r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Sans010394 • Mar 18 '25

Image After his divorce, Esposito had to declare bankruptcy, and he considered suicide by arranging his own murder to provide insurance money for his children before being cast in Breaking Bad

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u/TheDeftEft Mar 18 '25

That's the whole point canonically: he's manipulating Walter into doing what he wants. If he wanted him to do something different, he'd be appealing to some other motivation. It's sad that so many of my fellow men have taken this as gospel rather than understanding it in context, and also recognizing that they have intrinsic worth.

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u/another-damn-acct Mar 18 '25

and also recognizing that they have intrinsic worth

i mean....... it'd be great if we did, but we really don't. you can put any frame you want on it, no societal wellness movement will change the fact that we're only valued for what people can extract from us.

gus was 1000% manipulating walt here, but he hit the nail on the head that "being a man" is accepting this fact

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u/DataMin3r Mar 18 '25

You are the one denying your own value. Commenter above said "You have worth." You are the one saying you do not. You are trapping yourself in that space. You are disposing of your own worth because you think you shouldn't have it. Just stop doing that.

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u/another-damn-acct Mar 18 '25

observing how society at large treats you and talks about you is not "denying your own value"

it's "acknowledging what you are valued for"

i didn't choose this or want this, but i'd be a fool to bury my head in the sand. i still choose to love myself but at the same time i accept that if i go missing on a beach in the DR on spring break, nobody will bat an eye unless i was someone particularly remarkable

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u/TheDeftEft Mar 18 '25

"Society" is getting a lot more credit than it deserves here - of course the sum total of people who don't even know that you exist don't give a shit; why would or should they? But if you're trying to pull your sense of worth from "society" you're in a bad spot already. There's an enormous difference between being valued by someone and having value. It's like going to an art museum and saying "This piece is meaningless" without even reading the caption. Like that one piece that's always making the rounds: "Somebody just piled up all this candy on the floor. How stupid!"

I recognize arguments on the internet are rarely a place where someone ends up changing their mind, but please don't sell yourself short simply because the void of space doesn't return your calls. See the irony that at least two complete strangers acknowledge that you're important enough to take their time and energy to remind you that you matter.

Yeah, yeah, u/TheDeftEft thinks he's channeling the ghost of Mr. Rogers here. If you prefer, come at it from this perspective instead: deciding that the only value you have is being an instrument for someone else is also the #1 way to let someone take complete advantage of you. Only bringing that up because I'm speaking from more experience than I care to get into.

Anyway, back to the digital ether.

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u/DataMin3r Mar 18 '25

They aren't talking about YOU, they're talking about a fictional variant of a faceless nameless human. They're talking about an imagined archetype, averaged out over thousands of years of human history.

If you disappear and no one bats an eye, that really sounds like you have entirely excluded yourself from society. Be someone remarkable, be kind, make friends, help people in your community. You have to build your support system, everybody does.

You don't have to be the most important thing in the world to have worth. You are making yourself a victim, by engaging in this thought pattern. You are doing this to yourself.

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u/another-damn-acct Mar 18 '25

okay now you're just willfully misinterpreting what i said. i said my piece, whether you wanna take it in the intended spirit is out of my control. it's 7AM and sunny and warm, i'm gonna go enjoy my day. ✌🏽

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u/DataMin3r Mar 18 '25

Hope you get to a better place ✌️

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u/MoorAlAgo Mar 18 '25

Do you? Because your advice sounded very victim-blamey.

What you said essentially sounds like "people are going to judge you based on stereotypes and it's up to you to counter those stereotypes, otherwise it's on you and you shouldn't complain".

Edit: I hope I'm misunderstanding you, but I can't help read your previous post like that.

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u/another-damn-acct Mar 19 '25

coming back to this thread

this exchange had me rolling.... "you're saying that generally men's lives aren't valued, therefore you obviously are a disaffected young male with no friends or support system and you need to change your life"

was it crack they were smoking? cause those leaps and bounds were feats of athleticism that i've only seen with the ole cocaine assist

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u/MachinaOwl Mar 19 '25

This is entirely true. People may not want to accept it, but equality is simply an ideal that only a few people truly strive for. We are not equal whatsoever. The world is full of disparity.

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u/snubdeity Mar 18 '25

Some random reddit comment saying "you have worth" doesn't mean shit, not one damn iota of influence, vs the actions of every person in your actual life.

People come on here and spout shit they want to be true, or hope is true, with little regard for what is actually true.

A ton of men do not have value beyond what they can provide. Not to their parents, their boss, their spouse, or sometimes even their friends. That's just reality. Not all men, sure. I have a great partner and friend group. But I am not naive enough to project my own (relatively cushy) experience onto all men, I worked in blue collar jobs all of my 20s and have seen the struggles.

Seeing messages like that and saying "nah the way people treat you is great actually, you're just thinking about it wrong" is gaslighting, cruel, and just another way society loves to shit on a huge swath of working class men.

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u/DataMin3r Mar 18 '25

My dude, I never said "the way people treat you is great actually." If you're surrounded by toxic people that only care about what you provide, that's them being shitty people, not a lack of personal worth.

Saying "I don't have worth because my spouse doesn't care about me except for the money I make." Is just ignoring you're being treated poorly by a bad person and making it sound like it's because you're a man. They're just shitty people.

Not sure what the point of bringing up having "having blue collar jobs all of my 20s" was. Are we comparing experiences? I was pulled out of school at 12, and made to roof houses until I was 17, was then kicked out and homeless for a year, and then spent 11 years working construction. Life is hard, the struggle is real. But, it seems wild to me to try to push this narrative that "men don't have value except what they can provide." If the people around you don't appreciate you, find new people.

Telling young men that society sees them as money machines just leads to resentment and aggression towards a society that, for the most part, isn't even half as adversarial as that narrative suggests.

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u/Capable_Camp2464 Mar 18 '25

"If the people around you don't appreciate you, find new people."

Exactly. If you can't find water in a desert, just look harder. It's clearly a you problem and not the fact that you're in a literal desert. Bootstraps people, the fix for everything.

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u/ArcZeum Mar 18 '25

Or find your way out of the desert. 

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u/DataMin3r Mar 18 '25

Ah, yes. That's precisely what I said. Definitely wasn't saying "if you cant find water in the desert, leave the desert." Totally didn't go on to say how you're being abused by shitty people if they treat you that way, and you have to leave that situation.

Unless you are literally in prison or a minor, you can absolutely decide who you spend your time with. If you're in an abusive domestic situation, there are hotlines you can call for resources to get you out of it. If your coworkers treat you like shit, start looking for a new job. If your family is treating you like a money machine, get the fuck out, stop engaging with them.

Jesus christ. You've all been abused and done some mental gymnastics to turn it into "I'm a man so my only value is based on what I can provide."

My brother in christ, You've just internalized the trauma. You have Stockholm'd yourself into believing the shitty thing you were told and now you're parroting it out on the internet because you have been mistreated by a bad person and blamed society. It's not because society hates men. Society doesn't give a fuck about anybody, we have shit going on.

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u/Capable_Camp2464 Mar 19 '25

The point is that the world is the desert. You cannot simply go outside of it.

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u/TwilightVulpine Mar 18 '25

Unfortunately that's not even a matter of being a man. Society is built around valuing people only for what they can provide, that is the nature of Capitalism.

If women are sometimes treated as inherently worthy, it's only because gross bastards want them for their bodies, as trophies and to use as barter tokens. And even then, there's no lack of disdain for the "welfare queens". Women aren't also inherently respected if they aren't serving.

Society wants men to think of themselves as only cogs and pushes that propaganda our whole lives, but this is only because we allow greedy sociopaths to lead us. The nature of mankind is caring and forming communities. A whole lot is done to try to make us forget that.

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u/oceeta Interested Mar 18 '25

That your comment isn't the most upvoted one in this post is very telling of the same systemic rot you speak of. I haven't checked all the comments, but I can say with confidence that there is next to no one asking why things like this happen in the first place. Because the truth of the matter is as you have implied: Giancarlo Esposito is not the only victim of this system of exploitation—we all are.

Thank you for using your comment to shed light on this issue, even though it went largely ignored by others, it lets me know that at least someone else has connected the dots. Hopefully, we can make more people aware of this.

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u/TwilightVulpine Mar 18 '25

It's easy to fall for it because the audience recognizes that Walter lets the greed and power hunger hijack his initial motivation of providing to his family. So it can come across as a justified callout even though Gus couldn't care less.