both closer to Brahmin than my father’s and continuing to move closer for at least a century, but the decisions my parents each made between roughly 1975 and 1985 – their careers, where they lived, their aesthetic tastes in art, music, television, their hobbies and lots of other things – were all much more Brahmin.
But sending me to work was a very Vaisya decision and in the decade and a half since then, I’ve not really recovered from it. At all of these roughly dozen after-school, part-time and summer jobs, I was always the low man in the office, or at least on the team. I got used to it – being diffident and quiet, taking orders and not giving them, not feeling in control of my present and future in the company. Because of being trained over time to feel this way, I have no ability at all to manage other people. I can’t really think strategically for the company. I’m pretty good at working independently (years in a mailroom will do this) but I’m not good at all at figuring out what needs to be done without instruction. I don’t adjust well to change in an office setting. What it all boils down to is that I have no sense of entitlement and this ruined my chance of becoming a Brahmin through success at work.
Fortunately I have some skills and I am able to support myself by working at home in my own profession, for myself and without a boss telling me what to do. But this isn’t ideal for me.
Brahmin parents who come from Vaisya backgrounds should think long and hard before doing something silly and stupid like sending their children to work. Doing so will likely result in instilling Vaisya values in those children. One of my younger brothers didn’t have to do after-school jobs like I had to do. Instead he got internships that not only didn’t pay, but actually cost money, and now he’s an engineer who’s working on a Phd and has visited about 15 countries in Asia. He also used his good Brahmin connections to get a very high-paying job as a government contractor, which he used to pay off his student debt. Wouldn’t you rather have a son like that than a son who might make some money but will never function well in an office?
If you have kids, be smart with them. Don’t send them to work. Get them good internships and lots of connections so they can make money effortlessly after finishing their advanced degrees.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
The advice given in this post is highly dependent on your particular circumstances and personality.
The title ought to be “Don’t Send Your Extroverted Yet Intelligent and Disciplined, Potentially Social Climbing Children to Work”.
How about, don’t send people to work period. Send robots… Come on, it is the 21st century, can we please all stop slaving our lives away creating junk?
>But sending me to work was a very Vaisya decision and in the decade and a half since then, I’ve not really recovered from it. At all of these roughly dozen after-school, part-time and summer jobs, I was always the low man in the office, or at least on the team. I got used to it – being diffident and quiet, taking orders and not giving them, not feeling in control of my present and future in the company. Because of being trained over time to feel this way, I have no ability at all to manage other people. I can’t really think strategically for the company. I’m pretty good at working independently (years in a mailroom will do this) but I’m not good at all at figuring out what needs to be done without instruction. I don’t adjust well to change in an office setting.
All that is stuff you would have learned from the military, if you wanted to.
>What it all boils down to is that I have no sense of entitlement and this ruined my chance of becoming a Brahmin through success at work.
What it boils down to is that you’re not a natural leader and have not developed your leadership abilities, your sense of initiative, responsibility, etc. What you’re talking about would have given you a sense of entitlement, but that doesn’t equate to leadership. Being a fan of Moldbug, you may have read Carlyle, who discusses this repeatedly-sham-kings vs. real kings and all that. Being a pampered Brahmin baby may have helped make you a sham king, but only God can give you the potential to become a real king, and only you can develop it-or not. But there’s more nobility in being a follower good at his job than in being a sham leader.
The advice given in this post is highly dependent on your particular circumstances and personality.
The title ought to be “Don’t Send Your Extroverted Yet Intelligent and Disciplined, Potentially Social Climbing Children to Work”.
@IHTG the advice applies to any parents who want the best for their children. I’m of course presuming agreement with Moldbug’s caste analyses, that the Brahmin caste provides today’s ruling class and that it’s “best” or “better” for a child to grow up and enter this caste than to enter any other caste. For families that need the money a working teenager can contribute, they should of course disregard this kind of advice. Other families wouldn’t mind having their children grow up to be Vaisyas or Dalits, or would even prefer it. I’d like to know what’s going on in their minds.
How about, don’t send people to work period. Send robots… Come on, it is the 21st century, can we please all stop slaving our lives away creating junk?
@Xamuel Our civilization is organized around work. Some Moldbuggian castes have a healthy disrespect for productive labor, but the Brahmins and Vaisyas both take work very, very seriously (though they have very, very different conceptions of it and of its importance). As long as Brahmins and Vaisyas are in a position of numerical superiority and/or influence, the question, What do you do? will always be important and will always mean, What do you do for money?
All that is stuff you would have learned from the military, if you wanted to.
@B sometimes it takes more than wanting to. I was kept out of military service by various medical problems. Some time I’ll write about that.
What it boils down to is that you’re not a natural leader and have not developed your leadership abilities, your sense of initiative, responsibility, etc. What you’re talking about would have given you a sense of entitlement, but that doesn’t equate to leadership.
Being a natural leader and developing leadership abilities / sense of initiative / responsibility should be mutually exclusive, right? A natural leader has those qualities and doesn’t need to develop them. Natural leaders will succeed at almost anything they do. I’m not worried about them. The other avenue to success in our modern age is to go about one’s life with exactly the right sense of entitlement. It used to be that hard work and ingenuity were rewarded after being a member of a “good family,” but now there are no more good families as the Optimate caste disintegrated.
You’re quite mistaken. People are born with varying degrees of leadership POTENTIAL. Just as nobody is born an Olympic athlete but rather is born with varying physical predispositions, and then develops them to varying degrees through constant purposeful effort and dedication. Your abilities as a leader in large part rely on wisdom, will and empathy. All these things take a long time to develop at best, and most people end up lacking them in various proportions.
Sorry about the medical stuff. Fortunately, God gives us an almost infinite array of paths to better ourselves in the direction we choose. Childhood work is not a roadblock on any of these: Ben Franklin started working as a printer at age 7, and was eventually able to persuade France to go to war against Britain for us. In other words, he led a nation.
If you have kids, be smart with them. Don’t send them to work. Get them good internships and lots of connections so they can make money effortlessly after finishing their advanced degrees.
…
Other families wouldn’t mind having their children grow up to be Vaisyas or Dalits, or would even prefer it. I’d like to know what’s going on in their minds.
Well, let’s set aside the intelligence requirement. Obviously a major dummy can’t become a Brahmin.
Perhaps their children are not extroverted. In that case, they wouldn’t be able to successfully make and exploit “connections”.
Perhaps their children are undisciplined goofballs. In that case, they would not leverage their “connections” towards anything useful or profitable – they wouldn’t really want to.
Putting these types of children in a serious, goal-oriented work environment can be highly beneficial to their development. Maybe they won’t become Brahmins, but then, maybe they were never really up to it.
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