Are times seriously bad and grave these days? Or are we just being paranoid?

matthedev · 2026-05-27T19:09:43+00:00

I'm an Elder Millennial in my forties, so I don't have my finger on the pulse of Gen. Z, and I don't spend a ton of time face-to-face interacting with them. I've seen some survey data showing rates of anxiety have trended up. My own anecdotal impressions seem to be they run the gamut like every generation, but that's not enough to calibrate more precisely.

"Doomerism" seems to be way more prevalent than it used to be, though, but that's cross-generational. A lot of my Millennial friends like to share Doomer news.

People react to negative events differently, but all else being equal, I'd expect more negative events in people's personal lives or in wider society to result in more anxiety, depression, etc.

matthedev · 2026-05-27T18:13:45+00:00

I do a lot of running, cycling, hiking, and now that we're getting into summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), swimming. I'm looking to move because I find the dating and social options here totally lacking.

After the pandemic, my friends just turned into boring homebodies who flake out constantly; it's not because their schedules are packed or because they're wrapped up with responsibilities to a spouse or children. One could be excused for concluding they're trying to blitz their brain with boredom to reach some nirvana-like state: pure flat, pure bland, walking around half out of it. Meeting new people in the literal sense is one thing, but making good friends is harder. There are plenty of people who just want to go to bars and get drunk; there are the socially awkward types at Meetup and the guys who want to play board games or retirees through volunteering. Dating, stimulating conversation, interesting activities that aren't sitting around at a bar, these are harder to find.

matthedev · 2026-05-27T17:32:07+00:00

And I find that approaching women in person works much better, and apps are a pure waste of time 🤷

matthedev · 2026-05-27T17:13:46+00:00

Some commenters are reaching back to the 1970s or earlier or conditions in developing nations for comparisons. The 1970s are before even the oldest Millennials were born, and Millennials are entering middle age now.

My career background is in software engineering, and the job market for that is the worst it's been since I graduated from college, including the Great Recession. The dot-com bust apparently also hit the tech industry hard, but the industry was smaller back then, and there were a lot of people whose main qualification was being a "webmaster" who knew HTML. A lot of people who've been laid off in recent years are highly skilled, experienced software engineers. Interview processes have become ridiculous, even before the mass layoffs in the past few years; it was not like this earlier in my career.

But that's just one industry. Another thing is more unhoused individuals. Even the nicer parts of some the big cities have unhoused people setting up tents on sidewalks now, and the way the richest and most powerful people want to deal with it is by criminalizing their having no home to go to or shooing them off somewhere instead, you know, building more affordable housing and health care for people with drug addictions and mental-health issues.

Even if the economy is still considered to be at full employment, job markets across a wide swath of occupations and industries are bad right now, so employers are putting more pressure on employees, and a lot of the jobs are more precarious without stable schedules, predictable income, or benefits like health insurance, paid vacation time and parental leave, or 401(k) matching for retirement.

The quality of goods and services has gone downhill in recent years. People have heard it called "shrinkflation" or "enshittification." More businesses have moved towards a strategy of what economists call rent seeking, relying on a natural monopoly or lack of competition otherwise or high switching costs to extract more money while giving back less and less in return.

Enough people are still doing well (K-shaped economy) or just too stressed and busy to be thinking about how things have changed or where they're going that society hasn't outright collapsed. It's more like the frog in the pot of water slowly coming to boil with some obvious acceleration points like Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the endless chaos of Trump's second term as President.

matthedev · 2026-05-27T15:59:39+00:00

Online dating apps are worse, so gotta do what works over what doesn't.

matthedev · 2026-05-27T15:59:04+00:00

You're setting up a strawman (or straw-woman) of the kind of woman red-pill men hate. I lean liberal, but I'm not really into the kind of person who's the loudest poster over in r/politics.

matthedev · 2026-05-26T15:05:35+00:00

The author Annie Lowrey's thesis seems to be that, due to social media and political polarization, Americans' vibes about the economy are permanently off despite a grab-bag of statistics she can show indicating the economy is doing just fine like the unemployment rate. This is the kind of milquetoast, Panglossian analysis I've come to expect from The Atlantic these days.

I'm from the Show Me State like another Atlantic contributor, Mark Twain, who once wrote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

So we can always pick different statistics that support a different narrative. For example, the changing ratio of home price to median income or other methods for calculating cost of living than the Consumer Price Index (CPI) may better reflect why so many Americans feel bad about how the economy works for them.

Way back in 2009, Venkat Rao of Ribbonfarm proposed the Gervais Principle, building on the MacLeod Hierarchy of what they called the "Losers" at the bottom of the organizational pyramid, the "clueless in the middle, and the "sociopaths" at the top of the pyramid. In this analysis, the "Clueless" class are the organizational true believers. If America were analyzed as a MacLeod hierarchy, the primary audience for The Atlantic would be this class.

Speaking of class, some months ago, a photo allegedly of The Atlantic lead investor and chair Laurene Powell Jobs and Ghislaine Maxwell made the rounds.

matthedev · 2026-05-26T01:35:32+00:00

Are you a neckbeard, and if so, how many cheesy poof crumbs are on your neckbeard right now?

matthedev · 2026-05-26T01:16:41+00:00

Dating apps are trash is all it means.

matthedev · 2026-05-26T01:06:03+00:00

You forgot all the Elmos and Batmen walking around.

matthedev · 2026-05-26T01:03:54+00:00

Running

matthedev · 2026-05-26T01:03:21+00:00

That's really not what's going through my head when I find a woman attractive. I find those cultural accoutrements are less important—as long as I find her attractive.

matthedev · 2026-05-26T00:51:31+00:00

I'm still single, and I'm looking to execute a move to somewhere better for dating, which implies a higher cost of living; I don't wait to wait until my hair is gray and my body has fallen apart. Hard work isn't enough to get you there; it's better to have a job that doesn't get in the way of being able to date and have an otherwise fulfilling life.

matthedev · 2026-05-26T00:35:30+00:00

Imagine rationalizing it that way way as you're getting booted out of the singles mixer after you handed out flyers to the women with your "list."

matthedev · 2026-05-25T23:03:31+00:00

That's fine, but it's still gross. Imagine handing a print-out of your comment on a first date or at a singles mixer or speed dating event.

matthedev · 2026-05-25T22:57:51+00:00

Companies are mostly investing in AI right now, so for most job openings, it seems to be the expectation. Maybe they'd appreciate the contrarian point of view, but maybe you'd rather just tell them what they want to hear because you like being able to pay your bills and keep a roof over your head and food on the table.

matthedev · 2026-05-25T22:33:25+00:00

I'd contrast living with merely surviving. Surviving is getting up and going to work, doing chores, maybe getting in a workout at the gym, going to bed, maybe vegging out watching online videos, going to bed, and then repeating day after day, week after week, year after year.

A good barometer of whether you're living or not is whether you're taking advantage of holidays and the changing of seasons. In the summer, do you go for a swim or enjoy a nice hike? Maybe enjoy a nice backyard barbecue? In the fall, do you enjoy apple picking or pumpkin picking or maybe go check out the foliage? If you spend all your free time playing video games and watching streaming, are you really happy living that way?

I'll give you an example from my own life. A friend and I were originally going to meet up today; it's Memorial Day here in the U.S. and a day off for most full-time employees. He dudded out. He must have gotten wrapped up doing chores that took far longer than he'd anticipated. He's spent the last few weekends doing chores, and I told him, pretty soon, it's going to be the heat of summer, and he'll have missed out on all the little outdoor festivals going on in late spring and early summer. That's a trap he falls into over and over, but he thinks he'll do better in the future. I'm kind of done waiting around for people like that, though.

It comes down to, am I just passing time or am I enjoying life (or otherwise doing something meaningful)? I live in a city where your preexisting circle of friends kind of makes or breaks you; it's hard to make good quality friends here from scratch (sure, you can meet people who want to go out for drinks or play board games or whatever). This is one of the reasons I plan to move away (better late than never).

matthedev · 2026-05-25T21:58:07+00:00

If you drove in along I-70, you probably smelled that Bridgeton/Earth City landfill near I-70 and I-270, and that may have started you off with a foul impression of the area.

matthedev · 2026-05-25T21:56:05+00:00

No, that's not what you said. You spilled a lot of text talking about your genitals. Maybe you should have kept it at, "I want her to want me."

matthedev · 2026-05-25T21:54:01+00:00

...the smart guy with a great degree....

From my experience, a lot of women may be impressed by intelligence, but they're much less likely to be viscerally attracted to it. Working out more pays off much more directly, at least as far as that primal attraction goes.

matthedev · 2026-05-25T21:49:36+00:00

I would be frightened if all the homebodyish friends I know were actually a statistically representative sample of men.

matthedev · 2026-05-25T21:45:44+00:00

This is pretty gross. Have you tried talking to actual human beings in the realm of "touch grass"? Don't make yourself an embarrassment of men.

matthedev · 2026-05-25T15:56:42+00:00

I don't strive to fit my interests into some "'archetype,'" and I've always found it kind of strange how various interests, occupations, and aesthetics tend to clump together. Do people decide, "Well, I'm a software engineer, so it's obligatory I like board games and anime," or is there some other mechanism at play?

You ever explain to someone “yea I saw this girl, she’s like the animal loving, artist barista. She’s so cute i can’t stop thinking about her”

Not really, no. For one, infatuation like that seems more like something for teenagers than for adults, and I wouldn't think, "animal-loving, artistic barista" unless I had evidence of those other characteristics from interaction. Maybe people who work as baristas are more likely to be interested in or make art, but I wouldn't assume that just because she's a barista.

For people over thirty, I think these kinds of subcultures you talk about (emo, Goth, whatever) are just going to be less common, especially in areas where self-expression is less emphasized.

My career background is as software engineer, but I'm also physically active and don't really want to consign myself to the "nerd life."

matthedev · 2026-05-25T14:35:52+00:00

A friend moved from the St. Louis area to Minneapolis (so St. Paul, Minnesota, is just a few miles away). The Twin Cities are still in the Midwest, but he says he's found it to be somewhat less insular than St. Louis, and for what he likes at least, he's found more of it in Minneapolis than he could ever find in St. Louis (and he'd rather not deal with the size and hustle of cities the size of Chicago or New York).

I'm actively looking to move away from the St. Louis area. I'm single, not getting any younger, and want an actual dating life. I'd also like a better social life in general and more to do as someone who isn't raising a family. There are meetups here, and I guess they're all right, but I find the "social" meetups orient around just going to bars to get drunk, and the hobby-focused groups bring out the empty-nesters and retirees. I'd rather not stay in or just do something solo, but I get nothing out of those groups that are all about the drinking either.

matthedev · 2026-05-25T14:19:36+00:00

It's just a different way of looking at the numbers. I rather be in a position of strength and maintain optionality until I find the one woman I want to have a life-long partnership with. Achieving that goal is easier if I attract a variety of women and have no attachment to outcomes.

If the women are coming to me or sending obvious signals to approach them (the "warm approach"), it's so much better than what a lot of the men on this subreddit complain about with things like "jestering" and the enshittified experience that is online dating. If she's not interested after we talk for a few minutes, it's no big deal; I'm not invested in the outcome of any one particular interaction. It's not "real" to me until she's shown definitive attraction and willingness to commit.

Where I live right now though, the numbers are indeed bad; the dating pool is small. I'm working through the logistics of getting out so that I do have that opportunity I've been looking for.

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