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Notes -
FWIW, for my personal life I have concluded that relationships are mostly not worth the effort.
When I was 18, I did not worry about finding a girlfriend at all, just assumed that it would be something which would happen on its own eventually. When I was 25, I noticed I was wrong about that, became depressed and so on. From 30 to 40 I had a relationship which felt like net negative at least in the last years, in retrospect. About a year on, my feeling about relationships is "been there, done that".
I mean, both getting laid a lot and being in a good relationship would be net positive in an abstract way. Having a helicopter pilot license would also be a nice thing to have, I guess. But just like I don't have any big dream of becoming a pilot, I also don't have a big dream of becoming a sexual successful man or starting a family. Getting to either of these three goals would take perhaps a few years of work, with the helicopter thing being way more deterministic.
I mean, if I got stuck in the 18th century, I might conclude that cleaning up my act enough to attract a partner would be the best way towards happiness. But today, I have the whole internet at my fingertips. Video games, netflix, porn, whatever. Yes, all of that is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that everything a human does is irrelevant in the great scheme of things.
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