[jimmaswell]

I feel like we're evolved to deal with this kind of concrete threat throughout the day. Go out into the world, avoid the saber tooth tigers and enemy tribes, gather some berries, go back home to safety, threats are gone.

On the other hand, the kind of existential dread many men experience now is something only modern society really made an opportunity to foster. Depression, loneliness, and feelings of abject hopelessness can eat you from the inside out. You feel anxiety as if there's a tiger outside but there is no tiger, you can never "escape" the tiger until you find a partner (and even then your past life can have a permanent lasting effect on you), and being clocked as experiencing all of this makes you "desperate" and less attractive creating a vicious cycle of misery.

If I could have chosen I'd rather have been born onto the other side of that experience instead of barely being able to enjoy life up until recently. Manageable specific threats presenting themselves throughout the day that go away when I remove myself from a situation (or mace them or something) instead of going through the motions day in day out feeling increasingly worthless with every failed attempt at reaching out to a potential partner, online or offline. Having too many options presenting themselves to you versus knowing that at least 500 people in a row online deemed you not even worth responding to.

[CPLX]

You are presenting a theory that those primitive tribal living environments did not have the same social interactions and dynamics that we have in the present day. But you’re not presenting any evidence so support that assertion.

It’s entirely reasonable to assume people then had the same existential dread and fear of social exclusion we had today plus festering wounds, lack of hygiene, and poor dental care.

[zozbot234]

Come on, the whole point of tribal living as a social structure is that it has way more tightly-knit social interaction than a modern day, Western, late-stage-capitalistic, 'Bowling-Alone' society. OP's theory is entirely plausible, even though the sort of existential dread he posits has little to do w/ gender relations per se.

[jimmaswell]

The gender relations point is any random woman is much much much less likely to have loneliness and finding dates as a problem so it doesn't come up in this scenario as much.