Date: September 24th, 2026 2:18 PM Author: Adamo Tuti (⚖️)
Tired of blue collar fetishization among UMC white dudes. Educated, sometimes affluent, guys who are embarrassed by the idea of being cultured or intellectually serious but take enormous pride in cutting their own grass as though that's any meaningful signal of authenticity or masculinity.
Lots of people on this board too, over the years, abandoned any aspiration of being refined as soon as it became mockable in the zeitgeist. Why is cutting your own lawn treated as evidence of character while taking an interest in art, literature, architecture, dressing well, etc., treated as faggy or pretentious? Why does refinement require an apology?
These are guys who have benefited enormously from education and professional life, but seem determined to distance themselves from the very values that made that life possible. They romanticize physical labor while retaining the income, flexibility, and security to engage with it entirely on their own terms. There iss something so comfortable about celebrating a blue collar existence when you can opt out of it whenever you want.
Exhausted with the idea that the highest compliment you can pay a successful man is that you’d never know he was educated or successful. Perhaps no one exemplifies this deterioration more than TSINAH
Date: September 24th, 2026 2:27 PM Author: Arousing telephone
Building and fixing things is fun, and hard physical work is fun so long as you don't have to do it all the time. Did your dad never teach you how to do these things?
Date: September 24th, 2026 2:31 PM Author: Adamo Tuti (⚖️)
No he did not - we lived in an apartment building my entire childhood and adolesence. Hard physical work is fun if youre training for a triathlon or swimming long distance. Cant convince me it’s fun or rewarding to put up a new fence if you can easily afford to pay someone else for the job and save an entire day to do something actually fun
Date: September 24th, 2026 5:42 PM Author: Arousing telephone
"Cant convince me it’s fun or rewarding to put up a new fence if you can easily afford to pay someone else for the job"
WTF, lmao at cosmopolites. The only reason I'd pay someone for a project like this is when I thought they'd do a better job than me if I did it myself.
Date: September 24th, 2026 2:37 PM Author: medicated demanding pistol church
this is true but part of the vicarious appeal of blue collar culture to the middle classes is that WITHIN that sphere, the longhouse can actually be much more escapable than outside it. it's beneath the notice of the state enforcers and allowed to run itself, so natural masculinity is more preserved there (meaning the expressive and interpersonal kind, not the tokens of physicality addressed in the OP).
Date: September 24th, 2026 2:55 PM Author: self-absorbed depressive
This is also why I LOL at the crossfit spartan run type workout groups. Not that the workouts are bad but shut the fuck up about it. If you want to be gladiator then join the marines. No one cares about your spartan mud run.
Date: September 24th, 2026 2:57 PM Author: razzle-dazzle private investor
high quality, normal men grew up doing a lot of things: reading, puzzles, math, playing music, playing sports, fixing things around the house with their dad, cooking, playing and caring for siblings or younger relatives.
I spent the morning mowing the lawn and now I'm watching The Human Condition trilogy (directed by Masaki Kobayashi) on 4k Blu Ray and then later tonight I'll read "Can Life Prevail" by Pentti Linkola and play some Diddy Kong Racing
It’s the cultural bounce. You grow up working class but clever and desperate to escape it. So you STRIVE like a dumbass toward these notions of success and culture and prestige that you have all mixed up in your head. That you know only through the out of focus lens of movies, books, and maybe if you’re lucky that one friend at school from a great family. Then after you’ve graduated lolschool and gotten an actual up close look at all those things you thought you were supposed to want, you realize that it’s all HORRIBLE FLAME.
And so you revert back to your actual childhood role models for what a man should be, but having left behind the chance—the tools and the life—to actually become that man. Then you buy a Carhartt chore coat.