Comment on Painful to recover from
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours agoI’m not aware of any culture in which hiding one’s strengths is a common response to one’s own surroundings. Placing value on a particular characteristic does not imply that a completely unrelated characteristic is undesirable. Plenty of beautiful smart people out there, and even in a society where beauty is prized above all else, why would someone beautiful hide their intelligence?
For whatever it’s worth, in my circles (urban white collar millennial professionals in dense cities), most people are both athletic and intelligent. There are plenty of finance bros and tech bros who have Ivy League degrees (sometimes Ph.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s) that represent real academic achievement and can also turn around and dominate on a basketball court or in a fighting gym. Lots of smart people like gyms, whether we’re talking resistance training, Olympic lifting, CrossFit/Hyrox, endurance cardio sports like marathon running or biking, winter sports like skiing, etc.
That’s also consistent with what I saw in my high school. Most of the top students headed towards Ivy League or similar caliber schools were also athletes who were very good at a competitive sport for the school. The “nerd”/“jock” dichotomy we expected from John Hughes movies never really materialized, and the popular kids tended to be people who were both good at school and good at sports.
phx@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
And yet where do you think the demographic that voted for the guy that shits his pants and falls asleep comes from exactly, and moreover continues to double-down on supporting him even to their own detriment? How about the people who modify their trucks to spread black smoke just to “own those pissy hybrid drivers and cyclists”?
The continued attempts to enumerate activities that would have fit on Jackass (and likely watched the same on repeat).
Never knew a pretty girl in school who got good grades but hid then and played dumb?
There’s plenty of people who embrace an absurdist mentality and openly reject anything that requires actively using one’s brain.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
I think they’re old, fat, unathletic, and unattractive.
I know Trump voters. For the minority who are actually young, they’re much more likely to be loser incels who are both bad at sports and didn’t get a college degree (much less post graduate educations). It’s aggrieved losers trying to make sense of the world, who are generally unattractive on most metrics: poor, unhealthy, unathletic, not very smart.
It’s like looking at people who work in the trades. Plumbers and welders and carpenters. They tend to be in worse physical shape than, like, lawyers and doctors, who obviously have better intellectual and academic credentials.
So if you’re surrounded by losers, I’m just gonna ask that you stop being impressed with them.