thejdizzler
18d ago
Prompted by the discussion in the main thread about dating, I just broke up with the girl I'd been seeing for a few months, and am simultaneously relieved and feeling quite bad about myself. We had been friends for about 18 months, and I'd thought she'd liked me for a while but I wasn't particularly interested because she had done polyamory in the past. A few months ago she asked me out, and I initially said no, but changed my mind and said yes with the condition that there would be absolutely no polyamory. We got along really well, so things were good in some sense, but she didn't want to actually be intimate at all (despite complaining to me when we were friends about a previous boyfriend who didn't want to have sex), and told me yesterday when we broke up that she was feeling trapped.
I should never have said yes to this girl in the first place (polyamory is huge red flag), but this whole experience has been kind of a blackpill. She asked me out, so she clearly was attracted to me in some way, but there must have been something I did earlier in the relationship that really turned her off enough not to want to have sex. I don't want to have to be overanalyzing my every move trying to decide if it's given a girl the ick or not. It also didn't seem to matter at all how compatible we were platonically (both vegan, runners, huge readers): she still ended up feeling trapped because she wasn't romantically attracted and I wasn't cool with polyamory.
Some ideas I have for improving things in the future. Firstly, not saying yes to someone just because they asked and it looks good on paper. I knew in my gut that this wasn't going to work. Secondly, I think there are some small things that I can do with my appearance that could prevent the ick in the future: getting different conditioner so my swimmer hair isn't so straw-like, stopping eating beyond meat so I don't fart so badly, and getting rid of some old clothes. Thirdly, I think I need to get a car, or at least move somewhere where most other people don't drive frequently. Unfortunately driving everywhere is seen as a sign of "being a real adult" by a lot of Americans, and I think me biking everywhere might have been a factor in the lack of attraction (although she knew this when she asked me out). Finally, I think I need to get better at scaling my commitment appropriately relative to how much time we've been together, and how much the other person is willing to put into the relationship. This is something I have trouble with in all areas of my life (I'm 0 % or 100%, never in-between).
The dating scene is pretty bleak out there (which is why I said yes to this girl in the first place), and I honestly think this might be a sign to focus on getting my PhD done and making myself more attractive (getting in better shape, earning more money) rather than wasting time dating people in this shitty city.
thejdizzler
20d ago
I'm doing my PhD at Hopkins. I'll be done by May 2026 probably.
thejdizzler
21d ago
Reading some Anne Tyler (who is famous for setting her books in Baltimore), a collection of Argentinian horror stories (las cosas que perdimos en el Fuego) and Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe). The last of these I am reading in English alongside the Italian.
thejdizzler
21d ago
I just had my bike kicked out from under me by a pedestrian while I was stopped in a cross walk. I shouldn't have been in the cross walk (and I won't in the future, at least for the next week), but I also would have happily moved if he asked, or he could have, you know, walked one foot to the right and went around me. My bike weighs about 10 pounds so I was fine, but because he was black (and I'm white) I was seething with racial animosity on the rest of my ride home. On one level I recognize that this is obviously irrational (and racist), but at the same time I have had so many negative interactions with black people in this city (Baltimore) that I'm starting to wonder if there maybe is some truth in the HBD/race realist positions.
thejdizzler
26d ago
I don't know man I think @MaiqTheTrue gets it right. We know what the best diet is (Mediterranean/Japanese diet). Mostly vegetables, some starches, fish, and a little bit of meat. It's just that no one wants to hear this. It's bad for food manufacturers because it obviates the need for their existence and most of the public wants to eat junk food or is ideologically opposed to certain elements of this diet.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Just wanted to say this is fantastically put!
I'm of two minds with regards to this. On one hand I wish that my parents would have been stricter about video games. I sunk so many hours into CK2, Civ, Dark Souls,etc. that could have been spent hanging out with friends in real life (perhaps one of the reasons I don't have any friendships remaining really from this period), learning a language, or just chilling out/running slightly more. On the other hand, these games got me interested in history and geography (CK2, Civ), and philosophy (Dark Souls). Also my ex-girlfriend and her siblings were raised with no video games/social media. It didn't really help at all: she still got addicted to instagram/tiktok, her brother still got addicted to video games in adulthood.
To synthesize, I think some kind of exposure is good to be able to handle the super stimuli in adulthood, but I would recommend some kind of limits to be put in place. My parents let me play video games for 2 hrs Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Sometimes I would go over a little, but these limits were pretty well enforced. Maybe you could do something like this?
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I think the difference with poly is scale. Maybe you do this with serial monogamy once every few months to a year (although hopefully eventually you stop serially dating and get married). With polyamory it's a problem (everything) everywhere all at once. You are always looking for new relationships and defining boundaries with new partners. It sounds like it fucking sucks, and I'm not sure why anyone would voluntarily participate unless they were a sociopath.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Polyamory might be able to work for some people, but I think it's gotta be a net negative for society. I think it's simply a question of time. Every additional partner that you have creates a time commitment that you could have spent a). strengthening your relationship with your main partner, b). spending time with friends/building community, c). self-improvement/hobbies. A potential counterargument is that polyamory is just a different form of leisure, and so fucking around on the side is just like watching Netflix. I would respond to this in two ways. Firstly, maybe watching Netflix for 5 hours a day isn't great for society either. Secondly, I'm not sure that polyamory comes from the same pool of time as relaxing and watching Netflix. It's an inherently much more effortful activity, and is probably going to replace much more meaningful activities. Anecdotally, one of my roommates, who never practiced polyamory per see, but always had a "rotation" of girls going (maybe this is the cool chad version of poly, idk), never had time for any other hobbies or interests besides chasing tail, which I think has made him pretty boring and socially isolated.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I think for me when I level the accusations of LARPing, it's a synonym for accusing people of being unserious about the thing they are trying to practice/accomplish. It's not enough to pretend, you have to pretend effectively. You see this equally with rad-trad catholics or fundamentalists who conveniently forget that Jesus said that it's easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (how convenient that my new religion that is supposed to save me from the problems of modernity doesn't require me to give up the material trappings of that same system), and with leftists in favor of degrowth that don't seem to see that actually being serious about that ideology requires you to stop buying everything on amazon and doing gross things like composting your own poop. I would never accuse the Dominicans at my parish of larping, nor would I accuse the hippies who live off grid of doing so. It's the people that stridently profess a certain ideology without taking its tenets seriously that makes me think "LARP".
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I walk to the grocery store and go about once a week. It's about 0.5 miles each way, so it's a bit of a workout on the way back.
If I really need to transport something heavy I'll Zipcar or mooch off of a friend. This kind of stuff is made much more practical by a car. I'm not a car abolitionist, they have their place and their uses and are obviously essential in rural areas. What I'm frustrated by is the desire for many to make the car into the one size fits all transportation model. The actual costs of car use should be internalized by the user: things like congestion pricing seem like a great way to do that. Congestion pricing is not going to affect the ease of me bringing my grill to a friends house, but it might make me change my commuting behavior.
Let me be clear re:crime. We need to crack down on anti-social behavior here in America. If new green spaces are immediately colonized by junkies and other bums then that indicates a problem with society that runs much deeper than public transit. Cars don't really solve this problem, they just confine it to the walkable areas of the city, which are usually also historically the most pleasant.
My vision is for protected bike lanes of 1/4 lane width on the side of most streets. There are still issues with this: mainly it presents a hazard when cars are turning right and cutting off bikes, but it seems better than the alternatives (median bike lane has the problem with both turns, single use trails don't make use of existing infrastructure).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Bike lanes, denser cities, green space. If you could narrow most road ways to 1-2 lanes we could have bike lanes almost everywhere, larger sidewalks with more trees/green space. Parking lots could be turned into public parks or even businesses.
In 2022 there were 45 fatalities and 16k accidents in Baltimore city. That year there were 350 total traffic deaths in the whole state of Maryland. So 13%. The city makes up 8% of the total population of Maryland so the city is actually relatively more dangerous than the rest of the state for traffic deaths.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I was thinking more of 7:30-6:30 pm which is what the original post about congestion pricing in NYC was discussing. I don't doubt that people need to get other places during other times of day, but congestion pricing wouldn't affect this: it primarily would affect commuters during these hours which I would argue are very safe times of day for public transit use.
I apologize for the name calling. It wasn't my intention, although it seems obvious when I read my post again that it's there. I'm often frustrated with people who are anti-public transit and/or biking (which you are not) for a failure to acknowledge the externalities they impose on non-car users, and rather prefer to think of the issue of one of individual choice rather than something that affects the whole community (my rights vs. what would be best for the community as a whole).
Let me try to engage more with what you said about why people don't want to use public transit. I think the disagreement centers on to what extent public transit is actually dangerous as compared to driving in a car versus merely uncomfortable. In 2024 there were 202 homicides in Baltimore (these statistics have been on a downward trend since 2020 which is also an encouraging sign). One of those occurred on public transit (a murder on a bus on Eutaw st.- not a terrible neighborhood in December of 2024). Compare this to 45 fatal traffic accidents in Baltimore in 2022. How does this stack up proportionally to use?
The 2024 ridership numbers for the MTA bus system were around 217,700 per weekday. Car ownership in the city averages around 1 per household, or one per every two people. The city had a population of 565,000 in 2024, so that's around 280,000 cars in the city proper. Let's assume all those cars are being used to drive to work/school every day. Of course we also have people coming in and out of baltimore/howard counties, but the MTA bus system goes there as well, so I feel like this is still a reasonable comparison. Our working numbers are 217,700 public transit trips and 280,000 car trips per day in the city. This means that driving in a car is around 43 times more likely to result in death than using public transit.
Of course there are other risks from public transit like mugging or assault that I would also characterize as violent crime. In the last year there were 33,507 crimes committed within the city of Baltimore. About 9k of these are characterized as violent crimes. Assuming all of these were aided and abetted or occurred on public transit, that's still only half the total crashes (16k) reported in the city in 2022.
The numbers just don't add up. Driving isn't a whole lot safer than even the absolute worst case scenarios for public transit in one of the worst cities in America for violent crime. Part of it may be that we don't have a super robust public transit system (although ridership is quite high on the bus system) and so people don't use public transit to commit crimes the way they might in NYC. I'd rather argue that people are not actually responding to the actual risks, but rather the perceived risks from frequent encounters with unsavory individuals, and the fear of a lack of control or agency when it comes to being a rider in a dangerous public transit situation (despite the fact that you can't really control other dangerous drivers either).
I'm all for cleaning up the streets and the bus system, but I think without massive levels of law enforcement crackdown that even the most conservative people in this country will not be able to stomach, the types of people that give a negative perception to public transit systems are always going to be there, despite most of these people being harmless. Violent crime is an issue at a 45 degree angle to public transit. Yes doing a Bekele and locking up or killing all the criminals will improve the perception of the bus/train system in most American cities, it won't stop poor, unsavory and less functional (but not criminal) people from using buses and trains, which is the fundamental issue I think most people actually have with public transit.
I hope this is a better critique that doesn't rely on name calling as much.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I bike to and from work and the gym on busy streets. It's uncomfortable but I still do it because it's my best option. I have incidents with drivers cutting me off/parking in the bike lane almost every day. It is inconvenient and feels unsafe. Even if every driver was perfect and traffic was reduced 10x it would still be inconvenient and uncomfortable because I have to bike uphill at least in one direction. If the bike/public transit infrastructure was better there would be less cars on the road and the quality of life for everyone, including drivers, would improve.
I agree violent crime is real and a serious problem. Classmates have been mugged multiple times, and one was pistol-whipped outside her house. There are multiple homicides every week in the city. Yet most if not all of this independent of public transportation. Homicides aren't committed on buses or on the one light rail line in the city, they're local or in hit and runs in cars or motorized dirt bikes. Sure, some of these people MAY use public transit to get around and commit their crimes, but the majority of the unsavory people that repel people from public transit aren't actually dangerous.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
The pro-car post was not that good and deserving of quality contributions IMO. Really shows the biases of this place. Insane pro car legislature was a thing here long before cities became the dismal wrecks that they are today. I think honestly people also just need to grow a bit of a spine. I live in Baltimore where we have a limited public transit system that I sometimes use (I prefer to bike). There's always an unsavory character using it at the same time as me, but absolutely nothing has ever happened. Maybe this would not be true if I were an attractive young woman, but I doubt there are many users here who fit that description either. People need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable. Biking is always a suitable alternative in major eastern urban areas (Boston, NYC, and DC all have good bike infrastructure) if you really don't want to deal with public transit. I get that cars are convenient and make people feel powerful and in control, but they impose such a big negative externality on the rest of us non-car users (pollution, taxes, use of public space, not to mention the very large amount of deaths caused by accidents, far higher than that caused by urban villainy on public transit) that I have a lot of sympathy for NYC trying to price car use correctly. I get that this is not feasible in Texas or in most parts of California, but posters here are so car-brained that they can't get on board with the government trying to address the problem in place where it is actually feasible to fix it. Guys, the subway is not very dangerous during work hours, and the problems with it (congestion, speed) can all be fixed with investment.
I think the righties do this too here. I think the most blatant example was responses to my effort post defending ASOIAF and George R. R. Martin. Many responses were from people who hadn't read the books very carefully, and even more egregiously, from people who hadn't read my post carefully at all.
I think the kind of effect that we see here is due to the fact the kinds of topics that we like to debate on this form are usually ones in which the right is clear-pilled (immigration, economics) much more so than the left. There are other issues that I think the right is weaker on (car-brain, media literacy, veganism, etc.) that don't get as much attention on this forum.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I don't think it really did unfortunately. I still masturbate and lie despite not wanting to and go to confession. The priest will say things but you kind of lead the conversation.
It always feels weird good in, but I always felt good after confession.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I just remember being impressed by your analysis of the right’s problem with didactic media in response to my ASOIAF post. Sorry if I labeled you as something you’re not: I really probably meant something like critical of the right rather than “liberal” per see when I thought of you.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
The Motte is more balanced than you think. There are people who are a little bit more liberal here at least in some ways, such as myself and /u/Hoffmeister. That being said I'm not woke by any means, but I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody, although I generally find this is one of the highest quality places on the internet to actually find good arguments from both sides.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Just ran the Boston marathon without really a proper training cycle before hand. Got injured in February and hadn't done more than 30 miles a week since then. I was going to just jog the race, but my college friends (who are all low 2:30 marathoners) successfully bullied me into trying somewhat. I held just under 6:30s for the whole thing, which felt great and re-qualified with a 2:48 (about ~15 min off my PR), but now my legs are absolutely destroyed and am having trouble walking around work. Any tips for dealing with DOMs in the legs?
thejdizzler
2mo ago
You can download shared decks from ankiweb.net. I've used some for spanish colloquial phrases, logical fallacies, and basic vocab for Italian and French. Most of my cards are self-made though.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
I agree it's well established, but the last time I made an effort-post on /r/slatestarcodex there were many people that seemed to doubt that Anki was an effective way to learn things.
There's also the question of long-term effects of spaced-repetition. Ebbinghaus's original experiments certainly didn't go as far out as five years, and neither have any academic studies. The long-term posts I've seen on less wrong and other blogs are also not as glowing. I haven't really experienced this, but I'm not sure how to convey it.
This is helpful, thanks! Going to get a haircut this weekend and start doing this.
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