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Notes -
A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
Competence and self-direction are virtues in men, so we expect men to get attainably competent at things that are important to them.
Our hero might not start as an amazing shoe-salesmen. But, I'd expect him to get good enough to hold down a retail job at a shoe store, especially with a few years of trying.
Applying that to dating: The background belief is that it's not that hard for an otherwise healthy guy to get into a relationship, or at least go on some dates.
So, if a guy isn't dating, then the assumption is that he has a lack-of-ambition issue (he's not asking anyone out), a lack-of-skill issue (every woman rejects him), or a lack-of-interest-in-adult-women issue (... what is he interested in?). None of those are especially flattering.
There are plenty of people here that could not do this: not even if they were as dedicated to their craft as say Paul Ekman was dedicated to the study of facial expressions. It would - I shit you not - be easier for some of the people here to become literal rocket scientists (or at least aerospace engineers). I am not joking.
This seems silly and self-aggrandizing.
I don't believe that otherwise healthy people are putting engineering-degree levels of effort into learning to hold down basic retail job. If someone's telling you that they spent thousands of hours, with engineer-student level focus, and can't hack it at Payless Shoes, then I think they're lying to you.
Maybe he could hack it at Payless Shoes because he's an hourly worker that just has to know a bunch about shoes and show up on time in clean clothes. But selling something like insurance or used cars? There are a fair number of engineers that wouldn't be able to do that.
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