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Why Should I Care?
I recently greatly enjoyed Naraburns' post on the life of Dylan, so I thought I would give back by putting together my thoughts as someone that empathizes greatly with Dylan, and would probably be picking pineapples right next to him if I didn't happen to be born with some aptitude for shape rotation. To provide some context, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days, having had a rough week at work, and I get into a spiral of fantasizing about quitting my job when the thought hits me - why, exactly, do I even care about the job? Why do I actually care about contributing to society?
As any good economist knows, people at scale generally do what they're incentivized to do. Yet from the point of view of a young man it's increasingly harder to get a bite out of carrots historically used to incentivize men to act pro-socially, while simultaneously most of the sticks and fences previously used to corral people's worst impulses have disintegrated. Viewed from a sufficiently cynical lens, it becomes more and more rational from a self-interest perspective to drop out of the system and become a disaffected bum, and indeed this does seem to be reflected in the male labor force participation rate.
The elephant in the room is, of course, dating discourse. It is absolutely true and subject to much discussion amongst these types of circles that relationship formation and TFR is dropping off a cliff in almost all countries on the planet. Everyone has their own hot take as to what's going wrong and who's at fault; personally, I just think it comes down to incentives.
Men no longer need women for sexual gratification [when HD video porn exists] or domestic labor [when household appliances exist], women no longer need men for physical or economic security [when careers and the state will provide] and there's significantly less status or social pressure for either gender to get into and stay in relationships early, unless you run in religious or traditional circles. It's a similar story for having children; most people, if asked, will at least nominally say that they want children, yet revealed preference is for global TFR collapse. In agrarian societies having children isn't a great burden relatively and they become useful quite quickly, whereas in modern societies having child(ren) will result in significant changes to your lifestyle, and impose notable financial burden [less than what most PMC's might think, but certainty an extant one] for at least twenty years for a very uncertain return; it's a hard sell to the modal person to make sacrifices to their quality of life and economic stability for the sake of very expensive pets [from an economic perspective].
As a result, polarization between the sexes is at an all-time high as a result as neither sex really needs the other, and left to their own devices the observed tendency is that they mostly end up self-segregating. For men that do still want a relationship and marriage, this means it's the hardest it's ever been; in-person ways for singles to meet have all but disappeared, dating apps are perhaps the most demonic application of technology ever invented, and the very high amount of options that most women now hold [including that to eschew dating altogether] heavily disincentivizing making any sort of commitment [to be clear, almost all men would and do act in similar ways given the same breadth of options as well].
I don't agree with the blackpillers, in the sense that I think the majority of people could eventually find a partner if they put in enough effort [which might be an incredible amount depending on the starting point!]. However, it is true that we went from a society where the standard life script ended up with everyone except for a few oddballs partnered up, to one where the standard life script results in most men ending up alone unless they spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on dating or are exceptionally [hot/rich/charismatic/lucky] in some way. Most people really just go with the flow, and hence increasingly more people end up alone.
Even for those who do manage to summit the mountain, the returns on entering into a relationship and marriage seem to be diminished for most men. It's likely to be expensive financially [I'm not convinced by Caplan-style arguments that relationships save you money, the most expensive budget items like housing, childcare and healthcare are largely rivalrous or wouldn't otherwise exist, and it's reasonably well studied that relationships where the woman makes more money suffer] and of course there's little to really secure commitment or incentivize sticking it out if something goes wrong; getting divorced is one of the easiest ways to have your life ruined, after all.
At the end of the day, modern relationship formation is less about the practical benefits as was the case for almost all of human history, and almost entirely about self-esteem and self-actualization; hence the rise of incels [who are bereft of the validation of being desired, not the literal act of sex] and romantasy fiction. How much does it validate me that I have a high status / hot / rich partner willing to have sex and be seen in public with me? Have I now truly found my soulmate, the ideal parent for my children? This is, of course, an impossible standard to meet for the vast majority of people and relationships and hence most people who think this way end up dissatisfied and unhappy - and yet without the illusion of self-actualization what else is there really to gain bonding yourself to someone else with a bond that is not a bond?
With all is said and done, as the mountain grows ever-harder to summit and the rewards for reaching the peak become ever-increasingly a mirage, I think it's an increasingly rational choice for many people to decide not to climb and to try and find contentment at the bottom. That's certainly how I've been feeling lately, at the very least.
This brings me to my next point, where if a first world man decides that they no longer want to conquer the mountain, there's not really much else that buying into modern capitalism can offer them in many cases. It is of course a stereotype that men are happy living in squalor, and that women be shopping, but I've found it to be remarkably accurate; women make up something like 70% to 80% of consumer spending, and in general it's motivation to be a provider that drives many men to work as hard as they can, most of whom otherwise are pretty happy living with a mattress and WiFi.
If one's lost the motivation or opportunity to provide, suddenly most of what remains expensive in modern abundant society doesn't really matter; you don't have to spend money on up-keeping a lifestyle and status symbols to attract a mate, and you no longer need to spend most of your life paying off a house in the best school district you can afford to keep the wife happy and the child as advantaged as possible.
Similarly, the stick of impoverishment is no real threat in any rich welfare state; He who does not work, neither shall he eat is now comically false, food [and non-housing living expenses in general] are pretty trivial to cover if you're smart/frugal about it and if you're not the gibs will probably cover them for you anyways. Housing is a real problem that's been exacerbated near-universally across the world, but if you no longer need to provide for a family or make a lot of money there's still plenty of ways to keep a roof over your head without working too hard; living out of a van, moving to somewhere where the jobs aren't great but living is cheap, or the good old solution of failing to launch.
Anecdotally, my college friend group includes a guy who dropped out to live with his parents and do gig work and a high-powered lawyer who inherited a few million, and despite their significantly different socioeconomic classes still live materially similar lives and are still good friends. Sure, the lawyer can afford to live in a massive house, fly business and collect a bunch of expensive trinkets, but when it comes down to it neither of them worry about their basic needs, and spend most of their leisure time doing the same things; working out, playing the same video games, watching the same tv/movies/anime, scrolling too much on social media and going traveling to similar places from time from time.
Of course being wealthier and more powerful gives you more optionality in the face of adversity, and that's great if you're born into wealth or are exceptional/lucky human capital, but honestly the vast majority of people are never going to have enough power or money to matter if anything really goes wrong with their life, even if they spend their entire lives grinding and buying into the system. "Making it" to middle manager at a big firm or owning a small business doesn't save you from targeted lawfare, developing late-stage cancer where the experimental treatment is going to cost a few million out of pocket, or your home burning down and getting denied by insurance. And of course, no amount of money can save you from the true black swans e.g unaligned superintelligence, gain of function^2 electric boogaloo or nuclear war - how many young people in the first world really believe that they'll be taking money out of their retirement fund and living life as normal in 2080?.
So if the dating market is FUBAR and money has questionable marginal utility, what else is left to encourage men to work hard? Well, people will think you're a loser and low status if you don't work or you work a shitty job, maybe that will work? That's true, and historically granting young man status when they do pro-social things has been a pretty effective motivator.
Yet now we live in a highly globalized society for better or worse. No matter how far you are up your chosen totem poles, status has gone global; it's easy to look up, see who's still above you and feel bad about yourself. Chad is probably just a twitter DM away, in fact! Being unemployed or a gig worker might be low status, but even "good" jobs don't feel much higher status either; it's hard to feel the average software engineer or electrician job is particularly high status when constantly inundated with people who are orders of magnitude more successful. To me, it feels like the endgame is SoKo or China; competition for "high status" becomes more and more ludicrous and absurd, and everyone else sits on the sidelines resigned to feeling like a loser even if their lives are materially still great.
Faced with such competitiveness, you can either throw yourself into the maw and try and win an winnable game, or decide to tap out of the game altogether. Sure, there will always be those with immense will to power that will maximize for status, to strive for the stars and win at at all costs, but realistically most people don't have such strength of will. If the only options are play and lose and not play at all, it increasingly feels like the best play is to just drop out of striving for status altogether; it helps if you're no longer invested in dating or careerism, the arenas where status is most instrumental...
This piece ended up being significantly longer than I intended, and really I don't expect any sympathy nor do I have any solutions [much less politically viable and moral ones] to what I see as a deeply society-wide malaise. I have a deep respect for the incredibly autistic open-source emulator developer, the Japanese master sushi chef, and the Amish craftsman, those who still Care about their crafts in the truest sense of the word. Yet one cannot choose to win the lottery of fascinations, one cannot choose to be born into a high-trust society, and one cannot choose to have faith when it does not exist.
At the end of the day, it's hard to argue it's not a triumph of society that the modal first worlder spends most of their time wallowing in comfort and engaging in zero-sum status struggles in a world where so many still suffer. Yet what is great can easily be lost, and modernity as it exists today cannot survive without the buy-in of young men. Maybe it doesn't matter, that in the end us dysgenic neurotics will end up being weeded out of the gene pool, and that future populations will be able to break out of this local minima and take over the world. Perhaps the prayers for the machine god to deliver us salvation will come true and the priests shall finally immanentize the eschaton so that none of this matters.
In some ways it feels like to me that the barbarians are banging on the gates while nobody else notices or cares, as everyone else seems to be whiling away the hours eating bread and going to the circus. But well, if nobody else is manning the walls either, why should I be the one who cares?
This is one of the most devastating and accurate observations I've ever read. It almost deserves its own post. I'm going to think on it a while and maybe lose some sleep - nothing else to add at this point, but chalk another one up for this being another unforeseen payoff of the Century of the Self.
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Great beginning to the post. I agree that with decaying pro-social institutions in the west there is a massive movement towards dropping out, and not working hard to maintain the status-quo of society. The economy seems rigged against specific demographics and jobs specifically (while making others on ez mode like software devs and crypto entrepreneurs).
Huge quibble with the post: all the blackpill “women won’t fuck me” crying is total bullshit. Women are easier at the moment than they’ve ever been. Women literally medically augment themselves (with birth control) so that sex has no consequence, and many modern liberals treat it as lightly as scratching an itch.
If you feel this way, this is a YOU problem, plain and simple. I know so many >30 yr old halfway balding dudes with desk jobs who are banging new girls every week. Even better, it’s a skill that can be learned, not just something innate that you’re born with.
How often do you work out? Are you in respectable shape? Do you live in a populated area? Can you hold a normal conversation? How many girls do you approach, or even just talk to in real life per week?
I absolutely hate this mentality. It’s communism for pussy. Blackpill turbo-online men want to be able to do nothing, not work on themselves at all, and be guaranteed sex and a mate. Sounds like some Marxist who barely tries at their dead end wage slave job and is complaining about the wealth gap and wants gibs and wealth redistribution.
Stop whining and start working on yourself. You’ll thank me later. I know some people get off on self-pity, but chances you’ll get off on pussy 10x more if you give it a shot.
Nope.
The situation has given women more options, which has led to them being more selective.
For the young folks, there's a general recession in sex and in Relationships, which is especially pointed amongst men. Its baked in, young men who don't get experience dating while young will just have a harder time getting dates going forward.
"Women are easier than ever" only holds true for the subset of men that women find attractive on a basic physical level.
Dating Apps, for instance, heavily favor women and the small subset of men who are getting laid left and right and, likewise, have no incentive to settle or commit. Which just makes the women they interact with bitter.
This is supported by virtually every statistic you can find on the matter. You can't self-improve your way out of a game that is rigged against you.
Its harder for everyone else across the board.
Men don't just want pussy, they want a meaningful, committed relationship within which they can start a family.
They're not getting it.
Women aren't settling.
This advice is just not going to work for the vast majority of young men, no matter how much it is repeated.
Now what?
You have repeatedly heard from men (I will add myself to that pool) who can tell you from their observed experience that this is not true, that most guys around them don't have insurmountable problems either dating or getting laid, and that those who can't are not perfectly decent, fit guys with good jobs and stable personalities who are being rejected by the entire female population because they are all alpha-widows, but because there is something wrong with these guys.
Frankly, I believe my lying eyes more than I believe a collection of blackpill-curated stats from places like the Institute for Family Studies.
I'm sorry you are having such a struggle, and honestly, the dating landscape does look kind of awful right now (speaking as a guy who was pretty awkward and had a number of other strikes against me in my youth) and I am glad I'm not on the market. But the blackpill is not going to do you any favors. Even if your pessimistic assumptions are true, you ask, "Now what?" Now go out there and get in the game and stop making excuses, that's what. No one is going to hand you pussy or a relationship, and if you have to work harder at it than grandpa, well, every era has its challenges. You probably don't want to deal with the other things grandpa had to deal with.
No, the game is not rigged against you. No, there are not zero acceptable single women in your city. No, the solution is not to contrive reasons why women should not have agency to choose.
They're stats from literally everywhere I look. Stats that have been tracked for decades. Unless something radical changed with definitions or analysis (possible, I grant), then the trends are all pointing the same way, and demonstrating the same underlying phenomenon.
I've been through it, I've had multiple close friends and acquaintances who are all having the same difficulties. I find it on reddit forums, I find it on my groupchats, I find it when I hear from people in my age cohort and younger in here.
Its a rising chorus of voices that some people claim not to hear.
When the stats are lining up with the anecdotes are lining up with the personal observations, and EVERY SINGLE person on the other side says "No, can't be true, I know a guy that is doing fine" while offering zero verifiable evidence...
I'm not going to update very heavily in favor of that.
There is literally not a single piece of statistical evidence that supports the idea that relationship formation is improving.
I can't find ANY single person who is having a 'good time' in the 'find a partner' game.
None.
Zero.
Marriage rates are about the most objective stat you can find that are tracked by the Census, and the definition of marriage is about as standardized as you can get.
They're in the tank., especially among the younger generation.
This is downstream of something.
Offer me an alternative hypothesis.
If you say so.
Anyway, here's an extremely recent article from The Economist bemoaning the fact that despite the fact women are now outperforming men in EVERY school subject, but can't seem to keep up in Math, so OBVIOUSLY we need to close that gap.
Very evenhanded analysis.
Here's direct evidence that Lockheed Martin very directly discriminates against White Males in deciding on who gets bonuses.
Would you wager on them being the only major company doing this?
What does 'rigging the game' look like, to you?
Never have I said anything remotely like that.
What I HAVE said is that the competition for the pool of 'acceptable' single women is high enough that its guaranteed that many men will lose out.
And women having the perception of more choice makes the average woman less likely to settle, at all.
Too many men chasing too small a pool of women, full stop.
That's just objectively true if we restrict our examination to dating apps
They've been choosing quite freely for a long time, and they're less happy than ever. TFR is in the gutter. Women are suffering from more mental illnesses than ever.
What now? Shall we try even harder to give them MORE choice?
Or just let the status quo continue?
You tell me.
It's not "I know a guy," it's "most guys I know are not experiencing this."
Marriage rates have been falling because younger generations don't value marriage as much, and more and more people live in "situationships" without ever getting married. There is certainly an argument to be made (and frequently is made) that this is bad for society and does not promote stable families, but falling marriage rates do not in themselves indicate that "no one is finding a partner." They indicate people are not marrying their partners, and that most people are having many more relationships of shorter duration.
Okay, so women get unfair perks in the name of ending sexism. We talk about that a lot here. I don't see that having a lot to do with whether or not men can get a date.
Dating apps are hellish, as I said. There probably is something commodifying and unhealthy about treating a potential relationship the same way you treat looking for an appliance on Amazon. If you were proposing we ban dating apps, I'd have qualms about the legality and the implementation, but I'd probably approve in principle. But I have it on good authority it is actually still possible to meet a fellow human being in real life.
I've already told you. Why don't you tell me, in unambiguous language without waffling. Do you want to go full Dread Jim (literally make women property)? Do you want to retvrn to traditional (pre-Enlightenment) Church rules? You've thrown together a lot of correlations to fit your narrative, but you don't seem willing to commit to a solution. If you think women just shouldn't be allowed to choose, say so. If you think fathers should decide who their daughters marry, say so. If you think something vaguer like "Women should be persuaded to be less picky and settle for an 80% guy instead of demanding 100% of what they want" - okay, that probably is not a bad idea. How do you propose getting there? (And would it apply to men also having to settle for women who might not check all their boxes?)
the argument would be 'if women are attracted to men who have higher social status, money, property, etc., than they have, and we've created a society which makes women better off than men (at the expense of men), then women will not find the men the society has made worse off attractive and therefore more men cannot get dates and women will only be satisfied with a continuously shrinking pool of men'
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Yeah, the increasing numbers of people who report not having a partner indicate that actually.
If you think this data is just wrong, fine.
But its all kinda points in the same direction. Fewer relationships, women being more choosy, men losing ground, and marriage rates tumbling, along with birth rates.
I keep posting data from various countries, from various sources, and asking someone to find me data that disagrees with this, that shows a different story.
And about the best that I've seen is that SOME PARTICULAR SUB-POPULATIONS, say the Amish, the Mormons, other religious sects, are doing pretty well overall.
Well here yah go, from me:
I'm standing by each of these suggestions.
No.
I'd like to return the a legal status quo of approximately 30ish years ago, where there wasn't nearly as much direct economic support for women to pursue additional degrees, or hang around in the long term in corporate jobs, or to remain unmarried even with kids b/c the state and the corporation will pay their bills regardless.
I'm not hiding the ball, I've stated my main position/suggestions openly. I'm not out here yelling "REPEAL THE 19TH." I know guys who are.
Just even the playing field and the incentives and I think we see improvement. Women need some reason to prefer marrying a guy and sticking with him, rather than being able to just extract the same resources via the state, or from hundreds of microhusbands on Onlyfans.
But Gen Z men are turning further and further right. (Caveat, of course, Gen Z women have made an even more pronounced swing left, which makes them even less appealing as partners.)
And let me just point out. These are men who were raised, in some large portion, by single moms. As in, steeped in female influence literally from birth.
They were taught mostly by female teachers.
They've had their lives guided by female academic administrators, HR staff, hiring managers, and they've had their dating lives governed pretty much completely by female standards since they hit their teen years.
They have their entire upbringing defined completely and utterly in terms of female guidance and authority. I won't go into the concept of "the longhouse," but that's just the facts.
And they're turning right. They're listening to Andrew Tate, and they're voting for Trump and Co.
What do YOU think this cohort of men will do if they hit their 30's and find themselves unable to form families or hit the other life goals that they'd expect to achieve by then?
Just throw some thoughts out there.
I'm offering the moderate options, but these guys are even less likely to give a shit about women's input.
Why do you think the 90s legal mores will be a stable equilibrium this time?
Griggs v. Duke power was in 1971. Price Waterhouse v Cooper was in 1989. The 90s saw the CRA of 1991 which put into statute bad court decisions around disparate impact and mixed-motivation being enough to show discrimination under the law. VAWA was in 1994. At best, the 90s were the last hurrah before social institutions had decayed to the point where they could no longer provide guiderails to the radical legal environment which had been created over the last two or so decades. And even if that's not true, there was a reason why these were passed in the early 90s and it's because the 80s wasn't a stable equilibrium either nor was the 70s or 60s or 50s. The legal environment had been pretty bad on this front for pretty long, but it wasn't until social conventions, communities, and institutions decayed to the point they could no longer provide sufficient guardrails that we saw the significant effects of them.
I was only cognizant near the end of the 90s so I don't have much experience with what they were like. When I speak to young people now in the real world about these topics, many of them have views which are similar to how you describe them on all sides of the divide. When I see others discussing the topic on this forum, it just comes off as older people who caught the last train out of the station before the power went off and they're on the right side of the bell curve on top of it. They really do not have a clue how bad it is out there for a whole lot of people.
In the past, older generations thought pairing off the younger generations into prosocial relationships was near the most important thing they could do for their children. Now, the best on offer appears to be "look 'em in the eye and give 'em a firm handshake" boomerisms directed almost entirely at males and general denial about the reality the younger generation is describing to them.
You're absolutely on point that the early 90's was clearly not a stable equilibrium, as it still led us to where we are.
But, no joke, the change that I think screwed us in a few different ways was The Student Loan Reform Act of 1993.
This made it FAR simpler for the average citizen to get student loans regardless of financial situation or the academic path they chose... or the economic viability of their major.
You can flipping SEE THE INFLECTION POINT when student loans became way more common and thus more people attended college on loans.
So I'd suggest this has a number of impacts:
Women start attending college more often. Which has them burn more of their most fertile years, and the added debt load makes them less appealing as partners and less able to support kids.
Men start accruing more debt too, which stunts their personal wealth acquisition in their 20's and thus makes them less appealing to women... and just less able to support a partner/kids in general.
Obviously this allows economically nonviable majors like "Women's studies" to grow, which has some clear downstream impacts.
Probably causes women's standards to rise, they wouldn't accept a partner without a degree if they have one.
Of course turned College into the 'default' life path rather than hopping into a career and getting married as the best practice for advancing socially.
So putting us back to the status-quo ante of 1990, and NOT expanding access to loans for college, we might be able to avoid the worst excesses of Feminism entering the mainstream. I dunno.
1994 also saw The Gender Equity in Education Act which made it actual policy to push for more education programs geared towards women, and might be attributable to the general decline in male performance in school, which would then play into the college issue.
And the 1994 Violence Against Women Act which I'm definitely not saying was a bad idea, but might have shifted incentives that led to, e.g. the eventual MeToo movement.
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Not the commenter you were responding to, but I'll bite:
First, re-create high social penalties for promiscuity for both men and women. I'm not the first to say this but the sexual revolution of the 1960s can be accurately viewed as the fight to let women behave in the same ways as the absolute worst of men. Being a "cad" or a "cocksman" should be socially treated the exact same as being a homewrecker. Dating is fine, but it should be used to figure out if there is an alignment of values and a shared vision for the future.
But, but, consenting adults! Who cares if two people just want to f*ck! Well, everyone, judging by this thread and many others like it. You have the situation now where promiscuity is not only tolerated, but lauded as some sort of expression of personal discovery, autonomy, and that most meaningless of words, _"empowering." Leaving aside the fact that this isn't true, the circumstances create a situation where the most antisocial of people can hit "defect" a million times and benefit greatly from it while those who are looking to cooperate are in a constant state of paranoid suspicion about any sort of medium length relationship they may find themselves in.
Second, get rid of no fault divorce. I know this is politically untenable, but I'm offering what I think is a correct solution. Marriage has to be meaningful and a real commitment, or else it's just a temporary tax arrangement with unbalanced incentives for the two people in it. Because of the history of marriage and family law in the US, women are usually the one's with the counter-incentive to staying in a marriage long term.
Much like @Amadan, I'm not actually that worried about following marriage rates because 1) I think most marriages today are shams anyway and 2) We're approaching a situation where 1/3 to nearly 1/5 of children are born out of wedlock. Marriage is so hollow now that policy positions that try to nudge people toward it aren't really serious about solving the problem.
I also agree with @Amadan in another way - blackpilling is not only (by its own definition) futile, I think it's just wrong. Once you pair secular materialism with battle-of-the-sexes blackpilling, the question has to be asked; why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend and then end it with a 9mm breakfast? Usually, the responses I hear are along the lines of, "I don't want to take such a cowardly way out", "I still want my life to mean something", "You should still try to be a good person." Hmmm, interesting how that kind of sounds like there's actually a higher level moral and ethical framework in play. Maybe these hardcore secular materialists really are trying to both fill and not acknowledge the God Shaped Hole.
Not to blow the scope of this comment into the stratosphere, but I do often think that we might be living through an inflection point in human history on par with the invention of writing, if not even moreso. The technological and political change over the last 100 years (which is a single long lifetime or about 1.5 - 2 "standard" lifetimes) is truly a phase change when compared to all of human history before. We've mostly outpaced our cognitive hard-wiring. So we see the effects of that across nearly every facet of life. I don't doubt that in 1000 years, it's likely some humans, looking at our times, will say "lolol, they totally had no idea wtf was going on during pre-Nuke early-AI." But this is no excuse to smash the like button on fuckItAll.mpeg. Do the best you can and try to find genuine happiness where you can. Even better do the "right" thing, so long as what you define as the right thing is a self-contained and demanding moral framework.
Because those are illegal, I don't know where I'd find them in my area, and don't have the money to afford them anyway?
Because I'd worry about missing the right spot, and ending up still alive but with seriously incapacitating brain damage — which is why I'm more likely to go with helium and an "exit bag" instead.
And as for why I don't do that, mostly because my family would get stuck with the bill for disposing of my corpse, which exceeds my (SSI-limited) net worth. Once my parents are both gone, though…
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They're just flailing around the fact suicide is scary and they'd rather not die, even if the world around them sucks. The self-preservation instinct is quite strong, and has nothing to do with God or higher level morals.
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From how I interpret your post, I assume you're trying to be charitable and not propose or imply that there's something "wrong" with (posters like) faceh so as to leave him with some hope, but I'd much prefer being told there is something wrong with me and that the game is rigged against me in the sense that I'm somehow inherently inept or dysgenic, than be told to
when platitudes of that sort have brought nothing but misery, humiliation, and further demolition of my self-esteem.
If I had Down's Syndrome, but had enough introspection to feel humiliation at my intellectual inability to pursue a serious college education, it would bring me no happiness to hear that I just need to "try harder" when what I'd really need is to be told that some things are beyond my abilities: then at least I'd be given my peer group's permission to come to terms with it. But for some reason, similar platitudes are reflexively dispensed in dating discourse regardless of the aptitudes of the people these platitudes are thrown at: "you are deeply awful and there's something very abnormal about you but also never give up, keep on trying to jump for that bone, you retarded little doggie" is - broadly speaking, referring to dating discourse as a whole - how absurd and cruel these juxtapositions sound to me, even if, in the more rigorous and careful context of your post, you are making a charitable distinction between faceh and the faceless guys you know that "something is wrong with."
Why can't people like me even be given the solace of hopelessness? I'm an aspie, my parents deprived me of peer socialization almost (they were blindsided by the internet, all the worse for me) entirely throughout my youth via isolationist homeschooling, my post high-school experiences were retarded by COVID lockdowns, and all my attempts at friendship crashed and burned because I'm a hollowed out pseudo-sociopathic social imitation machine (I still get to feel terrible about socially "lying" at people, so I wish I'd just been born a real sociopath who didn't care) who's never had a single positive response to "just being myself," so I'm well past the point of having normal relations with the opposite sex, and certainly not relations on the terms I'd have once looked for (not overweight, not a single mother, not a drug addict, not older than me, not prodigal). So at this point I really should give up hope and move on, which I try to do with public stoicism (really just another extension of habitual masking, so no biggie), but then I see all these platitudes thrown my way, and every time I do, for the briefest of moments I get just enough hope to torment myself with.
On the internet, people can't tell you're unfixably socially retarded over one (or zero) posts.
Not wrong! Honestly, on further consideration I even suppose that it's even a good heuristic to push people to struggle who plausibly are unfixable retards. Better to refuse emotional gratification to a few unfixables if it means you're on the safe side of ensuring people with decent odds who merely appear unfixable don't have peer permission to throw in the towel.
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So you haven't had much response from younger women who are 75th+-percentile slender and wholly unencumbered. Out of curiosity, what happened when you reached out to women who were slightly plump, slightly older than you, or divorced/had a kid in tow?
Firstly, if we are limiting the discussion to the mentioned attributes, with the exception of age (a condition which on retrospect I suppose I only included because it tends to correlate with accumulation and accentuation of other mentioned issues), why is it unreasonable for me to set as conditions my own characteristics (not with children, not overweight/obese)? I refuse to compromise on what I also expect of myself, and if that destroys my odds, so be it. Whether this is "punishment for entitlement" or "punishment for having standards" is a good Russell Conjugation.
Secondly, if it is, as I believe, psychological issues which inhibit my rapport with the opposite sex, then a relationship with someone sufficiently "low value" to initially entertain my eccentricities and chronic self-esteem issues would likely end up going badly in the long run.
This does loop back around to a rejoinder which I have come to accept: it is also perfectly reasonable and fits with my experience that most women are similarly unwilling to compromise on certain severe psychological and self-esteem issues in men, and that's not a standard I'd expect anyone to spontaneously drop.
Well, both of those features are much, much more important to men than they are to women. Some women may care, don't get me wrong - but numbers of women irl don't mind a potbelly if the guy is kind/confident/funny, and could cheerfully learn to love somebody else's cute kid in the right circumstances. So in saying "She shouldn't have 25BMI, because after all I don't have 25 BMI, and no kids because I don't have kids," you're trying to buy two things that are somewhat rare and highly valued, with two things that are nice but not especially highly valued. By contrast, charisma and good social skills do matter a lot for women's attraction, so your challenges there also align you at a somewhat lower percentile on the global scale, where to match properly you might have to make corresponding concessions in some domain of male attraction.
But surely that's just self-awareness, not despair? You're saying "My 1010 SATs/2.8 GPA didn't get me into Duke, guess it's miserable NEETdom and food stamps for me," but millions of people are living happy, fulfilled lives with community-college degrees. You're a good writer, you seem intelligent; you worry about long-term prospects with a "low-value" woman, but many of those plump ladies and single moms are very nice, smart and kind people who would at minimum be fun to get to know. Is it really better that you and all the plump/ slightly older/ kid-having ladies in your vicinity should be lonely and celibate, rather than compromise your standards to connect with each other?
My gut reaction is that there are some things I will never compromise on, particularly being a stepfather, but on consideration my reasoning extends beyond mere prejudice to further self-doubt. My prima facie reasoning for not wanting to raise another man's child is that I've seen too many relationships of that sort (no, not just online, but among friends and acquaintances) devolve into volatile and ultimately catastrophic affairs for everyone involved, but with the bulk of legal censure & penalty falling onto the man, and so I believe that no amount of mutual compromise will make it worth my trouble when women are given legal advantages (again, not just online drek, but personally known), and they are also prone to leveraging those advantages on what externally appears to be a whim - presumably due in part to the fault of the men for their lack of assertiveness and charisma.
But it is this latter point that most concerns me, because it implies a lack of male assertiveness and charisma is a catalyst for dooming relationships. As I fall into that category, that would make any relationship an anvil over my head: I can't play the odds because I bring the disaster with me. Put another way, even if the catalyst for poor outcomes isn't "single mothers" but "the sort of man who shacks up with them," the outcomes are still poor, I have reason to suspect I share a lot in common with those unfortunate men, I have no interest of participating in those outcomes, and those outcomes would have increased odds of occurring regardless of who I shack up with, single mother or no.
In short, it creates the possibility that that sort of low-charisma, low-assertiveness man will have long-term problems with any relationship, and perhaps out of a prejudice against single mothers or perhaps out of circumstance, I've only noticed the problems with relationships involving them.
Some things aren't worth taking risks on, especially when the payoff is low, the risks are enormous, and my disposition is the catalyst for those risks, meaning I may as well go double-or-nothing hoping to both overcome my own issues and satisfy my desires, rather than compromise because of those issues, and still court disaster long-term regardless of the compromise.
As for overweight women, well, that is just prejudice. I'm in the USA. Our fat is a special kind of fat, and the fatter that fat gets the more viscerally I am repulsed by it. If a woman can't establish herself as capable of maintaining a healthy weight, I'm going to assume that she's just going to keep getting fatter over time - again, based on experience, the sorts of people I see either maintain a healthy weight or proceed to obesity. And I cannot overstate how repulsed I am by obesity, to the point that I struggle not to grimace when I see obese people in public. I nervously peruse NIH & CDC obesity & overweight projections and wistfully browse coffee table books full of pictures from when such was not commonplace.
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Because the hopelessness is a construct of your own making. With very few exceptions, most of romanceless men are not like someone with Down's Syndrome longing for a college education that is literally beyond his potential.
I am not religious, but I kind of sympathize with the Christian idea that despair is not just counterproductive, but sinful. Yes, it's comforting to escape into despair and hopelessness and just say "No matter what I do, it won't work, so no sense in trying." But sometimes things are hard and difficult but still doable, and you would just prefer not to do them.
I doubt there is something deeply awful and abnormal about you. Maybe there is, and if so I'm sorry, but I can't diagnose you personally. But I get that we are given a lot of really bad, if well-meaning advice, like "just be yourself." (I got that one too, and it did me no favors.) That said, when your life is not working out for you, contrary to the fellow I was just arguing with about how grand and free medieval peasants were, no one has ever lived in a period with more freedom to remake, reinvent, and choose our lives than today. That doesn't mean everyone gets to be happy and fulfilled and get everything they want, but every incel-type guy I've ever known has basically had no serious personal defects that would make him literally undatable, just a lot of bitterness and resentment and unwillingness to change or put in the necessary effort. Why do you see so many men who shouldn't "rate" (they are definitely not chads or three-6s) pulling relationships? Are they just blindly lucky? Or do they persevere with some luck and effort - maybe a lot of luck - but mostly persistence?
Hell, there is even the redpill- "Game" apparently works, though I personally dislike the manipulativeness of that entire scene.
I can't tell you not to give up and abandon hope, but I cannot honestly feel sorry for you if you do.
I think that those are all people who are not socially and emotionally malformed via catastrophic deprivation of peer relations during childhood and teenage, and - thank you, COVID - early adult development, and all I hear from the rest of this response is that the only way to receive sympathy from people who share your approximate perspective is to take my society-mandated optimism and bang my head against a wall, no stopping allowed. I will admit that an example of Down's Syndrome was excessive: strictly speaking there is some nonzero hope given a considerable effort on my part, but this demand for effort gets crueler as the minimum effort gets greater and the odds get worse, and I'd put my odds low enough and the prerequisite effort for those odds high enough that that extreme example is, if not equal, then congruent.
Then again, of course that's what I'd hear, what I'd say.
But I want to jump out of my personal gripes, my uncharitability: whatever my dissatisfaction, your perspective is a good one to hold. Denying pity to people like me is a healthy social tool, as refusing emotional gratification to a few terminal sad sacks is preferable to letting someone with a decent chance at some (hopefully prosocial) goal give up prematurely. After all, for all you know I'm lying about my chances - either to you, or to myself.
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I actually endorse this approach 100%, but surely this implies a general rejection of social science?
Wait what? Why are you glad you're off the market, if your eyes are telling you things are fine?
I don't completely reject social science, but @faceh's constant citing of statistics from sources engineered to affirm his priors does not strike me as rigorous social science. "More people of both sexes are not having sex." "People are marrying later than ever or going unmarried." Okay, I believe that, but there are a lot of other explanations for those things. It is not convincing evidence for the argument that this is because women overall have become completely unreasonable and delusional and 80% of them are getting pumped and dumped by 20% of the guys, and decent normal men can't get any action at all.
I don't think things are "fine" exactly - it does seem very difficult to navigate relationships nowadays, but that is largely because of generational differences. (I am in the "kids today" stage of life.) What I see is not that guys simply cannot find a girl, but that relationships between the sexes are more fraught than ever before, and also the whole idea of trying to market yourself online with an app (which is apparently how most people do it nowadays) seems hellish to me.
I am deeply skeptical of there being such a thing as social science that doesn't do it. Pretty much every academic has a preferred theory explaining societal ills, and they'll pull of similar tricks to the sources you're complaining about, in order to promote said theories.
I agree with you that the issue is much more complex than "it's all the women's fault", but I also think that any solution demanding that women change anything about their behavior is haram in our society, and that such changes are indeed necessary to solve the problem.
Yeah, that part of the conversation is hard for me to participate in. a) I don't personally know that many Zoomers, and b) I live in Europe, where American societal trends arrive with a lag.
I mostly agree with this. I have been reading hot takes on both sides for a number of years (the redpillers vs. the feminists, the Dread Jims vs. the radfems) and I think the discourse overall is quite poisonous. On the one hand, yes, Women Are Wonderful and how dare men ever criticize any woman's choice ever? OTOH, it's hard not to sympathize with women who become paranoid and fearful of men when you see so many men (including right here on the Motte) who, mask off, believe that women should not have a choice about who will fuck them. Also, I admit there are very few populations I have a harder time sympathizing with than incels.
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"Why Should I Care?" is exactly the right question, and I don't think that our society has been able to properly engage with.
At this point the whole system is running on inertia, and what we see in East Asia may be a result of "the default life plan" ceasing to be either desirable or necessary for the majority of the population.
To paraphrase BAP's famous tweet, "Why isn't Final Fantasy XIV better?" is a question that secular culture has not yet been able to answer. Frankly, I would be interested in that answer for my own sake as much as for the sake of others – I've previously posted about my struggles with appreciating the "real life" and the physical world, so spiritually I'm very much in Dylan's camp. I just happen to prefer a bit more comfort and security in life, which is why I'm not picking pineapples just yet.
Until a solution is provided, and despite the shaming from boomers and the "just psyop yourself into an entirely different belief system, bro" camp, people will continue dropping out of society. Because, as things currently stand, the incentives structure is decidedly not in favor of living a real life in a real world, and unless you happen to be a particularly driven individual or grew up outside of the framework of secular hedonism, there's not that much value in the default life plan, with a regular job, wife and 2 kids, and all the struggles those involve, compared to the alternatives.
Are people really dropping out of society, or are you just in a circle where people are dropping out of society? Like one simple metric, the prime-age labor force participation rate, is near all-time highs. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060.
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I've psyopped myself into believing that the general task of continuing human civilization and seeding the galaxy with intelligent life is important (I've taken the Muskpill, if you like). So having and raising kids, avoiding existential risks, and generally trying to push society forward technologically are goals that I find give me a sense of purpose.
And there's something to be excited about there. No matter what it is you like about living on planet earth, EVERYTHING ELSE is out there in space, if you can just find a way to get there. Every human could have their own planet to shape to their preferences, eventually.
But I've also got to recognize that most people don't have an inherent appreciation for space exploration nor any expectation that space exploration will improve their lives.
And as AI and VR tech gets better, the majesty of outer space is going to have to compete with just plugging into the infinite experience machine that will make you feel whatever emotion you want to feel and allow you to have endless new experiences customized to your liking... without ever leaving home!
Me, I like living in (what I perceive to be) baseline reality too much. There's still so much goofy stuff to discover, and we haven't even unlocked the truly interesting stuff on the tech tree.
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I'm really liking the discussion here but I'm going to call this point out.
Its true on the face of it. Society is set up so no woman need be entirely reliant on any particular man.
But its really just because they can outsource the duties normally handled by a spouse to other specialized MEN in their community, as needed. Men can be hired on a gig basis.
If she's physically threatened, she calls the police. Who are mostly male.
If there's a natural disaster, fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, flood, avalanche, etc. etc., the first responders/rescuers are largely male. DITTO for the guys rebuilding infrastructure in the aftermath, and who will be shipping emergency supplies in.
If she needs something at her abode fixed, her car repaired, heavy furniture moved... SAME THING. It'll be a man doing it.
And for economic security, well, the various programs that allow women to have shelters, welfare, food stamps, and other support, even if they're a unmarried, drug addicted, unemployed mother... are largely paid for on the back of taxes extracted from other men.
Its male labor all the way down. No, not every male, or maybe not even a majority, but the only reason women can even afford to express open spite towards male behavior is because men have built the prerequisite conditions for them to do so safely.
Its been shunted into the background somewhat, but oh boy do women still ABSOLUTELY NEED MEN to enjoy any standard of living and and ongoing safety from most physical dangers.
Men created and maintain the internet, too, and various apps, and that's now the preferred vector for women to complain about how useless and ugly men are. This is a supreme, SUPREME irony. Google "Chopped Man Epidemic" for a vantablackpill. Women who couldn't manage to set up a basic LAN are tearing into the exact type of men who make it possible for them to publish this stuff to the masses in the first place.
The current delusion (I will call it what it is) shared by many women that because they can work a job and provide for their own independent living means they don't need men at all is the symptom and somewhat the cause of the current gender discourse. And trying to point this out is very much taboo in polite society.
In short, I'm actually pondering whether we should organize any and all single men with decent-paying jobs into a unified income tax strike. Just refuse to pay taxes and see how society reacts to this simple act of peaceful rebellion. If men aren't needed, if women are capable of getting along without them, then things should putter along okay anyway.
What is the objective of this male general strike? What’s in it for the men, just teaching some women who making annoying videos a lesson? Why would any man who’s a productive member of society rally behind this?
That benefits men too! The time when the average man needed to farm the land, build a house and fix most things he owned himself is over. Men are just as reliant on the collective labour of society as women. Any blue or white collar male worker needs the police, firefighters, agricultural workers etc just as much as any woman, and can count on disability and unemployment benefits if things go poorly (maybe less so in the US, but that’s another issue).
And it’s not like women don’t do any “essential” work. The healthcare system would fall apart without the majority female nurses and staff. Childcare? Education? Who does the majority of the work when it comes to household and raising kids? Fighting over which is more “essential” is pointless.
You’re just doing the same old identity politics as the feminists you’re complaining about, just flipped.
To keep more of our money, I'd say.
Any other effects would be completely incidental. If society isn't offering any net benefits in exchange for the money paid into it, then it is quite morally defensible to stop paying in.
That was like 30% of the justifications put forth in the Declaration of Independence.
Why would any man want to continue to support a productive society that treats him like an expendable worker bee and doesn't even guarantee that he'll at least have the CHANCE to pass on his genes?
That's what the OP is getting at, directly. What's the point? Why stand by and be exploited?
There's a question their net contributions, clearly. Division of labor is good. But someone who is putting in more than they're getting out has direct reasons to question the arrangment.
Anybody who says "we don't need firefighters, we can fight our own fires!" and/or denigrates the role of firefighters is being stupid and discriminatory.
But anyone who says "we don't need men, we can take care of ourselves" is implicitly saying "we don't need firefighters, solders, builders, police officers, etc. etc. etc."
Its an even more fundamentally delusional worldview.
And it should be acceptable to call that out, no?
Yes.
So why is it so easy/reflexive to attack when men do it, but its impossible to find anyone serious suggesting that maybe women should lower their expectations a bit.
You’re American I believe, so fair enough your social services are inefficient and terrible (although you pay less taxes and earn a lot more than us Europeans), but that’s completely unrelated to gender.
This is clearly a personal grievance. All I can say is, you’re sitting inside watching content designed to make you angry, with the goal of hooking you on a corporation’s algorithmic content feed and selling your attention to the highest bidder. It’s not real.
It’s absolutely true that being plugged into the globalised online rat race is hopeless and depressing, so switch it off. Focus on your local community, your niche interests, and you’ll find people that value you for who you are. Join a commune or go pick fruits if you have to.
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I did, and 100% of the links are videos. I tried watching one of the less-terrible-looking videos, and it was still terrible; it started with a "preview" reel that was clearly just there to inculcate feelings of "WTF is going on" in order to maximise watchtime.
Could you summarise for people who don't feel like dipping their brains in the
brain-hackingengagement-optimisation industry?There's some largish subset of Gen-Z women who are claiming that in their daily lives, they almost never see 'hot' men out and about, and the vast majority of the men they do see are hopelessly ugly, don't take care of themselves, and are just horribly unattractive, meanwhile they also claim that most of the women they see are gorgeous, well-put-together, and otherwise "hot" and thus deserve better partners than they've got.
"Chopped" is apparently slang for "rough-looking."
And they further suggest that this is why men are lonely and undateable, since they aren't doing any interesting hobbies, aren't putting effort into dressing well or taking care of their appearance, and are generally "failing" to do the things that would make them attractive to women. And the implicit point in all of this is that the woman speaking is in fact hot and desirable and thus entitled to be as selective as she wants.
The reason its only videos is because that's how Gen Z communicates, which is why this might escape the notice of the older generations.
And of course, the added irony that this is taking place during "Men's Mental Health Month."
If this is a TikTok/ Twitter/ Insta thing, have you considered that the algorithmic video influencer mechanic is also what brought us mukbang, cinnamon challenges, contour makeup, Lil Tay, faking your own death for clout, etc. etc.?
The bad guy in a pro wrestling match is not actually trying to kill anybody with a folding chair, the monster truck with the teeth decals is not actually trying to eat the cars. The crazy infuriating shit influencers say (or their followers parrot) is not actually representative of what sane people act on in their personal lives.
Of course not.
I contend, however, that fewer people in the younger generation meet that definition of "sane people." Particularly young women.
Its becoming more common because people are becoming less sane.
This is a completely compatible set of views, supported by the evidence.
Because more of them are exposed to exactly this sort of ragebait and manipulation, constantly.
The internet isn't real life, but its correlating with something.
Anyway, here's a tiktok video with over 600k likes and 8000 comments where a woman breaks down in tears b/c a man she considers ugly gave her unwanted attention. (read: asked her on a date)
Is it a lie? MAYBE! But a lot of people believed it and completely support her position anyway!
Here's one with 367k likes and 64k comments claiming MEN are the ones not putting in enough effort into their appearance and there's just not enough hot men out there.
Ragebait? Could be, but a lot of women happily gobbling it up and affirming it. There's a comment with 64k likes claiming "I see a decent-looking man once a week."
Is it true? Do the people liking the comment BELIEVE it is true?
You tell me what one should make of this.
You are basing your worldview on random ragebait TikTok videos, a platform where the #peeyourpantschallenge had over four million views. Please, I implore you, talk to real people instead of doomscrolling dumb online discourse.
It’s absolutely true that most men put way less effort into their appearance than women. Like, c’mon. If you don’t believe this, tell me your skincare routine, how many hair products you own, and how long it takes you to get ready in the morning.
But anyway, that should be an advantage for you. Getting a nice haircut, moisturising regularly and buying a few well fitting fashionable outfits will already set you apart from the crowd.
Uh, No.
I've basing it on literally years of research on the topic:
I've researched the Low TFR Issue
I've researched the legal and economic side of it. Pointed out how corporations are technically competing with men for women's commitment.
I brought up the "how many marriageable women are actually out there question literally a year ago, then I ran some very rough numbers.
I've pontificated on why intersex relations have degraded over two years ago.
I've even researched the age-gap question.
This includes talking to real people, I can offhand name a dozen people in my circle experiencing the EXACT. SAME. ISSUES.
I beg you to try and give me some data that I haven't seen yet. You came in and assumed off of 3 comments that I've somehow NOT bothered to look into this issue at every level I can?
In fact, I've put in a LOT of effort to try to find the evidence that runs against this point, but in this search I keep finding videos like the ones I posted, which seem to confirm the data, the anecdotes, the personal experience. All of it pointing in the same direction.
Your attempt to dismiss my point out of hand without a single argument has been noted, and my opinion has remained utterly unchanged.
This is not a problem for me. I am not the one who needs to hear this advice.
I am the one telling you this advice is useless for most men under current conditions and you sound like a Boomer telling someone to sharpen up their resume and give the manager a firm handshake to get hired.
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I will say, this is a lot better than there being a (new) epidemic of men being chopped up or having their dicks chopped off. I suppose if you wanted to get particularly creative, a particularly disgusting case would be an epidemic of meat intended for eating being discovered as, well, "chopped man"!
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Look, listen, I'm broadly sympathetic to the points you're raising about relationships for younger people, but this ain't it. Women are more religious than men, and this just so happens to be a religious belief that they have to proclaim even in anonymous surveys, but that doesn't mean they actually believe it. See: Lizzo is beautiful, right up until you call a woman beautiful just like Lizzo.
Ironically men are attending church more than women now, the previous trend is just barely inverted.
Which suggests women have indeed found a replacement outlet for their religious tendencies. Things are getting janky.
But yeah, to the extent women are saying this, its ultimately just a shit-test or its them asserting high standards so they can pretend they're more selective.
Because they converted to another religion, which is conveniently not tracked by church attendance, as it's pretending to not be a religion.
Now I am wondering what the equivalent to the church service is for these folks.
Protest marches, for one, but surely they don't have weekly sermons in the equivalent of a chapel.
Like church, most people don't attend regularly. They just go to the holiday services (pride).
But as with certain varieties of Buddhism, most people will spend a period in a monastery (university) where they will engage in serious study and pious indoctrination.
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Jon Stewart/John Oliver/the other guy with glasses/the View/&etc.
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TLDR: A number of women are now going online and complaining that the majority of men are unattractive/ugly('chopped men'). The pushback from some of the more spicy internet content creators is that the women complaining about this are all mid, and have no space to talk.
Sadly, this isn't a new opinion. I've seen a number of threads in popular reddit forums(I know, I know) that have voiced similar opinions, that when going out in public, they never see men that they find attractive.
Assuming this is all done in good faith, it's a demonstration of just how women and men are different. I can go out in public and I'm going to see plenty of women I find cute, attractive, appealing, classy, and whatnot. That women don't have a similar mindset is, well, depressing, more than anything.
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It will fail because men in the government want your money, not because women do.
Men who were elected mostly by women. Who want gibs.
This "women never do anything" perspective is one of the major pillars holding the status quo in place.
Everyone wants gibs. Cushy government jobs, questionable grants, corporate welfare and industry nepotism are not a gendered phenomenon.
Sure, but women want gibs more as a matter of simple fact. It is absolutely gendered.
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I don't.
Neither do it, at face value, but you and I are a vanishingly small minority.
And OTOH, let's dig deeper: I don't want there to be gibs, but since the gibs are already out of the box, why shouldn't they go to myself as well as to the less deserving? With that framing in mind, I too want gibs.
I voluntarily took a pretty big paycut to avoid gibs. Admittedly, I am not exactly of a pure heart here, as I was enjoying said gibs for quite a while, but I claim partial credit for eventually refusing them.
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As if governments didn't collect taxes with brutal force for less noble causes than that for millenia.
Your point being?
My point being, the state of welfare for women is utterly irrelevant to what happens if men "just refuse to pay taxes", as per faceh, because governments extract taxes with certainty that doesn't care what they then spend them on. If all women were principled self-sufficient libertarians there would still be taxes.
But without a welfare state the taxes would, presumably, be smaller.
No, they'd just go to different people.
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I've made the point before that women are a potent political force, but an incompetent military one
If things get heated for real, the side that wins will absolutely positively NOT be the one that is depending on women voting for them.
So its a question of who has enough motivated men to 'force' the issue.
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One interesting implication of all of this (that you hinted when discussing future generations) is that Darwinism is coming back in a big way. Short of some world shattering event occurring (like an AI singularity or nuclear war), it looks like the world will be inherited by two groups.
The first are those who have such a strong drive to reproduce that they overcome all the perverse incentives and still have large numbers of kids. Presumably, if these incentives exist for multiple generations, after a century or two we will have selected for people who will reproduce in spite of pressure to the contrary.
The second are groups that impose strict social mores in such a way that they prevent such incentives from infiltrating their communities. Hasidic Jews and Mennonites still have very large numbers of children, and show no signs of slowing down. These groups have also existed for centuries during periods of massive social change, which lends credence to the idea that they will continue to do so.
All of this brings me to what I consider to be the most lamentable point of this whole discussion; we will never get to see what happens. It sort of feels like watching a movie and leaving right at the climax. Massive technological, social, cultural, and environmental trends all peaking at the same time, and then no resolution. Such a shame.
evolution doesn't work that way, there must be alleles for that trait, if they are not there, then no matter what selection pressure be, it would not evolve.
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The main problem I have with blackpilled monk types (and this post is pretty archetypal blackpill despite claiming otherwise) is that it can work while you're younger but it has an expiration date. Eventually you'll have a crisis and medical expenses. What then? If you have no savings then you'll either need to forgo medical care or do the leech thing where you receive medical care and then simply don't pay for it. What happens when you're 60 or 70 and too old to work? If you've calculated everything and know Social Security will get you through it, then OK, that seems fine to me. You do you.
I'd still somewhat worry about peoples' (really just men's) inherent existentialism. Modern generations grow up on Disney movies that tell them life should be wonderful and meaningful, and that'll largely not be true for blackpillers. It won't be horrible overall, but they'll lack a lot of the self-actualization they think they deserve. If they're fine with that then that's OK again, but a lot of them eventually start screeching about how "the system has failed them" and how we need to "burn it all down" just because they were too foolish to make different life choices.
That’s a fair point and we need to consider the steps that need to be taken to avoid that fate.
• You need to have a happy, functioning marriage that preferably produces multiple children
• Those children need to become well-adjusted working normies producing an economic surplus
• Both you and at least one of the children need to organize your lives so that you live in relatively close vicinity
• Your children need to be willing and able to help you with their time, effort, money etc. whether they are themselves married or not
You’ll avoid the sad fate you described when all four of those conditions are met.
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Yes, to some extent this is true; I'm coming at this from a place of relative financial privilege, am not looking to divest all my worldly possessions anytime soon and the risk calculus probably does change if you're flat out completely broke.
Yet at the end of the day, everyone and everything has an expiration date, doesn't it? You can justify working arbitrarily hard for the sake of security, but if you get a terminal cancer diagnosis or you swallow a bee no amount of grinding at work or worrying about it would have helped very much.
It's mostly a question of risk tolerance; there's plenty of guys on the Bogleheads forums that won't retire until they have 100x annual expenses which is frankly silly, there's plenty of guys who regret being workaholics on their death beds, and plenty of guys with significantly higher risk tolerance than either you or I who are happy to carpe diem and forget about retirement altogether.
My P(life is similar enough until I die so that retirement funds remain relevant) is probably higher than the rationalists or the collapseniks, but how high is my
P(life is similar enough until I die so that retirement funds remain relevant) * P (I run into a problem where I need more money and the state won't provide) * P(working harder would actually result in me having the money I need)?
Not sure about that one.
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And even if you're healthy, what happens if you get Alzheimer's? You wouldn't even know it, and eventually you'd either freeze to death trying to walk to work or get in a car accident if you still drive.
I have never been in a romantic relationship and furthermore have no friends or loved ones, and the very day I become conscious of physical or mental deterioration, I'm checking into a hotel and euthanizing myself with the strongest poison I can get my hands on.
As opposed to keeping to exist basically as a vegetable in the nursing home your children paid to let you in, which I suppose is much better.
Nursing homes are containment areas.
Yes aging to death in there is horrible for everyone involved, but it involves fewer people and keeps the horror away from anyone who isn't professionally obliged to deal with it.
You degenerating in your home means neighbors, landlords and everyone nearby need to deal with your increasingly disagreeable behavior and appearance, if you still drive then you may also endanger other people in traffic, and even if not everyone around needs to be on their guard lest you burn the house down.
It's horrible either way, but making you die under controlled conditions is somewhat more pro-social. Except for you of course, but you aren't really part of society anymore by that point.
God, I hope I just die from lightning strike.
Point taken. But OP's comment and the reply only concern the effects of the black pill lifestyle on yourself. Your comment concerns its effects on everyone else. Those are rather different things especially in the case of Alzheimer's when you're unaware of what's happening to you either way.
Fair. But what is the ideal way for a practical egoist to deal with Alzheimer's?
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So you're going to kill yourself by 40? Certainly just about everyone is in worse physical shape at 40 than at 20.
This isn't a gotcha, the point is that very slow decay is, uh, very slow.
40?? I'm already 57. I walk eight miles a day and I'm still in great health (though I put down enough beer that my liver probably isn't thanking me (I never get hangovers though)), but that can't last forever.
You're 57 and you've noticed zero deterioration in 37 years?
Other than losing my hair and having to urinate every hour or so, no. I guess I got lucky in my genes.
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Yeah, mental deterioration is something I also fear. I'm mostly fine living in solitude, but I do have fears of tail-risks involving medical episodes that could be fixed by just having someone to call an ambulance or tell me I've lost it.
These are strong words to say when you're young, and I've heard this sentiment from many people, but I've seen very few actually follow through.
Who said I was young?
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You can always consider getting a roommate or checking yourself early into some sort of supervision program.
I've heard this sentiment a few times, but realistically 50, 60 years is a long time; plenty of happily married couples end up with someone dying and the other being forced to go it alone, the kids end up apathetic/abusive/fuck ups etc.
I'll grant that having a family does give you better odds of mitigating these tail risks compared to being permanently single, but I've seen enough elderly end up alone and abused even with a big family to know that it's no guarantee.
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The existential dread that you've truly wasted the one life you were given on this Earth, and there is no going back. Then you die. Or at least many do.
As opposed to the existential dread that you've wasted the one life you were given by working? And not even for nothing, but to actively fund the destruction of everything that used to give life meaning.
Everyone does.
That's certainly one way to portray working.
That part is not about working, but about taxes.
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Where do you draw your meaning from?
I think needing to have "meaning in your life" is largely overrated. Life is largely something you just get through -- nature loved using the stick much more than the carrot. Modern society is extremely cushy in most ways, sanding off the edges of the stick. This is why I see populists as a natural enemy -- they want "burn it all down" for stupid reasons based largely on hallucinations, and they'd take my comfy pillows away in the process.
If I have any life goals, it would be to build something, probably a video game or maybe something with AI. I've made essentially zero progress in that goal, but I have no illusions that the fault lies with anyone other than myself for being excessively lazy.
It seems to differ quite a bit from person to person. For people like me, having no meaning in life is enough to drive you to drink, or far worse. I'd imagine this might also be a semantic issue - you probably have "meaning" in the sense I mean, even if you don't necessarily see it that way. For me meaning is like... motivation to do anything whatsoever. Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
Perhaps you are typical minding here. The majority of people, it seems, don't have their happiness or satisfaction levels meaningfully raised by material gain. Perhaps there is more to life than creature comforts. I agree that most people are under massive delusions though, it's quite sad.
Why do you want to build something?
Not the same guy, but
I just do. "Meaning" focuses on me, me, me. It presupposes that if I believe something about the outside world, it will change the inner me, grant me motivation; the outside world would somehow be worth experiencing and interacting with. It puts me at the centre of the universe, but I'm not the main character on this planet. The world will still be there and I will still be there regardless of what I think.
What's true, though, is that your actions create meaning, not your thoughts about the meaning. You do stuff first, then you gain meaning, which is a roundabout way of saying that having connections to the world creates responsibility, which in turn creates meaning. Kids, for example, give you plenty of responsibility. You get up for them regardless of what you think about the meaning. Vice versa, living empty lives devoid of responsibility leads to thoughts about meaning.
I need something, so I want something, so I do something about it (which is the easiest way to want). I can also just want something, without external necessity, based on my life experience.
There's no greater meaning to it. I want something, so I do something. If your wants have to be created by a meaning, you haven't been taught to want properly.
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If one considers the same overall phenomenon from what I assume is women’s usual perspective, I’m sure one can’t help but roll the eyes at the recent discussion on Aella’s degeneracy, for example. Shaming and punishing e-thots can only work when alternative life paths are broadly accessible for average women.
The norm of enforced monogamy (heh) in the old days of Christian patriarchy (heh) basically functioned as a life insurance policy for women. Someone was surely going to marry each woman, with a few extreme exceptions, no matter how stupid, ugly or fat she was. The same path for heterosexual women today, on the other hand, is largely up to chance and luck, something that is pretty much optional – it may happen and may work out well, but there’s a significant probability that it won’t. Just listen to women’s usual complaint about men, which is usually that attractive men refuse to commit to an exclusive relationship. Of course we see the massive proliferation of e-thotting, sugar-mommying, gold-digging etc. when the social consensus is that a happy marriage is by and large off the table.
Unmarriageable women in the olden days were a dime a dozen, though- after the convents became selective those who weren’t taken care of by a male relative worked as servants, in textiles(the word ‘spinster’ has a completely literal meaning as well as its other one), as prostitutes, etc.
?
Indeed it's another important aspect of a society where men are generally expected to fulfill the roles of protectors and providers.
A lot of the women in convents used to be there because they were widows or unmarriageable. It hung on longer in the east- where high status divorcees and widows were expected to become nuns even fairly late in the Russian empire- but becoming a nun was not previously something that required particular religious devotion; it was often a last resort for widows, daughters who refused every suitor, etc.
Isn't it more accurate to say that being a single woman carries a lot less stigma and is much more normalized and thus much fewer women are compelled to become nuns as a consequence?
Western convents got picky about ‘only be here if you want to spend your life in prayer’ before it became socially acceptable for women to live independently; it was a counter-reformation change, which, like most counter reformation changes, was later copied by the east because of the need to actually run their church.
And of course convents in Northern Europe were closed down in the 16th century for obvious reasons.
Obviously, convents did not decline due to the growing social acceptability of being a single woman.
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Work how and to what end? I don't think most people calling out Aella are there to 'save' her and bring her to Jesus. They just want her to stop spreading her poison. I'm sure many think it would be good if she found salvation, happiness and peace or whatever, but her not existing as she does today is a more immediate goal, I would reckon.
Your post reads like the blame lies somewhere with 'attractive' men not committing to the women who want them. But chances are there are simply not enough 'attractive' men for these women. A part of that problem, that older societies had solved, was to largely take the choice away from women. To that end I can only roll my eyes at your post. The problem is entirely woman made, maintained and supported. So if women are having a perspective on this issue I'd hope it includes some pretty drastic self critique and reflection to reconcile just where the woman ingroup brain has taken the society that gave it freedom.
On top of that, women can be financially independent. How we can equate marriage and prostitution as the only avenues of life for women in the modern age doesn't compute for me.
I’d say women in the past generally understood that they can elicit long-term commitment from the men they identified as desirable partners, and that this isn’t achieved by merely offering up their orifices for use. This knowledge is mostly lost at this point, which incentivizes women to fruitlessly try out-slutting one another in order to pander to the whims of the top men. In fact, even the simple idea that young women should learn how to become eligible long-term partners if they want a happy relationship is largely forgotten.
That's a very salient point that comes from a perspective I'd not normally think from. Though I think it raises two questions: Why was this knowledge and tradition lost in the first place and what good would come of bringing it back?
Women might be trying their best to lock down a relationship with an attractive man but so long as that man is not looking for life long commitment or is demanding sex before taking things any further then any woman not playing the out-slutting game will simply lose faster than anyone who is, no? And this state of affairs can continue forever so long as there are more women looking for attractive men than there are attractive men. Since the men have the power to gatekeep relationships.
From my perspective a part of the problem is still, as I alluded to before, that women have a choice. They could bend to some form of patriarchy and functionally organize and regulate sex in exchange for commitment, as traditionalist social values functionally did for a time, or at least tried to. Or they could have a sexual revolution against these social values and dictate their own bodies how they please.
Now, women have already made their choice. And I think their choice was made before you saw any widescale acceptance of black pilled nihilism about life and the lack of value placed on work and pushing yourself. Exhibited by many men in the thread you linked. To that end I think the chain of causality that leads to many of our issues, though certainly not all, lies at the feet of women having the power to make that poor choice.
Then he's not relationship material.
That might be true but I'm not sure what that changes.
It changes everything. If he's unavailable for long-term commitment, he's no longer a potential catch for women who want that.
Yet they still try.
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I have heard that women are far too picky many times- but when the complainant is herself a woman, the complaint is usually ‘ok, men don’t act like protagonists in a romance novel, because men are real people and not fictional characters’ and not ‘ok there are only so many 6’5 self made millionaires to go around’.
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There's plenty of men who are up for marriage in the giant "unattractive" bucket. They can't offer ressources on par with pimps, however.
That's indeed the gist of women's usual complaints: the ones willing to exclusively commit aren't desirable, and the desirable ones don't commit exclusively.
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I have to strongly disagree. I don't want to get into all of the specifics, but this type of blackpilling comes from a nihilistic, materialist framework. Yes if you see the world as nothing but a meaningless collection of atoms bouncing around, many will get to this viewpoint inevitably, it seems.
That being said - you don't have to view the world that way! We have free will, we are able to interrogate our axioms and try to understand things at a deeper level. If your worldview is so bleak, it may be because some of the things you believe are not fully true. I would encourage you to look deeper.
Yes, you're correct that I'm a materialistic atheist, and that this is where my beliefs have lead me to.
I enjoy reading your posts on theology; in the words of the rationalists, rationality is winning, and I do believe that the religious are winning in a way that secular society increasingly is not. It's pretty clear, however, that society has largely rejected religion as a whole, and so it is for me; I don't think it's possible to convince myself into religion at this point.
Like I said in another post, perhaps the way this ends is that us atheists all die out and the religious end up fighting for control of the planet; it could certainly go a lot worse.
Not bad! I think we are generally on the same page, hah. Personally I simply see religion as a higher level of rationality - while materialism may work on some level, humans still inherently operate in the world on a symbolic frame. To ignore the symbolic frame entirely is foolish.
That being said, I personally think the symbolic frame is the higher level of reality as opposed to the secular materialist one. But that takes a bigger leap.
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I’d disagree with you - your post seems to be entirely aligned with the blackpillers, in that it shares a central outlook on things. That outlook could be summed as nihilism, but the overtones of philosophical malice which that word implies are pretty misleading, in my opinion. If I were to give a real summary, it would be: the feeling that nothing one does is working. And to be quite clear, I think this is not about dating specifically.
There’s a particular psychological phenomenon, which I’m sure has a proper name but which I will term traction. Traction is the guttural sense that you are getting somewhere. It is the feeling that the things you do have a palpable effect on larger circumstances, and especially on your own fate. Traction is the internal representation of your own agency. Failing to find traction is, correspondingly, absolute torture.
Traction requires the experience of matching your own efforts to meaningful results. If you work hard, and do the right things, you will be rewarded. But there are two ways for this to go wrong: first, for a person to fail to find things to do which will yield tangible rewards, and second, for a person to get rewards despite failing. Both paths lead to despair, to the sense that what you are doing doesn’t matter. A person without traction is perpetually frustrated, in a sort of frictionless distortion of a world, all intangible images and no hard if painful reality. This experience is outright torture.
I’d argue that our immediate society is effectively set up to maximize frustration, starting from childhood. Schools have few avenues for real success or failure. If you are convenient for the teacher you will get approval, but excellence at the material has no outward effect. There’s no actual way to fail either, no real consequences to suffer, No Child will be Left Behind. And kids are stuck in that fake world for most of the day, leaving little time to go explore elsewhere. At home may be better, but a complacent parent will provide distractions for the kid that have no connection to their behavior (we used to call this spoiling the child) and make no real demands of them. College is little better, of course. And the political moment is so far against failure that even adults who should be failures are able to scrape by as if nothing was ever truly lost, and even collect Social Security as childless elders instead of facing their failure to directly or adjunctly reproduce the next generation who will care for them.
Anyway. Career trajectory is obviously part of this. If you can’t swing extra work into extra pay, or if that extra pay cannot visibly lead to things that concretely matter to you, then you have no traction at work. Why not skate by at minimum? Dating is as well. There’s a phenomenon where someone is trying to make a bigger leap, in terms of their own ability, than they think they are - usually because they’ve been carried past the point where they’d typically learn the elementary pieces. But making that leap in a single burst of effort is impractical, and the inevitable failure is frustrating. And if you keep getting your dole payments that bring the floor up on where you should be, such that if you were to go stand on your own two feet it would be a long and painful journey to get what you can currently get for free, then getting traction is a monumental task.
Dating is like this, I think. Porn, both for men and women (romance literature), gives a person sexual experiences they don’t really have a right to. Ditto the sorts of wish-fulfillment literature that lets a person self-insert into an infinitely pleasant and unchallenging relationship. Meanwhile, the actual starting point is obscured: the person who wants to date needs to start by learning to be decent around the opposite sex, what things they do or don’t appreciate, how to charm them and not offend them, and only then progress to things like flirting and courtship. An explicit dating relationship can only really happen on top of that foundation. And this applies to women too: if you’ve heard anything from the women miserable that they’re stuck in a “situationship” where they put out for a guy who won’t date them, it sure sounds like they’re the unfortunate equivalent of a guy who’s been relegated to simp orbiter. Neither knows what to do to get what they actually want.
The blackpill is nothing more than an expression of this condition. Nothing you do seems to matter; maybe nothing could ever be done at all? And it can apply to anything: dating, career, hobbies, even politics. We have a lot of political blackpillers on this forum, which I personally take as a sign that they’re trying to influence national politics instead of the more appropriate first step of coming to terms with one’s friends, family, neighbors. But national politics continues to deliver people political wins they don’t deserve, so we’re likely to continue seeing frustrated people for the time being in that dimension. And for you, friend, I have sympathy. I don’t particularly know what your struggles are, as your post mostly talked about generalities, but I’m guessing you’re from a striver background and are on the first or second rung of some or other intense career and feeling pretty lost. Or something else! I’m not a psychic. In any case, I wish you the best in finding something that is, to you specifically, worth the effort which you are capable of.
Fantastic post, you've given me a lot to think about. If couched in those terms, I suppose I am indeed a blackpiller lol.
Scary psychoanalysis haha, that's pretty much it. Spent a bunch of time striving to "make it" and now I'm having my quarter life crisis I suppose...
I agree completely on the idea that the blackpill is the idea that nothing you do feels like it matters, where you have no traction on something you wish to move.
If I say I'm blackpilled over, say, my ability to beat the final boss of Final Fantasy or improve my deadlift obviously that's silly; everyone who isn't disabled can do that, and there's clear feedback loops on how to accomplish your goals. It's very easy to have "traction" when playing video games and when working out, which is why so many men find themselves drawn to such things.
By the same metric, if I say I'm blackpilled over my ability to beat Lebron in ball or beat Carlsen in chess it's hardly a "blackpill" in any real sense, there's nothing I could ever do to achieve that and my chance of doing either is 0.00%, any blackpill here is just being realistic and I should probably abandon my goal.
Where it gets complicated is for goals that are neither 0% or 100%; I definitely agree that a lot of disaffected guys are cognitively distorted about what they can achieve, but at the same time it's abjectively true that career and dating "success" is becoming harder and more costly, while any feedback loops are increasingly being broken down.
The true percentages of success nobody can really know, an optimist might say they're high enough to be worth trying, while a nihilist might say their chances of finding a partner that improves their life are the same as my chances of checkmating Carlsen, so it's time to check out; two ways of looking at the same picture.
If we're talking dating in specific, the eternal challenge is that, like a job search, you have nothing to show for it until you have something to show for it. It's a binary; zero or one, success or failure. There's no obvious progress, it just doesn't work until it does work.
...Except that's not true, as far as I've been able to tell. The most romantically gifted men, starting from puberty or even before, don't see things that way, as evidenced by their actions. I'm talking the playboy type, casual and friendly and involved with women without any aggressive need for sex, natural at swinging that into a relationship when and as he pleases. He keeps score in a totally different way: by how he enjoys talking to women, being friendly or flirting or something more as the case may be - and if it isn't anything more, who cares? He's already on the board. And, as a matter of fact, those are the elements of cross-sex engagement that form the foundation for actual dating, the awareness of what women are like socially developing into a sense of what excites them and how to win their hearts. Put another way: imagine your average kissless virgin were to happen to get a girlfriend. Wouldn't he struggle massively until he was able to fill those same elements back through his experience with her? Wouldn't he have trouble satisfying her romantic needs, keeping her excited and attached, and even interacting with her on the banal dimension of the everyday? Even if you can skip the tutorial, there's no replacement for the basics. And obviously, the same applies to women, just in a different form. And I don't think that's just true of dating. Every one of the seemingly binary outcomes in life actually have concrete elements that constitute the potential for the correct outcome. The job search is a good example: people who are really, really good at careerism are always cultivating their contacts, they enjoy networking, they get a kick out of an interview just to learn what a certain place is like. And, in fact, that is the baseline for finding a good job and navigating upwards in it. Even trying to beat Magnus has concrete prerequisites - to have any chance at all you need to be at least 2500 ELO, for example, and that in turn requires you master the various basics of chess, and so on and so forth, and whether or not you get remotely close to your goal is of course founded in your native talent but also in how much you can appreciate and pursue those lesser accomplishments. And, for what it's worth, I think that merely becoming quite good at chess can be a great outcome, even if your initial goal was foolishly to score a point off of Magnus Carlsen.
So much for the practical side. How about theory?
Deciding on what to pursue and why to pursue it is the unsolvable question of life. Some things we get more or less for free, like basic drives for hunger, sleep, etc, and some things we get socially, like the sense that a girlfriend or a white picket fence should drift into frame at some point. But what exactly one should do, what marks success as distinct from failure, is inherently a value judgment and has no absolute scientific answer. Of course, that doesn't stop people from waffling about evo psych or some such if it's their wont, but we all know about the naturalistic fallacy. But knowing what your destination is, even in a rough and sketchy sense, is an absolute requisite for navigating life. Imagine the captain of a ship who does not know where he is going or what he hopes to do when he gets there. What would the point be of such a voyage? He stares across the horizon not knowing if open sea or visible land is preferable; he adjusts the steering and the rigging not knowing if he should go this way or that or faster or slower; he comes across a beautiful island or a vibrant port and stares dumbfounded, even coming in to dock briefly, but soon leaves again as he has no idea what to do there; and in the end, he develops a sense that storms are to be avoided because of their unpleasantness but little else. But a captain who has a goal, even a vague one of "find what lands there are in this direction and what they are like," is grounded and guided in his ventures, even where his knowledge and ability might be vague. He can learn and adjust as he travels, become a better captain, and eventually have something to show for it.
And this sense, as it applies to life, is one of the central pillars of the old liberal arts education: the aesthetic. Aesthetics, the sense and study of what is beautiful and what is not, is the fundament for all subsequent judgments. When we say we want a good life, what I believe actually obtains is that we want a beautiful life. We want to be surrounded by what is beautiful and meet, to have the cadence of our lifestyle bear a harmonious rhythm, and to have our life story tell itself a lovely tale. But telling the beautiful from the ugly requires some education. In the old days, this was done (for the common folk) through repetition of folktales and religious extracts or (for the elite) through explicit indoctrination into a specific tradition. This, I think, holds across the entire world, as a pattern. But these days this story is weak. Postmodern perspectives refuse to judge beauty if they do not actively attack the beautiful. The common folklore is shared through advertisements and popular media, and peppers vague platitudes into the central message that the good life involves a credit card. Finding the right thing to do is harder.
But, of course, it isn't impossible. The prescription is simple: engage with art, especially older and more spiritual art, and decide on what is beautiful enough to pursue. Just imagining that one is obliged to find a girlfriend is insufficient. What does a romance mean, what kind of woman does one want, what kind of man does one have to be to be a partner to that woman, and what kind of woman would want the kind of man one would have to be to be a partner to the kind of woman one wants? And given that, where might she be found, approached, attracted? That's the real question for our imagined incel. And even then, the answer doesn't have to be concrete. A failed search for the East Indies can instead yield the West Indies, although I guess that's not really a positive analogy for the ladies in this scenario, given what happened next. But a lifelong pursuit of the aesthetic and a vague goal to motivate can help one hone in on a real set of goals, something real to accomplish. And that accomplishment has to start with the notion that there is something worth accomplishing.
Fucking GOAT'ed comment, to use the parlance of our times.
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This is a really excellent post. Identifying what you actually want is extremely important with dating — a big problem is that people are just passively moving through the world, hoping for something to happen, without much direction or purpose. So they end up learning very late what they’re looking for, long past the point where that’s simple to get.
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This is a good critique of the blackpiller mindset.
For what it's worth I asked ChatGPT if there was a more well-known term for the "traction" you were talking about, and it said "self-efficacy", which I think is pretty close but maybe not entirely aligned with the vibes you were going for.
I've heard it called "Locus of control." This is a spectrum from internal to external based on how much you think society rewards people based on merit or effort. 100% internal means that an individual doing the right actions will lead to the expected outcome 100% of the time. 100% external means that success is effectively random or determined at birth.
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Is the term you are leading toward learned helplessness?
"Learned helplessness" carries the meaning that the helplessness is false and the problem is internal. "Traction" suggests, or at least allows for, the possibility that the problem is external.
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I wouldn’t say so, no. Learned helplessness is more: I couldn’t, therefore, I can’t, starting with the paradigmatic example of the tethered elephant. A lack of traction is more: I don’t know how, therefore, it’s impossible. A major difference is that you should expect the former only after extensive cudgeling, but the latter can arise out of a simple lack of stimulus. After all, the default state is not knowing how.
Small example. When my daughter was learning to crawl, she was REALLY mad. She wanted to get somewhere, but had no idea how to make it happen. She wound up going backwards a lot of the time! If I’d let her onto incel forums she’d be posting about “walkchads” and “leg ratio” and that she was NGMI (to the rattle which we’d put out of reach). But then she figured it out and everything was OK. She was frustrated, there was a lack of traction, then things came together. But you definitely couldn’t call that learned helplessness. Where would she have been able to learn it?
Sounds like your notion of traction is a combination of internal locus of control and grit, both of which are mostly reinforcement-learned by exerting deliberate effort towards a goal and then achieving that goal. Ideally this happens many times in varied contexts throughout the subject’s development.
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This is, unfortunately, the conclusion I have come to. The crisis of meaning is, like the problem of low birthrates, ultimately self-correcting via natural selection, as those without the psychological capacity to handle modernity will end up in some ideological or nihilistic dead end or another and fail to perpetuate their lines. But who knows, maybe someday we'll invent the mental health equivalent of GLP-1 agonists and people will be able to pop a meaning of life pill every morning to motivate themselves.
Nicotine and dextroamphetamine have been around for quite some time, but the delivery method for the former has been bad for a long time and the withdrawl symptoms are absurdly bad, and the latter still requires a prescription for whatever reason.
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One big difference is that a rich guy can throw cool parties and have lots of people come to hang out at his house. A middle class person can't do that, but can at least invite a few friends or a date to come over and watch TV. The dropout living with his parents has a hard time even doing that, he's pretty much forced to always go to other people's houses for social interaction. So there's a real power dynamic at play.
When the rich guy inevitably develops a major health problem, he will pay to have it treated. A pineapple picker lacks this. Easy to survive problems become deadly when you are poor.
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That'll be a great advantage to him as long as he's strongly an extrovert. There's also the aspect that he'll have to clean the mess all up afterwards or hire some maid to do so, and that his social circle will come to expect him to keep throwing cool parties.
If he lives in a community where third places don't exist at all, then yes.
My brother is pretty much the dropout guy. Rents a room in a friend's house, makes very little money through various gigs (and some less-legal stuff), but has no space to host or otherwise have people over at a whim.
But he's so damn affable and charismatic that he never lacks for invites to go and do interesting stuff. The dude took a day trip down to Key West yesterday (didn't even invite me) and a couple days before that he was hanging out with some guy who, no joke, is building a large reptile zoo facility on his property.
I don't envy him, per se, but I don't get invited out nearly as much as he does. I have to do the hard hosting work. And someone has to.
Thankfully my friends are pretty tidy guests, and don't tend to expect me to host. Hell, they seem nervous even asking.
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Or just, if he wants any social contact at all. Doesn't have to be a wild, raucus party. It just becomes increasingly awkward asking your friends to hang out in your mom's basement or a tiny studio apartment as you get older. People will also reciprocate by inviting you to their own parties.
3rd spaces usually cost money, though. Maybe the hippie dropout is happy to hang out in the public park or town square, but the millionaire lawyer guy tends to get tired of those places pretty quickly. He might want to go on a ski trip or to a fancy restaurant, and then what does the hippie dropout guy do? Beg for a handout? Just skip that one?
Friends had a good episode about the awkwardness of doing shared experiences with a friend group where people have vastly different incomes: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EYb9jnt2cv4
These are all good points. However, I'd mention that none of that is relevant to the examples the OP gave, namely "working out, playing the same video games, watching the same tv/movies/anime, scrolling too much on social media and going traveling to similar places from time from time".
True. And warren buffet and Trump are both famously big fans of regular coca cola, which i assume is just the same for them as it is for anyone else.
Lets conpromise and say, there are some experiences universal regardless of income, but others really require money. And my opinion is that a fulfilling life in modern western society really does require some rrasonable amount of money. Theres a thin libe between "free spirited hippy" and "miserable homeless bum"
And probably that line is labelled: 'has options'.
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personally I like hiking etc, and I expect that I would still like it if I would be really rich (millionaire seems to be not really impressive nowadays after few rounds of inflation).
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Maybe it’s down to my social bubbles, but the way men are described in these kinds of posts just doesn’t mesh with the men I know.
Like the supposed truth that men aren’t big spenders and would happily sleep on a mattress in a cardboard box that had wifi. Sure men don’t tend to own as many knick-knacks and care less about interior decorating, but men loooove to spend big time on things they care about, like “gear” for their hobbies. Who’s buying $2,000 GPUs, 4k ultra wide monitors and pricy mechanical keyboards? Expensive guitars when they can barely string together a few chords? Ridiculously pricy sports gear? Who tends to spend extra on high performance sport version of cars even though they look basically the same as the base model? I don’t know any women who are impressed by a $1500 espresso machine, but I know guys who have them.
I’ve never seen an “average” man have issues with dating (casual sex, sure, but not dating). The guys I know who can’t seem to find a single woman to date… you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation. It doesn’t take the average guy an inordinate amount of effort to find an average woman and get married. Even awkward nerdy guys I know are getting married as long as they’re not actively unpleasant to be around.
I feel like that kind of malaise and blackpilling mostly happens to neurotic, terminally online people. If you touch grass in a first world country, those issues aren’t really there.
Of course I can't speak for all men, but I think it's a bit more subtle than men be spending too; yofuckreddit put it well in the sense that many men's lives are more simple. Sure, I spend money on my home office and gym because I can afford it, but that doesn't really change my day to day life; if I ever went broke I'd still have a computer and be working out.
Obviously speaking in generalities, but I've found women enjoy a more dynamic life and are more attuned to keeping up with the lives of others; new experiences, new toys, new clothes etc. You can see how this might pre-dispose men to dropping out as opposed to women.
I agree in the sense that most people, especially in middle-class+ demographics, could probably find a partner if they put a lot of effort into it and relaxed their standards; a lot of incel/red pill discourse is either fairly lower-class coded (single mothers, criminal chads etc) or wildly high standards for a partner and for a relationship.
The point I'm more trying to make is that it's significantly more difficult and costly than it ever used to be to find a partner, and even for those who do, the incentives for actually having a partner are falling further and further. Having high standards is not wrong, for a lot of people it probably is true that they're better off alone vs partnering with the people they can convince to commit to them; the single life is pretty damn good nowadays!
I will say that this is emphatically not the lived experience of most (straight) young men nowadays [it may be different in queer spaces like yours, I'm not sure].
Others already linked Radicalizing the Romanceless, but in general unless you're significantly above average in looks/charisma/wealth etc you're not getting set-up [especially work relationships are verboten], off-the-cuff hook-ups are not happening unless you're in college and rarer even there, and the primary way most men are going to meet women is through the dating app hellscape.
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Yeah. I move in / post in / am at least aware of many different circles of guys (old high school friends, nerdy types, lefty types from my lefty activist days, church guys, football fans etc.), mostly millennials but sometimes trending towards zoomer, and in all of the circles a clear majority of guys is either married, in a steady relationship or has no trouble with dates, perhaps barring the church guys who obviously are playing a somewhat different game (and even there there's been a number of marriages recently, typically to girls from the same parish). Of course the traditional answer is that since I'm an (early) millennial I can't possibly know what it's like with zoomers, but even the younger guys in my circles seem to be doing OK.
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Everything else you wrote rings true - but this is absurd! Or rather, not my lived experience at all. The person sleeping next to me now can tell you about all the expresso machines in all the various price ranges and why one is better than another.
But, all things have exceptions I imagine.
My wife wants some fancy espresso machine and is opinionated about which sort is good.
She refuses to drink my AeroPress coffee.
Whaaa....? My head just exploded.
ETA: Is she possibly looking for some sort of frothed milk beverage with espresso in it? Because that's the only way I can make sense of those two sentences together.
She wants espresso in steamed milk, so yeah.
Yeah, thanks, I was all, "how could anyone who is opinionated about which sorts of fancy espresso machines are good refuse to drink from an AeroPress?!" Then my brain kicked back in.
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This has always been amusing to me. Online discourse is profoundly rife with "alpha fux, beta bucks" and "no man can get dates finder is a hellhole" but all my male friends seem to have as much sex and dates as they want.
Admittedly, my social sphere leans towards white collar yuppies downtown, so there's lots of fish and no one is answering "flip burgers" to the "what do you do" question.
But even my childhood friends, who are not yuppies, still pull?
One guy works like 2 days a week (smokes weed the other 5) and lives in a shitty apartment but always has a new girl, and they're bartenders/bottle girls/etc (one time a stripper lmao) so they're attractive, if messy.
Another is decidedly not conventionally attractive, works a non status job, and churns first dates enough he had to stop posting Instagram stories of sunsets because he was getting worried someone would notice (it's his first date move).
Im not sure how to reconcile these two realities.
I wonder if it’s basically shared knowledge. The thing about dating is that nobody will tell you how it works. If you’re lucky in your social circle, you and your friends figure it out in your late teens and pool your shared knowledge and experience. If not, your only option is people who are incentivised to lie to you: priests, gamer girls, masculinity influencers, MeToo journalists, etc.
For various reasons, all these people tell you what they want you to believe, not what’s true. For high-conscientiousness men especially this is a killer.
People flock to those like themselves, so you have all-male groups who collectively have no idea how to get dates and have male hobbies as an alternative, versus mixed groups like yours who all date constantly.
I think that might explain what you see.
I'm confused, how do you figure priests are incentivized to lie to people about how to find dates? I wouldn't go to a priest for marriage advice (for obvious reasons), but plenty of priests dated (and yes, even had sex - priests are sinners too) before joining the clergy. For example, the pastor of my parish is a pretty young guy who was engaged before he decided he was being called to the priesthood, so he could probably give decent advice about attracting women (if you're in Brazil where he's from).
There are priests who are good at this and priests who are bad at this, IME.
Obviously if you ask your priest how to get laid on a first date he will answer ‘dont’. But the better ones are fine people to listen to. Few of them are popular on the internet.
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Essentially along the lines described below by other posters. I would expect priests to be disproportionately virgins or bad at dating for the obvious reasons, and they are also often older and regarded as pillars of the community. Finally, Christianity has certain ideas about what women and dating are like and how they should work (as do feminism, PUA, etc.) and priests are sort of expected to uphold those values.
As such, it's not that priests are incentivised to lie to you exactly, but I think to some extent they are motivated to lie to themselves and also they will not necessarily tell you all their own private thoughts. Some very self-aware exception will exist, as with any other creed, but I don't think institutional authority figures in general are very helpful in this sphere.
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Priests and especially Protestant pastors, influenced by feminist tendencies, often tend to push misandric, gynonormative ideas, even though Christianity as a creed is unreservedly and unquestionably patriarchal.
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It's not about having no experience, it's about them having a tendency to tell you that behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner, when it's at best unrelated or at worst actively counterproductive.
Ironically, I would actually say that they are better equipped to give good relationship advice once you already are committed to each other, for the same reason.
I was going to say that churchgoing women outnumber men, so yeah maybe. But, now that I google it, articles say young women are attending church at much lower rates than previous generations. So much lower that it flipped to more young men than young women who regularly attend church.
Sorry young guys, you missed the boat on that one.
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It's simply the 'alpha fucks, beta bucks' phenomenon in action. And what you and @rae are generally describing are the 'I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon' effect in action.
But what I'm saying is that my friends really aren't too 5% Giga-chads and those last two example friends are extremely not that.
So if I know lots of non-alphas who are fucking, what's up?
apparently under that definition alpha is greater than 5% or you do not see vast number of people stuck in basements
Yeah I guess my thinking was if below average men in the looks/earnings/status department can get laid regularly, anyone can
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At the risk of being circular, one answer is that if your friends are getting loads of dates / sex with reasonably attractive girls, they are in fact giga-chads because that's what being a giga-chad is. Whereas if someone is rich and handsome but can't get girls interested in him, it would be odd to call him chaddish. Some men seem to have It, a strange factor that impresses other people, and much of the verbiage spilled here and elsewhere is working out what It is and how people who don't have It can get It.
That's a fair point
I guess my thinking was if they can do it, anyone can. But thinking about it more today, one dude is extremely forward and the other is nominally shy/introverted but he does play the numbers game.
I guess for the "shy" one, I'm still suprised he pulls as much as he does (given internet discourse) as he uses tinder, etc and isn't that hot. So the narrative "tinder only works for the hottest men" falls apart a bit.
Also both of them are more than happy to date women that aren't perfect (one literally dated a stripper). So they're also realistic about standards.
That seems sensible. I know a fat, short dude who's fun but not good looking by anyone's standards (think fat Gimli) but he has a happy marriage with a lovely girl who he essentially seduced away from a much handsomer and richer dude; he's as forward as that sounds.
I think that it's partly that dating is heavily subject to virtuous cycles - even if you're dating on tinder, if you've got photos of yourself with affectionate women, if you're obviously comfortable with women, if you know how dating works and how to take the lead and make people feel comfortable, that makes up for a lot. Which is encouraging in that it suggests that datability can be improved, it's just that from a certain starting point it's hard to see how in an easily actionable way. @kky had the right of it when he talked about tractability. Also mixed friendship groups probably help a lot.
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I feel like I occupy some sort of intermediate space. On one hand, a fairly comfortable majority of men I knew (including myself) paired up without much trouble, or at least had no trouble finding intermittent partners when they were not too busy actively wrecking their lives; but on the other, I do see some 30% of guys that seem to live the internet discourse stereotype (orbiting, being serially relegated to the "friend zone", or outright socially shunned by any women) without being terminally online, or with the terminal onlineness appearing downstream of their misfortune. For maybe half of them, it is somewhat obvious to me what about them tanks their chances (though I have to wonder how much of these traits is upstream rather than downstream of the outcome), but there is a remaining set where I feel like I just lack the UV cone cells that allow birds to tell that the flower is fake, or something.
In some cases, it also seems to be a case of product-market mismatch: certain guys elicit the "I couldn't ever see him like that"~revulsion spectrum of reactions only from a particular demographic, and do normally with others. This is unfortunate when they only target that particular demographic - some combinations where I have seen this patterns is nerdy white guys and white girls (which is why you can always find the CS department by following the gradient of WMAF couples), Chinese-American guys who have Chinese Dad aura and Americanized Asian girls, and Indian guys and Asian girls independent of assimilation. There are cases that go against the common patterns though - I used to know a particular Caucasian guy in CS who elicited baseless shockingly cruel commentary from the Asian girls I was friends with, but paired up with a (status-matched, in my estimation) girl of his own demographic halfway into grad school.
don't I fucking know it ...
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I was (by my own analysis) a pretty good catch for years. My problem was that I couldn't find any women up to my standards. It is exceedingly grim out there for anyone with expectations that would have been reasonable even 30 years ago.
Found one eventually and we're very happy. Years later we're still constantly telling each other "I can't believe no one else got to you first."
Even so I know too many other men my age and younger who can't find a decent wife for anything.
That's so awesome man, congratulations to both of you.
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There's definitely a trend of men being too timid to take the initiative in relations between the sexes.
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I could not disagree with this harder (+the data backs me up). Maybe it’s slightly different 5-10 years older than me, but there are so so many single men in my social circles. Sure some of them have some social skills to work on, but they’re mainly average guys with average hobbies. Some of them haven’t been on dates in years.
Are you a woman by chance? Perhaps that might explain our different perspectives.
I’m a trans woman but before that I was a man and dated women and men. My experience isn’t typical but I know a decent number of straight men and I have trouble believing an actual average guy can avoid having a single date for years, unless they’re avoiding all social situations with the opposite sex.
If you’re a regular straight person, everything is basically designed for you. You can ask out basically any single member of the opposite sex. People try to set you up with their friends/co-workers/whatnot. You can hook-up with random strangers at a party if the chemistry’s right without having to worry if they’re in the <5% that’s attracted to you, if you’re sexually compatible, or if you’re trans and passing, that they won’t react violently.
You don’t have to deal with people hiding your relationship, you can just follow a preset script, introduce your partner to your friends, meet their parents without fear, etc. And as a man the bar is honestly pretty low and it’s ridiculously easy to set yourself apart in terms of fashion/being a decent partner/a decent father, and your attractiveness is dictated by a multiple of things rather than just your rapidly declining physical appearance.
Plus most straight men seem to be attracted to most women? I don’t understand it but it should make your life easier to not be picky.
In other instances, (gynephile) trans men reported that they found dating as a man was a lot harder.
do you realize that this is exactly how women see average man? median woman considers median man repulsive. This is only advantage for cishet males who are in top 5-10% and/or in low population density. Homosexuals have had their solutions to dating which serve average gay in big cities better than average heterosexual.
"script" used to be, now it's gone along with arranged marriages.
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I'm one of the many, many guys who grew up with the bedrock knowledge that I should never display romantic interest in a member of the opposite sex, for fear of creeping them out.
I can entirely believe that on balance, your analysis here is more or less accurate. I'm pretty sure Trans people do in fact have it significantly harder than straight men, and certainly much harder than straight women. But straight men have it pretty hard, and a lot of them have achieved common knowledge that approximately no one is interested in helping or even sympathizing with them in any way. The bitterness this produces is severe, and mixes poorly with claims that "everything is designed for them".
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Jeez I have no idea why you got downvoted so hard.
If you follow the upvote/downvote patterns you’ll notice that a fair chunk of the motte’s lurkers are pretty stereotypical internet right-wingers these days, of the type who are likely to read “I’m a trans woman” and instantly downvote. And/or the type who are wont to react with instant negativity to anyone saying that “the straight man dating world/heterosexual relations aren’t that bad, actually”. Sad but true.
Edit: plus some good old-fashioned identity elements. The straight men lurking the motte presumably didn’t take kindly to a queer person talking about them from outside their Lived Experience.
I was talking about my own Lived Experienced™ though! Maybe I should have cleared that up more. Oh well.
I think blackpill/manosphere/battle-of-the-sex discussions benefit from queer viewpoints as they can bridge the gaps between the sides so to speak, so I’m happy to give my two cents regardless.
I mean I'm pretty transphobic but the whole reason this place exists is to be an open forum where people of widely-divergent viewpoints can have conversations and consider each other's perspectives. I upvote effort and sincerity. Downvotes are reserved for bad form, not for disagreement. This is basic stuff and it bugs me that even among our much-smarter-than-average userbase people can't seem to figure it out. Downvoting you for your perspective is the equivalent of rating an item on amazon one star because USPS delivered the package late. Real trog hours.
Also @TheDemonRazgriz since I'm coming back late.
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As a bi guy, I've dated both men and women. And it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to get a date with a man than it is with a woman. Quantitatively, my inbound like/match rate online was literally 100x when matching with men (I'd get a number of likes in a day with men that it'd take me almost a year with women).
Sure, a fair bit of that was just casual sex. But even if 75% were just looking for casual sex, that's still an order of magnitude more ease dating men than women.
I suspect this mismatch is that your "average man" encompasses a lot of things that make him substantially above average.
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No one's is. I think the intercontinental, intergenerational (intersectional? a dirty word around here) scale of the internet makes comparisons nearly useless while also allowing almost any reasonably credible explanation to find enough support to pass as "true".
"You could meet someone at work" say 1000 people who work at bars in LA.
"I can't meet anyone at work" say 1000 guys who work in provincial warehouses.
"You can meet people at parties" say 1000 people who like to go clubbing in NY.
"I don't go to parties" say 1000 guys who like programming.
"You can meet people through friends and family, or at church" say 1000 Mormons in SLC.
"I was raised by 4chan and social workers after my dad abandoned my alcoholic mum and the only people who go to church are old or weird" say 1000 guys from the underclass.
"You can meet young, fun, attractive women online" say 1000 20somethings who live across the street from a middle tier university.
"Apps are full of divorcees and single mums" say 1000 40somethings who live in low turnover commuter towns.
Then a statistician comes along, shoves them all into one box and finds that 50% of people find someone at work/at parties/at church/online/etc.
It's like the blind men and the elephant. They're all true but without the full context people are talking past each other. This thread itself is a microcosm of this phenomenon.
On the other hand the internet is the only place where we can discuss this at length because workmates, party goers, friends, family, parishioners and statisticians alike are neither keen nor useful for sitting around IRL bemoaning one's dating woes at length, and maybe even less for proclaiming one's dating success. "Hello boss/barkeep/buddy/cousin/sir/professor, care to share some fully generalisable insight into why some people are struggling with dating? Not me though, I'm swimming in pussy. High five!"
Choose ten separate and unaccompanied strangers and then actively confirm which ones aren't single. As a trans woman you might have an intuition how different your approach and the results would be asking as a man or as a woman.
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I think the major difference is people who have monosexual friend groups vs mixed friend groups. If all your friends are nerdy guys you're probably not going to the kinds of parties where there are lots of single ladies to hook up with and you're relegated mostly to cold opens. People have been making less friends now than ever before so it's pretty common to not have one member of the opposite sex that you see regularly and platonically, and if you meet your friends through mostly male hobbies then, lets just say monosexual friend groups aren't rare.
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I have to ask what you're basing your statements off of because none of these statements are true for the "average" man, and they haven't been for at least the last 10 years. Full disclosure, I'm a late millennial/early zoomer (late 90s to early aughts) straight male.
You can do that in the same way that you can run through a minefield and not get blown up. The fact of the matter is simply that the consequences for running into a vindictive, cruel, or simply insane woman is now much greater than it ever was in the past. They used to tell you that the worst thing they can do is say "no" (this was never true, but it was true enough to be good advice maybe 15 years ago) but now the worst thing they can do is pull out their phone and start blasting your face all over the internet. And that's not even the worst thing they can do. If she calls the cops on you, you'd really be in hell.
First of all, dating at work is on of the worst things you can do to yourself. Again, it's simply not worth the risk. You're not putting just your reputation on the line, but your career as well. Secondly, maybe this is just because of my circles, but I've only ever once seen someone else even attempt to set up their friends. It happens so rarely, that I have to seriously doubt that it ever happened at all, even before the current climate.
You can hook up with strangers at a party (Personally, I'm not sure where these parties are or who's going to them. I haven't been to a single party outside of work events after college). This is one that might be colored by my own experiences, but I have never hooked up with a stranger at a party, even when I was going to them back in college. I have to assume that it's due to my deficiencies because it apparently happens enough to other people for it to be a prevalent thing.
In my experience, it's not my pickiness that's the problem. Or maybe it is. I don't consider myself unattractive (I give myself 6/10 simply because I'm tall and not overweight and I don't have any physical deformities), but according to at least a sizable minority of women, most men are unattractive, so in reality a 6/10 is probably actually a 2/10.
All in all, I legitimately don't know on what basis you're making your claims because they run almost completely counter to what I've experienced as a straight male. I have to assume that they must have been true in the near, or even distant, past, otherwise they wouldn't be so oft repeated. The only people who talk about how supposedly easy it is to date are either old and out of touch or have at least one attractive trait that is above average (looks, charisma, or money). None of the people who I consider "average" have the experience of dating being "easy".
This is my own lived experience as a bisexual man (at that time), and this was in the last 10 years as well. I’m not American though, so perhaps it’s different and more cut-throat in the US?
I was no “chad”, just a short skinny effeminate guy. I had an awful personality, little interest in women and still a few hook-ups and flings just happened from going with the flow. Getting set-up at work was a real thing that happened to me.
Nice humblebrag. Now I understand that was most likely not even meant as one, but that's how it comes across because that's how awful it is for most men nowadays. I'm not going to rehash Radicalizing the Romanceless, but it's even worse nowadays than when that article was written. Men are suffering.
And I think you're right in that it's worse in America, especially compared to East Asia, where I and my family were from originally, but with how widespread the American ideological contagion has become, I don't see thing getting better any time soon.
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When I was younger I hooked up with multiple women at the local club, which is kinda like a party that regularly happens in one place. Or used to be, about twenty to ten years ago. No idea what it's like now.
There are also music parties (usually techno) that are petty much designed for taking drugs, showing off your physical abilities through dance, and then hooking up.
University parties were also a thing, but I was too busy studying.
Actual house parties, I'll admit, I haven't seen since school.
Office parties exist, but hooking up there, as you said, can be tricky.
Clubbing is just another thing that gen z has killed, I'm afraid. I've never been to a club in my life, so I can't relate, but if you just search on youtube, you'll find dozens of videos that lament how the clubbing culture from the 10's is completely dead.
I've been to a single music party (concert?) though, and I have to say that I don't think I've ever felt more out of place than I did when I was there. The music was alright, but I don't take drugs and I don't dance so it was just awkward for me to be there. Didn't help that the friend that actually invited me canceled at the last minute.
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It's easier for straight cis guys (or even people like myself who are bi), but I think you overestimate how easy it is to walk into a relationship, depending on social class and work/life balance. This is an older poll, but you still end up with sizable percentages of unmarried adults having never had a date, and a much bigger group struggling to try to get a relationship; it's only gotten worse since.
Straight men can ask out anyone... kinda, and there's pretty strict social norms against doing so anywhere near work and several different classes of enthusiast hobbies. People try to set up straight men with friends and coworkers... if you're already the sort of person who has. You can hook up with random strangers... if you're in the tiny percentage of straight guys that can get a tindr date. There's a lot of ways for straight guys to set themselves apart to women... in the negative sense as easily as the positive: (het, cis) women are far more likely to get the ick for single 'red flags' that can end up being. Straight guys don't have anywhere near the expectations of attractiveness... but they're also dancing a very narrow line between coming across as too aggressive or not forward enough.
((and... straight guys are picky in a different way. The expectations are lower, but anything under them is far more strict limitation, in extreme cases to the point where even a guy that wanted to muscle through it in the interest of an orgasm or a relationship would find themselves 'pushing rope'.))
If you're able to make the first move, a lot of those problems disappear, but in turn a lot of the ways (straight, cis) men were allowed to make the first move have disappeared too. Of my social environments, there's maybe one in which asking someone out on a date would be accepted (and, uh, coincidentally this is also the gayest one, thanks FFXIV), and maybe three where it's not explicitly ban-worthy. I can't speak on straight guys getting set up by friends or family from personal experience, given the bi bit, but from what I've seen second-hand there's a lot of people where that either doesn't happen, or it only happens in situations that have developed the various taboos.
Some of that's downstream of selection effects as I've aged and been in a relationship for a while, but it's very different from the gay world or from what I can see of most of the trans-friendly dating world. A number of gay writers are pretty strong advocates of that model replacing the classical one for hets, but I'm not sure it's working out great for the gays: I have a hell of a time when quite a lot of my options are split between bars or dances, down2succ-level 'casual', or online stuff that's never going to graduate beyond RP and hard to even keep time synced. Where these options are unpleasant in a gay context, they seem unsolvable in a het one.
((And the dodges are so common that Scott Alexander had a post on how "you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation" explanations radicalize a lot of people who are very far from the central example of what I'm hoping are your actual focus, over a decade ago.))
Again, I'm not saying that het (cis) guys have it worse or even anywhere near as rough as you do, but I think you're running into a version of the lemon market problem in things like comp sci hiring; it's really easy for the absolute worst to get vastly over-represented, while a lot of those who are either slightly under-par or who are not as assertive won't show up much on your radar.
A nitpick, but it’s tinder, with an e. Grindr dropped the e — I guess because “grinder” sounds more like a meat processing tool than a dating app. (Not that dating apps don’t grind people up inside!)
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The stats are what they are. Do you reject this information, or doubt its accuracy? I'm in that category, AMA.
This would be an appropriate time to provide those stats.
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Bro, why you gotta single me out like that?!
Don't worry, it's in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that if you can get through the opening chords of "Smoke on the Water", you can buy any guitar you can afford.
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One such man I know IRL, who I was friends with at the time, said something like "I would ask Gaashk out, but she would probably stab me," in front of me. He did not in fact ask me out), and is still single and complaining about it on Facebook.
sounds like sort of deniable asking out, AKA flirting
I am pretty sure that it was an attempt
well, clearly their strategy is not going well but it mirrors more common complaint about woman sending utterly unclear signal and expecting man to spot it and interpret as interest and act on it this one was quite clear though
Yes, men are not women.
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Right, he was using a women's strategy and women's strategies don't work for men. Maybe that would have worked if he'd seen her reaction, decided he wouldn't get stabbed (or "HELP, AUTHORITY, REMOVE THIS CREEP"), and then asked directly.
But the direct methods of trying are forbidden for men (see above in all caps) unless they succeed, and the penalties have done nothing but increase.
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Isn’t that asking someone out? Or at least heavily indicating a desire to do so?
My understanding is that both parties provide plausible deniability whilst looking for positive indications. So the reply might be a laugh and a change of subject for no and a smile + ‘you’ll never know unless you try’ for yes. Am I totally off here? Paging @TitaniumButterfly here also.
Nobody teaches you how to do this stuff, unless you’re lucky and have generous male friends who know better than you do.
My general impression is that women seek plausible deniability (sometimes to the point of sabotaging their communication to men), but they want men to be direct with them (insert Darth Plagueis meme here), at least within the bounds of decorum. i.e. women want you to ask them on a date directly, not to talk about how you want to have sex with them if it goes well.
the trick is whether something is within "bounds of decorum" often depends on whether they want specific person to ask them
That is unfortunately true. I wish that such blatant double standards didn't exist, but what can you do.
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Forgive my directness, but as someone who desperately needs reliable advice, is this coming from an experienced participant or an onlooker like myself?
If a woman is interested in you she wants you to be direct.
When I decided my (now) wife was the one, I didn't pussyfoot around. It does take a lot of confidence to pull off though, which is why step one is "Become someone you can be confident about being."
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A bit of both I guess? I'm married, but my wife and I met through OKCupid a decade ago. So there wasn't the need to navigate asking her out on a date, because we met in a way that made it clear what the expectations for the relationship were.
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Literally every experienced participant will, if being honest, tell you the same thing.
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So... would you have stabbed him?
No, I wouldn't have even pretended. I would, at worst, have sighed a bit at his puns.
To be sure. Just had to note that you hadn't actually denied the allegations =P
All the best to you if you're still on the market.
Haha, I'm now married with children. Because he kept asking me out, more than once, to interesting places, even though I turned down the initial invitation and even gift.
That's a bit tricky though.
You turned him down, even after he invested in a gift, and he kept pursuing. And I don't know what if any signals he was reading that led him to think it would succeed.
Meanwhile, the advice that men would get, both from most women and men, is you have to move on after a rejection, because continuing on is 'creepy,' or is 'simping' (ESPECIALLY the gift-giving), or maybe even straight up stalking or harassment. How many rejections is a man supposed to 'ignore'? How much should he invest before it becomes throwing good money after bad?
There is no good answer. And there's the risk of a woman actively exploiting this tendency in men to pump as much money and effort from him as possible.
This pursuit model of the man slowly, politely grinding down a woman's barriers and making increasingly enticing offers for her time and affection is one that I personally prefer. But it just doesn't work very well when women have many available options, and to continually pursue one who has already rejected you just reads as 'desperation' which is a turnoff on its own.
Simply put, why would a guy put himself through that without some reasonable expectation of success?
Yeah, most of the married people I know met their husband in a fairly small cohorts, such as a church or volunteer group (not rotating volunteers, a specific stable cohort), where that sort of thing is more likely to work out, and both parties will experience negative repercussions if they act badly.
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It used to work when you could do this in the context of socially sanctioned courtship. The man knows he isn't being played too hard because no one is having sex with the woman. Women in turn get to get more exposure to a man and test his level of interest commitment. I think it's a W for both sides. Certainly women seem to still like it today (why is Pride and Prejudice still so popular).
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Well, would you have gone out with him?
Maybe. I'm not sure. It probably wouldn't have worked out romantically.
Well, I don't know what it's like to be a woman, but when I try to imagine that situation I feel pretty turned off. Somewhere between cowardice and whining. Like he's trying to plausibly-deniably get you to initiate.
Anyway congratulations on your husband and family. WAGMI.
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Discourse on "checking out" keeps mentioning prolific welfare, porn, entertainment, and nutrition as both the catalysts and trajectories for someone "giving up." I won't argue statistics - video hosts and imageboards are chock-full of pornography for a reason, entertainment is cheap, and it's easier than ever to satisfy caloric needs - but I do want to share my own experience of gaming the limbic system.
For reasons approximate to those given by Shirayuki I've stopped pursuing women, career improvements, a house, and the Red Queen Race that is modern "fitness," yet some blend of pride, risk avoidance, and personal satisfaction prevents me from jumping fully into decay.
My issues with dating I won't go into, other than that I'm as aspie; these issues have been hashed out again and again here and elsewhere, and from what I've seen of recent dating discourse on The Motte I suspect the topic has overstayed its welcome. That right there eliminates a lot of motivation for time- and resource-intensive preening behavior, and made it easier to "give up" in a lot of other areas.
I get what satisfaction I can working a rural office job that puts me in a position to assist people without a heavy regulatory burden on my actions or mannerisms, whereas anecdotes from friends lead me to believe that working for any larger organization, be it public or private, would entail onerous oversight of my task prioritization and my allowed range of expression - I've heard more than one horror story of a nearby city's municipal office HR enabling the usual suspects to crybully their way to dominance. I could make more of a difference with a developed career, but why would I put myself through all of that? Besides, I stand out more in a small office, I feel more valuable even if being a cog in a larger, more developed machine might be a greater net gain for the world.
Due to the aforementioned marginal value of cash below a certain tremendous threshold, I'm more interested in acquiring something approximating that tremendous amount than I am wont to burn money for social plumage: what good is owning a home if it means being broke when disaster strikes, or stressing over the postgraduate education and career investment necessary to obtain both the savings and the home? So instead I rent from my parents at a monthly rate below that of regional apartments but sufficient to ensure I am a net positive for their finances, and dump the rest into savings and investments.
I think I'm being narcissistic on a couple levels here: obviously, I'm writing this to justify myself: "sure, I'm a loser, but at least I'm not a gooner NEET! I make (token efforts to make) the world a better place!", but on a further level, it unnerves me to realize the prosocial impulses that prevent me from falling completely to parasitism and decay are nonetheless being gamed by myself to make myself feel good: I've learned that I gain satisfaction from helping people with their problems, and so I've positioned myself to solve lots of simple little problems despite my objective impact being minute. My drive for social acceptance can be somewhat satisfied by making myself useful in a small community with sufficiently low standards and human capital to make "successful" participation an easy bar to clear. However superficially prosocial my drives, I'm still just a machine fiddling with its own parameters.
And so it all spirals back to the problem of terminal values. I don't act because I have a purpose, I act as an animal with simple animal desires, molded by - well, currently I have some evolutionary just-so-stories popping into my head, but I won't pretend at knowledge by reciting them. Sure, my animal desires are wired so that I want to pursue "selfless" actions as well as "selfish" ones, but it's still a reward mechanism that I've gamed, and that exploitation makes it self-centered: "why bother" actually trying to improve the world, when I can game all my inputs to make it feel kind of like I'm improving the world? It isn't satisfying my need for a long-term purpose, when I'm alone at night or going on a long drive I'll ruminate on the fact that I'm sating myself on a hollow substitute, but for want of belief in said purpose I have no motivation left to pursue the full-bodied experience of "usefulness," or the will to sacrifice for a cause.
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Very relatable. Especially the romance stuff. Despite what a lot of the retvrn posters on this forum would have us believe, it's pretty grim out there for average looking guys, even if we are religious (I've attending catholic mass for ~4 years now, with a recent lapse, and have been active in the young adult community, and absolutely no second dates!). And it's not like I'm some basement dweller either! I'm out of the house most weeknights, don't game (except for twice a month with my college friends and we play terraforming mars of all things), I'm really fit, and I think my social skills are at least average. Sure I could probably lock down some tik-tok obsessed land whale, but what exactly is the point of that? I'd rather eat at a restaurant by myself and jerk off after.
In terms of my career, sometimes I really enjoy my PhD and the process of science in general, but the way I see academia going fills me with dread for PI-ship. It's all status jockeying, like you observe, and a lot of the science produced isn't even real! I like my hobbies too (running, fermenting, and language learning), but the internet and hyper-competitiveness of everything puts so much pressure on me to "improve" or "monetize" these that I don't think they would be very much fun anymore if they were all I had.
Luckily I believe that some sort of collapse is coming in the next 20-50 years, so we won't be in this state for much longer. Just sucks that it has to occur during the part of my life where I'm supposed to form a family.
What's wrong with that? Finding your spouse is a numbers game. Get to the 'not the one' quickly to move on to the next. You just haven't found her yet.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this I disagree with:
It indicates something is wrong here. It'd be one thing to not make it past a few dates ever, but to never get a second date means that after the first time someone actually met you at all, they didn't want to see you again. It suggests needing to aim lower when selecting first dates and/or figure out what you're doing wrong on the date.
The bar for wanting a second date for most people, myself included, seems to not be that high. The bar for wanting a third or fourth - much higher. One data point is not that much, so a first date's not necessarily sufficient to know what you think. And, first dates, especially from apps, are often coffee/etc to minimize the awkwardness if it's no good (which is often the case, and that's fine). So, if there's any promise whatsoever, I think people often give it a second chance.
If you're not even getting that second chance, something's wrong. This is in many ways good news: figure out what it is, and fix it. Throw a spreadsheet at the problem, get a trainer, or a shrink, or a stitchfix subscription. Yes, modernity is a shitshow, but the answer isn't giving up.
This I agree with.
I have had second dates, but not with Catholic women. I think the issue is my heterodoxy.
Sounds right to me. Either don't bring it up until date two/three, or pick different women (, or find Jesus).
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I usually relate to, if not agree with, a lot of online discourse but dating discourse and the battle of the sexes is the one thing where I feel a fundamentally disorienting disconnect between online and IRL. It's always so stunning and unrelatable when I read stuff like this.
I'm an early-30s straight guy, currently have a serious girlfriend, and when dating, actively date women between 18 and early-30s. It feels like everyone I meet in a dating context is a decent woman, marriage material (conditional on there being mutual attraction), and has the eventual goal of marriage + having kids. Well educated, bright, agreeable, high achievers. Everywhere I go is full of attractive women like this, all rearing to go. All the straight guys I know are in good relationships, many married, some with kids. The whole thing feels very healthy and positive.
I like women, in fact I love women. I love going on dates with them, I love hanging out with them, I love flirting with them, I love hooking up with them, I love dating them. I'm excited to get married someday. I've probably been on 250 dates, had sex with 125 women, been in some serious relationships, etc. etc. It's all so much fun. I hardly ever have a negative experience; I could do this forever except at some point I want to start a family. I really do not understand the seething hatred I see some guys express online towards women. How can you hate them? How can porn and gooning and videogames be a substitute for taking some beautiful girl out to a bar and getting laid? Why should you care? Because it's fun, you're built for this, you want to get married and have kids.
And women love men. My current girlfriend is a dancer in a major ballet company. I hang out with her and her ballet friends. They're top 1% in terms of looks and talent. They all have nice, normal boyfriends. One of the bfs is a poor PhD student. One is a random software engineer at some company. Just normal guys. One is one of the few straight guys in the company. The ones who aren't in relationships are dating, typically on apps (I met my gf on an app), and overall just having positive experiences. There's minor drama here and there, of course, but again it all seems super positive and there's no seething battle of the sexes going on. The women want to get married and have kids. It's true for the ballerinas and its true for the SF tech girlies and the PE girls and the McKinsey girls and the HR ladies too. Obviously, selection bias is showing me the more social women in dating, but all my coworkers, female friends, etc., are basically in the same spot.
Where is this all coming from? Is it rejection? I get rejected a lot, who cares? Do a lot of men not share my love of women?
You get rejected at 50% rate, average man get rejected at 99% rate.
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This kind of reads like a troll post from a new account, but I guess I'll bite.
If this is all true you're clearly on the very right end of the bell-curve in terms of sexual success and social milieu, it's like a multi-millionaire heir asking why people complain about housing affordability when they were gifted three on their birthday.
I suppose I can't really relate personally, in the sense that my libido is quite low and I don't have a lot of interest in casual dating or sex.
The median man probably does, in the sense they would mostly like to be Chad and Casanova who can fuck a lot of hot women, but obviously this is out of reach for the vast majority of men even if they work as hard as possible.
Do you have a strong romantic drive, or is the concept of marriage for you mostly a material alliance for childrearing? If you lean mostly towards the latter, I think that would absolutely contribute to your feeling that marriage in the modern concept has little to offer.
Also not a fan of casual sex, but my libido is moderate to high. I just enjoy sex with an intimate partner in a romantic context a lot more than casual trysts. I can’t have a tryst without catching feelings — not overwhelming passion or anything, I’m not insane, but I end up wanting to make a connection. I’m probably in the top 10% of men in terms of… romance orientation? Physical affection? Romanticalness? So the incentive for me to date is strong, even if I never wanted to marry, even if I never wanted kids. So long as there’s a woman out there with sweet eyes and a warm smile, I’m going to want to look deeply into them and smile back.
Yeah, if put in those terms I definitely consider marriage primarily as an material alliance for childrearing purposes.
I enjoy fiction about romance occasionally, but I suppose I'm blackpilled/realistic/cynical enough to think about romance (in the eros sense) in Roman terms, as a force that wounds men and drives them crazy; that the initial burst of limerance for someone that doesn't exist will always fade with time, and that it has very significant risks to my health and happiness.
At the end of the day, romantic drive (in the storge sense) is definitely more something that would hypothetically be nice, not something that substantially motivates me day to day.
I don't know that storge really describes what I'm getting at when I talk about romantic drive, but that word has been used in all sorts of contexts to mean so many different things, so I don't know.
I find it hard to meaningfully distinguish "companionate love" from "passionate love." I can understand the difference between infatuation (which often involves an impossible idealization) and a deeper intimacy based on truth, but I see a great overlap between the concept of eros and the more companionate romantic love you're describing as storge. In particular, I've been in relationships where the passion increases over time, rather than decreases -- and also where lots of things that are described as characteristic of infatuation (like "'Desire for "complete union,' permanency") also grow over time.
But infatuation is also fun! Yes, it's dangerous. Yes, it has led men and women off cliffs into the great dark beyond. But many great and valuable things begin with a little risk. When I fell in love with a woman for the first time, it was one of the most intense experiences of my life, and I've only ever been able to describe it in spiritual terms, both then and now.
Would you say that you've felt limerance before and believed on that basis that it's dangerous, or is your cynicism about eros based mostly on observing others who've experienced it?
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Must've missed my screed about the current state of Western Women a couple weeks back.
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My dude.
These are not normal people.
Alot of the motte falls into the far end of the bell curve when it comes to employment, money, and success. Of course they're going to look around like John Travolta and wonder aloud 'Where's the problem?' They all have factors in place that mitigate alot of what the median have to deal with.
I swear, I feel half the posts that seem to come up when this topic arises could simply be replied with the phrase 'OK, Boomer' and be done with it...
Idk, a PhD student is low status financially and a software engineer is low status socially, and they manage to date girls like this. The difference is that they love women and it shows.
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It is very validating to see so many people long for my life. For almost a decade I have worked two days a week and I have never been happier or ironically more successful. I don't really go anywhere or do anything most of the time, but I didn't before either. But it is also very alarming. I have one of the few mental illnesses we know is hereditary, there is no future for me. That ate me up for a long time, far too long. But my fate was a precondition of my birth, your fate is still within your grasp. Don't give it up without a fight. That said, if you feel you have already fought to your limit, I understand.
One other thing - you only ever choose to have faith when it doesn't exist. Faith without choice is belief.
This sounds foreboding and if I were less American I wouldn't ask you about it, but I am still rather very American and often poorly mannered, so what do you mean by this?
Lol that's all good man, my perspective on posting is if you never want people talking about it, don't mention it. I meant it in the sense of genetics, it would be unwise for me to have children. Ironically, or perhaps just fucking inevitably, kids were the only thing I was ever one hundred percent certain I wanted growing up.
I know I could adopt, but... Well I haven't found the woman yet who doesn't jump on her backwards bike and backpedal out of the relationship when I say "hey I have a tenuous grasp on reality at the best of times, plus it's heritable, so let's adopt a kid together!" Well there was one, the girl of my dreams, she didn't want kids, but she would have been a great mom and she put up with my bullshit for a very long time, but she was solidly progressive, and so when I started drifting further rightward (I was a lefty centrist when we started dating) we stopped being able to talk as much as we had, so I fucked that.
I don't mind any longer. I'm not saying I wouldn't jump at the chance if a woman asked me to adopt with her, but I'm alright. My brother and sister have kids and they are not shy about asking for help watching them, so I get to be the cool uncle, which is a good consolation prize.
Thank you for the response. Just to press the point, is the worst that would happen to a hypothetical child that he or she would end up like you? Is that so bad?
That's a really nice thing to hear, even if you don't mean it in a complimentary way. Nobody has asked me that before, once they know it's hereditary they accept it. Not that I think poorly of them, it's just nice to hear. But no, the worst is much worse than me. Any son or daughter of mine would likely be smarter than me and therefore even better at hiding their craziness from others, and I went 5 years before anyone realised how crazy I was. And it's not that people weren't looking, they were and some even suspected. I just knew how to brush them off. But the other component is my craziness was almost entirely benign. When it connected with the real world it mostly led to me making confusing purchases or instantly writing off strangers for no apparent reason. There's no way to know what shape the illness would take in my child.
I do think about it sometimes though, lord knows I want to roll those dice. One in seven is either the best or the worst odds depending on how optimistic a gambler you are, I'm told. But then I remember my time in hospital - not how I was, but my fellow sufferers, sitting in the common room at visiting time staring blankly past their loved ones, in an entirely different world - their loved ones just hoping for one fleeting glimpse of the person they know and love. Not a conversation, not even a word said, just recognition. And so few of them got it. I could handle that, because I've been there, but there aren't many who'd sign up for it willingly. Then the years on medication, zonked out of my mind, changing my diet to accommodate the constipation and absence of energy, being tethered to my home because if I miss a day I'm a vomiting, shaking wreck. Oh and then the new medication, with no withdrawals, yay, oh wait now I just throw up every day full stop. No it is healthier for me to consider myself a genetic dead end I think.
It's difficult to judge from this distance. You certainly appear to be verbally very sharp, articulate, together, and self-aware. But of course you have a far better grasp of what's what here.
Thanks dude, that means a lot coming from you. But yeah, I don't visit the motte when I'm sick, so you're only getting part of the picture. I can't go into it further without revealing more of my identity than I am comfortable with unfortunately.
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What do you do?
I manage a farmer's market. The only problem with it really is that most people I know are free on the weekend and working during the week so it's hard to socialise, but I don't do that much anyway.
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You started your post with:
You followed up with 20 different ways society fails men, whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative. None of these actually answer the question you started with - okay, in the past men could be decidedly average and the church would still furnish them with a doe-eyed virgin and 20 acres of land on their 18th birthday. Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
If your answers were orgasms, economic utility, economic utility, not starving and I don't talk to my parents on a regular basis then your problems run a lot deeper than dating market hard and my life is pointless because the state won't let me starve. If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.
I don't consider myself as a passive victim but it's undeniably true that people as a group are passive victims. Just look at weight loss; everyone knows that eating healthy food in small portions will mean you lose weight, and yet the efficacy of prescribing diet and exercise as a health intervention rounds down to 0%, and almost all people need Ozempic before they actually lose any weight.
Because marrying her makes my life better and allows me to make hers better, isn't that what love is?
Because having children and raising them well makes my life better and I can give them a good life, isn't that what love is?
Because treating my parents well and being treated well in return makes my life better, isn't that what love is?
I don't mean to say that we should all be trad rvturners, the idea is silly, and I'm well aware that there was a lot of misery hidden in pre-modernity, and that not all trad marriages were idyllic and happy. I simply mean to say that in the past, working hard, getting hitched, and doing my best to make it work pretty directly correlated with my own incentives, in a way that it's not at all clear whether it does now.
You may call me a cynical bastard for saying this, but if the incentives don't line up for me, saying that I should stop caring about my own ego and pleasure to care about someone else's just sounds like they're trying to figure out the best way to exploit me.
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I dunno, one can be noticeably happier on the pineapple plantations while still suffering from a lack of larger meaning, and indeed that's a pretty fair description of how it worked out for me.
There's also some ambiguity here (and in the original pineapples post)--is "picking pineapples" meant to denote physical work in the outdoors, maybe somewhere exotic, maybe seasonal, maybe paired with travel during the offseason? (Planting trees in Canada, fishing in Alaska, wildland fire, etc. etc.). Or is it merely supposed to be any kind of low-wage minimum viable employment? In the former case in particular, I can see it being quite a bit better than Office Spaceing and swiping harder, while still being ultimately meaningless. In the latter case, maybe less so (though even then, "work a mcjob and spend half the year training muay thai in rural Thailand and living like a local" might fall into the same bucket as the first class of jobs.).
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Curious what your answer to this is. I realize I've basically asked you "what is the meaning of life", but I like your writing and so assume I will like your thoughts on the matter.
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What's your personal solution to this problem? I ask sincerely but also by way of justifying the comment I actually wanted to make, which was that I haven't seen you around for a bit and am happy you're still here.
Carrying on, one of my major frustrations in modern discourse is that there doesn't seem to be much individual reflection on what the point of life (or anything) even is, let alone widespread agreement. "Gratifying the human limbic system" seems to be what we're settling on and that puts us squarely in OP's dilemma.
I've been here the whole time. Lurking is just my natural state. This is the only forum I've participated in across thirty odd years on the internet.
It's always been easy on a personal level. I have some innate affinity for and take pleasure from responsibility, returning the shopping cart, and working towards the flourishing of family/community/nation/humanity in that order. I appreciate that this is not a generalizable solution, although it's one I wish we could evangelize.
If one's moral framework is entirely built around one's own pleasure and benefit (or limbic gratification as you say), then sure, none of the above matter and anything I say will fall on deaf ears. There's no logical argument I can provide to convince you that I'm right. But frankly, not calling your parents or raising your children or treating your wife well or reading books or staying fit is, for lack of a better term, a bitch move, no? At the risk of typical-minding after already admitting I'm weird, I think nearly every man has this urge or understands what I mean when I say that.
Both sides of the aisle generally agree that the left fails to provide role models for men. Someone needs to wrest the banner of self-improvement, fitness, hygiene, stoicism, etc. from the Tates of the world and divorce it from the more toxic aspects of masculinity.
They just need a better physique and more charisma than I can muster.
The time is ripe for the birth of a new religion. Gather thy flocks, and adapt thy sermons to tiktok.
The latter can't be done. What feminists deem to be the more toxic aspects of masculinity are essential to it.
'I hate it,' quoth the hater.
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Deeply in this boat and curious how they respond. Having kids is probably the single best way to add purpose to your life, but this gets circular very very fast.
Yeah, I have a friend who says that 'meaning' is just another word for kids.
It certainly helps! But I find Christianity to be better on a personal level and it has the advantage of applying to the many, many people who won't (and some who shouldn't) have kids.
The Christian perspective is that there are two valid paths in life. Marriage-and-children-if-possible, and monasticism, which equates to a life of service to others and the greater good, in both cases as guided by the Church. I think this is a healthy perspective and would help a lot of people trapped in the modern abyss.
I am decidedly atheistic, although I do sometimes wonder if it's worth it to try to psy-op myself into a belief system. Not sure if I could though.
When I was younger, I thought Western societies abandonment of religion in favor of enlightenment/science/whatever was the natural progress of civilization, and an amazing thing. Now I think we've made a horrible mistake, but I don't think we can really go back.
Whoops!
Second reply for different topic:
What do you know (and how do you know it) that would stop you here?
Putting on my atheist hat, what I see is something like this:
Being is. Something exists, rather than nothing. The nature of Being is structured such that conscious life arises and starts thirsting for a relationship with a Creator beyond the bounds of the universe. Probability is a silly thing to bring into this matter imo; this is simply what is.
Meanwhile there's plentiful reason to suppose the simulation hypothesis, our status as Boltzmann Brains, etc. or at least to collapse into methodological solipsism. What doesn't make sense is to assume that the external world we perceive is as we perceive it, or that our faculties allow us to satisfactorily observe and evaluate its nature or scope.
Our existence is fundamentally incomprehensible. Within this scenario we either don't have free will (in which case, whatever, we're just going to do what we're going to do and the consequences if any will find us) or we do in which case we're left with the question of what is worth doing.
The two options would seem to be 1) temporal hedonism or 2) reference to an external source of value, e.g. a Creator who provides a possibility for ultimate consequence to exist and for some choices and outcomes to be objectively better than others.
Given 1) I would agree with Camus that suicide is the only interesting question.
Given 2) I find that all kinds of amazing possibilities open up and suddenly life is full of wonderful (and terrible) potential.
This choice is an individual one, but I've never quite comprehended those who choose 1).
From Aurelius' Meditations.
This is the kind of thing you hear when someone's peddling something that they know will never be made distinguishable from non-reality by any demonstrable method whatsoever. Maybe it sounds good to believers eager to quit getting kicked around by observations of reality, but you could use lines like this to argue for literally anything
Yes, literally all belief is faith-based and we should be very careful about where to place that faith.
All maps are wrong; some maps are true. If it's blurry but gets you where you're going it's better than technically-accurate but leaves you stranded.
Anyone who would complain about this state of affairs had better take it up with Reality.
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Who said that the unity, order, design of (ii) are going to be favorable to you?
Hence the 'terrible' and the 'faith' in my post.
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Pursuant to a few posts up the chain, what do you think the point of life is? Or, if it hasn't one, what do you think is worth doing while alive, and why?
Yes, it was a horrible mistake, which validates Christian priors. Re: going back I'm not so sure. Seems to me that the problem should work itself out over time, though with hellish collateral damage.
The Old Testament is basically a long list of examples of what happens to a people when they stop worshiping God and start worshiping anything else. Eventually the survivors come back around and the cycle starts anew. Humanity is generally a faithless bride, which is why the example of Mary is so vital.
I'm not sure. I think I've been having a gentle ~third life crisis about this for the last year or two.
I think the "point" of life is to procreate at a base level. Because life seems to be a self-replicating collection of molecules that enjoy being alive, and replicating ensures this process continues. However, procreating is hard these days, and so is a while away yet.
I'm going to think on this more and maybe my answer will change after a few hours of writing, but my initial gut response is that aside from procreation, life is about maximizing your subjective sense of pleasant/enjoyable experiences, and minimizing the bad ones. The logical endpoint of this is wire heading however, which I don't like and is not inspiring at all. You should also seek to increase other's enjoyment of life, and not make their lives worse, this is slightly more inspiring.
I like how you anchored it in actions (and their "why") though, that I will need to think more on.
Incidentally the novelty you're finding here is reflective of a split in Christianity.
In Western Christianity, 'faith' has become somewhat conflated with 'belief', i.e. a sort of propositional system where one evaluates a statement and says "Yes I think that's true" or "No I don't."
The New Testament says that "Faith without works is dead", which has caused much consternation in the West. Which is it? Believing a proposition or performing actions? What 'saves' us?
In Eastern Christianity, faith is understood to have much less to do with propositional belief and more to do with action. Let me explain my perspective here a little.
Faith is acting as though something is true despite not knowing for sure. When you sit in a chair it might buckle and injure you, but you're operating in faith that it won't. When the plan is for someone to pick you up at a minor rural airport at 10PM with no other transportation options available, you're engaging in faith by showing up expectantly, even if he might have forgotten or died in an accident along the way.
To have faith in Christ is to behave as though following Him should be your highest priority. To believe that but act otherwise is to break faith. Make sense? As the Bible says, even the demons believe that Christ is who He says He is.
It would be too great a digression to go into Orthodox theology a la Palamas but long story short I think it's basically correct to say that all propositions re: God are approximations and therefore necessarily partly incorrect. There's not really anything that I intellectually think is 'true' about God, because all truth about God is beyond mortal understanding.
To be a Christian requires some (possibly temporary) dogmatic intellectual belief, yes, but of surprisingly few propositions, and those universally of the sort that we might call unfalsifiable. But the much greater part of being a Christian is acting accordingly. Go to the liturgy. Receive communion in the hope that it's actually doing something. Confess your failings and strive your hardest to be more Christlike.
Like passion in a marriage, belief comes and goes. But love is a choice, and faith is always on the table.
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This is not the first time I have seen the idea that HD porn obviates sex. While ceding that people have limitless access to porn these days, it still doesnt come close to the real thing!
And eating junk food is no substitute for real meals cooked with healthy ingredients. Some people eat the junk.
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I don’t watch porn but masturbation alone can definitely be better than sex. When you’re by yourself you don’t have to worry about having the right chemistry, about your partner being selfish or getting tired, and if something doesn’t feel good you can just stop, slow down or try something else without being afraid of ruining the mood.
Now, good sex doesn’t compare of course and is a divine experience, but not everyone is so lucky as to be with their ideal sexual partner.
Yeah, but finding that ideal (or a pretty good one with whom you form an emotional bond or simply have some hot experiences) sexual partner is a pretty key part of the human experience. Continuing to look even while failing is too!
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If memory serves your particular experience may not mirror that of the usual heterosexual dude.
I doubt I'm all that far off the heterosexual baseline, and I'd say it's a pretty reasonable description for the porn life as well. After a while it approaches wireheading. You want to feel [GOOD], and these actions allow you to turn on the [GOOD] feeling and sustain it for arbitrary amounts of time. Orgasm is nice and all, but it really isn't the point, the point is, as a book put it once, surcease. Your larger mind, your worries and anxieties, the tension and frustrations of the day, vague unknowns of the future and sharp hurts of the past, all of that flattens right out to smooth, gratified pseudo-flow-state, a delightful little mental loop through desire and satisfaction that's always there when you need it. And all it costs you is time, discipline, investment, human connection...
Thank you for the response. Just to press the point, is the worst that would happen to a hypothetical child that he or she would end up like you? Is that so bad?Posted in the wrong place.
To be clear, I'm describing the life I used to have; I'm not living that way any more.
I don't think I could claim that it's the worst that could happen. My porn addiction was far more manageable and less destructive than, say, what I've seen of the median meth addict. There were pleasures and pursuits beyond mindless self-indulgence. But it was not a good life, and it absolutely was not getting better with time. I observed myself slowly degrading, becoming less in very tangible and concrete ways, losing my humanity and degenerating into something verging on the insectile, as bitter regret and the need to escape that regret grew more and more to define my existence through habitual loops of pointless escapism and empty stimulus-response. Lying awake in the early hours of the morning, I would remember what it felt like to have someone I loved lying next to me, and know for an absolute certainty that I would never, ever have that feeling again, and the pain of that was considerable. At the time, I joked to my family that my purpose in life was to serve as a cautionary example, but the joke wore thin the worse it got. Toward the end, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about being dead. One of my main objectives in my current life is to do what I can to help my children and nieces and nephews avoid ending up in a similar place.
...All this is to say that, in my experience, the question of whether sex is or can be better than masturbation depends on the mentality of the assessor. In my own experience, I know for a fact that masturbation appearing preferable was a consequence of profound dysfunction. I am at least somewhat confident that my own experience generalizes at least to some degree, but this is pretty obviously a question that grounds out at one's values. At a minimum, I'd endorse what you wrote here.
Wow apparently I misclicked because my question was meant for someone else, apologies.
I did wonder about the double-reply...
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Oddly I spent the better part of my considerable commute time this morning reading several of your old posts debunking materialism. I saved them.
@rae if I am correct is a trans woman. Now I don't know to what degree masturbatory practice is consistent among biological males of whatever stripe, but one might assume the "ideal partner" as it was put might be considerably more difficult to locate. A good man is hard to find, etc. Or the other way round as the case may be.
I can't sit in judgment of masturbation as an act, but I would certainly caution any young man against relying on it, and chaturbate or whatever, as any sort of long term answer to the yearning for companionship. For that matter one doesn't have to look far in my part of the world to find men who seek solace in hostesses, call girls, or various other professional services, and I don't see any of them smiling broadly on a regular basis. And finally, I would suggest orgasm itself outside of some Tantric whatnot isn't particularly long-lasting, post nut tristesse is real, and, perhaps sentimentally, ultimately nothing beats (cough) the dozens of micro-interactions that are just spending time with someone you love (or are attracted to), completely outside the context of the boudoir.
After 20 years of marriage the dynamic changes somewhat, but the thesis still holds.
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It doesn't need to be better to have a devastating effect, it just needs to be 'good enough'.
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I want to agree with you, but after a lifetime of feeding my animalistic brain porn and more porn, I kinda think porn may be better than sex, at least in some ways. I feel worse after porn, but it's much easier to reach similar levels of sex-high with porn then with real sex. Porn allows your idealized image of sex to dominate, vs the actual thing which is limited by real social interactions and physical sensations. I'm currently trying to ween myself off of porn, in the hopes that doing so will make sex easier and more pleasurable, but it's really hard to do. I've had mixed results so far.
Note: I'm on anti depressants, and have been for decades, which may totally blow my whole equation out of the water. They seem to make it very difficult for me to feel sexual pleasure, especially during sex as opposed to watching porn. So everything I wrote here may not apply to others.
I dunno, find better partners (not like I have any advice on that front; every time I write something here it's because I'm thinking about someone I think would be fun to do this with, and have some first-hand experience with someone who was kinda bad at this)? I can believe the stories of people who don't bother to look for this because they don't find this interesting, but to me it just seems like a waste.
Then again, I suspect this is just a (literally) childish way to look at sex, and literally nobody does this because rational self-interest trumps everything, or whatever. [Which comes back to "well then, if you're going to get married to do that because the sex drive isn't symmetric across the sexes, and aren't doing it because you already have that convergence-drive-love thing going on, isn't that just prostitution with a different name?"]
I guess so, but I'm already pretty confident that if I had my way with who I want it with it would look pretty close to what I think about. Maybe that's why I had a hard time with people who go "ur hormones make u a slave to ur passions" or finding masturbating to random attractive-enough people particularly fulfilling (imagining masturbating them, somewhat paradoxically, yields far better results).
I think nofap would be more popular if they weren't all just a bunch of weeners
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C. S. Lewis wrote a bit in a letter about the appeal of fantasy over real sex which seems appropriate:
Pornography asks far less of us than sex with another person does. If it displeases us we can skip to another bit of porn. We never have to think about pleasing another person, or do something that brings us little pleasure because it brings our partner great pleasure, or think of any needs but our own. Very tempting!
C.S. Lewis remains a remarkable writer of timeless trends.
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Come now, when you rig the game like this then of course porn is better than sex. I don't think that's under debate
Not sure I understand what you mean. Or maybe you misunderstood what I meant. I didn't mean, like, the chance of getting laid with a new partner is slim, I haven't had to deal with that for decades either. I just meant that your sense of how hot the sex is (which to me makes a big difference in how pleasurable the sex actually is) is entirely dependent on the other person and potentially conflicting desires or awkward interactions. As opposed to how you can just find porn exactly as you want it at the click of a button.
For me, the pleasure of the sex seems dependent on if I can bench press her or not. This reality means I haven't enjoyed having sex in years. It has nothing to do with not having any sex; or with not having new partners.
I will volunteer and raise my hand and say the reality is porn is just better than my sex. This also doesn't seem like my fault.
Edit since people are taking me very literally: sex does not include bench presses, instead it is a funny euphemism to mean, "i enjoy it if she is not obese." It has the added benefit of ironically warding off accusations that I should go to the gym more. If these women were as active as I am (and I've gone through cardio and weightlifting phases) then I would be able to bench press them.
I mean -- how much do you press anyways? I wouldn't actually get anywhere near 300 these days, but certainly well into fattie territory unless you also only like really tall girls. My current spouse I could have lifted when I was like 14, and she's pretty average height and weight.
To be fair, pressing from a bed is more like a very very unstable JM press than a proper bench press.
Biomachanicaly the pecs are in a more advantageous position, since like a floor press the elbow can't cross the frontal plane. But The delts and particularly the triceps are in a substantially less advantageous position. Assuming your partner is more narrow than you it's also technically close grip. You also don't have a nice ergonomic bar to hold on to, so the wrists are in much greater extension. Finally, you don't have the advantage of a relatively firm platform or leg drive.
If the load is your typical skinny women, it's likely to be somewhat... flopy. Like an earthquake bar. If they are more muscular they can probably hold their body more rigid, but then you have more mass to move. Assuming a random women, you would have to luck out with a gymnast or competitive cheerleader who is being cooperative, in order for it to be anything like lifting straight weight.
Maybe rather than pressing them fully off of you though, it would be more prudent to follow Nelson's advice at Trafalgar and "Engage the enemy more closely." He did seem to have some taste in these things.
He does say that he doesn't actually bench press these girls, so I'm not sure the mechanics there -- I can certainly lift cooperative average-sized women (or children) off the floor by the waist (from a standing position) without using my legs much.
For a bench-press equivalent, maybe they could wear a belt with side-handles, and crouch over one's chest? It would be about like pressing a large kettle-bell, and no need for the woman to be also capable of a plank or whatever. I'm pretty confident I could lift >200 lbs this way, and I'm not as fit as I used to be -- I get the feeling this is a larger lady than he has in mind?
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You should visit Japan. You could probably one-arm curl many here.
Post script for the literal-minded: I mean most women here are considerably slimmer than the average American female. Though perhaps Americans are becoming slimmer? This caveat brought to you by Ozempic TM.
PPS: Maybe Helmet is not American. Still.
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Somebody needs to spend more time at the gym! (it isn't that hard to bench press 300)
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Why? What about bench press-less sex doesn't do it?
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As with many things I think the issue is not that it is a perfect replacement, but rather that it reaches some minimal level. So porn is not as good as sex, but it is easier, and because the gauge is getting filled up just enough it makes the effort needed to get sex feel less worth it.
It takes effort to get good things, but once you have them it is totally worth it. But access to very easy quick, but worse, substitutes crowds out the effort needed to get the good version. So porn substitutes for sex, video games substitute for real accomplishment, social media substitutes for actual community and friendship, etc.
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Let's assume videogames and porn do not satisfy the reportable (conscious) mind as well as sex does, such that everyone agrees sex is much, much better. Could it still be that they satisfy the mechanistic actuating drive (chemicals and what not) just as well, so that it is still right to say porn and videogames obviate the need for sex?
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"The real thing" is a more complex concept than many people appreciate, and a lot of it happens inside the skull and is heavily mediated by that skull's other contents. It is definitely possible to get to a place where "the fake thing" appears to be strictly superior; general gooner behavior is more or less a superhighway directly to this state. Further, this general pattern generalizes to most of the other pleasures of human existence.
The greatest source of joy in my life by far is my eldest child. Interacting with them, reading to them, the joy they radiate whenever they see me in the morning or when waking from a nap, cuddling with them and singing them to sleep at night are profoundly wonderful experiences that I would not trade for anything. But I remember quite well being quite determined to never have children, because they obviously interfered with all the "fun" I wanted to have playing video games and pursuing various hobbies. I do not think there are words present-Me could say to past-Me to convince them of their error; they thought the way they did because their mind was shaped by their circumstances and experiences, and only a change in circumstances and experiences could deliver a change of mind.
One thought I've had is for alcoholics or drug addicts or really anyone, is there a convincing rationalist answer for why people should quit or not use destructive drugs? Without a higher power, why not abuse substances? If you live your life in isolation and are so inclined, I don't think there is a rationalist reason not to be selfish and NEET? Some times I wonder if belief and faith has a way of finding those who need it most.
"Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy." Paul VI in GAUDETE IN DOMINO.
Tautologicallly because they're destructive, but ulimately because the thing they destroy is the benefits offered by the drug. Users end up dependent on drugs simply to return to where they began.
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No rationalist or hedonist of even middling intelligence would ever recommend doing destructive drugs unless on your deathbed.
The downsides are obviously much worse than the upsides, drugs will break your body and mind trying to chase the dragon, and you'll likely ruin all your relationships and die early.
Well, that's the point of this post, isn't it? If being selfish and NEET is what society incentivizes, then eventually that's what you'll get. I have a deep respect for the faithful, but clearly religion is no longer a scalable solution for society at large.
Perhaps in a hundred years all us atheists will be dead and we'll be back to Christianity and Islam battling it out for dominance of the planet.
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https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/modern-freedom-means-being-a-slave-to-impulses/
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If you cannot imagine a life more fulfilling than drugs, then maybe it's really not worth quitting.
I think of the survivor who jumped from the Golden Gate bridge- all their problems suddenly seemed very solvable. What I see in friends and colleagues is a lack of faith (organized religion) that is coupled or leads to a lack of optimism in the world; and I think poor planning for their future (you're saving how much for retirement!). But I guess a Marxist interpretation would be the false lies distort a workers' view to accept their station in life. I guess my point is a strict reasoning and rationalist approach to life can be more harmful given certain personal characteristics and the human capacity of self delusion.
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Destructive how? Presumably methamphetamine destroys the body, or is gross, so I should not do it. I suppose if someone is in a social circle with enough social pressure then it might be worth the tradeoff to partake though (see also alcohol).
Being selfish and NEET on the other hand doesn't seem as obviously destructive. Maybe the kids would think so if they replaced the anti-drugs PSAs with anti-Fortnite ones.
Time is a terrible thing to waste. The question to be asked of younger folk not using their time employed or in education is "How are you going to fund your retirement?" Working hard and making money in your 20s / 30s I think definitely beats working as an old person. Banking on the AI miracle seems too low probability to me. The adage I think of is the job you are doing now often leads to what you do in the future. And short unemployment begets long-term unemployment.
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Do the bare minimum to not die NEET men have always existed, and always been seen negatively. It’s not some new thing caused by the awfulness of modern women(and, for many normal women, it does go the other way around- it’s difficult for the shy kindergarten teacher who has feminine hobbies and really wants kids to find someone compatible and not terrible as well).
Part of it is that modern society just coddles men more. There’s no expectation that you’re willing to move to take a job(and in the fifties people would move for factory jobs, not even the cushy white collar positions that ask for relocation these days) or spend a bit of time in harsh conditions or work twelve hour days. A lot of the boomer success literally does come from being willing to work twelve hour days in travel jobs while sharing bedrooms.
I tried to make it quite clear that I don't blame women beyond the fact that they are also rationally responding to incentives.
The standard feminist line, that a man must make their life better than the counter-factual, is fundamentally true. The revealed preference of the majority of women is that pregnancy/childbirth/child-rearing is physically unpleasant, they enjoy the economic freedom provided by work, the state and childlessness, and that they disproportionately pursue hypergamy [in the same sense that most men would disproportionately prefer one-sided polygamy if they had the opportunity, it's no great failing].
I cannot blame them for responding to incentives any more than I can be blamed for responding to mine or the average citizen can be blamed for contributing to climate change; I merely wish that it didn't have to be this way.
There's a good post on the Motte, that I can't seem to find, that pointed out that an increasing amount of skills, from fitness to cooking, are becoming bi-modal. Most people, lacking significant incentive, will let their skills atrophy, and a small subset of people will compete at all costs to take those skills to the very limits.
I think it's a similar dynamic here, where it's indeed true that lots of men get coddled and drop out in the face of adversity, but there will always be strivers who will fight at all costs, and so competing for "prestige" or "status" still becomes ever-increasingly difficult even as more people drop out.
This is pretty much the point of this effortpost; sure, I'm pretty successful relative to the average young person and could grind even harder, but at the end of the day what's actually incentivizing me to try so hard when all the incentives are pointing the other way?
My father is the hardest working man I've ever known, who moved heaven and earth to bring himself out of poverty and broke his body to provide for the family. He is and will always be my hero for what he's done for my mother and I, and yet sometimes I look at him and I regret forcing him through so much pain and suffering.
He's never complained once; yet at the end of the day everyone likes to adulate heroes from afar, but how many people want to suffer as a hero does?
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I am not sure. In the past being a spinster/old maid was considered as negative. Nowadays 40 years old childless women are viewed as empowered role models. This is by definition two sides of the same coin - for every solitary woman there is a solitary man. The only difference is social stigma - seasonal worker who earns just enough to survive is still viewed negatively as if it is his own character flaw, while for women it is either empowerment if they like it or they are victims of society if they are femcels. If you normalize antisocial female behavior, it automatically impacts men who are supposed to be in relationship with those women. Of course it also applies the other way around, so the genders can blame each other in vicious spiral. Welcome to modern gender relationships.
No, 40 year old childless cat ladies are not viewed positively. It is true that marriage is viewed more negatively, and that women are encouraged into things that make them, by effect, generally less pleasant and attractive.
But it is also true that tramps and roustabouts were a thing back in the day, too, and there’s definitely bigger factors than modern women in NEETdom(video games).
Yes, if you did not notice, the childless career woman was the latest democratic candidate for presidency. There is growing acceptance or removing of stigma for number of topics related to child rearing, marriage and other traditional duties of women during last few decades - be it acceptance of childlessness, popularity of DINK movement, acceptance of single mothers or growing support for abortion. It is all wrapped up as celebration of personal freedom, autonomy and individualism.
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Yeah, things like "40 years old childless women are viewed as empowered role models" always make me ask... by whom? Certainly not by the droves of guys posting about empty egg cartons on the social media? But somehow those guys never seem to make it into the assumed group of viewers indicated by the passive tense, as if they - and countless other people who might not post those things but still think that way - are somehow not a part of the society.
You have number of adcovates for childlesness: Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston, Helen Mirren and many more. You have people promoting DINK lifestyle, there is large number of feminist journals and magazines promoting childlessness.
This doesn't sound like a an advocate for childlessness:
At what age did Aniston start trying to get pregnant? From what I recall, she was already in her late 30s, early 40s when she started. I get why she chose to put it off, but it speaks to the broader issue here where women are told (whether implicitly or explicitly) that motherhood can wait.
This speech from Michelle Williams represents a not-so-small percentage of the modern Western woman, and, as someone who's always been begrudgingly pro-choice, I have a visceral reaction to it every time I see it. I get that it's the Hollywood bubble who is applauding here, but for a lot of people these are the role models for young women in our society. Also, take a quick guess at who's applauding in that video at the 1:59 mark.
To be fair, the current incentive structure makes childlessness materially more rewarding. You have fewer responsibilities, more freedom, and more status. That being said, there is just something so disgusting to me about the unapologetic self-worship that comes after the willing sacrifice of their own flesh and blood. The celebratory nature of it, how what happened to her body "wasn't a choice", and how her child was effectively nothing more than a stepping stone to success. It's not so much the facts of her story, but the philosophy behind it, that seems to resonate with millions of women, that is just vile.
Agreed. Actually the first link about Oprah contains another 22 celebrities promoting childless lifestyle. This push definitely exists.
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Or this:
All of these are precisely framed in the sense of being a reaction to a society that generally expects women to have children at some point. I don't get why this would be much of an argument.
Except that every single number you can think of related to marriage or motherhood is going to shit. Just name it: divorce rate, support of abortions, childlessness rate, age at marriage/first child, rate of single mothers and everything else. I can even grant you that "society expects" something from women - except they don't listen and do their own thing apparently. No role models involved, women just adopted these changes from ether.
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The dynamic is that someone (like JD Vance) attacks the childless cat women as destroyers of society, then others defend them, and that defence appears to some as if the childless cat women are being elevated into heroes. I think this is maybe sometimes a genuine mistake but probably more often a wilful misunderstanding done in order to deliver the minor vindication of being able to say, 'See how unfair it is? 40 year old women are portrayed as valuable empowered role models but us 40 year old men are once again seen as worthless.'
This is weird - are we not arguing that childless cat women by choice are destroyers of society? This was argued since time immemorial, the only difference is that nowadays the defense of this lifestyle has more success.
You could be arguing that, yes. I personally don't agree. My point in the above though is just that defending them against charges of being destroyers of society is very different to celebrating them as role models.
I think this depends on what you view as "role model". Would you for instance say that Andrew Tate is a role model? Even if I disagree with his prescriptions, I would definitely agree that he is a role model for large number of young men, even though he is incessantly criticized from left and right, often more from especially socially conservative right. But in my eyes he is still a role model influencing millions of young men toward his vision of society, manhood and masculinity. It is the same here with what the OP talks about. A carefree hermit surfer/pineapple gatherer is in this case a role model for sizeable chunk of population despite the fact that people like you criticize it.
The key issue here is that it is hard to criticize any of this from the standpoint of prevailing culture that puts individual rights, personal and body autonomy on the pedestal. It is almost impossible to mount effective counteroffensive against these alternative lifestyles. What if somebody wants to work part time and pour his attention toward his hobbies and enjoying his life? He is just living his life and he can leverage the modern live and let live ehtos in the same way this ethos is used to defend all sorts of now normalized alternative lifestyles such as childlessness or DINK life.
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I think we coddle everyone too much. Schools are literally afraid to flunk kids, parents don’t make them do chores, and so unless they play competitive sports, Theres just no push toward “you need to actually do stuff to be successful. Add in the push toward hedonism and consumer culture, and people have absurdly low work ethics and high expectations.
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Why should you care? Well, it's your prerogative to or not. But two reasons:
As young men drop out of the caring game, that makes the market (both economically and sexually) less competitive. There are more opportunities and niches to get utility from. Still less than a hypothetically static situation, but people dropping out mitigates some of the increased difficulty.
It's far better to strive and create than to passively survive. For society, sure, but also better for you as a person. There are forms of joy that aren't available to someone just existing.
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I agree with basically all of this, but I need to nitpick two things
From what I recall, a ton of this is driven by them shopping on behalf of their families, which drives their "share" of consumer spending way up. However, I think "women be shopping and men are fine to live the life of a monk + a PC/Xbox" is very true and accurate to my life experience.
This trope/concept really bothers me. I think "revealed preference" totally falls apart when constraints and other limitations are placed on behavior. People cannot express their true preferences when their choices are limited by exogenous factors.
I will use my own life as an example, as I'm not sure how to demonstrate this empirically.
My girlfriend and I live in downtown Toronto, working solid but not extremely lucrative white collar jobs. We will be comfortably middle class, we'll probably eventually own a home, if we play our cards well a cottage too. But unlikely we'll flying around first class on vacations, to set the stage. We're in our late (late) 20s.
We live in a 600sqft 1+1 apartment. It's pretty affordable at this point (thanks rent control). If we re-leased the unit it would be $400ish more a month. To get an extra bedroom/move to an apartment in the 900sqft range would be close to an additional $1000ish a month.
We can fairly comfortably afford our current lifestyle, and I'm actually pretty confident having a kid wouldn't tank our "net income" too much as the additional child costs (not including daycare) would be offset by not buying $11 tacos when out with friends (or PC parts, or whatever).
However, we have no fucking space. So we'd need to get a bigger apartment, which would be pretty expensive. An extra $1000 a month + a kid + the astronomical cost of daycare is a nightmare. There are programs now to make daycare cheaper, and that does help. Although I think they have waitlist nightmares, etc.
This problem will resolve itself eventually. Another ~5 years should see each of us go through one or two promotion cycles, and then having a kid and the subsequent space upgrades are actually doable.
However, at that point I'll be in my mid 30s. I feel very strongly I don't want to be cranking out kids in my 40s. I have a niece and nephew who I love to hang out with, and I can feel how my youthful energy helps me keep up and engage with them. I can also feel this energy fading slightly with age. I don't want to be doing this in my 40s. So depending on timing, we'll very likely have 1 child. There's a decent chance we'll have 2 kids, as long as something doesn't set us back on the "income go up" track.
I would prefer to have 2 kids, but have a sinking feeling it'll end up being 1.
Is having 1 kid despite telling you I was 2 my revealed preference? Or my response to a ton of limitations and issues that I have no power to fix, only adapt to?
Great posts, it does sound like you're having a rough time of it and hopefully it gets better for you.
Thanks, I didn't know that was how it's calculated; I think the broader point still stands though, e.g if a guy eats bachelor chow by himself but his girlfriend enjoys cooking big elaborate meals, it's true that he's the one eating but it's also consumption that wouldn't have happened without the girlfriend being in the picture.
This just kind of depends how you define "revealed preference"; it would be silly to say a prisoner's revealed preference is to to stay in prison because he hasn't broken out, obviously he's there because he's forced to and similarly there are real economic constraints on people that perhaps prevent them from having more children then they would have in an ideal world.
In your case though, I think the other posters are correct in the sense that your revealed preference is to value a host of other things over more children; you could value having them more but don't want to [for very understandable reasons!]. This isn't to mean that you don't want children or that it's irrational or morally wrong that you don't want to downgrade your quality of life, but I think framing it in this way is helpful in understanding the shitty incentives that are increasingly driving society.
I'm not familiar with Canada so don't have any practical advice unfortunately, but good luck whatever you and your girlfriend end up deciding, hope it goes well for you both.
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It's kind of funny how you thank rent control and then describe all the predictable downstream consequences of rent control like high market rate rents and difficulty in relocating. There are grandparents with an empty nest facing the exact reverse scenario an rent control prevents this from being remedied.
I'm not a fan of rent control, and I fully understand and agree how shitty of a policy it is.
I vote for the most economically literate politicians in every election (which is about as effective as spoiling my ballot, which I have also done). So I've done my part.
However, the clusterfuck that is housing policy carries on with or without me, so you fucking bet I am going to work what I can to my advantage.
Also, I find anti-rent control people (read: the entirety of /r/neoliberal) somewhat obnoxious in their "just get rid of rent control bro it's that easy it'll fix the market" prescription. They are right, in a vacuum. However, when NIMBYs get to block everything forever for any reason, getting rid of rent control is marginal at best.
4plex houses are being denied in Toronto neighborhoods because they "change neighborhood character" despite them being literally the most gentle form of density possible. They're also legal "as of right" but it turns out that was a total bait and switch because other zoning laws prevent them despite being "as right". Less than 400 4plex homes have been approved in 2 years, so it's safe to say this was an absolute fucking scam of a policy "win".
If any politician ran on a platform of "I'll get rid of rent control, making zoning identical to Japan, and cut development charges dramatically" I'd be out there knocking on doors for them every day, and I'd probably suck their dick too.
Unfortunately, the median voter is fucking retarded and this is an "instant lose" platform. So I'll keep abusing rent control until a better option presents itself.
The highest TFR economically 'normal' metroplex in the continental USA is Houston, which famously has no official zoning(although in practice there's lots of unofficial zoning, it's still far less than most everywhere else).
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I'd never fault someone for behaving rationally in the imperfect system. I just found it funny that you cheered on rent control then listed like the most central downsides. I see the cheering was sarcastic.
I viscerally hate "/s" but it does lead to these situations
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Sir, Irish immigrants of the past would raise a dozen kids in that space. Get to it!
This is true, it's also true that poor people (both in western nations, and worldwide) crank out more kids than wealthier people. So realistically if people who work as fast food cashier's and factory laborers can afford to have kids, us, with our mid-tier white collar jobs can too.
However:
/1) that sounds miserable, and like my life would become significantly more stressful with the addition of financial concerns (something I shaped my entire life around avoiding) and a space that is already too small for 2 humans and a dog becoming 3 humans + dog. We could put the crib in the den but then we'd need to throw out a huge # of our possessions, which are currently stored in the den about as efficiently as I could pack in floor to ceiling IKEA shelving and standardized boxes.
I guess one could snarkily point to "well that's just your revealed preference you don't actually want kids" which like okay? But I'm really sad and resentful at the state of society which forces to me to choose between security and less stress or my biological imperatives. So it doesn't feel like I secretly don't want kids but think I do, it feels like I'm choosing between two shitty options that I don't like.
/2) western society pushes a very strong narrative (not explicitly, but strong nonetheless) that your kids "quality" of life should equal or exceed your own.
If born right now, my kid wouldn't have a backyard to play in. We live across the street from a park, but it's downtown so it sometimes has homeless tents in it. Checking for needles in the sand of playgrounds is almost SOP down here. Moving to a fancy neighborhood (lots of "I support my neighbors in tents" lawn signs but never tents in their parks, weird...) is obviously out of the question (see: cost). This also means we have to take what we can get with school quality as there is a nice price premium for neighborhoods with the best schools.
I guess by the time the kid is old enough to have coherent memories we'd be making enough money to take them on vacation, etc, you get a bit of runway there.
But comparing my (extremely middle class) childhood to the childhood we could provide to a hypothetical child, it does raise the uncomfortable thought of
Can I provide an equal or better childhood than I had right now? Maybe, maybe not, trending towards not. If the answer is not it feels like I've failed as a parent and as a "successful" citizen. Which is uncomfortable and unpleasant.
And as a carrot on the stick in front of me, that answer changes to "definitely yes" come out household income increases another ~$50k annually, which is hopefully only a few years and job hops away...
It's also tough because my current career (mid tier finance, better than accounting, worse than IB) is extremely cognitively and time demanding. If I want to make more and move up, these demands will increase, until you get high enough they start decreasing again as you delegate to delegators. So the next 5 years of increasing my earnings will put my kid into a zero sum fight with my job for my time and energy.
/3) there's no village anymore. We moved away from family to live downtown because this is where the good jobs are and commuting 45min-1+hr each day is a hard no, massive evidence this makes you miserable. None of our friends are having kids for all the reasons I've explained, or OP has. So we'd be soaking it solo until we met other parents at school I guess. Makes it hard to trade kids to eachother to achieve informal childcare economies of scale, and grandma/grandpa live hours away.
/4 bonus) Unrelated, and not a great reason to not have kids, but im absolutely fucking horrified at the state of the education system right now. Between the corruption/inefficiency, complete inability to teach based on best practices, DEI insanity, and insane lack of funding (these kids are the future, why aren't we pouring money into them?!?!?!?) means I now also feel like 1) we need to ensure we are near a school that is less captured/ran by retards (now we're paying a school district premium on living costs) and 2) that I will need to dedicate substantial time to ensure my kid is actually getting a good education.
This has turned into an emotionally gratifying venting session, so thanks lol
I want to have kids, but every macro trend in society right now makes having kids a painful trade off, stressful, expensive, or very time consuming.
For point three, do you really think your childless friends wouldn't be lining up to babysit? Maybe it's just my bubble but everyone likes little kids and is willing to do some 'work' to get to hang out with them.
That's a great question, I kind of assumed "no" but truthfully, I've never asked.
I'm sure it has been studied already, but there is an interesting young adult arrested development phenomenon going on for white collar yuppies. We're all pushing 30, but our lifestyles would be 100% recognizable to our 24 year old (or functionally, our 20 year old) selves.
I've even been hanging out with a social group in their early 30s through sports, and aside from slightly higher rates of marriage and condo ownership, basically everyone does the "white collar job, black out fri/sat, Pilates and brunch on Sunday".
So it doesn't feel like anyone would want a kid near them, but I can't say I've ever asked.
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I can't say I've never encountered communities like this, but certainly not in the US. I know some Albanian families overseas who wouldn't consider it unusual and a bit of an imposition to babysit at below market rates.
Grandparents charging money to babysit/complaining about babysitting is not something I have seen from normies- white, black, conservative, liberal, hispanic, anglo, Christian, secular, old, young everyone seems to really look forwards to family and close friends having babies when they're not unemployed or drug addicts or something and really want to help. Bring casseroles, ask to babysit, just drop by to help mom.
Europeans and yankees may do things differently, of course.
Different worlds.
Grandparents, aunts, and uncles don't necessarily charge money money or complain. But they don't necessarily do anything, either. My uncles and aunts, who were on reasonably good terms in general, never ever babysat my brother or I. My parents never, ever babysat my younger cousin. They just didn't. We still got together for holidays. I tried to meet up with some in-laws to introduce the cousins, but it didn't work out, they were a bit busy, this seems normal, I guess. I went to a wedding with three young children, and got some compliments on managing them, but no offers of help.
My parents and in-laws will watch the kids sometimes, a couple of nights a year, if we make all the arrangements to get together and find a space.
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We had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, didn't want to continue that way, threw out and gave away a bunch of our possessions, and moved across the country in a single vehicle to a place where we could afford a 2400 sq ft house on one income for five years (though we're going to have to make some changes soon). This is fine, because we aren't working white collar finance jobs that require a city. Also, we like that kind of thing. There are real industries as well, several of the fathers in my homeschool group growing up worked for the missile company, for instance.
Inconveniently, trading kids is just not a thing in American culture, even church culture, even with cousins (or when I was a kid, actually. My introverted parents were responsible for all childcare despite living in the same area as grandparents and siblings). If the kids are invited to something, I have to stay there and supervise them the entire time, and do nothing else. Everything is Childcare, including church, and hanging out with mother friends, and going out to restaurants. C'est la vie.
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A few years from now the COL in Toronto will have increased a commensurate amount, and you will be saying the same kind of thing.
If you want kids, you have two options:
So far we've been beating CoL inflation, so the trend lines look good (even modelling the inevitable slowdown in wage growth with age). It just takes time, which biology doesn't seem to have gotten the memo about.
I haven't done the math, but I also wonder how well this actually plays on net. The best and highest paying jobs are in Toronto. If I move to Calgary and my wages and CoL both decrease (or stagnate), am I ahead? Especially because I can always sell a Toronto home and move to Calgary later, but the reverse doesn't work (assuming Toronto house price growth continues to outpace Calgary).
Also, thanks to my parents I am an east-coast latte-sipping downtown elitist lib-pilled yuppie (see my flair). So moving to Calgary (and Alberta generally, although I liked Austin so if Calgary was cool I'd deal with the awful governance) is not a very appealing option. Soy-jacking aside, I love the vibe of big cities, and the absurd fun and convenience they provide.
Finally, all my friends and family are in Southern Ontario. Most of my friends live a 15 minute walk/5 minute bike from my apartment. If we moved 3000km to have a kid, we'd be completely isolated from everyone we know (which isn't a permanent issue, as you make new friends, but damn...).
You may be beating CoL inflation in some basket-of-goods sense; you may even have more than doubled your salary (starting from a pretty low number) in the last ten years -- but you still can't afford a house, and the average home price in Toronto has been quite consistent in doubling every ten years since well before you were born. How much more than twice your current salary will you be making ten years from now, that you will be able to afford the house that you can't afford now?
This is... mostly false? O&G in Calgary offices pay quite well. Not "Bay Street Investment Banker" well, but it sounds like you are not that.
You don't have a home to sell -- you can't afford one and your rent money is disappearing instead of being (partially) stashed away as equity. This is unlikely to change for you in the future.
Says the guy from Toronto
"I like having fun, I can always have kids later" is... not a really unique attitude, but not a long walk from "I don't really want kids that bad".
And now you want to inflict this pain on your own (hypothetical) kid -- you need to break the cycle somewhere man.
I do actually hope to double my salary in the next ~5 years. I'm currently in PE-adjacent consulting and plan to move into actual PE once I get bored where I am.
Even without a doubling, I'm pretty confident we'll be able to buy in Toronto in the next 5-8 years, I mean hell, prices are so good right now we've been debating going all-in and being house-poor. It seems quite miserable though, I have worked extremely hard to not be paycheck to paycheck, so going back to that level of penny-pinching... Ugh
You make a fair point, I'm sure the O&G gang need people to do modelling, etc. I was interviewing at a mining company way back when and they were just so boring and dry. Maybe O&G attracts more charismatic people.
I know I know, Toronto governance is absurdly bad. I think what differentiates it is that Toronto is run poorly because no one does anything, Danielle Smith and her merry gang seem to be actively trying to break everything. Which feels worse I guess?
It's not so much "city fun kid boring", I fucking loved growing up in Toronto. I want my kid to experience that. And Toronto is so much better now than when I was a kid.
The Toronto escape plan is probably Hamilton, which I actually think is super under-rated. Although with Metrolinx shitting the bed on electrification that plan just got less attractive.
This comment is gonna be an answer to all the comments you've posted, so apologies in advance if its a bit scattershot/accusatory.
I completely respect the desire to raise your kids in Toronto, while maintaining a quality of life approximately equal to your own. However, I'd urge you to reconsider how you view the challenges facing you. I've personally seen the apartment that my grandparents raised their kids in, and they raised 3 children in a small 2 bedroom apartment. Space challenges are almost always actually about the challenge of giving up space, and not about the physical impossibility of fitting in a child.
I'd also like to point out that your career trajectory lines up with your family planning; your (hypothetical) child won't need to have their own room until they're a couple of years old. That matches up with when you expect your salary increases enough to be able to comfortably sustain a 2-bedroom apartment - the best time to have a kid is now, because you'll be able to afford a bedroom for them, when they need it.
These two statements are contradictory with respect to your desire to provide a better life for your children. If Toronto is so much better now than when you were a kid, how could it possibly be a downgrade in quality of life if you raise them up in Toronto now?
As for education, look into IB. Cheaper than Private school, more rigorous than Ontario High Schools.
I agree, Hamilton is underrated, but have you considered the towns in the Greater Toronto Area, such as Burlington, or Oakville? Boring yes, but damn good places to raise a kid.
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No offense, but I started out predisposed to believing you, but the more you post, the more I think the revealed preferences people are correct, at least in your particular case. Whatever you wish to be true, large, especially capital cities in the west have been on a trajectory of being increasingly fun and cool for the young, childless and high-powered careerist, while becoming less and less affordable for families. The same goes for all the popular jobs. You pay a significant premium to have a job that is fun, and if that premium is so expensive that you can't afford kids, it means you value that fun higher than kids. No, people in the past didn't have fun jobs, in fact if boring and dry is the worst you can come up with, that's probably a top 1% job in terms of satisfaction right there, certainly in the past and to some degree even currently.
I did my PhD in London. For my career, and probably even for that of my wife, it would have been MUCH better to stay there. My PhD supervisor was ready to take me over as a postdoc, and she is quite successful. My wife, meanwhile, had worked with Friston (the neuroscientist), and would have had a decent shot at getting a postdoc there as well. But we both chose against it, for multiple reasons, but primarily because raising kids in London sucks. My PhD supervisor had her first child almost simultaneously with mine (just a few weeks difference), and I really can't see her getting more than one. We went back to [small university city in germany] and are now on our second child and counting. We will probably have three, maybe four (though more are unlikely, since we didn't start early enough and I'm also not a particular fan of having babies past 40).
And it was totally worth it! Kids really are the greatest meaning-generators. Fun also gets a lot cheaper; Suddenly, I don't need to go on expensive vacations or the like. All the simple things that have become boring for me, if I do it with our eldest and she is having fun, I have fun as well through the magic of empathy. Hell, even playing peekaboo with our baby is lots of fun. And no, doing it with other kids isn't the same.
Tbh, I'd say that you're stuck in a local maximum that is pleasant and fun right now but will lead to you being dissatisfied in the long-term, and you even recognise that fact, but you don't leave bc you aren't willing to suffer a little in the valley on the way towards a better maximum.
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The West is like this in general. Despite what Ottawa would have you believe, it's a different country out here- one where you can afford a house at the price of [what you perceive as] your Canadian identity.
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Church
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This is way more effort than my shitpost deserves. I actually agree with you, was just having some fun.
LOL
Honestly I'm mostly here for the free one-way therapy venting dump
The fact you read it at all is gratifying, have a lovely day!
Also my Family Doctor basically said what you said to me verbatim the other day lmao. While he wasn't wrong, the fact he's a millionaire with an S-class who's last exposure to housing costs was the 1970s made it land somewhat poorly.
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I really appreciated you writing this - it feels like it matches up well to my own experience.
There are two things I’d add on to this. First, I think one major problem that we are seeing with a lot of…everything… is that the ability for people to extract more “value” out of the average individual. You touched on this with your point about the housing crisis, but I think it applies to more than just that; landlords take a higher percentage of your income, taxes eat away at more, income inequality leads to your boss making more off of your back, and working harder is not really something that gets you promoted anymore.
Which leads me to my second point - I think the unfairness of, well, everything is one of the major drivers towards people being unhappy with buying into the system. I’ve mentioned this in my past comments, but I recently bought into the property market. I am the owner of a two bed two bath condo, which cost me $500k CAD. My parents, at my age, bought a 5 bed 3 bath house for (inflation adjusted) $350k CAD. My boss works about 20 hours a week, and makes around $200k a year - I work overtime in a leadership position for $85k a year. I spent a very long time unable to get a girlfriend, while I know a guy who’s primary profession seems to be beating his girlfriends have both a steady long term partner and several affairs going on at a time (see Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled). Edit: People seem to be focusing on this part, so I’ll say that this was intended past tense - I have a girlfriend now, and I am very happy with her. You do not need to provide me with advice on this front.
I don’t know that I have a solution - all I can say is thank you for putting into words something that has been frustrating me for a long time.
You may be interested in the Chinese concept of neijuan.
While I do think free market capitalism is really the only incentive structure that works at scale and we've never found anything better, I find it hard to disagree with the leftist criticism that the drive to optimize everything in sight, abetted by increased technological capacity, significantly eventuates human misery.
You can see similar dynamics everywhere, from college applications, dating and even PVP video games, where the competition is more and more of a red queen's race. Everyone would be better off if we all stepped off the brakes collectively, but of course nobody has any incentive to surrender an advantage and so we all drive off the cliff together.
I think most people just aren't psychologically equipped to deal with significant differences in the status of those "around" you without any way of being able to climb up. It's one thing if the king is far away, you'll never meet him and you only have to compete for status with your tribe, a whole another thing to feel like you have to compete with status with the entire world, which of course is an impossible fight to win and only the insane would try to joust the windmill.
Is it "fair" that the family of my lawyer friend is ludicrously rich because his grandfather owns a bunch of valuable patents? Objectively his grandfather's provided much more value to the world than I ever have and my friend is a great guy personally, but my monkey brain just isn't happy about it and still makes me miserable from time to time.
The modern liberal ideology of trying to Harrison Bergeron anyone that sticks their head up is of course a ridiculous way of addressing this dynamic, but it is true that free market libertarians have no answer.
I have no answer to neijuan either unfortunately; I can only wish you the best with your job and partner.
In many ways that the people who predicted East Asia to be the future of the West had the right idea, I can only hope we look more like Japan and less like South Korea.
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I'm in an extremely advantageous position compared to most, but I still feel that meaningful progress is becoming increasingly difficult.
Progress towards what, you might ask? I'm not sure I know myself. FU money perhaps. Feeling safe enough to take a lower-paying job at some point.
How much of this is a cage I've built on my own. OP discusses the difference in men's and women's ability to lead a simple lifestyle. I've actually lived on my own as a bachelor for probably only 2 weeks of my life. It was fucking amazing how simple it all could be. Even with a job and a dog as complications. The only "gear" I needed was the apartment's gym nobody ever used and my gaming PC. Plenty of social time. Losing weight and getting stronger. Entire living space immaculately cleaned.
Children make things more complicated. I spent two precious hours of "kids asleep" time last night trying to repair electrical issues in toys, only to realize I was missing necessary parts replacements that would be 2 days later on Amazon. $30 here and there, but every week, another system, another shipment of plastic wrapped in cardboard. It's hard not to occasionally take a hard look at all of it and feel a deep sense of ennui.
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This is probably not because women love awful men, it’s because he’s willing to make the old college try over and over again and even a low success rate, over enough attempts, gets some actual successes.
Ehh, I disagree - he has a much higher success rate with women (I can say earnestly that I have never had a woman give me her number unsolicited, while I’ve seen him get a number from a waitress while out with his girlfriend).
Was he flirting with her? Were you? Was she someone you wanted to go out with?
No, no, no.
Surprised he wasn't even flirting.
As far as I can tell, he barely spoke with her - it is possible he heavily flirted with her when I excused myself to the washroom, but it seems unlikely with his partner there.
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Social proof from other women.
Of course it’s also possible that he has things you don’t which are attractive to women, but that these things are unrelated to his woman beating- eg high cheekbones, sense of humor. Statistically, these people have to exist- women after all do not actually have a sixth sense for mind reading to tell if a conventionally attractive guy is a good man or not. Either way, one of those things is confidence, which he almost certainly has.
I’m not disagreeing - I’m saying it seems unfair.
I don't disagree with you either. I am saying that 90% of woman woes have as most of the answer 'just approach more, bro'. Yes, I know it's awkward and intimidating but women like a man with balls. Show her you can put a kid in her. Yes lots of men need to learn how to approach and get better a flirting and yes there's the bottom whatever percent. Maybe you're five feet tall(if you're shorter-end-of-normal, here's a pro-tip- cowboy boots work wonders, they come off as masculine and you can probably get a good pair from an estate sale or something) with an ugly face and a stutter. I don't know you personally.
At the end of the day men are the sex with agency. Act like it.
Okay, just because everyone is focusing on this part - I have a girlfriend now, who I love very much. At the time I knew this person (we’ve fallen out of contact), I did not.
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Minor point here but I'm intrigued by the thought of a non-religious traditional circle. Do you have any examples?
There seems to be a revival of non-religious conservativism, often called as Cultural Christianity. One such example is for instance Carl Benjamin AKA Sargon of Akkad - a self declared atheist who nevertheless is socially conservative, and lately even started going to church on Sunday. This is also very common for Jews, as judaism is more open to legalistic forms of worship, but I also find it quite common right now amongst former atheists.
It may also be one of the reasons why Orthodoxy is now on the rise, as they have more space for orthopraxy/lived theology/theosis as eventually leading to redemption as opposed to Catholicism and other churches, which put faith above all else.
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I was at a LessWrong meeting when a guy told us he had recently got married. We asked if he was going to have kids and when he said no, the reaction of the (almost all secular) group was quite hostile.
Young Rightists who are politically active are creating their own pronatal subculture. That's how you get quotes like this, from a 24-year-old White House correspondent who (like me) grew up marinating in 4chan:
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/katy-balls-night-out-trump-young-maga-crowd-9dv93rlx8
What's even the point in getting married if you don't want to have children?
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There’s definitely circles at least as culturally conservative as a typical evangelical church where strong religiosity is not the norm. They’re typically rather well heeled and in fairly non progressive areas.
I guess the word 'traditional' is doing a lot of work here and hasn't actually been defined.
The elites on both sides of the aisle are fairly culturally conservative in practice; the 'red'(and to some extent black tribe) elites will even cop to gender roles(yes, that means the woman gets your money, deal with it). And even among reds lots of these people are not weekly churchgoers. The country club crowd is not particularly religious and also their daughters are not in situationships.
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Without dismissing what you’re feeling, I think your narrative of modernity maps to a lot of great criticisms of the wealthy society begat by the Industrial Revolution over the last 150 years. It’s not as new as you suggest.
I think measures of national or even personal happiness are hard to parse. Swedes versus Danes, Greeks versus Germans. Are some happier, or is what counts as ‘happy’ for a Finn just less ambitious, less happy, than what counts as the same for an American? How happy were our ancestors a century ago really?
As a young person online, I was never deep into ‘new atheism’, but like many people I adopted a deep disdain for any kind of spiritualism, hackneyed ‘the secret’ style self-help and so on (which of course only made adherents vulnerable to slightly modified versions of the same eternal ideas). As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true. The happiest people are those who convince themselves most absolutely that they are happy, will remain happy, and that good things will happen to them, indeed that life itself is good and (broadly, if not in every case), just.
As I had more life experience and met more people, I realized that artists, (serious) writers and philosophers were often some of the most unhappy, most depressed people I knew, even if they had achieved great professional success or were otherwise wealthy, attractive and so on. This is no coincidence, it is because these careers often lead people to question the meaning of their lives, and doing that is a death blow to that simple kind of happiness that provides genuine satisfaction. Even those philosophies that attempt to grasp earnestly at a value and a happiness in that direction, like Buddhism, often embrace what appears at least to me to be a fundamental nihilism in their obsession with the mirror, with an interrogation of the self.
The key to happiness, and I say this as an amateur, is caring less, feeling more, and studiously avoiding the temptation to try to look behind the curtain. The smarter and more curious and more interested in the discussion of grand narratives you are (and if you’re here, that is probably ‘very’) the harder this is. But it is possible. As for young men, you can ‘enjoy the decline’ (which I suppose means checking out and enjoying the bountiful brothels of South-East Asia, or something), or see if there’s happiness to be found in the other people where you are. I suspect the latter might be more fruitful, but I won’t judge.
It's basically the inverse of "misery loves company" - both are self-reinforcing loops where your internal state shapes who you spend time with and what you pay attention to, which then reinforces the original state.
I was just rereading DFW's E Pluribus Unum where he talks about the same mechanism with loneliness: lonely people watch TV (or some other isolating hobby) for connection → less real-world interaction → more isolated → more TV. The medium becomes a kind of attractor state that keeps pulling you back.
Same principle whether it's gratitude journaling pulling you toward noticing good things, or doom-scrolling pulling you toward catastrophe. Once you're in the loop, the feedback mechanism does the rest. Knowing about the loop doesn't necessarily free you from it, you can see the curtain and still get caught in the performance. The hard part, like you say, is trying to forget or pretend not to do the curtain checking practice. I have some friends who swear by psychedelic usage as lifting them out of depressive states etc. but ultimately I think if you're pretty well adjusted or don't have some kind of PTSD or OCD, psychedelic use (even one off!) can make it really hard to break out of the "it's all a farce, look at us it's just monkeys [playing status games/performing characters/etc.]" mindset. Like yeah that's kinda true, just try not to think about it and you'll be much happier.
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