That’s not how we use the word, though. Nobody calls that “involuntary” if it’s just a hole that happened to be there. If somebody put you in the hole, then it’s involuntary. The way “involuntary” is used in English, there is a connotation of an entity with a will that overrides your will.

The reason the term “involuntary” is used is to differentiate from voluntary celibates, like Catholic priests, who the cultural zeitgeist most readily associates with the word “celibate”. You’re reading too much into it.

Don’t complain that there are too many. That’s why we have ratings. When you say “the floodgates are open”, you’re just trying to blame somebody else for your lack of effort.

You phrased it that way because that’s how you think about it. You blamed the women, and you still do.

So you are saying I’m lazy, and also misogynistic… Seems weirdly antagonistic for what is essentially a semantics argument. Like, seriously, I’m giving you my personal lived experience, and you’re putting words in my mouth and calling me names. You’re clearly getting way too worked up over this, so I’m gonna end this conversation before your temper tantrum gets worse.

When people talk about AI taking off exponentially, usually they are talking about the AI using its intelligence to make intelligence-enhancing modifications to itself. We are very much not there yet, and need human coaching most of the way.

At the same time, no technology ever really follows a particular trend line. It advances in starts and stops with the ebbs and flows of interest, funding, novel ideas, and the discovered limits of nature. We can try to make projections - but these are very often very wrong, because the thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet.

Yeah, imma need a source for those numbers.

Yes? What’s your point?

Did you try to find a self-help book for how to improve your social skills? It’s not like this is a new problem. Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936

I did try that actually, and I’ve read that book several times. Each time I come back to it because “it’s a classic”, and each time I roll my eyes at how trite, unhelpful, and sometimes manipulative the advice is. It’s a parade of funny tidbits that an already social person noticed about the way they already acted. It is, quite simply, not a good book on learning social skills or overcoming social anxiety. At all. Which is kind of my point - if this is the book on the topic that everyone recommends, and it is such hot trash, then someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is gonna have a hard time figuring out what to do. Of course, there are other books - but now the floodgates are open, and you now must wade through thousands of books on social skills, social anxiety, becoming confident and charismatic, the brain chemistry that causes your depression, how a new diet can fix your mood issues, how it’s all in your head, it’s not about how you act but how you dress, about 500 different inspirational figures who overcame their own neuroticism and became captains of industry, etc. Soon you are more messed up and turned around than you were before you started.

Calling it “involuntary” makes it somebody else’s fault

If I am walking through the forest and a sink hole opens up underneath me, and I fall in and can’t get out, I am involuntarily in that hole. Not everything has to be someone’s fault. Sometimes things are just shitty.

And it’s not women’s fault that you were unhappy with your sex life.

I never blamed women for my sex life. Mostly because blaming half the human population for something is silly - there is no way that many people could effectively coordinate to conspire against me. I also never blamed any particular woman for not being interested in me - after all, there were many women I was similarly uninterested in, and though I didn’t understand exactly what was unappealing about me, I accepted that they could have their own preferences and were entitled to that.

What I did do was develop a complex about how I was fundamentally broken as a human being which led me to consistent suicidal ideation throughout my adolescence. So, I mean, that was fun.

It was your own bad previous decisions that caused it.

Ah yes, my terrible previous bad descion of being bullied and socially ostracized as a child. Thank you for telling all the 8 year olds out there that the fact that they have no one they feel they can trust in their lives is their own fault.

If you failed a math test…

A more apt analogy would be if you failed a reading test because you have dyslexia which was never diagnosed and for which you never received appropriate support. And then the school just kept pushing you through the grades as you failed every single test and fell further and further behind.

Almost everybody has problems, and they all still have to figure out how to live their own lives.

Well sure. But I’m not going to tell a subsistence farmer in Sierra Leone that they are voluntarily poor because they could just risk life and limb to illegally immigrate to Europe and then work there until they can finagle legal citizenship, get a job as a janitor and work their way up the corporate ladder until they are CEO of BMW. And I’m not going to tell someone with only one leg that they voluntarily can’t walk on two legs, since clearly they could just make their own fully functional prosthetic just like Boston Dynamics made. Yeah, everyone is living a life, and they can’t expect sweet baby Jesus to just step in and solve all their problems. But at the same time, having problems isnt the same as choosing to have those problems which is what “voluntary” means.

Everything I’ve seen has indicated that it is spiralling pretty hard. It seems like it is just bots and Facebook level users now.

This is a social problem, so the solution is to look at what successful people do and copy that.

Then the question becomes (1) who is successful? Most people are not advertising every romantic encounter they have. Least of all to the weird kid who doesn’t talk to anyone. (2) Of the things they do, what makes them successful? Many of the black pill incels seem to have found the answer here, which is “be tall” and “have a strong jawline”. This is similar to questions about “how can I be well liked?” or “How do I make oodles of money?” There are a million possible answers, each as plausible-sounding as the last, all contradictory. And following any one line of advice requires a significant commitment of time and resources before you see results. (3) What do they actually do? It is very rare to actually see someone ask someone else out on a date, or go for a first kiss, or to hear how they flirt on a first date. These are private things, and therefore are difficult to emulate.

You say that you couldn’t talk to anyone IRL about your problem, because of your social anxiety and autism, but that’s also a matter of effort. Rather than working on overcoming your social anxiety first, you went straight to seduction. That’s skipping all of the groundwork, and you knew it at the time. Choosing a plan that is guaranteed to fail is a voluntary choice.

This very much was not obvious to me at the time. I was also working on my social anxiety and social skills, but any sort of solid framework or set of steps where one thing led to another was completely opaque to me. Meanwhile, it took me about a decade after I realized that I needed to improve the way I connected with others until I actually managed to get laid - a lot of that time I was a teenager where it was unlikely to happen anyway, so let’s cut that time in half and say 5 years. Can you really say that spending 5 years overcoming social anxiety, while agonizing over your lack of a sex life is a voluntary lack of sex? If someone spends a decade struggling with depression and couldn’t get a job, would you say they were voluntarily unemployed during that time?

Seriously, the idea that there is no such thing as “involuntary” celibacy because you can just work on yourself completely misses the fact that these people have real problems.

If some friends hanging out together just wanna have a boys night because that’s what they want to do - because they like that energy for whatever reason… if that’s patriarchy… Then I’m okay with patriarchy.

I have to say, I personally have been actively seeking male-only spaces for the past year. This has nothing to do with disliking women. I like women a lot and have a lot of female friends I care deeply about. The reason comes from my end - I have things that are difficult for me to talk about that I would like to discuss in a supportive environment with other people who understand and accept my lived experience. While I can and do open up to my female friends about some things, for other things I am simply more comfortable talking to other guys - where “more comfortable” means “I might talk about it *at all.”

Unfortunately, most male-only spaces put up significant barriers to entry, because otherwise they become magnets for right wing lunatics or the chronically depressed.

I’m not saying you are categorically wrong about the benefits of male-only spaces. But I will say that the attitude and language with which you are approaching the issue is not doing you any favors.

I don’t feel like I have to live up to some arbitrary metric of success set up by others. I am aware of the fact that others will be interested in knowing me based on my achievements. For example, if I have the achievement “earn enough money to support myself”, other people will want to be around me than would otherwise. These are nice people whose company I enjoy, so I am going to try to keep earning this achievement.

If I can say “I have run a marathon” or “I placed 3rd in my community chess competition”, these things indicate that I have positive attributes which other people will find attractive, like fitness, consistency, intelligence, and an interest in community events. I also want to spend my time with people who have cultivated these traits - so when someone tells me that they once meditated for 24 hours straight, I am impressed and am more interested in knowing them because I intuit that spending time around them will imbue me with some of that potential. Meanwhile, if someone tells me that they spend their free time watching reality tv reruns, I am less interested in knowing them, because I am not interested in becoming more like them.

I mean, basically you failed to cultivate deep and meaningful relationships with other people is the problem. Did you ever open up to your friends about anything before your break up? Did they ever open up to you, or come to you with their problems? Did you have friends who were “your friends” who you often hung out with while she didn’t?

I’m a guy. I have male friends. I would support them in an instant if they were going through a breakup. I would expect my male friends (and my female friends) to do the same. Is this rare or weird? I dunno. I’m just me. I don’t have experience living anyone else’s life. But I’d recommend finding some friends who can form a support network for you whether or not it is “normal”. If it’s normal, be normal. If it isn’t, fuck being normal. Go be weird.

Damn, there’s a local think happening near me in a couple days, but I already signed up for some shifts at work. But thanks for the encouragement! I’ll look into it more!

As someone who was previously involuntarily celibate, I have to say that this comment really misses the actual problem, which is mental health. I had basically been suffering from some combination of depression, social anxiety, and high functioning autism from around age 8. This didn’t leave me with much in the way of friends or social skills, but it didn’t reduce in the slightest the horniness I felt.

To me, trying to figure out how to get women to have sex with me felt like dying of thirst on a desert island covered in land mines. In my constantly precarious mental and social situations, I was always terrified of trying anything because I feared that doing the wrong thing would lose me the few friends (ie, acquaintances who tolerated me) that I had. And I feared that letting on to anyone that I had any sexual interest in anyone ever - that I had any sexual urge at all - would lead to everyone I knew immediately abandoning me. And this, I was quite sure,would result in my own death via suicide. This was the case to the point that, one time, my friends asked me if I was gay, probably assuming I was closeted. They were right. I was closeted. I just wasn’t gay.

So since I couldn’t talk to anyone in real life about my problem, I turned to the internet. I ended up in /r/seduction and… was immediately grossed out. It was weird and manipulative and unnatural and and just generally unappealing to me as someone who was committed to treating other people with basic human dignity. So instead I turned to the normal/liberal/leftist side of the internet, which was… unhelpful to say the least.

Saying that it is voluntary assumes that the steps needed are straightforward and obvious. But you might as well say that primitive tribes were voluntarily living without electricity for 200,000 years. After all, you just have to spin a magnet! Just put the work in! What’s wrong with them?

I mean, you should. Because they’re gonna start organizing and buying guns

That attaches self-worth to achievements in life and tightly couples success with partnership and parenthood.

I am highly skeptical of a viable alternative here. Self worth is strongly tied to the quality of our social relationships. Our social relationships depend significantly on our achievements. People want to be around other people who are succeeding, because they know that successful people can help them also be successful. Sure, your mom will always love you, hopefully… But who else?

You have worth as a human beyond your capacity to produce profit.

This is only true in a vague, wishy-washy metaphysical sense. Fine, whatever, you have intrinsic value. If that warms your cockles, more power to you.

But the extent to which other people value you is entirely dependent on what you can provide to them. This has nothing to do with capitalism. Do you think that in a socialist society, a person who refused to do any work at all - not because they couldn’t, but just because they didn’t feel like it - would be shown general love and acceptance and kindness? No! They would, at best, be tolerated and given the bare necessities to survive - but they wouldnt be celebrated. Do you think primitive tribes love and support the lazy asshole who never contributes and just expects food to be brought to them every day? No, of course not! They kick that motherfucker out when they are dead weight.

And what you “provide” for other people doesn’t have to make money. But it does need to provide some kind of value. Do you have a beautiful smile that brightens peoples’ day? Are you tall enough to reach things on the top shelf, and willing to reach them for short people? Can you make hilarious dolphin sounds at parties? Are you a supportive friend who listens to others’ struggles when they are down? No? You just sit your ass on the couch all day and watch TV and interact with basically no one? Then why the fuck would you expect anyone to value you, when you provide no value to them? This is not a capitalism problem. This is a human solution. Dead weight gets dropped. Period. Always has, always will.

I honestly don’t think third spaces on their own are the answer. After all, suppose a city makes a nice park across the street from an incel’s apartment. Maybe they’ll leave their house and go there… but do you really think this socially awkward weirdo is gonna start striking up conversations with other people there? Do you think they are going to engage with others who say hello to them, if others interact with them at all? Yes, a lack of third spaces is a problem, but I don’t think it is the lynchpin. We are also less likely to visit third places when they do exist these days due to digital distractions. People seem to be more insular, less likely to introduce themselves to strangers and less likely to be open to strangers introducing themselves. And significant social anxiety and lack of social skills is seldom overcome simply by having a neutral environment.

What we really need is grassroots social movements dedicated to being friendly to strangers, reducing digital distractions, reaching out to men who feel left behind, and informing parents about the importance of proactively ensuring that their children have healthy social and emotional lives.

Leftist incel vibes

People who seek power being more scared that being exploitative has consequences, so they limit exploitation.

Or you just bias the power vacuum to be filled with even more paranoid and ruthless nutjobs, because the more sensible psychopaths choose to avoid the consequences you are proposing. We see this fairly consistently when authoritarian governments get coup’d - the person most likely to take the place of a bloodthirsty dictator who knows he could get assassinated at any moment is an even more bloodthirsty future dictator.