Like, it’s probably more noticeable that you don’t have any romantic or sexual relationships than it would be if you don’t have any true, close, platonic connections. Romantic and sexual relationships have things that are very obvious and for the most part, exclusive to them, such as kissing, making out, sex, etc. Platonic relationships that are true and close are not as visible, they’re more feelings on the inside (not to say that there’s none of those feelings involved with romantic and sexual relationships). If you look exclusively at the activities done with a platonic friendship, it’s not very different from an acquaintanceship, or an activity partner.
I’ve met people who claim they have friends, but they’re just coworkers they talk to a bit, guys they play games with, or guys they see at the sports bar a lot. Not people who actually support each other or any true connection. Now granted, there’s nothing wrong with having those acquaintanceships or activity partners, and it can be argued that they’re necessary for a fulfilling life, but they’re not the same as a true connection or friendship. If you’ve never had that or hadn’t had it in a while, it can be hard to tell what that feels like.
The only way to make these connections is through social skills, which a lot of people lack. They lack social skills, so they don’t make connections, platonic or romantic. Since romantic and sexual connections have more exclusive activities, it’s more easy to notice them than the lack of true friends. So I’m wondering if all this talk about the lack of romance and sex is really just poor social skills.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse a little bit. You’re blaming “lack of social skills” as if that’s just an individual problem that people need to/can work on. It’s in a way the same as the “hustle and grind” and “learn some skills” truisms trotted out by libs and capitalists.
The actual problem is alienation at a societal level as all the community bonds we had to each other are destroyed, and this is affecting men more because it’s men who enjoyed the benefits of the patriarchal society the most - sports, bars after work, unions, churches - all used almost exclusively by men to socialise. Now they’re all gone and what has replaced them - online fucking vidya games and fucking twitter and fucking facebook - all these bs that serve, in the vast majority of cases, to only entrench their loneliness and hatred of everyone else.
I’ve met people who claim they have friends, but they’re just coworkers they talk to a bit, guys they play games with, or guys they see at the sports bar a lot.
Where is the time to meet people otherwise and form deep connections? It’s all gone.
The extreme focus on “dating” is so short-sighted. That is mostly just a symptom of this wider societal disease, and its not even the most dangerous ones. School shootings, Trump, fucking QAnon are so, so much worse.
What is the solution? Ending capitalism. Nothing can be done otherwise. None of this, btw, is a defense of those organisations - they were all sexist, racists institutions that often served to exclude women, bipoc and lgbtq people. The solution, unlike what fascists say, is not a “return to traditional values” but a replacement of them with progressive, socialist ones. And “dating” will be solved as a byproduct.
Where is the time to meet people otherwise and form deep connections? It’s all gone.
Idk about that. Particularly during the peak of COVID, time was the one thing people had in abundance. Even afterwards, there’s still a not-insignificant chunk of unemployed and underemployed people - particularly young people - who can and do have a surplus of free time that could be spent socializing.
Video games and social media are two sinks for this surplus, but they’re hardly the only ones. People have used books, Radio/TV/Movies, arts & crafts, cooking, and a host of other private recreations to “voluntarily” alientate themselves from the general public. Hell, the very core idea of the “dorks” and “nerds” - alienated typically young people with very peculiar hobbies - predates electronic entertainment by decades.
I’d argue that the primary barriers to human interaction are a combination of physical distance and an increased degree of social distrust created by a more migrant population.
The suburbs and the modern private home have very physically divided large bodies of people from one another. We must travel larger distances to see friends and family. It takes me 45 minutes of drive to get from my home to my mom’s house, for instance. It takes me 15 minutes to meet up with friends who live in the same city. I get to see my nieces maybe once or twice a year, because they’re a 3 hour plane ride away. Visiting my sister is another 3 hour trip in the opposite direction. I am not lacking for free time in a pre-modern sense. I am lacking the ability to cover several thousand miles in the time I have available.
I come from a family that had two really big moves to chase the job market (and a few minor moves that hindered my ability to make friends in the short term). They really do fuck you up in a material way. Imagine the trauma of being moved, but normalized into a salesman’s or traveling engineer’s or nurse’s lifestyle. Nevermind dating. Its impossible to make any kind of long term friendships this way.
Then there’s the issue of stress and anxiety around strangers. We’ve entered a period of human civilization in which many of the people we interact with, daily, are functionally strangers. Our commutes are full of strangers. Our offices are full of strangers. We only know the people who live on our street, because our houses are so fucking spread out. We definitely don’t know our trash guy or our mail guy or the guys that cook our food at lunch. We certainly don’t know our local pigs or our city councilor or our fucking mayor. That’s the baseline for human interaction. Then pile on the fear that comes at us from all angles - fear of fraud, fear of theft, fear of being injured by accident (drunk driver) or on purpose (road rage). Everyone is constantly feeling one another out, because we’re all raised to believe that Strangers Are Dangers.
What is the solution? Ending capitalism.
Sure, yes, obviously. But I don’t think that solves the problems above. I think it solves the conditions that incentive the economics. But once they’ve become entrenched, I don’t really think a Worker’s Soviet chaired by the same folks that run my HOA would provide me a meaningful lifestyle improvement. Certainly not if they’re a bunch of weirdos I’ve never met before.
I would argue that much of the “failure” of post-revolutionary soviet states has stemmed from this unimpeded march towards alienated lives and livelihoods.
I strongly, strongly agree with all this. I feel like I lucked out in this game, despite being an incredibly awkward and homeschooled kid, by ending up part of a strong community of young people of various ages, with a unique internal culture, in my teens and early twenties. There’s a kind of connection and trust you can have in that sort of situation that forms deep and lasting bonds. Many of those people are still my closest friends to this day, and we plan regular camping trips and such together. I can reconnect with many of the others from that time period, who I didn’t regularly keep in touch with, out of the blue and the love and trust is right back to where it was. There are more introverts than extroverts in this group.
I have no idea what kind of person I would be without that. I’m a little scared of the prospect tbh, but that’s the reality that who knows how many people - maybe even the majority? - are living with today.
I feel like I lucked out in this game, despite being an incredibly awkward and homeschooled kid, by ending up part of a strong community of young people of various ages, with a unique internal culture, in my teens and early twenties.
Oh absolutely. I’ll openly admit it wasn’t great for my GPA, but the best choice I ever made in college was getting a few old high school friends, putting out a folding table, and starting a college club for our nerdy hobbies.
Just, totally transformative from a psychological perspective. The friends I made back then are with me over twenty years later. And the friends they made have become my friends in turn. In fact, friends-of-friends introduced me to my wife.
I’m a little scared of the prospect tbh, but that’s the reality that who knows how many people - maybe even the majority? - are living with today.
Part of me just assumes that I’d have a different circle of people today. But who and what kind of people? Idk. My early twenties were rough, and I have no idea how I’d be living today without the folks I bounded with so long ago.
At the same time, I had friend groups in my prior moves, too. I have to wonder if we’d all just be people we’d known since elementary school… who would we be today?
there’s still a not-insignificant chunk of unemployed and underemployed people - particularly young people - who can and do have a surplus of free time that could be spent socializing.
I wish I could meet other young people who are in this situation, but I don’t know how. I live in a rather small city and don’t have a car (which is nearly required to do anything interesting) and everyone else my age seems to spend all their time indoors anyways, or is already full up on friends or is married or busy with a career, etc.
I’m just stuck :sadness-abysmal:
how are homebodies supposed to find eachother? Certainly not on capitalist dating services.
I wish I could meet other young people who are in this situation, but I don’t know how.
I mean, I can find people like this with relative ease. When my city throws a free concert at the big downtown park, they gather in droves. When there’s a festival or parade, they fill the streets. When its a weekend, they’re all across the popular drinking and clubbing spots, particularly the cheap ones. They’re all over college campuses, too. Yeah, I can find people.
But then what? Approaching people is so much harder. Making a sincere connection is hard. The people I find who are the most engaging are inevitably the flakiest, too. The folks who are more reliable tend to be withdrawn and skeptical, plus they also do tend to have their own shit going.
This is why “entryism” is so appealing. You don’t need to break a bunch of new ground. You just find a pre-existing group of people who have already flagged themselves as interested in doing shit, and you engage with them directly. Its why organizations like churches and political parties have so much staying power. They’re magnets for people with more time than sense or personal direction. At some level, the DSA - for all its flaws - is a powerful organization simply because it exists and people recognize it as such and they come to you rather than you running around town looking for like-minded people. And its a known quantity, so when you go out and say “There’s a DSA meeting would you like to come?” you don’t have to explain what the hell you’re inviting people to in quite as much detail.
But a lot of these organizations can feel like dead-ends, too. Easy to get in, but there’s nowhere to actually apply your time productively. Its just an engine for self-promotion. So you leave and go looking for something better.
I’m just stuck
Hey, I feel ya.
But I don’t think that solves the problems above.
On the contrary sir, Bhagavan Shree Matt Christman (PBUH) has the answers.
The suburbs and the modern private home have very physically divided large bodies of people from one another.
This was a semi-intentional “feature” stemming from the deeply ingrained colonial delusion of the “American Dream” that could theoretically be corrected with a more socially oriented paradigm towards urban planning. One of the hypothesized reasons why the left in CANZUK countries is in such an abysmal state is the suburb, because of the effects you highlighted.
Then there’s the issue of stress and anxiety around strangers.
This will be less of a problem without the market. The resulting superstructural logic of capitalism leads to increased levels of hierarchy, domination, and transactionality within social relationships. When life is a competition “stranger danger” is amplified.
I don’t really think a Worker’s Soviet chaired by the same folks that run my HOA would provide me a meaningful lifestyle improvement. Certainly not if they’re a bunch of weirdos I’ve never met before.
They won’t be. By the time capitalism goes and something comes to replace it, the vast majority of us who were born of the machine will be dead. Those who come after will be fundamentally different to us as we are different to European Peasants living during the time of the 30 years war. We won’t know whether things will be different better or different worse, however the only thing that can be guaranteed is difference.
This will be less of a problem without the market.
Sure, in theory. But, in practice, markets are very useful tools that are difficult to surrender. Lenin couldn’t manage it, and he had near dictatorial control over the shambling remnants of the central Russian Empire. Fidel couldn’t get rid of markets after fully galvenizing the majority of the Cuban population. The Kims have, if anything, relapsed into market mechanics despite three generations of near-uncontested rule in North Korea.
I think you’re putting the cart well ahead of the horse if your plan is to simply abolish markets.
The resulting superstructural logic of capitalism leads to increased levels of hierarchy, domination, and transactionality within social relationships.
It also provides durable lines of succession, rapid decision making, and an abundance of surplus wealth. Capitalism hasn’t dominated the economic ecosystem by accident, even if it has come at a hellish cost.
By the time capitalism goes and something comes to replace it, the vast majority of us who were born of the machine will be dead.
I mean, there are definitely places in which traditional merchantilist capitalism is dead and buried. But the vestigial remains persist in dictating social norms. You’re seeing the Chinese struggle with vestigial capitalism, while the Russians have gone into a full relapse. There is no bright line between the end of capitalism and the beginning of what comes next. Its all interwoven.
What’s coming to an end is the :free-real-estate:. It is no longer trivial to do an Adventurism in a foreign country with a dozen heavily armed dudes and topple a sclerotic empire. The stresses and the contradictions that propel people out of the imperial core still exist, but there’s no longer a California or a Texas for them to flee. What’s more, the modern concept of “home ownership society” combined with suburbanification has created a new foundational element of infrastructure that isn’t going to be quickly or easily replaced. Our grandparents carved grooves into the earth, and then our parents and now we spill like water through the cracks, because it is the path of least resistance.
Again, look to Russia and China. I don’t think its fair to say that “capitalism goes” in a straightforward manner. I think the structures carved in the name of capitalism will endure as subsequent societies exploit and exhaust them.
But even beyond that, we’re carving our own groves. We’re dictating where our kids and our grandkids will flow, because of the trails we blaze. That’s what so much of this conversation is ultimately about. We’re not going to live to see the far-flung consequences of our decision, but we are going to make those decisions and propel subsequent generations down those paths.
I believe there are studies that concluded that women had a larger and richer social/support network, and men would have, at best, their wife lol
What is the solution? Ending capitalism. Nothing can be done otherwise. None of this, btw, is a defense of those organisations - they were all sexist, racists institutions that often served to exclude women, bipoc and lgbtq people. The solution, unlike what fascists say, is not a “return to traditional values” but a replacement of them with progressive, socialist ones. And “dating” will be solved as a byproduct.
Maybe you’re right, but I don’t think many people will be too thrilled that an entire system needs to be replaced which will take decades, maybe centuries, before they can be happy again.
Metaphor is looking for clean water in a desert vs in a swamp. If all you tinder messages are never replied to or are replied to with “send nudes” or similar, you get the same amount of desirable responses
I think it’s better to just accept dating sucks for both men and women, but for different reasons. In my view the largest difference is that women unlike men face actual real physical danger.
Yeah, that’s why it’s a metaphor and not an actual description. I’m talking about how incel types are like “I wish I’d get catcalled” when women talk about it. Both situations for online dating mean you are unlikely to find a fulfilling relationship, just as the person in the desert and the swamp both lack drinkable water. And comparing sex/romance to water is not something I invented. See: the word “thirsty”
Plus the idea that sex/romance is equivalent to water is kinda iffy.
humans are social animals and most of us need companionship and wither away without it. what’s really the difference between dying of thirst over a few days and dying of misery over several years?
it’s weird you focused on trying to disect the metaphor instead of actually talking about her point but ok
there’s a lot of weird going on in this comment and i don’t have the energy or desire to pull it apart or argue about it lol
I’ll just say that dating for women is distinctly not easier. our rates of being murdered / assaulted / etc by a dude are painfully high.
most dating apps are a bunch of noise with little signal because a lot of guys will swipe on everyone to see who bites. the amount of unsolicited dick pics is nauseating.
source: briefly tried dating men online, went back to only dating women.
To a certain extent but the average woman can much more easily date casually than the average man.
In practice thats… It’s complicated. I’ve known a lot of beautiful, employed, interesting women who should have every advantage in finding someone cool they vibe with, but what actually tends to happen is they get deluged with so much unwanted attention that actually finding someone genuine becomes very difficult.
Men often don’t get any responses on dating apps. Women, on the other hand, often get huge, overwhelming numbers. And many of them are gross, upsetting, and unwanted.
It is actually fairly difficult for a woman to date casually. There is a non-zero chance any man they interact with will try to violently ruin their life. Or just like be misogynistic and bad in bed. Plus they gotta do their makeup, and every together thing.
They have so much more stress to deal with than me in finding partners
Most men have had a story where they accidentally scared some woman walking home at night and wonder if it’s even possible to ask someone out without potentially scaring someone.
#elevatorgate , the scandal that destroyed the Atheism+ movement
These last two paragraphs - this is The Market for Lemons. Apps were such a fucking mistake
A lot of leftists who really, really, really should know better make jokes about small penises. I find it illustrative of how far we still have to go for the rhetoric of body positivity and sexual liberation and just not being jerks to people just because they’re different we have to do.
wanting/needing a romantic partner is typical and cool and it’s concerning when frayed social relations prevent such couplings, actually
well, if you’re saying that the phenomena of young people having fewer romantic connections is due to a cultural obsession with getting laid, i’d disagree with that as well.
I have some thoughts on the subject, but in all but the broadest sense “social skills” aren’t that important, to my mind at least. Some people get along easily, some people will never get along. I’d say the changes to our built environment and economy are the biggest factors in loneliness. There’s always a catalyst required for a relationship to form. For a long time now, in the West at least, it seems like the biggest factors have been proximity and time. School, work, and (formerly) church were pretty effective means of keeping people in close proximity for long enough for relationships to form. Familiarity. It’s much easier to make friends with a mutual friend than a complete stranger, so having at least one friend is significantly better than none. Even if two people only know each other, that relationship effectively doubles both of their odds of meeting someone else, and so on. Once a critical mass of people don’t know anyone, or the only people they know only know them, it’s pretty hard for a community to come out of that.
Socialization has always been a struggle since market economics came to dominate. But in the past people still got to know each other because there were incentives. There was genuinely some sort of trickle-down from imperialism, and less of everything had been vacuumed up by national and international corporations. Petite bourgeoisie constituted a larger share of the population than it does now. Even if things were largely transactional, there was still a bit of humanity to it. At least the sense that cooperating was still potentially going to leave you in a better position in some way, or at least not worse off unless something unexpected happened. Nowadays it’s not uncommon for people to think that the other party doesn’t have anything to contribute, and it could be expensive for them, so why bother? The perception, largely real, that people just don’t want to be bothered in most contexts is debilitating. It’s a feedback loop.
One of the few good posts in this thread. Some of the more lib posters here seem to think anyone will/can be friends with anyone else as if people are interchangeable and we just need to get them to hit some arbitrary charisma level to make it happen. They need to look at the environment more.
Thanks. It’s always a tricky subject to break down because there are clearly examples of people who are “good at socializing”. But historically not everyone, not even close, was like that. People were socialized out of necessity, at the most basic level it increased odds of survival as long as food was secure. Homo sapiens are specialized through evolution for cooperating and socializing, which is why some groups of our species dominated the planet and achieved the things they have (without making value judgements about those things or how sustainable any of them are).
Group, and self-, interest are the friction in the socialization process. Everything about capitalism promotes self-interest so the reasons why socialization would decrease are numerous and obvious. A side effect is the loss of the interpersonal relationships that almost everyone would prefer not become transactional, friendships and romance, which were usually fruits of the other activity which socialized people.
I’m over 40 and my ability to “socialize” for somebody who wasn’t all that social was like night and day.
Pre “adulthood” I had small but very close group of friends in middle/elementary school and then a different close group of friends in high school when I moved.
Post “adulthood” I’m always needing to be somewhere else so can’t chat or am at work in places where I’m at the beck and call of customers or bosses that it would take years of 10~30 minutes of honest to goodness talking to actually make a decent social connection with a coworker enough to even begin entertaining the idea that, “Yeah, this person could be considered a friend.” But never fully developing into a full friendship as … I’m always at work or going to work so being available to be a part of somebody else’s life (handing out, lending a hand, etc) is pretty much nil.
So yeah, I think you’re comment is pretty spot on.
As someone with poor social skills: yeah, it’s probably part of it. I actually have some semi-close friends, but I haven’t established any new relationships deeper than an acquaintance, whether platonic or romantic, since high school. I generally don’t like interacting with most people, so I choose to do things either alone or involving just that core group of friends, which then atrophies my social skills further, and the cycle repeats.
