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Whither the way of the Boomer; or, Where Hydro rants about the Gosh-durned millenials
The dominant trend of the new generations is to replace the boomer's functioning social technology with actual technology that doesn't work and then justify it with orgiastic doomerist neuroticism.
Downstream in the thread- literally the first topic this week- there's discussions of modern dating and the social technology around it. The point I made was that the loss of meeting people in real life didn't happen because of the sexual revolution, because for 40-50 years after the sexual revolution people met in real life. The loss of meeting people in real life happened because of the apps. And of course the apps displaced meeting people in person, and it kinda seems like everyone who actually wants to have a relationship and not just a hookup would rather meet people in person. But the justification for nobody meeting in person anymore was #metoo when people defended the apps, and 'well it would be kind of awkward' sometimes. Usually the latter explanation is male, and when you drill into it with 'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward. And of course #metoo is in its usual formulation also delusionally neurotic.
But I want to talk about jobs. It's time for a nice change of pace. Back in the day, to get a blue collar job you walked in, physically, to a blue collar workplace and asked for one. It's true; ask the old men and they will tell you. And you can in fact still do this; I reckon any one of you can find a job within biking distance of your house if not walking distance by asking around enough, in maybe an afternoon's effort- granted, probably a job as, like, a dishwasher, but the boomers don't regale you with stories of walking into a job as CEO of the company. No, they found jobs as janitors and cashiers and, yes, dishwashers and they got their positions as lawyers and accountants through classified ads. The point is, the zoomers have the same opportunities as boomers to go find employment, at least if you use a big enough scale(Detroit has fewer opportunities than in 1955). No, not as computer programmers, but well-remunerated white collar work has never worked like that. My grandfather(RIP) used to tell the story of how when he first started college he could find a job in an afternoon for his spending money, and can anyone do that anymore? I did it in the 2010's. And it seems to be that the now-hiring signs adorning many stores and restaurants are there with this expectation, elsewise why would they exist? It's just that zoomers won't apply, as any restaurant manager will tell you. Instead there's online applications of the sort that are notoriously shitty when as anyone who's gotten that sort of low-level job recently can tell you, HR just filters it out for not having ten years experience and a masters degree in washing dishes when the store manager would've happily hired you after a handshake. I listen to restaurant managers complain about it all the time, usually in rather different language. It's not hard to draw the connection to millennial dating woes above; if you're too scared to ask a girl out due to paranoid imaginings you're probably also too scared to just go talk to the manager and ask for a job.
Downthread also, there's discussion of 'why do women give up the tradlife when it delivers the things they say are important to them' to the answer of 'because they believe most men will horrifically abuse them as soon as they can get away with it, even though that belief isn't true'. Likewise, this is the same quality of orgiastic doomerist neuroticism. In the fifties, when a large majority of women were totally dependent on their husbands, my great-grandmother was considered singularly unlucky because her second husband beat on her and was an alcoholic. Obviously, these two sets of implied numbers don't match up.
In the breeding of hunting dogs, there is this quality of just going for it which is referred to as grit. It seems our society is sorely lacking in grit. Safetyism is a dominant component of our culture, and this gets used to justify throwing out social technology that just makes things work.
This is anecdotal and not hugely relevant to the wider point you're making but this doesn't resemble my experience of looking for menial jobs during the year between high school and University (early 2010s as well). I must have asked for a job at most stores or establishments in my hometown of about 10k people, until after four months or so I managed to get a job cleaning a petrol station at 6am in a town 10 miles away. These were mostly in-person applications of the sort you described, occasionally on the phone, and sometimes online (for places like supermarkets that have official hiring channels). I also remember that those stores and restaurants with now-hiring signs in the windows would always ask if I had any prior experience, and then let me know that they weren't interested in hiring someone who had none.
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I know a place, you call a number they will put you up in a hotel for two weeks, pay you for training for two weeks, give you a company truck and all sorts of equipment, which you can take home. You start at twenty-five an hour, with raises every six months, and you'll never work less than sixty hours a week. Literally any joe off the street can grab this job any time they want. Rehab, felonies, whatever. You have to work outside, in all weather, six days a week and in the prime building season, a hundred plus hours a week. I worked there for a year back when wages were lower, made ~85k my first year and quit from the burnout.
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The funniest thing is when people today complain that the old method of starting in the mail room doesn’t work anymore. Literally every major investment bank has extensive employee development programs for very smart but junior/low level/pink collar/blue collar employees. One of my early managing directors started as a secretary, the company paid for her to do a degree, moved her to mid office doing compliance, then to front office, now she’s no different to any Harvard MBA MD at her level and making a million a year.
The difference is that it’s much easier in today’s hard meritocracy for a smart kid from a poor background to go to a good college than it was generations ago. The equivalent of those smart Jewish guys from poor families who started in the mail room at Disney or Goldman Sachs in 1960 and became CEO ace the SAT and go to a pretty good (at least) college now, they don’t need to start in the mail room. Social mobility ‘worked’.
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I think you have your causality backwards. It's not that people don't bother asking people out in person anymore because they'd rather use the apps: it's that Western society has become massively atomised as a result of technological progress, which is a void that the apps have stepped in to inexpertly fill.
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person? Common examples included i) a nice girl you met at church; ii) a colleague at work; iii) a classmate; or iv) a friend of a friend. Why i) is no longer viable is self-explanatory. Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her out bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply, and you also run into the problem of a paucity of available women - if you're a socially awkward man in college, odds are good that you're pursuing a degree which is highly sex-segregated (computer science, engineering etc.).
That leaves iv). It's impossible to ask a friend of a friend on a date if a) you don't have any friends, or all of your friends are online friends; or b) all of your friends are people you met through an extremely sex-segregated common interest (Warhammer, D&D, coding, esports,
rationalist-adjacent subreddit spinoffsetc.) - something that the internet and social media facilitates far too easily. (People self-segregrating into ideological echo chambers is only the tip of the iceberg: self-segregrating into echo chambers of people who like Obscure Hobby X or want to fuck toasters is the major underlying cause of the demise of any shared monoculture and the enshittification of Western society. I and everyone reading this are guilty of it.)So you're left with cold approaches: going up to girls in bars or nightclubs. Again, not a problem for charming and socially adept men; big problem for the socially awkward millennials/zoomers you're criticising. Hard to blame them for making a beeline for the apps instead.
Of course it's easy to criticise Millennial and Gen Z adult men for not taking proactive steps to organically encounter single women in real life. Obviously talking to strangers halfway across the globe is not a great way to get laid in real life; nor is spending every day in your local Games Workshop. But the thing is, they didn't make this decision as adults: they made it when their parents gave them a smartphone as teenagers, and all the years of adolescence they should have spent ironing out the kinks in their patter have been squandered watching YouTube and Twitch instead. Gen Z boys are starting college barely more acquainted with the rules of social interaction IRL than Gen X 13-year-olds were, for reasons that are not entirely their fault: no one here thinks someone's life should be ruined because of a stupid decision they made when they were 12, a decision which directly harms only themselves and no one else (but indirectly harms society as a whole, obviously).
And your assumption that dating apps killed traditional courtship hinges on the questionable presumption that Millennial/Gen Z women are exactly as receptive to a stranger asking them out as Gen X women were in their youth. But I don't think they are, and I think the fact that they aren't is part of the problem. See this great article:
See also (coming back to "Untitled" above) innumerable feminist comics about how it's creepy for men to ask a woman out in a coffee shop or in a library or in college or on the third moon of Venus or whatever. There are plenty of women who are far less receptive to being asked out by strangers than their mothers were, and make no secret of that fact. Obviously the women writing these comics don't represent all women, but the men reading and internalising these comics don't necessarily know that, and everyone ends up poorer for it. If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries. The typical "if you're reading it, it's not for you" dynamic.
I think the main thing that boomers and even elder Millenials might be missing is that literally EVERYTHING in Zoomer culture is in a constant state of molochian hypercompetition/red queen races thanks to the influence of social media and algorithmic ranking of every aspect of their performance in life.
I mean this literally. If you grew up playing video games, you probably remember online multiplayer as a casual fun thing to do, where the level of competition varied depending on the server you loaded into.
At some point in the past 15 years, the concept of RANKED MODE was introduced, and now every single player can be aware of their skill level relative to every other player at all times. So if you care about skill level at all, you have to play your hardest at all times to keep your rating up. Casual play is still allowed but you don't get the luxury of just hopping to a different server that's more your speed. People will judge you for your ranking constantly.
Or if you're a streamer, you are fully aware of how many viewers you're attracting at all times. So is everyone else. Only the top 1% break more than a hundred at a time.
Dating with the Apps makes things easy for that top 10-20% of males, and throws challenges to the rest of the men. A man now is judged against every male in a 20 mile radius rather than just the guys in his high school.
Top paying jobs draw applicants from across the entire planet, which means they get Extremely selective and have every more stringent criteria in terms of the degrees, experience, and candidates they accept.
These are sometimes gated by degree requirements, which brings me to the competition to get into these schools.
And of course the rampant cheating and adderal abuse that occurs for those trying to maintain high ranks.
If you go to a good school and get good grades you can walk into one of those top-tier jobs, but this is only applicable to the tippy-top, and everyone is generally aware of their status well before they graduate. If they get the right degree or know the right people they can be basically guaranteed access to elite social circles. Otherwise... may as well resign yourself to lifelong mediocrity.
Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.
So perhaps the reason they decline to throw themselves at jobs or dating or developing GRIT is because the entire social environment is simply not conducive to chasing these endeavors unless you are one of those PSYCHOPATHS who doesn't mind abusing stimulants, exploiting every social loophole you can find, committing light fraud, and otherwise sacrificing health and happiness to actually compete for the most desirable positions out there.
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For many many years the main true answer was "the bar" -- zoomers are too scared to go in those either, and now they are dying.
As a 29 year old with primarily Zoomerish co-workers in my niche I think even 'the bar' isn't really what it was.
Alcohol's increasingly expensive in most urban areas, I think social dynamics in bars is more about 'I go to the bar with my group of friends to be somewhat near other groups' instead of as much interlocking as you'd get historically and frankly my younger co-workers just don't really drink that much.
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Everyone knows women don’t care about looks, but it sounds like her feminine intuition and personality-detector correctly clocked you as the type of bigot who posts in a lair of racists, misogynists, and transphobes. So she bravely and rightfully got you excommunicated from a community and an industry to keep everyone safe *crosses arms and turns away indignantly*.
Yeah, women take it as an insult when a man she views as beneath her shoots his shot at her, as it offends their princess complex. “Ugh, you thought you had a chance with me? Gross.”
Usually (I hope) getting rejected by a girl doesn’t lead to immediate exile from community and industry, but realistically it at least means no other girl in her social circle will want you. And even the guys in your/her social circle will have their priors updated in the direction of you potentially being a social liability. A girl will eagerly spread the word and poison the well after rejecting you.
On the bright side, though, banging a chick greatly increases the chances you’ll bang other chicks in her social circle. Praise be the double-edged sword of female mate-choice copying.
It amuses me that, even in the showerthoughts, daydreams, and fantasies of presumed PMC(-aspirant) #GirlBosses, such women are comically hypoagentic and can’t muster up a fraction of the courage and initiative that men regularly exhibit. The thought of themselves making The First Move is outside of their personal Overton Window. If a given man doesn’t read her mind and approach her after she performs the physical and emotional labor of sitting, standing, or existing near him... k fine whatevs, it’s his loss.
If a man does successfully pick her up in a bar, elevator, bookstore, breakroom, subway, or wherever and a long-term relationship ensues, it’s retrospectively revised on her part to be “omg it just so happened that we met” rather than “he assessed the costs/benefits, initiated the conversation, led the conversation, drove the interaction forward, and I just followed along” such that she can claim that she Did Her Part as an equal partner rather than being a bystander in her own narrative.
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I believe you when you say you've been treated unfairly but I think this is an exaggeratedly bleak depiction of modern in-person dating. I'm a milenial and I've asked out colleagues, classmates, hit on girls in public or who I've only met once etc and *I've never been reported to the authorities for it (that I know of). And I'm definitely closer to the bottom guy than the top one in that meme - I'm sitting here posting on the Motte after all.
*Never faced any serious social consequences for it (edit)
To clarify, I've never been reported to the authorities for asking a girl out either. I'm not arguing that any man who's less than maximally attractive who asks out the wrong girl will inevitably end up with his career destroyed and his life in ruins - that's preposterous. I'm merely arguing that there has been a concerted effort among feminists to stigmatise male dating behaviour which would have been seen as perfectly innocuous a generation ago; that the most severe consequences for a social media cancellation campaign can be disastrous for men targeted by them (e.g. the Shitty Media Men List, the more recent "Are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups); and that this produces an inevitable chilling effect on the behaviour of socially awkward men who are aware of the new norms (which is most of them). Much as cancellers cancel people who contradict woke orthodoxy in order to send a message to onlookers, the cancellation of men for being "creepy" (i.e asking out a woman who isn't interested) is intended to send a message to socially awkward men. It may well be that the risk of professional/social repercussions as a result of a particular socially awkward man asking out the wrong girl are only 1 in 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 - but if the knowledge that he might face these repercussions makes him 10 or even 5% more risk-averse (and if every socially awkward man is making the same calculation) that will have massive knock-on effects on the dating economy, the loneliness/sexlessness epidemic and the fertility rate.
Edited my post so it was a bit less facetious on this point than I realise it might have looked (not that it really changes much of what either of us are saying)
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It's actually worse than all that.
Due to demographic implosion, families and friends' circles are smaller, so your friends and their friends have fewer or no sisters, nieces, cousins and other friends to introduce to you even if they want to help you out. Also, boys who have no sisters and no female cousins will tend to develop dumbass ideas about girls because they don't see how they actually behave normally as humans. It also happens with the sexes reversed, I assume.
Widespread use of social media abetted the decline of nightclubs in general, which the COVID lockdowns also heavily contributed to.
Strict enforcement of the 21-year drinking age means that young people over 21 and those under 21 have basically no access to social venues where they can interact.
Atomized societies normalize heightened social mobility for young singles, which means you'll pretty much lose your entire social circle if you have to move to another town after graduation to get some job.
To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.
Well, duh. If you ask them about a RANDOM GUY, of course they'll react like that, because they don't see 'random' guys as attractive.
The cherry on top is the recent fracas with Bumble, who got in hot water and profusely apologized for the offensive insinuation that some women may desire sex.
Hadn't heard of this so did some googling, ended up reading USAToday's coverage of the issue which contains this gem:
How does she think dating sites are making their profits?
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True. "I married my sibling's friend" was a pretty common route of courtship in generations past, which largely doesn't exist anymore as a result of smaller family sizes.
Neatly encapsulating why men and women alike complain about all the bad behaviour on dating apps. If there's no overlap in social circles between you and the person you're dating, there are no social consequences for bad behaviour, so feel free to ghost to your heart's content. It's not that the people who use dating apps are necessarily uniquely shitty people, or that dating apps select for people who are uniquely shitty (though both of these are true to some extent, particularly the latter): it's that dating apps don't incentivise people to behave pro-socially.
You're also gesturing at precisely the "social atomisation" thing I'm describing: a few generations ago, asking out a girl with whom you have no overlap in social circles simply wasn't an option. A hundred years ago, if you lived in a town of a few thousand people and tried to ditch a girl after getting her pregnant, her father would be hammering on your front door with a shotgun before the day was out. Nowadays if you do that, she has no recourse.
It does make one rather cynical about human nature when you realise that a lot of people (not a majority or anything, just a lot) are operating on the basis not of "I should treat this girl with respect because it's the right thing to do and it's how I'd like to be treated" but "I should treat this girl with respect, because if I don't she'll tell everyone and it'll come back to bite me in the ass". The sexual revolution is basically a prolonged experiment in what happens when you take away the personal incentive not to be shitty to girls that you want to fuck but don't want to wife.
I don't know if the author would have gotten a different answer if she'd specified "How would you feel if an attractive man you don't know started talking to you in an elevator?"
I think this is also a large part of the non-stickiness of online dating relationships. You meet somebody, have a fairly good click but the thread drops or there's some light friction for whatever reason and there's essentially nil chance of randomly bumping into them again in person at a mutual friend's social event or however else people tended to get over light cases of 'the ick' historically. I, a few years ago, went through a hell of a lot of app dates and have since come out the other side with a longterm partner and a child. I still had a lot of time to formulate crotchety opinions about the dynamics in a lot of these things.
Now if somebody gets even slightly peeved at the other party, you've got one or maybe two DMs to try and rekindle things then you're dead in the water. Without even getting into the 'there is an unlimited supply of shiny new toys being served up via app' element.
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But isn’t the increased social atomization caused by changes in technology? I don’t think the sexual revolution is what broke down regular social connection
Yes on both counts. The sexual revolution and the free love movement promoted the idea that casual sex should be consequence-free (which that generation of Westerners fully internalised, for the most part) - then technological developments caused social atomisation which actually removed most of the indirect social consequences for bad behaviour among "cads" and "rakes".
It's possible to imagine an alternate history where we had the same technological developments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that we had, but not preceded by the dramatic social liberalisation of the sexual revolution. In this counterfactual world, social atomisation still happens, but sexual misconduct (e.g. impregnating a girl and running off on her) remains so aggressively stigmatised that most men refrain from it of their own accord. What I'm describing actually sounds fairly similar to modern Japan and Korea, in which less than 10% of live births are out of wedlock, as opposed to the West in which they're 30% at the absolute minimum (granted, more abortions are carried out in South Korea than in the US or UK per capita, so it's not quite as rosy as I'm making it out to be).
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I imagine that yes, the answer would be different.
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I feel like this is a little bit unfair on zoomers here. It's true that online applications are kind of a waste of time, the response rate is so poor. At the same time the boomer nostrum of "just go in and give them a firm handshake" might have worked for (white) men back in 1955, an age when people were happy to hand out junior executive positions to (white) dudes they just met, but it's just silly in this day and age. The old world is dead, but the new struggles to be born - in the meantime we have crappy online job boards.
Personally, looking for temporary work in New Zealand, I've gotten work through all of online applications, pavement pounding, agencies and word of mouth. There's value, too, in being aggressive - just asking people you meet if they know of any work going has some response rate. I think maybe some people worry they're being pushy but most managers do not like looking for new staff and are happy to see people who just want to work.
(More that all of this is for low wage/status work. The game is totally different if you want like, a real career)
No one is suggesting that walking into a business will get you a position as VP of random bullshit, responsible for spending time on the golf course.
It’s that zoomers won’t show up in person to apply for even low level jobs, and you have to grind it out a bit at a low level job to get a better one. That’s the point of your grandpa’s stories about ‘I got a job as a janitor with a firm handshake and diligence led to me getting promoted to the mailroom and then a clerk and whadooyaknow, I would up retiring a vice President’. And part of the reason this doesn’t work anymore is the unwillingness to give it a whirl.
This really does seem totally out of step with how corporate jobs work in my experience. The people who do the janitorial work in my mega bank are almost all contractor immigrant and there is no existing track for them to become direct employees, they'd apply through the external portal like anyone else. I don't know a single person who's career looks anything like what you're suggesting younger than 55. Furthermore the people complaining about having trouble getting a job have usually studied something and want to work in that field, you just don't take a finance degree through the mail room, which as far as I know doesn't even exist anymore, into an associate role, it wouldn't be seen as relevant experience.
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Just for clarity, there were no boomers looking for work in 1955. A substantial balance of boomers were looking for their first job during the doldrums of the 1970s economy and a not insignificant portion during the early 80s recession.
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I want to +1 this.
And -1 this.
When I was in high school I literally dated my best friend's girlfriend's sister. We broke up like 2 years before they did. I saw all of them all of the time. It was fine. In college everybody I knew dated someone in their major at some point. It rarely ended in a blissful marriage. More often one of them ended the relationship and had an immediate fallback plan, which was the obvious cause of the breakup. We survived. Beer and vodka solve such things.
But me too. I was in school before that got big, mostly, and it is scary for good reason. I do know 2 male engineers who got expelled for 1 night stands at parties I was at. And they were drunk and the girl was drunk and they were like sloppily making out on the couch and then like a month later he gets a notice of a hearing.
I guess the real lesson is, of course, avoid hook ups, court a lass and you should be fine.
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I think someone can get a job as a landscaper around here just by asking. One acquaintance (with a MFA fwiw) is working as a handyman by mostly just asking around, which seems to be going alright. I haven't noticed anyone really having a problem with those kinds of jobs around here, or anyone complaining about getting them, either. It's the jobs by which a man can be the main earner for his family, and his wife can afford to take a few years off to be with the young children that are the issue.
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From my experience, you can apply in person to entry-level, wagie jobs, and they may want you to work there, but if it's not a small business, you will still have to painstakingly submit an application online anyway. Some kind of humiliation ritual, perhaps.
The best part is that the people in charge of hiring you will also struggle with the process, as the devices they have in their grocery store have awkward hardware, the 3rd-party app (successfactor) is complicated or constantly changing, and they don't actually perform that process very often.
The technology was supposed to make hiring easier, more convenient, practical, but it is questionable whether that was actually achieved. I'm sure some metrics were improved, corporations have better awareness of who was hired and when, and they can do more background checks, penny-pinch wages and target workers for layoffs more accurately, they can optimize diversity scores to manage unionization risks...
On the other hand perhaps 'old-school hiring' wasn't so bad. Perhaps somebody can still be a good employee despite having used the n-word in 2008 or being an ex-con in some other state.
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I actually did literally get a job as a dishwasher that way as a teenager. But it helped that, (a), someone else I knew worked there, so he had already vouched for me and told me how to ask and (b) the place itself was such a shitty job that no sane adult would want the job. They relied on teenagers to young to have any other options and, uh, recent ex-cons.
More recently I tried to get a bartending job this way. The bar was crazy busy, the staff was all obviously overworked and exhausted. I asked them if I could apply. They seemed open to the idea, but they were just shift workers, the actual manager and owner were nowhere on site. They took down my name and info, but never called me back. I have no idea what happened to my "application," it seemed just the same as an online app where you throw your app into the ether and it disappears without a trace.
I actually think people have plenty of grit. See: all the people hitting the gym every day, or training for marathons, or grinding out thousands online of hours to try and launch their streaming career. It's just that "grit" sucks, and the modern world makes everything so unpleasant and unnatural that it leaves people feeling confused and isolated. Most of us aren't cut out to be pushy telemarketers who will ignore all social cues and relentlessly press for what we want.
Applying at one bar and hoping they respond is like hoping to get married after talking to one girl. Do this twenty more times and then see. Also, don't do this when the bar is busy. The scrap of toilet paper that your number was incorrectly scrawled on was probably thrown away by accident. Bring a one page cv with your contact details and job history and nothing else. Go at 5pm, when there's no work to do, because the actual manager might still be around.
good advice, although to be fair i wasn't that serious about working there. It was a spur of the moment thought while I was hanging out at the bar.
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I work in tech, but my employer explicitly forbids walk-ins and will throw out anyone who tries. Which did happen once.
As for the social consequences of getting rejected, it’s kind of circular. I was on the internet in 2010 and feminist websites did pretty much say on behalf of frustrated gamer girls everywhere, “asking out a girl without her explicit permission in advance is literally sexual harassment and me and my friends treat it as such”. In retrospect, that was a narrow subgroup of crazies but without experience, how is a young, naive man supposed to work that out? Then MeTop comes along and, yup, the wrong pass can destroy your career.
Is it any wonder that people got afraid to date except on an app where she’s explicitly expressed interest by swiping right?
The gay version of Me Too. But it is more bragging about fucking another guy than complaining about Aziz Ansari being awkward.
Lol. I like my tiny phone but it plays merry hell with my spelling.
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Imagine how insufferable it would be for a normal gay man to date a gay Aziz Ansari.
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Except everyone hates that. It doesn’t get any dates, it doesn’t get anyone anything, and most women prefer some sexual harassment to no interest at all(because they won’t show interest first).
Oh, I know. Believe me. But you said
And I’m trying to show how the current situation developed. It’s not (just) because young men are afraid of a polite no, it’s because we were told (and then shown) that asking without prior explicit interest was sexual harassment. People therefore moved to a platform that structurally required women to show interest before any interaction.
I’m not sure this is true. I think most women explicitly prefer no interest to unwanted interest. If female-centric outlets started saying loudly, “don’t punish men for politely trying their luck” then the dynamics might change quickly.
Both of you are correct. It depends. In very broad strokes, typical women want the attention from the men who instinctively understand they are playing the game, as long as it's in a safe environment. They don't want attention from the men who are trying to follow a twelve-step plan to sex with a woman. That's why they support measures that complicate this plan further, they weed out the guys who want to "politely try their luck".
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I don't know if I really agree that the "revealed preference" of women is to have no interest as opposed to unwanted interest. Women who have tons of unwanted interest may say that, because of status signalling, virtue signalling, and because they may not know what it's like to actually have no interest. But women who actually have no interest may reveal the preference. For a glimpse of this, look at how single women in their late 40s and 50s behave and how aging women tend to lament the lack of the previous unwanted advances.
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