Bigger Capacities

This irritates PT Sir. He lies with his head on his thin pillow and wonders why his wife cannot tolerate something exciting that is happening in his life. She is annoyed, he feels, because he didn’t have much of an appetite for the yogurt fish she cooked. She is annoyed because he filled his belly with store-bought biryani. But he is a man! He is a man with bigger capacities than eating the dinner she cooks.

– A Burning, Megha Majumdar

Dream big! Someday you too can achieve your destiny, escape a life of domesticity and drudgery, leaving behind…your family, the ones who love you and care for you.

Pair with:

pretty much what I said! "deserving" is a notion that layers on reality extremely poorly. it does not fit how things actually work

— 🎀 sonyasupposedly.com 🤖 (@sonyasupposedly) October 22, 2020</blockquote>

“Deserving” is a concept I was taught as a child. It seemed like something fundamental. “You have a contract with society and with other people. If you do X, Y is your reward.” But this confuses a few notions:

• X causes Y
• X and Y are correlated
• X causes Y through Z, where Z is often “society giving you Y so as to incentivize Z”
• People in your life who want you to do X lie to you by promising that Y will be your reward

This last one, which creates an overly mechanistic view human society and an instrumental view of other people, leads to the common failure mode for young men: “I’ve been taught that working hard in school and achieving career success means that I will receive love and sex; this woman is not giving me love and sex; she has broken the contract.”