Early 40's - getting sized up more?

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I don't know if it's just me but I feel like this has actually increased and I feel as if my right to be me and live, in any way, shape, or form, is probably more challenged than its really ever been.

It apparently looks dysgenic if you don't look or 'vibe' precisely your age, and I've noticed, even more than in my 20's and 30's, a sense that I'm getting sized up.

Am I the only one whose noticing this or is there a sense that, for a lot of men 40+, that there's two types of men in the world - psychopathic or psychopathy-emulating in one group and weak pieces of ---- with no right to be alive in the other?

I used to wonder how so many older people I've known had rotten and bitter attitudes and it could just be that Machiavellianism for some reason intensifies after 40 in the broader population, or is it just the current economic times getting worse?

I've been totally out of the working world since I was about the age given with your posts and am now largely out of the social world.

Therefore I've not got much commentary to offer and no observations.

I will comment that the sizing other men up thing sounds a lot like how women have been sizing up and judging each other for most of human history.

Which leads to headlines such as,
Why Do Women Judge Each Other And How Do We Stop?
By Emma Wood
11/01/2017 11:56am GMT | Updated January 12, 2018

My best take on the trajectory - self-awareness is perceived as fear and weakness. Any kind of internal honesty about anything, if it isn't strictly picked up when it leaves you up and other people down, is a sign that other people have beaten you which means you have weaker / lesser genes.

I get the impression that it's not a problem I'm supposed to solve but rather something that's supposed to have killed me years ago and people are inflamed that I'm still alive.

It's also not like I've been carrying some child-like naivety that's just now, at age 42, getting smashed, rather it's the realization that even perhaps looking out at the world around me for any kind of feedback is going to constantly be weaponized against me by people who will do anything they can to dominate anyone they can with whatever tools they have. For example - if I'm not a huge guy, or not super-coordinated, but hella-smart, I'd act like I'm bulletproof, be deliberately too stupid to imagine things going badly in that area (so that no one can get any hooks under my self delusion even with physical action - and then truly, deeply, also believe that human life is so worthless - and that my life is so worthless - that falling to homicide in the pursuit of dominating other is perfectly okay), and I'd try to use my intelligence to enslave, subjugate, and dominate anyone around me that I possibly could, and then what makes me 'weak' and 'other' is that show signs that I'm not doing that.

Meaning - if you have any interiority worth having and you wanted to fix that problem you'd need to stab that interiority in as many ways as possible, dowse it with gasoline, light a match, and hope you're able to torment it out of existence to become a non-human perfect pure-replicator.

It could be as well that there's no world to improve, rather it's an animal species that wants to both destroy it's own generation, destroy/devour any younger generations because they're smaller, weaker, and thus lower on the food chain, and it might be that I need to stand back, watch, and let it all self-imolate because these things really need to strip naked, climb a tree, and chew leaves till they die.

It's like Idiocracy but with much muddier wood.

yeah, i found that too
around that time/age, people re-start heavy comparing and status minding again,

I relate very much to your post. I think in the USA the individualism and dominance factor are out of control. Ironic that an Autistic person (me - unto myself) would find Individualism overplayed.

Very soon I leave the 40s and am glad for it. It's gotten better over the decade and I now have more personal power than I did at the start and I look forward to more. I am not sure how much gender plays a role as I've read books that suggest it does. My NT dad kept telling me that 45 was the height of my career etc. but there's more for me.

It frustrates me that kindness is associated with weakness in this culture. I've read that Darwin was actually about the survival of the fittest community, but it was taken out of context and interpreted as the individual or dominance. I have found strength in vulnerability - as always balance is good.

I think it evidences that meritocracy has a lot of the same problems that communism does - ie. that since everyone starts 'equal' it means that the dog-fights to get what you want, along with the group sabotage, stabbing anyone in the legs who can run faster, etc. becomes more of a thing for similar reasons. This is something that Rene Girard talked about.


I'm hoping that's the case. I'll go for walks in the evening during sunset hours and as I walk through the neighborhoods I feel like all of this isn't just slipping away from me - it's slipping away from everyone. It's a bit like - living at home, being a 'loser' on paper in the sense that I'm single, not making a huge income, doing all the right things but little is landing, I can look at what hurts in my life but at the same time I look at most people, their families, their mindsets, and I'd rather take being a 'damaged' outcast any day of the week to having the kind of inner poverty I see (and quite often their kids aren't nearly as bad yet - still 'normal' in the sense of being curious about the world but - they're mostly headed to the same place as their parents which is battered leather inside and out).


My sense of how gene wars of this sort work though - it's not about assessing truth, it's about weaponizing the most powerful case of cluster B personality disorder you can, learning the arts of Machiavellianism, and being so dangerous that no one wants to touch you. That's how I've noticed that dark triad and other cluster B like borderline really seem to have grabbed up our culture and remade it in their own image - it's right in line with Nassim Taleb's minority rule where people plan around a prickly minority and hence effectively forfeit the reigns of power to avoid inconvenience.

The really sick thing about nature - it doesn't care about human happiness, thriving, or well being, it's really a rollout of physics and power where whatever can bully and survive bullying keeps on doing it and getting better at it. They can be some of the most miserable people in the world and yet in a lot of ways they're also what's making hell for everyone else and - at the same time - making everyone around them increasingly like themselves. The technical term for this is that they're something like walking, talking, breathing multipolar traps. Multipolar traps are how we all get sucked down the drain together - into things like techno-feudalism, new dark ages, totalitarianism, etc.. It's part of why I've really been hoping that something useful and powerful in its own right would come out of complexity analysis groups like Game B and similar circles but so far a lot of peacocks tails - little prima materia.

A toxic society combined with the realization that what they believed they were promised will never actually be received.

That sounds lovely.


I recently read the book Machiavelli for Women and it pointed to the underlying message Machiavelli was sending the prince: that what we call Machiavellianism is not preferred. Good read. The concept reminds me of the studies of gorillas. Generally, the fair leaders live out their lives fairly while the abusive leaders are abused once their strength wanes. Before I left my toxic workplace, some bullies had faced consequences of their behavior, but certainly not much and not many.

It doesn't seem like a meritocracy if resources are based on ruthless competition.

Wishing it does get better for you!! Finding the right balance of realism, cynicism and optimism.

To be honest, I felt like I was being "sized-up" when I was younger. By the time I hit my 40's, I sensed less judgement from people in general.

I'm in my early 60s----and I feel I am respected by at least some people because of my age. And, truth be told, I haven't really accomplished all that much in life. I did okay----that's about it.

I'd plit it into two categories:

a) guys in their late 50's or early 60's seeing a guy in his 40's showing some sprinkling of mannerisms (add boyish facial appearance), identifying him as a punk or a screw-up, and needing to show in every non-verbal way to that guy that he's clearly a piece of sh--, scum, and that he needs to know that he's scum. I had this recently where I went to a gyro place run by some old Greek guys who didn't know me, I went at 2:30 PM in the afternoon, made my order, didn't realize that it was already a combo, something in my non-verbals told the guy that I was probably an unemployed screwup, druggy, someone who was far enough beneath him that it was a travesty that he had to 'serve' a punk like me. IMHO that sort of thing is unavoidable - ie. if he didn't speak clearly, told me to look to my left at something but there was a smaller menu board closer go me and in that direction, he jumped to a lot of conclusions about my cognitive ability really fast and had no interest in letting to of them (I was on point for the rest of the interactions like giving him my credit card and the like but he went out of his way to display contempt the whole time).

b) other guys in their 30's or 40's who are still in the mode where if they see any bodily signs of self-awarness in another guy it's 'Mmmm.... I smell p----y...'. It happens in the most stupid places as well - ie. checking out at the grocery store, getting takeout at a busy local restaurant (one i stopped going to because it seemed like their clientele was the local upper-middle class version of towneys where if you didn't look or vibe just like the other customers they'd go out of their way to be rude to you.

To that last comment - the reason I stopped going to that restaurant - this is really, really stupid but I'll share it anyway. I made a call-in order, showed up, it's a normal depth strip mall store and may half width, so there's maybe ten feet from the counter to the other side. The owner is a girl in her 30's, most of her employees are girls in their late teens or early 20's. The owner (never had a problem with her before) and one of her employees were talking to an older gentleman who was sitting at a table (in a row of tables against the wall) on the other side of where you'd stand to get a pickup order - as in yeah, that was the line of fire for the conversation but it was also where if you were there to do business it was unavoidable. When I walked up to the counter they both looked away as if I'd done something incredibly rude by stepping between them and the guy they were talking to. My own sense of how people should act - the owner should have kept talking to the guy, the other girl should have broken off and asked what I needed. They gave me a hard gaze aversion and silence for about forty seconds before giving me a very saccharine greeting. That's actually the first time I've ever pulled over to a dumpster and thrown food away that I'd just ordered because, on a subconscious level (and perhaps Indian ayurvedic would agree on this point as well), if someone disrespects you and they're in a transaction where they're giving you food, you don't want to eat it because it's a multilevel sign - to yourself - that you're 'imbibing' their behavior, which goes beyond agreement with them, it's an agreement with them that they were right.

What bothers me about the last story - it's very difficult to interpret that last interaction any which way other than as a perceived differential of social status between me and the guy who was sitting there, and one where rather than evading the temptation to display 'You don't look right - we don't want you as a customer', they went for it.

What boggles my mind about this - I don't have a limp, no droopy eye or an eye pointing in another direction, I don't walk into any of these places looking grungy/dirty, the worst I can say is that - maybe - I have a brown suade jacket that I've had for years (not ripped with the stuffing hanging out, still almost looks new!) and something in my body language might say 'space cadet' to them. It's all I can think of, lol.... unless I'm carrying some strange occult data object somewhere in my 'energy' that people are reacting to (so who knows, maybe I've got a micro black hole in my pocket).


It's like.... give me my space to entertain myself by myself - I'm great. Give me a workplace where I can just get my work done rather than having it be a place where saying anything remotely intelligent (unless it's in super-straight-jacketed lanes) gets you permanently ostracised, like saying anything to anyone causes thirty seconds of silence before people start talking to each other again, just give me enough people who aren't playing Machiavellian status games and I really don't need a lot. The problem is - you walk out the front door and it's walking into a snowstorm of narcissism and borderline which then gets condensed into warped... I won't call them social 'rules', I'll call them excuses to pull status.


The other thing, it could just be me, but I feel like people have a radar for anyone whose constructed their personality from first principles rather than being layer after layer of cut-and-paste copying of others. I think I know why, ie. if you have build yourself from first principles it means something went wrong, most likely people didn't like you, so it becomes a secondary signal of an original sin. If that's what it's about though, ie. identify any signals of original sin including secondary and tertiary growth patterns as signals of that sin.... you just can't get around it, that's a kind of dysgenics sniffer because genes are the only thing that could qualify as an original sin of that sort.


And yeah, I really try to blow it off but - where it annoys the ---- out of me is that I knock myself out as a programmer for a small company where I don't get paid enough to move out and it's very hard to leave that job because I know everything's, socially speaking, incredibly cutthroat. A bit like the whole of 'Wait... you haven't been doing test-driven development since the first moment you started coding? I'm guessing you crush ritalin and snort it or masturbate in public as well - go smoke weed and play video games at home like you were going to anway.... f---up....'. Somoene who'd say that, BTW, is incredibly-incredibly insincere, they're not 'abashed' by someone's abomination of immaturity for not having lived, breathed, and slept in technique 1, 2, or 3, it's that they're part of an imperial tribe, they're defending their territory, and that's just how war goes.

And THEN.... because of my reduced job options or higher risks.... people can pull in any conversation 'Wait, how much money do you make? How much land do you own? How many kids do you have? Oh wait...... you live with your 'parents'.... thank you, that's everything I needed to know about you'.

IMHO, strongly, that CANNOT be a mistake. If someone was confused enough to run to that judgment and fully believe it, I don't know what neurological pathways allow them to cross a street without getting hit by a car or how they can even drive a car or pay bills for that matter. Those kinds of asymmetries, in my mind, really prove that it's got absolutely nothing to do with truth and absolutely zero interest in truth.


Sorry if I just rattled on for almost a dozen paragraphs, I think the hardest thing for me to deal with in all of this was spending so much of my teens, twenties, etc. on a mission to 'fix' whatever was wrong between me and the world to find out that it's not so much that I was doing things overtly or technically wrong, it's just that they're the same kind of batisht crazy and can all agree that anyone whose not just like them has serious problems. I mean - if that life is, ie. 80 some years of grappling with the Machiavellianism, insecurity, and imperialism of the people around you, it's really pathetic and sad but, if I have to accept it as that then what is is and I can wish in one hand, do something else in the other, and see which hand fills up faster.

The other thing I'm starting to wonder about, it's not a fully formed theory yet but I'm sort of playing with pieces of it:

I'd really love to know what life is like for 'sigma males' (or 'sigma females' for that matter) in sort of the new pop-psychology parlance, who happen to be NT.

I mean that because, part of being sigma is that you don't run around a room socially rimming people as a human sweat sprinkler all the while living under the perceived mortal threat that someone might not like them, rather sigmas just assume that they should be able to do their own thing in peace as long as they're not overtly starting anything with anyone else - AND - they don't talk to people who they don't think are on the level or whom they'd have nothing in common with (to which, with that, most of the time when I'm not socializing with people, they've hardly said a word that makes me think that our interests cross, or they've shown signs that they're really narrow and war-like about what few things we do have in common).

If they get loads of what I'm getting, and it turns out that they're constantly battling with people who demanded their total submission, without being on the spectrum, it would be more confirmation to me of what I think I see happening. It would be a 'tall poppy' attack.

Sigma --- I hadn't heard of that. I've heard of Omega.

I relate to Sigma for myself. My NT husband appears to be Omega. I call him NT b/c he doesn't appear to be Autistic, but he's probably ND in some way. I've read that "loner" NTs tend to pair up with ASDs b/c there is more freedom for the NT. I do crave connection with him, but apparently don't make the same "demands" that a non-Sigma or NT woman might. Early in our relationship, my husband was amused by my lack of jealousy (my trust and/or outward indifference).

He recently had trouble with an Alpha male threatening him. He smoothed it over for now. He's considering whether to leave the pack (workplace). Last year I had an incompetent wanna-be Alpha male that I took on. He forfeited his Alpha position, but I left the pack (workplace) anyway.

Yeah, a simple way to phrase them would be alpha-introverts perhaps.

I really wasn't all that interested in things like the stock market or crypto until I realized that it's a battle to keep a paycheck coming in and that basic competence as an employee is only a fraction of it. The idea that if I just 'live right' and 'do good work' things will work out is probably one of the more recently illusions to properly leave me in the last few years and this is part of why I want enough of a landing pad to where if it's not enough to retire early on it's at least enough to give me several years grace time (and as I get better at investing with practice that should ultimately end up being an early retirement fund).

I think people expect you to fit into their definition of what's "normal" at your age.

I'm a few years older than you Techstep and come across people that want to size me up on the basis of "married? children? what do you do for work?" so they can slot me into some sort of ranking in their mind.

I was at a funeral wake recently where a 60 something tried to size me up with a low level interrogation.
Apparently not married (he knows my partner), no children and "mostly retired" meant he couldn't put me into a compartment. He seemed puzzled that I work as a form of recreation and couldn't understand my disinterest in getting married and bearing children. I was waiting for him to ask me what is wrong with me!

I'm quite happy carrying on my merry way, doing what I want and I really couldn't give two shakes of a rat's tail what anyone else thinks of me. I live a fantastic lifestyle where I do as I please free of other people's expectations.

I'm really hoping that if I invest right I can do semi-retirement.

My understanding of my own circuitry at this point:

1) I have sensitive tooling onboard, thankfully not of the sort that has me unable to bear loud sounds or lights, it just has me - to the best I can gather - unusually self-aware, and my neurotype and build pretty much has me looking like the sort of guy who other people would expect to be a psychic medium (and to a lot of people that's either 'he's gay' or 'he's a p__y', and particularly to the later they just can't let the travesty of perceived weakness go before them without an overtly hostile response). My guess - this will last until I'm in a casket, especially after having gone though enough things and overcome enough things to where if this was pure and simple weakness that needed to be beaten out of me it would have been gone years ago, instead it just grows back when the traumas and struggles subside. I have to figure out some way of no longer taking this - in any way shape or form - like I did something 'wrong' and that a 'real' adult is scolding me for being a weak piece of sh--, IMHO those are the dregs of childhood and 'respecting my elders' still clinging on and, sometimes your elders just need a beating.

2) If I can't change my wiring, I need to very carefully edit which social situations I'm in and which ones I stay out of, considering that people not only lack self control and perspective but seem like they'd loath to exercise it even if I could. If I ever found myself in a post apocalyptic situation where the rough equivalent of prison inmates were running things, I'd be raped and murdered because the moment someone thought they were seeing weakness it wouldn't matter how many people it took to take me out or how well I fought, perceptions must always beat truth. I have to now learn to separate that from character. Even if people really want to eradicate lines between external appearance and character and smash down on another person's character the full weight of how they feel about how that person looks - that's the same exact reflex as chimpanzees smashing the face of other chimpanzees with rocks because they had a limp, were from another tribe, etc.. They might as well reach down their pants and masturbate in front of me, that's the level of 'adulthood' I really feel like I'm seeing. I also need to deeply reconsider the idea that if someone got you, and you're male, then you deserved it or worse - in that case school and mall shooters are amazing displays of virility racking up slaves in the afterlife, and yet no one seems to see it that way (for really good reason - and I wish they'd trace that same logic back down to their admiration of dark triad/tetrad traits).

3) I've been watching more interviews and discussions people have had about things like Darwinian evolution, John Vervaeke was talking to an Australian guy about this, it sounds like enough people agree with Teilhard de Chardin, even if in a more purely secular sense, that the ingredients - such as consciousness - are obeying certain rules to go to certain places. To that extent I have to consider the possibility that I'm more observant or lucid on certain things, lets say that my nervous system didn't do all of the synaptic pruning to specialize me to such a point that I can do things lightning fast but miss the forest for the trees as a side effect, my ability to 'compete' red in tooth and nail is hampered but at some point I have to consider - like cell differentiation - that me being exactly what I am may serve some critical purpose. Thinking their way makes me feel like I'm beating myself with a hammer for being born which results in damage not transmutation, thinking this way feels like rapid healing and warm hugs (I mean tingles in my feet and legs, warmth coming up my spine, it's almost scary how euphoric that gets). I came to take the later as not safe because it would make me 'vibe' like no one had sorted me out, historically it's always made it seem like I'd be more of a target, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if I might actually be wise enough to carry it having properly taken in how almost universally Machiavellian things are.

I'd add - I'm quite open to things like panpsychism and/or Russelian monism, I've seen a lot of signals that would suggest 'data' flowing in more complex ways, I don't think it's insane that evolution could actually include some sort of cross-talk across levels of complexity in ways that can, at a minimum, instinctually 'feel' their terrain even if they're more unconscious and less self-aware than the searing points of focus that we have.


All of that's really a way to say that I think I need to measure this carefully.

A small silver lining to where I'm at is I have over ten years of kali / kuntao / silat, I can handle myself if push comes to shove, I also know that people prefer to menace each other hands off, will always go with confirmation bias, and will always think they're winning unless someone hits them (verbally and socially) low and hard. That's where I feel like this situation gets difficult - ie. it's easier to deal with a mugger than a social bully for reasons that you can put the former in the hospital in self defense, you can't do much with the later unless you can scrounge up enough saliva to spit something worse than they do (and sadly even enjoying my fair share of hip hop and knowing how to do this, it's way easier to sing along to lyrics, especially when I don't need to fully internalize them, than spend so much of my day thinking of how many ways I can lash someone to ribbons with my tongue).

That was a lot to read but I enjoyed it as I feel even as a about to be 30 year old in the Fall how it feels being male from the inside once you get past your 20's. I do look much younger though so I have some benefit there and jkeep my health up very well as always looking for ways to improve so I expect I'll remain where I am for some years still but even then I still get whatt you get. It doesn't seem to be entirely age restricted as long as they at least know you're an adult though if many of them knew how old I actually I was it would likely be far worse.

Funny you mention the Sotre and take out situations s I get that sort of thing a lot, even from being the one in the uniform behind the counter. Whether it be males or females, many of them are always sizing people up. The males that sense any of that self awareness at all almost immediately get an sttitude with you and the females act like you're some kind of disease carrying rabid animal for simply being in their space. If it's a day where my social issues are acting up a bit more and/or my PTSD is leaking into the situation from elsewhere than my reputation for the day is over. It's brutal out there and sometimes the only answer is just relentlessly pushing in your own direction improving wherever you can know that even if no one see's all of that effort it might make you stand a little taller in ordinary life.

"The problem is - you walk out the front door and it's walking into a snowstorm of narcissism and borderline which then gets condensed into warped... I won't call them social 'rules', I'll call them excuses to pull status." - I love this comment, you framed what I feel daily perfectly. A lot of what happens is just people weaponizing that status. It's a strange system and I don't care the least about it despite my uncontrollable often hyper vigilance that comes with needing to be subject to it every day I go outside to do anything around other people that may or may not get dangerous. All it takes is one really deranged, social status abusing lunatic to really ruin a day or more and since so many people behave like this it's impossible to tell who those dangerous people really are. Though yes it is almost always a verbal beat down over getting actually attacked. though a while back when I was on the edge of being homeless and scrapping cans that actually did happen and it didn't help. No one cared, broad day light. Yet at the same time someone once accused me of stealing something and the police acted right on it despite there being no evidence I did anything (I didn't even have anything but a bag of groceries on me at the time). The next day a lot of people who usually helped me didn't even leave anything out for me any more despite not knowing the full story of what happened. It's a joke and I can rant to myself all day on it. I got better treatment being much younger when I first entered the clinic, got diagnosed, barely verbal, and thrown into a mens group with a case worker that showed me just enough to help me get on my feet than I often do now just because I'm more visible in public as a result of simply doing more with yourself. It doesn't make any sense up front but you frame things from the way you explain them here you really get it.

Most people would tell you to just "get over it" but when you're not the problem and you are currently doing a lot with yourself already as well as trying your best socially then what else can be done? The only answer seems to be conform but I can't realistically do that nor do I want to anyway. It doesn't matter what I do, I get treated the same way. I think I gave up on "the game" when I was kid cause clearly that wasn't working out for me and I only made a fool of myself. There's no place for me in these social hierarchy games. Like I quoted above it always feels like I'm dealing with an obnoxious social snow storm than anything else. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.