> As men’s unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline.
Conversely: as young men's potential future employability rises, their romantic prospects also decline. That is - the men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.
Is this actually true? This feels a bit like a post-facto generalization from specific situations. "I was a nerd and didn't go on dates. Being a nerd got me into software and now I make a lot of money. Therefore people who are on the path to high earning are not getting dates."
My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software is no longer dominated by social loners.
Even if this were true (jocks go into management and management is useless), it would be the opposite of what the parent was saying about the people on the path to high pay rarely having romantic relationships since management tends to pay well.
Maybe true but there's a lot of survivorship bias in the population. Software shops are often hurting for clear communicators. Winsome folks tend to get bumped into leadership roles even if they start out slinging curly braces and semicolons.
I don’t know where you went to school. I guess I know a “jock” type who was running a meth lab, I guess that is a kind of management, at least until he went to prison.
The meme is not about income or physical fitness, it's about psychological aggressiveness. Highly un-aggressive men are considered emotionally unattractive and don't get dates because, for one thing, they're afraid to ask, but they're nice and dependable and will take care of you forever. Highly aggressive men come across as dynamic and interesting, and turn out to have five mistresses in three states and a warrant out for their arrest in two of them.
Poe's law, sorry. (Although some truth snuck in with the parenthetical about not asking.) The arrest warrants were supposed to give away the joke...
If you're wondering why people see it that way, just imagine a world where a large number of people had undiagnosed social anxiety, and another large group of people had undiagnosed sociopathy, and they both got pushed out of normal society into the same place. Then the ones with social anxiety look at the ones with sociopathy and associate their slightly greater success with short-term relationships with the condition they do have, rather than the one they don't.
As a guy, you can handily subvert this dynamic by learning to act assertive in a way that implicitly appeals to others' sensation seeking, without being so aggressive that you end up being off-putting to others or even scaring them away.
Interesting. I'm just one person, but: I've enjoyed stable employment as a programmer since I was 23, and my teenage years and early 20s were easily my most socially (and romantically) active, and I rarely felt lonely then. I've felt most lonely in my late 20s and early 30s.
I sometimes wonder if my career destroyed my ability to make and keep friends.
Social groups just dry up when you get to your late 20's as people are marrying off, having kids, and only maintaining the utmost of friendships. I know it's brutal but it's a time thing... significant others and families take lots of time if you're doing it right so socializing time becomes of higher value/expense.
It was way easier to meet people when I was younger - not just romantic partners. Social groups were much more cohesive and much less based around couple activity. People were just down for whatever and would jump at something just for the experience. I had tons of friends I could just call/SMS like "hey I'm bored let's go find a show" whereas I would feel inappropriate doing this as an adult.
I think late 20s is when most people lose touch w/ remnants of their college social circle if they're not naturally outgoing. Usually everyone has moved away or married off at this point. It's fairly normal.
I'm one of these men and I hope this actually works out in the end. I sense that men also have a biological clock but we can reassure ourselves that we can keep putting off settling down because of the biological reality of male reproduction. If I just get a little more successful, then I will be more attractive in courtship. But the thing is, you lose track of time really quickly. And, it is quite the bootstrapping problem to catch up on romantic social skills that you didn't cultivate earlier in life. Being awkward around women in High School is a given, but as a thirty-something it can be profoundly uncomfortable and off-putting.
Good luck to you. I'm in the same boat and it's comforting to not be alone. I've sacrificed a social and romantic life to get to this point (20 year old, fairly well paid DevOps guy). There are days that I immensely regret leaving school at 16 and terminating my youth early but financially speaking it was the best decision ever. I just push onwards, hope for life to become fun, and hope that I won't become a cautionary tale.
Please please please try to find good outgoing non-techy roommates that you can tolerate while you are at this age. Even better if they are good with girls. Do not live alone just because you can afford to do so. Try to spend as little as possible of your salary and regardless of the market buy a house/apartment as soon as you can. Live in the smallest room.
There are plenty of excellent places in the world where you can have a reasonable quality of life for about $10k/year, your goal is to have that covered from your real estate income. Go do that as soon as you can, travel slow. Overnight trains, house/pet sitting, couch surfing, 'etc are all good things to try.
Try to find a remote job and never touch your salary income again, keep investing it. Do not mention your net worth to anyone.
You will find in a few years that "DevOps" is a very finite skillset so there is no real need to push so hard as you'll know most of what you need to know in about 3 more years if you do not already.
No reason not to have a social and romantic life and great weekends. I'm quite confident your employer and less talented peers are exploiting your age and willingness to put in long hours.
Don't be available after hours and avoid being on call as much as possible.
You only get your 20s once. Make memories.
Money is important but you need less than you think and is never a worthy goal in and of itself. You can convince yourself of this by reading up on behavioral economics. Optimize for quality of life. Have a FU-money number, reach it, and bail.
Appreciate the advice. It is a bit harder than it sounds though. Building a friend circle from scratch is harder than any technical challenge I've faced before. I overcame my social anxiousness for the most part but that doesn't mean I can cold approach people and build a conversation up to a friendship.
Anyway, HN is hardly the place for this kind of topic but thanks again. I'm giving it my best but it's not a piece of cake.
HN is certainly the place for this kind of topic, it is one of the most important topics discussed here. I've been on this site for over a decade and was exactly in your shoes when I found it.
Tech crap comes and goes and is repetitive. You'll sponge it all up sooner or later anyway.
It is absolutely not a piece of cake, I know buddy. It requires a massive investment on your part and I am flailing around to really drive home the fact that it is worth literally ALL THE EFFORT YOU CAN MUSTER. Guaranteed.
I sincerely hope you succeed in making the very necessary changes you know deep down you have to make. Best of luck!
If there's any solace for you, there are plenty of similarly brilliant kids as you that did stay in school to try to get that 'college' experience, and still are unsatisfied with themselves and feel out of place. Think about if you were in that normal streamlined path in college, would your personality and innate nature really do a 180? Highly doubt it, even though most people think they can exercise a locus of control and that external circumstances can change their deep inner character. There's a reason why you gravitated towards leaving school and being a young genius and working early. You live a unique (and impressive) life. Try to live your life out like a movie and don't look back at the what ifs. You're 20 too, haha. You're a baby. Your future is fucking unscripted. Don't worry about any of that shit. Your life is just starting.
>" Don't go the "creepy incel who hates all women and Chads" route"
Absolutely. I am on the autism spectrum so part of the difficulty I have can be attributed to that. However I accept that my social shortcomings are my own responsibility. I think a big part of the problem is finding new friends now that I am in my 30's and life is very stagnant.
Anecdotal, but I had this problem for many years, I stuck to my existing (small) social circle which included no single women, and that social circle got increasingly small over the years as people moved away, settled down, etc. I moved somewhere where I didn't know anyone at all, and after a few months of just spending every waking moment alone, I just started going to the same place where people are and doing the same thing every day.
I think all it takes is going somewhere where people are and being friendly, somewhere that doesn't include existing friends and acquaintances, just sticking with it and not really caring who thinks what about you. Anywhere but a bar would be my criteria, and ideally not a commercial establishment. For me it was the local swimming pool in my community.
I found myself in a similar boat until I started doing something that had a high community dependency that is also less extremely gendered. So, for example, biking and hiking are not gendered activities and a variety of humans do them. Foodie things, business things, specific crafts will also do this. Consistently appearing in them helps a lot. This is dependent on how “evident” your autism is though. There is a good amount of therapy that can be done to mitigate some of it, but there are also groups (fandoms for example) that are both less obviously gendered and also more open to awkwardness (like writing fantasy novels). Once you’re in an activity for the fun of the activity, friendships and the like also tend to form organically, like sewing seeds in a field and then allowing rain to trigger sprouting.
The problem is people, including women, get to pick their friends. If you're branded as awkward or ugly all women will avoid you leading to a self-perpetuating cycle.
Since women can pick their friends and generally pick gregarious, outgoing, and socially competent men for their friend groups, they ignore and do not understand the type of man who is labelled an incel.
No, these are false premises. All of my female partners have had the feedback from someone that "you're just like a guy". The so called "girl next door" wearing sweats, and rocking a bad-hair-day ponytail because she's late for her lab may be way hotter when she dresses up than the median film actress. She may be an awesome friend. She may be a frickin' monster in bed, without giving off any porn-star vibes.
Incels are fundamentally working off a broken model of women, attraction, dating, and sex.
EDUT> Not getting "Stacy" is making them crazy, but they don't realize that they don't want Stacy. Stacy's frumpy-seeming neighbour will rock their world.
> Incels are fundamentally working off a broken model of women, attraction, dating, and sex.
That broken model is unfortunately widespread in both genders. Some "girls next door" can basically feel like failures in the dating/relationships sphere, which ends up making them even less appealing to others. It's worth trying to fix this of course, but it's not always easy.
The former part is the cause of the latter. The guys I've known like this were trying to treat it like a game and/or had unrealistic expectations, and that ended about as well as it always does. Once they started being genuine and realistic, things changed dramatically.
You have no idea. I am sure there are some men who change for the better, but there's plenty of men who try being genuine and realistic and get no positive response.
Well, I certainly don’t know your friends but I can say that in my experience the guys who _said_ that tended to have, shall we say, gaps in their self-assessment or were unable to accept that there was nothing you could do to make one specific person feel differently.
A lot of stable and reliable men have really good teenage years.
There is definitely an arc-type of socially awkward boys who grow up to be engineers, accountants, etc. But within that group, romantic prospects are positively correlated with employment prospects. An awkward guy w/ a job is better than an awkward guy w/o one.
> men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.
You are describing nerds having high paying tech jobs, right?
I find that little bit short sighted, there are huge number(probably the majority) of people with balanced lifestyles who are employed in stable jobs, just not really in a trendy high paying or high status sectors.
There are also a sizeable number of people who don't posses the nerdy characteristics at all and still are good in academics and business. Colleges are actually full of that kind of people, they all end up in good jobs.
Hey, sports teach valuable life skills -- life skills the socially awkward often miss out on. Things like grit, teamwork, and not being a sore loser, as well as the importance of keeping your body in shape. In fact we are having a crisis of not enough boys doing sports, and as a consequence elite military units can't find enough recruits who meet the baseline physical fitness standards.
A reasonably intelligent person with an athletic background probably did well socially in HS, and will probably do well in the working world.
Surely one's romantic prospects should not be set in the teenage years. Or even be affected all that much by contingent employment status, when future potential might be far more relevant.
As another reply touches on, there's a developmental process to romance. A guy in his thirties dating for the first time will have a seriously hard time because of his inexperience. I'm not saying that it's impossible at that point but missing the boat in your teenage years can stunt this development. I think Jordan Peterson has described this in one of his lectures (it's an interesting idea regardless of what you think of his character).
a guy in his thirties dating for the first time will have troubles IF he didn't have good friendly social interactions BEFORE that with both women and men.
> That is - the men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.
Wouldn't that be nice? That sort of karma is not really guaranteed to exist. Chances are the ostracized lonely introvert will be worse off due to poor networking and if he finds any success at all it will be despite many disadvantages. Meanwhile, asshole bullies could very well go on to become their bosses because sociopathy is often found in powerful people.
Conversely: as young men's potential future employability rises, their romantic prospects also decline. That is - the men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.