The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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I’m sorry bro. We’ve all been there.
You now understand how completely unhinged conventional-wisdom dating advice is. You’re not supposed to tell bright-eyed youngsters, “actually the worst thing that can happen is that she becomes viscerally disgusted by the thought of being with you,” but that’s the truth. That’s not necessarily what happened here, but it is a realistic option that one needs to be aware of.
I get what you were going for here. You heard somewhere that the biggest thing women fear about dating is feeling unsafe, so you wanted to be as non-threatening as possible. Women hate this for some reason. I don’t know why, but they do. You will drive yourself insane if you try to figure out the deeper operating principles at play which cause this bizarre-seeming behavior. Just accept it.
Unfortunately I don’t have any practical advice for what to do going forward. If you wanted a sanity check, you are making the typical mistakes that a young man reasoning from male-brained priors would be expected to make, so no, you are not going insane.
Thank you. She’s not a big texter AFAICT and the most likely thing that happened was that she read this and thought about it for 30 seconds and forgot to reply because she was in the middle of something and had other more urgent messages which really isn’t that bad, but I can’t help overthinking.
It's a no from her my guy lol. One does not simply forget texts of that magnitude.
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She didn't forget to reply. She deliberately didn't reply because it would be socially awkward for her and make her feel uncomfortable.
Your best step from now is to follow through and pretend like nothing happened and you never asked her.
I'm rooting for you with future women btw. You did nothing wrong here. Her behavior is incredibly common.
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Yes, you cannot help overthinking, yes. You are spot on here. You cannot help overthinking. Or can you? Can you begin to help it. I think you can. Help the overthinking to go away.
What's your plan for tomorrow's lunch? No plan? Okay spend some time thinking about that. What are you going to eat? Why? Are you on a diet regime at the moment? Exercising? What's your BMI? When was your last health checkup, and are you planning to begin the process of sculpting or taking ownership of your body and appearance or are you just going to melt into entropic blobhood like most Americans do (No idea if you are American)?
I am not solely trying to distract your interest here, I am mostly serious. But you see my point. There are other things for you to be focusing on that have to do with your very real well-being that have zero whatsoever to do with any woman. Finally, brother, whatsoever is healthy, whatsoever gets you those gainz, what adds to your physical strength and formidableness, whatsoever clears your complexion and staves off the beergut--if there be any excellence in your life or anything praiseworthy--dwell on these things.
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It’s a very glass-half-empty way of looking at life, though. I’m often reminded of the Donald Trump mentality, like it’s impossible to imagine Trump responding to rejection with anything except “your loss!”. And while I have many problems with the Trumpian attitude to life I concede that it captures the kind of glorious nonchalance / DGAF attitude that many genuinely happy people have.
If she didn’t reply, it’s her loss, and whatever her reasons, they don’t matter (assume she has a boyfriend or something). You move on, there will be more opportunities. Believing anything except this is a recipe for self-pity and self-hatred.
One of the few comments of yours that I actually agree with.
If you think with a cool head, playing the numbers game is the best tactic for a man trying to date in today's world. There are common factors that might increase ones chances (obviously), but variability is still high enough that only way to get P(X) close to one is to have many X's.
Its not trying to maximize the number of attempts at the cost of quality of attempts (being NOT bad here is more important than being good). Its reach a sufficient quality of attempt and then maximize the number.
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If you want to recommend people purposely believe things that are false, then go ahead. Everyone copes differently. As for me and my house, we will serve The LORD.
As the adage goes, it’s cope or rope.
Hah, never heard this but I love it.
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Where is this coming from? It is always, objectively true that there will be more opportunities. That's not naive optimism or wishful thinking, it's the stark reality.
If you were talking more about the earlier paragraph (about being nonchalant) that is entirely subjective and cannot be right or wrong.
In a loose, almost meaningless sense, yes, there will always be more opportunities. The epistemic parameters that actually matter are 1.) What is the probability that my next attempt will succeed? and 2.) What is the probability that I will ever succeed? There are humans on Earth right now who's parameters are both essentially one, and humans on Earth who's parameters are both essentially zero. This means that these parameters need to be estimated empirically using Bayes's Theorem. You might object that you should "just turn your brain off bro" and ignore all this fancy reasoning stuff, but then you run the risk of ending up like this guy. Does this guy need to simply "move on" and remember that "it is always objectively true that there will be more opportunities"?
Now, this guy is not the median male. I myself have had better luck than him (I was able to get multiple actual dates!), so I'm comfortable saying that he's more than 1 standard deviation below the mean in terms of all-inclusive attractiveness. Is he more than 2 standard deviations below the mean? I'm honestly not sure. This is the buzzsaw that millions of young men are being tossed into with no warning by everyone's cheery platitudes. Enough. If we can't be honest on TheMotte of all places about what it's really like out there, then we can't be honest about it anywhere.
That guy, specifically, needs to remember that dating apps are a platform men are more interested in than women, and that he isn't going to succeed on them with whatever he has now. If you imagine every 'scene', very simply, just pairs up men and women matching in ordinal SMV rank starting from the top, in scenes with a lot more male interest than female interest, bottom-quartile men will not get any matches. He should pursue other opportunities, the kind in which most men succeed. Even very low 'SMV' men like the obese, poor, criminal, stupid, and awkward usually have sex and relationships, usually with similarly low SMV women of the same social class.
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Absolutely, yes, he needs to remember that there will be more opportunities, because that is the factual truth. Not just in an "almost meaningless sense" either. Perhaps he should change his strategy up, maybe dramatically, but to give up and say he's out of opportunities would be to deny reality.
It sounds like what you're really saying is that some people are too optimistic about their own chances. OK, sure, maybe they're too optimistic about their own chances barring major lifestyle changes, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and you can't turn around and say that this means that advice to "remember you'll always have more opportunities" is delusional.
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