Before we start, I shan’t use “nice guy” without defining it first: a “nice guy” is man whose sexual intentions are focused on love and relationships, with no interest in high-frequency promiscuity or social dominance. A nice guy is one who treats others as he would like to be treated, in friendships as well as in dating. A “nice guy” need not be milquetoast or weak; in fact, most “nice guys” aren’t.
Paul Graham, a celebrity in the technology/startup community, is known for his brilliant essays on a wide variety of topics. (However, he is completely wrong about ML and static typing. Haskell is the pwn sauce.) Among them is “Why Nerds Are Unpopular“. Although long, I recommend reading it in full. The ideas central to his essay apply to the current dating and sexual market, so I’m posting excerpts, with commentary, here.
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why? […]
In the schools I went to, being smart just didn’t matter much. Kids didn’t admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.
So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things. […]
Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school. (All emphasis mine.)
Paul’s thesis, which I consider correct, is that smart high school students aren’t popular because they don’t work hard enough at being so. I tend to agree. I wouldn’t say that nerds are unpopular. They’re respected but generally ignored, never popular and viewed as almost asexual. They get picked on by a few people, but most people are too wrapped up in their own concerns to bother the nerds. A nerd who tries very hard to be popular will be struck down, for punching above his weight, but no one is out to pick on him just because he’s smart.
If you don’t work hard to be popular in high school, you probably won’t be. You may be respected and have good friends, but you won’t reach the A-list. Likewise, if you don’t strive for psychosocial dominance, or “alpha” status on the dating market, you won’t have it. Here we confront the plight of the “nice guy” or “beta male”: too invested in higher interests– love, work, art, spirituality– to enter the idiotic “alpha” contest with force, he makes an insufficient entrance or none at all. He lacks “game”.
[…] I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.
I don’t mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.
The conformity is very similar to what we see in combat dating, defined as dating in which the assertion and assessment of social status take priority over growing to know, and eventually love, another person. Men want to bed the “objective HB9” because other guys desire her, so she’s a challenge. Women want the socially dominant badboy whom other girls want (preselection). In both cases, they’re operating against their own interests. The runner-up “beta”, getting one-tenth the attention, is often just as attractive, more interesting, and better suited for a long-term relationship. To pursue him or her would be a more intelligent decision, but one that is rarely made.
For betas to pursue each other would be the logical decision, but they generally lack the competence to find each other in the modern dating market. Beta males are very unskilled at discerning actual nerdy women from garden-variety bubbly/slutty girls who’ve co-opted the “quirky” look and aura. Beta females are shy and rarely make any approaches.
So far I’ve been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it’s only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn’t socially adept enough. But “enough” depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don’t have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.
This sounds exactly like the plight of the beta male. His social skills are average or better– more than enough to excel in the workplace, make friends, and hold a family together. Yet, he lacks a specialized and highly superficial set of social skills, and looks like a doofus (in comparison to the “suave” men) when he tries to get a date.
Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
Kids are supposed to grow up, and adolescent cruelty should end. Should. Casual sex is an adolescent behavior, not an adult one. So is status-obsessed dating. The rise of “hookup culture” and combat dating among young urban professionals are an example of juvenilization, and the world they’ve spawned is, in fact, “cruel and stupid”. Americans are refusing to grow up, even in their 20s and 30s.
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn’t want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.
Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it’s populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don’t think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.
High school inherits its culture from the notion of an educational “factory”, and has been slow to deviate from this stencil due to the sleepy, gradual nature of suburban life. Prisons are institutions whose purpose is to confine and punish. Socialites have empty, pointless lives. All of the environments thus created are permissive but disempowering— you can do almost anything, but nothing you do matters– and in such situations, people become cruel and perverse. Respect fades and cruelty becomes common. This was observed most poignantly in Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Well-adjusted college students were placed into a makeshift prison culture and assigned roles of authority or submission. The experiment was terminated early because they were treating each other so badly.
The battleground of casual sex and combat dating, where men and women refuse to treat each other with basic respect, is a similar place: permissive but disempowering. You can fuck 50 people per year if you want, but you’ll be laughed at and treated as “clingy” if you strive for a serious relationship; you’re not even supposed, many advice-givers assert, to return calls! Most well-adjusted people do not want to be in this game, but there seems to be no alternative. One can abstain from casual sex, as I do, but avoiding combat dating is harder. Even I, “nice guy” of the Roissy-sphere, have picked up an abominable array of asshole dating habits over the years.
I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. (Emphasis mine.) That’s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
When the things you do have real effects, it’s no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that’s where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.
In the romantic sphere, the much-needed “real effects” are love– one of the most beautiful emotions we can experience– the heights of sexual experience that can only be achieved with a loving partner, and family formation. These give meaning to dating, romantic relationships, and sexuality. Without them, all of these are utterly meaningless. So, whatever happened to the “adult world” in which dating and sex were geared toward these ends? Why are we, the urban 20- and 30-somethings, possibly the richest and smartest generational subculture in history, completely unable to get ourselves out of a high-school-esque, “game”-ridden, sexual-marketplace hell? I can’t answer that. I wish I knew.
As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn’t have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I’m not sure which was worse.
Because I didn’t fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn’t realize that the reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.
Many 20- to 35-year-old betas feel the exact same way about modern dating. Unfortunately, the “real world” of love and marriage we had hoped to graduate into is being depopulated rapidly. Our generation has spent too much time learning “game” and too little time building the relational skills necessary to form relationships based on (in this order, with each supporting its predecessors and successors) respect, friendship, admiration, love, and then sex and (optionally) family formation.
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.
We also have a “caste of giants” in urban combat dating. We call them “alpha males” or “pickup artists”. Instead of chasing a football, which at least counts as physical exercise, they develop a set of domain-specific social skills suited to a purpose that, thirty years ago, would be found extremely distasteful.
In almost any group of people you’ll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it’s generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that’s exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one’s rank depends mostly on one’s ability to increase one’s rank. It’s like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another’s opponents. (Emphasis mine.)
I think it’s obvious how this applies to “game”. The single strongest determinant of whether a modern, urban woman will date or sleep with a man is if he has learned the superficial and manipulative skills necessary to get a woman to sleep with him. Modern women are actually consciously attracted to men with game, because it’s a signal of preselection, superficial sociosexual confidence, and experience. None of these would matter in the context of a loving relationship that develops over time.
The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they’re supposed to be learning.
Rebellion out of frustration? Yes. As much enjoyment as I get from bashing women and their behavior on the internet, I’d rather be in the arms of one.
And– shit, man– the fact that we’ve had an adult Columbine recently makes even more sense.
I mistrusted words like “character” and “integrity” because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.
If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don’t have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.
Likewise, I disagree with the Roissy-ite misogynists who claim that all men are promiscuous, superficial assholes, and that women are alpha-seeking and amoral sluts. Human “nature” is to be infinitely flexible and adaptable, intelligent even beyond our own comprehension. Casual sex and combat dating have created a horrendous sexual environment but we, as humans, don’t have to be this way. A lot of us don’t want to be like this, and are desperately trying to find a way out.
I’ve said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one– that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.
Amen, Paul. I think the same holds true of yuppies in their 20s. Many of us want to treat each other better, and to be treated better, and eventually to find love. Unfortunately, the normal method of achieving this– a patient dating process based on companionship and admiration, as opposed to the more modern one driven by sexual impulsiveness and obsessions over social status– is rapidly fading from the scene. People don’t even know how to do it anymore.
Our “nature” can be improved, and we can graduate to a “real world” better than the hell we’ve created, but we face two challenges that disaffected high schoolers don’t. First, unlike high school students, we have no one to blame. It’s not our bosses or our parents or even pop-culture that created this execrable sociosexual environment. It’s us. It’s men who use “game” and women who fall for it. It’s all the people out there– men and women, myself not excluded– who’ve made stupid dating and sexual choices in the past, rewarded bad behavior, and polluted the environment with a mean spirit and bitterness.
Second, high school has a defined end. Traditionally, graduating from high school and attending college meant that one would be entering an environment that encouraged and nurtured intellectualism, growth, and refinement. (Once “hookup culture” crept into the college scene, college’s social environment became an extension of high school.) The “real world”, as Graham defines it, begins when high school and its phony social contests end. Unfortunately, major cities nurture a dating environment that refuses to advance beyond adolescence. When the majority of young professionals are playing the combat dating game, it’s almost impossible to avoid it. Many of us desperately want to evolve into some notion of the “real world”, where things that actually matter (e.g. love, integrity, patience) are valued, but we fail to do so. Game über alles.
There’s hope. As dismal as Manhattan’s dating environment may seem, it’s not necessarily destined to remain this way forever. Despite the doom-peddlers’ extremely negative take on human nature– especially female human nature– I think we are capable of something much better than what exists. In fact, with sufficient good will and intelligence, we can create a better dating environment than any that has ever existed. (About half of the women I’ve dated I would not have been able to legally marry, in some U.S. states, before 1967.)
As adults, we don’t turn on our close friends when they lose their jobs or get sick, and we don’t stuff people in lockers at the workplace. Even in actual high school, at least as I remember it, peoples’ behavior wasn’t 1/50 as evil as Hollywood depictions of high school let me to expect– and I was a nerd at the 30th-percentile of popularity. So I don’t believe there’s anything natural or inevitable about an opposite-sex landscape characterized by adolescent behaviors like casual sex and combat dating, and I think we, as humans, can do a whole lot better.
I’m afraid I don’t have a lot encouraging to say about this or about your previous (r/K drive) post.
A lot of people spend a lot of their lives in negative-sum status contests. Is this so very surprising? Short of a society/culture with rules, laws, customs, traditions, etc. that discourage negative-sum activities and encourage positive-sum activities, it is precisely what we would expect, regardless of whether we are talking about high school, the dating market, or something completely different. People respond to incentives. If there is a reward for getting higher up on the social pecking order, people will spend significant time and effort trying to raise themselves or lower others on the social pecking order.
Even in my own case, I have to admit that my study and practice of Game has been in part motivated by the pursuit of higher social status and other less-than-altogether-holy motives. I’ve felt down on myself at various times in my life for lack of success with women. I’ve felt jealousy and, yes, envy of others’ success with women. I’ve gotten pissed off at women who’ve rejected me. I’ve pursued girls I wasn’t all that interested for “practice.” I’ve done dickish things out at bars (hell, I was quite the dick just this last Saturday trying to separate a fairly drunk woman from her friends). You could, with a fair amount of justification, say that the entire exercise has been motivated by the desire to not feel like a loser, far more than for the sex itself or for companionship.
Indeed, we live in a culture that can be very inhuman to folks like you and me, where sometimes the most horrible things seem to be rewarded and the most wonderful things seem to be ignored or even hated.
For instance, one of my key personal values is long-term thinking. I may not live up to it all the time, but I think I do a pretty darn good job in a lot of cases. Yet we live in a culture where everything seems to be about Right Now. And isn’t that exactly what the whole r/K drive discussion is about?
Another obvious one would be emotion vs. reason. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate. Closely related would be the frivolous vs. the serious. Now emotions are important, and the frivolous has value, but I know I for one can’t be satisfied with a life of nothing but emotional whimsy, and modern society can’t exist without lots of clear hard-headed down-to-earth thinkers.
But how in the heck do you change a society or a culture?? Most of us have zero influence at the macro scale. Voting and political activism are both a farce: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyond-folk-activism/ The best we can hope to do is to (A) look out for ourselves within the broken society that exists; (B) move to a different society; or (C) build a new society from scratch. Or, more specifically, in the sphere of dating/women, (A) Game; (B) expatriation; (C) [good question, I don’t know, in the sphere of politics I’d say “seasteading” or even “spacesteading” but no seastead/spacestead will be a good place to meet women in the timeframe we’re talking about].
I feel like I’m starting to exhaust my options in the realm of (A). I’ve learned a bunch of Game (hell, I even took a bootcamp), I’ve gone out and met a ton of women, I’ve learned a bunch, I’ve gotten a bunch of dates, I’ve hooked up with some girls, I’ve had some fun, I’ve met some neat friends. At the same time, I’ve put myself through a lot of crap, I’ve met a bunch of seriously emotionally disturbed people (hell, one of the girls I slept with earlier this year is now *dead* — and given her problems I’m not entirely surprised), I’ve been treated like complete garbage, I’ve treated some other people like garbage, and I don’t seem to be any closer to a stable, fulfilling, long-term relationship than when I started. I feel like I’m close to the end of this road. I’m not giving up, I’m going to keep at it for now, but I don’t see Game, by itself, taking me to where I want to be.
Of course there is the broader matter of self-improvement, and that’s a never-ending process, but I’m not sure there’s a ton I can do that will radically enhance my standing with women from where I am today. There are a few specific things I’d like to work on, but I don’t see any silver bullets.
So, especially after my recent trip overseas, I’m starting to think along the lines of (B): am I in the wrong place? The M:F ratio stats on Austin are certainly quite atrocious, that’s for certain (funny, one of the reasons I moved here was because the South Bay was such a terrible place to meet women). There are also some cultural things here that have started to annoy me (for instance, there’s a slacker culture here that I don’t see eye-to-eye with). A good friend of mine has been trying to convince me that I should move to Manhattan and can set me up with some job interviews, but I’m honestly feeling a little more adventurous than that. And I certainly have the money such that I could have more than one home, or that I could travel around rather than living in one place (and I don’t mean in the sense of “slumming it” by sleeping on trains and in hostel dormitories). Hell, why *shouldn’t* I be an international playboy? 🙂
If combat dating goes out, I think it will do so in the way racism did– not through a change of individuals’ attitudes, because many people are just stupid and broken, but through death/retreat and replacement. At some point, there will be a generation of women, disgusted by the misbehavior of their older cohort, will eschew casual sex and take a straightforward and respectful approach to dating. A sea change will occur, combat dating as the mainstream dating environment will end, and absolutely no one will want the damaged older women (except for the few girls who “held out” and remained relatively pure).
This could happen as early as now, or as late as 2050, in which case it’d be useless to us. There’s some evidence that this is happening, though it’s difficult to be sure. The Damage Clock seems to be slowing, imperceptibly. We’ll know for sure in 12 years, if the 30-year-olds of 2021 are as damaged as those of 2009.
I’m going to say that the nadir, birth-year wise, was somewhere in the late 1970s, and that we’ll start to see major changes around the 1990 birth year. Don’t underestimate the importance of role models, and Michelle Obama’s a great one. So I, somewhat arbitrarily, place the dividing line at 2008 – 18 = 1990, noting that while female corruption happens at all ages, it doesn’t start in the smart, upper-middle-class, “good kids” until college.
I agree. People’s fixation on immediate short-term interests is what we get in the absence of civilization (see: Prisoner’s Dilemma). I think we need to invoke the carrot as much as the stick, however. Just as we must shame the casual-sexing sluts, the alpha-male pricks, and the women who date such men; we must also exult those who stand up for love and the family.
B is the individual solution, although it doesn’t work for everyone.
C can be achieved, on a very local scale, but not on the national arena. New local sub-societies and sub-cultures are created all the time. It needs to be a grass-roots movement of people voting with their feet.
Related to C is D: find a better pool and only date there. This is one of the historical purposes of college– to provide an environment where intellectualism and culture reign, our worst sexual impulses are muted, and people can form long-term loving relationships. (In modern times, ha!) If you’re religious, churches can work to this purpose.
Every man who has been overseas between the ages of 18 to 30 has come to this conclusion. The U.S. is a horrible place to meet women, especially in the cities where it’s possible to find a good job (e.g. San Francisco, New York, DC).
Although there aren’t nearly enough of them for all of us, I think the best women for an American man to date are those who are fully American, but grew up somehow apart from the SWPL, suburban mainstream– with enough distance from it to reject the obviously bad elements (e.g. casual sex, combat dating). This includes (1) women who grew up abroad, although some diplomat brats are atrocious/filthy party girls, (2) second-generation immigrants, and (3) upper-middle-class black women (who have, at this point, a cultural mix of Afro-American, Caribbean, and recently-immigrated African influences). I’m a huge fan of category 3, because a lot of these girls are so refined, cultured, sweet and brilliant that they make Sex and the City white girls look like ghetto/trailer trash in comparison.
Related to C is D: find a better pool and only date there. This is one of the historical purposes of college– to provide an environment where intellectualism and culture reign, our worst sexual impulses are muted, and people can form long-term loving relationships. (In modern times, ha!) If you’re religious, churches can work to this purpose.
Having been young and clueless at the time, I completely blew my chance to take advantage of my college’s (pathetic as it may have been) dating scene.
Despite being an atheist, I’m still almost tempted to try the “church” option. (Thought experiment: imagine that the cost of getting a good girl was to have to pretend, for the rest of your life, that you were a true believer. Yack.)
I’m not sure what other options there are.
The U.S. is a horrible place to meet women, especially in the cities where it’s possible to find a good job (e.g. San Francisco, New York, DC).
You have fairly negative things to say about NYC dating-wise — I’m curious why this is (seeing as one of my friends is trying to convince me to move there). I’ve never lived in either place, but I’ve heard reasonably positive things about both SF and NYC from various people. Can’t speak much for DC.
I’m a huge fan of category 3
Maybe I just haven’t met the right folks (I can’t say I’ve ever met a girl who fits this description), but I’m finding myself to be increasingly racist in my old age. I’m tired of looking around at the bars and seeing hordes of Chunky Mexican Girls.
Have you considered a Buddhist group? Buddhism is much more based on personal experience than revealed religion, and theologically agnostic.
Some Buddhist beliefs might be different from yours (e.g. reincarnation) but you won’t be kicked out of the temple for believing differently. A Buddhist will tell you that you’re wrong, but he won’t say that you’re going to hell or kick you out of the temple. You’ll still be welcome to meditate with him.
A couple of points on this.
The first is that the reason why you see status-based “combat dating” is because male/female mate selection is, and always has been, based to a significant extent on one’s standing in a respective hierarchy. Women (or the families who were selecting mates for women) have always been keenly interested in the groom’s status in the male hierarchy as a key determining factor of suitability for mating. In the past, the proxies for determining status were sometimes wealth or the ability to generate it, but also stability, familial history and background and the like. There certainly was pre-selection going on (in its own way – not by the groom being a “cad”, but by his having been vetted by yours and his family members in some detail), and a weeding out based on lack of suitability, even among competing suitors of acceptable “status”. But the position of men and women in their own respective hierarchies has always been a substantial factor in mate selection for humans.
What we see today is that men and women are grasping for ways to sort each other in their respective hierarchies in a way that makes sense in a post-feminist world. This has impacted the male hierarchy more than the female one – in that I mean that women still are more or less evaluated, in the first instance, in light of their standing in the female beauty hierarchy. Once a woman is past that, then the next level of evaluation gets to other intangible factors, but the attractiveness factor generally needs to be there, for most men, from the beginning. That hasn’t changed that much in the current era – intelligent, successful career women are not despised due to that (regardless of what they may think), but instead are evaluated, in the first instance, in terms of physical attraction relative to the man’s own level of attraction, before the rest of the person is evaluated. That is a status-evaluating behavior.
When it comes to women evaluating male status – again, this is the door-keeper which is evaluated before the rest of the picture is given serious consideration – the old proxies of wealth generation ability, educational attainment and so on no longer really apply, because they are not status elements that women themselves lack, nor are they, in someplace like Manhattan, particularly rare. With their own abundant earning capacities and educational pedigrees, the kind of urban, professional women you’re talking about are going to look to other factors in order to do the necessary work of distinguishing some men from others – and today women seem to be overwhelmingly using social dominance as that proxy for status determination. Put another way: in Manhattan, a man with an advanced degree and a six figure salary is an “also-ran” he brings nothing special to the table as a result of that, and is simply part of an army of such men. Being with an “also-ran” is not interesting to the kind of driven, attractive, educated professional women you meet in Manhattan (or DC, or Boston, or LA, etc.). So, when she is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff among men, she’s looking for something rarer, something that most of the men do not have, something which makes them stand out in an otherwise overly educated army of matching suits, and something which adds to her own status in bringing something to the table which she does not herself have – hence social dominance.
As a result of this, I see the rise of male social dominance to the level of being the primary status proxy used by the most demanding/picky/desirable women when evaluating who are the “top males” in a given group to be the inevitable development of the last several decades. Women need some proxy to sift through any given group of men, and today, and especially in those cities where young, educated, professional women congregate in numbers, the old proxies for status are fairly useless – they will lead to a woman picking an “also ran”. Getting hooked to an “also ran” is not why she has worked as hard as she has, and not why she decided to live in Manhattan to begin with, after all. She is a driven person who is used to getting what she wants, if she puts in enough effort, and she will sift and sift and sift to get the mate she wants, the guy who brings everything she does to the table PLUS that element that she doesn’t – male psychosexual dominance. For women like these, there isn’t that much else that men can offer that is easy to evaluate in terms of a status proxy. Ideally, I think – as I posted yesterday – women are not looking to get hitched to cads. But, ideally, they would love to be hitched to a man who is that mythical mix of dad and cad – someone who has strong psychosexual dominance, but who only applies this to her, and is a stable, loving, husband and father. It’s the fantasy of taming the cad, transforming the cad into a loyal mate, of him being so overwhelmed by her irresistibility and his love for her that he trades in his caddishness for good and devotes himself to her alone. As you point out, this is extremely unrealistic as an expectation, but it’s what a goodly number of the women you are writing about here (Manhattan professionals) are looking for. It’s precisely what they are saying when they whine that there are “no good men”. We both know that there are plenty of “good men”. Most of these, however, lack male psychosexual dominance. So what women are saying is that the men I prefer to select – the ones with psychosexual dominance which I am using as a status proxy to sift men – are not “good”.
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I don’t think we’re going to intellectually engineer a new dating system. Women do need to sift through men somehow, and that sifting will always be oriented toward identifying men towards the top of whatever proxy hierarchy she is using to do her sifting. Context matters, however, quite a bit. Young, highly educated, professional women on the coasts are going to be using status proxies typically that do not involve education, earning capacities, intelligence, and so on, both because these qualities exist in these places in relative abundance (still … that may change as men continue to decline) and the women themselves have these attributes, and so are instead looking to something else as a proxy for a high hierarchy man who brings something to the table she does not. This is why these areas are so rife with women using social dominance as their status proxy when evaluating men.
In other areas of the country, this effect is much less strong, simply because the landscape of what the men and women have to offer in those places is so different. It’s not going to be the case that all women in these places are using social dominance as a status proxy, for example. However, it’s also not a back to the 50s scenario either. Social skills do matter, in any context. But not the caricatured psychosexual dominance that is required in places like LA, Miami and Manhattan.
Put another way: in Manhattan, a man with an advanced degree and a six figure salary is an “also-ran” — he brings nothing special to the table as a result of that, and is simply part of an army of such men.
That may be true, but I don’t see evidence that these factors are even being considered by young women. Not even as some kind of minimally important tiebreaker. Here is, from my own personal experience, what girls seem to be screening guys on, in order.
1. Social status/social proof.
2. Fun/lifestyle/humor.
3. Looks.
4. Money/education.
I actually think I’ve gotten significantly more female interest from my looks than I have due to my money/education — even though my looks are nothing super special, whereas my money and education are WAY out of the ordinary for someone my age in this town.
Is my experience unique on this point?
This sounds about right. I would take issue with item 2. Drop “humor” below looks but above money, tie lifestyle and “fun” in with item 1– social status–because all of those are one ball of wax. Urban slut-monsters are excited by the smooth-talking guy who can get them inta’ ‘da club, and not so much by the wealthy comp-sci PhD with a knack for wit.
For most women, education and IQ work against you. A not-rich man with a 150 IQ is a 7-footer outside of the NBA. The “H-bomb” works in Cambridge, MA– probably the most intellectual town in the world– but not elsewhere (and if you’re over 25, bragging about your undergrad is just pathetic). A PhD is not sexy. Nor is an MD (although the money doctors make is). MBA or JD– which I would classify as elite vocational training and not education– are alright, as long as they’re followed up by “appropriate” jobs.
People with high social status, who can get into famous nightclubs, put a lot of work into knowing the right people and buying the right clothes, just as (to invoke Graham again) people who are popular in high school work at it. However, they work hard at making it look effortless, as the people who are evidently trying hard to be “cool” will faceplant.
Thus, women are misled into believing that the “alpha” males are naturally superior, because those men achieve high social status and make it appear effortless, when the reality is that those schmucks are underemployed losers with a lot of free time to waste frivolously, while the rest of us are doing more useful things and becoming the natively interesting people that the alphas, superficially, seem to be.
No, your experience is pretty typical.
I remember when I started practicing law on Wall Street back in the early 90s. I had advanced degrees from fine institutions, and a very nice starting salary (was overpaid, really), but I quickly learned that none of that was relevant to the women of Manhattan. I would have done better with women there had I been a starving actor who waited on tables to make ends meet, because educated, young, overpaid lawyers are quite literally a dime a dozen in Manhattan.
Now I value the time I spent there building career — that was important. But it required sacrifice in the women department. It’s a trade-off like any other.
I do think that your friend is a bit crazy for suggesting you move to Manhattan because of the dating scene there. Cless can confirm this, I am sure, but at least when I was living there ~15 years ago it was an extremely Darwinian dating market, to say the least.
I’ll confirm it. The Manhattan dating market is brutal and extremely alienating.
There’s an illusion of infinite choice. Of course, this leads to a scenario where people don’t take each other very seriously, and make quick, faulty decisions in dating. Dude only tipped the waiter 16%. Next!
The reality, of course, is that “infinite choice” when no one is taking anyone else seriously is no choice at all. What use is it for me to have access to an indefinite stream of dates when most of them are either (1) going to reject me over something trivial, or (2) behave so obnoxiously– because they have an indefinite option stream, too– that I have to dump them? I’ve been able to go on dates since I was 15, so the fact that I could go on hundreds per year doesn’t mean anything to me.
Manhattan’s dating scene sounds good on paper because of the gender ratio. We have more single women than men. This doesn’t help much, because quality women are still rare.
That Manhattan’s dating scene is a complete bitch for women– which I believe it is– doesn’t mean that it’s any good for men. Actually, love and dating are about as far from a zero-sum game as one can get.
I would have done better with women there had I been a starving actor who waited on tables to make ends meet
My theory is that the ideal pickup profession in this town would be pedicab driver. Even if you were off the job, all you’d have to do is say you’re a pedicab driver and girls would be falling all over themselves to tell you “OMG THAT IS SO AWESOME!!!”
If you don’t work hard to be popular in high school, you probably won’t be.
I went to an atypical high school (very small private school), but I didn’t see the popular kids “working hard” at it. By the same token, I didn’t work at all towards being popular. I thought that would be a waste of time, since I was a nerd and popularity seemed off the table.
Someone popular, fill me in – is this true, was it a lot of work?
Men also do not require super beauty from women in places outside of LA, DC, Boston, Miami and Manhattan.
I don’t think most men require extreme beauty, even in large cities. Anyone who’s been in a relationship knows that the difference between a “7” and a “10” melts away when you’re in love.
Women, on the other hand, seem to feel intimidated if they aren’t as well-dressed and made-up as other girls. I had a naturally beautiful Polish girlfriend, who never dressed fashionably or wore makeup. She said she was intimidated by the stylish, catty girls on the subway, even though she had no reason to be, because I had absolutely no interest in them.
If anything, the most common male complaint in large cities is that the “7” girls are as bitchy as the “10”s. Most men would love to find a sweet, intelligent, “girl-next-door” and date her, but there are few of those women around.
Yeah, but in a large city the “floor” for attractiveness starts at 7, or if you’re “slumming it,” a 6.
Out in burbia it’s not uncommon for girls who are 4’s and 5’s to get married to great guys.
I think both men and women perceive this differently. When I lived there, I saw female 5s and 6s in Manhattan punching above their weight in the dating market, because the women who were 7s and higher were off-limits to all but a small cadre of men. I think when women look at it, they see an inverse picture, perhaps because the also-ran guys who are not with the 7s+ are less visible, or are less noticed.
I am mostly going off what the bloggers who study game say they want (8, 9, 10). They often laugh at girls who aren’t at least a 7, and they seem very harsh, at least over the Internet, about minute details of female appearances.
Many have reiterated that men are first and foremost attracted to looks and everything else is basically insignificant. What you have written makes it seem like you are saying those guys are “settling” because the prettier girls are not available.
Personally (and I know this is contra biology etc. etc.) I think men should put less emphasis on looks and women should put less emphasis on status. If everyone got to know others first as people rather than as “hot commodities,” and chose mates on character and integrity, things would be a lot better.
They want to bed women who are wanted by other men, and their bullshit ratings are a way of keeping score.
That’s a sign of inexperience. Socially inept, mid-20s basement virgins are the worst in terms of having unrealistic beauty standards. Men with even a little experience realize what matters and what doesn’t.
This is true of the crude r-selective sex drive, but that has no staying power. (Its natural tendency is to seek new partners after 4 weeks, anyway.) It’s not true of the K-selective sex drive, which is as strong in many men as it is in women.
I agree 100%.
In effect, yes. The only other option on the table is sitting on the sidelines, which is an option a fair number of men take as well. At that period of life, I think a lot of guys have to realize that their market value is middling, given what that market actually values. You can rail against that market valuing scheme, but you can’t unilaterally change it. So you either adapt to the market, or abstain from it. Women are in the same boat on this, just coming from the other direction.
Well, there has to be attraction there from the beginning, I think. That doesn’t mean he/she is the absolute best in view in terms of pure attraction, but there has to be a strong attraction there. I think that’s the case for men and women alike.
Many have reiterated that men are first and foremost attracted to looks and everything else is basically insignificant.
They’ve admitted to other features playing a role, but from my interpretation, for the purposes of a pump and dump, short-term relationship, only looks matter. For a long-term relationship, they merely want submissive and hot with their alphahood being able to tame her when needed.
If everyone got to know others first as people rather than as “hot commodities,” and chose mates on character and integrity
While I’m a bit of an extreme outlier, the problem is that the person who may present the best emotional match is not the most attractive, leading to the dillemma where you’ll love being around them, but not engaging in any sexual acts with them.
I think you’re making way too much out of these numbers. One person’s “7” is another’s “9”. People have to different beauty standards, and different scales. The only beauty scale that matters is your own personal assessment, which is a discrete 0/1 for most people.
It’s not even clear what a “7” is. When I say a “7”, I mean an attractive woman I would be thrilled to date, but of relatively moderate sexual market value/attractiveness to others. Thus, the 7/10 difference is of no value to me, since they’re both a “1” by my accounting. All else equal, I’d rather date the 7.
When I say a “6”, I mean someone whom I would certainly not call unattractive, but that I don’t feel any special physical attraction toward. (Unless and until I get to know her and discover that she has a great personality.)
So these numbers, which mean different things to different people and are far from standardized, aren’t very meaningful. They’re pseudoscience. For me, they mean:
8+: hot enough, from the general population’s perspective, to get lots of attention from other guys, which is annoying and mostly a negative.
7: physically attractive enough to get me interested in dating her, if she turns out to have a good personality.
6: I would date her if she had a great personality, but she’d have to break the ice.
4-5: not attractive to me, but certainly not ugly. Wouldn’t think my friend is “slumming” if he dated her.
sub-3: doesn’t need to be said.
I think you’re making way too much out of these numbers.
Agreed, and furthermore, I’d say that anyone who takes a lot of the PUA/Game rhetoric about “bedding HB10’s” seriously is just plain gullible. Most nights I go out, I won’t even see a single girl who I’d rate a “10” in looks. At a given bar at a given point in time, there might not be a single “9.”
So when I see stories of some guy who just got into Game and was previously a virgin only months ago, who just now slept with his “first 10”, his 9th girl in only 3 months (all 7’s or above!) — and yes, I’ve seen those kinds of stories — I am inclined to say to myself… ahem… BULLSHIT. His “7” might be my “3”. Or whatever. It’s all a big pissing contest, and everyone’s trying to make themselves sound cooler than they really are. They don’t think they’re lying, but they’re at very least exaggerating the good and omitting the bad, and people are remarkably skilled at believing their own bullshit.
On the other hand, I never see people telling stories that sound like my personal stories. My main wingman has some equally demented stories (we’ve both hooked up with a girl who’s now dead!). And many of the guys I’ve met who consider themselves to be part of the “community” are WEIRDOS.
Now, my own personal views on the numbers scale. First, the #1 thing that determines a girl’s grade on the looks scale: her weight. Human biology is doing its job: if a woman in the (let’s say) 18-29 age range is not overweight and is not physically deformed, I will probably be attracted to her appearance enough that I would be inclined to want to sleep with her.
Since nearly 50% are overweight or obese, if we declare that the median girl is a 5.5, with some kind of bell curve distribution from there, then it would stand to reason that most 1-5’s are overweight or obese, while most 6-10’s aren’t. Clearly there is going to be crossover in both directions.
Now, another key point, a point that too many adherents of Game go to great lengths to deny. The people you see at bars are not a representative sample of humanity at a whole.
For example, during everyday life, I find that I am taller than most people, including the majority of men (I am just a hair above 6 feet); whereas I regularly find myself at a bar looking around noticing that I am below the average male height, with large numbers of guys clocking in at 6’4″ or so. Furthermore, to the extent that I am above average in height at a bar, it’s only to the extent that there are no other white people in the bar.
Likewise, guys at bars rarely look like the stereotypical “computer guys” I’ve worked with plenty of.
Bars are a filtering function. People at bars tend to be more superficial, and so people who aren’t good at appealing to superficial people don’t go to bars as often. (Contrary to established “Game wisdom”, looks do matter.) The same is true with women; in day-to-day life you will see some truly hideous women, but even at fairly “ghetto” bars I won’t see a lot of female 1’s or 2’s.
Practically speaking, the girls I’ve gone after at bars are mostly going to be in the 6-7 range. There’s a decent supply of them, and they might catch my attention. The 5’s and below are just… ehhh. Mostly overweight. The 8’s and above have craploads of male attention.
Obesity really wrecks things. If there were no obesity, and then we renormalized the curve, a 3 or 4 might be a cute but not hot girl. (Remember, nature did its job!) Instead, that gets pushed up to 6 or so. But 6’s are past the level where they’re easy to snag.
This is the most accurate depiction of the bar/”game” scene I’ve read in a long time.
Some reality pills that a lot of men would do well to swallow about “game”:
1. Looks matter, as you said, a lot. So does “show”, which is why learning breakdancing or, if you lack the agility, magic tricks is useful. Unless you’re over 6’2, 210 pounds, with sub-10% body fat, you can expect a LOT of rejection, even if you’re “alpha”. While some 5’5 bald guys are “alpha” and able to succeed on the bar scene, it’s through persistence alone. Rejection doesn’t faze them. They move on to the next. Most guys I know who are training to be “alpha”/PUA make rejection a contest, so that it’s fun instead of a smack on confidence: they go out and race to rack up 10 rejections.
2. “Glamorous” women on the bar scene are extraordinarily rare. The fashionably-dressed “8”s and “9”s become distinctly less attractive once you start talking to them. They’re not that intelligent and, even in Manhattan, they’re somewhat trashy; binge-drinking, “ironically” smoking, PR girls with college degrees and the clothing fashions of the upper class may be a step above what’s available in bars out in the provinces, but it’s a small step. To the extent that worthwhile women go to bars, they go with their friends, not to meet guys.
3. It is possible for an average schmuck to become “alpha” on the bar scene. It’s not very hard, but it takes a lot of time and investment. This is why unemployed and relatively dumb schmucks rule the scene. (This is the problem with all modern dating scenes– online dating as well as the bar scene. They’re so time-consuming that most of the people who use them are desperate.)
4. There’s only one benefit to the bar scene if you’re looking for long-term relationships: confidence, which tends to flag in the otherwise dry spells between relationships. Also, you can only gain confidence from the bar scene if you understand it for what it is. If you go out to a nightclub looking to have scintillating conversations, meet well-bred ladies, and find your next girlfriend, you’re going to get smashed in the teeth, because you’ll never find any of that.
Very true, I think. Which is why bars and clubs are silly places to look for an LTR.
The problem is that there are no good places to look. None. Bar scene? Disaster. Online dating? Terrible. Speed dating? Sucks. Friends of friends? Great in theory, but
genuine opposite-sex friendship is so rare after age 25 that this is very uncommon.
I’m starting to wonder if long single spells are like quicksand, whereby struggling to get out makes it worse. In quicksand, struggling makes you sink, because you create vacuum pockets that suck you in, and if you panic-struggle, you’ll drown. On the other hand, it’s much heavier than you are, so if you don’t struggle, you can float to safety.
Yeah I think a lot of relationships start randomly — that is someone you meet at a social event, or at work, or through some kind of third party and so on. Sometimes group activities. I don’t know many successful LTRs that began in bars. Online dating — more so, but mostly from places like eHarmony where there’s a significant amount of self-selection. The bigger sites are like virtual bars.
Solid analysis.
I actually believe an online dating site can work, although most of the ones out there are mediocre. I’ll post my thoughts on how to do online dating right (it’s a novel idea, and the first person who can execute it will make lots of money) in a later post.
I believe none of you are gamers. But I know a lot of couples who initially met in video games. At my university where I was working as an undergrad, I knew two marriages that resulted from the guy meeting the girl playing the same online game.
Online games are essentially social activities where mixed groups of men and women “hang out” together. The male to female ratio is not nearly as bad as it was 5 or 10 years ago. The social group element exists such that a guy can get noticed by not being a “douche” but by being fun to hang out with, interesting to talk to, and by being smart. Smartness is not a drawback for the nerdy girls who populate these games.
The other dangers of online and long-distance relationships exist, but it’s still better than sifting through thousands of “profiles” at some dating site. I knew a Wisconsin guy who met an Australian woman, moved there and married her. They have a son. They were both very wonderful people who were also very skilled at the game. These games often test the g-factor, people of intelligence (translating to higher competency at the game) find each other quickly and establish rapport easily as well.
I used to be a gamer; not any more. These days, I see video games as primarily just “addictive” and not really stimulating in any deeper sense. How about reading a book or going on a hike, y’know? I’m exposed heavily to the hardcore gaming culture through work, and I’m not exactly a fan of it.
It’s definitely not a place I would go looking for a relationship.
Unless you’re over 6′2, 210 pounds, with sub-10% body fat, you can expect a LOT of rejection, even if you’re “alpha”. While some 5′5 bald guys are “alpha” and able to succeed on the bar scene, it’s through persistence alone. Rejection doesn’t faze them. They move on to the next. Most guys I know who are training to be “alpha”/PUA make rejection a contest, so that it’s fun instead of a smack on confidence: they go out and race to rack up 10 rejections.
I’m currently getting started on a bodybuilding kick; that’s one of the few areas I think I can work on that is likely to measurably improve my success.
I’m a little annoyed by the use of the word “alpha” here — doing well at the bars involves a lot more than just being the prototypical “alpha.” You can be plenty “alpha” and still get nowhere unless you also have the other stuff to go with it. For example, there’s also the “emotional connection” aspect of Game (building an artificially deep feeling of emotional connection more quickly), or the logistics aspect, or calibration, or whatever. You can’t just be a pure asshole, and whereas anyone can do “pure asshole”, it takes a substantial amount of social competence to pull off the “charming asshole” persona. Even just plain “charming” can be a challenge.
I agree that most guys can probably get to the point where they do OK picking up girls at bars, unless they have some pretty serious natural disadvantages. I mean, I’m a recovering Aspie — I was unbelievably awkward as a kid. (Undiagnosed, but I met the symptoms to a T.) Yet even with a disadvantage like that, plus no women in my social circle, plus basically no house parties, I’ve had a few crazy runs, especially one about 6 months ago.
Now, the amount of time and energy required to get to that level and stay there is pretty substantial, unless you can get to the point where you’re constantly meeting new girls outside the bars through your work or your social life. Enough that now that I have a normal job again, it’s hard for me to justify.
Having a “normal day job”, especially one that is intellectually engaging to the point where you actually enjoy it, is almost certainly a disadvantage in the modern dating scene.
The first thing game has to offer is basic social skills, which a lot of the nerds lack. Understanding basic body language is important, because it’s through body language that women tell you if you’re wasting your time (which, usually, you are). The second is target selection: stupid and shallow women are very “gameable” and interchangeable. This means you can learn one approach, get it down, and have a sexual “skeleton key” that works on a wide variety of low-quality women. The third is confidence and rejection tolerance. No matter what, you’re going to get rejected a lot. Game creates a frame in which rejection doesn’t hurt, and can be used as “practice”. You learned what not to do.
On women and assholes, I think more of them are into douchebags than assholes, especially among middle-class women. Assholes like Charles Manson and Scott Peterson certainly get a fair share of women, but only because such men are (be glad for this) rare. 90% of women, many of whom would date douchebags, would be turned off by their overt violence.
The distinction between these two classes is that douchebags are more tame. If assholes are aurochs, douchebags are bulls. The asshole is the person who would commit rape if he could get away with it. The douchebag is the slightly pudgy, “fun” investment banker who was popular in high school and college.
Out in burbia it’s not uncommon for girls who are 4’s and 5’s to get married to great guys.
I’m almost tempted to argue that it’s because there isn’t much choice for them. The pretty AND smart girls left for the big city to find work, leaving the average and below average girls in the suburbs. The guys don’t have much choice, and the low ranking girls are desperate for any male attention, so it sorta works out.
In contrast, the big city women have alphas to keep them entertained, and the men are used to seeing beautiful women and have little desire to import an ugly girl from the hinterlands.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
Are you non-White Cless Alvein?
I’m white.
The runner-up “beta”, getting one-tenth the attention, is often just as attractive, more interesting, and better suited for a long-term relationship.
Maybe it’s me, but I’d argue that in most cases, the beta is a drab boring, average male with nothing really of note to constitute any attraction other than being gainfully employed and not criminal.
Americans are refusing to grow up, even in their 20s and 30s.
Nobody really wants to grow up as I’m learning the hard way. Adulthood is filled with real responsibilities that make life downright unenjoyable, and since we can’t all be trust fund babies with high levels of income and no responsibilities, the closest that most of us can achieve is this state of perpetual adolescence.
the much-needed “real effects” are love
There is no romantic love. There is only lust for alphas and friendly admiration for other males.
“Beta” is a wide range. Only about 2% of men are actually alpha, and maybe 15% are gamma or below. This leaves “beta” to represent the remaining 83% of the population, including a lot of boring people, but also some very interesting people who just lack “game”.
Emo! Work can be enjoyable, although it’s usually not if you’re chasing the money. I did the hedge fund thing once, earning $150k at 24. It was exciting for the first 6 months, but over time I gradually started to hate it, and not even because of the company or work, but because I didn’t enjoy being in an environment where everyone was obsessed with money. If you enjoy your work, adulthood isn’t so bad. It does mean that you’ll have to forgo the quick, low-risk paths to being rich (e.g. investment banking) because those careers are designed to own your life and waste your talent.
If you do it right, work can be enjoyable. The other responsibilities suck putrid asshole, but most of those can be automated or outsourced. I don’t sit down to “pay bills”; the money is automatically debited from my account. If I weren’t living by myself, I’d have a once-a-week maid service, which is pretty affordable.
Complete and utter bullshit.
Well, sure. There is can be a heavy addictiveness if you are not careful. I was quite addicted for a while myself when I was younger. I would stay up until 7 in the morning playing a new game, and I don’t do that anymore. Like all other leisure activities, in moderation it can be a good thing and a lot of fun.
I can read a book by myself. I read a lot as a solitary activity. But going hiking alone as a woman? No thanks. So I go on walks and hikes with my boyfriend. But I never went out to bars or clubs, nor did I like to go out much in general. So aside from occasionally catching a movie or something, I went to work then came home and played video games.
Video games are more interesting than solitary activities in that they can be social (not always; different people play them in different ways). For introverts with a degree of sociability, they satisfy the desire for social activity without the overbearing and loud people that parties and bars feature. They do exist, but I avoided them like the plague.
In online games you have things to do together, places to explore together, virtual battles to fight together. People plan strategies, talk game stuff, or talk about their real lives. People also talk to each other on ventrilo, with real voices and nuances of voice inflections which you don’t get with text alone.
I know the stereotype of the crazy addict playing games all the time, neglecting work and health. That’s not most of the people I knew and met. A lot of people lead productive lives and play for a few hours after work. They do this instead of watching TV. Watching TV is so much less stigmatized than playing video games, yet TV is passive entertainment as opposed to active and interactive gaming.
Anyway, what would you prefer your prospective mate do as opposed to video games? Go out shopping all the time like “normal” females? Hang out with her friends at the mall? Go hiking all the time? Watch TV and movie marathons? These are all very typical leisure activities, but are they really much “deeper” and “more stimulating” than gaming?
Another reason some kids might not want to be popular is because they don’t like the popular people. Maybe the popular kids are shallow airheads and they don’t want to hang around people like that?
I don’t think there were any great intellectuals amongst the popular kids in my school. But looking back there were a few “alternative thinkers” who crossed over into the popular crowd.
I think the popular crowd at my school was more fluid. It wasn’t just jocks and cheerleaders.
[…] Before we start, I shan't use "nice guy" without defining it first: a "nice guy" is man whose sexual intentions are focused on love and relationships, with no interest in high-frequency promiscuity or social dominance. A nice guy is one who treats others as he would like to be treated, in friendships as well as in dating. A "nice guy" need not be milquetoast or weak; in fact, most "nice guys" aren't. Paul Graham, a celebrity in the technology/sta … Read More […]
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