u/MetaPhil1989

I am 36 and since the age of 18 I have had two serious illnesses. One was from 18 to 24 and the other from 28 to 34. This has had a seriously negative impact on my adult life, though I still managed to get an advanced education throughout that. In fact, today I have fully recovered my health and am finishing a PhD I had started before I got sick the second time. 

That being said, my PhD is in a very competitive field, and the state of my CV due to my years of illness means that my chances of getting a job in it are unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. I am mostly finishing my degree at this point because it is a major life goal and it's almost done. 

But if I don't get a job in my field, the odds of me having to start over in a completely different one in a low paying position are very high, especially with the state of my CV. So I would be a man in his late thirties with a fairly low income – not great.

God willing, I would still want to get married and start a family. But I am not sure if there will be a viable path to that given this state of affairs. I will certainly try to date and be open to surprises, but if the hand I am dealt with is poor I do want to face that and accept it.

I am currently trying to think through this, and I'd be happy to hear any insights you could share.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a hard time structuring my essays until I took a class at my school's writing center. This served me very well, as after this my grades when up significantly and I still use what I learned today in graduate school.

Nevertheless, this was only one out of many classes taught at the writing center, and so there are many more academic writing skills that I could still learn.

Do you have any suggestions of ressources for learning these? My field is analytical philosophy, and I'm especially interested in anything that could make my writing more fluid and engaging to a reader.

I would also be open to paying for a few sessions of coaching, as I remember the feedback being very important in the class I took.

I (36M) will have 6 empty months next year between the end of a degree I am now doing in Europe (PhD in philosophy) and my main academic job opportunity right now. I will have no income and will be forced to live with family here in a pretty uncomfortable situation.

On the other hand, I have a family member who currently has an empty appartement in New York City and would allow me to live there for free. So I'm thinking of coming back to the US to live there instead for 6 months. But it will only be possible to do that if I can find a job to support myself during that time. Given that I will not have to cover rent, it does not have to be a great one.

In my country here, it is almost impossible to find a regular job with a PhD in philosophy, or training in the humanities more generally. But I've heard that in the US that is less of an obstacle. From what I've read, people with degrees in philosophy actually tend to do really well professionally there, as it does give you a lot of valuable professional skills (writing, logical analysis, close reading, problem solving, etc).

Anyways, how hard would it be to find an ok job for 6 months? Since I will not be paying rent it does not need to pay much – just enable me to eat and live a bit!

I've been wondering if a reason why George R. R. Martin might not be able to finish A Song of Fire and Ice is because of deep inconsistencies make it impossible to give the series a satisfactory resolution.

In effect, the world he has created seems to be operating on two different and opposed mythologies at once.

The first one could be described as the "might is right and goodness is irrelevant" mythology. This is a nihilistic narrative, and over and over and over in GoT there are brutal and deeply unfair events supporting it.

But there is another thread in GoT, which is the classic fantasy mythology, which is also found in most religions: that there world may be a mess, but deep down there is a meaning to all of it and it is a good one. This mythology also shines through in many parts of the story.

To be clear, these two general types of stories are not totally incompatible in bits and pieces, though in the end one of the mythologies has to win, since they affirm contradictory messages about reality and human existence. In the end, you either have to affirm that what seemed meaningless was, in fact, part of a greater meaningful plan on a deeper level. Or on the contrary, you have to affirm that what seemed meaningful was in fact random and an illusion, and that in reality chaos reigns. To resolve the story, either nihilism or classic fantasy needs to win.

But the problem is that Martin's experiment seems to have been to bake these two mythologies as deeply as possible into his story and to try to have the coexist, as both are continually reaffirmed.

Initially, this is probably what made the series feel deeply compelling, because it oscillates so much between nihilist chaos and classical myth, that you begin to think "if *this* level of narrative tension can be resolved, we are going to get something extraordinary."

But as things go on, there is no resolution and the two mythologies just keep existing side by side. At one time chaos wins, and at another classical mythological meaning, and so on back and forth. And then the story starts to feel tedious.

And my hypothesis here is that *this* is precisely the point at which Martin got stuck and where the GoT show started to get bad. He had to make one myth win to resolve the arc of the story, but he can't because his project is precisly to try to have both exist in the same universe. So he's stuck in a dead end. The GoT showrunners seem to have stopped caring at this point and just took an easy way out: make the classic fantasy win and don't worry about tying up the loose ends. But since this involved butchering many of the story's narrative elements up to that point, it did not feel compelling at all.

The lesson for me in all this is that if you want the classical fantasy "mono-myth" that seems to speak to so many of us, you can only stretch it so far, because it has an internal consistency to it – and that consistency is not compatible with might-is-right type nihilism. You can have one or the other, but not both together.

Anyways, I just wanted to share these thoughts! I'd be happy to hear what you think of this.

A few years ago I (36M) went through a really difficult few years on several levels (health, professionally, etc.), and lost quite a few friends in the process. Things thankfully have been going well for the past 3 years and I'm rebuilding, though it's being going much more slowly on the social side. Making new friends in your mid-30s today isn't easy.

I value a few new connections I've made, but I am having doubts about one of them, and I'd be grateful for any insight.

This guy is about the same age as me and we met doing volunteer work. I noticed pretty fast that we had a similar "vibe", that we seemed on the same wavelength, and we got along really well in that setting.

Eventually we started to do other things together, but that's when his behaviour would surprise me sometimes. Like, most times we would get along great, but maybe 30% of the time he would do or say something pretty careless or insensitive, often in a kind of weird way, that would feel pretty hurtful or stressful.

Just to give the strangest example, he once proposed we go to this sports activity together, and when I got there he had another person with him, which is fine. But it turns out that it was a random person he had connected with over a "find a sports buddy" app and then he spent 90% of the time talking with the random person, leaving me alone. I thought to myself, why invite me at all if you're planning on hanging out with a stranger off of an app?

That being said, this stuff was uncommon enough that the relationship was overall worth it, until I recently invited him to stay at the place I'm living with family for a few months for the week-end, several hours from the city we met, and he did way too much stuff that bothered me. For example, I invited him from Friday to Sunday and he got a train to arrive on Thursday, without asking. Or, since the house is really nice, he made a bunch of comments about how wealthy I was, which is weird since he makes a lot more money than me and I made sure to tell him that my family bought this place decades ago when it was cheap and no one wanted to live in this area (I'm also living here since I can't currently afford my own place in the city). Or, we went for a long run and he ran way ahead of me most of the time, since he's much more of a runner than me. So I basically spent over an hour just trying to catch up, 30 feet behind him or so. This kind of thing was sufficiently peppered throughout the week-end that I felt tense the whole time.

This was a few months ago and now I feel conflicted since a part of me does not want to call him up to hang out anymore, but another is thinking that 70% of the time or so we do get along fine and I am not getting any obvious "toxic" vibes from him. He just mostly seems to be really careless in his words and actions sometimes, as well as a bit weird around the edges. This is very disappointing too since this was the first person I've met these past years with whom I have a quite a lot in common.

Anyways, I'm pretty confused by this, so if you had any insight I'd be grateful!