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Sept. 8, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:16
Selfish Women End Up UNHAPPY!
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Alrighty.
Very interesting stuff from Steve Cornaki over on the faunted wild west of thought X, he writes, our NBC News decision desk, Paul asked, Gen Z adults 18 to 29 years old, what they consider important to a successful life.
The combination of gender and politics produced two very different sets of priorities.
So let's go into this.
Important to personal definition of success.
So what is it for your personal definition of success?
And of course, this is young.
Young people.
So men who voted for Trump, number one, having children.
Ah, fascinating.
Women who voted for Harris, number one, fulfilling jobs slash career.
So human beings produce more than we consume.
We produce more than we consume.
And the question is why?
I mean, the obvious answer, of course, is that we produce more than we consume because we have children.
So we have the capacity to get more food than we need, to have more resources than we need, to get more water than we need ourselves, because we have children, and of course that in nature, which is the most complex, tends to develop the most slowly, which is why it takes early twenties for women and mid-20s for men to achieve full brain maturity.
Like a quarter century.
It's mad, right?
I mean, like horses can walk within a day or two of being born human beings take like a year.
And so having children is the goal.
Now, men who voted for Trump, uh, people who voted for Trump tended to be significantly more religious, and people who are more religious tend to have more children.
Uh atheists have fewer children significantly.
Agnostics are the worst of all.
I think they have a replacement rate of 1.3.
And so having children is the number one list of success for men.
Women who voted for Harris, where's having children?
Uh down at the very bottom, right?
So for men who voted for Trump, having children is at the very top.
For women who voted for Harris, having children is at the very bottom, only uh six percent.
Financial independence.
So if we look at for men who voted for Trump, having children, financial independence, fulfilling job career, being married, having money to do the things that you want, owning a home, being grounded spiritually, making family community proud, having no debt, using talents and resources to help others able to retire early, having emotional stability, these are all centered around the top goal.
So uh if you want to have children, then you need some financial independence.
Uh you should have a fulfilling job or career because you want to provide for your children.
You want to be married because being married is the best environment for your children.
Having money to do the things you want, well, what you want is to have children and be married.
So it's not like you go to Cabo and get drunk on the beach.
Owning your own home, that's important for your family, being grounded spiritually, that's important to be a leader within your family.
Making family and community proud, uh, that is not selfish, right?
That means that your uh self-esteem and your uh happiness is all bound into being approved of by a moral community.
Uh having no debt is important because if you have debt, then you are paying the bankers or the lenders rather than investing in your own family.
Using talents and resources to help others able to retire early, having emotional stability is right at the bottom.
Now, people who have emotional stability don't say they want to have emotional stability, and so on, right?
So um having emotional stability is a low priority because these uh men who voted for Trump, these are people who uh want to be married, productive member of their community, uh, and be responsible, not get into debt, and uh live in service to to others, right?
And I mean that's the hedonism, right?
I posted this on X, that of course one of the problems with hedonism is that you run out of fun a lot long before you run out of life.
And that's sort of why hedonism becomes kind of hell itself, right?
So living for others is great, because then you start to take your pleasure in the happiness of others, and they take pleasure in your happiness, and you just end up with uh maximum happiness, right?
Like if you try to produce everything yourself, you're gonna have a pretty horrible life, right?
Uh You gotta build your own house, uh, build your own boat if you want to go fishing, uh, build your own fishing rod, uh, and so on.
You have a pretty horrible life if you want to do it all yourself, but if you trade in the free market, you end up with being able to specialize in your labor and do all of these wonderful things.
It's the same thing with happiness.
Uh if you share your happiness with others, each person focuses on what makes the happiness the best.
So I can focus on some things in my family which add to our happiness.
My wife focuses on other things in our family that focus uh that that bring happiness.
She's amazing at making the house uh beautiful, and uh I live in an absolute girly world paradise, it's uh amazing, and uh so on, right?
So, all right.
Um, so this is uh a life of reproduction, of service, of morals, being grounded spiritually has to do with morals, and so on, and focusing on on helping others.
And this produces emotional stability.
So I mean, if you want stability in your investment portfolio, right?
Some people say, I think it's probably a decent idea.
Don't have all your eggs in one basket and uh you spread your risk around and so on.
And if you put everything into one basket, you win big, you lose big, but it's kind of a roller coaster.
It's the same thing with happiness.
If you put your happiness in the happiness of your kids and your family and your friends and your customers and all of that, then you'll end up with a lot more stability in the same way that if you invest in a wide variety of things, you're probably going to end up with more portfolio stability.
All right, so this is men who voted for Trump.
Now let's go over to women who voted for Harris.
So fulfilling job career, and the question is uh for what?
It's not for having children.
Having children, like it's the lowest number of all.
For the men who voted for Trump, having emotional stability, nine percent.
And for the women who voted for Harris, being married and having children, it's six percent.
Six percent.
Isn't that wild?
Now, of course, women who voted for Harris, so what are the number one thing?
Fulfilling job career.
51%.
Uh is that the highest?
Yeah, that's by far the highest.
Men who voted for Trump, having children was 34% of their definition of uh success.
For women, fulfilling job or career, 51%.
Now, I mean, basic fact is most people don't have a very fulfilling job or career.
Of course, a lot of women go into the helping professions, and the helping professions are run by the government, which means that they don't really help that much.
Uh they just provide the illusion of helping, but anyway, so women want a fulfilling job or career.
And why?
Right?
Men, number one thing is having children, and therefore fulfilling job career is in the service of being married and having children.
So the women who vote for Harris, they don't want to get married, and they don't want to have children.
So what is the fulfilling job or career?
Well, that's 51%.
The next high it's way higher.
Again, next highest is having money to do the things you want at 46%.
So what are the things you want?
Well, it's not being married and having children, so it's the things you want are selfishly.
You want just for yourself.
Hmm.
Very interesting.
Very interesting.
So the things that you want are your own personal pleasures.
This is a form of hedonism.
Now, as I was saying, if you only focus on pleasing yourself, you will run out of fun long before you run out of life, and you tend to be less stable.
In the same way, if you only invest in one stock, uh, especially if it's a volatile stock, you you won't have financial stability.
And so if you only invest in what you like and what you want with no service to others, you have a one volatile stock, and so you're not gonna be emotionally stable.
So these men who voted for Trump, kids married, uh, and so on, uh, make family community proud, they have emotional stability because having emotional stability is very low on the list of priorities, which means they already have it.
Uh these women who focus only on themselves, selfish, they don't have emotional stability.
So fulfilling job career, 51%, having money to do the things you want, 46%, having emotional stability, 39%.
Using talents and resources to help others.
Okay.
So in this case, who were the others?
Well, it is uh having children, uh being married, right?
So for the men who voted for Trump, the others they want to help, family, community, children, and wife, right?
That's who they want to help.
Who do these women want to help?
Strangers.
Right?
This is the in-group, out-group heat map, right?
They want to help uh strangers because they don't want to get married and they don't want to have children.
And so the others that they help are the underprivileged, the people overseas, the migrants, the refugees, all this kind of stuff, right?
It's just way, way, way others.
Financial independence, very, very high.
And for what, right?
So financial independence for men is very high at 33%.
It's almost the same at 32% for the women who voted for Harris, but what do they want their financial independence for?
Uh well, it's not to have children or be married.
They want financial independence so that they can be uh hedonistic and do what they want.
Having no debt, um it's the same, high priority.
High priority.
Owning own home for uh men 26%, for women 20%, so less important.
And of course, if you don't have kids, so you're not married, owning your own home is uh is a little bit less important, right?
Because if you own your own home, then you have to save up for the down payment, which is less of having the money to do the things that you want in the moment, you have to pay a lot of interest.
Whereas if you just rent, you have more money to do the things that you want in the moment.
Okay, making family and community proud, making family community proud.
For men who voted for Trump, it's uh 23%.
For women who voted for Harris, uh 19%.
And I think making family community proud, since the men want to have children and get married, I assume it's a large to a large degree, it's their own family.
For this, it would be your family of origin or community, but not your children.
Being grounded spiritually, 11% for women, 24% for men.
So they don't particularly care about being grounded spiritually for women, and if you're just pursuing hedonism to a large degree, or just doing the things that you want or doing what makes you happy and not I mean it's funny, it's not a sacrifice, right?
Like if I want a coffee and the coffee is two bucks, am I sacrificing by having an economic interaction with the guy selling the coffee?
No.
He wants my two bucks more than he wants to keep his cup of coffee.
I want the cup of coffee more than I want my two bucks, so we're both better off for that exchange.
And exchanging happiness with others makes you happier.
Having people in your life that you will make, quote, sacrifices in order to be uh to make them happy makes you happier because they're bringing their own specialization in what makes you happy.
And also we are not always really good at what makes us happy.
Sometimes we need an outsider to help us understand what makes us happy, right?
So uh if you want to be an entrepreneur, sometimes you need your wife or your husband to really believe in you and say, of course you can do it, and here's why, and I'll help, and right.
I I really you don't seem happy at work.
Let's try this, uh, let's really go for it.
You know, you need somebody outside of yourself to notice when you're unhappy to then work for your happiness.
So you end up with way more happiness when you are trading happiness with others than when you're focusing entirely on yourself, which as I said before, is kind of like trying to produce everything for yourself.
So, yeah, being grounded spiritually is more important if you are exchanging happiness credits in a sense with with others.
Able to retire early, six percent, nine percent for men, so you know, a third more.
For men, uh being married, having children is is nothing for these women.
And of course, single women vote hard left, which is why the hard leftists are very, very keen on promoting a paranoia towards men, you can't trust men, you've got to be financially independent.
What if he just takes off?
Men are trashy, men are unreliable, men are patriarchal, men are exploitative, men are violent, men, like all of this stuff, right?
It's just scaring.
I mean, uh think think of a uh uh a company that sells uh home home alarms, right?
The alarms.
Are they going to put out a lot of ads saying, you know, crime is really, really low, you know, you're not really in any danger.
No, no, what are they gonna do?
They're gonna put out ads about some sinister guy breaking into your house, and uh, you know, one scenario, uh, you end up uh killed in your bed in another scenario, the alarm goes off and the guy runs away, right?
So they're going to focus on making you feel frightened so that you will buy their protection, right?
That's we can understand that it's not not very complicated.
Uh it's the same thing with the government, right?
The government wants you frightened, so you'll run to the protection of uh the government, right?
And so uh women who are single uh tend to be pretty anxious, neurotic, uh and uh women in general score higher in neurosis, which I don't mean that in a negative way.
I mean you need to be neurotic to keep a bunch of babies and toddlers alive because they're uh you know constant death magnets.
So the neurosis is why we're all here.
It's a beautiful aspect of women.
But if it's not around children, uh women tend to just worry about everything if they don't actually have if they don't have actual children to worry about, then they tend to worry about uh anything and everything else.
And if they don't have actual children of their own to take care of, they tend to try and mother the entire uh world, right, including that uh poor Turkish guy on the beach like ten years ago uh that made all of the women want to open borders for Europe, right?
So they tend to want to mother others if they don't have their own uh own children, and so and if they don't have their own protector, which is a husband who loves them and uh pays the bills and protects her, then she still feels anxious and runs to the government for protection.
Of course, the government doesn't protect her, but the illusion is, right?
That it well, so you know if you look at sort of feminism and and skepticism of men, uh none of this is ideological.
It's all it's all political, right?
It's all political.
So men want to have children, they want to be married, they want to serve their family, and uh they are emotionally stable.
Uh women want to live for themselves, they don't want to be married and have kids, which is the perfect place for them to vote for bigger and bigger government and uh living for themselves uh mostly, or having only generosity and compassion and empathy for distant people, people kind of coming through.
See, if you have empathy for your own kids, what's interesting, and you of course you should have empathy for your own kids, kind of goes without saying.
But if you really love and care for your own kids, a very interesting thing happens, which is that your kids will judge you because they're around, they see you at your best and at your worst, and uh they they you know, you have a whole world to process out there, and kids are basically just processing what's going on in the family, particularly if you're homeschool.
So uh if you uh love your wife, and if you love your children, they will judge you and they will know you very well, right?
They know you better.
I mean, in many ways, your family knows you better than you know yourself, which is uh good, right?
You uh you you need your wife to check your back for moles, right?
So it's it's helpful to have another perspective on yourself and can be life-saving.
So if you use your talents and resources, right, to help others, which is very important.
Number four for the women who voted for Harris.
So let's say you're a social worker and you help uh some homeless person, he kinds of comes and goes, and he doesn't judge you.
Because he just needs you so much.
He doesn't judge you.
So you end up being judgment-free.
If you help strangers, it's not bad or wrong, but you should help those close to you first, and you should have those who are close to you first, uh, and then help them first.
And it's a power thing.
Because if you are dangling resources like a lot of these women will be in jobs uh in the sort of social services and welfare and unemployment and and uh all of that.
Um they're using the government's money, which is to say the taxpayers' money or the the the children of the men who vote for Trump uh using their future tax revenue that's borrowed against.
So they are dangling resources that they didn't earn in front of other people who are desperate for them, which means it's a power thing, right?
Uh and those people will just kind of pass through, they'll take the money, they'll move on.
Whereas the people who you really care about, uh they will judge you and they will have criticisms of you, and it's an equal relationship.
Uh this helping strangers, especially using government money is a power relationship, whereas uh investing in the people who care for you is an egalitarian relationship where you will get judged and you should be in this way.
Like nobody's nobody's gonna say if you're desperate, right?
You're desperate to get resources from some social worker, the very few people are gonna say, well, you're kind of mean, and I don't I'm not gonna take your resources or whatever it is.
Whereas if you're mean in family and kids, still have something to say about it, and you'll get that feedback, and then you'll end up, you know, blunting or sanding down the rough edges of your personality and being nicer overall, being nicer and better on all of that sort of stuff.
So I just wanted to uh point out that uh this is uh helping others is a power relationship using other people's money.
And this is uh winding yourself into other people's happiness, being submitting to judgment.
This tends to sand down the rough edges and aggressive aspects of the personality, makes you nicer and more pleasant in the long run.
Uh this does not, and this is why uh government workers tend to end up as Karen's, because they've had too much power for too long, and it has corrupted their very soul.
So, yeah, let me know.
I know that there's another one of these below.
I'm curious if you find this interesting.
I find it quite fascinating.
Love to know what you think.
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Lots of love, my friends.
Wind yourself into the happy loves of others, and you will live in blissful life.
All the best.
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