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Dating apps have a severely skewed gender ratio, so the competition is indeed stiff no matter how much work men put on their profiles. Throughout university and even after graduating, I've always found my dates through shared hobbies and mutual friends. Never installed a dating app on my phone and don't plan to.
Well I partially agree, though I'm not sure it's easier to take the black pill that you're inescapably fucked genetically instead of just deferring your happiness to the future. "I'll get there but I'm finding myself right now" is an easier coping mechanism than "It doesn't matter how much I lift, how much I read and how much I spend on clothes, I didn't win the lottery at birth and all that awaits me is a lifetime of desolation and solitude". Guys who take the black pill genuinely do believe what they say, they aren't merely making excuses to avoid overhauling their lifestyle and routines. And the only medium of human interaction they're exposed to confirms every negative bias they have about themselves, be it through what randoms say online about them or through "experiences" of men like them. You see this kind of behaviour the most among Asian-centric spaces, particularly South, East and South East Asians. So they give up, because they do believe it is futile to try.
It wouldn't be a good coping mechanism if people didn't sincerely cling to it. I'm not sold that it's just an empirical judgment and not a result of the fact that trying to dig oneself out requiring high investment and being more than a little demoralizing.
To put it another way: if you see fat activists who've "taken the blackpill" that weight is just genetic and there's nothing they could have done would you trust this as a mere reasonable response to the data?
Forgive me if I'm misreading you, but I take it you mean black pill beliefs don't necessarily stem from reality? If so, I don't really disagree. My point is that the response itself need not be reasonable and there could be more to the data than the OKCupid stats for example might reflect. But if some asocial Asian fellow in an Ivy League school sincerely believes that even if he shoots for a Lanny Joon physique, he'll never match the SMV of an average white athlete in his class, and ends up deciding that it's all too much effort for too little gain that isn't even guaranteed (in his mind), is it really just a coping mechanism or has he prematurely given up on life altogether? There's still a section of woke who'd sympathise with fat activists, but a maladjusted young male who effectively exists as a ghost in society, who can literally disappear today and no one will notice and let alone miss him, is fair game for shaming regardless of his ethnicity.
I think they're catastrophizing - there's a basis for the negativity but it's taken to its maximal extent.
Any individual may be driven from the dating market in despair. The entire intellectual edifice that justifies this as inevitable serves as the cope.
Plenty of people can't and don't give up.
The coping mechanism helps him give up on life by emphasizing downside and de-emphasizing upside - kind of like a depressive mindset. The depressive also believes that there's no point in working out cause he's so tired and it'll make it worse. The empirical evidence is against him though.
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