The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Notes -
Anyone have thoughts on the Huberman article run by NY Magazine? He apparently was dating 5+ women simultaneously, letting each of them believe he was only dating them, and therefore it would be safe to have unprotected sex.
My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?
On further thought, I wonder if he didn't want to do the poly thing because you'd have to go through the process of electing a #1 girlfriend that you can swap fluids with, and then for girlfriends #2-5 you have to use condoms and that's no fun.
But on even more advanced thought, perhaps this is a signal that poly is actually pretty low status? If an adored sensitive smart hot famous-ish science-y guy can't even be honest about his sexual desires and find suitable partners, again, in the Bay Area (!), that suggests poly has a very, very long road to general acceptance.
I've got a good quantity of thoughts on it, in that I've listened to a ton of Huberman stuff, bought supplements from Momentous, etc. and was sent the article by a ton of friends.
-- DeBoer wrote on it. He commented that the article feels five years out of date, in that it presents itself as a hit piece but fails to deliver the goods. At the height of #metoo it might have hurt Huberman's business, and tbh I'm considering downloading some episodes in case content disappears, but post Tara Reid it mostly gets a yawn except among fans and the bitter-end-feminists
-- This is a case where understanding Sexual Market Value and basic economics makes things a lot clearer. I mostly agree with @2rafa (as usual) on the normal ranking of male relationship states, though it needs a 6 or a 4.5 depending on the man: Never getting laid at all. What we're seeing here is largely Hubes in his 40s going from "Kinda lumpy looking Stanford professor" to "moderate internet celebrity" and that changed his dating options. He went from a guy who could get a normie girl at a 4 or a 3 on @2rafa's scale, to a guy who could get multiple internet hotties to work toward a 2 or a 1. I've never experienced anything like Huberman's level of celebrity, but his behavior largely mirrors at a larger scale my brief fuckboi phase at 18-19, when I realized that girls might actually want to sleep with me. There's a mix of suddenly feeling like a kid in a candy store, and a scarcity poverty mindset of feeling like you need to warehouse as many of these girls as you can because surely they're going to reject you any second now, a sort of sexual imposter syndrome where you can't let go of your old assessment of yourself. I've noticed this with a lot of men over my life, when they suddenly get rich or lose the weight or otherwise experience a glow-up. They fuck around, because they have the option to do so, and because it is novel and fun, and because they feel like the opportunity is fleeting.
-- This all clearly relates back to @Walterodim's post in the main thread about the urge to label fitness as fascist. They keep trying to hint darkly at Huberman's pipeline of "optimizers" and their weird habits. Given, I have a meathead tendency to want to know the bench press of everyone complaining about him, I really do think a lot of hatred towards Hubes and his Optimizers is simple jealousy. Fat out of shape slobs want the guys who wake up at 430am, meditate, lift weights, and take a cold shower to be losers for some other reason. Because to accept that Huberman is just doing things better than you are is a deep psychic injury, his actions must be evil for some unseen reason.
-- It's amazing how weaksauce their accusations of Charlatan-ry against Hubes are. Athletic Greens probably isn't as good as they say it is, but it isn't harmful either. And they didn't even touch Momentous in any detail, probably because they couldn't come up with anything. They couldn't point to any of his content that was really harmful. Either they didn't do any research, or he really is that whistle-clean. I do think that Huberman's podcast suffers from needing to put out content, though less so than most fitness influencers, with a constant stream of things you should be doing. Huberman, at least by his own account, actually does follow too many confusing protocols, claiming for example that he saunas regularly but puts an ice pack in his shorts to keep his balls chilly, which is just colossal levels of weird. Any given episode may be great, but trying to do it all at once will end in nonsense for most people.
-- There's this weird strain of thought among some extremely online femcels that a man who talks with emotional competence is actually a crypto-abuser using therapy-talk to manipulate women. I noticed this a lot on podcasts for the current season of The Bachelor, with Joey being regarded skeptically for trying to listen to girls play their Personal Trauma Cards and gas them up about how strong they are, with some women praising him and others engaging in Backlash because he's surely secretly evil. And for the most part I think what we're seeing with both Joey and Hubes is: they were being a good boyfriend, but they didn't pick you and that's upsetting because they were a good boyfriend. I got the feeling from the little we heard from these women that they would have been perfectly happy with Hubes if he had picked them.
-- Everybody, if you don't want shit like this to happen, don't commit and don't expect commitment until you get married, or at the very least are on a glide path to a definite date of marriage. Don't move in with a boy/girl-friend, for Christ's sake don't do IVF without a ring. If you like it than you should have (made him) put a ring on it. I have very limited sympathy for "cheating" in an LTR that seems to have no plans for marriage. You get what you put up with.
I don’t think it’s this. I think it’s that many women realize that there is a subcategory of men who pretty ruthlessly optimize every aspect of their lives to get laid and who don’t really care about any moral or ethical issues, telling the truth or whether people get hurt along the way.
What's the moral/ethical issue with optimizing for getting laid? Other than straight up lying, I can't think of anything, but lying is bad in any context.
I don’t think trying to get laid is necessarily bad, but lying to people and giving them STDs surely is, as is infidelity more generally.,
Okay, but those 3 things are not exactly what one thinks of optimizing for getting laid.
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Nothing, really.
But it makes women feel less Wonderful, less of Strong Independent #BossBabes, the thought that they’re but passive objects, NPCs or lootboxes, for which men can strategize or play the numbers game.
Courtship and romance, from the view of women generally, should be something that just happens like a magical act of God.
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