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techstepgenr8tion
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16 Sep 2019, 4:33 pm

I was listening to this and had to say yes, it's a huge part of why I hardly dated. Really when I think about the half decade or so where things were really awful, between 20 and 25, there were attractive girls at work (I was in the restaurant industry) who went to a private college down the road who'd be furious with me within a week or two of their starting to flirt with me, and it seemed to be twofold reasoning - a) They found out despite looks I was low social status and b) apparently since I hadn't asked them out that I, as a low status guy, had also snubbed them, and there wasn't much more calculus allowed in that.

A really big part of what was happening there - I was trying to have conversation and 'vibe up' to see if I could get an intellectual, emotional, or any other kind of vivid connection and I often found that such just wasn't allowed. To be fair it wasn't out of any desire to reject them, I just knew that I was different, that anyone who didn't know me and was going on my looks was a bomb waiting to blow up in my face, and that was my attempt at trying to navigate around that obstacle.

This Thinking-Ape is relatively short, 16:30, but I think it points out a large part of the dilemma a lot of deeper or more thoughtful men are in (Thinking-Ape himself sort of has the history of his channel in this vain), and a lot of this seems to come down to what I think has hit the nail on the head as far as the problem - sexual economic theory, the idea that women are in cut-throat competition with other women for attractive and successful men, men in cut-throat competition with men for attractive women (some more coalition building for collaborative success-building), men's sexual market value by itself being nil, etc.. The worst part about that - it takes any hope of meaningful connection out of the picture and if you're a guy an attractive girl is supposed to be an attractive girl and if that's not enough there's something wrong with you, and something equally barbaric seems to be done to women with respect to attractive and prestigious guys.

Anyway the video:


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16 Sep 2019, 6:15 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
This Thinking-Ape is relatively short, 16:30, but I think it points out a large part of the dilemma a lot of deeper or more thoughtful men are in (Thinking-Ape himself sort of has the history of his channel in this vain), and a lot of this seems to come down to what I think has hit the nail on the head as far as the problem - sexual economic theory, the idea that women are in cut-throat competition with other women for attractive and successful men, men in cut-throat competition with men for attractive women (some more coalition building for collaborative success-building), men's sexual market value by itself being nil, etc.. The worst part about that - it takes any hope of meaningful connection out of the picture and if you're a guy an attractive girl is supposed to be an attractive girl and if that's not enough there's something wrong with you, and something equally barbaric seems to be done to women with respect to attractive and prestigious guys.

That whole way of thinking is, to use your word, "barbaric." It puts heterosexual men and women all in one gigantic commodified mutual slave market. As you say, "it takes any hope of meaningful connection out of the picture."

If you want meaningful connections, look for meaningful connections. Please don't give up on that idea. There do exist women who want meaningful connection too. You just have to find the right places to look for them.

EDIT: Poking around in the channel that video comes from, I see he's one of those misogynistic "manosphere" guys who loves to overgeneralize about women and claim that his overgeneralizations are biologically determined.


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Last edited by Mona Pereth on 16 Sep 2019, 6:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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16 Sep 2019, 6:33 pm

There is a difference between high hormone sexual attraction and a mutually intellectually and moral partnership.

I am pretty weird, but was able to attract men through sexual attraction. This was an abysmal failure for finding a life partner because strong sex drive in men does not have a high correlation with the thought process or a desire to discuss philosophy well into the night. :D Could be true for women too. It's just my experience is from the other perspective. :D

But as Mona says, you could still run into one or two women who like to think.


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techstepgenr8tion
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16 Sep 2019, 8:04 pm

Mona Pereth wrote:
If you want meaningful connections, look for meaningful connections. Please don't give up on that idea. There do exist women who want meaningful connection too. You just have to find the right places to look for them.

I'd actually agree with rdos on one point - you're lucky to run into anyone like that once every five to ten years in any authetic sense. That's not me griping, it's just something I noticed and I tend to prefer acclimating to reality to breaking my own heart. Similarly it's really clear, just because a guy's a bit choosy on connection doesn't mean he's necessarily elevated stock or perfect for any woman 'wanting a connection', that's a potential starting point but wants have to match too.

Mona Pereth wrote:
EDIT: Poking around in the channel that video comes from, I see he's one of those misogynistic "manosphere" guys who loves to overgeneralize about women and claim that his overgeneralizations are biologically determined.

I've actually been listening to him for at least a year now because I find his dialogues quite high quality when it comes to sociology, societal breakdown, etc.. I do think he's had a consistent set of negative / shallow experiences and that's put a slight skew on how he sees things (he'd classify as MGTOW in the sense of genuinely no interest after those experiences) but when he gets people like The Wandering Wojak (very sharp gay sociologist who was brought up in an incredibly severe Jehova's Witness household), or Monday Blue, or a whole host of other people they tend to get on really good topics. One of those that had a lot of silver lining, just regarding concerns about where the west is headed, was his chat with a guy who for the program went by Coyote on a show titled 'Cognitive Dissonance'.

I think what draws me to these guys is similar to what draws me to listen to Bret and Eric Weinstein or some of the guys on Rebel Wisdom (eg. Jordan Greenhall, Jamie Wheel, Daniel Schmachtenberger), or people like Sam Harris or Robert Sapolsky - ie. they're trying their level best at sense-making. The trick I think is listening to these sorts of things and weeding out the places where they've over-extrapolated.


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techstepgenr8tion
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16 Sep 2019, 8:10 pm

blazingstar wrote:
But as Mona says, you could still run into one or two women who like to think.

The funny thing, I almost feel like I'm sharing this video more out of 'yes - x happens', and I don't always necessarily know how firm a grasp people outside of that situation have on it.

An interesting example of something slightly different but it showed there's a sweet-spot in the middle, I was in a forum where one of the women who post there said something like 'Does every guy think your their mom?', it got a lot of humorous responses, and I made a few jokes like 'well, I suppose you could settle that with a maternity test' but I did mention as well in that thread - equal and opposite problems seem to happen if a guy's too independent. In fact nailing the 'sweet spot' for a lot of people, whether it's just enough, not too much not too little, for guys to nail for women or women to nail for guys is quite difficult and it seems much more luck and life/developmental circumstances than anything that's quite acquirable. People tend to talk about 'social skills' a lot but I tend to think it rings a bit hollow when that's almost like a first order and very cerebral level of communication and really it's the secondary and tertiary consequences of life, like having watched the same sitcoms, been shaped by the same environments, etc., stuff you can't 'build' necessarily as a skill set.


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techstepgenr8tion
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16 Sep 2019, 8:44 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I think what draws me to these guys is similar to what draws me to listen to Bret and Eric Weinstein or some of the guys on Rebel Wisdom (eg. Jordan Greenhall, Jamie Wheel, Daniel Schmachtenberger), or people like Sam Harris or Robert Sapolsky - ie. they're trying their level best at sense-making. The trick I think is listening to these sorts of things and weeding out the places where they've over-extrapolated.

Ugh, I forgot a lot of other very important names - more on the spirituality side, like Iain McGilchrist, Tim Freke, Gordon White, the whole Solomonic Facebook click (Ashen Chassan, Aaron Lietch, Stephen Skinner, etc.), Mark Stavish and his take on Hermeticm, there are lot of really acute thinkers all over the place and I want to pay careful attention to what they're up to because I think they all have critical pieces of the puzzle we're trying to figure out these days.


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17 Sep 2019, 1:24 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I'd actually agree with rdos on one point - you're lucky to run into anyone like that once every five to ten years in any authetic sense. That's not me griping, it's just something I noticed and I tend to prefer acclimating to reality to breaking my own heart. Similarly it's really clear, just because a guy's a bit choosy on connection doesn't mean he's necessarily elevated stock or perfect for any woman 'wanting a connection', that's a potential starting point but wants have to match too.

Of course. Where/how have you been going about meeting people, including women with whom a connection might be relatively likely to be possible?

You then mentioned a bunch of YouTubers. I took a quick look and saw that most of them appear to be, primarily, right wing political commentators. Not sure what relevance they are supposed to have in the L&D sub-forum; it seems to me this belongs in PPR, if it belongs anywhere on WP.


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17 Sep 2019, 2:08 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I'd actually agree with rdos on one point - you're lucky to run into anyone like that once every five to ten years in any authetic sense. That's not me griping, it's just something I noticed and I tend to prefer acclimating to reality to breaking my own heart. Similarly it's really clear, just because a guy's a bit choosy on connection doesn't mean he's necessarily elevated stock or perfect for any woman 'wanting a connection', that's a potential starting point but wants have to match too.


Well, I've had two of those this year, which is a bit exceptional. Especially since I really don't desire any more natural connections right now. However, I think this kind of "proves" my point that you can increase the frequency of this to something a lot more common than five to ten years.



techstepgenr8tion
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17 Sep 2019, 6:51 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
Of course. Where/how have you been going about meeting people, including women with whom a connection might be relatively likely to be possible?

You then mentioned a bunch of YouTubers. I took a quick look and saw that most of them appear to be, primarily, right wing political commentators. Not sure what relevance they are supposed to have in the L&D sub-forum; it seems to me this belongs in PPR, if it belongs anywhere on WP.

I think my point didn't land then. What I was getting at is I'm more interested in picking out what's true about human interaction, sociology, why our culture's getting into the jams it's in right now, and I was trying to indicate that I listen to a wide array of thinkers across the political spectrum, and that got poisoned too when to my best guess Bret and Eric got interpreted as 'right-wing'. My take on that last piece - if we now have progressives with left-leaning social and economic goals being interpreted now as right-wing because on some level the sounds they're making are centrist it seems to me like the terms left and right wing are turning to Zimbabwe currency.

As far as politics coming up at least somewhat on L&D - it's a layer of sociology and in a perfect world we might have a fused forum that could hand the arc of every topic between L&D and PPR but that would need some radically different forum architecture or folders on a sliding scale. This topic's not exactly appropriate for PPR on its own either.


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techstepgenr8tion
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17 Sep 2019, 7:16 am

I'm going to add something quickly, if the placement and content of this thread lead to the conclusion that it wasa shy or veiled request for help or if there's no real good way of indicating that you're rotating and examining the crystal and it's various facets so to speak rather than asking for help I apologize for any confusion I've caused and I'll take these things more into consideration next time I post here.


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17 Sep 2019, 10:22 am

I think has hit the nail on the head as far as the problem - sexual economic theory, the idea that women are in cut-throat competition with other women for attractive and successful men, men in cut-throat competition with men for attractive women (some more coalition building for collaborative success-building), men's sexual market value by itself being nil, etc..

I'm sorry but this is just human biology, and psychology for that matter.

Humans are animals - get over it.

You think the nice bird that tweets quietly in a corner of the tree gets to mate? No, it's the ones that blare their little heads off, scaring off other rivals, blatantly chasing the female, and showing off. Across the animal kingdom it's the same. Humans are different only insofar as the complexity of psychological and sociological factors , but the underlying mechanics are the same.



techstepgenr8tion
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17 Sep 2019, 10:53 am

Justin101 wrote:
I think has hit the nail on the head as far as the problem - sexual economic theory, the idea that women are in cut-throat competition with other women for attractive and successful men, men in cut-throat competition with men for attractive women (some more coalition building for collaborative success-building), men's sexual market value by itself being nil, etc..

I'm sorry but this is just human biology, and psychology for that matter.

Humans are animals - get over it.

You think the nice bird that tweets quietly in a corner of the tree gets to mate? No, it's the ones that blare their little heads off, scaring off other rivals, blatantly chasing the female, and showing off. Across the animal kingdom it's the same. Humans are different only insofar as the complexity of psychological and sociological factors , but the underlying mechanics are the same.

The irony here is you just went ahead and described the same exact thing in the animal kingdom rather than the human arena of nature, different language for similar ideas and all of the above within nature (which either everything is part of nature or nature doesn't exist, we're getting lost in the fumes of religion and supposedly post-religious religious heresies to think otherwise).


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17 Sep 2019, 1:41 pm

Justin101 wrote:
I think has hit the nail on the head as far as the problem - sexual economic theory, the idea that women are in cut-throat competition with other women for attractive and successful men, men in cut-throat competition with men for attractive women (some more coalition building for collaborative success-building), men's sexual market value by itself being nil, etc..

I'm sorry but this is just human biology, and psychology for that matter.

Humans are animals - get over it.

You think the nice bird that tweets quietly in a corner of the tree gets to mate? No, it's the ones that blare their little heads off, scaring off other rivals, blatantly chasing the female, and showing off. Across the animal kingdom it's the same. Humans are different only insofar as the complexity of psychological and sociological factors , but the underlying mechanics are the same.


I think you forgot something important here. Every species has their own preferences for how males and females go about courtship & mating, and if you break the rules, you get excluded. Now, if the rules say males cannot form coalitions, those that do anyway won't get to mate. If the rules say you must show off like a peacock, and you show off like a human, you won't get to mate. If the female bird want to hear a creative love song and you blatantly try to chase her instead, you won't get to mate. And note that some species are social and other's are solitary, and if you try to mate with a female of a solitary species, forming coalitions & ganging up with other males won't get you anywhere.

IOW, the rules of NT courtship applies to NTs, and has no relevance in the animal kingdom or with NDs. As a male, you need to obey the rules that your favorite target female population has, and if you want a compatible partner, that means the rules of NDs, where coalitions, ganging up and sex-markets are non-existent.



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17 Sep 2019, 2:10 pm

This circles back to the value of the video and point of the OP:

I still don't know what to call people who have a deep inner world, interest in philosophy, art, who seem to be a bit like nature trying to grow another canopy over and above the animal level, and I say that because I can't isolate them to anyone group - ASD, NT, ND, or anything else exactly. Even anotherwise NT can get hit with genuine crisis and be thrown on to this sort of path.

Regardless though such ways of thinking, especially after you've survived genuinely awful battles, is that your story is fundamentally worth something, that your ideas and way of seeing the world is fundamentally worth something, and what a close study of nature (which we seem to be all agreeing on - just perhaps bickering on phrasing in some cases) is that the brass tacks of forming relationship have just about nothing to do with this taking the total landscape into account and almost everything to do with something like food/shelter/sex/offspring concerns. Double-rare people suffering the mark of the outsider then have to find doubly-rare people of the same sort. The point in bringing it up - its really incredibly silly for us to give people advice as if they aren't essentially living in a social desert, especially if they're in that more thoughtful category rather than being something a bit like Dawkin's pure replicators to which very little of this is even odd or abnormal.


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17 Sep 2019, 2:32 pm

My husband and I are together 25 years and counting. Just as the presenter suggests is often the case we were physically attracted to each other. The presenter says we then needed something in common, but doesn't suggest what that might be. We are from different cultures and different socioeconomic statuses; I'm ASD, my husband is NT. A counselor said to us; "You are very different. A marriage would be challenging..." Is our commonality simply that we are non-conformist? That on rare occasion we do physical activities together, e.g. back then dancing, now biking?

I read that Aspies are more likely to find companionship outside their culture and socioeconomic status, so I'm not alone in that, nor their Aspie or NT spouses. I suppose we had some commonalities, but ultimately my husband and I married for our differences - b/c we complemented each other.

Somebody has to do the errands (him). And somebody has to get the groove on (me).

If you so desire, wishing you find the commonality (or differences) that makes for a long-term relationship. I went/go with serial monogamy b/c that was the rule in my part of the woods. It's been good (but I am well aware I know nothing else).



Justin101
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17 Sep 2019, 2:49 pm

I think you forgot something important here. Every species has their own preferences for how males and females go about courtship & mating, and if you break the rules, you get excluded. Now, if the rules say males cannot form coalitions, those that do anyway won't get to mate. If the rules say you must show off like a peacock, and you show off like a human, you won't get to mate. If the female bird want to hear a creative love song and you blatantly try to chase her instead, you won't get to mate. And note that some species are social and other's are solitary, and if you try to mate with a female of a solitary species, forming coalitions & ganging up with other males won't get you anywhere.

IOW, the rules of NT courtship applies to NTs, and has no relevance in the animal kingdom or with NDs. As a male, you need to obey the rules that your favorite target female population has, and if you want a compatible partner, that means the rules of NDs, where coalitions, ganging up and sex-markets are non-existent.


I agree with this @rdos. But at the same time all animals will have something in common and that is based on the same thing noted in the video. The rules may differ per species, but the drive does not.

Regardless though such ways of thinking, especially after you've survived genuinely awful battles, is that your story is fundamentally worth something, that your ideas and way of seeing the world is fundamentally worth something, and what a close study of nature (which we seem to be all agreeing on - just perhaps bickering on phrasing in some cases) is that the brass tacks of forming relationship have just about nothing to do with this taking the total landscape into account and almost everything to do with something like food/shelter/sex/offspring concerns.

Exactly @techstepgenr8tion ! We might also want to consider that it is healthier to keep a divide between 'mating' and 'partnership'. Plato separated love into different kinds, of which the 'Platonic' version relates to that deeper stuff you refer to and what the young guy in the video was missing. The problem is society tells us we need both in the same person, yet the odds of that are, let's face it, pretty astronomical. Now the Greeks were onto something: they married and had kids, but their wives were just that - housekeepers and mothers. They didn't set their expectations so high as to be disappointed, so could find 'Platonic' connections through the same sex. As the video noted, men and women think very differently on so many levels so finding 'deeper connection' is much easier when this is sought from people of the same sex. Of course for the Greeks it did also overlap into the more primal side too, i.e physical love as well as Platonic love. The problem is society has attached a taboo on such connections for so long that people just go through life seeking some perfect soulmate in the same sex when, if they were realistic, they would find one sort of connection in women and another in men. Or blend them both. I guess my point is we've been constrained by society to look for certain things in certain people/sexes.

I read that Aspies are more likely to find companionship outside their culture and socioeconomic status, so I'm not alone in that, nor their Aspie or NT spouses. I suppose we had some commonalities, but ultimately my husband and I married for our differences - b/c we complemented each other.

@SharonB - But this is an interesting point. I agree with it, but where is it drawn from? Would like to read more into this.