faceh
2mo ago
Sounds like textbook Borderline Personality Disorder.
I've dated girls like that on VERY short timeframes, but enough to see the switch flip.
And yeah, it is disconcerting. Yeah you can expect emotional outbursts on occasion, but the literal "I love you more than anything" one day to "You mean nothing to me whatsoever" the next 180 turn feels like something humans SHOULDN'T be capable of doing.
Good on you for actually ending it. I kept a friend around with those tendencies at extra long distance for a few years and she had a habit of calling me at random to expound on all the drama that had unfolded in her life for the past few months. What eventually made me cut it off was her tendency to just dredge up and mention every mistake she knew of that I had made, or every way I had allegedly wronged her to hold it over my head for... no apparent reason. I eventually said "look, since I apologized, you either forgive and forget and stop bringing it up, or I stop answering your call every time."
This was a girl I knew from college, who I knew was smart, and had her academic life in order, but otherwise was a disaster.
where she got really into some weird cult and stopped doing drugs all the time and seemed to be improving, but then she started doing hurtful things to me again and I ended it.
Oof. The half-assed commitment to improvement that gives you false hope but ultimately everything returns to baseline because of course it does.
Familiar with that too.
faceh
2mo ago
Unreasonably high time preference making life harder for everyone.
Many such cases.
I'd push back because yes, the kids start drawing attention, but mom, as the arbiter of who gets to interact with the baby, also gets a lot of attention and, if the child appears to be doing well, accolades for raising them.
So to the non-narcissists who don't mind sharing the spotlight, this is a boon.
Indeed, this is probably the only way a woman can keep herself centered in attention in her thirties and forties, short of being a literal celebrity.
Smartphones.
Then Social Media...
Then algorithmically curated feeds.
I think the last one is where the breaking actually happened. But I say this as someone who remembers original Facebook where you just got a feed of stuff your friends posted, in chronological order, without the site itself trying to guess what you would find most engaging/catering to your worst impulses directly.
You generally used the smartphone to send messages directly to friends, not have things mediated through an app that aggressively wanted to steal your attention.
Yeah you'd get in political arguments, but it'd be with actual friends and generally the temperature was kept below a boiling point. The algo introduced you to ever more distant strangers, who held ever more extremist opinions, and did its best to keep you in a happy little echo chamber where you had your ego stroked THEN were randomly introduced to an unknown wrong-opinion-haver to unload on.
Its not a new insight that ragebait and outgroup bashing are the most effective way to hijack human attention.
But now, that's how literally every single media platform works. There is no countervailing force whatsoever. Even sites that became popular for featuring cute and 'funny' content have bought in.
To say that I am appalled with where this once-promising tech has taken us would be an understatement.
faceh
2mo ago
I've seen variations of this path happen to people who are in the second layer of my orbit (i.e. usually not my CLOSE friends). At first it appears like the the varnish of a happy, complete life is simply peeled off to reveal the dysfunction beneath, but after seeing it often enough, it really turns out that they just wanted out of what could have been a complete, happy life, and they're basically bailing out of a situation that was otherwise quite tolerable.
Call it Trump Derangement syndrome or whatever, but I'd say its just Trump or the Conservative/Right Wing boogeyman acting as a nexus point for their internal turmoil and persistent sense of pending doom, it feels better to externalize all that negative emotion to an outgroup.
What is more unique now is how ubiquitous and all-consuming the fear-driving stimuli is. THAT part, being fully inundated in an information environment that exacerbates and amplifies thought processes that would otherwise possibly remain mere undercurrents is what leads so many to have these aggressive and apparently 'sudden' breaks from whatever friends and groups they had previously maintained.
I've watched the pattern unfold enough times now that I am confident I can recognize the earlier stages of it and predict with some accuracy where things will end up after a brief observation period.
If the woman is already at the point where she feels comfortable disrespecting the man in public view, and/or is falling in with some of the lefty activist causes, its likely terminal.
It goes towards a point I made a while back, though.
Scared, anxious people are easier to control. You create a population of neurotic, particularly fearful citizens and scream in their ear, nearly 24/7, through every media outlet possible, about how much danger they're in, and then you offer them the outlet for all that pent up anxiety: vote for [Candidate!] or [Policy!] and you can finally be safe!
Except it won't help, they cannot be mollified. But if the policy fails or is never implemented, they can continue to blame it all on the same boogeyman.
Thus, the incentive to fix or moderate this issue simply isn't there. Scared people are politically useful. All the more so if you isolate them from their sane, well-meaning friends and family.
I've known a decent number of girls who were disordered in this particular way, but maybe not to that degree.
Like, they can do the basics of holding down a job, maybe even one with actual responsibilities, keep an apartment, MAYBE keep a pet alive. But their personal and social lives are complete shitshows because they can't keep social commitments, they will lie about things with reckless abandon, and view other people as amusements as best or instruments of their own desires at worst. That is, they care about another person only to the precise extent they can get something fun or useful out of them.
Girls whose aging cars are constantly breaking down or running out of gas but have like a half dozen guys who will show up to bail them out on short notice, and MAYBE get rewarded with sexual contact or at least some drugs.
And sometimes the right kind of broken person can play into that and you can get a codependent relationship that persists for 6 months to a year, then usually ends in spectacular fashion, but the girl, she does everything she can to put up the facade that she has no emotional reaction. And maybe she doesn't, who knows.
USUALLY its downstream of absentee (possibly dead) parents, then the spiral of drugs and self-sabotaging behavior that reinforces itself over the years.
The spooky part is that they're capable of dressing well, speaking well, behaving well in contexts where it is needed, and thus the true extent of the antisocial impulses is simply not clear until you've gotten to know them, then maybe you're a teeny bit infatuated with them and learning how bad things are under the hood simply elicits sympathy, which is something she can use to again extract fun or use out of you.
Apparently the part of the brain used to regulate emotional responses and guide 'constructive' behavior is not tied in tightly with the one that produces social cues and the presentation one gives to others.
faceh
2mo ago
Oh also when Gamora was begging Quill to kill her earlier in the film, and he hesitated too long, even though Thanos complimented him on having the guts to do it.
That also might play into his reaction against Thanos later.
I appreciate that the film made it clear that Thanos 'deserved' his win since he would actually go as far as needed whilst the heroes kept dropping the ball for (comparatively) petty reasons.
That's probably why some fans ironically(?) valorize the guy.
faceh
2mo ago
I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like.
It isn't a perfect fulfillment of the fantasy, but the Sylvester Stallone series Tulsa King has him playing a traditional Italian mafia underboss who gets out of prison after a 25 year stint, and ends up in Oklahoma, and has to adapt his older-generation mobster style, macho braggadocio and all, to modern times and a smaller town.
The general theme is that his brand of realistic common sense, his willingness to use violence, and his tendency to take what he wants is actually extremely useful for achieving success compared to the beta males that modernity has wrought, and this likewise gives him success with ladies.
faceh
2mo ago
Oh yeah.
They had to contrive a VERY particular situation where the heroes are on the cusp of winning and somehow, without some crazy deus ex machina, lose and Thanos achieves his objective.
Hell, they showed that Dr. Strange's portals can be used to sever people's arms earlier in the same film, that should have been the thing they tried first.
So they used Quill as a device for Thanos breaking the hypnosis and reclaiming the gauntlet. While it was in-character for Quill, it required a lot of contrivance to get it to happen.
HOWEVER, I do like that one common theme in the film is that the heroes lose b/c they don't have the "will" to make the hard sacrifices, whereas Thanos puts it all on the line to achieve his goal, and so he does.
There are MULTIPLE scenarios where the heroes could have won if they weren't committed to avoiding any real sacrifice.
Big one: they tried to save Vision's life when removing the stone instead of killing him so they could destroy it faster. Vision himself was okay with dying!
Or earlier, Loki gives up the space stone rather than letting Thanos kill Thor.
The heroes, despite the stakes, couldn't bear to accept losses.
faceh
2mo ago
Its funny, a couple years back I joked about setting up a GPT3 instance trained on my posts and then just retiring from the internet at large.
I wonder how many people have already done that.
faceh
2mo ago
There's a BIG question as to why none of those 5 relationships stuck it out and became permanent.
faceh
2mo ago
FWIW I'd support that.
But it would be almost impossible to enforce if a user can simply lie and SAY they did the math or thinking themselves.
So you end up with a situation where the only posts banned are the ones where the user is honest.
I would humbly suggest that there be a given day or thread set aside for posts that rely heavily on AI work.
faceh
2mo ago
Yeah, hence the scare quotes.
That scene gets maligned for a few reasons. I don't think Quill acting out of character is a good critique, though. This is the same guy, who, in the second film, impulsively started blasting his own father into smithereens because he found out that dad was the cause of his beloved mother's death.
Forgetting the stakes and wailing on Thanos over his lost lover is fully in character.
faceh
2mo ago
I was going to call you out for glossing over the Guardians of the Galaxy series, where Starlord and Gamora have a truly interesting romantic dynamic across the first couple movies, which is SO emphasized that it is the entire reason the heroes 'lose' the Infinity War.
But then I remembered they turned it into a joke for the third film.
So this might just prove the point.
Although James Gunn's NEXT film, this time with a more well known hero looks like it will lean heavily on the Lois Lane romance.
faceh
2mo ago
Making a dating app that works isn't an unsolvable problem, OKCupid was pretty effective back in the day.
They abandoned the hell out of that though.
If it would cost them more money and make it less likely people stay on the apps indefinitely, I can't see why they'd implement the feature.
faceh
2mo ago
That's about it.
Even bringing up the relationship recession to make the complaint marks you as lower status. "Lol this guy can't get dates!"
And yet, if the problem doesn't get acknowledged, it all just stays in the 'positivity' loop. "You'll find someone eventually, just make yourself better and it'll get easier" even as the objective facts show this is simply untrue.
And finally, people who won already and have committed relationships have less reason to pay attention to this issue, and are more likely to assume the complaints are overblown, and so join the chorus of voices dismissing the speakers sounding the alarm.
Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are still billionaires, btw.
Yep.
You can either be rich enough to just absorb the hit, or so destitute you have nothing to lose.
For guys in the middle (i.e. WHERE MOST GUYS ARE), its just financial devastation.
Man was not owed the wilderness, and men are not owed women.
Women aren't owed men's attention and support, by the same token.
And if men are making the logical decision that the prize they get for supporting and paying attention to women is not appealing, why SHOULDN'T they just ignore them?
What's the point of taming wilderness if you aren't then allowed to build a society in it?
What's the point of taming the ocean if you can't go fishing in it.
Why explore the universe if you are not given the credit for your efforts and risks?
You're basically characterizing women as a ENEMY, or possibly just a natural force that men must overcome.
In other words, as a force against ongoing maintenance of civilization.
Makes little sense to give such a dangerous presence much control of your civilization.
faceh
2mo ago
I can't think of any political answer to the issue that wouldn't restrict women's liberties, and I'm not into restricting women's liberties. Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.
We've run this experiment for about 30 or so years.
That is, we tore up any laws or social norms that might be considered restrictions on women's liberty (Even WITHIN the marital relationship!), gave them 'equal rights' to every legal benefit they could want, we have every single cultural institution, Academia, Corporations, Social Media, Hollywood, all telling them they never have to settle.
Then the few guardrails that remained (i.e. religion) have been pushed aside, so that women genuinely do not have ANY pressure on them to live up to ANY standards, whatsoever.
And what we see is that women have more mental illness, are more medicated than ever, have more radical politics than ever, are less healthy than ever, they have more sex partners yet fewer children, and self reported happiness is lower than ever.
Don't know what to tell you man, women are miserable under this current state of affairs, too. And they tend to blame men, despite having been given all the agency they could possibly want.
Solutions that DON'T directly restrict sexual liberties could involve removing the direct incentives to put off relationship formation and simply reinstate the cultural 'guardrails' that at least give them a path they can follow that tends to create healthy outcomes.
Surely we can put some 'pressure' on women to settle down earlier without making it a legal mandate?
faceh
2mo ago
Because they still largely hold the reins of power, which at a bare minimum means they can stop solutions from being implemented.
Other solution, aside from outright revolution, is to wait patiently for them to die.
faceh
2mo ago
There's a lot of room for profile optimization to allow men of average looks to get into the top 20% of profiles, or
You see how this is a Red Queen's race, though, do you not?
If every guy puts in incredible effort to up his game, to make his profile as slick and impressive as possible... then NOBODY actually improves their status relative to the others much. Its a lot of effort burnt for no real improvement in the overall situation.
Well, women get a bit of a benefit, but they're still given dozens of options with no pressure to settle so its not like it'll encourage them to actually CHOOSE the guy in front of them.
And on the flip side... the quality of the women they're in competition for is lower than before, so what exactly is the MOTIVATION to put in all this effort, to try to win the race for her affections...
For a woman who already thinks you're unattractive:
https://x.com/whatever/status/1927741663054553242
This is a massive genre of video, I could pull dozens of examples of women openly declaring they don't find average men attractive. Despite not being very hot themselves. The toxicity is not just a small subset of them.
Even obese women won't settle for an obese man, although an obese man is willing to have an obese woman. this is quite the asymetry... and its not solved by men 'getting better.'
This is my point with my earlier post. The Pool of women who are actually appealing to marry is small, compared to the vast number of single guys fighting for their attention.
The only way this resolves favorably is to increase the pool of women who are marriageable.
But nobody will even broach that topic... except Andrew Tate.
faceh
2mo ago
Yes.
But this is my point. Yelling at men to 'get better' is not a viable solution when the reason they're not putting in the effort are mostly attributable to FACTORS BEYOND THEIR CONTROL.
faceh
2mo ago
I think there's an empathy gap, men know how much effort it takes to create good results, AND how few compliments a man gets, so men are more prone to give 'em when justified.
faceh
2mo ago
I knew this meme for years, but when I started lifting in earnest about a year ago, I was still quite tickled when literally the only people paying me compliments were dudes. "Arms looking thick!" "Great work on that bench PR!" "I see those biceps!"
Nary a peep from any woman, friend or otherwise.
That said, at least I can be pretty secure in the knowledge that if the guys are noticing it, then there are visible improvements that the women will notice too, even if they say nothing.
faceh
2mo ago
I literally just want to figure out the most most efficient way to show the Boomers pushing the "just improve yourself and then women will flock to you" advice that this is horribly insufficient and increasingly divorced from reality, so that they can be convinced to either start helping with the problem or, preferably, stand aside to let others fix it rather than just interfering with anybody who tries so NOBODY can fix it.
The fact that they don't let any 'serious' guy talk about the problem or take genuine actions is why Andrew Tate is the main voice men get to hear about this from.
It's me.
And yeah, they also have to be smart and, to some degree, self aware.
Unfortunately them merely being aware that they're being unreasonable isn't enough to convince them to STOP being unreasonable.
The smart ones tend to be able to create unique coping mechanisms that work until they have a particularly bad episode and then all collapse at once.
At which point they usually shut down all connections in life, job, friends, living situation, move somewhere new and start over to try again "fresh."
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