Yeah, I can totally tell you’ve been there. Talking from personal experience, you are.
Also I’m not sure it’s helpful to pretend that incels are some freakish nonhuman creature that subsists entirely on hate. (Those would be “republicans”.) While an incel would almost certainly suck at being in a relationship, it wouldn’t be because he doesn’t want one. It would be because he’s built up expectations of the “perfect” relationship that he imagines all Real Men™ have, and there’s basically no chance any real woman would live up to that. She’d have to be both perfect and perfectly submissive - and willing to put up with an asshole with no social skills.
The experience of being in places where people walk a lot and eat healthier diets, and seeing far, far fewer obese people than in America - that experience.
Some people who feel alienated and ostracized become radicalized when they find an outlet where they are able to find social validation and scapegoats for their problems. This isn’t something brand new. “Chad” is the symbol of the guy who has the validation they really want. I see no reason to think they wouldn’t be a Chad if they could be a Chad.
As I said upthread, I don’t think it has to do with dating. I think it has to do with psychological resiliency. People who are missing some of the tools that other people take for granted and the lack of those tools causes them to struggle or fail at certain aspects of life, largely those that revolve around building satisfying interpersonal relationships, and to blame others/life/Chads/women for those failures rather than bouncing back.
I had a therapist who encouraged this mindset. Whenever I would bring up how stupid or inadequate I felt when socializing with a particular group of people, she would tell me these people were a bunch of so-sos anyway, so why care what they think? Whenever I would tell her I wished I was “normal”, she would tell me that normal is boring.
It might have an unorthodox approach, but I don’t have low self-esteem anymore.
There’s a huge difference between “these people never got fat, aren’t exposed to crappy food, and don’t have a problem maintaining equilibrium” and “if you’re not basically dead it will all fall off if you put the twinkie down!”
Kind of the difference between a ship that’s afloat, and one that’s been on the bottom of the ocean for a hundred years. As long as you pretend that it doesn’t take any work to drag it to the surface, either.
The main difference I see in this particular example is that the anorexic is going to extreme measures to try and change herself while the incel expects something and is going to extreme measures to whine about it when they don’t get it. One is much more sympathetic than the other.
I am (among other things) part Greek and part (Northern) Italian. Two similar populations genetically; belonging to the Alpine-Mediterrenean genome generally, with similar diets. But the Greeks have high obesity while the Italians have very little. The difference is in the decreased adherence to the traditional diet in Greece.
The people of coastal Italy live a long time because they eat lots of good fish with shellfish, oily fish like Sardines, and many green vegetables and more lean meat like lamb, chicken, and pork, rather than red meet like beef because they don’t have enough land to graze lots of big, fat, unhealthy cattle the way they do in America. They eat lots of olives. They eat a lot of fruit. They drink wine rather than lots of beer with empty calories or distilled liquor mixed with sugary shit. And they move around a lot.
It doesn’t exactly take William of Baskerville to figure out that you’re going to be healther with this diet, man.
I doubt anyone thinks that diet has nothing to do with weight and health. What DSeid said, which has a lot of data backing it, is that obese people generally don’t become non-obese, even with lots of reasons to become non-obese. Exercise programs, fancy diets, plain diets, social opprobrium, health risks, etc. don’t seem to change the fact that obese people, in general, struggle to become and stay non-obese. That’s it.
So, just to clarify, your solution is…what? State-funded therapists for all? What if they don’t want to see them? State-mandated therapists for all? What exactly does “long-term interventions” look like?
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if ANY country does this? The Nordic states maybe, have state-funded free-at-the-point-of-use therapists?
I think of it as more educational and social. Trying to teach social skills, adaptive strategies, building resiliency and well-being, trying to enhance community engagement, etc.
I am for figuring out which teenaged boys are at risk of becoming low-attaining, angry, violent young adults and using the same CBT-based practices that are currently being used (with some success) to deter urban youth from joining gangs.
These guys are desperate for status because they are constantly being bombarded with messages that they are losers. So they need to be taught how to block out these messages and come up with their own. They also need someone to put their hand to activities that are conducive for building self-esteem as well as developing concrete skills so they can graduate from HS confident they can survive in their own.
They need role models. They need to know that you can still be “cool” and not have all the shiny symbols of success. They need role models who they can relate to…not someone who has the perfect life but someone who knows the sting of the “spergy” label…someone who knows how it feels to be misunderstood by everyone, but is still doing positive stuff with their life.
They need help with emotional and social skills. Not just in the context of girls, but everything. Including verbalizing ones thoughts and feelings. The group theray framework–in which kids can talk things out in a structured non-judgmental way–can help with this.
Pograms for at-risk youth are age-old. Thing is, we are accustomed to thinking they are only useful for poor minorities, not middle-class whites.
^ Damn right about that. But I worry that the young men in question would avoid such programs out of fear of being stigmatized as some form of “special ed” or “program for troubled kids.”
I also wonder if the programs should be co-ed or single-sex. I’d worry that having boys and girls together might cause either the boys to hold back from sharing their feelings due to not wanting to be embarrassed in front of the girls, or else just get angry and be needlessly cruel to the girls.
It should probably be led by a man who’s older, but not too much older - maybe in his 30s - ideally with some experience leading younger men, such as in the military or as a teacher tasked with imparting some technical or intellectual skill to younger people.
If you make the program worth their while, boys will participate.
In one anti-gang program I heard about that is based in Chicago, participants in are paid a stipend. That may not be a seductive lure in middle-class surburbia, so swap money out for job apprenticeships. They complete the program and they have a guaranteed job. Might take away that feeling the odds are stacked against them.
OK, I look at where I was at 30, when I was convinced I was a forever alone (and my life up until that point made it look like a possibility).
Long hair and beard, but always clean and well groomed. My job allowed me dress casually but neatly.
In good enough shape to run a half marathon at a sub 7 minute per mile pace, with good upper body development for a distance runner.
Good conversationalist until I wanted to ask someone out. No matter how much practice I got, I never got better or less nervous.
I was never going to get rich, but there was no reason to think I wouldn’t be steadily employed.
It wasn’t enough until I was standing around and was approached by the future Ms. P. That’s something that just doesn’t happen. I have no reason to think I’d be any less socially awkward if I were still on the market. Pure dumb luck, that’s what it was. Once the pressure of making the first move was taken away I was fine, though.
That is one of the problems we have today with our culture, a stigmatization towards those with mental health issues.
If I am missing my right arm, it would be a real asshole that would make fun of me for that, and most people would make allowances, and help me out where I needed it. It would be expected that I could cope with that, but it would not be expected that I would never need help.
Mental health is different. People do make fun of those with mental health problems. They don’t see the missing arm and forgo asshole remarks about the handicap, they see that you are acting differently, and point that out. Not only is this not helpful, it often makes the mental health problem worse, as they withdraw from social contact. People do not make allowances, and expect you to cope with it with no help.
People in this thread are making fun of the “losers” who have mental health problems that cause them to have social anxieties or otherwise difficulties in fitting in. This of course, makes it even harder for those to see themselves as a part of a culture or group. And more than anything, people want a place to belong.
For quite a while, these “losers” and outcasts just did their own thing. They suffered in relative silence, with only occasional outburst of an individual who had taken as much as he could. Now, there is a community that they can join. A group that will accept them. A culture that doesn’t dismiss their concerns. People who will not make fun of them for their undeveloped social skills.
It’s not a healthy community, as pretty much everyone involved is suffering from some sort of mental health problem, and you are literally having the inmates run the asylum, but it is a community.
This is bullshit, and IMO dangerous bullshit. There’s no nugget of truth in stereotypes like that black men are dangerous to white women, or that Jews and Native Americans can’t be trusted, or a million others. Spreading the message that there’s a nugget of truth to any of these greatly assists the very worst among us.
Why are you dismissing the possibility so eagerly?
You and I and the rest of everyone here come from a unbroken chain of procreation that stretches back literally billions of years. We exist because every single one of our ancestors took action that resulted in another successful link in the chain, despite how many countlessothers failed. So yes, the hope for a relationship deep enough for children might, you know, be part of what’s cooking here. There’s an immediate plausibility to this. Why would anyone dismiss that possibility?
Frankly, it’s clear at this point you have preferred paths of speculation that you’d rather take. Obviously, that’s fine. But what’s bizarre to me is that you treat other paths of speculation with such apparent immediate dismissal when as far as I can tell there is no quality data available to test which might be more likely.
Do we know what the numbers were fifty years ago?
Which way is the ratio going?
These might be relevant questions. If the ratio is heading in the 2:1 direction, rather than away, that might tell us something. (More likely, it would be another dead end. But for example, if the ratio today is lower than 50-100 years ago, that would definitively kill this particularly route of inquiry. If the ratio is higher today, that would mean much less except leaving the path open. It could still be very wrong for a dozen other reasons.)
This discussion is about what they claim to be feeling now, not ten or twenty years later.
They might think they want something today which ends up different from what they want in a couple decades.
Frankly, I’m not interested in pointing out the other side of the coin for every one of this little mini-arguments. It could just as easily go the other way. My point is that you seem, consistently, to argue against one side of an issue, in favor of another, without any clear reason that I can see for that difference. I’m far from convinced Velocity is right – and in fact I’ve seen sentences I definitely disagree with – but I’m also not convinced that there’s any strong reason to favor any particular argument at all at this stage. What we have, as far as I can tell, is a mess with no obvious method to untangle it. What I dislike is when certain routes are deemed somehow off-limits, when I don’t see any consistent reason for some others being left open. I’m not “defending” these other options because I like them. I don’t particularly like them. But I also don’t see the reason why they’d be chucked so quickly in the dust bin.
No.
It didn’t. The post asserted no stories of any kind.
It’s a simple fact that we have twice the number of female ancestors than male. I specifically pointed out that there were many possible stories that could explain that fact, and that we don’t know which story is true. If you’re going to dismiss established genetic facts as storytelling, then you’re free to do that, but there was literally no explanation or story favored in my post. I said exactly the opposite. I said that the problem with facts like these is that there are so many different ways to explain them, so many possible stories to tell with no obvious way to discriminate between the options.
Do you not understand this point, or do you think I’m saying something else?
This is a fair point. I blatantly mischaracterized what you had said.
My own point is not to argue stridently in favor of any one position, but to allow that it’s possible that recent societal changes might be pushing societal patterns in a certain way. I’m not mentioning historical genetics to say that it is absolutely determinative of today’s patterns, or even reflective at all. I’m saying that such a pattern is possible for human society, and we know for a damn fact that it’s possible because it’s actually happened before. Maybe something similar is happening again, on smaller scale. I don’t see any notable reason to favor that option, but I also see no reason to dismiss it so eagerly.
Those are all helpful, sure. “Be a good conversationalist and likable” isn’t terribly specific, though. Every person you interact with will be different; there are a hundred different ways we can change our behavior, and a hundred different social cues to observe to see if it’s working. It’s not just about putting in the work, it’s also necessary to find the signal amidst the noise. I’m not convinced that part is teachable, or that it can be overcome through effort alone.
(That’s not a direct quote. And I don’t mean a hundred literally, of course.)
Your list is good, but I’d describe it as “necessary, but not sufficient”. Even you say that doing all those things doesn’t guarantee happy relationships. What do you say to someone who works his ass off to do all those things and is still alone; do you think they’d be less frustrated, or more?
Yeah, some of the stories of how women are treated within the entertainment industry and shameful. But they have nothing to do with how we’re influenced by the content of that entertainment, or who’s influenced by it more. Why do we offer sympathy to some people who can’t live up to what they see in movies, and tell others that they were stupid to buy into those ideas?
I’m not seeing an answer to my question. I tried to answer yours.
