I seen some of the personals and off-topic threads and It makes me sad. I know men are not entitled to any kind of attention from females or other men but have we noticed how many lonely men are out there and why there is absolutely nothing being done to combat it. I know for older men when their spouses or partners die they lose their only source of human interaction. Younger people especially those with mental disabilities or struggled all of their lives interacting with people have to suffer a prison sentence just because they cant find or keep friends long term.

This worries me. I cant really do much other than just post a thread about it on a fetish website addressing it and might get deleted in a few weeks but I just want to know what people should do to address men being so lonely.

Why do you think there are so many men that are lonely? Is it really their fault or society's fault?

We're becoming less reliant on and involved with real world communities as we retreat to online ones. As a result we're getting stuck into habits and routines that are unfulfilling and have zero emotional impact on our embodied animal selves.

Probably the lesson is that the internet isn't a source of meaning in life. It's more like the psychological version of a giant communal toilet.

I think that's the effect, not the cause. I'm going to drop an unpopular but simple truth. "Men" are not needed anymore. There's a reason I put men in quotes. You see if I left it without them, people reading this may get a generalized wrong idea. Maybe say I'm anti-feminist, MRA, incel, and whatever other label (one of them ARE even true of me). The "men" I'm referring to are as a society of providers. I'm referring to many of the traits that have classically been defined as "masculine".

But make no mistake, society is changing, very rapidly from what it has been for thousands of years of human history. What I mean is this. For millennia men and women have been different (biologically, emotionally, etc). They are like Yin and Yang. No one is better than the other, and neither can exist without the other. Historically, men have been the providers and women have been the managers (good ol gender roles).

That's not the case anymore, we've changed a lot. Now I'm all for gender equality which is a separate story. What I'm getting at is about relationships. No matter how you look at it, relationships are a contract. You give something in return for something else. Looking at the very base of this, you have men trade livelihood for sex, and women trade sex for security. That's it, that's the elemental basis of a societal relationship. Note, I said elemental, people obviously look for a lot more when it involves their lives and not just a fling.

Women provide for themselves now, and rightly so. The modern woman is capable and usually not seeking security, they can damn well make their own. They no longer need to seek men for this quality. But this leaves men without much in the way of a bargaining chips as we're biologically dispositioned to show love and desire through work and sacrifice as a masculine trait. Sometimes when the guy says "here let me open that jar for you" it's not because he's trying to demean you, he's trying to show his usefulness. There is nothing more encouraging to a man than his partner needing and wanting his support and input. If we don't have that, we're nothing.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/insight-therapy/201305/the-price-sex-women-rule-men-drool-the-markets-cruel

Also consider that both men and women are hypergamous creatures. They want the very best they can get, also rightly so. Women don't want to settle for some bum, when they can find a much better partner. And if they find their partner IS a bum, they're going to leave for greener pastures. So if you're not a man of high relationship value (fulfilling the particular person's checklist of needs and wants), you're just going to be alone. That's the sad truth of it. I have actually had conversations with women where they told me I have no business trying to date because I'm on disability and could never provide for a family. Was it hurtful, yes. Was it true, yes, I suppose so. In their mind, a relationship with me would have been a drain, I would have brought nothing to the table they wanted, and they'd become something more like a caregiver. The socioeconomic factor is a very real thing.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/emily-levy/2013/08/were-too-poor-to-date-and-it-sucks/
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-hard-truths-about-dating-while-broke/

So what you have now, like in Japan for instance is men and women concentrating on themselves. And that IS a good thing. However, it's lead to less and less couples, less and less sex, and less and less children. People care less about relationships, at least some, or some on the surface.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7b7y8x/why-arent-the-japanese-fucking-361

So now you have a bunch of men that feel worthless because they cannot provide, and a bunch of women that feel like they are only tools for sex. And everyone is miserable. Combine this with the fact that people have less time and are being conditioned for interactions over a screen than in real life, you have a lot of loneliness.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-art-closeness/201601/3-surprising-truths-about-gender-and-loneliness

When we find out whose fault it is, what will we do? Punish the guilty?

I'm grateful to you for raising this issue, which was also the substance to another thread just a couple of days before, so I'm sure this is a problem so widespread that it needs much more airing than it has been getting.
I seemed to wake up one morning and notice that I no longer had any mates (friends) - they had all moved away, died or lost interest. I suggest I'm not a prime candidate for this fate, I'm healthy, presentable and have had a long career in the arts involving loads of interaction with people but, for example, I have no particular summer holiday plans because there is just no one to go with. I go to movies, concerts, the pub by myself. Sometimes I even see someone I know.
I used to think I was quite good at sex but my lovers profoundly disagreed, and given that at 67 I haven't had any for 15 years, I guess they had a point.
There must be lots of this going on.

I agree with the sentence where you said that society is changing rapidly. I also agree that the lack of meaningful employment is an aggravating cause. Corporate capitalism and automation are turning the world into a surreal hi-tech feudal system. Sadness is a rational response to this kind of world.

I can't comment on the rest. I couldn't comment on your own anecdotal experiences with marginalization, of course. People can be shitty. I also can't comment on dramatic overstatements like "everyone is miserable", though for a different reason -- it is so obviously not true. I am sure Jeff Bezos and the Koch Brothers are very happy.

The empirical claims you make are at best only partially supported by empirical evidence. I can't comment on all of them without being tedious, but: (a) Much of behavioral economics contests the idea that people are optimizing or perfectionist decision-makers. (b) The 'Yin' and 'Yang' binary stuff seems to ignore the fact that if you actually accept the gender that pairs with your sex then in affluent liberal societies you may experience quite a lot of latitude to choose what that gender role means to you (unless you live in a cult-like community that punishes any deviance, but that's a separate issue). (c) The 'contract' metaphor distorts and amplifies the transactional element of a marriage relationship, which would be fine if it didn't also obscure the coercive, non-voluntaristic elements of those relationships. (I mean, I'm sure you can tell a story about how even Stockholm Syndrome is a contract -- because obedience in exchange for security, etc.! -- and while I guess you can see the point if you squint at it, hopefully you can also see why it also might seem more like a joke in bad taste than a serious claim.)

This isn't to suggest that your links to Psychology Today are bogus, or totally unfounded or non-evidential, etc. I only mean to point out that social psychology and evolutionary psychology are highly speculative sciences which don't replicate, so their findings are not robust (and sometimes they are framed in silly or sensationalist ways in magazines).

Dude, I get it, you don't like or agree with Jordan Peterson or Carl Jung, etc.

I firstly would like to thank for actual conversation and debate. I feel like our society has forgotten how to do that. The culture of sensationalism has given way to the culture that is literally offended by EVERYTHING. No one can discuss anything anymore.

To address your points, and hopefully I followed them correctly.


I'm trying to pin where you are linking this to? The hypergamy comment? If so, then what I mean isn't about "optimization" but it is about "upgrading". If it wasn't then divorce wouldn't be so common. Hell, people aren't even taking the chance anymore. Marriage rates are at an all time low.

Furthermore, people are just leaving each other and not sticking it out. I'm a "disabled" person, far less than many others I've met in the past year in hospitals. But in the stories I've shared with them, more than one of them (men and women) have been left by a partner because they couldn't be in a relationship with them anymore. "Better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, yadda yadda". You see what people are really made of, and what their really willing to put up with. I don't condemn them either, it's perfectly natural to not only want to get out of that, but to NEED to for some people.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/31/us/disabled-spouses-are-increasingly-forced-to-go-it-alone.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-c-senelick-md/disabilities-can-wound_b_805614.html


I see what you mean with the Yin and Yang, but the interesting thing about the concept is the dot in each of them which signifies neither are entirely without the other, or at the very least symbolize the possibility of them shifting towards the other. I get that if gender is a quarter, then we've only cared about heads and tails for a long time and have forgotten about the edge. Furthermore, some people's identities cannot be described in terms coinage. I haven't managed to make my way through the Tao te Ching for better understanding on this yet. What I have is cursory knowledge from years of martial arts teachers. But these binary terms have existed across many cultures and even species throughout history for a reason.

For instance see our frequent experiment that is the nation of Sweden.
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/you-can-give-a-boy-a-doll-but-you-cant-make-him-play-with-it/265977/


I understand what you're trying to say here and agree to an extent. However, while this DOES in fact amplify the transactional element; I don't believe it just applies to marriage, but every single consensual interaction between two people. A conversation, such as this one even is an "exchange" of ideas. What we are (hopefully) offering and receiving is edification. You're gone quite to quite the nth degree taking this from a situation between two people at a bar discussing going home together and getting freaky with pies, to kidnapping, rape, and consequent Stockholm Syndrome. We do however have a mutual friend that is familiar with some of those situations. I mean I could generalize this even further and say that every decision you make is a contract with yourself. If I do my work today, I'll treat myself to a nice dinner for instance.

That wasn't what I was going for, but rather that men and women both want something out of a relationship. What men traditionally offered doesn't cut it anymore, they have to be more. Meanwhile, women on the other hand pretty much just have to offer what they have all throughout time; companionship, sex, love, and not be insane hopefully. Also, they ARE a thing

https://www.businessinsider.com/questions-fall-love-relationship-contract-2017-6


So I mean, is Psychology not a legitimate field of science then? Does it not follow the scientific method? There are so many facets of the mind we have yet to quantify, or sometimes even quality. I don't have the answers (and most certainly not the "correct" ones), I don't have a MD or PhD. I mean even the MDs and PhDs don't have all the answers either or we wouldn't be here discussing this, or making witty jabs about the evolutionary hierarchy of lobsters. But even if they did, it wouldn't satisfy some.

I'm going to observe "Rule 12" and go pet a cat now.

I like Carl Jung as a thinker because it's fun, though it's not science. I think Peterson is a doofus about quite a lot of things but I'll assume he's competent at personality psychology, and would be more receptive to his shit if he didn't pretend to know more than he does.


S'all good. I'll only reply to your direct questions below because I don't want to threadjack.


Upgrading to a new social class is an instance of optimizing. Satisficing reasoning can also explain upgrading and dumpage, though -- up to a point. On the satisficing model, we should expect that people would settle into a relationship after reaching a threshold, even if they could get better returns elsewhere. That's because stability makes for contentment and there are diminishing returns for a lifelong search. The reality is that people approach decision-making with different strategies when it comes to different kinds of preferences.


Sure, generally it's easier to process binaries, and easy is all other things equal better. (That's why a lot of people are satisficers -- it's easier!) I think you'll find the Tao is an extreme case of simplification, with Mother Void and all that stuff. 'Historically' the simple story probably looks like the best one, but that's because the history of ideas is unmanageable without unwarranted simplifications.

Anyway my point was to look at it from a different point of view -- not historically, but in terms of what it feels like to be a dude. And I say that, from my own internal point of view -- the point of view of being relatively happy with my gender-sex pairing -- the 'dot' in my Yang is of variable size, depending in part on my own say-so, because I live in an open and free society. I don't feel embarrassed wearing barrettes in my hair or whatever, I'm a man. OTOH, I've come to appreciate that if I were to feel alienated from my sex-gender pairing then the contrast will look far more rigid and inflexible, more binary-like.


My point with Stockholm Syndrome was just to say that the contract metaphor distorts our conversation about relationships. If you want to look at the "elemental basis" of relationships, as you said, then you have to look at the transactional part as well as the part rooted in coercion. The technical meaning of the 'contract' is fine as you're using it, but the metaphorical meaning is a farce, and it's not uncommon to confuse the technical and metaphorical meanings, so we shouldn't.


Depends on the sub-field. Some have fared worse than others. But yes, warts and all it's a science -- it's just that science, even when done right, is messy and values-driven. So, in social psychology, replication wasn't valued enough 15 years ago, and it led to under-powered studies being taken as gospel. Gradually people figured out (10 years ago or so) that many well-publicized studies couldn't be replicated and/or failed replications were being put in the filing drawer instead of being published. And then there was a miniature revolution. Luckily Jung is saved from embarrassment because his work doesn't really involve stuff like evidence!

My take as a lonely white young working class male in Tory England? Well I cant speak for anyone else here but my loneliness mainly comes from the constraints of capitalism and whatever the fuck kind of cultural hegemony led to me believe I was entitled and had to strive for certain things. Namely women, wealth and certain experiences and viewpoints. All a load of absolute bullshit that's brought me nothing but misery. I often see this talk of incels and young white anger and I always thought I would of been heading down that quite frankly disgusting and dangerous path had it not been for my change of viewpoint. I see legitimate anger at how this cruel world is and it being opportunistically weaponised by rich cunts and charlatans looking to make a buck and achieve a political goal. I might be wrong but meh that's how I see it

Exactly.

Also, I feel like this would have been the best "Good Idea / Bad Idea" for Animaniacs.

If you guys are lonely you're welcome to come around and take some of the assholes I have to put up with off my hands.

I have walked through life largely unseen. Am I lonely yes. I got 0 attention from both female and males in elementary , junior high and high school. My social skills as a result are poor i'm very shy and find making friends very hard. I go out and am largely unseen those that due notice me tend to due so out of fear not friendship. When you have been on the "outside" your whole life you learn to read peoples body language, posture, and intent quickly. I am not very good looking i'm far too skinny for my height and am fair skinned. My eyes are fierce and full of energy. Yet my body language is calm and resolved. I live my life how I want , doing what ever I want , with whom ever I want.(usually alone) This makes it even more difficult for me, as nothing is beyond my reach, this tends to scare people, this open thinking life style. Don't get me wrong i'm not without rules and I obey the laws within reason. Most often I am called crazy, though most use that word without really knowing its meaning. I am kind, caring, and highly intelligent. Men are turned away from friendship by my intelligence women too. So yes I am a male and yes I am lonely in this digital world. I hunt , I fish, I game and of course love WAM.

When I was 35,I met a fairly hot 20 year old for coffee, boned her after knowing her for 3 hrs, and never saw her again.

I don't know if it's relevant.

Its not.

This right here. How do we balance being intelligent without being condescending or arrogant and at the same time not appearing to be a complete meathead and contribute to the conversation.

Some people, like myself. Never learn that. Its one thing to be able to obtain knowledge but it takes some unique talent to be able to use it in a way to draw people to you.

It takes training and experience in conversation with people who are out to cooperate and not yell at each other or make drama from nothing. If you are shy and spend your time only on the internet or watching cable news, you may end up getting habituated to toxic conversations. (Though if you live in an especially shitty real world location the reverse might be true.)

Things like: take your turn. Don't Bogart your way into a conversation. Listen. Engage. Be present. Tailor what you say to what other people care about. Don't say more than you need to say to make your point. Don't say things you have no reason to think. If you're being sarcastic and have a dry sense of humor, use the right tone. If you don't care about what's going on in the conversation, politely excuse yourself. Try to be kind, and expect people to be minimally decent; even if they don't want to, hold them to a higher standard. If that doesn't work, disengage.

Still a fond memory though