The word ‘desperation’ really jumped out at me here. I’m very sorry you feel desperate and lonely. I agree that it can be very hard to tell the difference between a straight guy who thinks he deserves a woman, and a straight guy who thinks he deserves to be loved, and that often people don’t work as hard as they should to distinguish between the two. (Often including, I must add, the guys themselves.)
But a lot of your descriptions of reality strike me as almost mythic. I don’t mean that they are supernatural or inconsistent with the reality I know; it’s just that they seem highly oriented towards an explanation of your world and its inevitability, rather than towards power over your world through predictive utility. You use evolutionary psychology, feminist dialectic, and PUA identity categories to ‘explain’ your desperation- but all without, it seems to me, gaining the ability to make different and better choices about it. Might as well say that you’re cursed by Zeus, yeah?
One of the really tricky parts of social interaction is that the agents are all as intellectually complex as you are. The space of all social interactions is truly, mind-bendingly, absurdly, ridiculously large. Myth is especially poisonous in such a situation, both because it will lead to a narrow subjective framing and because it will narrow your own contributions in turn. The problem is hard (and almost certainly uncomputable!), so you might find considerable value in the concession that even the best models have very little power to predict what a given person can contribute to social bonding, or what factors explain that capacity. Begin with curiosity, and a keen sense of your own ignorance, and you are more likely to discover interesting choices that can offer happiness.
Maybe the reason the post reminds you of myth is that it’s expressing a lack of agency. It’s a common feature there; generally the world is a place where awful things happen to you just because. The poster above is in a complex system where he feels he has no control, and the “whiff of aggrieved entitelment” response touches on that exact raw nerve.
The word ‘desperation’ really jumped out at me here. I’m very sorry you feel desperate and lonely. I agree that it can be very hard to tell the difference between a straight guy who thinks he deserves a woman, and a straight guy who thinks he deserves to be loved, and that often people don’t work as hard as they should to distinguish between the two. (Often including, I must add, the guys themselves.)
But a lot of your descriptions of reality strike me as almost mythic. I don’t mean that they are supernatural or inconsistent with the reality I know; it’s just that they seem highly oriented towards an explanation of your world and its inevitability, rather than towards power over your world through predictive utility. You use evolutionary psychology, feminist dialectic, and PUA identity categories to ‘explain’ your desperation- but all without, it seems to me, gaining the ability to make different and better choices about it. Might as well say that you’re cursed by Zeus, yeah?
One of the really tricky parts of social interaction is that the agents are all as intellectually complex as you are. The space of all social interactions is truly, mind-bendingly, absurdly, ridiculously large. Myth is especially poisonous in such a situation, both because it will lead to a narrow subjective framing and because it will narrow your own contributions in turn. The problem is hard (and almost certainly uncomputable!), so you might find considerable value in the concession that even the best models have very little power to predict what a given person can contribute to social bonding, or what factors explain that capacity. Begin with curiosity, and a keen sense of your own ignorance, and you are more likely to discover interesting choices that can offer happiness.
Maybe the reason the post reminds you of myth is that it’s expressing a lack of agency. It’s a common feature there; generally the world is a place where awful things happen to you just because. The poster above is in a complex system where he feels he has no control, and the “whiff of aggrieved entitelment” response touches on that exact raw nerve.