The Great Trip
thought digest, 11.19.2025
Hello Deeists,
I’m going to be honest, I’m still not feeling the newsletter churn this week.
There’s plenty to say, of course.
I’ve found it unbelievably charming how people are just plainly delighting in the Nuzzi news. I’ve only seen one overwrought essay framing it as indicative of social decay and fascism or whatever. It’s mostly people are just gossiping. Real, honest-to-god GOSSIP. And thank god for that! I love a good scandal, and both politics and journalism have always done such a great job at giving them to the American public. I mean it. I love it.
I don’t think it means anything other than what it means: the lady wants to fuck and she has a type and like so many people before her, shat where she ate.
The other thing on my mind—albeit a week or two late—is a question: Why does anti-woke discourse—which, yes, I know I’m an active and enthusiastic participant in—tend to blame feminism more readily than the New Age currents that have been filtering into workplaces since the sixties?
Where is the Helen Andrews polemic on, oh, I don’t know, Landmark? I’m not claiming that New Thought or New Age spirituality is the primary engine of social change, only that, as my friend
recently wrote, these totalizing theories are always insufficient.There is no grand theory of everything!
The whole “Great Feminization” conversation really underscored for me that I’m in this weird Hanania–like1 position lately where, thanks to my obvious and crippling decades-long addiction to the internet—and specifically to Twitter—I’ve absorbed so much online right-wing discourse that I’ve nearly looped back into reactive wokeness.2
With the exception of the Nuzzi stuff, I read these back and forths, and I just feel this insatiable drive to disagree.
Here’s another one that triggers me. The term striver.
“Striver” gets thrown around to mean… what, exactly? An insincere grade grubber? A hyper-competitive résumé builder? Usually the paradigmatic striver is Ivy-educated, works in consulting or flounders in politics, and does everything “right,” as far as I can gather from people arguing about them.
One of my more controversial takes after being exposed to these conversations was that many of the people (in my opinion, resentfully) counter-signaling “striving” didn’t fail because of their identity—even if the obstacles they highlight as having theoretically prevented their success are real.
They failed because they were always going to fail!
Admission to an Ivy League school is still a strong signal, even now. Discipline and rule-following are valuable, and so is actually excelling on tests. The people who end up in these places typically go on to succeed in real, measurable ways — not like the “I can paint it myself” know-nothings who bitch from their digital perches. Credentials matter. They’re not the only signal, sure, but like working at a FAANG company, they’re a reliable one. The reason success stories who don’t have credentials are so impressive are because we know, deep down, that they matter. The exception proves the rule.
What the whole striver discourse really reveals is that many of its loudest proponents have never set foot in an elite institution. More than that, they’ve never been anywhere near the environments that prepare people for elite institutions. They don’t know the norms. They don’t know the expectations. Successful institutions run on a large cohort of competent, conscientious worker bees, and the genuinely rare talents (because all talent is rare) flourish because those structures exist.
Of course, there are also different kinds of credentials — plenty of Plan Bs: other prestigious universities like UChicago or Swarthmore, competitive internships, apprenticeships, research gigs, even volunteer opportunities. There’s an entire ecosystem of opportunities that most of the online commentariat — yes, again, I know that’s my gay ass — seems blissfully unaware of.
What especially pisses me the fuck off is that in the next breath, these same people go, “Why aren’t we producing great scientists anymore?” “Why aren’t we producing great ____?” as though the problem is too many strivers.
Bitch, what? We need MORE strivers!
Strivers do the reading, and they even comprehend it. The real issue is that baseline standards have eroded across the board. K–12 prep is weaker, coursework is softer, and “everyone should apply everywhere” has flooded admissions offices with wildly uneven applications. When you hear stories that seem to suggest it was “easier” to get into, say, Harvard 60 or 70 years ago, that’s technically true in an acceptance-rate sense — but the applicant pool back then was smaller, more self-selected, and coming out of a much more rigorous educational system.
The least informed people then knew more than anyone reading this, and certainly the person writing it. Fewer people applied, but the average preparation level was higher. My mom competently speaks three languages, at one point knew at least six, and she’s not like some crazy pedigreed person, she’s just old and came from a time where if you went to school you learned things.
If you were the kind of pain-in-the-ass teenager who cared about doing well on your SATs, you’d already know that.
BTW, I’m still not conceding that culture is “stuck” or worse. Just that we need education reform…3
Remember to tune into the call-in show tomorrow night! Special guest ALEX CRIDDLE. The theme is “THE GREAT TRIP.”
Recommended watching ahead of the show:
I acknowledge, Richard, that if you’re reading this, that’s not how you see yourself. But it’s how I see you and this is my diary.
It’s not really wokeness and I’m not fooling anyone on the other side, it’s wokeness as exists in response to a particular online conversation.
My crabby mood is justified I just can’t REVEAL the reason yet…
Seems like the popularization of therapy and pop psychology were also big drivers in making workplace culture more "feminized". The idea of the "inner child", Meyers-Briggs personality paradigms (my Dad had to read Please Understand Me and take the Meyers-Briggs for a job conference) -- all of it hammered home that you have to communicate with co-workers in a way that respects their internal subjective viewpoint and in the "language" of their personality.
FWIW, I've never considered you anti-woke. I think you're a rare person who doesn't let anyone decide what you believe but you.
I think you make an excellent point about about new age stuff influencing the workplace. I think you're all too young to remember all the (male focused!) new age stuff came out of the 70s and 80s. Est, Scientology/biofeedback, culty yoga, Amway, crystals, trendy Tarot, trendy witches. The wealthy Boomers were empty inside, y'all, and they threw money at all kinds of con men/women to try to fill the void that cocaine, polyester, and ugly shoes couldn't fill.
Millennial/empowerment/choice-choosing feminism lasted five years at most (2009 - 2013ish) before it started getting both a lot of pushback and a tendency to eat itself. I am fairly confident that group did not ruin the workplace.
Oooh, and striver discourse, too. I am trying to get the striver inside me back, but she is tired.
Excellent digest, lots to think about.