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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.
Jesus, one of the things I hate about this discourse is that everyone just takes a half-baked detail and… runs with it.
Here’s the actual quote:
$70k is a location-specific estimate for a set of far more concrete guidelines. The guy is saying: you should own a car and pay for your own place. (Small note, IME the roommate thing is not a particular dealbreaker provided your roommate is cool and you have space which is obviously yours.)
He then benchmarks: in the average CITY, he reckons this at around $70k. (Again, IME this is a little conservative, a lot of second-tier cities will run you fine for $60k or less.) NB: cities are more expensive than the country.
OK, let’s drill down on his raw expectations. What percentage of Americans have cars? Over 90% of households, according to a quick Google search. Pretty attainable by that metric. How about the rough cost of renting a 1bed? Average of $1650, which if you follow the “1/3 of your paycheck” rule, is around $60k average, regardless of location - so the average American can rent a small apartment affordably. And in places where the pay is lower, the rent should be lower too, so this should be a large average of people who can live this way.
So our entire discussion got arbitrarily pegged to the $70k figure, plucked out of the context of WHY he thinks that, in an article that already assumes the context of by-college-educated, for-college-educated. I mean, for Chrissake, he barely gets across the page fold before linking out to his favorite books list. This guy’s a nerd! $70k is pretty damn attainable in his class - it just shows you’re at least trying!
So, reading his article, I can comfortably say that this is correct and attainable advice for any man in the larger class of college-educated, intelligent, but not a true natural with the ladies. If I’m being perfectly honest I’ve seen too many chicks spring for a fella who didn’t have what he’s slinging to take it too seriously; the big thing is actually just to interact with women regularly, turns out they go for whoever shows up! But working on yourself gives you some major advantages with women you’re meeting for the first time, so they want to interact with you a little more regularly. And having a car and your own place DEFINITELY lowers barriers to sex. The rest of this, the “systemic” talk - yeah, obviously things are happening on a larger scale, but come the fuck on man, why are you already talking about yourself like you’re a statistic? Don’t you have any self-respect? Or is it just other people you treat this way?
Flip it around. Here’s a strong pronouncement for you: the thing that let our society do great things in the past is the same one that let people get married, and it is PERSONAL initiative and responsibility, not collective. If someone has to be “empowered” to do something, what does that say about where the power really lies?
You are totally talking past what I wrote. The individual advice works, I don't disagree. All of these things will help find a romantic partner. The problem is it doesn't fix the larger issue of why these things have to be said in the first place: in the past 50-30 (but really the last 10), the whole landscape of dating and relationships has imploded. Self maxing isn't going to fix this.
Where do I refer to myself a single time in this post? I haven't had the most success with dating, but I'm not an incel. I've basically said in other posts that the most actionable things to do align with what this guy is saying (car, diet, not being a doormat). Me playing the system this way is not going to fix the fact that the system is broken.
As far as the last part goes, I could not disagree more strongly. Yes individuals did great things, but they were only able to do those things because of the presence of continually enforced social norms surrounding gender roles and expectations. The farmer and factory worker of the 1880s worked hard to provide for his family. We were able to win the civil war and the first and second world wars because we had competent social systems (at the family level and beyond) that have since vanished. Dating is only one part of this.
Sorry buddy, Rambo rules apply, you drew first blood. Your whole post was spurred by a single dollar estimate taken totally out of context from that poor guy’s Substack, and what he was saying has zero bearing on anything you said. In reality, he could have said anything at all, it didn’t matter what, you would have read whatever you wanted out of it. That’s why it’s all about you. You don’t need to make it about yourself explicitly; your post is saturated with yourself. You couldn’t even keep it down enough to read what the guy wrote! No protesting, I brought receipts.
If you want to complain about Society, do it on your own. Don’t twist other people’s words into it.
This is far too much heat, not enough light. And I'm a little perplexed because you and the user you're talking to both have a history of AAQCs and no warnings, and even your other posts in this thread are basically effortful with minimal (albeit admittedly not zero) antagonism. To the point that I was tempted to let it go entirely but even with maximal "benefit of the doubt" this was a little too rough to not at least flag.
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