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367 sats \ 36 replies \ @grayruby 11 Dec \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
This is very depressing. I definitely agree with the casinoification of the economy. All these apps that were designed to democratize and gamify both finance and sports betting paired with young minds that are addicted to dopamine is probably a very dangerous cocktail.
Young men becoming degenerate gamblers is a very nihilistic and insecure way to live. "what's the point, I am never going to rich or have a beautiful house or find a great mate so let me yolo into memecoins and try to turn thousands into millions". In some ways I don't fault them for this attitude, this is the behaviour the fiat system incentivizes but I think we really need to push back against it. Young men spending all their time gambling on sports and memecoins would be better suited learning a skill, plying it, living below their means and reinvesting in themselves, finding a tribe (like minded people) and meeting in the real world. And for the love of god go talk to women in the real world, not online.
And that's all I have to say about that. I will go back to degen gambling on sports now and ignoring my wife. Haha
Statistics (which i'm too lazy to look up and link to right now) show that young men are actually trending more conservative in terms of desiring a more trad lifestyle: getting married, having kids, etc. But I think the stats also show that there's a growing despair that they'll ever be able to achieve that. At the same time, women are trending less trad than ever. The gap between young mens and womens' outlook on life has never been wider, afaict. It's very concerning to see. Every generation worries about the next, but the statistics seem to look worse than ever before.
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I don't want to be that guy, but I think someone has to be that guy, so I'm going to be that guy who mentions that, yes, he thinks his generation is mostly fucked (ha!) when it comes to dating.
I’ve more or less accepted that it's very likely I’m not going to marry, I'm not going to have children, but I might own a house thanks to bitcoin, but I’m not even sure if I want that, also thanks to bitcoin.
But I'll be rich enough to fly planes for fun, so I guess I shouldn't complain? 🤔
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yes, he thinks his generation is mostly fucked (ha!) when it comes to dating.
Why? "Dating" is overbroad, so maybe that's what I'm confused about. Do you mean:
- getting married
- having a family
- being in a stable long-term relationship
- something else
I've read some Gen-Z stuff on the topic but it's never made a ton of sense to me, since the arguments have generally been non-economic ones, so I'd be interested in your perspective.
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Do you mean:
I meant your first three, because for me, one follows from the other: a stable long-term relationship → getting married → having a family.
So by “dating”, I meant starting that journey with a relationship that has the potential to become something long-term and stable.
since the arguments have generally been non-economic ones
Why did the non-economic arguments not make sense to you?
I think my argument is also not economic, but a mix of culture and politics, so maybe nothing new to you. It’s just that I think society is deeply divided about many things: old vs. young; rich vs. poor; male vs. female; capitalism vs. socialism/communism; heterosexual vs. homosexual; cisgender vs. transgender; kids vs. no kids; science vs. populism; inclusive language vs. existing language. It makes it really frustrating to find someone who doesn’t think you’re a bad person because of X, as if only X matters.
And then you can also add social media, online dating, and all that stuff to this. I tried online dating, and it was soul-crushing. Maybe I should try again, but I really think it’s not for me. Does it make sense to change to fit into a society you don’t even like?
But I also think I’ve probably just been looking in the wrong places so far. I used to be politically left, but it turned out that women from the political left are far from what I want. I also met a girl who was far on the right (from my perspective), but she wasn’t what I wanted either. I’m also to blame, because bitcoin is one of those polarizing topics, and I didn’t necessarily handle that topic well when it came up.
I think the "End of the World" party from Mr. Robot might be something my generation (Gen Y) can resonate with, and Gen Z even more. Doesn't that mean there's a trend?
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I tried online dating, and it was soul-crushing
What was soul-crushing about it? Sorry, I grew up in an era where online dating wasn't common, so I don't know much about it and never tried it.
I do know a number of couples who found their eventual spouse through online dating apps though. Actually, I know of at least 4 in my own social circles.
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You don't get any matches, you don't get any messages1, and the app constantly reminds you that you can pay (more) to get "more matches" (but 0 times anything is still 0, haha). All the profiles look fake af, the interactions feel fake af, and nothing about swiping left or right seems to bring me closer to "real human connection." It's more like the opposite: getting used to and accepting the lack of real human connection, and realizing that we're all alone at home, trying to connect through apps (dating, social media, etc.), even though we're aware that these apps don't have our interests in mind. And that's how you're supposed to find someone nowadays? What is NOT soul-crushing about this? haha
I do know a number of couples who found their eventual spouse through online dating apps though. Actually, I know of at least 4 in my own social circles.
Yes, I think most couples I know did find each other through dating apps. But it doesn't change the fact it's a horrible experience.
Footnotes
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One time I even got a message, but it turned out it was just a bot marketing something. ↩
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dang.. i just wonder what the experience for those people was like. Like how many matches did they get before they found "the one", how soul crushing was it, how many times did they think about giving up, etc. You know what, maybe I should actually just ask some of them!
Also, i dunno what this means, but all of the couples I know who got married through dating apps were using one called "Coffee Meets Bagel".
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To be more positive and fair: I have had some good experiences just going out by myself, so I think I just need to do that more. I’m also getting more comfortable giving genuine compliments without any expectations, like saying, "Hey, your hair looks nice," and then running away, haha
Why did the non-economic arguments not make sense to you?
I expressed it badly: I've seen economic arguments that it's hard to get started on a family by most of the standard definitions (have a house, some economic security) and how that would cause perverse effects is easy enough to understand. The other class of arguments tend to range over much larger territory, and I didn't know which things you were talking about, but now I do thanks to your elaborated answer.
It makes it really frustrating to find someone who doesn’t think you’re a bad person because of X, as if only X matters.
I wish I was still in the game because I'm v curious about this. It seems like everybody is feeling this same thing, no? Nobody likes what it's doing to them. Which seems like something you could unite over. Like, if your profile called it out. "I'm looking to connect w/ someone and not get lost in these stupid labels and tribalisms and all that." But maybe that's naiive.
I can say, not from online dating but from life, even from SN, which is kind of a hostile environment for this kind of thing, which makes it a good example: putting yourself out there, earnestly, makes you a target for stupid bullshit, but there's always people who are hungry for real interaction, and they respond. It's always happened, to such a degree that it seems corny: put yourself out there, be real, have positive regard for people by default, and people matching that description turn up in all sorts of places.
Again, not denying your own experience. Dating is its own weird game. I wish I could play still, just to see what it's like now. Although from what you're reporting, maybe it would erode one of my handful of comforting beliefs about the world :(
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It's always happened, to such a degree that it seems corny: put yourself out there, be real, have positive regard for people by default, and people matching that description turn up in all sorts of places.
You are right, which is why I'm also maintaining my blog, and I conveniently left this part out to get my point better across
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dude, you're so young and everything is in flux.
don't hold out for a thing but if you want to find an emotional partnership it's well within your capability.
"lawyer up, hit the gym"
its not only a mantra, its the truth.
you can explore social environments you can't imagine. I would recommend Mars College... at the risk of destabilizing SN's development efforts, ping me if you want a reference
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Thank you!
You are right, this was more of an emotional outburst, miserably attempting to speak for a whole generation, than anything else. See #1332659 and #1333877.
Mars College
You mean this?
at the risk of destabilizing SN's development efforts
I don't work here anymore, so I already destabilized it as much as I can
ping me if you want a reference
Where? I'm currently doing #1299187.
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I'm sympathetic to both of your points:
- every generation thinks the next is utterly ruined
- right now feels (to me) acutely bad
... but then I think that maybe, wrt #2, I am exquisitely sensitive to certain flavors of ruin, and see it clearly, and see that it's worse than ever. But then I think that every generation may have had their own particularly fine-tuned feature detectors.
For instance, there are people alive now for whom the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times; that worry seems absurd to me, but I have an entirely different mental ecology as a function of my path and era.
It's a foreignness that's hard to simulate, I think.
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the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times
Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism. It's not like renting their labour. So yeah, end-times is on point.
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Bryan Caplan occasionally does posts where he makes a big list of things that seemed abhorrent and hideously unnatural over the years, that now we don't think twice about. This seems like that, to me.
The bigger class of concerning things, imo, are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.
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things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous
Hm. Wrt slavers, I think we can either excuse them because of moral relativism, or not, and say they should have known better.
Do you think we ought not to be excused for our follies on this principle?
Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
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Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
I do wonder if most people go around, as I do, knowing they're doing terrible things, and do them anyway, because they can, because it's normal and nobody's stopping them, and they get by through a willful act of looking-away.
Or whether the wrongness doesn't even occur to them, and so there's nothing to look away from.
And I don't know which I think is worse.
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With respect to your contrarianism, a few more questions:
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
If we agree to leave it up to the individual to judge the rightness/wrongness (or wrongness/more wrongness, as you seem to suggest) of their actions, then shouldn't we also establish what measuring stick they need to use?
If it's the same one, or at least similar, in the past and future, then haven't we contradicted ourselves?
If it is different, then isn’t that quite the quandary, since then the number of lashing owed to, say, the persecutors of Jean d'Arc, depended on how much we are willing to admit that our ruler looks the same as theirs?
As for what I think, if I compared my own wongness/more wrongness with theirs, I'd say I am still in good shape, because, at least to me, there does seem to be something definitely wrong about persecuting a teenager for her heresy in claiming to have had visions of Saint Michael.
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If we agree to leave it up to the individual to judge the rightness/wrongness (or wrongness/more wrongness, as you seem to suggest) of their actions, then shouldn't we also establish what measuring stick they need to use?
It depends on what the exercise is for. One could impose some set of moral axioms and reason forward from it, and say "this is how it should work" and make a rule set for how we should punish this or that. But others aren't likely to be bound by my logic, so I can't get very excited about the exercise.
You can get pretty far with some pretty basic stuff, though -- the golden rule is pretty good. It's relative, but it seems a stretch, in any era, to argue that people really don't see the problem with raping and murdering women in Juarez, or lynching negroes for moving into the wrong neighborhood. One can make the argument ("I'd expect the same if I moved into their place where I wasn't wanted") but I don't believe it.
Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism
Why?
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First try to understand why cannibalism is abhorrent, malum in se, and rather than just abnormal.
If you find yourself justifying cannibalism you'll be able to justify buying babies like IKEA furniture.
But the truth is that children from surrogacy tend to feel that their surrogate parent exploited their real mothers. These feelings are gaslit, and in extreme circumstances the surrogate parents cut off the children the way they would never have been cut off by real parents.
Bottom line is that people literally cannot be owned or bought, and if you try to buy a child you're only renting the experience of parenthood, not the real thing, hence those relationships are emotionally easier to sever from both sides.
Renting or buying a person's labour is not exploitation if the person is getting better at something, increasing their own capacity rather than draining it.
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I still don't understand why you compare something that’s—in my opinion—pretty close to adopting children to people eating each other.
If parents don’t want their child and I adopt it, you think this is as abhorrent as me eating other people?
This is what I'm hearing, and tbh, it sounds quite ridiculous.
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Surrogacy is nothing like adoption if the parent isn't buying the child.
If you bought it isn't a possession. You own it. But that person you bought has free will, they literally cannot be bought, it's technically impossible. The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process for a child whose parents haven't had the capacity to raise them. The purchased child will silently or publicly reject the relationship in favour of the parent they lost, but the taboo against speaking out is enormous because the surrogate parents can and do withhold resources.
Purchasing the experience of parenthood is a scummy way to exploit people in poverty.
Notice that in adoption the adoptive parents are told to tell them that they have been adopted from an early age, and to explain the situation, and to enable bridges to their real parents if feasible. It wasn't like that in the past, but we learned. That's not the case with surrogates.
Listen to the video by Olivia Maurel.
Cannibalism is using a person as an object, consuming them. Modern surrogacy is a consumptive act, like buying furniture from IKEA.
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The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process
Have you been through an adoptive process? It's quite expensive. Significant amounts of money change hands before a baby ends up as the legal child of the adoptive parents. You don't have to like surrogacy, but the arguments you're making seem pretty tenuous to me.
I'm curious if you have similar feelings about broad swathes of the economy where people in dire circumstances take shitty jobs that nobody in less dire circumstances would ever take. For instance, there's quite the cottage industry in third-world countries paying people to adjudicate terrible videos of animals being tortured for fun, and the like. The psychological costs of this job are substantial, but presumably people in those circumstances think it's less bad than the alternative. Is this fine, or not fine?
Agreed with all of this. I would only add: young women seem to have their own flavor, it's just pointed in a slightly different direction. Freya India writes persuasively on this topic.
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Interesting thoughts, thank you. But actually my small zap is for the Forrest Gump reference, wish such things were more common.
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