The Precarious Mediocre Life of Zoe Zoomette

A dating apocalypse

Two stories went viral on my social feed yesterday. The first, from Anthropic:

These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources [...] it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

And here’s the second one, from Why my Gen Z mates don’t have boyfriends by Tyler Bennett:

Last year I went on a date with a gorgeous man who ticked all my boxes: funny, clever, close with his family, capable of asking a follow-up question and — unusually for a dating app — exactly as advertised. After a fantastic date I watched him select the wrong currency at an ATM and felt all interest evaporate on the spot. By the next Tube station I had remembered an improbably early start the next morning and fled. Not my finest moment, but unfortunately a terminal one.

The first quote went viral because it launched a preference cascade of being allowed to see the smoke on AI risk. The second one did because it’s perfect bait for the most clichéd dating discourse — female standards. On the fem side: “trust intuition”, “doesn’t owe him attraction”, “my best life”. On the chud side: cats, eggs, walls, biodeterministic socioeconomic hypergamy. Everyone gets to accuse the other side of cope, especially since the author is much too attractive to date the sort of chud who talks about hypergamy online but not hot enough in his eyes to merit holding (other) men to arbitrary standards.

Tyler’s article is indeed about unmet female standards. But not their standards for men — their standards for their lives.

Everything But Fuckability

My last post explained how schooling teaches you to reward-hack authority and suppress awareness of your real desires. This is a plausible reading of Tyler getting the ick at the ATM. The guy ticked all the boxes but didn’t spark desire, and Tyler is too disembodied (being both a writer and a zoomette) to even know that this was what’s happening. So she gets the ick (embodied reaction) to the ATM fumble, giving her excuse to dismiss the guy on grounds legible to her self-image.

She follows this up with anecdote about a friend:

My oldest friend, newly single, told me she’d just been asked out by a guy at her run club. He was attractive, she fancied him, but she still wasn’t sure she could be bothered to go. Frankly, the flirtation had done the useful bit: she felt desirable and reassured of her options.

You know the classic line by now: people wanna be fuckable more than they want to fuck. The analysis is that these girls are performing fuckability for an audience of their friends, the internet, and mostly — themselves. They engage with dating just enough to validate their desirability and disengage when anything might plausibly threaten it like getting involved with an actual man who might actually dump you.

A plausible reading, but something’s missing. Female obsession with fuckability assurance usually comes with two more symptoms:

1. Getting excessively angry at undesirable men hitting on them — the ugly guy thinking he has a chance casts doubt on your attractiveness.

2. Obsessively reassuring other women, especially unattractive ones, of how gorgeous they are.

Tyler doesn’t do either. Not a single man in the article is described by Tyler as unattractive, even the one who “gave up on dating” because he feels that he can’t meet women’s demands. As for her female friends, the only descriptor related to appearance is one’s “excellent cheekbones”. Everything else is about their careers and life aspirations: “lawyers, creatives, and doctors” who manage clients, patients, and busy social lives.

These women are desperate to maintain their image of being successful in life, not of being desirable to men. How’s that going? The story takes place in England, so:

We have our own communities, careers and can live alone (or at least with six strangers in a wildly overpriced Victorian terrace…)

The cheekbones lawyer professes her love for Sainsbury’s Basics, a private label brand of discount groceries. At 27 she is either a trainee or newly qualified solicitor, likely earning around £3,000 a month after tax in a city where the median rent for a 1BR is £2,000. She’s a decade away from being able to afford to live alone, and that’s on the off-chance that human lawyers still exist in 2036. AGI may be about to “acquire real power and resources”; Tyler’s friends probably aren’t.

Here’s who these girls are comparing themselves to:

My mum pointed out that when she was in her late twenties, like I am, her peers had houses, corner offices, children and second mortgages under way.

Parents and schools promised these bright girls that in exchange for their souls they’ll at least get houses and corner offices by 30, with enough time to decide on husbands and kids. Living 7 to a flat in a country that was poorer when these girls graduated than when they entered elementary school, that promise seems impossibly distant.

These girls have a portfolio of dubious success markers (“creative”, “up-and-coming”) and one asset they’re not allowed to cash: their fuckability. They learned that you’re supposed to look for a guy only once you’ve made it or, alternatively, once you’ve given up for good. And no matter how hard it is to believe you’ll make it, it’s even harder to give up the appearance of trying.

The Precarious Mediocre Life of Zoe Zoomette

If you didn’t get the reference in the title, I encourage you to read VGR’s seminal post in its entirety. It covers a lot; here are the bits most pertinent to the current discussion:

The demographic at the very heart of the phenomenon, the sine qua non of premium mediocrity, is the young, gentrifier class of Blue Bicoastal Millennials. The rent-over-own, everything-as-a-service class of precarious young professionals auditioning for a shot at the neourban American dream, sans condo ownership somewhere at a reasonable distance from both the nearest meth lab and minority ghetto.

The essence of premium mediocrity is being optimistically prepared for success by at least being in the right place at the right time, at least for a little while, even if you have no idea how to make anything happen during your window of opportunity. Even if you know nothing else, you know to move to San Francisco or New York and hoping something good happens there, rather than sitting around in some dying small town where you know nothing will ever happen.

Premium mediocrity is a pattern of consumption that publicly signals upward mobile aspirations, with consciously insincere pretensions to refined taste, while navigating the realities of inexorable downward mobility with sincere anxiety. There are more important things to think about than actually learning to appreciate wine and cheese, such as making rent. But at least pretending to appreciate wine and cheese is necessary to not fall through the cracks in the API.

About the only path to wealth-building available to the average premium mediocre young person in the developed world today, absent any special technical skills or entrepreneurial bent, is cryptocurrencies.

This was written in 2017, on the west coast of the United States of America. The price of Bitcoin quadrupled in less than four months after VGR wrote that line. Guys nerdy enough to read Ribbonfarm but too young to own BTC in 2017 flooded into the Bay Area and spent the subsequent decade hustling crypto, B2B SaaS, and later AI. Some of them figured out what I did — that premium mediocre consumption is primarily an assortative mating signal — and have found themselves PM wives.

But what exactly is a zoomette supposed to place her bets on in 2026 Yookay? OnlyFans? Hunter Biden shitcoins? They already moved to London, and found a city in decline with unaffordable housing, stifling business regulations, and a 24.6% youth unemployment rate.

The strangest part of the dateless zoomettes article is a paragraph about how one-night stands don’t offer good sex immediately following a line about how relationships aren’t worth it. Aren’t committed relationships the only thing that’s worth it if casual sex isn’t satisfying?

The issue with a committed relationship isn’t the sex. It’s being an unhedged bet on a man who, for all that he’s funny, clever, and honest, has to use an ATM on a date. This man may even be great in bed, but he can’t give them a ticket to the middle class financial security their parents promised them.

Depart with Kindness

The kicker of the story is that Tyler herself is settling down with Nick. They had dated in 2015, but:

Like many cash-strapped teenagers, we discovered that love might conquer all, but it struggles with intercontinental airfares.

A decade later, Tyler “hears the clink of my bank account emptying” in London while Nick is a business owner in South Africa. So Tyler is moving to Cape Town, and that’s that.

This article is Tyler’s parting gift of kindness to her “Gen Z mates”. She reassures them that foregoing boys for “face masks and quality bed sheets” is enviable, a lifestyle “where a partner is an addition, not a necessity”. Her own choice of pursuing a financially stable man is framed with earnest self-deprecation:

I am now extremely, perhaps conventionally, serious about [Nick].

I’ve discovered I may be something of a traditionalist. At lunch last week I said: “I just want to be married!” My friend, wonderfully unmoved, deadpanned: “Why?”

It also tries to reassure their parents. Tyler is 28, but the average reader of the Sunday Times is at least a generation older. She’s telling them: your girls are doing fine, don’t worry about us just because we’re not getting married yet.

VGR pointed out the same inter-generational kindness in his own article:

Premium mediocrity is in part a theater put on by Maya Millennial in part to spare the feelings of parents. Inter-generational love, not inter-generational war.

The premium mediocre harbor few illusions about their economic condition. The false consciousness at the heart of it is manufactured for the benefit of a parental generation that is convinced it has set the kids up for success.

Zoe Zoomette has not been set up for success by a generation of myopic Euroboomers plundering the few productive remains of their civilization for one last round of pensions before submission. She needs every ounce of false consciousness she can muster to put a brave face on it and keep showing up. She’s keeping her fuckability in a drawer, last ditch collateral, so she can keep the dream of successability alive.

Godspeed, Zoe, I hope your dreams come true. And if it all crashes and burns, I hope you can at least get back with that hot guy from the run club. He’ll be useful when the killer robots come.