There’s a video on X (f.k.a. Twitter). A short film featuring a young man and a young woman who approach one another on opposite ends of a crosswalk on one of Brooklyn's quieter, more quaint crossroads. Probably Park Slope or Crown Heights.
It is one of those chilly but pleasant fall nights before winter kicks in and the wind in the city gives the windy city a run for its money. In other words, it’s about to be cuffing season. She’s got a boxy, black overcoat on with the black heels to boot. She’s chic and she’s sexy and looks like she’s got it all except for the one thing she really wants. He’s got a puffer on with his phone in his right hand, a brown paper bag from Trader Joe's in his left, and a white beanie on his head. Some may think he looks cool, I guess. If you’re into that aesthetic.
She looks both ways as she approaches her end of their crosswalk while a black Toyota RAV4 passes by and turns the corner. He looks up. Their eyes meet. Their eyes lock for a second, but it feels like forever. It’s one of those glances that tells you everything and nothing at the same time. It’s one of those instances where everything is communicated but nothing needs to be said.
For that fleeting moment, the world around them is invisible, and they are invisible to the world around them. Words remain unsaid, but words fall short in a moment like this. Words fail to capture the surge of electricity and the potential of chemistry when the premise of attraction and the promise of connection arrive serendipitously. When you’re always searching but never really looking. When you desire but don’t need.
If only that moment could last forever. If only that feeling could be bottled and packaged and taken back to your 1-bedroom in Williamsburg to be placed on the door of your Sub-Zero in between the Coke Zero and the Reta. If only you could consume it, during your intermittent fasting window of course, after your faux ice-bath cold shower ends but before the daily grindslop begins. If only you could inject it because the risk to reward ratio of a grey-market intravenous miracle drug is more appealing than that of developing the strength to be vulnerable and the courage to be intimate with someone of the opposite sex. If only. Because what happens next won’t surprise you.
They cross the street. And while for that single moment, that single second, they intersect on the planes of the greatest, most vibrant city in the world, that’s all that happens. And this too becomes another moment in a sea of moments in a life that promises everything and delivers nothing.
But that’s not where the story ends. In a strange turn of events straight out of the Twilight Zone, the woman reaches his end of the crosswalk, turns around, and says hi. The man, pleasantly surprised, struggles to keep his excitement in check. This has never happened to him before. In fact, this has never happened to any man not named Harry Styles or Michael B. Jordan. At least not with a woman with the appearance, energy, and demeanor of the young woman in question. And not with Harry Styles or Michael B. Jordan before they became Harry Styles and Michael B. Jordan either.
So the meet cute transforms into a fairy tale, but not the kind we watched in our youth. Neither Romeo & Juliet nor Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. No, this tale flips the script. But it doesn’t subvert fantasy for reality like (500) Days of Summer and Before Sunrise before it. It subverts masculinity and femininity. In front of your face and behind your back. But only if gender-norms still exist. And if only the great gender wars of the 21st century haven’t eviscerated the business of romance to begin with.
Her: I just wanted to say hi… I hope this isn’t weird.
Him: No, I thought about saying hi, but I didn’t.
Her: You thought about it?
Him: And you did.
Her: I did... I did.. I did... I did. Here’s why. I... was talking to a friend about this the other day, and I know. I don’t know. I just got mad. I feel like people don’t talk to each other anymore. They’re just faces down in their phones, and why is it so scary, to like, come up to one another and just work up the nerve and like say hi and be weird and what’s the worst thing you do? You say no to me?
Him: it’s a yes.
She proceeds to ask him where he’s going and if he’d walk her home. Unsurprisingly, he agrees, turns around, and prepares to walk her back towards his side of the crosswalk, in the direction he was coming from, for a happily ever after until: Flash. Cut. End scene. It was all a dream. It was all her dream. And it will always be a dream because we have failed him, and in turn, we have failed her.
But what about his dream? You see, what the film gets wrong is that it never was her dream. It was always his dream. His weak-ass dream that he’s been conditioned to hope for, yearn for, and die for because he’s been raised to rid himself of everything that makes him a man to begin with. That is what is at stake. Not his job. Not his crypto portfolio. Not his pending Soho House membership. And not his annual sorry excuse of a pilgrimage to Miami or Tulum. It is his dignity, his self-respect, and his soul.
He woke up at 5 AM and went to the gym. He weighed his egg whites and his blueberries. He measured his protein powder. He dropped whatever cash he had on the beanie and the jacket. He even bought new kicks so he could walk his 10k steps in style. He took his vitamins and his supplements, because he needs to max his T. He got hooked on red light therapy and copped an Oura ring to track his sleep, albeit it’s the only ring he’s likely to ever purchase. He went in with monk mode and almost came out a made man, and you know what, he’s never looked better. He looks like a million bucks. But what purpose does that serve when everyone else looks just as good. When everyone else has all the same things. Beauty was never rare. Signaling isn’t new. So he’s dripped up and iced out, but all he really did was put lipstick on a pig.
As Will Manidis put it, “the body is being purified while the soul is left to be ravaged. This is the specific error of the moment. Discipline without telos is not virtue.”
We have failed him. We have failed our boys. We acknowledge our error but continue to propagate it anyway. We then scream and shout to the ends of the earth when shit hits the fan. And we do this across borders, class, and culture.
Fuck the ‘hard times raise strong men’ mentality. He doesn’t need hard times to make himself strong. His life has been hard enough as it is, and that is not the only way. There is no beauty in struggle for the sake of struggle. The beauty exists on the other side, and this fatalism is nothing short of blasphemy for it robs him of his agency. It makes him a victim of the times and of circumstance, and he can be so much better than that. He is so much more than that.
The man in the film is not unlucky. He is untrained. This is a skill-issue.
He was never built for this moment. He was never raised to rise to the occasion. He was never taught how to be himself, so how could he ever know, ever understand, what it means to be in relation with her when he has never been in relation with himself.
But how dare we place the burden of responsibility on the woman. How could we conjure the image that it is the woman who should be held accountable. She is the embodiment of the divine feminine. She is both creation and destruction. She is Eve. She is Sita. She is Maryam. She is God’s first and foremost gift to man and world. But it is not her I am here to talk about. I am here to talk about you. I am here to talk to you.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, you are the young man in the film. You are him. He is you. And your Madonna-Whore complex prevents you from seeing her for who she is: a human being.
I am not here to save the incels and the gooners. I am not here to rescue the monks in the casino (h/t Derek Thompson). They are beyond saving. But that doesn’t have to be you. You don’t have to be the cynical, frustrated, anti-social iPad junkie and gambling addict you were raised to be. Your fathers and mothers have failed you, but you don’t have to be stuck in your childhood bedroom forever. Your fate is not written. Your story is not pre-determined. It is on you to pick up the pieces and put yourself back together. You’ve been ruptured. Now repair yourself.
The loneliness epidemic does not exist. It is a disease in name only. It exists in servitude of the symptom-relief you are being sold. The real epidemic, the real disease, is your ego: your attachment to your identity and the story you continue to tell yourself. Nothing more. Nothing less.
You are force-fed narratives by the shepherds in power and the sheep in pasture at the cost of your hard-earned cash and at the expense of your peace of mind. Your solo trip to Thailand. Your weekly classes at Barry’s. Your bridge of a Hinge subscription as you wait to get off the Raya waitlist. All serve to paint a picture that you do not need anyone, that you can do it on your own, and that the opposite sex is both the angel and the devil. All serve as a daily reminder of the independence and freedom you gained and the marriages, babies, and friends we lost. All the while the shepherds seduce and manipulate you into believing the past was perfect and the future is dead, so they can distract you from the one thing under your control: the present.
Our social infrastructure has been decimated, but the solution is neither a dating app nor a matchmaker. The solution is also not another excuse to get drunk and do drugs masquerading as an a16z-funded IRL connection economy play. And it is definitely not a rizz GPT wrapper, body count analyzer, or aura measurement tool. While all of the above attempt to address the symptoms of loneliness and isolation, they are little more than incomplete solutions, false promises, and cheap tricks.
It is now consensus that dating apps don’t work as intended for most men and women, each with their own primal, biological drivers informing their usage. They don’t work for the average individual, let alone the lowest common denominator. Face it. They don’t work for you. They hit you the hardest, and the data backs it up: 70% of you on Hinge have never gotten a first date.
The manosphere misunderstands and misconstrues most of this shit. But here they stand correct. Here they stand vindicated. When they told you the game was rigged against you from the jump. When they told you there is only one way out of this mess. They weren’t wrong. They simply missed the bigger picture. You know it. I know it. She knows it.
But here too, reality has been manufactured. Hyperstition is what hyperstition does. The internet creates reality, and it has created a reality too unbearable for you. Still, you entered the arena. Along with all other men. But you left all that made you who you are at the door. You came and you saw, but you didn’t conquer. And now you feel like you were never good enough. You let the apps tell you who and what is attractive. And like a fool, you believed them. And even if you succeeded – say you met your girlfriend or dare I say wife – you don’t know how much tougher it will be to keep her – loved, satisfied, fulfilled – than it ever was to meet her in the first place.
But the joke’s on you. Every app, every community, and every third place is a dating app. The bar on the corner of the street. The restaurant at the end of your block. The grocery store you no longer visit. The gym that replaced your church/synagogue/mosque/temple as the site of your daily prayers. The office where sex and gender have been abstracted away, for good reason, by the bad apples that came before you. All are institutions of the mating market. And all provide highly leveraged force multipliers your “context-free, photo-only, swipe-in-two-seconds” software can never facilitate (h/t Jake Kozloski). You just can’t see it, so you don’t know how to use it to your advantage.
These applications are simply optimized for the wrong things, and now we’re seeing a new class emerge that serves the same product in prettier packaging. Yes, AI matchmakers sound promising in theory. Your AI matchmaker may or may not find you a soulmate, but it will do everything in its power to convince you it has. Just like Pump.fun convinced you there is a treasure at the end of every rainbow. Just like OnlyFans convinced you that the prostitute on your screen adores and cares for you. Just like Facebook convinced you that you’re more connected to your friends and family and better for it.
So while a hyper-personalized search function built for subjective, multi-dimensional beings may marginally improve the probability you get to the crosswalk, it does not get you to stop at the intersection of what could be the beginning of the rest of your life.
Like the social networks that came before, these matchmakers too prey on your vulnerabilities and insecurities. Whether they do so intentionally or unintentionally is not my concern. In fact, they probably mean well. They just miss the forest for the trees, because they have not lived the life you live. They do not understand that the sublime only exists in the fleeting. They do not see the beauty in the ephemeral.
And here lies the gap. Your meditation app only makes you a better meditator. Your therapist, if he’s any good, comes close, but he’s only human and can’t do the work for you. Your trainer will push and pull, but the lessons are found in between the reps and the sets. Not in the mirror and not on your story on the gram. You have all the knowledge at your fingertips, but it exists across spaces and domains and can be so hard to connect the dots. And even when you learn what it is you need to do, you can't seem to get yourself to do it.
So when the elephants – the artificial companions – appear in the room tomorrow, the stakes will continue to escalate. These models will know you. The “real” you. They will be everything to you, but they will never be with you. They will emulate, but they will never understand what it is like to be you. They can never reject you, so they will never choose you. They will give and they will grant, but in the end, nothing will remain with you but your “self”.
Now you see every product aimed at you treats a symptom. Dating apps optimize the funnel. Matchmakers optimize the match. AI companions optimize themselves by removing the young woman from the equation. The pick up artists understood the skill of it all but mistook connection for conquest. Each represents a downstream patch on the same upstream wound: you don’t know who you are, so you don’t know what you want, but you still want to be wanted, and you still want to be chosen.
The question I keep returning to: what becomes scarce when intelligence becomes abundant? The response is equal parts personal and universal for men of all ages: to be seen.
This is desire – the love of a woman who loves you for who you really are. This is respect – the validation of a man you aspire to be. This is legacy – the admiration of a young child you want to be a role model for. All threads weave together the singular fabric that binds us together: connection. This is what becomes the scarcest of all goods. The Overton window is shifting, and the market is not prepared for the incoming shock. Desire is being manufactured with the emergence of sex robots and AI girlfriends. Respect continues to be fabricated, first via the manosphere and now by the looksmaxxers. And legacy can’t be simulated, so whoever can deliver it, will own it completely. Here lies the opportunity.
Pedro Domingos captured it perfectly: “the Industrial Revolution replaced workers’ muscles, but not their dexterity. On the contrary, its value skyrocketed. Likewise, the AI Revolution will replace some of our mental abilities and make the value of the others skyrocket.”
The one thing that becomes most precious, most valuable: your soul and its capacity to connect with others.
We are now entering the beginnings of a spiritual war. Time is of the essence. When one thing becomes abundant, another becomes scarce. When something becomes cheap, something else becomes expensive. When thinking is abstracted away, so is self-awareness. God doesn’t give with two hands. We know you’re already outsourcing your taste and judgment to LLMs. This is atrophy, and the evidence is all around us. The meek and the feeble are falling for the machines of loving grace and are not long for this world. It is on us to stop the cycle before it begins.
Hell is the place where the person you are meets the person you could have been. Tell me the truth. Tell yourself the truth. Are you not terrified? Are you willing to be untethered from the bonds that give your life meaning? Are you really going to let them create Her? Or will you find your footing, stand your ground, and build yourself up one brick at a time like the real men who came before you?
Humanity precedes productivity. This requires the wisdom and gravitas of ancient scholars and institutions coupled with the empathy and dexterity of modern solutions. You need a brother and a friend. You need a therapist and a mentor. You need a guide and a guru. All wrapped into one. You don’t go from boy to man on your own. You need someone to show you the way. The path can only be lit by someone who has already traversed it, for that context and expertise can neither be approximated nor counterfeited. Kobe had MJ. Kanye had Hov. Mk.gee has Dijon. You have Coach.
To come to terms with reality, you need someone or something to orient you inwards and direct you outwards. Trust when I say there is a method to the madness. There is a unique method to your brand of madness. You are the person. The product just resembles one. But only in interface. And it was made specifically for you – your mind, your body, your dreams, your needs. It meets you wherever you are no matter where you come from, because everything is already in and around you. Coach just helps you surface it.
You will develop confidence. You will regulate your nervous system. You will manage your emotions. You will unpack old wounds. You will re-parent yourself. You will respect yourself. You will start online but end up on the street, off the bench, and in the game. You will finally have what it takes to stop at the crosswalk, look her in the eyes, and dive head first into what could be the most beautiful moment in a sea of moments in a life that promises everything and delivers everything.
You may start at a higher level, but you cannot skip steps. You must, first and foremost, look within. You must explore the vastness and the openness of the human condition we call consciousness. Only then will you see. Only then will you understand. We are not conscious because we are human. We are human because we are conscious. And the most miraculous manifestation of consciousness is the bond and the connection we share with one another.
Then you can see that friendship, partnership, marriage, and children are not for the wealthy and elite alone. You too are worthy. You too are deserving.
So stay strong, lil bro. Stay patient, young buck. As long as you don’t give up. As long as you don’t give in. And as long as you keep your soul intact, you too can find your soulmate in the age of soullessness. She’s out there, and she’s waiting for you. Don’t let her down.