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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 hate to be pithy, but the problem is that we have forgotten God. I'm serious.
As we lose our connection to the divine and to a personal sense of moral agency, and responsibility, our society can't help but fall apart like this. A religious revival is desperately needed.
If by "forgotten God" you mean learned he never existed in the first place, then yes.
No need to be so rude. We have different beliefs. I believe He exists, so yes forgotten God is how I put it.
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Problem 1: God isn't real.
Problem 2: Many societies have done fine enough without God, like East Asia up until a few decades ago. They had watery "spirituality" like Shintoism's ancestor worship or Confucianism's philosophy, but those are very different from God.
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Well, serious question.
How do you make God more interesting than or more impressive than whatever's happening in their smartphone?
You reminded me of that 10 day revival on a Christian College campus over two years back. Which was very interesting to see at the time, but nothing else seems to have come of it? How to maintain such a thing in the current era of extremely short attention spans.
Well, he could start doing stuff again. Blatant smiting, parting of seas, that sort of thing.
Even the parting of the Red Sea would get secularized these days.
That’s easily attributable to luck and unusual weather conditions. Even if the whole modern world saw it being broadcast live on TikTok, I’m not sure it would change the priors of anybody, one way or the other, really.
Things like Elijah calling down fire from Heaven, and God speaking to Job from the storm, those might be more plausible. But then…AI and movie magic. I’m not sure those would have any effect on anyone who wasn’t directly present, and perhaps not many of those, either.
It is interesting to think about what sort of evidence you personally would need to bump your personal probability of "God" existing to like 99%.
There's a bit of a problem in that '1 off' events can be 'explained' as an extremely rare confluence of factors that produced an unlikely (but not impossible!) occurrence. And events that seem impossible but are repeated with some kind of regularity can be studied and eventually 'explained.'
And a lot of things CAN be written off as hallucinations or misperceptions of an otherwise normal event.
For me, I'd count "Reviving someone who was proclaimed dead, on demand" as pretty high up the scale of things that can't be explained (yet) with current science, and thus proof of 'divine' intervention.
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I just now realized how both the pager operation that decapitated Hezbollah leadership and the decimation of Iranian military ranks with precision strikes sort of pattern match to the idea of an angry God smiting the enemies of his chosen people.
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God is inherently interesting and doesn't need us to make Him anything. Eventually more and more people will be broken by the dopamine treadmill and will come back to God, as I have. Happens every day.
It may not necessarily happen immediately, I'd imagine this will play out over a large time scale as it often does. But the wages of sin are death, especially on a societal scale.
Do you really think shoving all the gays back in the closet and teaching masturbation is evil will fix everything? I get that's low hanging fruit but that's what a return to Christianity also implies, the wages of sin are death. If so what do you actually think we should do about the gays? I feel like we have enough Scientific and psychological knowledge about them and their are millions of them just in the US so what are we gonna do? I think that a quiet return to Christianity works a lot better when you have secular society for your gay sons to fade into
In addition to mindfulness centering outside oneself distrust of materialism and all that good stuff. It seems a some sort of neo-Confucian philosophy without the anachronistic rules of Christianity would work much better. Of course if you believe Christianity is true well than that's that. But every religion says the same thing about it. A Muslim might say the same you just haven't come back to God yet. Actually that's why English speaking Muslims tend to call converts reverts. They've finally abandoned the sinful world and returned to the true faith.
A practical Church-oriented solution would probably wind up looking like homosexual desires are a cross some people wind up bearing, like some people have kleptomania. It doesn’t matter how much you desire to steal, or how seen and valued it would make you feel, or what great justifications wordcel kleptomaniacs can generate to justify themselves. Civilization just isn’t going to let people steal all the time. The ordered solution is to not do it.
I imagine Richard Simmons was the optimal gay guy, from the Church’s perspective. Did he break down and sin from time to time? I’m sure he probably did. He was discreet enough that we will never know for sure, though.
But when society condones disordered living, it causes real harm to both society and the individual. Just like when society condones shoplifting, for any reason, SJW or otherwise, eventually stores start shutting down, harming society overall and the individuals who were doing the stealing.
Addendum: This stance presumes that homosexuality is, in fact, irresistibly based in biology, which I am not aware is proven.
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This is a great question, and definitely one the Church has struggled to have a convincing answer to for the modern world. Personally I do think that being gay is sinful and overall worse than being attracted to the opposite sex, and aiming for a family. I don't think pushing gays back in the closet will fix everything. However, I do think that promoting and growing the amount of healthy, happy marriages with children who are treated well will fix many of the problems in our society, if not most!
Yep... that is that heh. I do love Buddhism though, and actually was deeply into it for over a decade before I converted. So I agree with you on some things at least.
Just wanted to say I admire your ability to keep an open mind despite defending your beliefs strongly!
Hey thanks man. It’s a gift from God, was never very good at it without Him heh.
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I tentatively agree, but in the sense that "people need to reach a breaking point before they will return to the thing that they've been avoiding all along."
The church has the advantage of having been around for centuries and centuries, so they will be the default option people return to when most else fails.
But in the meantime I think the phones will probably win the attention game.
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Knock your girlfriend out, drag her to a campsite outside cell coverage, tell her it's surrounded with bears (and hope she ends up on the right side of the man/bear question), and after she recovers her focus and executive functions, drag her to church?
Not even exaggerating, I've strongly considered making up some third-date ideas that require both parties to spend extended time away from their phones, or at least without internet access on them.
Or failing that, just carrying around a signal jammer.
Convincing a woman to give up a their smartphone will probably go as well as asking them to cut off a finger, but maybe one can wean them off the most harmful apps and restrict them to just messaging friends and sharing photos to a site that doesn't allow viewers to interact directly.
Yeah, as if finding fit, financially responsible, and mentally stable wasn't hard enough, then add in "not addicted to their phone/social media."
As a man whose girlfriend is addicted to her phone, I’m telling you that it’s actually a blessing in disguise. She puts much fewer demands on my time than the non-addicts I’ve dated, because she is capable of entertaining herself rather than pestering me for validating attention every 10 seconds.
And it’s not as if I entered the dating pool in pursuit of riveting conversation in the first place.
I think that might be how it feels until she slips into a particular corner of tiktok or where-ever that starts shaping her mind in ways that you will truly dislike.
In such cases you might prefer being the main source of her validation.
Unless she has a good mental filter of her own to keep nonsense from taking root.
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And that one is particularly salient insofar as an otherwise mostly stable and fit person can become more unstable and then lose their minds due to effects of smartphone usage. (open question as to whether they'd lose their mind anyway.)
At least, that's what happens with young people.
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