thejdizzler
22hr ago
I've seen this realization hit one of my older female cousins: she's 43 now. Absolutely desperate for a boyfriend/husband because she really wants children. Wealth isn't a problem because my uncle and aunt are loaded, but she just can't seem to find anyone who works long term. She's been continually lowering her standards, in all the wrong ways, for the past 10 years, and I think is slowly coming to the realization that she's never going to find someone. I have a lot of sympathy for her: she got screwed over by a Kiwi expat who had another girlfriend back home that she probably would have married, and her sister (my favorite cousin who actually shares my birth date, but not my birth year) has been happily married to her highschool sweetheart for 15 years (and has never dated another man). Both have got to sting. Yet it's been absolutely tragic to see the vicious combination of parental and internal standards make it impossible for her to settle down.
Long-term this is only going to end with either an internal reversal of the feminist position (unlikely but possible, I see some signs of this on the corner of YouTube), or the forcible return of strict marriage laws probably through Islam in Europe and Evangelical christianity in USA. In the meantime, I don't think there's much we can do personally other than try to be realistic about our own standards (selecting for traits that actually matter in a marriage) and not simping.
thejdizzler
22hr ago
I'm in the 20-29 age cohort and it's a wasteland for a lot of men. When I used to go to church every single guy in the young adult group was either married or completely single (at this ratio was something like 10:1). And this was a Catholic Church where people are supposed to getting married early. At work it is similar, although in my family things seem to be better (my sister and all my female cousins have long-term boyfriends who are certainly not chad, although my sister's boyfriend is 6' 4").
I tend to agree with you that many of the put "women back in a box" solutions are pretty unworkable. Although stable, happy marriage might be far preferable on long time horizons, dating an average person as another average person is much less exciting than freedom and independence. I see this in myself with dating: why would I go out to a bar or another coffee date, when reading/exercising/friend activities are so much more exciting and less stressful. It's probably even worse for young women, who are constantly bombarded with attention and opportunities.
I don't find the political speculation to be particularly useful, but perhaps we can glean some personal self-improvement type stuff from all of this. I think both men and women could be better about selecting for traits that actually would matter in a marriage. Stability, kindness, physical fitness, etc., rather than raw sex appeal or charisma. That kind of selection is something that you as an individual can control (and advise your friends about). For men I think this means desexualizing your brain (no more porn and masturbation), and under no circumstances simping. Seeing women as human beings like you not only helps you to evaluate them more accurately, but also makes them more attracted to you. For women, I think I would recommend something similar: stop consuming fantasy romance slop.
thejdizzler
1d ago
I think doing the whole kitten-caboodle will be easier for me, as fapping tends to make me quite lustful.
I would ask her out probably and stop being celibate after a few months if we get along really well. I think it's a bad idea for me to have sex with a woman too quickly in a relationship. I've gotten trapped in relationships before because I'm too addicted to the sex and feel like I owe it to the woman because I've already slept with her.
thejdizzler
1d ago
By celibate I mean no masturbation, porn, or sex with women (or with men I guess too, but I'm not into that). I think this will also probably be easier with no dating as well, but I'm not sure if I want to commit to that.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Would you mind linking to your blog? (EDIT: nvm found it in your bio)
Let's keep each other accountable on porn/masturbation!
thejdizzler
1d ago
New Year's goals/resolutions.
- Work: I had a huge surge of success right before I left for break, so I'm feeling optimistic about finishing my PhD this year. I probably won't graduate until May 2027 still, but I hope to have all the experiments done by the end of this year.
- Fitness: Every year I keep saying I'm going to try high volume training and never actually do. I plan to build up to 15-20 hours a week of training, 1-2 of those being mobility work, 2-4 being in the gym and the rest some form of aerobic exercise (swim, bike, run, row).
- Intellectual stuff: I want to focus on improving my Italian this year, and having a more professional approach to writing on substack (drafting and proofreading posts before I publish them).
- Finances: I have a system I'm happy with set up for investing (1/3 bonds, 1/3 index funds, 1/3 speculation, in retirement account it's more like 1/6 bonds, 2/3 index funds, 1/6 speculation), but need to work on budgeting this year. My sister (who lives in the UK) earns about the same as me, but is able to travel almost every month because she budgets better than me (she spends the money I would invest on travel). For me this means probably reducing sport related expenses (less races, not getting injured and having to go to PT), reducing travel, and limiting eating out to once a week.
- Dating: I think I'm going to be celibate for 2026 and put my energy into other areas of life.
- Spirituality: Will continue to practice tarot with my ex-roommate over zoom, and want to get into a breath work practice.
- Health: After reading This is Natto, I'm way less concerned with trying to optimize my health, which I think paradoxically will make my health much better. I will continue to track HRV and RHR for training purposes, but otherwise just listen to my body.
- Community: My tarot draw for 2026 was the three of cups, which is the card of fellowship/community. I want to cook for a friend at least twice a month this year, and hold a social gathering and my house or a third space at least once a month.
- Via negativa: All of these goals are going to require time to complete. Some of this is going to come from not tossing and turning in my bed trying to get extra sleep. The rest is probably going to have to come from reducing digital distractions. I'd like to reduce my phone screen time to less than an hour a day by the end of the year. I'm going to do this by adding micro anti-habits every month. The first of these is to batch respond to texts only twice a day in the morning and the evening and otherwise not respond.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Nominated for AAQC!
thejdizzler
8d ago
ouch yea I didn't do enough research! This is a problem for 2026!
thejdizzler
8d ago
Just want to thank @TowardsPanna for the recommendation to read This is Natto. Completely changed my relationship to sleep and wakefulness and I've been sleeping much better since.
The big shift has been one of mindset. Rather than obsessively think about numbers, I just give myself ample opportunity to sleep, remove all trackers/watches from the room and sleep and wake up when my body feels like it. If I wake up in the middle of the night or "too early", no biggie, I just do stuff I want to do until sleepiness returns or I think it's time to just get up.
thejdizzler
8d ago
I've just bought an index fund that's supposed to track copper futures. CPER is the ticker name. I believe it is a basket of futures up to a year out.
thejdizzler
8d ago
I’ve struggled to find a good commodity fund for gold that isn’t really expensive per unit or isn’t just a gold mining ETF. I’ll look into this in the New Year more.
thejdizzler
8d ago
lol when you put it that way I sound pretty crazy.
thejdizzler
8d ago
I don’t know, I don’t think it makes me a very cynical person. I enjoy my life a fair bit as you can maybe see from other posts on here. I think it just makes me a bit less naive about tying my future plans to economic growth. I’m still invested in the stock market, but have been trying to avoid the AI boom for example. I’m still going to finish my PhD, but maybe not work in academia when the whole system is going to fall part because of demographics and lack of surplus to pay for basic research. I’m thinking about how to continue to live my life without buying a car so I don’t have to worry rising fuel and associated costs. The future is going to be what it’s going to be: one of us will be right, and there’s very little either of us can do about it as individuals, which I think is what depresses many doomers. They see the doom and gloom as taking away things, I see it as freedom. Guess what can’t happen in a declining energy environment: woke police states, AI takeover (either through what we’re seeing now or AGI), or continued global homogenization. All the atomization, hyper stimulation and specialization that modernity has brought will have to be scaled back and I think that’s a good thing. By trying to build my life around those things, even if you are right about energy/material abundance, I think will end up happy.
Anyway, happy to debate this more another time. I will make a top level post on a culture war thread in a few weeks with my thoughts better laid out with more data and we can debate there.
Ehh communists were just one faction within the Republican umbrella. With all the infighting that happened during the war, doubt a communist regime would have lasted long. Especially if WW2 happens as if in our timeline. No way in hell Hitler lets communist Spain exist. Which now that you mention it is probably pretty ass for Spain. So I guess Franco saved Spain from even more war/ Nazi occupation, which is something. In fact, if the coup didn’t happen, Republican Spain probably tries to join up against the Nazis and gets bodied then too.
I don’t have the energy to debate the earlier parts because I’m frankly getting a little tired of the snark and lack of real argument. Give me a couple actual claims that we can debate rather than just telling me my argument suck.
However, one the last part I will disagree. My theory does not state this because neither the Romans tbr 19th century English had access to oil reserves with crazy EROIs of 1:100. It’s only in the 20th century that we got that and only really after world war 2. I will go to bat for a higher standard of living between ~1950-1970 in America than now in America.
Paging @FirmWeird on nuclear.
thejdizzler
8d ago
Copper is up 20% this year and S&P is only up ~17%. I only got into the copper futures around Feb.
thejdizzler
8d ago
Let me try and lay it out how I see it. The extraction of every nonrenewable resource is defined by a tailed Gaussian curve, where the easy to harvest resources are mined/harvested first. The really easy sources of fossil fuels and minerals were harvested a long time ago because they didn't require large expenditures of energy. High grade ore and high-pressure oil deposits are no longer readily discovered as those have been exploited and exhausted by lower tech civilizations (the Romans for example exhausted much of the easy to access mineral resources of Europe). With better technology lower grade sources of these resources can be accessed, but these usually require more of an input of energy. To go from PA or Texas gushers to fracking for example requires a higher input of energy because you need to pump water into rock at high pressure to get the oil out, refine it more, etc. Same with copper and other minerals: more energy is required to get copper out of lower grade ores than higher grade ores.
This would not be a problem if we had unlimited energy. We literally could filter seawater to get the copper we need. The problem is that we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for pretty much all our energy, and they have been getting more expensive to extract since about 1970 due to declines in easy to access oil/coalfields. You can see this in the behavior of oil prices: steady if declining real price until 1970, and then consistent if ragged increase in price since then. This increase in the cost of energy is one reason why mining companies don't want to invest in exploration: the energy cost of extraction is continuing to rise, meaning any new mine with low ore grades may not be worth the investment because of associated high-energy costs.
To answer your last question: I don't think now is special. I think we've been in a slow decline since the 1970s. Real assets (houses, cars, most real foods) have had a real increase in price over the last 50 years, reflecting a real chipping away at living standards here in the west. I think this reflects increasing costs of energy, the fundamental basis for human society. Of course there are other explanations for this phenomena on the forum, many of which may contribute as well. But I think energy is primary. The "peak" I think will merely be the point where it gets difficult to deny this.
Of course if we successfully invent fusion power, I will be wrong about this. Then we can access effectively unlimited materials here on earth. In that case pollution will be a more limiting factor, which we can theoretically solve with unlimited energy as well.
I don't know man, I think my way of looking at the world has pretty good predictive value. My copper futures outperformed the S&P500 this year. I also would predict real global increases in the cost of material goods: which also has happened over the last 50 years, with notable exceptions in electronics. In addition, the increased energy expenditure required to get these resources is having terrible effects on the biosphere: global warming, ocean acidification, and loss of wild animal biomass. All of these graphs are going in the direction that my view of the world would predict.
Of course if we invent fusion this all could be moot, but even then, given the history of how human society has dealt with increased energy availability, its doesn't seem likely to me that we would actually solve our ecological problems.
thejdizzler
8d ago
Yea dude, copper has been way outperforming the SP500 for the past few years. I'm long on copper futures and my portfolio has been doing excellent.
thejdizzler
9d ago
IDK man, copper is pretty convincingly in decline. We basically haven't found any new large scale copper discoveries in the last 15 years. Grades are continually declining. We're currently mining ores that are 0.6% copper!!! And this is only going to continue to get worse. Unless we find an extremely large easy to exploit source of copper approximately ~now, copper production is guranteed to fall in the next 10 years.
thejdizzler
9d ago
I think material limits will hit us far before we can even get to harnessing all the energy available on the planet. I, like the original limits to growth study, think that we are pretty close to material limits right now. We are basically already at peak oil and we hit peak copper this year. Global warming (really global climatic instability) is worsening, as well as microplastic/endocrine disruptor pollution that is making it more difficult to reproduce. AI, short-form media, and other opiates are deskilling the population at a time when genuine scientific advances require more and more resources to achieve. There's a perfect storm of bad shit looming down on the line go up narrative, meaning it is not long for this world.
I too agree that the limits are in some part social and psychological. If we weren't so obsessed with consumerism and pointless travel we could have shepherded our resources better and got a little further, or maintained a pretty solid standard of living for a long while. But things like space colonization are a largely foolish endeavor and this is because of fundamental physical and biological limits, which will prevent us from leaving this planet, or even ever fully consuming its resources.
I would challenge you to read two resources in the New Year: Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works (yes I did write a really negative review of this on Goodreads, but the first few chapters about material resources are fundamentally solid), and Tom Murphy's Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet. I think many people on this forum (and in wider society) are energy and materials blind, which lead to extrapolations from the past two centuries of economic and technological growth that I find to be fanciful.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Did he though? 40 years after his death Spain is just and gay and trans as the rest of Europe and leftists control the main levers of power.
thejdizzler
10d ago
We are so diametrically opposite on this I don’t even know where to start! Kudos to theMotte for bringing these viewpoints together!
thejdizzler
10d ago
Do you think Sadly, Porn is worth reading in its totality?
thejdizzler
10d ago
Limits to growth. If the line go up forever/space colonization crowd is right almost all my beliefs fall apart.
Thanks man. Been thinking about this proverb wrong the whole time.
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