Understanding dating failures as a non-incel

Post Reply New Topic

I thought I'd write this post because certain things are starting to click into place for me, at 40 of all things (that's a bit horrifying), but I think there are really some awful things about the human social condition that aren't well understood, they're not handled directly by rational processes by most people, hence it's almost impossible to figure out what you're doing wrong.

To try to tether / tie up some of what I think I'm seeing:

1) I've heard Renee Girard's name brought up by various people in relation to memetics and how he drives home the issue of imitation.

2) The guys and girls who I see striking out who also have themselves together tend have self-written or self-made identities.

3) Social personas not reach by pure imitation seem to signal to most people that there's something deeply wrong with the person who hasn't fully assembled their identity by imitation, that they either have low socio-economic status and a family who couldn't support their social learning or, more negatively, that they're creepy for the ambiguity cast as to whether their 'art' is a skillset for grifting or preying on other people.


I bring this up also from watching how non-judgmental people are about some things and where there seems to be extremely black-and-white thinking. I think about what out-group people tend to have in common and it seems to manifest itself in deviation from the norm. I've seen for a long time that the 'norm' or what I might consider to be the center of the social bellcurve, is a proverbial sweet spot where if there were a real sort of prosperity doctrine Santa-Jesus meets John Frum - this is the sky-Santa that gives good things to people who ride the tides of social conformity better than the people around them.

I also have to throw this against little things that happen when I go out. For example I was at Home Depot, I've been forcing myself increasingly to walk the isles to find things rather than ask for help (NT's do see it as a sign of weakness to ask for help and I'm coming to the conclusion that this does tangibly matter). Today I passed the door greeter where a couple shot him a quick question and went off. Now, one of the things I was looking for is calipers to use on a wood lathe. I said something to the guy about 'calipers for wood turning', I had to repeat myself and started seeing that he was getting agitated with me, ie. I was clearing 'doing something' to him, so I cut myself off and said 'calipers!' where he recomposed himself and told me where to go.

I've had that happen many times in the past, I do enough ordering of things on line these days that I can forget that it's a thing, but I've also noticed over time that in environments where you have a coagulation of the 'popular kids' or 'popular adults', ie. the people who would have been popular in high school (something that seems to almost set an indefinite social caste system in life) what a person is somewhat less important than how they say it - ie. are they saying it in a way built on imitation - and I only stop at somewhat more important because what's even more important is that the person is not telling them things they haven't heard before without having a PhD, being a highly successful entrepreneur, etc., meaning that if you don't have overt material marks to account for your differences then they're a problem irrespective of their content.


This has left me to ask myself - what do I do if I know that the self-made aspects of myself are right and, at the same time, I don't want to live the rest of my life in the permanent limbo of social-dislocation. I actually want to separate socially-dislocated men from the incel community in this respect because it's really important to understand that there are multiple things at work, and it's quite possibly as well that many men and even women who are in incel or FA are probably, similarly, ostracized not by the content of their character, lack of achievement, or refusal to do hygeine but by something as simple and awful as not being able to figure out how to naturalize who and what they are to sheer social conformity. To an outsider the wheel of sheer social conformity is spinning so fast on its own internal logic you feel like you're stepping into the blades of a lawnmower and there's a sense that if you stepped in your identity would be completely deconstructed, everything that you've built of value within yourself up to that point would be destroyed, and then on top of that there's the added horror that 'children' would be then deciding where you'd fit in the social ladder and, if its beneficial to them, it's on the bottom.

I'm writing some of this optimistically because I'm beginning to think that there may be a third way about this, ie. to where you can wrap yourself in the camouflage, engage with it in ways that are not depleting, I've tried that in the past and it has failed because fundamental differences seemed to be the engine of failure, but I'm actually seeing where that assumption wasn't quite correct - it's not that fundamental differences are the engine of failure so much as it's a problem of attempting said dance without actually knowing what's held most important or where the absolute black-and-white thinking comes down on you for something so small and seemingly meaningless that there's seemingly no logical way to anticipate what will trigger abreactions.

This is where I'm actually quite excited about both the idea I mentioned at the open of my post and the possibility that it may actually be correct - ie. that the root of those black-and-white behavior judgments are based on non-imitated or logic-centered social behavior. The way to resolve it might be to much more carefully pull back positive displays of logic-oriented behavior, the negative displays (certain things you won't do) you likely will not want to remove completely because it's your right not to literally become something that's against your principles. There are also positive displays of social conformity or 'I learned this by imitation' that you can carefully select for effect and essentially merger.

The question is 'how much is enough?'. The place where I could see this having as unfortunate of outcomes as it did in my teens and 20's when I'd tried it before is that the threshold for 'how much is enough' might be 'all of you'. In that case any deviation from the norm is Darwinianly selected against, this becomes an almost perfectly Hermetically-sealed system where no progress can be made without being devoured by it, and hence humanity would quite likely have a fate almost perfectly in tandem with the fate this hive-mind delegated to its future as all who belonged to it continued to spin along as a holographic set of mirrors bouncing around the same value sets.

At the same time I have to admit - evolutionarily the 'pure imitation' route makes sense, ie. wisdom of crowds included and the notion that if the outliers, free-thinkers, and untouchables on the periphery are right about something that the hive mind is not that the hive mind will eventually reach the conclusions they did without them, and there's a good chance those free thinkers will already have died and gone by the time that happens (actually this really does damage to women who think outside the box passing on their genes - what happens when she's been saying the same thing all along, people ignore her as a crank or weirdo, and then sometime in her 50's or 60's society says 'Oops - we were wrong you were right!' - exactly, too f'ing late).


Admittedly this is rough territory to chew threw and almost nobody wants to look at it at this level. If this gets no replies I'll understand (it's 'out there' and likely loaded with all kinds of things people haven't thought of or about), but I still want to throw it up there in case anyone sees something that's potentially useful in it.

Mary Wollstonecraft would have dug you.

She would have disliked Incels intensely.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 05 Jul 2020, 5:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

TY, I just looked her up and yeah - it's a topic just as relevant to poets, artist, and philosophers of all stripes because if they're doing anything particular interesting they tend to be outsiders and the long-term limbo of social dislocation is something I'd consider to be a common theme for almost anyone whose thinking on their own feet.

Whatvarr "Incel's"?

In simplest terms, "Incel" is a portmanteau of the words "involunarily" and "celibate".  In more complex terms, "Incel" has come to refer to adult men who are still virgins, who can't get a date, and who express a generally hostile (if not hateful) attitude toward women, complete with stereotyping, projecting, and general misogyny.  Mostly, women don't find "Incels" attractive, and the "Incels" blame everything and everyone for it ... except themselves, of course.

We had an incel here and then one day he got banned. He was constantly making posts about it.

I'm thinking anything longer than Twitter-length posts are self-derailing, regardless of buzzwords in titles or lack of. I might think of something more oblique/opaque next time so it at least falls off the front page if or when the conversation's over.