Two points on loneliness, family, and evolutionary biology
I have often banged on about evolutionary biology, it being the theoretical and intellectual core underlying game, as guys have evolved to like young hot chicks and chicks have evolved to like guys with skills, knowledge, resources, height, and status. But we are also an evolutionary puzzle,
Humans are almost unique in having menopause; most animals keep reproducing until they die in late middle-age. Why does evolution want humans to stick around without reproducing?
Because old people have already learned the local culture and can teach it to others. Henrich asks us to throw out any personal experience we have of elders; we live in a rapidly-changing world where an old person is probably “behind the times”. But for most of history, change happened glacially slowly, and old people would have spent their entire lives accumulating relevant knowledge. Imagine a Silicon Valley programmer stumped by a particularly tough bug in his code calling up his grandfather, who has seventy years’ experience in the relevant programming language.
On average, the people I know who have kids are more satisfied and content… more purposeful. Often they are not “happier,” if you think of happiness as a giddy joy, but they seem to have more purpose, and purpose can satisfy us. Trying to maximize “happiness” seems to make many people, probably most of them, discontent over time. English has developed subtly different concepts for “happy,” “meaning,” “purpose,” “satisfaction,” and similar words for good reason, but we tend to treat these states of being as interchangeable.
What we find most satisfying when we're younger, like status among our peers and f**king younger-hotter-tighter, we might find less satisfying when we're older (that is the time-horizon issue). Those thoughts are underlying Kids, the player, and the Red Pill: Comprehensive statement. We focus on the game because, although it may be sad, it's also true that we need game and to understand women in order to form satisfying relationships, particularly in an age of legal theft via marriage and paternity fraud. It's necessary both to guard your interests and for most guys to have a family. Many guys don't do either one effectively. Your stage of life is relevant and I see too few guys discussing stage-of-life points, so I want to change that here.
There are different game and relationship “levels,” and most men never get good at opening women, flirting with women, seducing women, and forming strong social networks and bonds. Because of this, most men’s long-term relationships suffer, because the men feel they have no other good options, and their partners, if they manage to find one, feel the same.
Postwar baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were Generation Zero for the Second Demographic Transition in the United States. Now shuffling their way into their sixties and seventies, older boomers give a glimpse of the long-term downside of the post-SDT culture. If we had to pick just one word to describe it, “lonely” would do. In widely quoted research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ashton M. Verdery and Rachel Margolis uncovered a recent surge in the number of “kinless” older adults. Lower fertility translates into fewer siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, whether for hospital visits or emergency contacts.
That article is amazing and please read all of it. Living without kids for your entire life is probably contrary to our psychology and leads many people to bad second halves of their lives. It must be especially hard for guys who fail to be players and learn about chicks in the first half of their lives, then spend the second halves of their lives with no or estranged families. Suicide rates for middle-aged and older guys have been going up for a long time and I bet that's part of the reason. Younger guys can learn game and get laid (the way is hard but it can be done), while older guys without families don't have that source of meaning. The later part of life is about the next generation, one way or another. Life is full of transitions that some people make successfully and others don’t.
I'm still anti-marriage (it's a bad contract) but I also see the sadness in many of the older people around me, and I see a lot of younger people (mostly chicks but some guys too) who are heading towards the lonely path. Game is important because it can reduce loneliness in some ways. It can also be supremely lonely in other ways, I want to add, as the seduction arts can estrange you from a lot of society when you begin to learn how the real world works. Aging is more painful for women and low-status guys than for top guys, as top guys can keep nailing younger-hotter-tighter for a pretty long time. Not forever and that is where the family aspect becomes more important.
If you are a 31-year-old guy, do not despair and think you are over the hill. You're not and still need to learn game and learn how to exist in the world, and make your mark in it. The strength of your ultimate relationship will depend on the strength of your seduction arts.
Many people seem to spend their lives trying to keep their options open. But let's say you keep your options open into the indefinite future, as you age out of your fertility window and into the injuries and sicknesses and infirmity of time: so what? What are you keeping your options open, to do? Should your gravestone say, “He kept his options open?”