Not to be the Debbie downer, but how much have you hedged against exogenous black-swan type risks?
Being able to say fuck you to any given job or walk away from any situation where they treat you unfairly is truly powerful.
But its always the thing you didn't expect coming in from the angle you weren't guarding that gets you.
Divorce, or credible accusation of criminal conduct, or randomly getting on the bad side of some psychotic, violent asshole are hard to ward off just with "fuck you" money.
I'm in an intermediate stage, I'm aggressively paying down (unsecured) debts, and I've got some money saved up to throw towards a big play the second I see one.
Good luck.
faceh
8hr ago
Trump successfully dodges every other attempt to scandalize or imprison him (and a literal bullet) and yet people still think THIS is the one.
faceh
1d ago
It is interesting to think about what sort of evidence you personally would need to bump your personal probability of "God" existing to like 99%.
There's a bit of a problem in that '1 off' events can be 'explained' as an extremely rare confluence of factors that produced an unlikely (but not impossible!) occurrence. And events that seem impossible but are repeated with some kind of regularity can be studied and eventually 'explained.'
And a lot of things CAN be written off as hallucinations or misperceptions of an otherwise normal event.
For me, I'd count "Reviving someone who was proclaimed dead, on demand" as pretty high up the scale of things that can't be explained (yet) with current science, and thus proof of 'divine' intervention.
faceh
1d ago
Don't even have to go to a specific site for it.
I have an OKCupid account that I haven't really touched in over a year, and whenever I log in I'll have a handful of likes from Filipina ladies.
faceh
1d ago
Alas, I'd probably have to extend attorney-client privilege in order to get her to talk, so they'd have to offer me a ton of money to breach that with the goods.
faceh
2d ago
I just now realized how both the pager operation that decapitated Hezbollah leadership and the decimation of Iranian military ranks with precision strikes sort of pattern match to the idea of an angry God smiting the enemies of his chosen people.
faceh
2d ago
I tentatively agree, but in the sense that "people need to reach a breaking point before they will return to the thing that they've been avoiding all along."
The church has the advantage of having been around for centuries and centuries, so they will be the default option people return to when most else fails.
But in the meantime I think the phones will probably win the attention game.
I think that might be how it feels until she slips into a particular corner of tiktok or where-ever that starts shaping her mind in ways that you will truly dislike.
In such cases you might prefer being the main source of her validation.
Unless she has a good mental filter of her own to keep nonsense from taking root.
I didn't even mention the most befuddling and depressing stat:
When asked about having children, 51% of young adults who are not parents say they would like to have children one day. Three-in-ten say they’re not sure, and 18% say they don’t want to have children.
While 57% of young men say they want children one day, a smaller share of young women (45%) say the same.
21% of childless women say the DON'T want kids, compared to 15% of childless men.
Men by and large want kids.
And the ones they'd have to do it with are by and large NOT seeking kids.
"Oh but 12% isn't that big a difference."
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of men that represents.
Women are passing on men who would date and marry them. It is not the reverse.
The ONLY way this gets solved is convincing more women to settle and have kids.
Men can't improve their way out of a shortage of women who want kids.
faceh
3d ago
See it sounds to me like you are trying to treat men and women as the exact same and getting frustrated that they aren't.
I have a generalized model for Western Women:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party. Thirst traps abound here.
Devoted and effective mother.
I'm actually frustrated that they AREN'T acting more different than men, and eschewing the one role that men can't actually fill.
Women are not and shouldn't be as hardcore about discipline and working out etc. as a man. That's ok.
Yes, indeed, all a woman has to do to be considered 'fit' is 'not be obese.' Just don't be obviously and grotesquely fat.
AND YET, they're still the more obese gender.
I don't know what to tell you man, they have an overall lower bar, and many of them don't even try to clear it.
faceh
3d ago
Why would they continue to work on 'productive' labor when there is no actual purpose to doing so?
I mean that literally, why would they do more than the bare minimum, enough to keep their electricity and internet on?
Why would they do any job that carries any amount of risk or requires excess hours of their time?
And, of course, why wouldn't they just vote for the most radical political candidates in the meantime?
Its prevalent enough in Japan already that they have a term for it: Herbivore men..
Consider that there are two types of 'fuck you' money.
Being filthy rich so that you can afford to lose a bunch of it.
And being so dirt poor that you have nothing to lose and thus don't care about losing.
The only real suckers in this scenario are the guys stuck in the middle class doing most of the productive work and paying taxes whilst receiving very few benefits back.
This is just your insecurity talking.
Yeah sure. And if you have a job applicant whose resume shows 12 different jobs in the past 5 years, none of which lasted more than 3 months, they're 'insecure' if they pass you over for an applicant with a more stable history, right?
(hint: it shows trouble actually committing, i.e. a red flag).
Nobody is obligated to be 'secure' about promiscuity, that's laughable to even suggest. Its about the one thing we are genetically wired to BE insecure about.
Which is to say, your comment reads like satire.
but 6-12 is perfectly normal in this day and age.
And it was less normal in the past.
Granddad had a 64% chance of marrying a woman with only 1 or fewer sexual partners.
Guys now have a 27% chance, at best.
Strangely, more people got married back in granddad's day.
faceh
3d ago
Well broadly if you ask them, they can't find men that meet their standards.
But its broadly women who are passing on men, not the other way around. Which explains both the large number of single women AND the fact that apparently desirable men remain single.
And the fact that half of Gen Z men are just giving up.
And young women are significantly less likely to report being single.
For those that are:
Close to half (45 percent) of college-educated women say not being able to find someone who meets their expectations is a major factor, while only 28 percent of women without a college education feel the same. This education gap is slightly smaller among men. One-third (33 percent) of college-educated men claim not finding someone who meets their standards is a major factor for them, compared to 19 percent of noncollege-educated men.
DESPITE this, young single men report greater interest in dating than young single women:
There is a significant disparity in dating interest between single men and women. Nearly half (47 percent) of single men report being open to dating, compared to only 36 percent of single women. The gender gap in dating is even wider among young singles. More than half (52 percent) of young single men say they are open to dating, compared to only 36 percent of young single women.
This doesn't make sense if MEN are the ones passing on women.
So yeah.
That's been my point all along and I haven't seen a single piece of data that would refute it, yet.
faceh
3d ago
And that one is particularly salient insofar as an otherwise mostly stable and fit person can become more unstable and then lose their minds due to effects of smartphone usage. (open question as to whether they'd lose their mind anyway.)
At least, that's what happens with young people.
And a huge (and growing) portion of them aren't using it.
Whose fault is that.
faceh
3d ago
You're doing the same thing as the women who say "yeah I have 20 options but I'm just not feeling any of them, you know?" It's the exact same thing.
Sure. So why do you only think it's a problem when men do it?
Its the asymmetry that grates me.
Once again I assert that you are completely and utterly off base about my material conditions.
As stated, I've gone on dates with a number of women who, far from getting scooped up by better men, just end up alone and slowly have their lives spiral away.
If I were the problem, why aren't they going on to something better?
faceh
3d ago
My first hope is that someone has some countervailing argument or data that actually shows its not so bleak as it seems.
I want to understand the problem well enough to know if I'm not seeing something, or I'm seeing something that's not actually there.
Nobody has brought that forth that I've seen.
And finally, if nobody is going to implement a solution... fine. But the status quo will not hold!
What is going to happen in, say, 10 years when a majority of men aren't married, don't have kids, and are being expected to keep on working and upholding a society that doesn't give them anything in return?
I suspect a combination of:
A) Men voting for some RADICAL policies that REALLY DO start stripping women's rights away, because they have ceased to give a shit about women's opinions;
B) Men lashing out in more violent ways (both in lone wolf ways and maybe organized) because there's no rewards for good behavior;
C) Men just dropping out and refusing to do the basic work that keeps civilization afloat. If they refuse to become cops, soldiers, garbagemen, construction workers, but stay in their room jerking off or playing video games, then things start breaking down. And in this case, we will have fewer people to protect us from the violent guys.
I do not see a scenario where men continue to just keep eating the shit sandwich AND contributing to the society that is force feeding it to them.
All that to say, I think you should stop worrying so much and become a doomer, like me! I guess I still worry, anyway, so I'm doing it wrong.
The crazy thing is that I'm still pretty optimistic at my core. Despair is not in my nature. But I also REFUSE to lie about reality as I see it.
And I get a certain amount of joy from arguing someone into the ground and, if not forcing them to admit defeat, at least getting them to stop spouting stuff that I know to be false or inaccurate.
Everyone's entitled to their point of view in here, after all, but I'm happy to interrogate their view, and be interrogated in return.
faceh
3d ago
Given that the median WHITE male salary for under 40's in the U.S. is about 60k and its about 33k for the under 30's, I think I can spot where your largest filter is.
If a woman in her 20's is looking for a guy in his 20's making 70k or more, then she's already eliminated 90% of her options before zeroing in on other traits.
But uh, there's a bigger question there. Why are these guys single if they're such objectively good catches? Unless they're choosing to remain single, then this just shows that women are still rejecting them for some reason.
Alsoooo I notice that you didn't include "is heterosexual" in the criteria, so I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of these desirable dudes are actually just gay. Yes, even considering that they attend church once a month. Also probably a good number of divorcees in there.
Look a single dude straight in the eye and say "Yeah she's banged 6-12 dudes prior to you, but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance and YOU'RE the one she's going to stick with" with a straight face.
And like with other issues, women now have more premarital sex partners than they've had in the past.
Yet another way in which the average woman is less desirable as a partner than they were before.
Which cannot be fixed by telling men to improve.
Man, we're getting to quite a number of asymmetries that favor women and are mostly controlled by women's behavior, aren't we? The obesity, the heightened expectations, the low childbearing rates while men keep doing the (literal and metaphorical) heavy lifting.
Not even exaggerating, I've strongly considered making up some third-date ideas that require both parties to spend extended time away from their phones, or at least without internet access on them.
Or failing that, just carrying around a signal jammer.
Convincing a woman to give up a their smartphone will probably go as well as asking them to cut off a finger, but maybe one can wean them off the most harmful apps and restrict them to just messaging friends and sharing photos to a site that doesn't allow viewers to interact directly.
faceh
3d ago
Well, serious question.
How do you make God more interesting than or more impressive than whatever's happening in their smartphone?
You reminded me of that 10 day revival on a Christian College campus over two years back. Which was very interesting to see at the time, but nothing else seems to have come of it? How to maintain such a thing in the current era of extremely short attention spans.
Yeah.
Its a little less bad if you aren't exclusively staying on the dating apps, which I avoid like the plague now.
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something, and is generally not in great financial shape to boot. Often times they advertise their mental illness diagnoses.
And if you've gone to the effort of squaring away so many aspects of your life, its actually riskier to try to add someone in who might disrupt all those arrangements!
I genuinely ask myself the question "does adding this person to my life improve it or am I basically just getting an overgrown teenager with a caffeine addiction?" and it kills my interest. "The ick" as they say. The times I've gone on dates with such women hasn't done much to improve that perception.
On the flip side, you get the girlbosses who ARE spending their time at work (so have finances in order), slamming out sets at the gym, and pursuing six different side activities at once. Which is kind of neat, but they don't have time to go on dates.
What you rarely seem to find is women who have their lives generally organized, they don't spend money exorbitantly, they stay in shape through regular but not obsessive exercise and watching their diet, and have moderate ambition but are happy to just relax most nights. Someone who would be a nice supplement/complement to your own life and isn't going to disrupt your own routines.
It seemed like the women doing most/all of those things got married to someone they met in college or grad school.
That seems to be the blunt truth of it. The best women are getting scooped early, and, generally, stay in their relationships.
So the pool is mostly comprised of those who either didn't get scooped or couldn't stay in said relationship for [reasons].
This wouldn't be so bad if there were decent ways to filter for what you're looking for (old OKCupid!).
faceh
3d ago
I think I would have a lot more respect for the women who hit their late 30's still single and childless and realize how they've messed up if said women were willing to openly act as a warning for those younger.
Most of them want to reframe themselves as a complete victim and garner sympathy and attention that way.
Or, we need to empower the elder women who actually "GET IT" and want to ensure that they have grandchildren to raise to be a stronger social force.
Yeah I was specifically thinking of WHERE you would reside to mitigate a lot of the random elements of life.
And having enough money to pick up and move if you need to is, IMHO, the final "fuck you" step.
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