thejdizzler
12d ago
Just wanted to say I admire your ability to keep an open mind despite defending your beliefs strongly!
thejdizzler
13d ago
Maybe this is the key. Female roommates.
thejdizzler
13d ago
I used the I Ching a lot in college. I didn't really use either of them for straight up prediction very much but I've found that Tarot seems to help me psychoanalyze a lot more because it has greater symbolic resonance for whatever reason.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Okay bucko let's look at what Mr. Get Better Soon wrote and see if I really took it out of context.
What is a good job? It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car (unless you live in a place like NYC or SF where it’s impractical), and pay for an adult lifestyle—probably $70K at the low end, depending on the city. If you can afford your own place, congrats, you’re an adult man...until you can do this, you’re a boy. Men, as a rule, don’t have roommates.
This is the quote that I refer to and you and I cite. How reasonable is 70k? The median income after tax in 2020 was 64k, and data that I could find from 2016 from the census bureau suggests that cities on average had about a 4% higher household income than rural communities. So let's call the median income 66k in cities, and since men out-earn women, 70k actually does make sense.
The national average for a one bedroom is 1,713 a month, so you are indeed right that this fits with the suggested 70k income, leaving plenty of money for savings, car payments and discretionary spending.
Can you achieve these milestones on a lower salary? The first quintile is pretax earning 45k a year. In this scenario a single apartment is eating up more than 50% of your income, not to mention car payments. So possible, but not financially wise. So maybe we lower the bar and say that these income requirements are locking out around 25-30% of men out of the dating market. Point still stands.
Now what do I actually say about this advice:
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family.
Nowhere do I dismiss this advice as bad or non-actionable. In fact, some amount of wealth generation is and has always been necessary. This is the expectation. What you fail to engage with is my argument that I don't think the average man can meet these standards. It doesn't matter if the number is 70k or slightly lower, more and more men are being priced out of the market.
This also has fuck-all to do with my personal income situation. I don't make 70k now, but I will as soon as I finish my PhD. In terms of his other requirements, I think I'm okay too: certainly below 15% body fat, dress pretty well (although this could be improved easily), am well read, speak multiple languages and am quite social. What I'm critiquing is this attitude that you, Get Better Soon and other posters here that we can solve these issues merely by improving ourselves. I am not saying self-improvement is bad, nor that it won't increase your odds of success, I am saying that it is insufficient to deal with social decline, which is manifested in this issue and the others that I mention.
I'm sorry this is ridiculous. Talk about ad hominem. Attack what I actually wrote rather than assuming things about my personality and life.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Anyone on the Motte practice Tarot? I've dabbled in it for the past year, but looking to a go a bit deeper in terms of interpretations and understanding of the cards.
thejdizzler
14d ago
I have two roommates. Everyone in the Bay Area has like 7. Get Better Soon is a bit out of it IMO.
thejdizzler
14d ago
You are totally talking past what I wrote. The individual advice works, I don't disagree. All of these things will help find a romantic partner. The problem is it doesn't fix the larger issue of why these things have to be said in the first place: in the past 50-30 (but really the last 10), the whole landscape of dating and relationships has imploded. Self maxing isn't going to fix this.
Where do I refer to myself a single time in this post? I haven't had the most success with dating, but I'm not an incel. I've basically said in other posts that the most actionable things to do align with what this guy is saying (car, diet, not being a doormat). Me playing the system this way is not going to fix the fact that the system is broken.
As far as the last part goes, I could not disagree more strongly. Yes individuals did great things, but they were only able to do those things because of the presence of continually enforced social norms surrounding gender roles and expectations. The farmer and factory worker of the 1880s worked hard to provide for his family. We were able to win the civil war and the first and second world wars because we had competent social systems (at the family level and beyond) that have since vanished. Dating is only one part of this.
thejdizzler
14d ago
I'm not saying that the individual shouldn't do the things he mentions. They will work. The problem is expecting this to resolve the crisis on a larger scale. The system is broken, gaming it won't magically fix things.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Probably true, as long as we remember that is the case for both genders not just dudes. Girls can easily obtain instagram orbiters or read things like Fourth Wing that push those buttons without putting in effort.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Guaranteed monogamy is also one of the few ways that actually produces stable societies. You mess with it at your peril.
thejdizzler
14d ago
I know the dating crisis has been done to death on this forum, but I want to talk about it perhaps from a slightly different angle than previous posters; that of the collapse of the ability to make collective decisions/sacrifices. Various self-improvement substackers seem to be populating the majority of my feed these days, and one, Get Better Soon had a post yesterday about how to attract women. Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable. This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family. But we've rapidly gone from a situation in which pretty much everyone, including the ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50% of society could expect to get married, to a world where maybe that will happen to 20% of the population, and most of those people should expect to get divorced. The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
It's not just dating, I kind of see this with everything. We used to be able to take effective collective action as a country. Things like ballooning government debt, government incompetence, rapid urban decay, and breakdown in communities are relatively new phenomena that have popped up in the last twenty to fifty years. Aurelian loves to talk about how much the civil service and government in general have decayed in the UK (and France I think) since the end of the Cold War, and lays a lot of the blame at the feet of the focus on individual outcomes. I'm not sure if he has the causality the right way round, but it seems clear to me that we can no longer really effectively do things as a society. The inability to form lasting romantic and family attachments is only part of that.
thejdizzler
15d ago
I would argue that we crossed the threshold into really bad a long long time ago. Probably around the time of the serious adoption of instagram/Facebook's algorithm change. Many would place this date as 2012, right around when the smart phone went mainstream. AI wouldn't be as serious of problem if you didn't have it in your pocket 24/7.
thejdizzler
17d ago
I've been reading What hath God Wrought (Oxford History of the US from 1815-1848) and one thing I'm finding quite confusing is the animosity towards the Federalist Party in most of the country? What did this party stand for, and why did it become so hated outside of New England?
thejdizzler
21d ago
I think I'm putting dating on pause at least for a few months but probably until I finish my PhD. I'm finding I'd much rather train or spend time with friends (or making new friends) than go on a date with a stranger that probably won't go anywhere. Of course at some point I do need to focus on dating: I think finding someone to spend the rest of my life with is important. But I think things will go easier when I earn more money, have clearer work/life boundaries, and in an era of my life where I don't want to train as much.
thejdizzler
23d ago
I am really enjoying What Hath so far. I'm only a few chapters in, but I like how he is framing the whole period in terms of a transportation/communication revolution. Also enjoying his take on Jackson as a bully. McPherson is awesome, as you've surely seen me post about before. The only other two I've tried are The Republic for Which it Stands and The Glorious Cause. I found the first 5-6 chapters of the first one really really good (dealing with Western expansion/Reconstruction), but have been getting bogged down in the social history that follows those chapters. The second book is overwritten, at least in the first few chapters. I'd like to revisit them both quite soon though. Soft goal for this year is to read all of Oxford US history books that have come out so far.
thejdizzler
23d ago
What hath God Wrought: history of the US from 1815-1848. Also still slogging through Way of Kings.
thejdizzler
25d ago
I think you should stop taking this guy so seriously. He has good advice in some areas of life (financial independence, internet use), but he is a hack in many other areas. For example, he claims that you don't need to learn a ton of vocabulary to be fluent in language and also that he is fluent in Spanish and French just from learning Latin. The first of these is not true, and he should know better as a someone who claims to be a linguist. The second seems to be really improbable: I'd have to hear him speak Spanish to believe it. I'm sure this is true with other areas of his "expertise" that I have less experience with.
thejdizzler
27d ago
Flame of Frenzy in Elden Ring.
Yep. It's the same conclusion that I've come to. Lots of vegans will shoot back with "you wouldn't buy something made with slave labor" or "it's not okay to beat your wife just a little bit". The former is funny because all of us do in fact buy things made with slave (or quasi-slave labor). The second is true, but if I was the wife in question I'd much rather a little light spanking than being beat by a crowbar. It's this same false equivalence and purity culture (you eat oysters so you're equivalent to a guy who eats steak twice a day) in veganism which is so contrary to the actual goals of the movement (get people to eat less meat so less animals suffer and die on factory farms).
thejdizzler
27d ago
I don't eat diary or eggs though. Looks like there's a name for this. Ostrovegan?
thejdizzler
27d ago
They have about as much sense perception as a tree: their single sensory nerve is to open and close the valve that allows them to filter feed. Nutritionally they fill a gap in my diet (Taurine, Iron, Omega-3s, B12), and I live in Maryland so they're cheap and tasty
thejdizzler
27d ago
As perhaps one of the few resident vegans (although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey) on this forum, I think this stuff is insane and is why we've had little to no progress in growing the movement or in meaningfully reducing animal suffering that we cause. Things like animal welfare restrictions that make factory farms impractical are broadly popular (although would require people to eat less meat). Nope, instead we have to focus on utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).
I still have an intuitive belief in a lot of what veganism stands for. I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure. Yet as a movement, or at least how it's practiced right now, veganism can never work. Nutritionally it's become clear to me that eating shellfish/fish is straight better than being on a strict vegan diet. Ethically, the emphasis on not eating/exploiting kingdom Animalia, when things like oysters have just as little sense perception as plants makes no sense, not to mention the failure to admit that there are gradations of intelligence/sense perception that should cause us to feel differently about cephalopod or mammalian suffering say, compared to that of arthropods. Practically, people don't like being scolded, and that's what a lot of vegans end up doing when it comes time to do activism. You can prevent a lot more animal suffering by teaching all your friends to cook more plant-rich meals than by converting one person to veganism and alienating everyone else.
thejdizzler
28d ago
I have quite a few Joe Abercrombie books to read still.
I'm quite partial to the Rider-Waite deck, but I also got one of my friends an Odyessian Tarot based on Greek mythology that I perhaps like better. He ended up buying the Rider-Waite deck as well, so maybe not a ringing endorsement.
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