4 ms·
I think he just grew up, frankly. I've never had a blog, but I'm fairly similar intellectually and dispositionally to Scott and have followed him a long time an
by nonameiguess 2y ago
I think he just grew up, frankly. I've never had a blog, but I'm fairly similar intellectually and dispositionally to Scott and have followed him a long time and I've seen the same thing happen to me. When I was younger and in school, I'd go deep into rabbit holes and investigate them very thoroughly, mostly dispassionately, trying to have as little bias as possible, maybe come to conclusions, maybe not. But having a full-time job I'm reasonably senior in, a family, and needing to stick to some regular exercise routine to stay functional and healthy as middle age otherwise ravishes me, there is simply not the time or mental energy to do those things any more.
My reponse has been different, though. I just don't care any more. I have had no personal interaction with any person or institution that seemed woke in nearly a decade and I have no opinion about it, probably because I'm not in school and stay off the Internet except for Hacker News every few days. I haven't voted in two decades and avoid culture war nonsense.
But Scott is a terminally online person, has built a brand, and is being paid lots of money by Substack to keep churning out these think pieces. So he has to keep doing it, but he's also a middle-aged man running a private psychiatry practice with a wife and two young kids. There is no way he has the time or mental energy to devote to this stuff that he had 15 years ago. He has accumulated knowledge and wisdom and is still a hell of a writer with a very good understanding of how to present statistics to a lay audience, but he's probably also forever going to be mentally stuck in 2007 when Ron Paul seemed to every professional-managerial class 25 year-old man in America to be the most intellectual honest, exciting thing we'd ever get. He's becoming the poor man's version of Andrew Sullivan or Megan McArdle for the kind of people who only listen to bands that aren't popular.
- sdwr 2y agoSuffering from success, DJ Khaled-style! Better to die a hero...