4 ms·

it seems like society has engineered itself into a real pickle as evidenced by all the hand-wringing articles on this topic. personally i find serious relation

it seems like society has engineered itself into a real pickle as evidenced by all the hand-wringing articles on this topic. personally i find serious relationships to be a giant waste of time, probably because i'm no good at maintaining them or i just don't check all the boxes, or whatever. i like dating and commitment-free sex, so i really don't have much incentive to improve. i'm basically financially independent so i don't really care about paying for things most people would split. in the few instances i've sincerely tried to keep it going, it ended after no particular incident/fight/whatever. just fizzled out, or a non-dramatic breakup over text message, which doesn't really bother me. these things come and go and i have no real hangups about attachment or have any dependence issues. personally i think there is no "fixing" this, at least for 20 or 30 years until a brand new generational cohort come into their 20s and 30s. non-immigrants are simply just going to get married less and have less children than were historically 'normal'.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
I like that you put "fixing" in quotes. People are of two minds. They think they want some things while their revealed preferences are different. Id vs. ego, maybe. There's good things about relationships, but I don't think anyone ever got into committed relationships for fun; I think they were forced into them by their environment (finances, family). It's good not to be forced into them, but then you lose the good things to be found in them. But people want to have their cake and eat it, which doesn't make sense. So it's not a black and white thing; even to a singular person, the "fix" or the "problem" may seem both good and bad. I'm skeptical about future generations though. If you frame "not having kids/serious relationships" as "bad", then I think things will continue to get "worse". :p There's nothing for future people to figure out; the incentives that were once in play will continue to erode. It's like expecting war deaths to decrease as weapons continue to grow in power. UNLESS you're talking about the state growing people in pods. And generally going transhuman/posthuman (and post-"relationship" and post-"two people fucking"). I think that's the ultimate future, and it's way better than the setup we've had traditionally in all but romance and current Overton window.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

I like that you put "fixing" in quotes. People are of two minds. They think they want some things while their revealed preferences are different. Id vs. ego, maybe. There's good things about relationships, but I don't think anyone ever got into committed relationships for fun; I think they were forced into them by their environment (finances, family). It's good not to be forced into them, but then you lose the good things to be found in them. But people want to have their cake and eat it, which doesn't make sense. So it's not a black and white thing; even to a singular person, the "fix" or the "problem" may seem both good and bad. I'm skeptical about future generations though. If you frame "not having kids/serious relationships" as "bad", then I think things will continue to get "worse". :p There's nothing for future people to figure out; the incentives that were once in play will continue to erode. It's like expecting war deaths to decrease as weapons continue to grow in power. UNLESS you're talking about the state growing people in pods. And generally going transhuman/posthuman (and post-"relationship" and post-"two people fucking"). I think that's the ultimate future, and it's way better than the setup we've had traditionally in all but romance and current Overton window.