Live data from Hacker News

‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

thecut.com

571–580 of 669 posts

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropology shows religion exists in various forms, but across societies. That's not a statistical accident.

Right, it's a baby step to science: actually explaining how the world works. It's a powerful meme that tends to run away with itself once the scientific method is stumbled upon in society.

You are conflating communities formed around religions with explanations that religions have about the world. Religions provide many different things, one being community and sense of belonging, another being a sense of understanding of the world. You can be part of the former without necessarily beleiving the latter.

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#572
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is just not my impresion that men who hop relationships look all that better. The comitted ones are not ugly ones. There are plenty of good-looking men in committed relationships. You're reading the relationship in reverse. It's not that "men who hop relationships look all that better". It's that better-looking men can hop relationships.

I wouldn't equate looks with desirability, for men it's much more complex because women have complex expectations, and that's exactly why men maintain and even enhance their desirability with age. That being said, the desirable men are either committed (unavailable) or available because they can hop and choose to do so. So only a minority of desirable men are available. This is in strict contrast with the large major…

No, it is not that easy to find desirable men for large majority of young women. No, women can not hop relationships as easily as you seem to believe.

Also real sociologists do not claim what you claim. They have a lot more nuance into it and in terms of marriages, talk a lot a lot more about economy and it's affects.

Your version sounds like something that emerges on chat when people cherry pick half understood studies, not what sociologists says.

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#573
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I debated about whether to post this, because it’s rather emotive, even unsettling, but on the off chance it might actually sway someone, I will. The average life expectancy for a male in the USA is 76. All other things being equal, a 51 year old father will die when their offspring is 25 years old. This is too early to lose a parent. Think about how this would have effected you, reader of this post. This is also ass…

Oh? Would you like to tell when is a _good_ time for your father to die? He's going to die sometime, you know. And maybe taking care of a parent with dementia is actually more of a problem when you're older and have kids of your own? At my advanced age, I have the advantage of remembering things like the arguments you would hear back in the 1960's about why interracial marriage was a bad idea. Not because we're racis…

I am 26 and would definitely not have been ready for my father to die in the past year.

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep raising the straw man of "settled science" - who here, or in fact in the scientific community, believes this let alone proclaims it? Even in broader (non-scientifically literate) society, there are few people (in my experience) that believe science knows everything already. Science had its "protestant" moment - it was called the Enlightenment, and it result from questioning the dogma of settled knowledge as…

I'm not going to list politically-charged examples because that's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion and everyone here knows it. I'm not knowledgeable about philosophy or metaphysics but is there even anything approaching consensus on whether or not there even is a "knowledge ceiling" that an individual or even society could ever achieve? (If so, I'd love to know how anyone came to that conclusion lol)…

You keep bringing in disparate arguments as if they are part of the same thing - infallibility, knowledge ceiling, dogmatism - and also throwing in the odd barb - "whatever passes for science these days" (the answer to which, is "science!").

Yes, agreed that human systems have a tendency to corruption, however the scientific method at least has within it the seeds to "keep the bastards honest" (as we say where I come from). i.e.

1. Nothing stops you from learning and becoming a scientist. 2. Nothing stops you from attempting to repeat published experiments, or if you can't, then to point out why (which are likely to be faults in either the description or execution of the original experiment).

In other words, there is transparency and a basis for objective comparison. Lack of transparency (either through gatekeeping or lack of detail) is considered a bad sign in science. That's what differentiates the scientific method, from say, the "political method", or "the religious method".

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these I would argue are positively correlated, especially loyalty and kindness. Some I would argue are a bit of a toss up, like intelligence. I am not sure what flexibility means (ability to adapt to change? I would argue that a 40 year old is more capable than a 20-something on average in that regard). Some I feel are more about having a similar level to a partner rather than being an absolute value (energy…

You're trying to contort a mate selection process that has an inherently sexual-reproductive basis (for most people) into an exercise in platonic pair bonding. It doesn't make sense as such, and it isn't supposed to. People are seeking fulfillment of motivations that are fundamentally evolutionary in nature. For everything else, we have friendship. (Setting aside the evolutionary advantages of e.g. male coalition-bui…

From my perspective: Bullshit.

I am someone who exists outside of evolution's traditional goals. I'm a transwoman, and predominantly lesbian at that. In all honesty, I'm so far outside the norm (even for a transwoman) that it causes most people I date not to have a script for it; the usual reaction is for them to become "starry eyed" and metaphorically eat out of my hand.

This is extra bizarre to me, as someone who used to be read as a relatively uninteresting, effeminate male; being passably female in pretty much every sense (including hormonally) should not increase my attractiveness to other women, yet it does. Not a single woman I've dated has expressed any particular interest in me as a fertile partner, and in what biological sense am I, really? While I have banked sperm, my testosterone levels are lower than most cisgender women's - in all likelihood, I am not fertile. There's very little way for a casual observer - even one who has access to my blood to run non-genetic tests on - to recognize that I am transgender.

I'm not just bragging; I straight up don't understand it. It was one of the things that kept me from transitioning for so long - being afraid women would have no interest in me if I did. I have postulated that the unique mix of hormones that I currently have, somehow, smells like perpetual ovulation; and yet if so why am I apparently far more attractive to women than men? Most girls I date seem particularly attached to my smell in a way they weren't before, but the interest I get from men is somehow less than before I transitioned.

I am promiscuous and unwilling to commit; I neither seek nor am particularly attractive to women seeking someone to support them and potentially their children. I regularly date women who have or have previously had male partners (in an ethical way).

Unless my humanity itself, the fact that I am living authentically and being who I truly am is more attractive, more valuable to the women I date, I simply have no explanation for the reactions I get now.

As a result - my own lived experience tells me that humans, and our relationships, are so much more than evolutionary motivations - at least as we understand them.

The testosterone running through my veins was just as real as the estradiol running through them now; the queerness of my life does not in any way diminish my humanity nor that of those who have interacted with me.

If you come at it from a queer perspective, you plainly see that your argument falls apart. Us queers are very sexual people, but by nature of being queer, don't feel compelled to follow any particular script; as a result our interests are very diverse. Some lesbians might prefer childbearing hips; the ones that date me definitely don't! And yet my femininity is nonetheless compelling; I've had girls tell me how nice it was to date someone so feminine (and how hard that was to find).

The women I find the most attractive tend to be KPop stars; east Asian (usually Korean) women in their early 20s (if that), often who are borderline underweight. The woman who I bonded with like nobody else in my life, the one I loved, the one I always thought was beautiful even when she couldn't see it, the one who gave my life meaning, the one who I still sometimes weep about even months after I last saw her was an obese scots woman in her early 30s with a serious disability.

And she was beautiful to me. Even before I transitioned.

Humans are wonderfully, fabulously, beautifully complex creatures. Our culture and social complexity has run far ahead of our genetics in so many ways. If we accept we have gone past our genetically programmed ways to figure out what to eat, consuming endless salt and sugar, causing us cavities and diabetes and unhappiness, why can't we accept that, too, our genetics were never meant for a world with Tinder and plastic surgery or even fast fashion? That our basest instincts do not bring us happiness - unless we examine them from a perspective that we are something greater, that we can be better than that?

The truth is, we can. The truth is, happiness - mediated by oxytocin and dopamine and all of that evolutionary history - DOES exist beyond merely eating and sex. We are programmed for empathy, for cooperation, for belonging. For love. We may desire things that will make us unhappy but we can make a choice.

If you ignore that, whether you are male or female- if you insist that, no, your life is just about having sex with the most attractive partner because evolution demands it - you will wind up like the parent of this entire conversation. You will be sad. Whether you are a 60 year old man or a 35 year old woman, you will realize at some point what you have been doing is refusing to be human, to have real relationships; you have been using sexuality to protect your feelings, and suddenly, it doesn't work any more.

Choose to be human; choose to be more than your selfish genes.

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to list politically-charged examples because that's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion and everyone here knows it. I'm not knowledgeable about philosophy or metaphysics but is there even anything approaching consensus on whether or not there even is a "knowledge ceiling" that an individual or even society could ever achieve? (If so, I'd love to know how anyone came to that conclusion lol)…

You keep bringing in disparate arguments as if they are part of the same thing - infallibility, knowledge ceiling, dogmatism - and also throwing in the odd barb - "whatever passes for science these days" (the answer to which, is "science!"). Yes, agreed that human systems have a tendency to corruption, however the scientific method at least has within it the seeds to "keep the bastards honest" (as we say where I come…

You keep beginning your responses with formal criticisms of my posts instead of the content within, starting with "You keep..." This time it accuses my previous post of "bringing in disparate arguments," but said post contains three paragraphs excluding the pull quote; the first two address pieces of the first paragraph of the post of yours my post was responding to, while the third paragraph directly responds to the second paragraph, indicated by a pull quote. It's clear you're either not really interested in discussion, or we're talking past each other, so there really isn't a need to continue this conversation thread.

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to list politically-charged examples because that's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion and everyone here knows it. I'm not knowledgeable about philosophy or metaphysics but is there even anything approaching consensus on whether or not there even is a "knowledge ceiling" that an individual or even society could ever achieve? (If so, I'd love to know how anyone came to that conclusion lol)…

You keep bringing in disparate arguments as if they are part of the same thing - infallibility, knowledge ceiling, dogmatism - and also throwing in the odd barb - "whatever passes for science these days" (the answer to which, is "science!"). Yes, agreed that human systems have a tendency to corruption, however the scientific method at least has within it the seeds to "keep the bastards honest" (as we say where I come…

I think you’re not going to win this argument, but I will point out that you can’t look at a giant meadow of grass, focus on a few weeds and say, “see, it’s not grass!”.

As a system, science has brought about a better understanding of the physical world around us and has dramatically improved the lives of every human on the planet.

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#578
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication that all people of a certain group behave and desire a certain thing is obviously false, especially when the group is as large as half the population. Furthermore, even if it is true for a wide swath of the group, that does not mean it should not be criticized and torn apart for the assumptions that it rests on. A lot of people of both genders internalize negative messages about themselves and operate…

I think you’re assuming tabula rasa here; that there is no innate human nature, that everything is socially constructed. If there is such a thing as an innate, biologically derived measure of attractiveness, then your point doesn’t really hold up. Unless we’re comfortable with saying biology is misogynistic. That would be an interesting one. Frankly it would be great to have real, impartial numbers about all of this…

No, even without innate human nature / assuming tabula rasa, it makes logical sense, because we still cannot escape biology (yet). Women can only have kids when young, so youth is hugely important when men choose their partners, and is proxied by beauty. Women also invest much more than men into each kid (9 months of their life and a chance of dying), so it makes sense for them to seek men of wealth, status, power.

In other words, differences in preferences for choosing sexual partners follow directly (logically) from sexual dimorphism, nothing else required, and are thus in a sense “correct”.

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#579
post #65

Wow, so much HN hate for Polly? It's my opinion that Polly is a national treasure. Her shameless wit and sense of humor make me smile. Her profound love of humanity makes me deeply happy. Not only that, but her writing is so poetic and lovely. Truly a gem. On the topic of this question/answer, I assume most of you are young? Or at least younger than I am. I can tell you now that the way you feel now will not last. Ch…

I get the sense that there's a lot of embittered-male, "rubbing it in" type comments in this thread. Mixed-gender communities seem to have much more balanced and meaningful discussions for these kinds of topics: https://www.metafilter.com/171539/I-did-everything-you-said-...

Re: ‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

women like aging white men because of our sweet dad bods, lawn mowing skills, and obsession with sports.

They like them because they see them as non-threatening providers; women didn't flock to the dad bod guys during college.

They never see the dad bod as a sexual thing, it's more a symbol of other traits that the man brings to a relationship. Traits that are very important to a woman looking to start a family. The 'hot body' will still be their sexual choice but it's a trade-off.
Post reply on HN