Letter to a Lonely-Hearted Zoomer

Can I give better dating advice than the Boomers? Maybe not.

I am currently in the throes of my third “Kindergarten Cold” of the month, which has made it difficult to get quality writing time. Headcolds don’t prevent you from grinding at your corporate job, but they make creativity almost impossible. Still, it seemed like there was a window to write something for the Substack this week, provided that it required minimal thought.

So here’s an essay on the romantic woes of the modern young man.

I frequently get questions about dating, both on this blog and on my attendant YouTube channel. And I know I am not alone in this. Dating problems are a constant part of online discourse, one of the most observable pieces of decline in modern society, and no one ever gets tired of talking about these issues.

Moreover, the topic of dating is surprisingly controversial since it tugs on a core generational divide that separates the older cohorts who “made it” before things started getting really bad from the younger men who had to bear the brunt of social media malaise and fourth-wave feminism.

In short, the recommendations provided by the older set (a.k.a. “Boomers”) don’t work well anymore. Our society has fundamentally changed. And very few of the people trying to mentor young men can speak to their problems directly. This might be because the conventional wisdom of our age was developed either by older men whose personal experience was limited to a time of unprecedented prosperity or bitter middle-aged feminists who don’t like men generally. Either way, the older set’s understanding of “how things work” remains completely out of touch, and their advice is subsequently way off target.

“Boomer” dating advice is easy to mock. In the Boomer imagination, dating is just a matter of “putting yourself out there,” “being a nice guy,” and “believing in yourself.” In “Boomer-world’, America is just bursting at the seams with opportunity; great jobs are out there provided you give the company’s CEO a firm handshake, and every red-state gas station is occupied by a virginal young Christian girl waiting to be swept off her feet by the next random stranger. There is no acknowledgment of declining economic prospects or the impact of social media on women’s sexual expectations and experience. There is no understanding of the institutional barriers faced by many young men. So, more often than not, the recommendations of older people fall flat.

That being said, I don’t think the dating advice preferred by Zoomers is much better. From what I have seen, it is dominated either by fantastically aspirational “red pill” con men like Andrew Tate, or fatalistic hand-wringing internet shut-ins, who we once called “MGTOW” men. Needless to say, such a detached perspective doesn’t help many young men engage with day-to-day reality.

And even for the more sober advice out there, Zoomers focus entirely on the tactical details of their problems while simultaneously regarding more traditional big-picture insights from married people as the equivalent of blathering Boomer platitudes.

As a married Millennial myself, I have complex feelings about the perspectives that I hear from young men. Certainly, as a relatively older person, I don’t have the experience they do in a post-tinder, post-COVID world. They know their own lives and their own situations better than I do, so there is a certain amount of humility required when offering advice to this cohort. It’s not that I don’t know things are bad in the dating world. I literally saw it get worse during my decade “on the market” from 2003 to 2013, and by extrapolation, I can guess that it’s much worse now.

Nevertheless, none of the things that I see Zoomers talking about online correspond to the mistakes that I regularly see younger men making in real life, mistakes that I know I wouldn’t have made at their age.

What young men need is not a new strange exercise routine, or dietary supplements, or investment advice. Rather, it’s some basic wisdom that would stop a lot of these young guys from making the same big strategic errors over and over again.

Sure, there might be some “Boomer” takes mixed into my insight, considering I am applying more classic wisdom and perspectives. But is that altogether a bad thing? Even though things have gotten worse, the problem of courting the fairer sex still operates with the same basic physics. Female psychology and sexual economics still obey the same rules, even if some of the parameters have shifted in a less favorable direction.

As I remember from my very brief stint playing tennis in high school, it’s the small technical things that really hold a player down. After I would lose a match, I would always focus on the big rallies that I couldn’t finish or that one time I got blown out by an ace serve. It took my father to point out that those big moments I was fixated on didn’t really matter. It was all the little mistakes I made, the “unforced errors”, that caused me to lose the match.

And isn’t something similar going on for most young Zoomers out there?

Sure, if you suddenly became rich and astoundingly good-looking, your romantic woes would be a thing of the past. But for the most part, the real way Zoomers are losing out is through small, ordinary, unforced errors that are sabotaging their otherwise very reasonable dating ambitions.

I can provide a few insights here for the benefit of any young man reading. If I might speak to them directly.

Letter to a Lonely-Heart Zoomer

So now that the married old folks have cleared out and I am speaking to you, the lovesick young man, I have some things to say.

While I sympathize with your grief in this mess of modernity, I want to walk through some common unforced errors that I see all the time when I observe the young men in 2024.

This isn’t a dig at your cohort. I know your generation is the victim of one of the largest campaigns of systematic miseducation in history. Still, we have to start with the fixes somewhere, and it might as well be here.

And, if you perchance recognize these behaviors in your own life, perhaps this letter could be some food for thought, especially if you are looking for resolutions in this new year of 2025.

Error 1: Simping

Alright, guys, there’s one thing we need to get straight before we get started. Simping is a huge problem for Zoomers, collectively speaking.

Probably almost all of you young guys know simping is bad, but yet, in the age of the internet, young men have never simped for women more pathetically and slavishly. Sites like OnlyFans wouldn’t work without this reality; millions upon millions of men, giving up significant portions of their life savings, functionally castrating themselves economically and socially, all for the approval of women who secretly hate them.

Probably, most young men know that these extreme cases of simping are bad, but then they go out and simp more. I understand subconsciously lapsing into bad habits, but the persistence of these simp behaviors is evidence of a deeper misunderstanding of why this behavior is so self-destructive.

Perhaps we can start with the basics: What is “Simping”?

At the basic level, “simping” is a type of male orbiting-behavior where loud public adulation is given to a female character, which is not reciprocated or acknowledged. The nature of said female character could vary; she might be an OnlyFans model, an e-celeb crush, a (prospective) girlfriend giving you the cold shoulder or even an entirely fictional female character.

But the pattern of simping behavior is always the same: lavishing affection on the form of the fairer sex in a pathetic mode of futility. The simp debases his own masculine worth based on some strange perception that the public exhibition of male desire creates some kind of value that other people are obliged to respond to. In reality, these displays of futile desire just fill other men with disgust and women with contempt.

But why is simping so incredibly self-destructive?

On its face, the practice of slavishly orbiting a woman may seem like ordinary internet cringe, stupid but ultimately harmless. However, simping drives all the worst aspects of the sex-wars because it fundamentally inverts the healthy male-female relationship.

The simp-attitude teaches men that sexual gratification is the highest good, and that their role is to be a support structure for the women they desire. Conversely, simping teaches women that sex is the ultimate currency of the world, that their appearance on social media is more powerful than anything that a man might have to offer, and that they should hold the male affection they receive as a cheap currency, its pretension to be anything other than transactional as contemptible weakness.

This is a total inversion of how healthy relationships between the sexes should be structured.

For men, defining oneself in terms of attraction is enervating. The habit robs you of an independent identity by structuring your life through the experience of desire rather than the practice of getting things done. And, the problem doesn’t get better if the object of the simping is entirely fictional, as it is in the case of the infamous anime “Waifu.” In fact, the fictional nature of the “waifu” only makes the sexual energy directed towards her form more futile and, therefore, more emasculating.

This is often why, in a strange way, intentional celibacy makes men more powerful. It is the pinnacle of independence from female subversion, an escape from the longhouse, and part of the subtle art of not giving a shit. When everything is said and done, men need to have an energy that is independent of women.

This is not to say that there are no situations where it is proper to venerate the female form. In fact, the concept of the sacred feminine has been a central piece of Western Civilization from the start, even within warrior sub-cultures. However, the venerated female icon is never sexual in nature. The sacred feminine may only be properly venerated by the male if it is either motherly or virginal, sometimes both. The sacred energy found in relationships, however, works on an entirely different kind of logic.

As my friend Isaac Simpson likes to put it, all successful relationships are like cults. This means that they have an internal understanding of the sacred built inside of the sexual union of the couple that forms the foundation of the family. When you build the relationship, you are building the beginnings of the family cult, and in that particular spiritual relationship, the male does not orbit around the female; the female orbits around the male, as the lunar orbits the solar. The dance between male and female only works in one way. You don’t sweep the girl off her feet by being her fan. You sweep the girl off her feet by making her a fan of you.

Error 2: Lacking Focus

Perhaps a less obvious mistake many young men make is participating in the “general dating market”, a.k.a. pursuing the “general woman”. It’s understandable that people looking for women would try to maximize their odds by taking their chances with as many females as possible. However, this approach is a classic rookie mistake made by many post-red-pill men who take a statistical perspective and try to make up for the lack of quality dating experiences by pursuing quantity.

The thinking goes like this. Success with women is hard. Luckily, there are a lot of women out there. Therefore, the best way to "get a woman" is to play the market. Also, therefore, we need to buy as many cheap lottery tickets as possible and appeal to the median in order to get results in the aggregate.

This makes sense from a statistical point of view. But unless you are just trying to get casual hook-ups, this is the wrong strategic approach to finding a lasting relationship.

As you are probably aware, the existence of one giant dating market where all men and women view each other as potential prospects doesn't work for most people, especially most men. There are natural dynamics between men and women, specifically the inclination towards polygamy and hypergamy, respectively, that collapse the ability of the system to make good matches. This results in a “feast or famine” situation that gives some people too much and some people too little while never leading to any lasting marriages. And the algorithm attached to these markets only ever has the incentive to make things worse.

For anyone watching this process take root online over the last several decades, it's fairly clear that the existence of a general dating free-for-all isn't doing anyone any good. To the extent that our species ever found mates in a choice-based market system, they never did so at such a large scale, and the undifferentiated nature of high-speed dating apps is totally unsuited to the needs of real communities and real family formation.

Luckily for our species historically, most men and women weren't forced to find mates this way. People were more targeted in their approach. They were part of communities that offered a level of pre-selection and that pointed them in the direction of good matches.

Could something like this work in the current year?

The overwhelming consensus, at least online, is a definite “No”. And the objections are well-known:

“That's not how dating works anymore! All of the local community resources are destroyed! You MUST participate in these new large-scale systems to even have a chance!”

This is certainly true, at least in part. The old networks of friends and family that used to "set people up" are long gone. So, too, are the ordinary social organizations where men and women used to meet in an organic way.

However, as degraded as our social systems are in the early 21st century, opportunities still exist. And often, modern complaints about declining social cohesion are used as perfunctory excuses not to pursue the (more difficult) changes necessary to escape (easier) failed modern systems.

For instance, despite their precipitous decline since 2012, IRL social organizations still exist. There are still sports and outdoor leagues, book clubs, political groups, and even, believe it or not, churches. They are obviously more plentiful in urban areas, and even then, you might have to drive to find them. But they are still out there. And if you can become a valued community member, making yourself a "big fish in a small pond," your chances with the opposite sex will increase precipitously.

Of course, I know that this is highly dependent on circumstances. There are a lot of Zoomers out there who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time and don't have access to any IRL communities with attendant groups of young women. If you are one of these more isolated young men, appealing to a general market of women online might seem like your only option. But even then, there are ways you can handle yourself more prudently and not fall into the traps that make many highly online men fail at the dating and mating game.

First, joining IRL communities, even without access to women, just makes you stronger, so it’s a good idea to participate in things that you love for their own sake. Furthermore, there are even online communities that can help with your ability to focus your dating efforts.

For the religious out there, online sectarian dating services (like CatholicMatch) are leaps and bounds better than their secular alternatives, provided that you are sincere in your religious belief and, follow the rules. Smaller dating services, even secular ones, can actually be better BECAUSE they are more limited and force you to focus your attention on a smaller pool of women. They force you to define who you are and, subsequently, what you are looking for beyond just base attraction.

This is why developing yourself as a content creator on non-dating social media can also help you find a date. The act of becoming a good writer on Substack or a competent SoundCloud musician helps you define a personal brand among a collective of people who share your interests and values. This is a critical first step for most young men.

You need to know who you are in order to know what kind of girl you really want and use that to your advantage when allocating your limited time and effort. Not all women want the same thing. Most women respond better when they can feel themselves being pursued specifically rather than just as an instantiation of general femaleness.

This took me a long time to learn, but your efforts at pursuing women must be focused. Male sexual energy is at its strongest when it manifests like a laser, narrowed down on the focal point of one woman at one time and then being totally unobservable everywhere else like the dirac delta function. Male sexual energy is at its weakest when dissipated outwards to many different female objects, which is the reason why porn and simping are so disempowering for men generally.

In order to get a woman, you need to focus. And, in order to focus, you need to know what kind of man you are.

But how do you know what kind of man you are?

Well, from other men mostly. Which brings me to the next common unforced error.

Error 3: Not Having Male Friends

Questions about dating always sound the same. But then, so do the follow-up questions. My favorite follow-up question to men who ply me about dating concerns is simply:

“So, what are your in-real-life guy friends doing? Are they ALL single?”

Invariably, the most common answer to this follow-up is simply:

“I don’t have any in-real-life-guy-friends.”

This is a major unforced error.

Having a group of guy friends with whom you are (relatively) close is the easiest way to improve your chances of getting a woman. And there are a lot of reasons for this.

First off, socially speaking, the general interpersonal skills you need to get and maintain a relationship with a woman are identical (or at least very similar) to the interpersonal skills you need to get and keep long-lasting male friends. And guys are much more forgiving and much more willing to show newcomers the ropes when it comes to proper social skills.

In fact, apart from the issues recently created by feminism and high-speed dating, a lot of young Zoomers’ problems in the dating world come down to poor socialization and poor interpersonal skills. No one wondered why the man with no friends couldn't get a date in 2005. Yet, for the younger generations, there is this strange expectation that totally isolated people should just be able to get dates (and even a long-term relationship) because of social media. This expectation is not realistic for most people.

And I know the retort, same as last time. "It's not our fault! Making friends is more difficult in the current year!"

Yes, of course it is. No one is saying that this is your fault. Zoomers didn't choose to be born in the age of social media disintegration. They didn't choose to have their IRL social life destroyed by the COVID years. They didn't choose to be born into an education and media system that was totally incapable of preparing them for the modern world.

Still, even if these challenges are not the fault of young people, they are the challenges that you, as a young person, will have to confront and overcome. A good place to start with overcoming your dating woes is to make sure that you aren't an atomized individual. The difference is night and day.

Immediately, what friends give to young men is a constant check on their own smaller set of "unforced errors" that people tend to become "smell-blind" to in isolation. For all their other known flaws, groups of young men are great at detecting and calling out bullshit. The dynamic can be grating, but it's a necessary evil. Because, as most reasonably aware men understand, you aren't going to get constructive criticism for women any more than you are going to get useful dating advice from feminists.

And I suppose that brings me to the other main utility you get from having male friends. They don't give you good dating advice, per se. But they make you better in ways that "dating advice" cannot. Anyone who has listened to the standard discourse on dating from online sources, especially from women, will immediately notice that you are hearing something that is mostly useless. It’s all just bland blather about hypothetically ideal situations with very few actionable recommendations. But real-life male friends will give you a lot of straight answers you won’t get anywhere else. Your guy friends will even give you straight answers about women.

The infamous question, “What do women want?”, is actually not a hard question to answer. Everyone already knows what women want. Women want strong, confident, high-status men to lavish affection and attention on them. But if you talk to females about this, you will hear endless discussions on the variety of different ways you might choose to lavish your attention on women, never any insight into HOW you get to be the kind of man whose attention women want.

This information is never forthcoming and never will be because it isn't women's job to make men better. That's the job of allied men, starting with your closest friends. And male friends don't just tell you how to be better, they provide an incentive always, to go further, push harder, be more competetive, be stronger and more daring. After all, it's in their interest. Strength wants the company of Strength. Confidence wants the company of Confidence.

And it is just these qualities that attract women. It's easiest to build these qualities in healthy male camaraderie.

But I suppose some clarifications might be helpful about what "healthy male camaraderie" means, especially for you Zoomers out there.

Male camaraderie is not a "hug-box"; it isn't a mutual admiration society; it does not work like female friend groups where everyone just validates each other. Real male camaraderie is slightly adversarial; there is a dimension of competition and a bit of constructive tension. Moreover, male friendship is always directed at some higher end. It always pushes outwards to take more and do better than what has been done before. That's what makes it masculine to begin with.

So, where do you find this kind of camaraderie in the modern world?

That's a harder question. But look to any kind of larger project that involves a lot of men, be it intellectual, technological, or political. Certainly, we all have our own projects. But it's critically important that you find something that you are passionate about and that has a dimension of competition to it.

A lot of young guys out there don’t have a passion like this, which is itself an unforced error, in fact the next unforced error on my list.

Error 4: Not Having a Sport

Ok, this one might be hard for us sensitive young men born after 1980. However, despite what you have been told, jocks are better than nerds.

Why is that?

Jocks play sports. And sports are cool.

I say this as a nerd myself: my only experience actually doing sports competitively was a year playing tennis on my high school team, from which I was cut after a year of bad performance. But that experience was enough to give me a lot of insight and personal development.

Sports are cool because they express the best parts of manhood: risk, teamwork, sacrifice, and conflict. This is a place where men can prove themselves to each other. Sports also get you in shape, which is increasingly important both in modern dating and status games.

There is nothing quite like sports except war, and sports don't get you killed. So, if you are looking for personal development, it’s good to look for a sport to play.

Perhaps this is another thing that is easier said than done. After all, it's hard to just "find a sport" in your 20s. It takes a long time to develop into an athlete who can be competitive in any sense, and it gets harder as you get older.

Nevertheless, even if you missed the boat in being a passable athlete, there are still many substitutes for sports in the classic sense. Less conventional sports can be a good outlet (perhaps like Pickleball but less dominated by Boomer women). Even outdoor activities like fishing, hunting, and sports shooting can be good. In fact, the benefit of "having a sport" can even be adapted in aggregate by combining solitary exercises like weight-lifting with a competitive but more sedentary hobby like Chess or wargaming.

But with all of these sports replacements, there are some necessary components. There must be a physical IRL aspect to the activity. The recreation must be competitive. E-sports don't really fill the niche, and video games and role-playing games, while fun, don't provide the same spirit that sports do because they are too inwardly directed, which ends up dissipating the very spirit that sports facilitate.

Sports force you to be comfortable with a certain amount of adversarial competition, make that competetive spirit part of who you are, and give you a kind of masculine energy totally independent of more feminine modes of social interaction.

When I look at young men today and compare them to what I remember from my youth, the first thing I notice is this remarkable lack of competitive energy, which leads me straight to the next unforced error that I see frequently in young men.

Error 5: Not Having Energy

This is something I think that a lot of young Zoomers miss when they try to understand what attracts women. Women want energy. Women want enthusiasm. Women want a masculine life force.

This is hard to pick out because young men look to older men for direction and often notice a certain kind of passivity. Many times, established men who are popular with both men and women possess a type of aloofness, a feeling that they know the score and let what does not truly matter slide. This leads many Zoomers to take the wrong lesson and assume that what masculinity entails is just passivity, not doing stupid things, and being a cool customer.

Subsequently, these same young men are blown away when this approach doesn't get results and even more blown away when the girls their age start falling for the high-energy, dopey "golden retriever" type guys who aren't even very attractive or competent.

Don't they see that these types of spergs aren't cool? Don't they understand they are making fools of themselves? Don’t they see how they are constantly failing and falling flat on their faces?

What is going on here?

Well, what’s going on here is that young men are missing the forest for the trees.

While being cool is nice. There is something that women want more, and that is energy. That energy can burn hot (as it does in many young guys), or it can burn cold. But if it doesn't burn at all, then women aren't going to be interested.

After all, that’s why women are drawn to rap artists. It isn’t their horrible sense of style or (largely imaginary) talent and wealth. It’s their energy, their hustle, and their flow. In fact, it’s just this masculine spirit that gives all music its soul, from rock and roll to jazz to opera.

If you are a fan of Bronze Age Mindset, you probably already understand this concept. But to be honest, everyone knows this who has been through high school. And if you still think this is a stupid meat-head jock take, you can hear this same observation from the arch-man-hater herself, RadFem Hitler.

Women are followers; they want someone to lead. Women are receivers; they are looking for someone to give them energy, both physically and spiritually. And to play this role as a man, you have to have enthusiasm, a certain love for life, and a willingness to take risks. This type of energy goes an enormous way, particularly for young men.

If you can’t feel the excitement and eagerness for life welling up inside of you, how do you expect women to respond to your presence?

And yes, before you ask, there is a way you can cultivate energy.

You cultivate energy by habit. You cultivate energy by saying “yes” to more things and by training yourself out of risk aversion, even if you are a naturally risk-averse person. You cultivate energy by trying to be spontaneous and optimistic, even if you are naturally introverted and pessimistic.

Optimally, you can start as a young man by just having a general lust for life, and then begin to focus your energy on a specific life strategy as you get a better understanding of your priorities, which will provide the kind of “aloofness” observable in many older men.

Over the course of a man’s life, energy moves from “hot” to “cool” as that man’s life starts coming into focus. And your life should always be coming into focus, which brings me to the next common unforced error that I see in young men.

Error 6: Not Having a Plan

This issue is sort of the flip side of the “No Energy” problem. However, for most men, the goofy golden retriever act is not sustainable in the long run, and most women eventually want more.

What exactly do they want?

A lot of people say money. But that's not exactly true. Women want leadership. Specifically, they want to be led to a vision of the future that they believe is good. They want a plan. And you need to be the man with the plan. Maybe you aren’t there initially, but you need to slowly strive to be a man with vision and competence, and the more real this process is, the better.

This, of course, is easier in some eras than in others. When culture and the economy are stable, almost every man has a plan because society has a plan for almost every man. During the height of the post-war baby boom, the plan for men was standard: “white picket fence”, “a chicken in every pot’, and pursuing the great American nuclear family. But we don't live in a stable age anymore, and a standard plan for success is the one thing our world refuses to give us.

However, the path to successful long-term relationships is to develop a plan. You want to be the person who can give women the dream of a beautiful life. The dream of a life with meaning. The life that has impact on the world and a purpose beyond herself.

It's this piece and the energy and sacrifice put towards it that creates the belief necessary to keep the relationship going past the point of initial sexual fascination and limerance. This is the foundation of the true “cult” of the relationship. It has to be rooted, ultimately, in a larger sense of meaning based on eternal contact with divinity. But the cult of the family always begins with you, the “man with the plan”.

If you don't have a plan for your life, find one or build towards one. Other men can help you accomplish this task.

Error 7: Not Having a Story

I guess this brings me to my last unforced error, the one that brings all the others together. As a young man, you need to have pride. You need to have a story about yourself. What does this mean exactly? That's harder to say, but let me put it this way.

The most common reason women discard men is that they get bad “vibes” or (as Zoomer girls put it) or "The Ick" when interacting with them.

But what do these things even mean? As a young man, this reaction was constantly mystifying. At least until the woman who is now my wife told me that a lot of other men gave her the "ick" but not me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It's how you hold yourself.” She answered.

Then, the puzzle fell into place. By my early 30s, at least, I held myself confidently. I knew who I was. I knew what I stood for. I had energy. I had a plan. I had a group of friends and a game. I knew where I was going. And if she liked what she saw, she could come along for the ride.

Was this life plan necessarily the path to money? No. But it was some future that I thought was viable. It was someplace that I thought was interesting. And if she chose, she could be part of that larger adventure. She could be part of that larger story. This is what women really want.

A girl wants to be part of a story where she is the heroine, a place where she and her feminine energy matter and can build something bigger. Maybe that desire sounds cultish. But cultish or not, female desire begins not with a list of requirements but with a narrative.

Haging a story about onself and ones’ futures are what give men pride and confidence, provided they believe what they are saying. And it's that male confidence that draws female attention wherever it occurs.

If you can build this story around yourself, starting with all of the things that I have talked about here, then you have taken the first step towards getting your life in order as a man. In some sense, you have stepped over a large set of obstacles that modernity has put in front of your personal development.

No, it doesn't make you rich. It doesn't make you a giga-chad. It doesn’t undo all of the many, many ways that our society has been made more inhospitable to young men and family formation in general. This advice doesn’t remove the enormous political problems that we have to address in our society generally.

However, all of the problems here are preventable mistakes that are still very common and fixable in most young men’s lives. And addressing preventable life mistakes is probably the best that any advice can hope to achieve.

Hey, at least it is better than the advice you get from Boomers, but maybe you young guys can tell me otherwise in the comments.

Otherwise, Happy New Year 2025!