This is scary. This is the first time I read such article. I live alone, never married ( no plans to marry either ), have no friends. I have a decent job though.
This article scares me.
This article scares me.
Not really a fan of that advice (although better than no action) - I believe it is difficult to avoid shallow connections with a shifting group of people.
I personally (A) choose to share accommodation (shared house), (B) live in a part of the city that has that community feel (not the "best" neighborhood). Now meaningful long-term connections just happen without trying (in fact it would take effort to avoid it).
A person can be at school and have a small number of friends. They then leave to go to college and lose those friends. They may make a few more friends at college. They then leave college and go to work - and again they lose their friends.
Once you're at work it is hard for some people to male friends.
This isn't a new or unusual point of view. We freqently hear about how lonely cities can feel.
"$cityname is lonely" returns hits of people talking about how lonely they are in any city. The fact that they do this on the Internet makes it, to me at least, very sad.
Some people just struggle to make and keep friends.
That was my point. Why?
I have plenty of relatives along with close friends (enough that getting together to play Arkham Horror is becoming a logistic nightmare), but I could easily, with just a few unlucky breaks or moves, not have any close friends. It isn't even that uncommon.
Try online dating, or go to a bar to meet a girl. It's a lot easier than you think, especially when you're gainfully employed.
Coupled with sexism meaning that women typically earn very little if anything, and their only chance to escape abject poverty is to get married, and because there are so many women for so few men and with nothing else to make the guy interested, pregnancy becomes the only option. To keep the guy married (especially given that divorce laws are very weak and not in general working in post-Soviet countries, and men lose little if they divorce), an extreme psychological pressure is required, which usually takes efforts of the whole girl's family. Except the very cynical guys, only chance to escape this is to keep as far from marriage as possible. This is probably why post-soviet population declines so fast.
Of course, the higher classes of society (e.g. coders) are exempt.
(the other side of this is domestic violence which is very common, and sometimes not even viewed as a problem, which is an even more sad side of the story)
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing...
Similarly telling a lonely person to just get over it does nothing to help that person. It might even make things worse - increasing feelings of failure and hopelessness.
These two sentences seem to contradict each other - the short courses of planned therapy are basically a therapist saying "get over it" and providing opportunities to ease into getting over it.
And in this particular case, I can state confidently that telling people to just get over it does work. I've done it with a number of people, mostly successfully. At first they think approaching women is just one of my firangi powers and completely impossible for a desi. Then they try it themselves and discover it works better for them than for me.
If you are in this situation, go to a pickup artist, red pill or other male self improvement subreddit and follow the FAQ. (Do NOT internalize the misogyny - that stuff is toxic.) Unless you are completely hideous in a manner that can't be fixed by lifting and eating right (read: facial disfigurement, muscular dystrophy) there is a simple program to follow to solve your problems.
One thing that the FA crowd doesn't seem to realize is that you don't have to be attractive or even average to get into a relationship or friendship. Ugly people get laid all the time and have plenty of friends. The important thing is getting out there. And yes, it's hard. It's new, it's uncomfortable, and you suck at anything that you're new to. But the only way that you're going to get better at it is by getting out there and talking to more people.
Unfortunately the only people teaching those skills are redpill, pua, and similar sorts. I think this is mainly because many of the effective techniques contradict a lot of socially desirable dogma.
There's advice in the post, BTW. Did you read it?
In any case, there are far more many spouses than there are billionaires in this world.
that sucks that the article scares you, stay strong my friend. my room in japan actually has started to look like the picture i saw in the article. back in the states, i was a much cleaner person but now i find it almost impossible and stuff is just lying around everywhere... the similarity is a little scary there but i just laughed it off like i usually do. im hoping ill be fine :)