Although it is both.
Hmmmm… So, confronted with a harsh and bitter world that demands a constant, all-consuming drive to complete whatever task you’ve been handed regardless of cost to personal life, the logical course of action is complete submission and perpetuation?
If that counts as true, put me down in the falsehood camp.
It’s aimed at a demographic that’s actually much, much smaller than assumed: the pathetic 20-something man-child.
In real life, people in their twenties have worked at shitty McJobs or, if in college, chattel interships, and have long since realized that their worth to others is a very narrow point. Twenties? Hell, by age sixteen all guys know the score on who gets to mate and who only runs at the back of the pack with lowered tails. *“You have to stand on a hill with your mouth hanging open for a long, long time before a roast duck will fly into it.” * Same goes for girlfriends, too. We didn’t need to log onto Cracked to learn that.
I also think it’s telling that while Mr. Wong castigates the young males for their sense of entiltement, all he expects of the young woman barrista is that she use moisturizer. As the father of a daughter who works full time while carrying a classload enough to qualify as a full-time student, I testify that there’s more required there than Maybeline can supply.
Two really significant points he misses:
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For the articles target demographic “external worth” will always be reduced to money. Your worth to society is an ambiguous and amorphous quality, so to simplify things it will always boil down to money. For respect above an beyond money, like big-shot executives, doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc., you won’t get there while still in your twenties.
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You’re still going to need unsupportable self-esteem to get through this. Women will dump you, the economy will tank and your “worth to society” will evaporate. If you don’t make yourself the main character of the story here, but just accept whatever marginal role you’re offered, you are toast. At the end of the shittiest day in his life, who’s mouth is the gun barrel more likely to go into: The guy who reasures himself he’s still a good person, or the guy who wails “I didn’t make commission! I didn’t even cover my nut!”
Or on the other hand, when confronted with a harsh and bitter world that only cares about your actions, you can either do some actions or sit back and whine about it.
Yeah, it’s not a bad little article and I wish I head read it when I was a twenty something slacker.
Me too. Even now, it had quite an impact.
Yeah, I found myself thinking about the article and then coming back to this thread. I like that he made a particular effort to make it clear that he’s talking about making a contribution, not necessarily making money. Instead of saying you are your job, he could have said you are what you do, not what you imagine yourself doing. I also thought it was the best deconstruction of the ‘nice guy’ meme, I’ve read.
I could see it really hitting a little too close to home, it probably would have pissed 20 year old me off, to no end.
I thought it was great. Ultimately, it boils down to “The World Owes You Nothing”, a lesson that everyone needs to learn, and the sooner the better.
Meh. I’d say the article boils down to “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated,” or rather, “You should assimilate yourself to save us the trouble.”
Now while it’s true that we all have to pay our dues, it’s not necessarily the case that doing so makes us better people or makes us happy, which are the rationales that the article offers for assimilating yourself. It’s simple expedience.
How is it suggesting you assimilate yourself? Unless you mean “getting off your ass” - it’s saying you can’t just say you’re a writer, you have to actually write something. I really liked how it talked about how you do things because you are a thing (you volunteer because you are a nice person, you become a firefighter because you’re brave, etc.) but you have to actually do something for anybody to give a shit. Which is absolutely true. People know you’re a kind person because you help them out when they need it, not because you stand around being kind.
Yeah, I think you could just as easily say the article says “get off your ass and avoid assimilation.”
I found it mostly irrelevant. Some of it is just plain obvious. Some of it seems like rah-rah masturbatory yuppie chest-thumping. I don’t even agree #1 is true - “Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement”. Bullshit. Depends if you’re like that - not everybody is.
Agreed. I’m 29, and I’ve understood the points in the article for a while - but it still has an impact to read them baldly stated. It’s easy enough to forget why entering a photography contest, or applying for a new and challenging job, or hitting the comedy open-mic, are worth doing - and the answer Wong would give is that, well, you’re doing something. And if it sucks, at least there was a chance it would be good.
Having read a few of Wong’s articles on Cracked, I notice that he’s fond of hyperbole. My guess is that he’d respond to your criticism with something along the lines of:
“Sure, that’s true; the only thing you can say about everybody with certainty is that we’re all mammals, and that might not even be true once the Lizard People invasion gets rolling. But if I say ‘Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement’, you might at least look inside yourself and ask if that’s what you’re doing. For a lot of people, the answer will be ‘oh crap,’ and that bit of hyperbole will have been valuable for them. I’m a comedy writer, not a documentarian - if I need to stretch the facts to make an important point just to get a laugh, I’ll go for it. And if that point might actually help people? Fuck yes, I’ll shout from the rooftops that five plus five is twenty-seven if that makes a difference.”
Didn’t Bruce Wayne give the same message in Batman Begins:
“It doesn’t matter who you are underneath. It’s what you do that defines you.”
The odds are even more stacked against us than he lets on in the article.
I mean, you can actually get your ass off the couch, learn to do things other people value, and do them well for decades… but if you get caught buggering a goat just once, your rep is tarnished for life.
Oh good, someone cross-posted this. I had a pretty strong reaction to it and felt compelled to comment, but I make it a rule to stay away from Comments sections, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it here. Fair warning: if you don’t like pseudo-philosophical ranting, please proceed to the next post.
This article assumes that everyone is a self-centered pragmatist asshole, concerned with others only to the extent of what they can provide. That isn’t true, but it’s close enough to it to make most of the points in the article relevant, at least with regard to winning the approval of the majority of random strangers.
Where it fails is in the overall message — following the writer’s advice will in no way “make you a better person,” it will make you a person more highly regarded by the pragmatist assholes that comprise much of society. That might make you a happier person, but happier isn’t the same thing as better…and even at that, I’d argue that it would only bring happiness if you personally really rather suck.
A true article on becoming a better person would include many of the same observations, but with a totally different focus: encouraging the reader to hone their own introspective powers to ensure that they aren’t the sort of person only interested in others for personal gain or amusement. Instead of teaching how to elevate oneself in the perceptions of selfish shitsacks, it would teach active recognition of one’s own shitsacktic tendencies, and promote the idea of treating people as people — forming relationships with others for the intellectual and emotional value of personal social connections, rather than what they’ve done for you lately. (Granted, such an article probably wouldn’t get many hits on a humor blog, but it also wouldn’t have pissed me off, so there you go.)
I’d elaborate on the problems with the idea that conformity for conformity’s sake makes one “a better person,” but I think I’ve done about enough of that for one MPSIMS post, so I’ll finish this up a bit more concisely: fuck that noise.
I liked the article. While presumably it’s aimed at the magazine’s primary readership, it’s an appropriate message for everyone.
There is one point he should have emphasized, though. Producing stuff helps you earn the respect of others, but most importantly, it helps you respect yourself. Living your life solely as a passive consumer of other peoples’ creations leaves you with very little to take pride in, which can easily make you vulnerable to feeling jealous of others and insecure. These are Nice Guy feelings.
I think there’s a whole lot of women who could stand to hear this message, by the way. Not just man-child men.
That video on the second page is one the most awesome videos ever.
I don’t know him, so I’ll take your word for it, but it’s impossible for him to be wrong with an approach like that - but that also means he’s never profoundly right.