Conversely: as young men's potential future employability rises, their romantic prospects also decline. That is - the men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.
My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software is no longer dominated by social loners.
36% higher lifetime income for joining a college fraternity.
The numbers don't lie.
I don't think any of this is true.
If you're wondering why people see it that way, just imagine a world where a large number of people had undiagnosed social anxiety, and another large group of people had undiagnosed sociopathy, and they both got pushed out of normal society into the same place. Then the ones with social anxiety look at the ones with sociopathy and associate their slightly greater success with short-term relationships with the condition they do have, rather than the one they don't.
I think you're probably right with your second paragraph.
I sometimes wonder if my career destroyed my ability to make and keep friends.
Social groups just dry up when you get to your late 20's as people are marrying off, having kids, and only maintaining the utmost of friendships. I know it's brutal but it's a time thing... significant others and families take lots of time if you're doing it right so socializing time becomes of higher value/expense.
It was way easier to meet people when I was younger - not just romantic partners. Social groups were much more cohesive and much less based around couple activity. People were just down for whatever and would jump at something just for the experience. I had tons of friends I could just call/SMS like "hey I'm bored let's go find a show" whereas I would feel inappropriate doing this as an adult.
You spend thousands of hours at your job. It is inevitable that it will change your personality.
Choose wisely.
Males should be fixing that by making some female friends. Don't go the "creepy incel who hates all women and Chads" route.
Absolutely. I am on the autism spectrum so part of the difficulty I have can be attributed to that. However I accept that my social shortcomings are my own responsibility. I think a big part of the problem is finding new friends now that I am in my 30's and life is very stagnant.
I think all it takes is going somewhere where people are and being friendly, somewhere that doesn't include existing friends and acquaintances, just sticking with it and not really caring who thinks what about you. Anywhere but a bar would be my criteria, and ideally not a commercial establishment. For me it was the local swimming pool in my community.
Since women can pick their friends and generally pick gregarious, outgoing, and socially competent men for their friend groups, they ignore and do not understand the type of man who is labelled an incel.
Incels are fundamentally working off a broken model of women, attraction, dating, and sex.
EDUT> Not getting "Stacy" is making them crazy, but they don't realize that they don't want Stacy. Stacy's frumpy-seeming neighbour will rock their world.
That broken model is unfortunately widespread in both genders. Some "girls next door" can basically feel like failures in the dating/relationships sphere, which ends up making them even less appealing to others. It's worth trying to fix this of course, but it's not always easy.
There are plenty of excellent places in the world where you can have a reasonable quality of life for about $10k/year, your goal is to have that covered from your real estate income. Go do that as soon as you can, travel slow. Overnight trains, house/pet sitting, couch surfing, 'etc are all good things to try.
Try to find a remote job and never touch your salary income again, keep investing it. Do not mention your net worth to anyone.
You will find in a few years that "DevOps" is a very finite skillset so there is no real need to push so hard as you'll know most of what you need to know in about 3 more years if you do not already.
No reason not to have a social and romantic life and great weekends. I'm quite confident your employer and less talented peers are exploiting your age and willingness to put in long hours.
Don't be available after hours and avoid being on call as much as possible.
You only get your 20s once. Make memories.
Money is important but you need less than you think and is never a worthy goal in and of itself. You can convince yourself of this by reading up on behavioral economics. Optimize for quality of life. Have a FU-money number, reach it, and bail.
Anyway, HN is hardly the place for this kind of topic but thanks again. I'm giving it my best but it's not a piece of cake.
HN is certainly the place for this kind of topic, it is one of the most important topics discussed here. I've been on this site for over a decade and was exactly in your shoes when I found it.
Tech crap comes and goes and is repetitive. You'll sponge it all up sooner or later anyway.
It is absolutely not a piece of cake, I know buddy. It requires a massive investment on your part and I am flailing around to really drive home the fact that it is worth literally ALL THE EFFORT YOU CAN MUSTER. Guaranteed.
I sincerely hope you succeed in making the very necessary changes you know deep down you have to make. Best of luck!
There is definitely an arc-type of socially awkward boys who grow up to be engineers, accountants, etc. But within that group, romantic prospects are positively correlated with employment prospects. An awkward guy w/ a job is better than an awkward guy w/o one.
You are describing nerds having high paying tech jobs, right?
I find that little bit short sighted, there are huge number(probably the majority) of people with balanced lifestyles who are employed in stable jobs, just not really in a trendy high paying or high status sectors.
There are also a sizeable number of people who don't posses the nerdy characteristics at all and still are good in academics and business. Colleges are actually full of that kind of people, they all end up in good jobs.
A reasonably intelligent person with an athletic background probably did well socially in HS, and will probably do well in the working world.
Wouldn't that be nice? That sort of karma is not really guaranteed to exist. Chances are the ostracized lonely introvert will be worse off due to poor networking and if he finds any success at all it will be despite many disadvantages. Meanwhile, asshole bullies could very well go on to become their bosses because sociopathy is often found in powerful people.