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I know the dating crisis has been done to death on this forum, but I want to talk about it perhaps from a slightly different angle than previous posters; that of the collapse of the ability to make collective decisions/sacrifices. Various self-improvement substackers seem to be populating the majority of my feed these days, and one, Get Better Soon had a post yesterday about how to attract women. Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable. This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family. But we've rapidly gone from a situation in which pretty much everyone, including the ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50% of society could expect to get married, to a world where maybe that will happen to 20% of the population, and most of those people should expect to get divorced. The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
It's not just dating, I kind of see this with everything. We used to be able to take effective collective action as a country. Things like ballooning government debt, government incompetence, rapid urban decay, and breakdown in communities are relatively new phenomena that have popped up in the last twenty to fifty years. Aurelian loves to talk about how much the civil service and government in general have decayed in the UK (and France I think) since the end of the Cold War, and lays a lot of the blame at the feet of the focus on individual outcomes. I'm not sure if he has the causality the right way round, but it seems clear to me that we can no longer really effectively do things as a society. The inability to form lasting romantic and family attachments is only part of that.
I increasingly agree with the suggestion that infinite easy entertainment online, constantly available, means young people are just less interested in the opposite sex overall than previous generations were at the same age.
Sure, in the abstract the average 19 year old would probably still be interested in having ‘a girlfriend’ or ‘a boyfriend’, but that’s different to going out and making it happen. And there’s a real sense in which maybe they want one a little less than their equivalents did in 1990 or 1965.
Some young man sated by porn, twitch, games, TikTok whatever might still want a girlfriend, might still take one if she fell into his lap, but he is often still going to put less effort into looking for her than his father did at his age. Maybe that’s all bullshit, but I don’t think so.
The humiliation, self-consciousness, embarrassment of seeking romantic affection that most people experience to some extent is just less desirable and more easy to defer if good alternative (in the moment, not long term obviously) entertainment sources exist.
Another way to think about this is like filter bubbles. People are through the internet and digital media increasingly able to engage in only the activities they enjoy the most, with the people that enjoy them the most (just like with politics). It turns out that the sexes on average have different interests so now they don't meet organically.
The guys play video games and watch porn and the girls are on social media and read romantacy. Both want a partner but the meeting place activities have been outcompeted so they more rarely meet in social settings where forming a relationship is a possibility. Oops!
And for damn near a year this was basically MANDATORY during Covid restriction times.
If you weren't meeting people in your online circles, you weren't meeting people.
Or, if you wanted to meet in public with other people, you basically had to do a voluntary pledge of allegiance to specific political policies.
I don't think I'll ever forgive some people for that.
I like this post because it can be interpreted two ways- in the 'fuck covid, the virus is so deadly it doesn't affect those who don't give a shit, I'ma do what I want' platform or BLM.
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