[laratied]

It strikes me that we just have our head in the sand when it comes to dating.

From the sample of young guys I know, the ripped guy on trenbolone that takes great shirtless pictures is fucking so many women that he actually says he is picky on tinder. All the other guys are playing video games. The ripped guy has zero interest in relationships and giving up what he has now. The video game guys have zero chance at a relationship.

No mystery that this setup is going to produce a highly neurotic society that almost no one is happy in besides the small group of guys working on a sex addiction.

The other stuff you mention is really not much different than the past.

Min wage in 1990 was $3.35 an hour and average new car price was $15k. All my money at 20 went to a piece of shit car that constantly broke down and needed repair. That was pretty much everyone I knew. That is a time when even the $15k new car was basically a piece of shit by modern standards. There was never a time in the past when the average person had it easy economically sipping champagne. Dating though you have a point.

[ravenstine]

Dating today is tough for many reasons, most of which are systemic. To go on a bit of a tangent from the main discussion here, a certain amount of the difficulty is self inflicted. People are convinced that dating apps are their only option, but my experience has been the opposite in practice. The actual trouble is how so few people are actually willing to meet and give others a chance IRL. I host a bar games meetup in Los Angeles, a place you'd think would be teeming with youngish people looking to go out and have fun with new friends, and yet a meetup in a hip part of town like the Arts District may only have 4 attendees. Everyone complains about how hard dating is, but so few are willing to put down their phone and actually go out and find people. Even if they do, they come up with excuses as to why everyone is not their exact type. There's women I meet all the time who are obsessed with a certain archetype of man, and even if they happen to stumble upon that kind of man by chance, they refuse to approach. Men are no better either.

What I'm saying is that these are choices people make. Companies like Tinder and the media we live vicariously through have definitely trashed the landscape, but we are also our own worst enemies, and I see that as the biggest problem. I'm not the most accomplished in terms of dating, but all of my long term relationships came out of just meeting people organically. I'm not even particularly good looking. I'm bald and have a touch of gray hair, but I've still managed to find opportunities with women. Even when I was fat I wasn't as hopeless as I thought I was at the time. Some people truly lose the genetic lottery, but at least 90% don't actually fall in that category.

I just hope someone reads this and figures out that a big part of the problem with dating comes from within. Not everyone has to be in a relationship or be some kind of Casanova. But if it's something a person wants then they need to get out of their own way. The culture today convinces people to remain in their own way because it's not profitable for people to stop using apps and TV.

> There was never a time in the past when the average person had it easy economically sipping champagne.

There's truth to both claims. Things have always been difficult. I think there are also ways in which opportunities were more accessible to some, and the only thing holding those opportunities back today is an economical bust-boom similar to those that many of our elders were able to benefit from. Where I live, many of those in my parents generation got into careers they weren't educated or experienced in because the economic condition incentivizes businesses to hire anyone with a pulse. That can happen again, but we haven't had anything like that (outside of some sectors of tech) for at least 15 years. Many younger people found themselves to be "failures" because they needed far more debt and time investment than their parents only to end up with less than they had at the same age.

To your point, things often seem harder because our expectations are higher than those of early generations, both in terms of person expectations and material expectations.