author:faceh recession
Presuming those relationships last.
Which is a sizeable "if" in the current era. That's why I think the AI companion is a possible death blow. Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down, this becomes the 'best alternative'/substitute good.
This thought only just now occurs to me, but if we took two otherwise similar guys, one who married a woman and another who just went all in on an AI companion, bought VR goggles, tactile feedback, the requisite 'toys' to make it feel real, and such.
And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone, and these two guys meet up to compare their overall situations.
And the other guy is still 'with' his AI companion, shallow as it is... would he feel better or worse off than the guy who had a wife but couldn't keep her.
You are basing your worldview on random ragebait TikTok videos
Uh, No.
I've basing it on literally years of research on the topic:
I've researched the Low TFR Issue
I've researched the legal and economic side of it. Pointed out how corporations are technically competing with men for women's commitment.
I brought up the "how many marriageable women are actually out there question literally a year ago, then I ran some very rough numbers.
I've pontificated on why intersex relations have degraded over two years ago.
I've even researched the age-gap question.
This includes talking to real people, I can offhand name a dozen people in my circle experiencing the EXACT. SAME. ISSUES.
I beg you to try and give me some data that I haven't seen yet. You came in and assumed off of 3 comments that I've somehow NOT bothered to look into this issue at every level I can?
In fact, I've put in a LOT of effort to try to find the evidence that runs against this point, but in this search I keep finding videos like the ones I posted, which seem to confirm the data, the anecdotes, the personal experience. All of it pointing in the same direction.
Your attempt to dismiss my point out of hand without a single argument has been noted, and my opinion has remained utterly unchanged.
But anyway, that should be an advantage for you. Getting a nice haircut, moisturising regularly and buying a few well fitting fashionable outfits will already set you apart from the crowd.
This is not a problem for me. I am not the one who needs to hear this advice.
I am the one telling you this advice is useless for most men under current conditions and you sound like a Boomer telling someone to sharpen up their resume and give the manager a firm handshake to get hired.
Nope.
The situation has given women more options, which has led to them being more selective.
For the young folks, there's a general recession in sex and in Relationships, which is especially pointed amongst men. Its baked in, young men who don't get experience dating while young will just have a harder time getting dates going forward.
"Women are easier than ever" only holds true for the subset of men that women find attractive on a basic physical level.
Dating Apps, for instance, heavily favor women and the small subset of men who are getting laid left and right and, likewise, have no incentive to settle or commit. Which just makes the women they interact with bitter.
This is supported by virtually every statistic you can find on the matter. You can't self-improve your way out of a game that is rigged against you.
Its harder for everyone else across the board.
but chances you’ll get off on pussy 10x more if you give it a shot.
Men don't just want pussy, they want a meaningful, committed relationship within which they can start a family.
This advice is just not going to work for the vast majority of young men, no matter how much it is repeated.
Now what?
faceh
1mo ago
That's about it.
Even bringing up the relationship recession to make the complaint marks you as lower status. "Lol this guy can't get dates!"
And yet, if the problem doesn't get acknowledged, it all just stays in the 'positivity' loop. "You'll find someone eventually, just make yourself better and it'll get easier" even as the objective facts show this is simply untrue.
And finally, people who won already and have committed relationships have less reason to pay attention to this issue, and are more likely to assume the complaints are overblown, and so join the chorus of voices dismissing the speakers sounding the alarm.
faceh
1mo ago
Meet girls IRL
That's not how couples meet anymore. Especially among young people, who don't get out much anyway, they grew up in the digital world, and Covid made this even sharper. You can't meet Gen Z girls by just 'going out.'
The gender ratios in most public spaces are skewed towards men, which also makes women more averse to being approached over and over agan.
Women can get on the dating apps or any social media site and get all the attention she wants, so there's no need for her to entertain IRL offers.
Is it THAT hard?
Now what.
It seems to me that you just have a chip on your shoulder about the guy.
I have a chip on my shoulder about a few guys who regularly make subtly fallacious arguments in favor of a position they support but who will never actually defend those arguments when pressed by someone with subject-area knowledge. As in, I've had to watch time and time again when somebody points out the error in the logic or brings in their own, seemingly superior data and these people will ignore it entirely and/or shift to a slightly different position.
Intellectual cowardice is an ongoing pet peeve of mine. All the moreso by parties who make their living on their analysis of reality. They seem to fill a niche that's a step above "blowhard cable news pundit" where people who want their priors confirmed but also want to think they're not being fed a line of biased tripe like the proles.
Again, this became blatant with Noah suddenly coming to the realization back in October that YES, the Left houses a LARGE amount of antisemitism whilst Conservatives/righties have been pointing this out for a really long time. He's happy to believe that the right tolerates antisemites and condemn them for it, because that fits his preferred conclusions. Simple.
I went back to his feed again and now I had to read the gem "Nuclear is a niche product." Which is 'true' in the broad sense (it is niche because nobody is allowed to build it!) but then he declares solar the superior product and when somebody reasonably calls him out on this he wouldn't even deign to respond.
"Nuclear is a niche product! Solar is our best bet!"
"Wait, by any fair definition Solar is in fact very niche and will remain that way for years to come, what are you basing that on?"
Clearly he's just engagement baiting at this point, but again, this is all decreasing the quality of discourse, and somehow this guy makes his living by the quality of his input to discussions. Compare that to Zeihan's take on the same issue, which means we can actually compare their accuracy down the road.
I've been going through some of Zeihan's predictions and he's a typical doomer, with all the bad predictions that come along with that. E.g. he made a very strong prediction that China would collapse in 10 years, and I don't think we need to wait another 6 years to see if this comes true.
On the other hand, I've yet to hear the good counterargument that demographic collapse won't inevitably lead to certain nations experiencing massive internal chaos.
China currently depends on imports for its basic energy and food needs, and the primary value they have to trade is a massive labor pool and, more recently, massive pool of consumers. And they admit that this pool is about to shrink sharply because the country's TFR has been well below replacement for decades now.
The cascade of effects seems straightforward:
- Shrinking population leads to fewer laborers AND consumers of end products.
- This decreases their ability to provide value to the global market.
- Which in turn decreases their ability to afford imports for energy and food.
- Which immediately threatens internal stability, as they will have to revert a lot more labor to their agricultural sector. i.e. deindustrialize.
- Which further decreases the labor pool available to provide value to the international markets, further hurting their economy.
- A bunch of people who got used to rising living standards suddenly see living standards crater.
- Unrest.
Which of these steps is wrong, or where can the CCP intervene to avert the end state?
He's been pointing out that the U.S. efforts to secure the seas for private vessels are likely to decrease, and with the Houthis continuing to interfere with shipping in the Red Sea there's already plenty of signs that this is accurate.
I see the Reddit comment and yeah, he definitely blew the 'two year' prediction and I'd not expect anything like that to occur even in the next two years, but I actually agree that we're in 'witching hour' times, where fat tailed impacts can occur on short time scales.
Indeed, the main reason I'm not a full doomer myself is that I'm seeing two possible futures, one where AI and automation lives up to the hype and manages to usher in a new industrial revolution, and one where things spiral out of control before we get true benefits from AI and we end up in a deep global recession. I honestly couldn't tell you which is more likely, but I don't see a likely future where we kind of just muddle along on the current path without something giving way.
Noah seems to try to put the optimist spin on things but doesn't seem to actually want to engage with the doomer's case in earnest. He mostly seems to say "line has been going up in the past, I believe line will go up in future." Which is fine... but not useful.
faceh
1yr ago
Different question. Nobody contests that 2008-2010 was a 'bad economy' (we can also look an unemployment rates to get an inkling).
The issue here is that many metrics are currently showing a 'good' economy and yet, for individuals with bills to pay and debts to service, they might not have a positive outlook based on their actual material circumstances.
Do you note how debt rates were rising as we headed into 2008. That is to say, could we interpret rising debt as sign of a pending recession/correction?
Or, more precisely, what do you think happens when millions of people are overleveraged and then many of them default on debt and/or go bankrupt (or literal banks go out of business) at the same time?
Why isn't that happening currently?
The reason the feel of this economy is off is because people can still remember how things were going Pre-Covid, and they have a keen recollection of how much was 'lost' during the Covid period, and one can easily argue that we have not yet 're-established' the baseline from before, and with the current interest rates, we might not be able to anytime soon.
What is absolutely fair to say is that we avoided a serious recession resulting from Covid and the attendant restrictions.
But if you're an average American, you've likely depleted most of your personal savings., you've got a high car payment ("affordable" used cars aren't a thing anymore), and may be in default on the loan, your rent has increased around 30% since 2019.
Of course with savings depleted, more people will start financing purchases/using credit cards. In a rising-interest-rate environment.
Oh, and Student Loan payments just resumed after a LONG hiatus.. It's hard to feel good about higher wages if you can directly observe that most of the extra money is going to service debt and you can't actually put much of it away for later. It feels even worse if your overall debt continues to rise so you're treading water rather than making actual headway towards reducing your indebtedness.
So if you were motivated to convince people they were doing well, economically speaking, you could isolate the variable declaring that wages are up so you can say "stop complaining things have reverted to the pre-covid norm!"
But if you were to ask a simple-ish question: "Are you materially better or worse off today than you were in 2019?" I would hazard a guess that most people are 'struggling' to maintain their standard of living more than before, and this feeling comes through.
Now, my own personal concern is that we've already used up a bunch of economic 'slack' during Covid times, Putin started further troubles, and oh golly gee the Middle East is now acting up again. So at some point we have to start rebuilding our reserves for some possible future shock, and few seem interested in doing that. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was depleted to historic lows and, as of yet, has not begun to be refilled.
It is nowhere near empty, mind, I just find this illustrative of the situation. We burned a lot of spare capacity and we still seem to be teetering on a precipice, what else can we deploy if we actually tip over the edge?
Hahahhh I feel your pain. I finally started making consistent decent money post-Covid and when I went to look at buying some of the luxury items I'd been looking forward to owning someday, I got massive sticker shock. I understand that prices tend to rise over time but one doesn't expect to see them DOUBLE, in some cases, over a mere three years.
Also, inflation 'rewards' people who took on lots of debt by devaluing said debt so I feel emphatically annoyed for taking pains to save/invest as much money as I reasonably could during the uncertainty of Covid times, when it seems like I should have racked up debt while interest rates were low. Although if recession hits that saved wealth might come in handy.
Honestly, I think the major factor currently pushing prices up aside from Covid spending is the ongoing labor shortage. Because whenever I go to price services the labor costs seem to be a driving factor in the price. Any construction job, food prep, or 'unskilled' labor (like lawn care or pool cleaning!) is just ridiculously expensive. Likewise, so many industries seem to be bogged down due to difficulty hiring enough people to fully staff up.
The inability to hire enough people to do the necessary work is going to have run-on impacts due to the drag on productivity. This ALSO creates upward pressure on wages but when there's literally not enough workers it puts a hard cap on economic activity.
Amazing to think that "FIGHT FOR FIFTEEN!" was a lefty mantra for raising minimum wage to a 'livable' level, then events transpired that made $15/hr pretty fucking standard in most areas as large companies get more desperate to hire.
I often think of the possibility that ML is right now our best and maybe only chance to avoid some massive economic downturns due to a whole hell of a lot of chickens coming home to roost all at the same time.
I will ignore the AI doomer arguments which would suggest protracted economic pain is preferable to complete annihilation of the human species for these purposes.
I am in a state of mind where I'm not sure whether we're about to see a new explosion in productivity akin to a new industrial revolution as we get space-based industry (Starship), broad-scale automation of most industries and boosted productivity, and a massive boost in human lifespans thanks to bio/medical breakthroughs... OR
Maybe we're about to see a global recession as energy prices spike, the boomer generation retires and switches from production and investment to straight consumption or widespread unrest as policies seek to avert this problem, international relations (and thus trade) sour, even if there's no outright war, and a general collapse in living standards in virtually everywhere but North America.
How the hell should one place bets when the near-term future could be a sharp downward spike OR a sharp exponential curve upwards? Yes, one should assume that things continue along at approximately the same rate they always have. Status quo is usually the best bet, but ALL the news I'm seeing is more than sufficient to overcome my baseline skepticism.
But the possible collapse due to demographic, economic, and geopolitical issues seems inevitable in a way that the gains from Machine Learning do not.
The problem, which you gesture at, is that this world is going to be very heavily centralized and thus will be very unequal at the very least in terms of power and possibly in terms of wealth.
ALREADY, ChatGPT is showing how this would work. Rather than a wild, unbounded internet full of various sites that contain information that you may want to use, and thus thousands upon thousands of people maintaining these different information sources, you've got a single site, with a single interface, which can answer any question you may have just as well.
Which is great as a consumer, except now ALL that information is controlled by a single entity and locked away in a black box where you can only get at it via an interface which they can choose to lock you out of arbitrarily. If you previously ran a site that contained all the possible information about, I dunno, various strains of bananas and their practical uses, such that you were the preferred one-stop shop resource for banana aficionados and the banana-curious, you now cannot possibly hope to compete with an AI interface which contains all human-legible information about bananas, but also tomatoes, cucumbers, papayas, and every other fruit or vegetable that people might be curious about.
So you shut down your site, and now the ONLY place to get all that banana-related info is through ChatGPT.
This does not bode well, to me.
And this applies to other ML models too. Once there's a trained model that is better at identifying cavities than almost any human expert, this is now the only place anyone will go to get opinions about cavities.
The one thing about wealth inequality, however, is that it's pretty fucking cheap to become a capital-owner. For $300 you can own a piece of Microsoft. See my aforementioned issues about being unsure where to bet, though. Basically, I'm dumping money into companies that are likely to explode in a future of ubiquitous ML and AI models.
Of course, if ML/AI gets way, WAY better at capital allocation than most human experts, we hit a weird point where your best bet is to ask BuffetGPT where you should put your money for maximum returns based on your time horizon, and again this means that the ONLY place people will trust their money is the the best and most proven ML model for investment decisions.
Actually, this seems like a plausible future for humanity, where competing AI are unleashed on the stock market and are constantly moving money around at blinding speeds (and occasionally going broke) trying to outmaneuver each other and all humans can do is entrust one or several of these AIs with their own funds and pray they picked a good one.
Well broadly if you ask them, they can't find men that meet their standards.
Maybe its politics.
Maybe its the money.
Maybe its about the weight
But its broadly women who are passing on men, not the other way around. Which explains both the large number of single women AND the fact that apparently desirable men remain single.
And the fact that half of Gen Z men are just giving up.
And young women are significantly less likely to report being single.
For those that are:
DESPITE this, young single men report greater interest in dating than young single women:
This doesn't make sense if MEN are the ones passing on women.
So yeah.
That's been my point all along and I haven't seen a single piece of data that would refute it, yet.
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