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Notes -
“Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise” link
This is trending on Twitter so might as well discuss it here anonymously.
I know more than a few people say it’s just vibes and the data is good but I think this article makes a strong point that a real loss of social capital has actually made younger people poorer. And I believe this links into the fertility debate because the goods that you could buy before with social capital are especially needed with children. Having kids has gotten very expensive. I think everyone knows education, housing, and health care have boomed in costs. Being single means you don’t need to take on these costs. You can have kids if you are poor and live off government resources or you can have kids if you are rich but it’s a financial disaster for the upper middle class.
I largely come down to diversity (mass migration) and the Great Migration killing American social capital that the boomers had. Before these things occurred we had cheap urban housing because people weren’t afraid of their neighbors and cheap public schools. And homogenous urban environments have a lot of social capital for their residents. Also you had cheap babysitters because your neighbors were like you and you trusted them. Your kids could just go to the park alone. So childcare was free. I feel comfortable blaming diversity on rising housing costs (zoning the poor away from good communities) and for rising educational costs (falling public school quality).
So yes I think today’s generation is poorer in a lot of ways that really matter due to less social capital (but richer in other ways). And I do think the ways we are poorer today are especially bad for fertility where you now need to buy those goods in the market but they were free before.
I will say this as a man, it really sucks ass having to compete with other men for stuff like good jobs, girls, etc. I'm in the gym 4 days out of the week, calorie deficit, I just got out of another 2nd round job interview, gonna do another tomorrow, hoping to get something high paying with the degree i got (in my lucky case, for free) and the certs. I've done damn near 4 -5 internships and a part time job. Thankfully i live in a city that actually builds housing so its not horribly bad, but I'm not anywhere near where I'd like to be in my life. I got lucky with a girl Im seeing by complete accident. Its just better to date as a man when you have your own place and a decent paying job, and those things are insane amounts of work to get your hands on. Im glad someone's validating my (and others) experience, instead being told about how "good" we have it now compared to the past.
I don't mind competing with other men in the abstract. Especially when the competition is "friendly" (i.e. they won't kill you to take your woman if she chooses you). I dislike that under the current norms, the competition is entirely opaque. She's got 20 other dudes in her messages and you have no clue who any of them are, what they look like, what tactics they're using. I can't be effective at competition if I don't know what I'm up against.
But the blackpill is realizing the pool of women you're competing for is heavily tainted, and the supply of women you'd genuinely want to marry is shrinking. Relative to the population of guys that want to lock her down, your base odds are pretty horrendous. I did a not-well-received post in the CW war thread on this topic. If you want though, any of the mainstream LLM's will run an up-to-date calculation for you!
So the thought that I might have to be physically fighting other dudes to the death for the few remaining marriageable women crosses my mind occasionally. Thankfully I trained martial arts while many other guys just went for general aesthetics.
The Vantablack pill is noticing that you're not just competing with your peers... but professional athletes, millionaires/billionaires, and various boomers who are sitting in various positions of wealth, power, and authority and are happy to also snag the occasional 20-30 year old for a fling.
Elon Musk is going around inseminating women seemingly at will. We have no legal or social guardrail on this, so assume other billionaires and high status males do something similar, which again cuts into the supply of attractive, marriageable women. Historically this is closer to the norm for humans. So you, regular middle class dude whose family doesn't have old money, whose job is not high status, who doesn't own a company or have power over thousands of humans, who is locked out of positions of power by older generations who view you as a rival... sorry bud, you just don't get to reproduce unless the random lottery draw for one of the last few decent women comes up in your favor. So sad.
Sorry, didn't mean to get THAT dark, but I think this is representative of where a LOT of guys heads' are at, (remember that spree shooter in Canada with the manifesto, last month?) and there's no discussion of real solutions on the social level.
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