On the subject of authors, Robert Pirsig. His book made a bigger impact on me than any other, and I constantly re-read it anytime I feel lost or depressed or in need of some kind advice. It’s the kind of advice I wish my dad had given me. Losing him was like losing the dad I wish I’d had.

What evidence do you have that it is unnatural? How can you tell the difference between brigading and simply lots of vegans showing up by chance? If we assume 2 out of 5 Lemmy users are vegans or think we should eat less meat to save the planet, and almost all lemmy users simply scroll the front page, then this seems like a completely expected phenomenon

I think some market-based leftists have proposed various solutions for this problem, like mandating that all companies be run as coops. But I’m still skeptical of these for a number of reasons.

Even if they don’t win the case, court cases in general can be extremely costly. So companies will try to avoid getting sued as much as they try to avoid doing things that would actually lose them a lawsuit.

It definitely does not require coordination.

You are on Lemmy, which attracts leftists. Hence all the communism memes. Leftists heavily overlap with vegans. Hence, there are a disproportionate amount of vegans on Lemmy, ready and willing to spread anti-meat talking points at any given moment. This is all quite straightforward.

That’s not how we use the word, though. Nobody calls that “involuntary” if it’s just a hole that happened to be there. If somebody put you in the hole, then it’s involuntary. The way “involuntary” is used in English, there is a connotation of an entity with a will that overrides your will.

The reason the term “involuntary” is used is to differentiate from voluntary celibates, like Catholic priests, who the cultural zeitgeist most readily associates with the word “celibate”. You’re reading too much into it.

Don’t complain that there are too many. That’s why we have ratings. When you say “the floodgates are open”, you’re just trying to blame somebody else for your lack of effort.

You phrased it that way because that’s how you think about it. You blamed the women, and you still do.

So you are saying I’m lazy, and also misogynistic… Seems weirdly antagonistic for what is essentially a semantics argument. Like, seriously, I’m giving you my personal lived experience, and you’re putting words in my mouth and calling me names. You’re clearly getting way too worked up over this, so I’m gonna end this conversation before your temper tantrum gets worse.

When people talk about AI taking off exponentially, usually they are talking about the AI using its intelligence to make intelligence-enhancing modifications to itself. We are very much not there yet, and need human coaching most of the way.

At the same time, no technology ever really follows a particular trend line. It advances in starts and stops with the ebbs and flows of interest, funding, novel ideas, and the discovered limits of nature. We can try to make projections - but these are very often very wrong, because the thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet.

Yeah, imma need a source for those numbers.

Yes? What’s your point?

Did you try to find a self-help book for how to improve your social skills? It’s not like this is a new problem. Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936

I did try that actually, and I’ve read that book several times. Each time I come back to it because “it’s a classic”, and each time I roll my eyes at how trite, unhelpful, and sometimes manipulative the advice is. It’s a parade of funny tidbits that an already social person noticed about the way they already acted. It is, quite simply, not a good book on learning social skills or overcoming social anxiety. At all. Which is kind of my point - if this is the book on the topic that everyone recommends, and it is such hot trash, then someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is gonna have a hard time figuring out what to do. Of course, there are other books - but now the floodgates are open, and you now must wade through thousands of books on social skills, social anxiety, becoming confident and charismatic, the brain chemistry that causes your depression, how a new diet can fix your mood issues, how it’s all in your head, it’s not about how you act but how you dress, about 500 different inspirational figures who overcame their own neuroticism and became captains of industry, etc. Soon you are more messed up and turned around than you were before you started.

Calling it “involuntary” makes it somebody else’s fault

If I am walking through the forest and a sink hole opens up underneath me, and I fall in and can’t get out, I am involuntarily in that hole. Not everything has to be someone’s fault. Sometimes things are just shitty.

And it’s not women’s fault that you were unhappy with your sex life.

I never blamed women for my sex life. Mostly because blaming half the human population for something is silly - there is no way that many people could effectively coordinate to conspire against me. I also never blamed any particular woman for not being interested in me - after all, there were many women I was similarly uninterested in, and though I didn’t understand exactly what was unappealing about me, I accepted that they could have their own preferences and were entitled to that.

What I did do was develop a complex about how I was fundamentally broken as a human being which led me to consistent suicidal ideation throughout my adolescence. So, I mean, that was fun.

It was your own bad previous decisions that caused it.

Ah yes, my terrible previous bad descion of being bullied and socially ostracized as a child. Thank you for telling all the 8 year olds out there that the fact that they have no one they feel they can trust in their lives is their own fault.

If you failed a math test…

A more apt analogy would be if you failed a reading test because you have dyslexia which was never diagnosed and for which you never received appropriate support. And then the school just kept pushing you through the grades as you failed every single test and fell further and further behind.

Almost everybody has problems, and they all still have to figure out how to live their own lives.

Well sure. But I’m not going to tell a subsistence farmer in Sierra Leone that they are voluntarily poor because they could just risk life and limb to illegally immigrate to Europe and then work there until they can finagle legal citizenship, get a job as a janitor and work their way up the corporate ladder until they are CEO of BMW. And I’m not going to tell someone with only one leg that they voluntarily can’t walk on two legs, since clearly they could just make their own fully functional prosthetic just like Boston Dynamics made. Yeah, everyone is living a life, and they can’t expect sweet baby Jesus to just step in and solve all their problems. But at the same time, having problems isnt the same as choosing to have those problems which is what “voluntary” means.

Yeah, I mean, a relationship is based on liking and respecting each other - an interest and respect which can develop out of time spent interacting based on physical attraction. Beyond that, a relationship can take any form that the involved parties choose.

This is a social problem, so the solution is to look at what successful people do and copy that.

Then the question becomes (1) who is successful? Most people are not advertising every romantic encounter they have. Least of all to the weird kid who doesn’t talk to anyone. (2) Of the things they do, what makes them successful? Many of the black pill incels seem to have found the answer here, which is “be tall” and “have a strong jawline”. This is similar to questions about “how can I be well liked?” or “How do I make oodles of money?” There are a million possible answers, each as plausible-sounding as the last, all contradictory. And following any one line of advice requires a significant commitment of time and resources before you see results. (3) What do they actually do? It is very rare to actually see someone ask someone else out on a date, or go for a first kiss, or to hear how they flirt on a first date. These are private things, and therefore are difficult to emulate.

You say that you couldn’t talk to anyone IRL about your problem, because of your social anxiety and autism, but that’s also a matter of effort. Rather than working on overcoming your social anxiety first, you went straight to seduction. That’s skipping all of the groundwork, and you knew it at the time. Choosing a plan that is guaranteed to fail is a voluntary choice.

This very much was not obvious to me at the time. I was also working on my social anxiety and social skills, but any sort of solid framework or set of steps where one thing led to another was completely opaque to me. Meanwhile, it took me about a decade after I realized that I needed to improve the way I connected with others until I actually managed to get laid - a lot of that time I was a teenager where it was unlikely to happen anyway, so let’s cut that time in half and say 5 years. Can you really say that spending 5 years overcoming social anxiety, while agonizing over your lack of a sex life is a voluntary lack of sex? If someone spends a decade struggling with depression and couldn’t get a job, would you say they were voluntarily unemployed during that time?

Seriously, the idea that there is no such thing as “involuntary” celibacy because you can just work on yourself completely misses the fact that these people have real problems.

If some friends hanging out together just wanna have a boys night because that’s what they want to do - because they like that energy for whatever reason… if that’s patriarchy… Then I’m okay with patriarchy.

I have a feeling that you were a very horny teenager.

Lol, guilty as charged. And the horniness has not really abated. I never wanted to fuck a 50 year old, but I definitely had some teachers I woulda been stoked to shack up with.

But I think it’s weird that you seem to be saying that this is weird. I am well aware of the fact that people who are asexual or who have a low sex drive exist, and I think their sexuality (or lack thereof, as it may be) should be legitimized and supported. But at the same time, I find it hard to believe that most other people aren’t approximately as horny as I am. Outside of bots, the majority of internet traffic is porn. People spend billions of dollars on sex and sex-adjacent pursuits, from dildos to ED drugs to gym memberships to strappy sports bras to hair plugs. As the old Oscar Wilde quote goes - “Everything in the world is about sex…”

So when someone starts talking about “X is just because of sex” or “Y is the thing we care about because it isn’t about sex”, what I think is “yeah, sex is important. Of course that’s what we’re talking about.” And denial or push back starts to sound like “my puritanical sex-negative upbringing has trained me to be uncomfortable talking about sex, so I’m going to delegitimize sexual desire as a significant factor in any interaction.”

I have to say, I personally have been actively seeking male-only spaces for the past year. This has nothing to do with disliking women. I like women a lot and have a lot of female friends I care deeply about. The reason comes from my end - I have things that are difficult for me to talk about that I would like to discuss in a supportive environment with other people who understand and accept my lived experience. While I can and do open up to my female friends about some things, for other things I am simply more comfortable talking to other guys - where “more comfortable” means “I might talk about it *at all.”

Unfortunately, most male-only spaces put up significant barriers to entry, because otherwise they become magnets for right wing lunatics or the chronically depressed.

So, first off your example takes advantage of a common yet sexist belief…

I was trying to avoid the common knee jerk response people have to a young woman being with an older man. But fine, I’ll make it as controversial as possible - a fine young woman who is 18 years old, graduated high school and moved out of her parents house a week ago, puts on her nicest black leather collar and matching eyeliner and heads to the local kink house to find herself an over 50 daddy dom. She finds one, and they go on to have a wonderful relationship for 7 years until she decides she wants something else in life and they part amicably.

But younger women are objectively more beautiful than older women so why would anyone not want the youngest, prettiest woman they can get?

I would argue that this makes complete sense (assuming the individual in question actually does find younger women more attractive), so long as one is not actively pursuing long term romantic partnerships. As long as everyone is consenting and having a good time, I see no reason why two people can’t simply share a common carnal attraction to each other.

Meanwhile, nothing precludes two people with a significant age gap from having a lot in common despite their age difference. I have a friend who emancipated herself at 16 and immediately went to travel SE Asia for years on a shoestring budget. I have another friend has started his own contracting business at 23. People mature at different rates, and can be very interesting at a young age. Again, assuming everyone is a consenting adult who is happy with the relationship, I see no reason to shame them.

I’m not saying you are categorically wrong about the benefits of male-only spaces. But I will say that the attitude and language with which you are approaching the issue is not doing you any favors.

I don’t feel like I have to live up to some arbitrary metric of success set up by others. I am aware of the fact that others will be interested in knowing me based on my achievements. For example, if I have the achievement “earn enough money to support myself”, other people will want to be around me than would otherwise. These are nice people whose company I enjoy, so I am going to try to keep earning this achievement.

If I can say “I have run a marathon” or “I placed 3rd in my community chess competition”, these things indicate that I have positive attributes which other people will find attractive, like fitness, consistency, intelligence, and an interest in community events. I also want to spend my time with people who have cultivated these traits - so when someone tells me that they once meditated for 24 hours straight, I am impressed and am more interested in knowing them because I intuit that spending time around them will imbue me with some of that potential. Meanwhile, if someone tells me that they spend their free time watching reality tv reruns, I am less interested in knowing them, because I am not interested in becoming more like them.

I mean, basically you failed to cultivate deep and meaningful relationships with other people is the problem. Did you ever open up to your friends about anything before your break up? Did they ever open up to you, or come to you with their problems? Did you have friends who were “your friends” who you often hung out with while she didn’t?

I’m a guy. I have male friends. I would support them in an instant if they were going through a breakup. I would expect my male friends (and my female friends) to do the same. Is this rare or weird? I dunno. I’m just me. I don’t have experience living anyone else’s life. But I’d recommend finding some friends who can form a support network for you whether or not it is “normal”. If it’s normal, be normal. If it isn’t, fuck being normal. Go be weird.

Why do you think that?