Most young men are single. Most young women are not

> a high success rate when getting a response

This is where I think you're undervaluing what's going on with what I said.

Often getting a response is all you ever need. The same is true when going out to a bar or whatever. If a woman finds you physically attractive - you really just need to not shoot yourself in the foot when interacting and it's mostly smooth sailing.

What I'm trying to say to you is: you might think you're not attractive because you're not a celebrity ("I don't stand out") but you're probably quite physically attractive to a certain amount of women. You discredit that because you don't succeed with every woman and you don't think you have incredibly high status or whatever.

You're also in your 40s now but I'm talking about when you were single and younger and how you're using your life experience then as justification as to why men aren't doing well. How you look now is not a reflection of how you looked then.

I suppose that there is no objective way to measure that, and we won't arrive at a conclusion by just talking about it. Maybe I could go use one of those sites where you post a picture and people rate you?

You are right that I'm physically attractive to a number of women. I just don't think this number is very big, haha... at least compared to most of my friends, but maybe my friends are way more attractive than average for some odd reason? A bunch of CS/Engineer geeks...

I just don't understand why you are - it seems - almost dismissing the possibility of this being a skill, something you learn. Why wouldn't it be? My life story gives me a lot of evidence that this is the case, it would be tedious to write about it in detail, maybe one day I'll write a book!

One thing that is easy to talk about is how my partners would often say that I'm "confident", "funny" and "charming" rather than "good looking". Not even my wife calls me good looking :)

Interesting comments. I will say that I still think my point about our linguistic frame regarding belief (and our beliefs about our own beliefs) as opposed to an action-oriented frame is confusing to me.

Without pragmatic grounding what are we ever even talking about, our untested ideals? Action in the present moment is the important bottleneck to consider in my opinion.

Your comments reminds me how recently I sort of made a triadic taxonomy of "types of values" (value in general, like a replicating bias). I think it was (1) parasitic values, (2) self-sacrificial values, and (3) circular (stable) values.

But again using the principle of thinking of things not through any singularity sort the frame but allowing extension and similar concepts we can seem some interesting properties about this dynamic.

Let think of things as a stratified hierarchy of values having tendency that higher up strata mean a larger spatiotemporal perspective (I guess once space and time are completely abstracted then the hierarchy is more about scaling in semantic space in general.)

Parasitic values are biased toward limiting or even eliminating the replication of other lower level values. I guess this is analogous to a neuronal group acting as an inhibitory module.

In the example of antinatalism the specific value of antinatalism is oriented toward limited or stopping what we could call the self-preservation or Darwinian value (a biological value, aka instinct). Of course it depends if one wants humanity totally extinct or just down to a small number. I would agree that a degree of this inhibition is good (maybe "parasitic" is too negatively connoted a term to use)

This is interesting because the value is stratified on top of the self-preservation value and so if it succeeds in any large degree in becomes self-undermining. This is like human's killing off their ecosystem on which they are stratified.

This is really the extent of my thought on this (you probably can complete the analogy with (2) and (3)). Also it will be interesting to think through the implications of feedback from the higher strata to the lower.

> Ephemeral, weakly bonding, "childish."

> ever any value in long term monogamous relationships

rhetorical question ? I wonder if a large group of young people just do not know what true 'contentment' feels like. To truly be at peace. To feel like everything is just right. To be relieved of all insecurities in that one moment, and just take in something for all that is.

None of my most cherished memories are ones of peak happiness or gratification. They are all moments of gratitude. Something that let me understand how content I felt. I didn't need, I didn't want, I had no desires. Everything was simple, and everything was there for that moment. The moments were, like all others : ephemeral. But the memories and the nostalgic feeling of security that it left behind sticks around for a long long time.

That to me separates sexual gratification from being in a long term monogamous relationship. The contentment that comes with time. To know that there is someone who accepts you in your entirety. Not because you were born soul-mates, but because each person has expressed an explicit intention to do so by committing the most important currency of them all : Time. And as you invest more time, the belief in the commitment strengthens, as does the contentment it produces.

I meant the question more personally. Where do you feel pressured to have no/more kids?

I mean yes, there are sensible arguments on either side. But it sounded like we are getting pressured to have more/less children. And that we was what I tried to get at. It sounds egoistic, but on very personal matters I don't like to listen to the ominous blob of internet opinions we all contribute to. And you should too..

I have seen some of my own comments and would be very ashamed if someone took it as literal advice/imperative.