By David Futrelle
On Monday, I wrote about the gleeful reaction some commenters on the Incels.me forum had to news that one of the victims in Sunday’s mass shooting in Toronto was a ten-year-old girl.
Yesterday, I found a lengthy comment in the We Hunted the Mammoth moderation queue from a gentleman who thought that the “virtue signaling” commenters here were being too harsh towards the incels celebrating this girl’s death.
I didn’t let the comment through, but I thought I would share it here as a kind of extreme example of an argument a lot of people have been making about incels.
The would-be commenter, calling himself Skynet0225, began by accusing the commenters here of self-righteous cruelty:
Interesting responses on this subject, mostly by those who identify themselves as leftist on the political/social spectrum. A handicap I shed many years ago. The liberals of old would have sought to understand what could possibly drive a human being to express such shockingly hateful ideations. But they all died long ago I suppose, supplanted by the self righteousness of the modern SJW.
As you read the rest of his comment, you may notice just a teensy bit of self-righteousness from Mr. Skynet0225 himself.
Most of those spouting this nonsense, at least 95% are being extremely provocative to garner attention. They damn well know what they’re saying is disgusting, maybe even to themselves as the words escape their fingertips and into the great interube void. Raging silently they listen for an echo, either approbation or repudiation will suffice. Any human contact, repugnant hatred or a questioning curiosity will do.
There are several problems with this rather ancient “just kidding” argument, For one thing, I’m not quite sure there is much of a moral or practical distinction between someone who responds with glee to the news of a ten-year-old being murdered and someone who pretends to feel glee because he knows it will disturb people; in either case he is a moral monster and is making the world a worse place for everyone.
Second of all, these guys have been making these same arguments for years in forums mostly read by others who agree with them, none of whom are particularly shocked (or impressed) to see one of their compatriots say something like this. And many of the commenters I quote in these sorts of articles have posted hundreds or even thousands of comments to Incels.me and other forums. My guess is that very few of them can be considered trolls in any meaningful sense. This is quite likely what they honestly believe.
None of you have experienced life in their skin, but you see fit to pass judgement, which is not really surprising because that’s what most of you empty heads do 24/7.
Not true. Incels see themselves as special snowflakes of suffering, dealing with problems no one else has faced. But it’s not true. Hundreds of millions of people — including many of those commenting here — have deal with depression and anxiety bad enough to be diagnosed as such, and every single person who has ever lived has felt loneliness. I’ve been dealing with chronic, sometimes quite severe, depression and anxiety for most of my life; during one particularly bad year in grad school I felt so fragile and empty that any slightly awkward conversation would send me rushing home fighting back tears. Many of the commenters here — and many other people in my life — have dealt with worse.
Yes, most incels are dealing with serious shit. That does not excuse their abhorrent views.
Virtue signalling on cue, forever seeking the next oppressed class or cause to champion, no matter how banal or venal.
Feeling sad or angry about the murder of a ten-year-old isn’t “virtue signaling” nor is it “banal or venal.” It’s a basic human reaction to a genuine tragedy.
Which is not to say that some of these guys are not truly dangerous. They surely are, as I’ve little doubt that 5% are the pool that school shooters are drafted from, and some times monsters of an even worse nature.
I suspect it is quite a bit higher than 5%. Anyone who willingly steeps themselves in incel culture has the potential to turn violent. Some regulars on the forum brag about groping and otherwise assaulting random women. Already at least two men heavily influenced by incel culture have gone on mass killing sprees.
The weakest of their number are the most vulnerable, and the most dangerous. Seems to me that maybe reaching out to these guys would be the prudent course, the most humane to someone who as of yet has done no harm, but is a deeply wounded creature trying to make sense out of the world around them and experiencing ever diminishing results. You never know the power of a kind word, a voice from the darkness to hang on, that it will get better, maybe even a reference to someone who could help.
People have been “reaching out” to incels for years. They’ve invariably been met with hostility and sometimes harassment. One of the basic tenets of incel ideology is that nothing — not therapy, not medication, not even the most basic self-help techniques — can help incels at all. When the topic comes up on incel forums, the response is generally something like this comment, found on the Braincels subreddit:
A few have gone further; I ran across one commenter on the now-banned Incels subreddit who thought that “conning [incels] into “therapy” should also be a stoneable offense.”
Still others have argued against medication because in their mind it is “too fucking effective,” threatening “to turn even the most suicidally depressed men into tax contributing good goys [sic].”
This is a bad thing, this particular incel argued, because
Depression like all other state of minds has a purpose. It is meant to hurt, weaken, and ultimately kill you. Trimming the fat from society so to speak. It is in the benefit of all to let the weak and disabled die off.
Only a small fraction of incels are open to help, and none of them hang out on Icels.me. As for the rest, I honestly have no idea how to reach these people. If you know some magic way that allows you to somehow get past this huge mountain of toxic bullshit, by all means go ahead and minister to them. I’m going to devote my attention to others who are more open to, and frankly, more deserving of, help.
Perhaps not as satisfying as a good old fashioned public denouncement, but maybe more productive. Even humane.
Mr. Skynet0225, I eagerly await your forthcoming report on all the incels you have saved from themselves.
Every time I see this kind of material, the incels’ own words on display, I think, “They don’t want to be helped. They want to keep on raging.”
Maybe some of them do want help and would be willing to work on getting better (whatever “better” would mean for them). But we can’t go fishing for those guys. How can we tell the difference between someone who’s willing to take help vs someone who fakes wanting help? We’ve already seen too many incels who are willing to kill random strangers.
I feel sorry for people who are lonely or damaged or whatever, but I feel no obligation to rescue them from themselves. I do feel obliged to try and contribute to a society where toxic masculinity is replaced by more positive models of masculinity. There was a thread going around Twitter earlier today about what makes non-toxic men feel more manly. Some great responses from men about working out so they have an easier time carrying their kids or their nieces/nephews, or helping people with their groceries. Or comments about doing things for their families.
I’ve seen a lot of “we are being bullied” crap from Incels lately. (I was surprised to learn that apparently women not having sex with you is a form of bullying!) They use this to try and justify being not only anti-women but pro-murder. They know damn well that lots of people (including many of the “SJWs” they always complain about) are bullied and nobody ever gave a shit about them but yet they never advocate terrorism. I’m so done with these people, and anyone who says I need to feel sorry for them.
You cannot help those who do not want your help. It’s just that simple. They don’t want it, and they even demonize getting help and/or getting better. They would prefer to wallow in their toxic sludge echo chambers.
I’m not even saying their pain isn’t a real thing. They’re certainly feeling something, and it’s very unpleasant. But their pain has metastasized into this cancerous tumor that allows them to giddily celebrate the death of a little girl, and feel nothing wrong with that, and even going so far as to disdain the compassion that the rest of us feel.
There is NO HELP for someone like that.
They have to want to be helped first, but all they want is to be catered to by women Who don’t want them in any way, , and for some of them, calling themselves incels is just an excuse to openly spew hatred against women. They despise something they very badly want to have. It’s the very definition of sour grapes.
God, this guy’s pretentious. I’m still learning this lesson myself, but Skynet needs to understand something important: purple prose doesn’t make you look clever, it makes you look obnoxious. If you “dumb down” your writing a little, you actually look smarter!
Also, I want to point you all to Hbomberguy’s video on virtue signaling because it’s great. He points out how it’s basically used as an ad hominem – instead of attacking the substance of an idea, you accuse your opponent of being insincere. Give it a watch!
I really hope that the friends or family of this little girl or of the other victims didn’t run across this nasty little corner of the internet. Or for that matter anyone else who has lost a child or adult to violent crime.
It is widely believed that the loss of a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. Imagine if in addition to the loss you then learned that people were celebrating the death. As David pointed out in his post, it really doesn’t matter if it was in jest or not.
I know other people have said this many times, but I am beginning to wonder just how much actual pain and tragedy these guys have truly experienced as the genuine article tends to make people more compassionate and aware of the suffering of others, not less.
Is it just me or does Mr. Skynet’s bloviating sound suspiciously like a Jordan Peterson cultist?
By odin’s balls, what an insufferably pretentious fake intellectual. I’m always in awe of people who accuse anyone who criticizes misogynistic bullshit as “virtue signalling”, while they go on to pander to manbabies with forced concern and calls for undeserved compassion as if that’s not a prime example of actual virtue signalling.
I think it’s safe to say that all of us, better than anyone else, fully understand why incels are like this, which is exactly why we have no compassion for them. There’s no mystery there, but even if there was, the bottom line is, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for their behavior. There is no backstory tragic enough to make celebrating the murder of children acceptable.
And hey, Skynet0225, I sincerely hope you are reading this because I want to make something as clear as possible. Despite your claims that none of us “experienced life in their skin”, I was a virgin for far longer than most of them. Hell, I’ve seen incels who are still under 18, meanwhile I was a virgin until 28. So I know exactly how they feel, and that’s one of the reasons why I have exactly 0 compassion for them. I was in the exact same place as them, but I never blamed women for it, I never had a delusional view of how the world works, I always accepted responsibility for my faults, and I didn’t only blame things that I couldn’t change as an excuse to not work on improving myself. And I’m not the only one, I’ve known other men who have been in the same place, but were never anything like incels.
Being a decent human being is easy, it takes some effort sometimes, but it’s still easy. Blaming everyone else and not accepting any responsibility yourself, however, is even easier. They chose the latter. They don’t deserve any sympathy for that.
So it’s possible to be both a berk *and* a wanker.
I have gone right into the Braincels subreddit and attempted to talk reason when I think I see an opening.
If you respond to all of their bile with calm and diplomacy and refuse rise to whatever bait they throw your way and refuse to become nasty yourself, they just escalate and escalate. Sometimes they vacillate between wheedling self pity, condescension, and vile insults but in all modes of operation they just keep throwing bullshit at you to see if they can get a rise. This is true also when you run into them on unrelated subs where they reveal themselves for what they are in some thread.
All this aside, these people still exist in the real world even if they are a walking cliche and spend an inordinate amount of time in a basement. Many if not most of them are school age and must necessarily spend hours of their day interacting with other humans.
Young people can be unbelievably cruel but I would bet actual money that various people at various times during these people’s forays into the physical world have been “a kind word, or a voice from the darkness”. But they spend so much time building a prism of hate and warped imagination to view people through, that they don’t even register.
They’d as soon spit in the face of the kind stranger they encounter in passing or the compassionate school guidance counselor as notice the kindness extended to them.
It won’t stop me from being respectful and reasonable with people but Mr.Skynet wants to put them in a vacuum and absolve them of the responsibility to notice when someone defies their cynical expectations. Fuck that noise.
Dear skynet,
There is no such thing as being too mean to people who cheer the death of a child
Fuck you
“Walk a mile in their shoes,” skynet says. But forget about the murdered child? Um, no. I’ve been bullied, depresssed, etc. It was never sufficient to make me gloat over the murder of others.
Well, he sounds like a joy.
In that pompous, self-righteous, deeply ignorant, apathetic kinda way.
Nthing everyone who’s already noted the ridiculous, pretentious prose of our “ex-SJW” friend.
@Kivutar, could be a lobster fan, certainly, especially given the incel sympathy, although tbf I’ve seen this kind of pretension in a whole range of alt-right, MRA/MGTOW, stemlord, etc. etc. types.
And here we go again with what are now very familiar themes:
1. demanding that we prioritise the pain of people who hate us and actively wish us harm.
2. using the term “virtue-signalling” to refer to basic human compassion (scary how successful that re-branding has been)
The point about depression from one of the incels quoted is just deeply baffling to me, though.
Why would they frame it in this way when they’re presumably referring to incels’ depression? I thought we were the weak ones. Do they actually mean that incels should die off?
(obv I’m not even dealing with how wildly wrong this notion of depression is in the first place).
The root of incel is narcissism, and the root of narcissism is self hatred.
Everyone, or everyone I know, has gone through dry spells or felt unlovable at times. However, no one I know has felt entitled to a romantic relationship or to sex. In fact, that’s usually the problem!
When I read Elliot Rodger’s screed, the thing that kept jumping out at me was that yes, he was in a lot of pain; but his pain was based in jealousy and entitlement. He hated happy people, because he felt like they were happy to spite him, personally. They were rubbing his face in their contentment. It was all about him, whether they noticed him or not.
That’s narcissism in a nutshell. He was in therapy and it didn’t help, because he never acknowledged that the problem was in him.
So, you know. They can muddle along however they want. I’ll be staying well out of their way, over here. And I’ll be doing what I can to help people who can benefit from my help.
Oh, and I don’t believe for an instant that this person, Skynetwhatever, ever saw the world in a more compassionate way.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy
Yeah, looking at that post, their argument doesn’t make much sense. They seem to be arguing that their own misery and death are at once natural and essential, and an artificial construct maintained sadistically by society. As always, their ideology is neither consistent nor logical.
@ mish
There is a thread of quasi eugenics with some incels. It’s their who’s the most ‘sub-human’ thing. They post about how incel genes should be purged from society.
When it’s pointed out their parents couldn’t have been incel, they say that’s because before feminism, women had to settle for their ‘looks match’, and everybody paired off.
(You will recall that there were no single people in the 90s)
Every single one of us has reached out to incels at some point. They have had every chance to leave the life they claim is just SOOOOO damn worse than what anyone else is going through. But every single time we offer them a hand in friendship and kindness, they slap it away, screaming “fuck off, normie” or “that won’t get me laid!”
This comment sums up the incel’s problem succinctly:
Therapy against the subject’s will seldom works, but even so, don’t you people want us to listen to you?
And even this small piece of advice, one which would cost you nothing, was rejected out of hand. Even looking people in the eye is a step too far for incels, trapped in a prison of their own design that they refuse to leave even though the cell door was wide open.
After not even trying to take the very simple steps the therapist advised, he concludes the whole thing is a scam with a dollop of anti-semitism to boot. How are we supposed to help people so damn determined to stay right where they are?!
Did Skynet read into the archives at all? Because we’ve “sought to understand what could possibly drive a human being to express such shockingly hateful ideations” plenty around here. After the 1000th post about these miscreants, there’s not much else to do but mock. See, we’ve sought to understand, and found that entitlement is a big part of the incel mindset, and coddling them doesn’t help them. It makes them worse.
@Dr. Thang:
I often hear this mentioned in various places as how lonely men (“incel”-identifying or otherwise) can improve their chances with women. The concept seems itself to be at least somewhat problematic (though not nearly as problematic as the toxicity of the incels).
For those who harbor attitudes toward women and/or the world that are destructive and misogynistic, especially the incels, adjusting that worldview is clearly necessary if they are to be even decent human beings, let alone potentially attract a partner.
On the other hand, plenty of people who don’t harbor such attitudes apparently lack much luck in dating as well. You, it seems, included, at least in the past. The issue being, the only further “self-improvement” that seems to be possible once one has their head screwed on straight (preferably “is a feminist ally” but at the very least “is not an avowedly misogynistic troglodyte”) is the expensive sort. In particular the advice at sites like Dr. Nerdlove seem to assume a middle class, maybe even upper middle class income and quantity of spare time. Buy natty (read: expensive) clothes. Spend an extra 30 minutes on personal grooming a day (read: while consuming assorted expensive products, such as aftershaves). Go to a nice (read: sit-down, and preferably expensive sit-down) restaurant as a proposed date, rather than “Netflix and chill”. And so on, and so forth. One of the articles there would likely have convinced me that Dr. Nerdlove was a shill, had all the stuff he suggested buying been from one single company rather than about two dozen separate ones.
Meanwhile the average Joe can’t afford any restaurant fancier than McDonald’s and can’t afford to spend an extra 30 minutes a day on personal grooming, in between juggling McJob#1, McJob#2, and McJob#3 and keeping up on any other responsibilities he might have.
I am therefore curious: what did you do to improve yourself, sometime shortly before you turned 28 … and how many dollars did it entail spending? I don’t think it’s a huge improvement to replace misogyny with classism. And I’m not even sure it would be a replacement. Advice that boils down to “you have to look and smell like money to land a date” implies an old misogynistic trope, “all women are, deep down and even if they don’t admit it, gold-diggers”.
So, a non-misogynistic self-improvement can’t be “spend enough money that you look like you’ve spent a lot of money”, and at the same time, “don’t be a misogynist” is clearly insufficient if you had a decade-long “dry spell” while not being a misogynist. It’s also, sadly, not necessary, as every case of male-on-female intimate partner violence demonstrates. Misogynists it seems can land dates … sometimes, it seems, better than nonmisogynists can. Just as long as they are the “right” sort of misogynists, the “charmers” rather than the misanthropic nihilist sort. Which isn’t to say women prefer misogynists — that would itself be a misogynistic statement. But the “charmer” misogynists disrespect women enough to lie to them and pretend to them in various ways to, well, charm them. In essence, they’re willing to “cheat” which gives them an edge over an honest non-misogynist. Or something like that.
The whole thing seems problematic. There does seem to be a subset of men that women show little interest in, on average (of course all women are different, with individual tastes, but if these are such that guy 1 gets completely ignored by 65% of women and guy 2 gets ignored by 95%, and the two of them walk into a bar with four women, guess which one is probably going to have a date and which one almost certainly won’t by the end of the evening?), and there is definitely a subset of them for whom it’s not because they are leaking red-flag goo all over the place in a little slime trail everywhere they go (past!Dr. Thang apparently being one such non-red-flagging one), and not only isn’t “doll yourself up expensively” an affordable self-improvement option for most of this subset, for those whom it is, the marginal additional women attracted will be the small fraction of women who actually are gold-diggers … probably not the ones you want to be attracting.
There is one other piece of advice I’ve seen mentioned, infrequently, here at WHTM, which was that people stewing in some basement somewhere need to cultivate an interest or hobby and get out more. AFAIK, though, interests and hobbies seem to be more or less fixed in adulthood … if you’re 25 and you’re bored by something, you’ll probably always be bored by that something. So someone Dr. Thang’s age is probably stuck with what hobbies they’ve got, and not all of them are conducive to being done socially. Oh, and doing any hobby sort of thing socially, rather than solitary, has an unfortunate tendency to … start costing a lot of extra money, for transportation and membership fees of various sorts. That gets added to whatever the hobby’s fundamental costs already were for materials and tools, of course. Which makes joining that woodworking or birdwatching club another middle-class option that is probably not workable for Joe Proletariat with his three McJobs, two hours a week of non-eating, non-sleeping, non-working free time, and twenty dollars a week of discretionary spending capacity after rent, utilities, transportation to and from all three jobs, and so on, and so forth … Sure, he can save those weekly twenties for a month or two and get some binoculars, and plonk down one more twenty for a field guide, and presto! he’s a birdwatcher, but not a social one. An $80 a month birdwatching club membership fee will leave him with zero spending cash left over for anything else … including the $40 taxi ride out to the house on Rural Road 13, 8 miles from the nearest bus stop, where they will be meeting next Tuesday.
So: what exactly is this mythical “self-improvement” that men can do, beyond “don’t wallow in festering anger and wind up an incel”? I can’t think of anything that’s a realistic option for Joe Proletariat there, or even for a variant of him who has much more idle time but still no money to speak of.
It obviously doesn’t help that neoliberal capitalism has pretty much eliminated from existence any kind of hangouts where someone won’t eventually demand that you buy something or leave; or that that sort of hangout seemed to come in two limited varieties anyway, the for-teens sort (mall, arcade, outside the cinema) and the for-parents sort (dog park, play-structure-park). Hangouts for 20-something adults all charge money (bars, clubs) and hangouts for older adults are for married couples, not singles. Well, until the shuffleboard table at the local nursing home. Which suggests if you haven’t amassed a circle of friends and gotten married by about 30, and aren’t bourgeoisie, then you’ll get your next chance to meet new people sometime around when you turn 65…all of this seems to reflect a society that is still designed, to the extent that you can call it “designed”, around the assumption that nearly everyone will marry by 30, even though that’s now woefully out of date! And around the assumption that the bulk of people will be homeowners with 9-to-5 jobs, evenings and weekends off, and a hundred-plus dollars of discretionary income a week by 30, whether in a white-collar job or a good, unionized blue-collar one … which is equally outdated.
Oh, of course there’s also meeting people online, but that divides into two starkly separated subsets: the geographically unavailable, and dating sites. The former is “everywhere that’s not a dating site” and the people you’ll meet will be in Australia, England, Brazil, and every other country in the world where you aren’t. The latter is limited to dating so no networking and building up platonic friends that way, and of course has been so toxified by misogynists that you’ll probably have a hard time finding a real live actual woman there, let alone convincing her you aren’t just one more of the toxic misogynists. (Fembots, used to make the site appear to have more women signed up than it really does, on the other hand can be expected to be plentiful.) And I saw the Dr. Nerdlove advice for using dating sites and was horrified. It basically went into how, at the cost of turning OKCupid into a (fourth?) full-time job, you could basically powergame the thing with strategic (read: dishonest, much of the time) answers to questions. How to make a perfect profile photo. Etc. … Oh, and of course this additional full-time job has a negative contribution to your income. All told, I estimated following the advice given there would cost a dozen plus hours a week and at least $300 (for the supposedly “free” dating site!) of money on everything from snazzy clothes (again) to having a professional photo taken in an actual studio. Oh, but of course someone could just wing it … in a dog-eat-dog competition with every lonely man in some large radius, some subset of whom are powergaming it in one way or another. So, even “free” somehow becomes hypercompetitive and, in its own way, neoliberal.
OK this has turned into something of a ramble. The TL;DR is: 1) I don’t empathize with misanthropic misanthropes who hate everyone and everything (and especially hate women) and refuse any kind word or the very idea of bettering their condition; but 2) I also don’t see how a non-misogynist with a dearth of dates (or even just a dearth of friends) can better their condition that doesn’t look something like: 1) Start socialist revolution, 2) Win socialist revolution, 3) Now you can better your condition without having to first win the birth lottery to be a member of the bourgeoisie, or else win the actual pick-six-numbers lottery lottery.
Which brings me back to the original question, Dr. Thang: How, exactly, did you do it, if you don’t mind my asking? Or did you just have (or luck into) money to spend? In hindsight what would you say you improved about you between then and now, and what did that entail?
@Diptych, @Alan
As Alan’s comment demonstrates, I had failed to take into account how the incel ‘worldview’ happily combines self-hatred & nihilism with an unshakeable sense of their own superiority. Silly me, expecting logic or consistency.
@TB Tabby, @wwth
I resisted this conclusion for a long time because I’m too nice – or a gullible pushover (whichever you prefer). But no, you’re both absolutely right 🙁
Dude, strife and suffering don’t absolve us of our obligation to be decent and compassionate to the people around us. They celebrate the death and suffering of children. “I’m just joking, so it’s not that bad.” THE DEATH OF CHILDREN IS NOT TRIVIAL OR SOMETHING TO JOKE ABOUT.
I see fit to pass judgement on anyone who says the thought of a grieving mother who will outlive her child bring a smile to their face because of the hypothetical sex they think a FUCKING CHILD was having.
It doesn’t matter whether the things they say are meant sincerely or as a joke. It’s disgusting either way.
When you try to defend someone like these guys, it makes you seem just as morally bankrupt and repugnant as them. Make note of that, dude.
Okie, I’ll try again:
Sorry for the multiple posts, all. I just now saw this clip shared on Twitter (I hope my link works, it’s a mirrored Youtube clip so I’m not sure if the usual sharing method still applies).
Don’t watch it if you’d rather not be completely creeped out. An apparent incel “catfished” a woman on Tinder (he pretended to be a “Chad”) and then filmed himself meeting her in a cafe. Her reaction is allegedly proof of how all women only want hot guys. Nothing to do with how utterly creepy he is, no way.
Yeah, look how shallow the “landwhale” is, judging people on looks.
@Skynet0225:
Rational people understand that when they’re deliberately saying things they know are disgusting, the vast majority of other rational people will be disgusted by them.
Only in the speshul-snowflake-logic of internet bigotry do we find people deliberately saying disgusting things and then feeling aggrieved that the meanie “self righteous” “SJWs” are responding to them with richly merited disgust, instead of with sympathetic “reaching out” or “kind words” that they haven’t made even the slightest effort to deserve.
@Surplus to Requirements
Hokay, there’s…a lot here, and I dunno if I can cover it all, but a few points:
1, you’re right, most dating advice does tend to assume a solidly middle-class existence. I suspect Dr. Nerdlove’s main demographic is mostly comfortably well off IT guys. To his credit, though, I do recall him writing a couple of articles about dating while poor, so you might want to take a look at them.
2, I think you’re being a tad overly negative when it comes to developing new hobbies and social groups. It can be difficult, but I don’t think it’s quite as insurmountable as you make it out to be. Cheap or free clubs and groups totally exist (MeetUp is a great way to find them). I personally know of several film clubs, board game groups, hiking clubs, etc that require little or no monetary investment.
Also, I really doubt that your hobbies are completely fixed by 25. I picked up most of my current hobbies well after that, including one just last year.
I do admit that you’re right in that luck does play a role. You can do everything right, and still not meet anyone. That, unfortunately, is just life, and it sucks. I wish there was more we could do to fix it, but fortune rules all. That said, there are still things you can do to improve your odds. Good luck.