38 ms·

I have a theory that contemporary life causes many people great despair, relating both to dating/relationships and career, because our culture is not very suppo

I have a theory that contemporary life causes many people great despair, relating both to dating/relationships and career, because our culture is not very supportive or accepting of personal growth. So, if you get off to a good start in your dating life and career from your late teens and early 20s, you get plenty of approval and validation and compounding success as you progress through life, and acceptance that you deserve the success you're having ("they were always a high achiever, ever since school days"). Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot. I suspect this has become more of an entrenched belief since the discovery of evolution/DNA, and the generally accepted belief that most of our life outcomes are predetermined by our inheritance. I think the dating apps (and employment recruitment platforms/techniques) intensify this further, by filtering based on a few simple characteristics, some of which really are genetically predetermined (height) and others that are downstream consequences of having had a blessed start in life (income/education level/job seniority/state of health). Society generally, including/especially the dating/employment spheres, don't seem to offer much support for people who really sincerely trying to undertake a journey of personal improvement (outside of mainstream accepted practices like conventional fitness training and education). You're just expected to be "good to go". Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members). I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth, and what kinds of social platforms, including dating and employment platforms, could emerge out of that and bring much more opportunity and satisfaction to people who currently feel the despair of being left behind.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head in a lot of aspects but I don't fully agree. Our society does endorse and actively support the virtues of personal growth. The issue is, as you pointed out, it only values the growth of those "chosen" to reach a high-percentile level at the end of their journey. There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity.
- sgu999 3y ago
  > There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity. I think it depends on how we define mediocrity. Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Ironically, despite being touted as individual work, this kind of success and excellence requires institutions to be recognized. > Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur". Or, unless you apply your skill into pursuing a bakery career, or a celebrity career (e.g. by running a baking channel on YouTube). Being good at something alone doesn't get you past being perceived as mediocre at best - you have to have an external institution attest for it. PhD, that's easy - the title is itself an attestation. Baking? Proof is in running a successful bakery[0], or in being called a great baker in mass media articles, or in running a popular baking show, etc. I guess that's implicit in the whole philosophy of "self-improvement" being conditioned on how others see you. -- [0] - However little sense this makes these days; "running business doing X" is 99% about "running business" and 1% about "doing X", and if you want money and control, you have to let other people to "do" X for you.
    - valyagolev 3y ago
      Never thought about it this way, but yeah makes a lot of sense. So the real approach should be: pick the kind of institution you care about first. Skill mastery might just end up being optional. To be honest, I'm rather surprised how good we have it those days, when good skills and hard work at least have a quite good chance to lead to a decent life
    - alwayslikethis 3y ago
      Ironically, by relying on institutions so much, the value of their recognition becomes reduced over time, and we get stuff like credential creep, university bureaucratic bloat, and general mistrust in academia.
mvncleaninst 3y ago
> Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot. You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice > I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth I think if you're motivated enough to do this, you're already motivated enough to go out and get the career success or love life or whatever you're after. Frankly doing that is probably simpler and more straightforward than "self discovery" or whatever. There's a Carlin bit for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg
- guerrilla 3y ago
  > You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice Right, this is why we can choose not to feel the pain of being punched in the face. No.
  - mvncleaninst 3y ago
    You're taking the word out of context and using a different definition of it
    - ravishi 3y ago
      You're literally "made to feel" certain ways. During your formative years someone was shouting you suck and generally acting as you're a burden and unwanted? You'll feel that shit for the rest of your life no matter what you "decide to think". It becomes ingrained in you. It becomes who you are. You can work on it like GP said and improve the situation but don't act like it's trivial or just a change of perspective. It isn't. It's like your body needs healing after a fractured bone. Your mind also needs that time and setting.
dmarchand90 3y ago
The only part I disagree with is the historical perspective. When was this time that people believed in personal growth? For most of history the nobels were nobels, peasants were peasants and that was that. If anything, the sense of having dynamic control of one's destiny throughout one's lifespan is a recent invention. (Well at least in the west)
- zemvpferreira 3y ago
  Absolutely with you. The great dissonance is between people's expectations and their reality, not the past and the present. Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
  - User23 3y ago
    > Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding. Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
    - abracadaniel 3y ago
      Reported happiness seems like a poor metric for comparison when the concept itself may be rather foreign to someone in the past. If your life is mostly hardship, you may not spend much time being introspective about how you feel about your plight. In a life of luxury, you have nothing but time to think about it and find things to critique. So, you may have an objectively better life, and overall more happiness, but report it as unhappy because there is more that you want to do that you feel should be achievable. Compared to someone who couldn’t comprehend their situation ever improving, so they. There is no basis for comparison of what it means to be happy between different life experiences.
WA 3y ago
In your analysis, it seems like the growing person should be recognized by the chosen class and be given a shot at relationships. Why though? If you don’t belong to the chosen class, find a partner that isn’t in the chosen class as well and grow together. Maybe I am mistaken, but this has a subtext of "I want to be recognized, but I don’t want to deal with disadvantaged people myself".
- tomhoward 3y ago
  Well, it’s not true of me, because I was lucky enough to find someone with whom to share a journey of growth (we got together in 2011, just before the dating apps took hold), and it’s worked out well for us. But I see what life is like for friends who are trying to find serious relationships/life partnerships via the apps, and how much it’s all geared towards being/seeming “the best” and finding “the right person”, and how brutal it is for their self esteem and life outlook (a good friend is at the age where she’s probably missed the chance to have children, having tried to find the right guy via the apps for many years). I often wonder how it could be better for her and other friends if there were apps/communities more geared towards finding people to grow with rather than finding someone who ticks the boxes now.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that your friend is struggling to find a long term partner. When I think about dating apps, they are mostly about cold introductions. If possible, you should try to do some warm introductions from her. It seems easier to break someone's heart with shitty behaviour from a cold introduction, than a warm introduction. Cold intros are relatively anonymous so you can hide after your bad behaviour. With a warm intro, if someone does something awful, their friends will probably learn about it.
- jwells89 3y ago
  In some ways it may be even more difficult to find a partner to grow with than one who has already grown and will give you a chance, because there’s more questions involved. Do they have the same capacity for growth? Are they as tenacious? Will they keep up their efforts after receiving the gratification of acceptance? Etc, etc.
gizmo 3y ago
In the "good old days" dating was simpler, but also much, much worse for the average woman. People dated within their town almost exclusively. The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly. That put a ton of pressure on the remaining women to quickly settle for an average guy in order not to be stuck with a terrible partner (an angry drunk or other kind of lowlife). Not marrying wasn't an option, and divorce wasn't an option. They had to choose, and their dating pool was small and constantly shrinking. Many women got stuck in unhappy marriages, but that was life. I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Women don't prefer being single. Women want a relationship - but with a hot tall confident rich guy their friends will be envious of who makes them feel butterflies ("chemistry"). That's the definition of the ideal boyfriend for most younger women. So the hot tall confident rich guys play the field, because they can. Worse, some of the hottest and most confident guys are narcissists - because narcissists and sociopaths are very good at seducing people with love bombing and future faking. Inexperienced women get their hearts broken and decide that all men are jerks - partly because at this stage the kind funny not-so-hot guys don't register as realistic prospects on their dating radar. There are subcultures within this, and there's certainly a niche of women who find clever, funny, and kind men more attractive than rich and tall etc men. But it's relatively small compared to most of the population. At the same time there's a strongly gender-polarised and adversarial (actually hate-filled) culture in the US where wannabe manly men who hate everything woke etc are in a permanent war with feminists who are convinced that all masculinity is toxic. It's not so much that "guys have to up their game" but that the entire culture is emotionally dysfunctional, and dating is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence where healthy give-and-take relationships aren't modelled at all. Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
oarfish 3y ago
The first paragraph put into words what i've always been intuitively convinced of, but it seems difficult to make people understand it who haven't had to live through it.
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
> contemporary life what you describing is human nature, the reality of it that people won't tell you directly. i don't think it's just something modern, most people have always been superficial, judgemental, tribal and so on.
posix86 3y ago
There are numerous studies confirming the effect you're speaking of, altough I'm not sure if dating apps have an influence on that. It was shown that certain national ice hockey teams were comprised mainly of players who were born at the beginning of the year. It is theorized that this is because the date that cuts one class for another is at the beginning of the year. If you're born in January, and you start playing hockey at 5, you're gonna be significantly older than a child that's born in december. As a result, you'll be recognized and helped more by your coach, which improves your chances of becoming better, and drags into adulthood, up until you're in the national team. The same applies for academic and professional careers and I'm sure dating as sell.
low_tech_love 3y ago
Humans are the same as we were for millennia, the problem is that we seem to be having a bit of a self-denial crisis nowadays. We just can’t accept our flaws anymore, apparently, so we build these fake meaningless narratives that “everyone is special” and “all bodies are beautiful” etc. The truth is that dating is brutal; it works very well for a few people, but for the majority of average people it is a hard competition to which nobody actually know the rules. It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being. So you find yourself in this situation where everyone is so nice and polite, so sophisticated and accepting, so inclusive, but for some reason nobody gives a single ** about having a romantic relationship with you. How’s that possible? Well it’s possible because it’s all fake. Deep inside, in our intimacy and our inner circles, we’re the same as we were a thousand years ago. The apps simply make it obvious and pull it to the surface.
- InSteady 3y ago
  Ugly people with lumpy bodies have been successfully reproducing for millennia. Many of them even had/have shit personalities to top it off. Dating sucks because in modern times we are coddled and are terrified of failure, many of us spend way too much time behind computer screens and on social media so our people skills have atrophied, and we also spend relatively little time around other people in fun and recreational environments so the opportunities are just missing in a massive way. The apps completely change how we perceive ourselves and our potential sexual partners. I can't believe I have to say this, but the biggest things that have changed with regards to dating in the past 10 years vs the past 1,000 are social patterns and technology. >It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being. This kind of attitude is so harmful. If your life's purpose is 100% dependent on some idealized stranger granting you validation you are in for a bad time. Sex is great, biological imperatives are powerful, but you wont find animals falling into existential dread and despair because they haven't gotten laid yet (or recently). That is a particularly human trait, and it comes from obsessive and self-defeating beliefs about the world rather than reality itself. You might feel like this belief is out of your hands, but it very much is not. Your beliefs are one of the few things in this world that are entirely up to you to change and improve upon (or not).
ruiisnwn 3y ago
[dead]
tester756 3y ago
>Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members). What makes you think so?
throwaway2037 3y ago
You are confounding social and professional outcomes. Social to me is much more genetic (looks, personality, etc.) than professional. Yes, IQ matters some for professional success. Grit, aka "The Grind" is probably the number one indicator of success. I'm not saying everyone can grind to wealthy, but almost everyone can grind to middle class. And the grind applies to all types of jobs -- professional or not, high income or not, corporate or start-up. Also, you wrote your post (I assume) from the perspective of a man. Even the most unattractive women on dating apps get far more attention than the most attractive men. This has been shown time and time again. Also, most men are invisible to women, but the reverse is not true. (Do not read this post as disparaging towards women.) What is really happening is that visual-only dating apps are refining the purest biological imperatives: women only seek the best physical mates (top 20%), where as men pursue whatever they can. As a result, most men get zero attention on dating apps. The craziest irony to me: I grew up before the Internet and dating apps became a thing. RARELY did I hear women talk about finding an attractive mate. They wanted to find someone compatible and supportive with good long term intentions. These visual-only dating apps have weirdly inverted the world as most women chase the very best men... who treat them terribly, but are very good looking and have a lot of practice seducing women. Rinse and repeat; almost everyone on dating apps except for the very top are much less satisfied than life before dating apps.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head in a lot of aspects but I don't fully agree. Our society does endorse and actively support the virtues of personal growth. The issue is, as you pointed out, it only values the growth of those "chosen" to reach a high-percentile level at the end of their journey. There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity.

sgu999 3y ago
> There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity. I think it depends on how we define mediocrity. Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Ironically, despite being touted as individual work, this kind of success and excellence requires institutions to be recognized. > Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur". Or, unless you apply your skill into pursuing a bakery career, or a celebrity career (e.g. by running a baking channel on YouTube). Being good at something alone doesn't get you past being perceived as mediocre at best - you have to have an external institution attest for it. PhD, that's easy - the title is itself an attestation. Baking? Proof is in running a successful bakery[0], or in being called a great baker in mass media articles, or in running a popular baking show, etc. I guess that's implicit in the whole philosophy of "self-improvement" being conditioned on how others see you. -- [0] - However little sense this makes these days; "running business doing X" is 99% about "running business" and 1% about "doing X", and if you want money and control, you have to let other people to "do" X for you.
  - valyagolev 3y ago
    Never thought about it this way, but yeah makes a lot of sense. So the real approach should be: pick the kind of institution you care about first. Skill mastery might just end up being optional. To be honest, I'm rather surprised how good we have it those days, when good skills and hard work at least have a quite good chance to lead to a decent life
  - alwayslikethis 3y ago
    Ironically, by relying on institutions so much, the value of their recognition becomes reduced over time, and we get stuff like credential creep, university bureaucratic bloat, and general mistrust in academia.

mvncleaninst 3y ago

> Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot. You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice > I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth I think if you're motivated enough to do this, you're already motivated enough to go out and get the career success or love life or whatever you're after. Frankly doing that is probably simpler and more straightforward than "self discovery" or whatever. There's a Carlin bit for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg

guerrilla 3y ago
> You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice Right, this is why we can choose not to feel the pain of being punched in the face. No.
- mvncleaninst 3y ago
  You're taking the word out of context and using a different definition of it
  - ravishi 3y ago
    You're literally "made to feel" certain ways. During your formative years someone was shouting you suck and generally acting as you're a burden and unwanted? You'll feel that shit for the rest of your life no matter what you "decide to think". It becomes ingrained in you. It becomes who you are. You can work on it like GP said and improve the situation but don't act like it's trivial or just a change of perspective. It isn't. It's like your body needs healing after a fractured bone. Your mind also needs that time and setting.

dmarchand90 3y ago

The only part I disagree with is the historical perspective. When was this time that people believed in personal growth? For most of history the nobels were nobels, peasants were peasants and that was that. If anything, the sense of having dynamic control of one's destiny throughout one's lifespan is a recent invention. (Well at least in the west)

zemvpferreira 3y ago
Absolutely with you. The great dissonance is between people's expectations and their reality, not the past and the present. Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
- User23 3y ago
  > Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding. Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
  - abracadaniel 3y ago
    Reported happiness seems like a poor metric for comparison when the concept itself may be rather foreign to someone in the past. If your life is mostly hardship, you may not spend much time being introspective about how you feel about your plight. In a life of luxury, you have nothing but time to think about it and find things to critique. So, you may have an objectively better life, and overall more happiness, but report it as unhappy because there is more that you want to do that you feel should be achievable. Compared to someone who couldn’t comprehend their situation ever improving, so they. There is no basis for comparison of what it means to be happy between different life experiences.

WA 3y ago

In your analysis, it seems like the growing person should be recognized by the chosen class and be given a shot at relationships. Why though? If you don’t belong to the chosen class, find a partner that isn’t in the chosen class as well and grow together. Maybe I am mistaken, but this has a subtext of "I want to be recognized, but I don’t want to deal with disadvantaged people myself".

tomhoward 3y ago
Well, it’s not true of me, because I was lucky enough to find someone with whom to share a journey of growth (we got together in 2011, just before the dating apps took hold), and it’s worked out well for us. But I see what life is like for friends who are trying to find serious relationships/life partnerships via the apps, and how much it’s all geared towards being/seeming “the best” and finding “the right person”, and how brutal it is for their self esteem and life outlook (a good friend is at the age where she’s probably missed the chance to have children, having tried to find the right guy via the apps for many years). I often wonder how it could be better for her and other friends if there were apps/communities more geared towards finding people to grow with rather than finding someone who ticks the boxes now.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that your friend is struggling to find a long term partner. When I think about dating apps, they are mostly about cold introductions. If possible, you should try to do some warm introductions from her. It seems easier to break someone's heart with shitty behaviour from a cold introduction, than a warm introduction. Cold intros are relatively anonymous so you can hide after your bad behaviour. With a warm intro, if someone does something awful, their friends will probably learn about it.
jwells89 3y ago
In some ways it may be even more difficult to find a partner to grow with than one who has already grown and will give you a chance, because there’s more questions involved. Do they have the same capacity for growth? Are they as tenacious? Will they keep up their efforts after receiving the gratification of acceptance? Etc, etc.

gizmo 3y ago

In the "good old days" dating was simpler, but also much, much worse for the average woman. People dated within their town almost exclusively. The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly. That put a ton of pressure on the remaining women to quickly settle for an average guy in order not to be stuck with a terrible partner (an angry drunk or other kind of lowlife). Not marrying wasn't an option, and divorce wasn't an option. They had to choose, and their dating pool was small and constantly shrinking. Many women got stuck in unhappy marriages, but that was life. I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Women don't prefer being single. Women want a relationship - but with a hot tall confident rich guy their friends will be envious of who makes them feel butterflies ("chemistry"). That's the definition of the ideal boyfriend for most younger women. So the hot tall confident rich guys play the field, because they can. Worse, some of the hottest and most confident guys are narcissists - because narcissists and sociopaths are very good at seducing people with love bombing and future faking. Inexperienced women get their hearts broken and decide that all men are jerks - partly because at this stage the kind funny not-so-hot guys don't register as realistic prospects on their dating radar. There are subcultures within this, and there's certainly a niche of women who find clever, funny, and kind men more attractive than rich and tall etc men. But it's relatively small compared to most of the population. At the same time there's a strongly gender-polarised and adversarial (actually hate-filled) culture in the US where wannabe manly men who hate everything woke etc are in a permanent war with feminists who are convinced that all masculinity is toxic. It's not so much that "guys have to up their game" but that the entire culture is emotionally dysfunctional, and dating is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence where healthy give-and-take relationships aren't modelled at all. Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?

oarfish 3y ago

The first paragraph put into words what i've always been intuitively convinced of, but it seems difficult to make people understand it who haven't had to live through it.

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

> contemporary life what you describing is human nature, the reality of it that people won't tell you directly. i don't think it's just something modern, most people have always been superficial, judgemental, tribal and so on.

posix86 3y ago

There are numerous studies confirming the effect you're speaking of, altough I'm not sure if dating apps have an influence on that. It was shown that certain national ice hockey teams were comprised mainly of players who were born at the beginning of the year. It is theorized that this is because the date that cuts one class for another is at the beginning of the year. If you're born in January, and you start playing hockey at 5, you're gonna be significantly older than a child that's born in december. As a result, you'll be recognized and helped more by your coach, which improves your chances of becoming better, and drags into adulthood, up until you're in the national team. The same applies for academic and professional careers and I'm sure dating as sell.

low_tech_love 3y ago

Humans are the same as we were for millennia, the problem is that we seem to be having a bit of a self-denial crisis nowadays. We just can’t accept our flaws anymore, apparently, so we build these fake meaningless narratives that “everyone is special” and “all bodies are beautiful” etc. The truth is that dating is brutal; it works very well for a few people, but for the majority of average people it is a hard competition to which nobody actually know the rules. It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being. So you find yourself in this situation where everyone is so nice and polite, so sophisticated and accepting, so inclusive, but for some reason nobody gives a single ** about having a romantic relationship with you. How’s that possible? Well it’s possible because it’s all fake. Deep inside, in our intimacy and our inner circles, we’re the same as we were a thousand years ago. The apps simply make it obvious and pull it to the surface.

InSteady 3y ago
Ugly people with lumpy bodies have been successfully reproducing for millennia. Many of them even had/have shit personalities to top it off. Dating sucks because in modern times we are coddled and are terrified of failure, many of us spend way too much time behind computer screens and on social media so our people skills have atrophied, and we also spend relatively little time around other people in fun and recreational environments so the opportunities are just missing in a massive way. The apps completely change how we perceive ourselves and our potential sexual partners. I can't believe I have to say this, but the biggest things that have changed with regards to dating in the past 10 years vs the past 1,000 are social patterns and technology. >It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being. This kind of attitude is so harmful. If your life's purpose is 100% dependent on some idealized stranger granting you validation you are in for a bad time. Sex is great, biological imperatives are powerful, but you wont find animals falling into existential dread and despair because they haven't gotten laid yet (or recently). That is a particularly human trait, and it comes from obsessive and self-defeating beliefs about the world rather than reality itself. You might feel like this belief is out of your hands, but it very much is not. Your beliefs are one of the few things in this world that are entirely up to you to change and improve upon (or not).

ruiisnwn 3y ago

[dead]

tester756 3y ago

>Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members). What makes you think so?

throwaway2037 3y ago

You are confounding social and professional outcomes. Social to me is much more genetic (looks, personality, etc.) than professional. Yes, IQ matters some for professional success. Grit, aka "The Grind" is probably the number one indicator of success. I'm not saying everyone can grind to wealthy, but almost everyone can grind to middle class. And the grind applies to all types of jobs -- professional or not, high income or not, corporate or start-up. Also, you wrote your post (I assume) from the perspective of a man. Even the most unattractive women on dating apps get far more attention than the most attractive men. This has been shown time and time again. Also, most men are invisible to women, but the reverse is not true. (Do not read this post as disparaging towards women.) What is really happening is that visual-only dating apps are refining the purest biological imperatives: women only seek the best physical mates (top 20%), where as men pursue whatever they can. As a result, most men get zero attention on dating apps. The craziest irony to me: I grew up before the Internet and dating apps became a thing. RARELY did I hear women talk about finding an attractive mate. They wanted to find someone compatible and supportive with good long term intentions. These visual-only dating apps have weirdly inverted the world as most women chase the very best men... who treat them terribly, but are very good looking and have a lot of practice seducing women. Rinse and repeat; almost everyone on dating apps except for the very top are much less satisfied than life before dating apps.