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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why do we expect and encourage the unattractive to have relationships? Yes. Disabled and ugly people deserve a shot at happiness. But there's a hell of a lot of suffering and tragedy that goes on there, and it may well be imprudent to bring children into that. If you're a dude who is 5'4" the least-bad outcome you can reasonably expect is marrying a woman twice your weight and watching her wind up in a nursing home age 44 because she sprained her ankle and couldn't take care of herself after that. And it only gets worse from there: I've known short guys who were with women that were child abusers. Serious shit - as in 'attempted murder' serious. It's no better for unattractive women: there's rapists and abusers and shitbags aplenty. Single motherhood isn't nice either.

I honestly don't get it: if you're unattractive as hell, whether that's partially in your control or not, dating and relationships will suck for you unless you are genuinely exceptional. The only short guy I knew that did OK with dating was a neurosurgery resident with enough charisma for a career in politics. The autistic woman I'm friends with - an emergency-medicine resident in California - wound up enduring a couple relationships with predatory, abusive shitbags before finding a decent guy. Shit fucking sucks, and there's a good chance that the best you're going to get is going to be straight up tragic.

  • -15

Ignoring the strangely binary classification you present, it is true that there are people for whom anything in life will be much harder than for others, through no fault of their own. I don’t think we should lie to them, but is it not the most noble expression of the human spirit to strive to overcome our own limitations?

Is it not better to want to succed as Nick Vujicic has than to be a basement-dwelling NEET? Would it be a better world if no one other than Usain Bolt ran track or no one other than Elon Musk tried to start their own company? Do we not respect people more who earned what they have through the sweat of their brow rather than had everything handed to them on a silver platter?

I think he’s a bit extreme, but he has a point. And it’s not just that they’re going to suck at dating or whatever, but that we as a society for whatever reason in most aspects of life oversell it, and while most of us get it quickly, for those with deficits, it can be extremely frustrating because you’re told it’s possible when it’s not. We tell kids who can barely do high school math that they can get rich doing something they love. Probably not true. A LD kid especially as we move into an AI world is probably going to be doing menial labor for very low wages. An autistic kid is told that he can date a good looking, well adjusted woman when realistically, no he won’t. Americans just seem to have a problem in general admitting that not everyone can have a good life.

I mean, fundamentally it isn't the job of society as a whole to give people this advice because society includes groups of people who need to hear contradictory things. People who are too assertive need to be told to be quiet and people who are too shy need to be told to assert themselves, people who are smart but lazy need to be told to buckle down and study engineering and medicine and people who are too dumb to master such subjects should be discouraged from going into STEM, etc. It should be the responsibility of one's parents, other relatives, and friends to give such targeted advice in private, but I would agree that among all the peoples in the world Americans seem uniquely unable to do so.