Is this advice in relation to dating and talking to women? If so, I’d agree. I can’t imagine most people want to hear endless complaints from their first few dates.
That said, not complaining ever won’t get you anywhere either. (Even in a relationship, complaining is important if you’re suffering) A lot of times, a lack of complaining and being unaware of solutions is what results in you living a shit life forever. Complaining can be incredibly productive and healthy - especially if you’re focused on solutions. Obviously, complaining that energy isn’t free or how the sun is going to swallow us whole isn’t super productive… but there are many things worth complaining about.
A context shift always changes things. At my core, I’m pretty similar to the person I was when I was very young.
I was always looking for love and romance. It escaped me all my life and still does. So, in some sense, I’ve never changed and my context hasn’t either.
Weird. I grew up in a similar environment. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Maybe the rampant violent alcoholism and meth just isn’t my thing. Of course, it had other major issues.
I had a huge family, 100s, and all of us were pretty religious so if anyone was drinking, it was secretly and I never really experienced it. I mostly just experienced hard work, hunting, 4wheeling, and general redneck shit. People were annoyingly religious but that was about the worst of it.
While senseless politics like this are going on that every person on HN is libbing out over - houses continue to be unaffordable, no universal healthcare, and wages will continue to stagnate compared to costs.
Y’all are blind as hell to the real issues. This football version of American politics is so nonsensical. Not an ounce of material analysis even in something that could be as material as this.
Another method for the state to collect tax dollars. Speed limits have a very low effect on “saving lives”. People will drive whatever speed they think is suitable for the road they’re on.
Go out to places where the speed limit is 55mph but it’s a straight stretch with high visibility and everyone will be going 90mph+. Is everyone suddenly dying on this road? No. However, it’s great revenue generation for the local police departments to start ticketing people.
If you’re concerned about the speeds of which people are going - design your roads such that they don’t make sense to go quick. (And I don’t mean ridiculous speed bumps that are wildly ineffective and just increase the amount of noise in your local neighborhood)
I don’t think most people are concerned about 25 vs 30mph in cramped city roads with many pedestrians. I think most Americans get pissed off when you start saying you can’t go 80mph on what is essentially an autobahn like 280 in Silicon Valley. It’s ridiculous the speed limit there is sometimes 55 for no justification whatsoever. It’s a massive open road where you can often have visibility for miles.
I’m saying this as someone living in NYC where I don’t think cars should even exist. But if you have to have cars, Jesus Christ make it efficient to get around and stop using every fucking mean possible to just tax middle class people to death. These things won’t bother anyone with any real money. I should know, I get my tickets every so often. I consider them my little tax and I get no points to my license every time. I have radar and will be installing laser jammers soon (god damn cops on 280 are running laser at midnight now, wtf).
I hear about this sometimes and I just wonder if the post-nut clarity makes you recoil. If I was finding my partner less attractive to the point of finding it challenging to become aroused around them, it certainly has more to do with them than it does with whatever I am watching.
I’ve never experienced this even in the slightest and I’ve definitely had moments where I was unattractive to my partner and not having sex with them and substituting with porn. It was cause they were being a jerk and I didn’t wanna fuck them. Shocker.
It makes me recoil that I replaced my partner with simulacrum of her.
I've been in situations like the one you describe but this was not that. It's not about attractiveness. A good analogy is that you can sate your sweet tooth by eating certain fruits. But if you start binging candy bars and ice cream, suddenly that pineapple you used to love no longer does the job.
I’ll add in a hot take. I think the entitlement of the more recent generations has a strong cause for this as well. I’m not one to say that millennials or whomever are more entitled than previous ones but when it comes to romantic connection - I definitely believe some are.
We see the rise of online dating apps being the number one way (by a large margin) for urban educated singles to meet their future partners. If you’re in a place like SF or NYC, you can completely forget about meeting your future spouse at some hobby, the gym, or even in a friend group. I think a lot of this has to do with entitlement - a strong belief that a person deserves a match that is unwaveringly perfect/better-than-themselves. This Disney-ification of romance is very strong among certain crowds.
In my view, this has a strong effect on social circles. People won’t introduce anyone anymore. You might have a party and people might end up together but the idea of specifically inviting people or introducing friends to each other for romantic purposes is, practically speaking for yuppie circles, gone. The main reason I’ve seen is that certain people have gotten increasingly hostile to anyone even suggesting a person to them that is less than perfect/godly. To the point where many people are afraid of suggesting anything and therefore will not risk their own reputation and friendship because they really feel they’ll lose their friend if they even suggest a potential romantic connection.
So, anyway, my belief is romance within social circles is quickly dying due to entitlement and this has a strong pusher for people to not put as much effort into them. Once that is established, it carries over into the rest of your life because you didn’t ever prioritize it. Therefore, even if you’re partnered, you have learned to live without.
It’s shocking how few relationships I’ve seen are from social circles. If anyone ever studies how people 25-35, educated, and living in major cities dates… being single will be more common than any non-app method.
I didn't think Aella of all people would put out a bounty. She must be looking for a wealthy man. As another commenter here said, it's two circles as far as the overlap goes for what she seems to seek - which I think is pointed out by how all the men she does know that meet her criteria are incompatible on some other fundamental level with her. (Not uber rich, not poly, not available)
What's funny to me about seeing the bounty at the end was that I had a similar bounty to friends and peers. I offered $50k then $100k then $250k then $500k... Eventually I started asking people, "I don't want to seem ridiculous here but guys... even at $500k none of you have even attempted. Do I really say $1m to get a single introduction?" I stopped even bringing up the bounty a long time ago. The more I told people of what I'd offer and their immediate refusal to even try to introduce me to anyone solidified just how much all the people I have in my circle thought I was destined to be alone due to my lack of physical attractiveness. They would mention they knew no one or that everyone they knew would not find me attractive in the slightest and it was futile for them to even bother anyone.
In all that time, only one gay man I had only talked to a handful of times set me up on two blind dates and I didn't ever prompt him about anything. Just told him I had been in NYC for a couple years and still had never been on a single date. The women who showed up didn't know what I looked like and neither did I for those women. I was just given two phone numbers and a couple names - so I arranged the dates and they showed up. Of course, it was a complete failure. The women saw me on first sight and were like, "Well, I guess this is what I get for trusting a gay man's sense of taste..."
I hope I never have to write a substack to find a partner. I want to completely forget these miserable years of being single and have a loving family to make it all fade away.
At least for all the surveillance the Chinese do - the standard of life is improving overall. We don't even get that shit here in the US. Our life just gets worse by practically every measure as the years go on and we're taken advantage of on top of it.
There’s probably not one single benchmark (and I won’t say that all of them are negative in the US) but we can just think generally about the things we’d like in a good life:
Life expectancy. Chronic disease rates. Suicide rates. Depression rates. Violent crime rates. Marriage rates. Home ownership rates. Education rates. Debt rates. Labor participation rates. Wealth inequity.
No one metric is a complete picture but together they tell a story. If America was a product and the above was on a dashboard, you would fire the CEO.
70% of these metrics are solved in China (or most places in Asia) through methods that most people in this thread would be vehemently against. You can put the mentally-ill back into sanatoriums, enforce quick and draconian response to petty crime, and pay an economic underclass a pittance to clean your streets if you wish.
Unfortunately for Americans, it's not the CEO at fault here actually, it's the middle class and left-leaning/progressive that are directly responsible for many of the problems here. The funny thing is that Republican Party being in complete power with Trump would be more similar to the CCP than the Democrats or Progressives. Suppressing dissenting voices like Pro-Palestine in order to force national homogenity is a big part of that.
And I say this as someone who supported Biden and Kamala, but these left-wingers or libertarians who are so vehemtly opposed to the US Gov but then simp for China are just being childishly incoherent.
Does authoritarianism and over policing cause their QoL to rise while ours is debatable? Their middle class is rising, ours is nearly dead. Their years of salary to purchase a home is decreasing, ours is almost a full lifetime. We have more people per capita in prison than they do. We have rising obesity rates. Rising chronic illness rates. We are now surveiling our own populations social media to find reasons to kick them out just like they do.
So please let me know how locking up more people and paying an economic underclass to clean our streets will help us achieve all those goals? Crime, I get it, but how is what you claimed going to solve our health and financial issues?
> enforce quick and draconian response to petty crime
In the Bay Area the median response to petty crime is zero consequences for the criminal. This is because in practice criminals are not caught or punished.
If the cost of having laws enforced is that we need better surveillance (read: more security cameras) then guess what? We are already heavily surveilled.
At the very least, wages for the average citizen. It’s not perfect but at least there’s movement towards building something. What is the US building towards? Enriching billionaires?
That said, not complaining ever won’t get you anywhere either. (Even in a relationship, complaining is important if you’re suffering) A lot of times, a lack of complaining and being unaware of solutions is what results in you living a shit life forever. Complaining can be incredibly productive and healthy - especially if you’re focused on solutions. Obviously, complaining that energy isn’t free or how the sun is going to swallow us whole isn’t super productive… but there are many things worth complaining about.
I wonder how capitalists feel about complainers.
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