Every age has its problems. And there is voluminous writing that seeks to understand what problems are present and what to do about them. Drop yourself into any age, and you will find difficulties in profusion. However, what differentiates one age from another is what problems are most apparent and which problems must be solved now, and which problems will be left to another era. This differentiation does not always work: things that need to be solved right now may not be the ones that society decides to focus on. This is true of any era.
Right now one of the problems is that the relationship between men and women as being imbalanced. When looked at carefully one finds that it is the average woman who seeks the best male material, not realizing that she is not the best female material. The bottom half of men, contrariwise, have little ability to begin relationships because they are not desired by a huge fraction of the females. This does not apply to the higher range individuals, either male or female, because they have a different selection bias that changes their calculations. But this is only the top percent of the young people. If you are roughly average the selection bias applies to you.
The root cause of the selection bias is the introduction of the Internet as the primary means of selecting potential mates. The top 10% of the men are selecting on the 50% of the females. Again, we are talking about the selection based on attractiveness rather than on other factors. As Scott Galloway points out, the bottom half of men are simply written out.[1] Older men and women use her means to select a potential mate and therefore the “Internet attractiveness” does not factor as strongly. This does not mean that older men and women do not have problems but this particular problem is not one of them to the same degree as those who are younger.
But there is a deeper level which goes on here: the present generation of young people has difficulty in finding a job, and this is most prevalent in the males. This disrupts one of the oldest mate selection parameters: a male has to display a willingness to spend money on a female that he is attracted to. But, at present, this has been disrupted by an economy that favors females over males.
The ratio of male/female has been biased in favor of females since the 1980s.[2] this means that the imbalance is not based on the number, because it has been true for the last 40 years. But when combined with the method of selection, this underlying imbalance creates a selection bias in favor of the top men. We can see this with a Pew Research poll.[3] The younger generation has adopted the Internet as their form of meeting people. One should also notice that younger people are looking for what they want as opposed to older people who know what they want and are looking for a particular match.
We can see that it is the match sorting algorithm, not the underlying ratio: because if it were the underlying ratio this problem would have occurred since 1980 rather than the present.
But this is only the first pass at a generational problem: because the search algorithm while interesting and important comes from deeper mechanisms. So, what is the deeper mechanism that is in balancing the average men and women on dating applications?
While it may seem that the selection of a potential person to date is a problem of specific people, there is a large fraction of the parameters that are set by society and more importantly by the economics. The key insight is to realize that the economics of dating attractiveness is correlated with “what level of job can you get when you are at the bottom?“
For a long time, the young male had advantages in this environment. Some of these were earned and many of them were not earned. The next segment of this essay will be to look at how this, from the viewpoint of the economic elite, has been dismantled in the last 40 years.
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236360/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-by-gender/
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/
Face to face in a McDonalds or wherever.
Take a leap, be real.
You don't need
a super star
Dont need the one
in everyone's eye
Cherry pie
in the sky
Get your feet
on the ground
You don't need
a plastered smile
Or a fast
two minute mile.
very interesting-especially for somebody like me who knows there are dating apps, and that's about it
I also know makes young people I know being very strangely convicted of their parameters/being upset of others having such parameters.
For example I've been told that many girls (and by girls I mean women under 30, which is also strange to me, lol) look at height..they say "I'm not dating anyone who's lower than 6 feet tall" I was very puzzled when I heard that. Would be fine if they themselves very pretty tall; but they can be any height, petite even. Seems awfully childish to me. I understand somewhere a cut should been made; but it seems a strange place to start making it. What if "he"'s 5.9? One inch difference can have horrible repercussions when about a surgery, or ..well, many things, just not here.
The observation that younger look for what they wants vs older that look for a match rings as very true..very generally speaking, of course.
Haven't watch the video yet, but will try in the near future. Looking toward the next post. Thank you, Stirling.