Such an interesting post. I see that in my niece. She’s in her mid twenties not bad looking but overweight. She’s always complaining about the guys on the dating apps, not tall enough, not handsome enough, not wealthy enough, not educated enough. I begged her to look beyond the superficial, but she wouldn’t. She showed me some of the pictures of the guys that she trashes as ugly and they look like pretty normal guys to me. The attractive, wealthy guys she’s interested are not interested in her. She is not dating & I’ve warned her that if she continues being this critical she will end up single.
Interesting she won’t date down and complains about the dating pool but does nothing to lose weight to widen her dating pool to include more higher status.
Well the guys are certainly not ugly guys or low status guys, they are normal looking guys with good college educated jobs for the most part. She also has height standards, which I can understand. She's down right mocks these guys & I've told her to cut them some slack - it's not easy for guys to continually risk rejection by girls. This post has been an eye opener for me because I couldn't understand why she wouldn't take my advice to give them a chance and get to know them, bitterly complained about being single, but had such unrealistic expectations. I've spoken to her until I am blue in the face, I'm so frustrated. I've been married for almost 20 years now, so behind on the dating scene. Now I get it.
If women experienced the rejection that men do when dating, they would never leave their rooms. For the "empathy" crowd, it's amazing how blind they are to the difficulties in facing rejection time and time again.
It's interesting that the women focus on money and education (which is biologically and historically what women have focused on) but ignore the flip side, which is looks and youth (which is what men have focused on). Women demand that men meet them at their level but only their terms and ignore the importance that men place on looks. I expect women like your niece would be horrified if high status men complained about her weight and looks (so shallow!). Not picking on your niece. Many women are like her.
I'm someone who "married down." I'm white collar (educated, prestigious field, high-earning, American born) and my husband is blue collar (less educated, manual labor, hourly employee and foreign born). As a young girl, my father explicitly told me that it was better to "marry down" within my ethnic and religious group but the man must be a striver (hard working and good with money) than to "marry up" with an outsider. This is an anathema to modern ears but I believe it is advice that would be worth taking for many woman.
There are other options to increase the marriage rate and fertility rate, like marrying younger and valorizing having children but these offends progressive sensibilities. It turns out our grandparents were doing things the right way.
The article has misled you into believing women on these apps are selecting men based on income, when in fact they are selecting primarily based on looks. A man who is physically a "10" doesn't even need to have anything in his bio to get tons of matches. A guy who is 5'5" and makes $200,000 a year may struggle to find matches.
I had an idea that an app that builds your profile based on what you’re doing and aspire and planning to do that would match you with people living similar lifestyles.
Going to yoga, watching succession, planning a trip to whatever. Coffee snob, watching baseball, foody, etc
Location data and photos could prove it’s not BS but I’m sure someone could figure how to hack that
Cool idea! There are so many issues with the way dating apps are designed. I’m not even a user because I don’t want companies to have access to such personal preferences, if I can avoid it. But from what I can tell, they have little regard for the success of matches and mostly just want to keep their user base active. Apparently, people spend ~90 minutes a day on these in the UK (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dating-apps-millenials-10-hours-per-week-tinder-bumble-romance-love-a8174006.html).
Some questions / thoughts on how to make them better: Why do users have to scroll? Why not have something searchable? And why does it have to be a complete waste of time unless you find someone? Hobbies where you meet people organically are at least time well-spent doing something you enjoy and / or learning something.
Also, the incentive structures of dating apps are flawed - these companies would have to take on a different business model in order to actually get rewarded for matching people, rather than getting rewarded for ad views or monthly subscriptions. It would be cool to see something that is more aligned to users’ needs gain traction. Maybe it will be your app! Or maybe Erik will build something :)
Even with the limited filters that dating apps have, it's easy for men to run out of potential matches. There are significant differences in religious views, political leanings, hobbies, and relationship desires between men and women. If an app were to provide more filtering options, it would quickly become apparent to users that there are few matches available.
All you need is 1 :) (Mostly joking, I realize that’s very optimistic!) I hear you. I think better filtering would actually help with this problem. If people could actually filter and find someone who really matched most of what they were looking for, they would probably 1) find someone, 2) save time by realizing there’s no one on that app that they want to date and looking elsewhere, or 3) come to the realization that… (as you point out) there are significant differences, and if they really want a partner, they need to be open to men who are less than 6’ tall, for example. I think maybe 14% of men in the US are over 6’, if I’m remembering right. My friends are always shocked to find that out. Seeing these statistics in real life on an app may help people come back to reality and might help take off some of the pressure women feel from their friends to “not settle.” Or they might chalk it up to option #2 and go back to the endless scrolling and dopamine hits of Tinder. It would take some testing to find out.
The point you (and others who focus on these numbers) are missing is that men greatly outnumber women on the apps.
The "top 78 percent of women" pool is probably still smaller in absolute size than the "top 20 percent of men" pool in the population you're talking about.
Do you have a source for the “90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0” stat? I tried searching for source and was unable to find any. That seems fairly implausible given that only about 12% of men are over 6’0”. This tweet claims that when women on bumble use search filters, about 30% of them include men 5”10’.
I would like to see a source for all of the stats. I believe them (they fit with my experience in online dating) but I'm curious about where they came from.
I believe polyamory can also have the effect of taking the pressure off of women to find that "100% perfect" guy they are after (and maybe give others a chance.)
When my partner and I started dating 3ish years ago, he wasn't sure he would be ready to have kids when I needed him too (I was 31 and he was 27). But I thought hey, we're non-monogamous, so let's keep dating anyway. I can still meet others while we're together. Low and behold, cut to today, and we are expecting our first baby together in January :). We;re both very happy (and still non-monogamous).
I feel like we (single men and women), don't have enough time to figure things out in this changing dating environment, before we've run out of runway. There's like a prime 15-year window (from like post-college 22 years old to 37) to do it all; find your match, be fertile, have kids, build up the income to be a good match, and more. Then factor in life changes, and you've cut that window even further (going back to school, career changes, illness, disease, depression, recessions, pandemic). People on apps want to explore as much as possible, while simultaneously marrying someone, it's conflicting free for all.
The apps remind me of food ordering apps. If that's your primary way of finding food (or dates), then you're at the mercy of the apps. Modern daters could learn the dating skills of past, of "hunting and cooking your own food" lol.
I think about this sometimes in relation to Balajis network state idea. If you wanted to truly find your “soul mate”, why are you limiting it to a 15 mile radius of your geographical location? I get it, we all have jobs and friends and homes and hobbies IRL, but if you found the absolute perfect match but they lived 750 miles away, and you could meet them digitally/holographically in the metaverse or on the Vision Pro, wouldn’t one of them up-end their life to make it work? Or do you have a cloud relationship with some sort of black mirror technology to supplement the physical demands?
That means leaning even further in to app culture, but I fear that the cat is too far out of the bag in terms of hypergamy and preference seeking. The same way that dopamine/phone addiction is too far gone, which is probably the root cause of the dating app issue anyways. To peel back hypergamy you have to peel back social media and then smart phones and then digital life in general. It’s an immense uphill battle.
Good post. The stats alone, without even considering the particularities of the demands on each side, paint a dismal picture.
This is not just a lifestyle issue, but a civilizational one, especially considering the profile of people who reproduce (who, let's put it gently, will not be the ones to maintain a complex society up and running). So it's a big problem, which requires big solutions.
We could start with sex segregation, which was the norm in basically all of history prior to the 1960s, when, coincidentally, we stopped producing men of geniuses. This would revive love, and make more robust educated men. And, quite frankly anything which makes men outcompete women in status and economically is part of the solution. The liberals answer to this is "let's die out and import massive amount of 'migrants' ". No thanks.
Folks not having babies is a bigger problem than unaligned AGI. It's the biggest problem from the perspective of accelerating humanity out of the gravity well of our current prosperity local maxima (centralized power always turns prosperity from tech innovation into stagnation/degrowth + moral regression, ie. WEF, ADL, Greta).
Crashing Total Fertility Rate in the smart/educated/prosocial/productive cohorts is the exponential drag on human civilization that dare not speak its name.
Because only smart/educated/prosocial humans can come up with explanations that solve problems and turn scarcity into abundance for everyone. You can have John Von Neumann as a boy in a sailor suit who becomes the fellow that unlocks energy at the heart of an atom. Or you can have a childless Greta Thunberg scolding you for using too many resources. We need more JVNs to accelerate. We need 100 Musk-like innovators with both the cognitive firepower and the pronoia to put a ding in in the Uni.
Bad news: No one seems to know how to get the innovator pool to reproduce.
Good news: Your boy Parsa has a plan based on startups, pushups, game, fam, and group-owned farms..
But first. my baby-making bona fides: father to six sons by three ladies, no marriages, three kids from long-term relationships, two from being donor to an ex, one via adoption. First son conceived at 43, now 11, newborn boy conceived at 54.
The solution is better family formation memes for men and women and better tech for family formation (mating apps vs. dating apps). The solution is NOT traditional marriage (although I love the Keeper team) or trying to cram the feminist mystique genie back in the chattel bottle.
This family formation solution is about has hard as any other novel stranger-to-stranger startup-- no harder a problem than airbnb, uber, or airtm (one of my startup babies). It just needs to be 10x better than dating apps, which is really a low bar since all those apps do is monetize female beauty (w/o sharing upside with ladies), turn 95% of men into porn-addicted incels, and encourage top 5% Chads to never have kids, while sending top 20% attractive ladies to ride the cock/corporate carousel until their fertility drops off a cliff.
How did Hss arrive at this current sorry state where the majority of humans override their evolved biological imperative, the very reason we're all here and for 30K generations prior? And why do I think we can reverse this trend with better tech and better memes?
For starters, let's acknowledge that we are mostly all the descendants of ruthlessly culled winners of the cognitive and physical lottery, the ones who fought to survive and reproduce. Just think back over 30K generations of your ancestors surviving to make babies and see them grow up strong and healthy, over and over.
I say mostly because starting with ag-fueled surplus, the NPC phenotype has spread like kudzu, presumably preceded by the spread of a polygenic set of heritable but mostly deleterious alleles that result in a predisposition to memetic programmability/persuasion, i.e. proclivity to get brainwashed by the current thingism spread by centralized power structures. I don't count NPCs among the winners, more like the free-riders, the useful idiots, the cannon fodder, and current thing amplifiers.
Before ag surplus gave rise to warlords, memelords spread their genes the most, but so did anyone who adopted their memes. The dankness, ie. explanations and ideas conferring survivor benefit in the ancestral environment, made gigachads of many-- the genes rode the memes. The weak and the slow to adapt and spread dank memes were mostly culled. The % of NPCs in the ancestral Dunbar number was very low relative to today's 25% (h/t Scott Adams on the 25% who always choose the regime-affirming answer in a poll). There used to be significant downward pressure on the spread of NPC genes since they conferred little benefit, because few bothered to try to persuade and program others vs. adopting and implementing, i.e. there was a lot more doing than talking about doing in the ancestral environment. Compare to today where the memelord and chadtastic meme adaptooors are a shrinking % compared to the current thing NPCs.
Post ag surplus gave rise to warlords and spread of genes by might is right. There were fewer winners, less fun, more drudgery, less hygiene, more illness, and all the fun meme inspiring gods were eliminated by one big daddy obey me or else deity that just so happened to align/echo the warlord's dominance. A priest class of power-hungry pervs was stood up by the warlords to separate the sinners from the saints and live in luxury.
Monotheism. Monogamy. Money. More NPCs. These are all downstream from warlords and their violence displacing memelords and their dankness. You could become a soldier, a courtesan, a counselor, or a pervy priest, but it was all very zero-sum vs. the positive sum of good explanations solving problems and creating abundance, ie. the memlord/adaptooor/gigachad complex.
Memelords still had a place, but in service of the warlords, which is why Gengis Khan was so good at spreading his genes, but how many descendants can the guy who invented the stirrup claim? We don't know because they weren't comparable to the lord of the hoard, the captain of the the Kipchat Khanate.
So we got here as victims of our own tech innovation (i.e. dankness) which gave us Ag and surplus, and by putting too much trust in centralized power to protect and provide, which gave us warlords concentrating wealth and reproductive sexual opportunities, while imposing biodyamic-defying and pseudo-stabilizing memes like monotheism, marriage, monogamy, easily debased money on the hoi polloi. Everyone being a tinkerer, builder, creator gave way to just a few doing that in cloistered environments under warlord dominion-- PG touches on this point in many essays including Heresy and The Four Quadrants of Conformism. Founder and Startup formation has reignited the memelord fire in many, but few have connected that to making more and better beautiful babies.
Lucky for all of you parsa has it figured out.
All the fellows need to do is build startups, do pushups/pullups/situps/dipups/squatups, and learn game. That takes care of the wealth, strength, and ZFG confidence that triggers the hindbrain tingles of female hypergamy. Boxes checked, so to speak.
All the ladies need to do is stop giving the milk away for free, find themselves a memelord or gigachad meme adaptoooor, or a proto version of either, and get knocked up. Forget marriage, prioritize the baby-making. Get off the coitus carousel. Get in early on the baby bonanza.
Remember that Hss had 30,000 generations of memelord-driven gene spread, followed by 250 of ag-powered warlord dominance, and 1.5 gens of web-enabled return to our memelord roots. We need to accelerate the understanding that both ethical wealth creation and baby making is now possible, (h/t NR) like never before in the Hss history. More on Airchat about this here: https://www.getairchat.com/bmeunier/benoitsmindmaze?r=8d18bf4f-8964-4135-9932-726a5e1f37be
So the solution to reversing TFR is going to happen at the speed of tech adoption like this:
1. Better, faster, easier founder/startup/community/capital formation-- 10% founder/startup/vc survivorship is condemnation of current paradigm; YC shows you can step-change improve; but it needs to be easy as TikTok to launch, grow, raise, build, hyper growth. Solving this solves the hypergamy problem for even the short kings. (Full disclosure: I'm 6'2" and enjoy elite endowment in every physical and cognitive dimension that matters to the ladies).
2. Better health & fitness motivation/solution-- memelords in the ancestral environment were never noodle-armed, nor pot-bellied, nor chubby, nor triple-chinned-- that soft round bod will not fly, my guy, especially not for short kings. Gyms are a waste of time mostly unless you are already in elite shape. Gravity and fasting are free. Get fit, get paid in every possible way.
3. Better family formation -- see above link. We need better pro-natalist memes and better tech to make babies. The anti-natalist memeplex has brain-wormed into so many folks that it's resulted in bullshit like the Dadbod (wrote about it here: https://x.com/TimParsa/status/1695860514952478977?s=20 and mom jeans. Elon is the model for the sorts of baby-making stories we need. As are my baby mamas who made their own money early and then decided to figure out how to make babies. As mentioned above marriage and monogamy are warlord psyops to program NPCs to produce taxes in a predictable way. The memelord method is positive sum, sperm/egg aligned, innovating on coparenting agreements, including education (if they have your genes, they should have your memes), financials etc. Marriage, like offices and gyms, are coercion disguised as coherence-- time to accelerate past all those dead end memes.
4. Better Land-based community formation. Families make us strong-- I have six strapping boys to carry on my genes and memes and support and defend me in my old age. We're told that families are expensive and reduce your options-- the marriage/divorce industrial complex sure is debilitating and destructive-- but families have long been a source of strength and enabled survival of the clan, the tribe, etc. Community is also important and tying it to land is key for all the reasons Balaji explicates in TNS and that I elaborated in this essay here: https://open.substack.com/pub/timparsa/p/land-of-our-own?r=4gw8s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. Land-based community makes you safe because you have skin in each other's game and shared upside. Indeed the two Ms in community can be understand to mean shared memes and shared money (upside). We need better, easier, more efficient ways for families to form land-based community.
Now go forth and make startups, do pushups, and stop accepting the warlord psyops as guiding principles. Ditch jobs for startups, marriage for baby-making. Get jacked fellas--noodle arms is failure mode. Stop riding the corporate & coitus carousel ladies-- build a startup, don't give away the milk for free, find a memelord or adaptooor or proto-chad and agree to coparenting terms before making the beast with two backs.
Most important: don't despair-- we've got the internet and an entire universe of infinite resources to figure out how to turn into abundance. Hss makes prosperity out of scarcity and dankness out of darkness. Let's accelerate out of this Mfing gravity well, leave the degrowth doomers behind, and spiral up and out via tech and moral innovation.
This article places too much emphasis on men's earnings, when in fact women are choosing men on dating apps based primarily on looks. Once again people are throwing their generational bias into the discussion - this is common with many Boomer and older Gen X commentators.
Acknowledging that they are already dishonest, the lying will increase to the point of being a useless method of finding a match. Apps may try to vet peoples claims but that will probably price them out of the market.
The happily married religious folk with lots of kids will be in a demographic death match with the sluts and slut-jerk males just wanting sex and occasionally having an unwanted or inconvenient kid. Which the govt will subsidize but Uncle Sugar makes a lousy father.
Such an interesting post. I see that in my niece. She’s in her mid twenties not bad looking but overweight. She’s always complaining about the guys on the dating apps, not tall enough, not handsome enough, not wealthy enough, not educated enough. I begged her to look beyond the superficial, but she wouldn’t. She showed me some of the pictures of the guys that she trashes as ugly and they look like pretty normal guys to me. The attractive, wealthy guys she’s interested are not interested in her. She is not dating & I’ve warned her that if she continues being this critical she will end up single.
Interesting she won’t date down and complains about the dating pool but does nothing to lose weight to widen her dating pool to include more higher status.
Well the guys are certainly not ugly guys or low status guys, they are normal looking guys with good college educated jobs for the most part. She also has height standards, which I can understand. She's down right mocks these guys & I've told her to cut them some slack - it's not easy for guys to continually risk rejection by girls. This post has been an eye opener for me because I couldn't understand why she wouldn't take my advice to give them a chance and get to know them, bitterly complained about being single, but had such unrealistic expectations. I've spoken to her until I am blue in the face, I'm so frustrated. I've been married for almost 20 years now, so behind on the dating scene. Now I get it.
If women experienced the rejection that men do when dating, they would never leave their rooms. For the "empathy" crowd, it's amazing how blind they are to the difficulties in facing rejection time and time again.
It's interesting that the women focus on money and education (which is biologically and historically what women have focused on) but ignore the flip side, which is looks and youth (which is what men have focused on). Women demand that men meet them at their level but only their terms and ignore the importance that men place on looks. I expect women like your niece would be horrified if high status men complained about her weight and looks (so shallow!). Not picking on your niece. Many women are like her.
I'm someone who "married down." I'm white collar (educated, prestigious field, high-earning, American born) and my husband is blue collar (less educated, manual labor, hourly employee and foreign born). As a young girl, my father explicitly told me that it was better to "marry down" within my ethnic and religious group but the man must be a striver (hard working and good with money) than to "marry up" with an outsider. This is an anathema to modern ears but I believe it is advice that would be worth taking for many woman.
There are other options to increase the marriage rate and fertility rate, like marrying younger and valorizing having children but these offends progressive sensibilities. It turns out our grandparents were doing things the right way.
The article has misled you into believing women on these apps are selecting men based on income, when in fact they are selecting primarily based on looks. A man who is physically a "10" doesn't even need to have anything in his bio to get tons of matches. A guy who is 5'5" and makes $200,000 a year may struggle to find matches.
Apps have ruined dating.
I had an idea that an app that builds your profile based on what you’re doing and aspire and planning to do that would match you with people living similar lifestyles.
Going to yoga, watching succession, planning a trip to whatever. Coffee snob, watching baseball, foody, etc
Location data and photos could prove it’s not BS but I’m sure someone could figure how to hack that
Cool idea! There are so many issues with the way dating apps are designed. I’m not even a user because I don’t want companies to have access to such personal preferences, if I can avoid it. But from what I can tell, they have little regard for the success of matches and mostly just want to keep their user base active. Apparently, people spend ~90 minutes a day on these in the UK (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dating-apps-millenials-10-hours-per-week-tinder-bumble-romance-love-a8174006.html).
Some questions / thoughts on how to make them better: Why do users have to scroll? Why not have something searchable? And why does it have to be a complete waste of time unless you find someone? Hobbies where you meet people organically are at least time well-spent doing something you enjoy and / or learning something.
Also, the incentive structures of dating apps are flawed - these companies would have to take on a different business model in order to actually get rewarded for matching people, rather than getting rewarded for ad views or monthly subscriptions. It would be cool to see something that is more aligned to users’ needs gain traction. Maybe it will be your app! Or maybe Erik will build something :)
Even with the limited filters that dating apps have, it's easy for men to run out of potential matches. There are significant differences in religious views, political leanings, hobbies, and relationship desires between men and women. If an app were to provide more filtering options, it would quickly become apparent to users that there are few matches available.
All you need is 1 :) (Mostly joking, I realize that’s very optimistic!) I hear you. I think better filtering would actually help with this problem. If people could actually filter and find someone who really matched most of what they were looking for, they would probably 1) find someone, 2) save time by realizing there’s no one on that app that they want to date and looking elsewhere, or 3) come to the realization that… (as you point out) there are significant differences, and if they really want a partner, they need to be open to men who are less than 6’ tall, for example. I think maybe 14% of men in the US are over 6’, if I’m remembering right. My friends are always shocked to find that out. Seeing these statistics in real life on an app may help people come back to reality and might help take off some of the pressure women feel from their friends to “not settle.” Or they might chalk it up to option #2 and go back to the endless scrolling and dopamine hits of Tinder. It would take some testing to find out.
The point you (and others who focus on these numbers) are missing is that men greatly outnumber women on the apps.
The "top 78 percent of women" pool is probably still smaller in absolute size than the "top 20 percent of men" pool in the population you're talking about.
Do you have a source for the “90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0” stat? I tried searching for source and was unable to find any. That seems fairly implausible given that only about 12% of men are over 6’0”. This tweet claims that when women on bumble use search filters, about 30% of them include men 5”10’.
https://twitter.com/eftegarie/status/1501202280120729603
I would like to see a source for all of the stats. I believe them (they fit with my experience in online dating) but I'm curious about where they came from.
I believe polyamory can also have the effect of taking the pressure off of women to find that "100% perfect" guy they are after (and maybe give others a chance.)
When my partner and I started dating 3ish years ago, he wasn't sure he would be ready to have kids when I needed him too (I was 31 and he was 27). But I thought hey, we're non-monogamous, so let's keep dating anyway. I can still meet others while we're together. Low and behold, cut to today, and we are expecting our first baby together in January :). We;re both very happy (and still non-monogamous).
I was wondering if someone would point that out. We don’t have to have a 1:1 or 1:n relationships.
Scott Alexander wrote that the evidence doesn't seem to match the hypergamy hypothesis:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hypergamy-much-more-than-you-wanted
related:
- Insights from 2,961 First Dates: https://dkras.substack.com/p/sex-differences-attractiveness-and
- On the Future of Dating: https://dkras.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-future-of-dating
I feel like we (single men and women), don't have enough time to figure things out in this changing dating environment, before we've run out of runway. There's like a prime 15-year window (from like post-college 22 years old to 37) to do it all; find your match, be fertile, have kids, build up the income to be a good match, and more. Then factor in life changes, and you've cut that window even further (going back to school, career changes, illness, disease, depression, recessions, pandemic). People on apps want to explore as much as possible, while simultaneously marrying someone, it's conflicting free for all.
The apps remind me of food ordering apps. If that's your primary way of finding food (or dates), then you're at the mercy of the apps. Modern daters could learn the dating skills of past, of "hunting and cooking your own food" lol.
I think about this sometimes in relation to Balajis network state idea. If you wanted to truly find your “soul mate”, why are you limiting it to a 15 mile radius of your geographical location? I get it, we all have jobs and friends and homes and hobbies IRL, but if you found the absolute perfect match but they lived 750 miles away, and you could meet them digitally/holographically in the metaverse or on the Vision Pro, wouldn’t one of them up-end their life to make it work? Or do you have a cloud relationship with some sort of black mirror technology to supplement the physical demands?
That means leaning even further in to app culture, but I fear that the cat is too far out of the bag in terms of hypergamy and preference seeking. The same way that dopamine/phone addiction is too far gone, which is probably the root cause of the dating app issue anyways. To peel back hypergamy you have to peel back social media and then smart phones and then digital life in general. It’s an immense uphill battle.
Good post. The stats alone, without even considering the particularities of the demands on each side, paint a dismal picture.
This is not just a lifestyle issue, but a civilizational one, especially considering the profile of people who reproduce (who, let's put it gently, will not be the ones to maintain a complex society up and running). So it's a big problem, which requires big solutions.
We could start with sex segregation, which was the norm in basically all of history prior to the 1960s, when, coincidentally, we stopped producing men of geniuses. This would revive love, and make more robust educated men. And, quite frankly anything which makes men outcompete women in status and economically is part of the solution. The liberals answer to this is "let's die out and import massive amount of 'migrants' ". No thanks.
Folks not having babies is a bigger problem than unaligned AGI. It's the biggest problem from the perspective of accelerating humanity out of the gravity well of our current prosperity local maxima (centralized power always turns prosperity from tech innovation into stagnation/degrowth + moral regression, ie. WEF, ADL, Greta).
Crashing Total Fertility Rate in the smart/educated/prosocial/productive cohorts is the exponential drag on human civilization that dare not speak its name.
Because only smart/educated/prosocial humans can come up with explanations that solve problems and turn scarcity into abundance for everyone. You can have John Von Neumann as a boy in a sailor suit who becomes the fellow that unlocks energy at the heart of an atom. Or you can have a childless Greta Thunberg scolding you for using too many resources. We need more JVNs to accelerate. We need 100 Musk-like innovators with both the cognitive firepower and the pronoia to put a ding in in the Uni.
Bad news: No one seems to know how to get the innovator pool to reproduce.
Good news: Your boy Parsa has a plan based on startups, pushups, game, fam, and group-owned farms..
But first. my baby-making bona fides: father to six sons by three ladies, no marriages, three kids from long-term relationships, two from being donor to an ex, one via adoption. First son conceived at 43, now 11, newborn boy conceived at 54.
The solution is better family formation memes for men and women and better tech for family formation (mating apps vs. dating apps). The solution is NOT traditional marriage (although I love the Keeper team) or trying to cram the feminist mystique genie back in the chattel bottle.
This family formation solution is about has hard as any other novel stranger-to-stranger startup-- no harder a problem than airbnb, uber, or airtm (one of my startup babies). It just needs to be 10x better than dating apps, which is really a low bar since all those apps do is monetize female beauty (w/o sharing upside with ladies), turn 95% of men into porn-addicted incels, and encourage top 5% Chads to never have kids, while sending top 20% attractive ladies to ride the cock/corporate carousel until their fertility drops off a cliff.
I've written about the need for this startup in the context of Balaji's TNS, and am working with my current partner (mama to my two youngest sons) on building the community and product. All family formation innovators are welcome to help us build and earn upside in FAM: https://open.substack.com/pub/timparsa/p/fighting-for-family-formation?r=4gw8s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
How did Hss arrive at this current sorry state where the majority of humans override their evolved biological imperative, the very reason we're all here and for 30K generations prior? And why do I think we can reverse this trend with better tech and better memes?
For starters, let's acknowledge that we are mostly all the descendants of ruthlessly culled winners of the cognitive and physical lottery, the ones who fought to survive and reproduce. Just think back over 30K generations of your ancestors surviving to make babies and see them grow up strong and healthy, over and over.
I say mostly because starting with ag-fueled surplus, the NPC phenotype has spread like kudzu, presumably preceded by the spread of a polygenic set of heritable but mostly deleterious alleles that result in a predisposition to memetic programmability/persuasion, i.e. proclivity to get brainwashed by the current thingism spread by centralized power structures. I don't count NPCs among the winners, more like the free-riders, the useful idiots, the cannon fodder, and current thing amplifiers.
Before ag surplus gave rise to warlords, memelords spread their genes the most, but so did anyone who adopted their memes. The dankness, ie. explanations and ideas conferring survivor benefit in the ancestral environment, made gigachads of many-- the genes rode the memes. The weak and the slow to adapt and spread dank memes were mostly culled. The % of NPCs in the ancestral Dunbar number was very low relative to today's 25% (h/t Scott Adams on the 25% who always choose the regime-affirming answer in a poll). There used to be significant downward pressure on the spread of NPC genes since they conferred little benefit, because few bothered to try to persuade and program others vs. adopting and implementing, i.e. there was a lot more doing than talking about doing in the ancestral environment. Compare to today where the memelord and chadtastic meme adaptooors are a shrinking % compared to the current thing NPCs.
Post ag surplus gave rise to warlords and spread of genes by might is right. There were fewer winners, less fun, more drudgery, less hygiene, more illness, and all the fun meme inspiring gods were eliminated by one big daddy obey me or else deity that just so happened to align/echo the warlord's dominance. A priest class of power-hungry pervs was stood up by the warlords to separate the sinners from the saints and live in luxury.
Monotheism. Monogamy. Money. More NPCs. These are all downstream from warlords and their violence displacing memelords and their dankness. You could become a soldier, a courtesan, a counselor, or a pervy priest, but it was all very zero-sum vs. the positive sum of good explanations solving problems and creating abundance, ie. the memlord/adaptooor/gigachad complex.
Memelords still had a place, but in service of the warlords, which is why Gengis Khan was so good at spreading his genes, but how many descendants can the guy who invented the stirrup claim? We don't know because they weren't comparable to the lord of the hoard, the captain of the the Kipchat Khanate.
So we got here as victims of our own tech innovation (i.e. dankness) which gave us Ag and surplus, and by putting too much trust in centralized power to protect and provide, which gave us warlords concentrating wealth and reproductive sexual opportunities, while imposing biodyamic-defying and pseudo-stabilizing memes like monotheism, marriage, monogamy, easily debased money on the hoi polloi. Everyone being a tinkerer, builder, creator gave way to just a few doing that in cloistered environments under warlord dominion-- PG touches on this point in many essays including Heresy and The Four Quadrants of Conformism. Founder and Startup formation has reignited the memelord fire in many, but few have connected that to making more and better beautiful babies.
Lucky for all of you parsa has it figured out.
All the fellows need to do is build startups, do pushups/pullups/situps/dipups/squatups, and learn game. That takes care of the wealth, strength, and ZFG confidence that triggers the hindbrain tingles of female hypergamy. Boxes checked, so to speak.
All the ladies need to do is stop giving the milk away for free, find themselves a memelord or gigachad meme adaptoooor, or a proto version of either, and get knocked up. Forget marriage, prioritize the baby-making. Get off the coitus carousel. Get in early on the baby bonanza.
Remember that Hss had 30,000 generations of memelord-driven gene spread, followed by 250 of ag-powered warlord dominance, and 1.5 gens of web-enabled return to our memelord roots. We need to accelerate the understanding that both ethical wealth creation and baby making is now possible, (h/t NR) like never before in the Hss history. More on Airchat about this here: https://www.getairchat.com/bmeunier/benoitsmindmaze?r=8d18bf4f-8964-4135-9932-726a5e1f37be
So the solution to reversing TFR is going to happen at the speed of tech adoption like this:
1. Better, faster, easier founder/startup/community/capital formation-- 10% founder/startup/vc survivorship is condemnation of current paradigm; YC shows you can step-change improve; but it needs to be easy as TikTok to launch, grow, raise, build, hyper growth. Solving this solves the hypergamy problem for even the short kings. (Full disclosure: I'm 6'2" and enjoy elite endowment in every physical and cognitive dimension that matters to the ladies).
2. Better health & fitness motivation/solution-- memelords in the ancestral environment were never noodle-armed, nor pot-bellied, nor chubby, nor triple-chinned-- that soft round bod will not fly, my guy, especially not for short kings. Gyms are a waste of time mostly unless you are already in elite shape. Gravity and fasting are free. Get fit, get paid in every possible way.
3. Better family formation -- see above link. We need better pro-natalist memes and better tech to make babies. The anti-natalist memeplex has brain-wormed into so many folks that it's resulted in bullshit like the Dadbod (wrote about it here: https://x.com/TimParsa/status/1695860514952478977?s=20 and mom jeans. Elon is the model for the sorts of baby-making stories we need. As are my baby mamas who made their own money early and then decided to figure out how to make babies. As mentioned above marriage and monogamy are warlord psyops to program NPCs to produce taxes in a predictable way. The memelord method is positive sum, sperm/egg aligned, innovating on coparenting agreements, including education (if they have your genes, they should have your memes), financials etc. Marriage, like offices and gyms, are coercion disguised as coherence-- time to accelerate past all those dead end memes.
4. Better Land-based community formation. Families make us strong-- I have six strapping boys to carry on my genes and memes and support and defend me in my old age. We're told that families are expensive and reduce your options-- the marriage/divorce industrial complex sure is debilitating and destructive-- but families have long been a source of strength and enabled survival of the clan, the tribe, etc. Community is also important and tying it to land is key for all the reasons Balaji explicates in TNS and that I elaborated in this essay here: https://open.substack.com/pub/timparsa/p/land-of-our-own?r=4gw8s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. Land-based community makes you safe because you have skin in each other's game and shared upside. Indeed the two Ms in community can be understand to mean shared memes and shared money (upside). We need better, easier, more efficient ways for families to form land-based community.
Now go forth and make startups, do pushups, and stop accepting the warlord psyops as guiding principles. Ditch jobs for startups, marriage for baby-making. Get jacked fellas--noodle arms is failure mode. Stop riding the corporate & coitus carousel ladies-- build a startup, don't give away the milk for free, find a memelord or adaptooor or proto-chad and agree to coparenting terms before making the beast with two backs.
Most important: don't despair-- we've got the internet and an entire universe of infinite resources to figure out how to turn into abundance. Hss makes prosperity out of scarcity and dankness out of darkness. Let's accelerate out of this Mfing gravity well, leave the degrowth doomers behind, and spiral up and out via tech and moral innovation.
Our destiny is Hss => Hiss. (more on HIIS accelerationist movement here: https://x.com/TimParsa/status/1697708444432949506?s=20)
Hiis kingdom come.
Hiis will be done.
Forgot to include Passport Bros, the only logical way out for average men.
This article places too much emphasis on men's earnings, when in fact women are choosing men on dating apps based primarily on looks. Once again people are throwing their generational bias into the discussion - this is common with many Boomer and older Gen X commentators.
are the numbers in this post based on actual data, or just made up numbers that sound reasonable?
5) An increase in dishonesty on dating apps.
Acknowledging that they are already dishonest, the lying will increase to the point of being a useless method of finding a match. Apps may try to vet peoples claims but that will probably price them out of the market.
The happily married religious folk with lots of kids will be in a demographic death match with the sluts and slut-jerk males just wanting sex and occasionally having an unwanted or inconvenient kid. Which the govt will subsidize but Uncle Sugar makes a lousy father.