Why do men strive for status and money?

You left out the sentence before that:

Marriage stops the "natural" dynamic by tying every male to a maximum of one female

That guy must be kidding, right? Monogamy is one thing, but what about other forms of marriage that involves more than one man and one woman?

But the rest of the sentence that you quoted is even worse, but so that it makes more sentence, I'll quote the entire sentence:

In earlier societies where marriage did not exist, the most dominant males had children with many women, and the males at the bottom of the hierarchy did not get to procreate at all.

But in most societies around the world, the poor tend to have more kids. Who is the author of that article?

He's:

a 33 year old semi-retired entrepreneur (I co-founded the Swedish marketplace Fyndiq where I was CTO for the first six years). Nowadays I spend my days mostly reading, writing and photographing stuff.

And making up crazy ideas about society.

Agreed. The entire thing is based upon a false premise.

Also weren't most very early societies without marriage matriarchal?

Addition: Isn't this also ignoring polygamist marriage?

Primates have existed for 50 million years. Marriage is what, 10k years old at most?

Sorry, I was very sloppy with the wording. What I meant to say is that monogamous marriage of the kind that is popular in many societies today is a fairly new thing in the perspective of evolution. Most evidence suggests that we introduced monogamy when we went to agricultural societies. I have updated the text. But my argument still holds.

"Marriage is considered a human universal by anthropologists."

Can you provide any sources?

"One man and a thousand women is a potential civilization, whereas one woman and a thousand men is a horror movie."

Very well put.

"Men, therefore, must strive very hard for 'best'"

Aren't I getting a lesson in this. Spent most of my life in pure abjection until a doctor, with some actual competency, prescribed me some ritalin.

You would not believe how mad I am. Now I'm trying to play catch-up to be the best and it's absolutely infuriating to hear people tell me to "relax".

I went through unimaginable hell because the wrong men were promoted to higher positions and nobody told them to eat shit. I can't even recourse to a notion of ultimate karma and fairness because I've realized how ultimately such notions are a case of the sourest grapes over losing in the competition.

There are MANY terrible and incompetent men and I want to devour them all. But my wants are nothing compared to what I need to do (develop skills and behaviors that are marketable and which act like positive feedback on another). My apologies for the little detour but figured that someone here has an inkling of what I feel and it's nice to know that one's turbulence isn't a lone storm.

Also autonomy. Not having control over one's destiny is stressful and unpleasant.

True but there is more. To go deeper on this you can check Signalling Theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

Spent, Geoffrey Millers' book is a fantastically good reading on this subject. You would be surprised on how much that theory can explain and predict. https://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior...

That's way too simplistic answer and not true in many cases. Does Donald Trump strive to be a president to get more women? I don't think thats his primary motivation.

I find this explanation particularly compelling because it also explains a host of behaviors that have little to do with producing children.

Khufu didn't build the Great Pyramid as a place for his kids to live in.

"but there is an epidemic of males who aren't thriving."

Shit diets, shit education, shit culture. It's nothing new, although it's been accelerating as society has become more dense and more concentrated on the top.

I say nothing new because I remember staying in the homeless shelter and just seeing entire lives wasted in abjection. Nobody held a decent hand to these men nor showed them another way. This utter abjection was intensified by the lack of positive models to emulate. When the zookeepers seem like a bunch of idiots, the caged animal thinks that, even for all of its trials, it is still more eminently wise and clever.

Are you sure? As a counter anecdote, I was diagnosed with low testosterone and went on replacement therapy. The injections were enough that my numbers in blood tests were up by a factor of three even a week after the injections. Certainly right after the injections my numbers would have been even higher. Despite this large change, I noticed no difference. I got more erections at night, that was it.

I hypothesize that sleep, diet and exercise can improve your mood through a whole bunch of factors, with testosterone playing an overstated role. Or even a reverse causation: improved confidence leading to higher T perhaps.

I've since stopped taking the injections as it simply wasn't doing me any good.

"It has become taboo to discuss"

I don't think you understand why you were downvoted. You made no effort to tie your comment into the OP. You then state a contrarian opinion as fact "my self-perceived status is low, my testosterone falls off a cliff." And lastly you use hyperbole "an epidemic" to describe your(?) situation which also expresses a lack of empathy for segments of society that really have it bad.

A reason to strive for status and money is because there is glory in it. The harder the struggle the greater the glory. So turn your "not thriving" situation into a personal battle. Let nothing hold you back. Fight brother! :)

I've learned it's important to be secure in your own abilities and bright future regardless of the dice roll outcome of your own startup.

How did you measure your testosterone levels? (Just curious)

How do you know your testosterone levels dropped? Do you regularly get tested?

Just off the cuff...

Pregnant women have sex because rewiring women to NOT want sex while pregnant would be evolutionarily pointless, not to mention sex is used to bond male partners.

Likewise, sex after menopause. Women still seek shelter from males post-menopause and also want males around for their children and grandchildren's sake.

Men's instincts do not have the abstract concept of "infertile" if a woman appears otherwise sexually appealing.

I'm skeptical of the idea that 50% of young people identifying as bisexual, but if there is truth to this, I imagine that it is largely females who identify this way. And bonding between females is likely to strengthen the 'herd'.

Men's instincts do not have the abstract concept of sperm banks. Even if they did, men are also selective in where they deposit their sperm, and in any case are largely motivated to reproduce through sexual desire. If sperm banks were the only way we reproduced, then we'd have evolved a desire for that.

The idea that there are any humans on Earth that aren't closely genetically related is absurd...

As for monogamy, it's a rational response on the part of males who want to be sure they are the father of their mate's children and who want a better mating opportunities than they might have if it was winner-take-all.

Obviously, I'm not sure of the veracity of any of these, but I think it's fairly simple to explain most of these from an evolutionary point of view. I think it is a mistake to assume that because the rational part of our brain can grasp more efficient ways to spread our genes (e.g. sperm banks), that we must therefore do that if we are wired to spread our genes. The parts of our brains wired that way aren't quite that literal and probably haven't had time to catch up with those concepts.

While I normally detest simplistic evo-bio approaches to complex emergent social behavior (particular as it is frequently used to justify shitty, misogynistic behavior), quite a few of those examples could be chalked up to evolution taking a slightly longer view than "get everyone pregnant all the time".

There is probably a strong reproductive advantage for a population as a result of having reproductively disinterested members, and there are individual benefits to sex and sexual desire outside of it leading to pregnancy.

Evolution is not an intelligent process, it's the result of random mutations. The more complex the adaptation the less likely it is to occur. A mechanism for "have sex whenever possible" is much more likely to occur than "have sex except for this long list of exceptions", or even less likely "evaluate this abstract function about genes". Complexity only evolves when there's a real fitness benefit. Evolving a mechanism to specifically avoid sex after menopause would have very little influence on your reproductive success, so there's no reason for it to be selected. The sperm banks example is interesting because that one actually does have a large reproductive fitness impact, but it's also too new and too rare for any sperm donation drive to have evolved. But maybe if the situation continues for long enough humans will evolve to want to donate sperm.

> Why do 50 % of young people identity as bisexual in some way.

I was not aware of this statistic. I really have no thoughts on it either way except - wow!

http://www.out.com/news-opinion/2016/3/11/less-50-teens-iden...

Because evolution is a local optimizer, not a global optimizer, and you can't account for all the factors an evolutionary process accounts for indirectly.

> Why do pregnant women have sex > Why do women have sex after menopause > Why do men stay with women who are no longer fertile

All of these are answered by the following:

A reason evolution would cause these "intentionally" is to help maintain social bonds outside of pregnancy.

A reason evolution would cause these "unintentionally" is because evolution created reward systems to encourage procreation, but never got around to disabling them when already pregnant/can no longer get pregnant.

> Why do 50 % of young people identity as bisexual in some way.

I don't believe this, but if you have a reputable source I'd love to see it.

Anyway, there are plenty of evolutionary explanations for having a population with homosexual tendencies. It could be good for social cohesiveness, or for maintaining a more effective fighting force, etc. etc. Evolution is also imperfect, so it's entirely plausible that sexual desires just get accidentally subverted sometimes. I can't imagine that it's very hard to accidentally trigger the growth of the "wrong" sexual selection hardware during development.

> Why do sperm banks have to advertise for doners

Remember that humans only have a weak desire to reproduce in the abstract sense. It was much easier for evolution to make us want sex (regardless of its outcome) and to raise children.

> Why do people adopt kids, its not their genes

Any time people have an energy-intensive social relationship that doesn't involve their immediate relatives, you have to consider the fact that in the sort of environments anatomically modern humans evolved in, if someone was in your community, they probably had very similar DNA. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to have the instinct to protect members of the community (especially children) even if they are not directly related to you. In fact, evolution went a bit overboard with this; not only do we want to protect young human children, but also anything with child-like features such as a large head or short legs. Honestly, I think puppies and kittens and the like are a lot cuter than human babies, which suggests that the human baby detector mechanism in the brain isn't particularly well-adjusted and is set up to have an extremely low false negative rate at the expense of a very high false positive rate.

So you're right, "everything I do is to carry my genes forward view" is too simplistic; in fact, you also have to take into account the fact that there is (or at least was) some correlation between social closeness and genetic similarity, so you have a huge incentive to protect your children, a big incentive to protect your siblings and their children, a moderate incentive to protect friends and their children, etc. etc. I'm told this principle has a name in evolutionary biology, but I can't remember what it is.

That was interesting. really really interesting. I feel like I understand my male family members a little bit better after it.