I'm a bit over 5'8". I always suspected that online dating was a bit more challenging because of my height. But when I looked at the numbers, I was doing fine at getting dates. The problem was actually that I wasn't confident enough on dates and didn't really know what I wanted, so the dates rarely went anywhere.
I did a lot of personal development work over a period of 10+ years. At some point, dating got a lot easier. I went from being single most of the time to usually in a relationship. I got married at 41, which was a bit late, but we all move at our own pace.
My little sister is married to a guy who is maybe 5'5" (and I think that's generous). She is 5', and is nearly as tall as him in heels. He's nice and treats her well. She dated a bunch of guys over 6', and likes him the best by far.
This is not to say that tall guys don't have an advantage. I'm sure they do. But fortunately there are a lot of things other than height that also make a difference.
Yesterday I made the comment "everything is collapsing underneath" though there's context etc. I think the better way to say it. "Is everything falling apart for the USA?" Yes indeed. Most other countries have problems.
Sure Sri Lanka has the same problems. Sure the middle east just went through the same problems and some states are still enduring civil war. Though from what I can tell it's mostly the USA in this 'falling apart' situation. Canada is certainly not far behind.
>“The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”
The political polarization starting pre-existed social media. This started late 90s or for sure early 2000s with GWBush. Bush knew something from his father's reign. He could play identity as a victim. So he would pretend to be a yokel and when the elites would make fun... it told every yokel that Bush was the only option. Obviously he never passed laws or tried to 'fix' something for yokels. It was shallow identity politics but identity politics breeds more identity politics.
The democrats then needed identity politics of obama. It's an inevitable scenario, 'first black president' will eventually happen in history and inevitably it would be toxic with identity politics. The rest is history, Trump is a symptom. Biden is a symptom.
>By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In Nonzero I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press.
Blaming social media is not legitimate in my opinion; social media will be what fixes this. The fix to the USA falling apart is free and open discussions between the camps. This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter.
He's a billionaire and will be the world's first trillionaire, ONLY if the USA doesn't fall apart. He has a vested incentive/interest to help make this not happen.
>One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland.
Which is for sure true. The reality is that they are still the same team. You can enjoy F1 over Nascar. You have to still realize you're on the same team. When the left-wing attacks the right-wing. You can't take actions that harms your own team. Eventually that team breaks and here we are.
I have four children. I'm not going to claim that sometimes kids are not frustrating. However every time I see parents being burnt out I see one of two scenarios.
Scenario 1: The over-achiever parent
I see this frequently, a parent that wants to be a super parent. This manifests in a bunch of different ways, but usually it's enrolling their kids to 15 different activities essentially running all over the place being glorified taxis for their kids.
Then their kids don't know how to function if there is nothing to do.
Scenario 2: The I'm missing our parent
Parents that either had kids too early, or not by choice. They feel like they missed out, so they lament about all the fun they didn't have. This is a weird form of resistance to reality. What usually happens is that they will get a divorce, to somehow escape their children. I am 40, so I see it with people my age, they divorce, see their kids 2-4 times a week and do crazy stuff to somehow recapture their youth.
In my opinion it's about keeping a good balance. If you never make time for yourself that's a mistake. If you put the bar too high as a parent you are bound to miss. The simplest approach is to carve out some time to yourself, balancing things out with your significant other. Enrolling your kids in 1-2 activities out of school and recognizing that not every single minute of a day needs to be hyper-optimized.
Let me proffer some of the obvious suggestions: D&D type of gaming (not for me but my adult child has met many great people that way), going to the gym, yoga class, chamber of commerce, get involved with a charity that means something to you, start going to church.
Try talking to people but when I say talking I really mean listening with all your heart, and being interested in them. Everyone has a story. If you’re genuinely interested, they will reveal everything within a few minutes. my kids make gentle fun of me for interviewing people, but I just like to listen to what people are really saying and respond by learning more about them. (If you are sincere it will incidentally help you enormously with women.)
A slightly less obvious one: get really good at something. When I do this I shoot to be better than about 80% of people, which you can usually do with raw work and without requiring some kind of genetic superiority. If you do it right the process is rewarding, and the outcome is also rewarding. Get fluent at a challenging language like Chinese or Arabic? Work out enough to get fairly ripped? Give away something great on GitHub? You’re a recruiter if your username applies, and maybe just focus on making a lot of money? That sounds shallow and you don’t have to take it very seriously, but I have learned that getting better than most people at some kind of lucrative or socially valued skill just helped me enormously, and you can you can usually do that simply by working hard and with common sense. The reason I harp on this angle is that when you’re pretty darn good at something, it attracts people. And getting good at something usually requires that you take on multiple topics well at once, which makes you feel better about yourself.
You can reach out to me via the email address in my profile and we can chat if you want. I have no agenda but I’m a decent listener.
If anyone wants to see how asshole management works in reality, just visit any random retail store, franchise or independent. Or worse, call centers.
These places typically have very limited upward mobility, and their only requirement for future operational (i.e, not corporate) "leaders" would be results from working at the ground floor.
This means that they tend to hire people that aren't necessarily the best leaders, but the best sellers. It's basically the Peter Principle in action, but often with only one step up on the ladder.
And because these people, or leaders, have very limited training or exposure to good leadership (their old leaders got to the same place, the same way), they perpetuate the same sh!tty anti-leadership practices - which is very much something one could call asshole management. And what's more, there's often such a extreme level of power asymmetry / imbalance, that lower-level workers are completely at the mercy of their middle-managers.
It is something you can draw parallels to in sports. You're being measured by KPI / performance measures, and get more responsibilities the better you perform. Everyone who's ever played any competitive team sports knows or has experiences this - some star player(s) that have can rein freely, because they exceed at some important measure (score goals, or whatever) - while rest of their teammates are walking on eggshells.
But to tie it all together: The problem is that entities (businesses, sports teams, whatever) become dependent on these stars, even though it could completely destroy morale, and create toxic cultures within.
I think that if you identify these following points in some environment, there's a great chance you'll meet on great asshole bosses / leaders
1) Great power imbalance between worker and leader.
2) Leadership compensation is dependent on worker performance.
3) Levels of compensation is driven by a very few measures / KPI.
4) Upward mobility is squarely tied to your KPI performance (from 3).
Basically - if the only way to succeed within is to be a rainmaker, and being a rainmaker makes you the king, then that could easily foster assholes.
I did a lot of personal development work over a period of 10+ years. At some point, dating got a lot easier. I went from being single most of the time to usually in a relationship. I got married at 41, which was a bit late, but we all move at our own pace.
My little sister is married to a guy who is maybe 5'5" (and I think that's generous). She is 5', and is nearly as tall as him in heels. He's nice and treats her well. She dated a bunch of guys over 6', and likes him the best by far.
This is not to say that tall guys don't have an advantage. I'm sure they do. But fortunately there are a lot of things other than height that also make a difference.