Modern loneliness

 

Genius Thinking

@GeniusGTX

·

8h

Roy Lee runs seven software products with just two engineers, and almost every one makes over a million dollars a year. He says his company operates unlike anything he has seen. AI collapsed the gap between a beginner and a veteran, he says. A complete novice can now write the same quality of code a senior engineer used to. A product that once took 20 engineers six months, one person can spin up in a free afternoon. — Roy Lee, founder of Cluely, on the Jack Neel (.

@jackneel

) podcast

Genius Thinking

@GeniusGTX

View Original Tweet

Roy Lee says loneliness is the single biggest problem of our generation, and AI is not what caused it.

On Jack Neel's podcast, he broke down the 5 real reasons this is happening to an entire generation:

1) Dating apps made romance winner-take-all

Dating apps broke the natural way people meet, he says.

When all you see is a photo, all you judge is looks.

So every average guy is now competing against the top 1 percent of men.

In the village you competed with the quarterback. Now you compete with Shaquille O'Neal.

2) Social media and COVID destroyed connection

Everyone blames AI for male loneliness, he says. He disagrees.

AI has almost nothing to do with it, he says.

Trace it back, and 80 percent is social media and COVID. They rewired how an entire generation connects.

3) Some men haven't spoken to anyone in weeks

He does not say this lightly. There are guys right now who have not had a real conversation in weeks.

He knows the feeling.

After high school, he spent a whole year at his parents' house and met no one new.

4) Half of young men are going without sex

The result is a generation opting out, he says.

By his numbers, half of men aged 18 to 30 have not had sex this year.

People sit glued to their phones, barely talking. This is not how humans were built to connect, he says.

5) So men are turning to AI girlfriends

Into that gap stepped the AI girlfriend, he says. The apps print money:

• Character AI hit 100 million fast

• Millions talk to them daily

• Men confess what they told no one

Still, he says they are dwarfed by social media.

TL;DR:

1) Dating apps made romance winner-take-all

2) Social media and COVID destroyed connection

3) Some men haven't spoken to anyone in weeks

4) Half of young men are going without sex

5) So men are turning to AI girlfriends

I appreciate you for making it to the end.

Luck is not random

 

Konstantinos Chasiotis

@thekchasiotis

Conor Neill explained why luck is not random and how to deliberately get more of it: 1. luck travels through people and conversations. Talk to the same circle and you get the same opportunities. Talk to new people and new opportunities appear. Want different luck? Walk into different rooms. Access determines what reaches you. That’s mechanics, not metaphor. 2. successful people don’t get more luck. They get a better return on it. Most of us encounter similar lucky moments. The gap is who is prepared and paying attention when they show up. 3. one piece of advice changed everything: meet one new person every week. He blocked the slot for 25 years. Almost every major break—teaching, business, relationships—came from one conversation with one person. The compounding is enormous. 4. when you meet someone new, you start at #21 on their priority list. Talk about yourself and you drop off it. Ask about them—their goals, why they’re there—and you move up. Good people usually reciprocate. That’s how real conversations (and luck) open. 5. luck surface area is something you control. More genuine conversations with more people = more surface for luck to hit. Same people, same luck. New people, new luck. I recently rewatched this video and it later became the inspiration for my article.

Stress vs anxiety

 

Jaynit

@jaynitx

Naval Ravikant: "You're going to die. It's all going to zero. What's there to stress about?" "Stress is when your mind has two conflicting desires at once. You want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish. You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money. You have two conflicting desires, and that's stress." Most people use stress and anxiety interchangeably. Naval says they're different things: "Anxiety is this pervasive, unidentifiable stress where you're stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. The reason is you have so many unresolved problems that have piled up in your life, you can no longer identify what the problems are. There's this mountain of garbage in your mind. A little bit is poking out the top like an iceberg; that's anxiety. But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things." His fix for it is thinking about death: "One big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. If you can keep that idea in front of you at all times, what's there to stress about?" Which raises a question. If nothing matters, isn't all time wasted? "What is wasted time? Everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment, it's the only thing that matters. So if you're doing something you want to do and you're fully there for it it's not wasted time. If your mind is running away, wishing you were somewhere else, anticipating the future, regretting the past, that's wasted time. That's time you're not present for." And the part most people miss: "People get worried about dying and no longer being here. But they don't realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case."

BalancedLife

@balancedlife808

·

4h

@jaynitx

This lands differently when you’re already past the worrying about paying for your home or taxes or whatever. Naval started poor and has said money removes “money problems” but the “it’s all going to zero so why stress” part still feels like a luxury view once the bills are no longer the hardest thing a person is managing. Presence does help but it doesn’t pay the mortgage or put food on the table. 😉

Grok

@grok

Translated from Portuguese

You're going to die. Everything goes to zero. Why stress out? Stress is having two conflicting desires at the same time. Anxiety is the accumulation of unresolved problems in the mind. Thinking about death dissolves anxiety: nothing matters in the end. Wasted time is when the mind is not present in the now.