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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12945 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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This isn't bad advice on an individual level, but I would argue that on a societal level, the highest-EV advice is to teach men [and women, although they do seem to be better at it already] how to be content without a romantic partner.

Modernity has made it so that there are very few reasons to settle for anything less than perfection; the internet has annihilated boredom, porn in all its various forms have annihilated the purpose of the sex drive, mass production has annihilated the economic reasons to marry, fruitful and multiply, and individualism has annihilated the social pressures that might encourage someone to settle down.

What both men and women now want in a relationship is self-esteem and self-actualization, to be desired by a high-status partner that they themselves desire, and fundamentally most people won't win that red queen's race no matter how hard they self-improve. If you would like a transactional relationship, hiring sugar babies and escorts for strings free sex, or taking a mail-order bride to bear your children from some impoverished country are still on the table, but fundamentally relying on these options as a bachelor is tacitly an admission of low status, and besides the point regardless if you're looking for a self-actualizing relationship and thus in practice done by very few.

None of this is going back in the box no matter how pundits gnash and wail online about it. Status will always be the final scarce good even if humanity eventually solves scarcity in all other things, and hence the only real way forwards I can see is for people at scale to take up some bastardized version of Buddhism, and realize that the romantic relationship of their dreams probably isn't going to happen and yet still find happiness.

This isn't bad advice on an individual level, but I would argue that on a societal level, the highest-EV advice is to teach men [and women, although they do seem to be better at it already] how to be content without a romantic partner

Perhaps a good first step in this direction would be for society to stop heaping scorn and mockery on men who are unable to attract women.

Edit: I'm actually pretty confident that if society dumped on single women the way it does on single men, this would disappear "women, although they do seem to be better at it already"

The shaming and gaslighting will continue until morale improves.

I partly agree, but at least one very real reason to have a romantic partner even if one is content alone remains: it is to reduce, through both the partnership itself and through children, the chance of being alone in old age.

I worked in a nursing home during my teens, and met many old men and women who married, had families and still ended up living out the end of their lives decrepit and lonely. Their wife/husband passed away early and they struggled to cope, or they had a bad divorce and never recovered, or their relationship ended up deteriorating and kept together largely by inertia, or their kids ended up apathetic / having moved elsewhere / busy with their own lives.

The ones who fared the best had little to do with their romantic relationships; generally it was the vivacious types who still had wide friend networks in old age, and were constantly active and out at social events (bad news for the type of people to post on the Motte...)

I don't mean to say that it's pointless to marry, because a good marriage is likely still a net benefit over being lonely. Yet at the end of the day a life where you grow old is very long, and there are no guarantees given at birth, except that one day you will suffer and die alone.

Right. That's the part I fear. In theory the single elderly can keep each other company, run errands for each other, etc. I'd sign up for some kind of mutual aid society of that type.

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