This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link