Death of the Author
The current arc of Second Person is my turning away from the idea of self-authoring and towards the idea of fucking around with no narrative. When I asked you all to write the story of you and your dream partner, you mostly described your current lifestyles. When I write the story of my own transformation, it only coheres in retrospect. When I think of a model for deliberate self-coaching, it looks more like gradient descent than like a well-planed voyage.
Caveat: allergy to grand narratives might just be a Jacob thing. I’ve never seriously tried one of those self-authoring programs Jordan Peterson is peddling, but I love improv. It’s how I approach my career as well. Looking at my friends who seem committed to lifelong narratives, I wouldn’t say that it helps them find happy relationships.
I can see two main benefits to deliberately writing out your story. First, it breaks you out of other people’s stories that you may unwittingly fall into, like red-pill noir or rom-com soulmate cargo culting. Second, it clarifies your values, setting a fixed guiding light for all your decisions.
Both are very important! I like to attack bad stories directly, like in the two posts linked above. You can confront the story directly to see the functional impact it has on you and, more importantly, how it’s false. Then you can dehypnotize without having to replace it with something else. As for values, I think bootstrapping integrity through ten thousand small choices is more important than having a list of “core values” published on the corporate website.
Self-authoring is so popular because other people demand that you write your own story legibly, for their own benefit. They don’t really care if it helps you or not. And we pretend not to notice that we’re all terrible at writing.
Seeing Like an App
I’ve seen a shocking number of dating app profiles whose response to the “about me” prompt is ugh, I hate writing those or I never know what to put here. Writing such a thing is a terrible indicator of your intelligence and seriousness about engaging on the app; you shouldn’t kick off your profile with I’m lazy and uncreative lol. But also: yeah, I get it. My self-summary? What the fuck am I, the wiki page for an IKEA bookshelf?
Apps mostly responded to how bad people are at writing by cutting down the space you’re given to write. My OkCupid profile in 2015 was about 600 words long, and my wife read every single one. In 2025, Hinge limits you to just over 600 characters; probably no one reads them anyway. And why would they? Writing a compelling story is much harder when you have less space to do it!
Certain blog-oriented subcultures responded to the decline in app literacy by writing date-me docs. In theory, these aren’t limited by word count. In practice, they’re limited by imagination: a laundry list of demographic info, a list of hobbies, a list of vague relationship aspirations. People write a poorly organized functional spec instead of an advertisement — a story someone would want to be a part of.
Even people who literally sell themselves can’t write a good ad. My friend who’s a former escort1 credits most of her success to how badly written everyone else’s escort page is. Most girls aim for the vastly overserved “luxury girlfriend experience” market by name-dropping brands and copy-pasting clichés like “jet-setting cosmopolitan.” Almost no one writes what most customers want to hear: I want to fuck you right away and I’m good at it!
There’s a reason Don Draper gets paid big bucks and swims in women.
Superintelligent Matchmaking
How do you make a dating app for people who can’t write their own story and can’t articulate what they want either? What if you had access to the sort of sci-fi superintelligence we’re going to see in, *checks notes*, about two years?
OmegaCupid wouldn’t give you any prompts or ask you any questions. Instead, it could simply observe your entire life and deduce what sort of relationship would make you happy, and with whom. That shouldn’t be hard. A phone or watch can track your lifestyle, your mood when you interact with people, your strengths and weaknesses. It sees which dating discourse takes you resonate with online and hears you complain about your ex with friends. A bit of gaze tracking with smart glasses lets it know exactly who you find attractive. It already knows how objectively attractive you are.
Tyler Cowen imagines that you’d be assigned a swipe based on an AI-generated report, but he’s just an old curmudgeon. OmegaCupid is designed to add romance to your life, not rob you of it. It will simply arrange a serendipitous meet cute with your soulmate by having Maps send you to the same coffee shop at the same time, or by making sure the same event invite pops at the top of both your inboxes.
Congratulations! You have been chosen to be an early user of this amazing app. OmegaCupid works perfectly, but there’s no user guide for it yet. It’s up to you now to figure out how to make the most of this opportunity in your quest for love. How would you go about it?
First, you’d want to make sure you’re living and speaking in actual alignment with your dating goals. If you’re looking for something serious, what would OmegaCupid conclude from your weekend bar-hopping routine and complaints about that ex that was “too clingy”? Do you actually put effort into meeting people, or can your single lifestyle accommodate no disruption? Does your own behavior suggest that you value kindness and authenticity, or that you value cup size and follower count?
Once your day-to-day conduct aligns with your dating aspirations, you can trust that OmegaCupid will attempt to summon the right person into your life. How will you make sure you actually meet and engage with them if they’re not explicitly flagged?
You’d want to make it very easy for meet cutes to be arranged for you. You’d say “yes” to more invitations, go out more, meet more people outside your regular circle. You’d smile at every attractive stranger you lock eyes with, wondering if they’re your arranged soulmate. You’d banter easily and make friends — your perfect match might walk past if they’re too shy, but you’re not worried about being friendzoned by your destined love. If you sense the chemistry, you may tell them that it sounds corny but you have a strong intuition that the two of you should get to know each other and are they free to grab coffee on Sunday.
In other words, you should live life with integrity, be open to connection, and expect to get unreasonably lucky.
Of course, that’s precisely what you should be doing anyway.
If “superintelligence” means something smarter than your conscious reason, then matchmaking superintelligence already exists. It is mostly distributed among everyone who meets you. Every stranger assesses whether you are friendly and approachable. Every friend deduces the kind of person you are and the kind of people you want to surround yourself with. Everyone looks at others to see if their judgment of you is confirmed, and updates accordingly. People do this automatically and, in the aggregate, quite reliably.
The other, crucial part of this superintelligence lives in you. That’s your Automatic Success Mechanism, informed by your self-image. It does exactly what OmegaCupid would: drive you towards your immediate salient goals, within the action space defined by your previous behavior. It achieves the best outcomes when you trust it to guide you without rigid conscious control. In other words: you get lucky when you trust that luck is on your side.
Whose ASM Is it anyway
A lot of people who would absolutely love OmegaCupid aren’t that excited about doing the whole psycho-cybernetics thing, even though it’s the exact same thing. I think the difference is ownership. If OmegaCupid fails you it’s not on you, you can just leave them a bad review on the app store and wash your hands of the matter. If there’s no third party to blame, the responsibility is all your own.
My personal ethos is to take maximum ownership of anything that affects me, even if others are involved. My own self-image believes that if I’m not being blamed for any failures, it means I’m not visibly pursuing enough successes.
But I understand that it’s not for everyone. In particular, women may face higher social costs for explicitly pursuing romantic goals and thus prefer an approach of subtly manifesting and leaving the rest to fate.
That’s perfectly fine. The best part of psycho-cybernetics, ofliving with integrity and expecting to get lucky, is that you don’t have to make it part of your story. You don’t need to go meta, or tell anyone what you’re doing. You just do it.
Your self-image can be “I’m a worthy wife, I will meet my future husband soon and seduce him with one smile.” It doesn’t have to be “I’m practicing a worthy-wife self-image with psycho-cybernetics.” There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but it’s not necessary for achieving your actual goal of seducing the guy with the smile.
If anyone asks for your “story”, tell them something in-character. Don’t try to describe the character like people do on apps and date-me docs. Your job is to live the story, not to write it.
No, the other one. The other other one. I know, I’m also quite surprised that being a nerd on the internet led me to befriend so many high-end sex workers.
Being a subscriber to Second Person is probably the most straightforward technique to dating success; I'm always amazed at the sense your stories make, compared to the doozies that folks tell each other elsewhere on Substack. This post is a definite winner.