Alone time I find quite valuable.
Every now and then I find myself with a day or two by myself, having no expectations, nobody to have to coordinate with, nowhere to be at a particular time. It’s incredibly resetting.
I know it’s valuable because when I can pull it off, I feel like I’m stealing something.
Joys of being a non parent. I miss those 'open days' :(
Au contraire, I get Columbus day off work. None of my kids are off school :) I’ve been looking forward to this coming Monday for months. Those brief periods of solitude must be taken advantage of with kids.
I'm wondering if it works the same way if the solitude is choosing you.
The first line under the article headline says solitude isn't the same as loneliness.
Well, forecasts says 45% of women 20-44 will be single 2030. On YouTube, you can find videos with tons of views discussing the loneliness epidemic, focusing on men having checked out because they are done with overly high expectations and plain entitlement from younger women. I am a bit surprised, because I always thought the inherent attraction towards your prefered sex would always overrule bad experiences in the past, but apparently, I am wrong. It almost feels like a coordinated campaign by the incel community. Whatever it is, modern politics is dividing the sexes, and it is starting to show stastistically.
And what does this article do? Find another excuse for this to be OK.
Actually, good question. Can your personal experiences with other people be so bad that it is actually beneficial for you in the long run to stay in solitude? If so, thats an indicator that some people are really horrible.
> Well, forecasts says 45% of women 20-44 will be single 2030
From my (cis white mid-30s) male perspective, if this winds up being true then it will be because they choose to be single
They will lament that they cannot find any good men, but they will be overlooking "good enough" men in thier lives, I guarantee
I see this with all of my wife's friends all the time. They are all single and they have insane expectations for what they want out of a man
It's a mix of funny and sad because they often will tell her how she's lucky to have found such a great guy, but I wouldn't check even half of their dating requirements
And of course men have high standards too. But despite how gender norms have changed, it remains the case that men pursue women and women choose who they date. So it's on men to meet women's standards but also on women to have realistic, reasonable standards. I see women with unreasonable standards all the time.
> I am a bit surprised, because I always thought the inherent attraction towards your prefered sex would always overrule bad experiences in the past, but apparently, I am wrong.
Sexuality is complicated. It isn’t binary. It exists on a spectrum and it would not be surprising for many people that the need for sex is less than the need for safety.
And people like me have no attraction even though we may be interested in relationships. I see so many bad relationships around me that I am just not willing to take the risk.
No one taught me how this was supposed to work. How can I mention I’m interested in someone without being fake or creepy?
I am not sure what safety-vs-sex has to do with sexuality supposedly not being a binary thing? I deliberately wrote "preferred sex" to be as inclusive as I could, but I find everything else pretty much uncalled for. For me, for instance, sexuality is pretty much the most binary thing I can think of. Its OK that you see it differently. But hiding advocacy in every statement is really tiring...
As a male near 60, all my relationships and a marriage have ended in heartbreak. I've been solo by choice since my mid 40s, and have never even thought about getting into another relationship. Just not worth it.
Thanks for proofing my point. Also, congrats for actually following through with your decision. Thats not a given for many, because natural urges typically are so strong, they sometimes resemble addicition. In any case, full power to you.
A single anecdote proved your point?
Some of us saw what our fathers went through and thought 'that's not for me'
For me it's more 'been there done that, got the postcard'. In the past I have had little influence on my partners decisions but when they make bad decisions I'm expected to bail them out the consequences. Perhaps there is some selection criteria bias - women who date me are more likely to make bad decisions. Being old enough to have seen what has happened to the women I've dated and the women I've not dated makes me think I've dodged enough bullets for one lifetime.
The probability that when meet someone new that I like that person more than the people I have already met decreases as I meet more people. Since I've previously gotten to know a large number of people that probability is now too low for me to bother with it.
I covet intelligence and only find intelligent people interesting, instead of searching the globe for these people I prefer reading old books written by smart people.
I sometimes wonder about the negative effects of media (particularly literature) on my personal relationships. Minds in real life rarely measure up to what I find on the page. And yet I know that those words were the product of an embodied human and I wonder where they are.
They exist but are rare - with books you're generally looking at the best of all time that have undergone a very strong selection criteria bias. I think the shift from an intellectual elite culture to a more egalitarian culture has reduced the extent that such elites could be found in the same place and thus the likelihood of a very smart person meeting another very smart person is similarly greatly reduced.
"Can your personal experiences with other people be so bad that it is actually beneficial for you in the long run to stay in solitude? If so, thats an indicator that some people are really horrible."
It might not be dependent only on your own experiences or even on specific people. If you have a significant number of friends going through rough relationships or divorces, what's the upside? Why bother getting married if the perceived risks outweigh the perceived benefits? As a society, we overestimate the benefits and heavily underestimate the risks. You can even see this baked into our laws in the asymmetric requirements/counseling to get married vs get divorced.
I am fully on your side. The asymmetry, or shall we call it sexism, in how divorces are handled, is definitely a contributing factor for younger men to no longer aim for marriage. If you look at it rationally, its simply too high a risk that you will get treated unfairly down the road in a few years.
I agree, but my original asymmetric comment was about how it's so easy to get married but is painful to get divorced. Making a massive legal decision of getting married doesn't require counseling, but most divorces require counseling sessions. Most people get lawyers for a divorce, but very few people get lawyers (or counseling, or financial consults) before marriage. So it seems all the focus is on the aftermath with new laws, regulations, or rulings on how to handle divorce with no focus on preventative education.
Oh yeah, young men have figured out the game and are done with marriage. There's only one statistic you need to know which is that 8 out of 10 divorces are initiated by the woman.
Why the fuck would any man marry ever again once he knows that? The odds are against you. Marriage and reproduction are such a fundamental thing that this took a couple generations to kick in after divorce laws were liberalized, but the jig is up now.
It's all a matter of degree also
Do you have any sources?
For what, exactly? The 45%-single forecast is easy to Google. And the word "male loneliness epidemic" is also easy to drop into a YouTube search.
I’m upvoting this comment because it’s a good bit of juicy flamebait and I wouldn’t like it to go to waste. Not on HN anyway. It has all the hallmarks of the genre trope. The undertone is that of the cliche: it’s women who are suffering, and the underlying blame is on men because people in general don’t care about the percentage of men who are lonely between the ages of X1 and X2. My feelings disagree with reality, so those high IQ incels have hijacked the narrative and are pushing their agenda. I’m chuckling at someone seriously suggesting that incels have the pop culture pull to execute on this. But I can play along - there are no wrong answers here.
I think there are a handful of reasons, some obvious, some too disturbing to discuss on a polite forum - but I’m sure folks here will jump to conjecture all the same that align with their educated opinions, as to the reasons why this narrative/reality is unfolding. This has been dragging on for decades and is only now really picking up steam.
In all seriousness, I would look towards in a kind of a squinting eyes way towards what Haidt is talking about. Social Media is toxic cancer and it has replaced a notion of positive communal relationships. I would then follow up with life priorities, and somewhere, very far down the line, interview a handful of those incels to get a raw (though tunnel-visioned) perspective on why they are the way they are. I would bridge topics like peoples needs and wants and desires and obsessions with wealth and being seen and heard and all these things as a kind of maelstrom for the unhappy and sad/solitudal landscape we have in front of us. Lives bereft of deeper joys and harmony in living.
People of course, both men and women, (and sometimes children too!) want it easy. They grow up with celeb magazines of the old or the Disney+ of the new and they have it in their mind that somewhere down the line, the cosmic balance will right itself and they will come out alright. But we all know, seeing the wealthy and prosperous on Instagram and TikTok and god knows what they’ll invent tomorrow, that we couldn’t be further from that. That the world is wholly, in human terms anyway, unfair unjust cruel et cetera. So naturally people gravitate towards complete detachment and, I suppose in a good bit of cases, resentment that manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Some inward, some outward.
But, nevermind that. I’m here for the flamebait, and OP delivered.
> I am a bit surprised, because I always thought the inherent attraction towards your prefered sex would always overrule bad experiences in the past
Porn exists. If you've had enough with the heartbreak etc then this is just an itch that's easy to scratch.