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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?
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?)
My vote, naturally, is the Hock. If you can't or won't Hock, maybe you can do something equally challenging to prove yourself worthy.
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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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