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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.
What dating crisis? This is just the almighty hand of the free market at work. Standards are high, as they inevitably will be when all parties are equally free to enter into voluntary associations.
We need to take "collective action as a society" to remove impediments to men's access to women (including, presumably, the "ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50%" of men) -- yeah, ok, have you asked the women how they feel about that? "I have this plan that will make it more likely for you to date someone who's ugly, mean, and poor". Wtf that's a terrible sales pitch.
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
Best take on this site.
The dating discourse here tends towards “communism for pussy” as I’ve said before. Funny that on a mostly libertarian leaning site, many posters write screeds about the “top 20% of men”, kinda like you’d see on some socialist forum about the “top 1% of earners”. Libertarianism for what I do have, communism for what I don’t!
You want more wealth and income? Better work for it! Want more pussy? Better work for it!
Good news is that they are somewhat correlated, so you can do a two birds one stone situation here.
When the entire world is experience a massive decline in relationship formation simultaneously, I think complaints and concern are merited, and the people who are claiming disbelief are in fact being... obtuse.
Y'all start sounding like boomers saying "sharpen up your resume and go and give the hiring manager a firm handshake."
Everyone seems to easily admit that the job market is harder on new entrants than it used to be, and is dysfunctional for the average person. Most would admit that the housing market is WAY harsher on new entrants than before, and is extremely distorted.
Most people can even acknowledge this is due to broad factors that distort those markets, NOT individual action.
But try to say the same thing about the dating market, and they immediately go "Well YOU must be doing something wrong."
Nah bro. You're just being a spiritual boomer.
Of course, I keep pointing this out to @Primaprimaprima, and they keep ignoring the point to drill down to individual solutions, which as we see are just not viable.
Ok, but on an individual level, don’t you want a solution that works for you, not someone to validate your feelings?
Assumes that there is a solution that works for your individual situation. I know that for me, personally, there's no fixing my problems — I'm a defective sub-human with no reason to live, and should probably spare myself the decades of pointless misery that lie ahead and just gas (helium) myself now.
Look, this is worth nothing, and I am no therapist, but I feel like a cry for help should get some kind of answer. I don't know you or your life situation. I don't doubt it's shitty for you to feel like this. But "defective subhuman" sounds pretty dramatic and very unlikely, and as for "decades of pointless misery," there are some things that are outside your control and some things that are not, and very people are truly fated to "decades of pointless misery" for reasons entirely outside their control.
I won't go further since I am not diagnosing you or trying to probe more into your "problems." If you just wanted someone to hear you, I hear you. If you want solutions, they exist.
He‘s always been like this. @Capital_Room , take some happy pills, for god‘s sake. @self_made_human what do you recommend?
This is me on "happy pills." I've been on multiple psych meds, including antidepressants, since my first suicide attempt back in 2004.
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I could have sworn that I'd previously and seriously advised him to see a psychiatrist or therapist IRL. It certainly can't hurt. I'm not supposed to diagnose him with clinical depression, but let's just say it rhymes.
Alas, I don't know of any actual happy pills, but a small helping of magic mushrooms did wonders for me.
(This is excluding the possibility that his life and personal circumstances are utterly FUBAR, which happens more often than I'd like. But what can I do about that? I'm a shrink, not a miracle worker.)
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