I don’t really understand the remark about slack: it opens the space to be less generally fuckable and still finding someone you love, you mean? I’d say, general fuckability does the same thing: if you’re fit, gracious and confident, you have space to not need to search for women desperately and can instead observe your local EA club girls dancing around you in circles, waiting for you to notice. Or, you have more slack for a faux pas while talking to someone, regardless if you’re willing to settle or not. Could you elaborate?
EA club girls dancing around you is *more optionality*, while slack is about having fewer demands on your attention and constraints on your behavior. The same for faux pas: if you're a very specific sort of person most people will not want to date you regardless of you avoiding missteps, and if someone is really into you specifically the faux pas won't matter. Either way, being very specific doesn't impose constraints, in the sense of having to control your behavior tightly to get more and better dates. It just means you're starting from a smaller dating pool, which means fewer a priori options (and that's good).
Yes, I see now — the core point is “become someone, narrow down the pool of people who could like you to those who more probably will.” That gives you more slack, because your personality or core interests take less conscious effort to maintain. On a side note, it feels a little sad your posts have such good messages but take a while to decipher — at least for me, I needed quite a chat with an LLM to arrive at this understanding.
On a personal note, I’ve found choosing the dating markets may work differently. For me, hobbies and interests turned out surprisingly uncorrelated with the qualities I actually value or with me liking the people. Extending the search to basically everyone on campus didn’t hurt my chances at all; instead, I’m now allowed to simply pick out places with max amounts of female students, seems to work so far…
I see it this way: human status is somewhat different from status in other primates. While in a pack of baboons every baboon is mostly interchangable and status is measured along one single axis, in a human tribe the status is more like a hedgehog with multiple axis - someone can be the best hunter, someone can be the best leader, someone goes on the path of a shaman, someone becomes an expert toolmaker. The generic primate one-dimensional status (which redpillers talk about a lot) is still there, but as long as someone has at least some medium level in it - not that important. However, if one doesn't commit to a direction and stays there in the center of the hedgehog, just playing the same game as everyone, maxxing their SMV or whatever - that's when it becomes the deciding factor, and it's a sucky market - lots of supply, everyone easily interchangable with anyone else - and even if you drive your SMV way up, you'll still lose the primate status competition to a local gang member or something. So a good human strategy would be to get your SMV to mid-level and then go for one of the hedgehog's needles, finding your own market.
Building a niche interest and using that as a signaling device for commitment and differentiation makes sense. But isn't this just one way to do it? I mean, most people aren't so driven to do a single thing so intensely that it can easily be understood by another person as a deeply committed/differentiated person. And yet, many people still do just fine finding happy partnerships.
You seem to discount being well rounded, but isn't there something to unique human qualities that we have that is then appealing to another person? For instance, you might have a type of humor that another person really likes in you. Or you might be introspective in ways that others find compelling. Of course, being someone who is reasonably disciplined and committed to things is a good thing, but many of us, and I would include myself in this, do that through our work and friendships, maybe not through a very niche thing. Work and friendships are often not differentiated qualities.
TLDR, what about the very simple framework of "be reasonably fit + take care of yourself + have a decent job + showcase your unique personality"? It's simple, but I think a lot of people fall short of even this, and I've found even this simple structure can lead to decent dating.
I don’t really understand the remark about slack: it opens the space to be less generally fuckable and still finding someone you love, you mean? I’d say, general fuckability does the same thing: if you’re fit, gracious and confident, you have space to not need to search for women desperately and can instead observe your local EA club girls dancing around you in circles, waiting for you to notice. Or, you have more slack for a faux pas while talking to someone, regardless if you’re willing to settle or not. Could you elaborate?
EA club girls dancing around you is *more optionality*, while slack is about having fewer demands on your attention and constraints on your behavior. The same for faux pas: if you're a very specific sort of person most people will not want to date you regardless of you avoiding missteps, and if someone is really into you specifically the faux pas won't matter. Either way, being very specific doesn't impose constraints, in the sense of having to control your behavior tightly to get more and better dates. It just means you're starting from a smaller dating pool, which means fewer a priori options (and that's good).
Yes, I see now — the core point is “become someone, narrow down the pool of people who could like you to those who more probably will.” That gives you more slack, because your personality or core interests take less conscious effort to maintain. On a side note, it feels a little sad your posts have such good messages but take a while to decipher — at least for me, I needed quite a chat with an LLM to arrive at this understanding.
On a personal note, I’ve found choosing the dating markets may work differently. For me, hobbies and interests turned out surprisingly uncorrelated with the qualities I actually value or with me liking the people. Extending the search to basically everyone on campus didn’t hurt my chances at all; instead, I’m now allowed to simply pick out places with max amounts of female students, seems to work so far…
Off only optionality,
ill impacts irritate.
Less lax, less loose, lone liberty
gifts grander gains. Go great!
I see it this way: human status is somewhat different from status in other primates. While in a pack of baboons every baboon is mostly interchangable and status is measured along one single axis, in a human tribe the status is more like a hedgehog with multiple axis - someone can be the best hunter, someone can be the best leader, someone goes on the path of a shaman, someone becomes an expert toolmaker. The generic primate one-dimensional status (which redpillers talk about a lot) is still there, but as long as someone has at least some medium level in it - not that important. However, if one doesn't commit to a direction and stays there in the center of the hedgehog, just playing the same game as everyone, maxxing their SMV or whatever - that's when it becomes the deciding factor, and it's a sucky market - lots of supply, everyone easily interchangable with anyone else - and even if you drive your SMV way up, you'll still lose the primate status competition to a local gang member or something. So a good human strategy would be to get your SMV to mid-level and then go for one of the hedgehog's needles, finding your own market.
Great post. Freedom vs optionality is very lucid. The part about slack could benefit from more explanations.
Building a niche interest and using that as a signaling device for commitment and differentiation makes sense. But isn't this just one way to do it? I mean, most people aren't so driven to do a single thing so intensely that it can easily be understood by another person as a deeply committed/differentiated person. And yet, many people still do just fine finding happy partnerships.
You seem to discount being well rounded, but isn't there something to unique human qualities that we have that is then appealing to another person? For instance, you might have a type of humor that another person really likes in you. Or you might be introspective in ways that others find compelling. Of course, being someone who is reasonably disciplined and committed to things is a good thing, but many of us, and I would include myself in this, do that through our work and friendships, maybe not through a very niche thing. Work and friendships are often not differentiated qualities.
TLDR, what about the very simple framework of "be reasonably fit + take care of yourself + have a decent job + showcase your unique personality"? It's simple, but I think a lot of people fall short of even this, and I've found even this simple structure can lead to decent dating.