I believe strongly in giving while living. I see little reason to delay giving when so much good can be achieved through supporting worthwhile causes today. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to give while you live than to give while you are dead.’
That’s the attitude of Chuck Feeney, the one-time billionaire who has spent several decades doing his best to give away his fortune. Just as he was wildly successful as the co-founder of retail giant Duty Free Shoppers, he was also accomplished in meeting his charitable goal.
This week, Feeney closed his 38-year-old Atlantic Philanthropies, having donated all his cash to such lofty endeavors as bringing peace to Northern Ireland and modernizing Vietnam’s health care system. More recently, he spent $350 million to turn New York city’s Roosevelt Island into a technology hub, Forbes reported.
His donations include a total of $3.7 billion to education and another $870 million to fight for human rights and social change, like $62 million toward abolishing the death penalty in the United States and $76 million to back the passage of Obamacare.
“We learned a lot. We would do some things differently, but I am very satisfied. I feel very good about completing this on my watch,” Feeney, now 89, told Forbes. “My thanks to all who joined us on this journey. And to those wondering about Giving While Living: Try it, you’ll like it.”
Feeney years ago said he would set aside about $2 million to fund his and his wife’s retirement. Dubbed the “James Bond of Philanthropy” by Forbes, Feeney now lives in a small apartment in San Francisco that ” has the austerity of a freshman dorm room. “
While he didn’t trumpet all his accomplishments along the way, Feeney was still incredibly influential, with both Berkshire Hathaway’s BRK.A, -2.46% Warren Buffett and Microsoft MSFT, +1.07% co-founder Bill Gates cheering his work.
“Chuck’s been the model for us all,” Buffett told Forbes when asked for comment. “If you have the right heroes in life, you’re 90% of the way home. Chuck Feeney is a good hero to have.”
At the closing of Atlantic Philanthropies, which was done over Zoom, Gates and former California Gov. Jerry Brown both sent video messages praising Feeney’s work. Also, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sent an official letter from the U.S. Congress thanking him.
Feeney was definitely feeling the love:
“I’m not here to tell anyone what to do with their money,” Feeney once said. “You make your money, you do what you want with it. But I think there is an obligation, certainly for the haves, to reach out and to see what they can do.”
Monday, September 21, 2020
ARTICLE: He went from multibillionaire to relatively broke and living in a small apartment — just like he planned By Shawn Langlois
Monday, September 7, 2020
ARTICLE: How the Far Left Fails Basic Math By Brian Riedl
The posts are a staple of liberal social media: Attacking the greedy billionaire who could “easily” give everyone $1 million.
“Jeff Bezos could give every single American $3 million and he’d still have $188.8 billion.” “Imagine if @JeffBezos decided to give $1,000,000 to each of those 33 million out of work. It’s pocket change to him.”
It is not just random social-media postings. In March, MSNBC’s Brian Williams went on the air and endorsed a tweet that stated: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. U.S. Population, 327 million . . . He could have given each American $1 million.” His guest, New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay, concurred that “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing.”
It is not true. Instead it is a spectacular failure of arithmetic. Michael Bloomberg’s $500 million in ad purchases could have otherwise given each American $1.52 — not $1 million. And dividing Jeff Bezos’s $200 billion in wealth equally among 330 million Americans would provide $600 each, not $1 million or $3 million.
Additionally, 260,000 people “liked” a tweet condemning how “Jeff Bezos is about to become the world’s first trillionaire” (he has $800 billion to go).
It is tempting to dismiss these claims as random, innocent mathematical errors. In reality, they are central to the growing “Democratic Socialist” worldview, which is increasingly united around the belief that seizing the wealth of Jeff Bezos and other billionaires can finance the future they want. This belief explains the far Left’s non-stop fixation with billionaire wealth (such as the widely circulated but false claim that billionaires have added $584 billion in wealth since the pandemic began). In particular, the Left is obsessed with the world’s richest man (“Jeff Bezos has decided he will not end world hunger today” recently received 500,000 Twitter likes). Just last week, protesters built a guillotine in front of Bezos’s home.
What is remarkable is that the unifying theory of this entire movement can be disproved with third-grade arithmetic. Billionaire wealth cannot fund socialism.
Let’s first add up the spending wish list. Washington faces a staggering baseline budget deficit of $16.3 trillion between 2020 and 2030 (nearly doubling the national debt). And yet the additional ten-year spending initiatives totaled $97 trillion for Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign, approximately $40 trillion for Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris during theirs, $11 trillion for Joe Biden, and an estimated $50 trillion to $100 trillion for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
Are these politicians also promising to double or triple middle-class tax rates? Don’t be ridiculous. Their speeches relentlessly focus on looting “the billionayas” (in Bernie Sanders’s voice).
Yet America’s 800 billionaires own a combined $3.4 trillion in wealth. Seizing their every penny could provide a one-time payment of $10,000 per person, or fund Medicare for All for a little over one year. That’s it. And say goodbye to your 401(k), because nearly all revenue would come from a mass liquidation of stock investments (billionaires do not store their wealth in savings accounts or swimming pools of cash). Also, as the market collapses, so would stock sale prices, and thus the amount of revenue to seize from these sellers.
Let’s stay in socialist fantasyland and also assume a 100 percent income tax rate over $1 million, with no tax deductions. IRS data suggests that would theoretically raise $11 trillion over the decade (or $3,000 per person annually). In reality, millionaires would quickly either stop earning or move their income abroad, drastically reducing the tax revenue.
In sum, seizing every dollar of billionaire wealth and every dollar of income over $1 million would not even balance the long-term budget, much less finance socialism.
We can next examine the actual far-left tax proposals. Sanders’s proposed 8 percent wealth tax — which far exceeds the typical 1 or 2 percent rate in the remaining countries that have not abandoned this tax — would raise $2.3 trillion over the decade, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. His other proposals would raise perhaps $1 trillion to $2 trillion from the wealthiest families.
On income taxes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposes reinstating a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income earned over $10 million. This would raise only $200 billion over the decade because wages are not a large part of billionaire income.
On this topic of income taxes, many on the far left pine for the 91 percent top-tier income tax rates under President Eisenhower or the 70 percent maximum tax rates through the 1970s. In reality, these policies raised very little tax revenue because high-income thresholds and tax exclusions shielded nearly all taxpayers from these rates. Only eight taxpayers paid the 91 percent rate in 1960, and the richest 1 percent of earners paid lower effective income-tax rates in the 1950s than today. Overall, today’s (pre-pandemic) 8.1 percent of GDP in federal income-tax revenues exceeds that of the 1950s (7.2 percent), 1960s (7.6 percent), and 1970s (7.9 percent). Those earlier decades were no tax-the-rich paradise.
The uselessness of such high tax rates explains why no country in the OECD has a 70 percent tax bracket. Indeed, America’s top combined income and payroll tax rate nearly matches that of England, Germany, and Norway, and is only ten points below that of France. Europe finances its generous welfare states through steep value-added taxes that hit the entire population.
Corporate taxes are also a common liberal target. Joe Biden’s $2.1 trillion in corporate tax increases would more than reverse the $330 billion in corporate tax relief included in the 2017 tax cuts (the cost of which was further reduced by $385 billion of “economic growth revenues” that was estimated to offset some of the total $1.5 trillion tax cut but was likely driven by these corporate provisions). The Biden corporate taxes could finance only a small fraction of his $11 trillion in new spending. Especially if these taxes cost jobs and drove income overseas.
If we add it all up, imposing the world’s highest wealth taxes, the OECD’s highest income taxes, and increasing corporate taxation to the extent that Biden is proposing would raise approximately $6 trillion over the decade, and that’s under the rosiest scenario, where there are no negative economic effects. This would not even close half of the baseline budget deficit projected over the next decade, much less finance a socialist spending spree.
Again, this is not a matter of philosophy or competing economic theories. It is basic arithmetic.
The issue is scale. Of course it can be argued that the rich should pay more in taxes to finance new spending or deficit reduction. Yet many of those making such arguments appear to make no distinction between programs with annual costs of $30 billion or $3 trillion. Many leftists claim that if America can afford the 2017 tax cuts (of 3 percent), it can also afford their spending hikes (of between 65 and 160 percent). When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN that any nation that can afford recent wars ($100 billion annually) can also afford Medicare for All ($3 trillion annually), the video received 170,000 Twitter likes.
To be sure few political movements are filled with policy wonks. Today’s GOP is united around President Trump and his overall blustery, own-the-libs approach, rather than a specific policy proposal. But when an entire movement forms around the belief that taxing the rich is the answer, it helps if someone — anyone — can take out a calculator and check if the math adds up.
Instead, even the leaders of the far Left continue to display mathematical illiteracy.
Bernie Sanders recently pointed to the richest four Americans being worth $512 billion as proof that “It’s time to tax the billionaire class and expand Medicare to all.” Ten seconds of math would show that seizing all of these individuals’ wealth would finance just two months of Medicare for All’s $3 trillion annual cost. Who funds the huge tab thereafter?
Former labor secretary and current Cal-Berkeley professor Robert Reich — whose Twitter feed also exhibits an unhealthy obsession with Jeff Bezos — recently complained of being “sick and tired of hearing that we don’t know how we’ll pay for Medicare for All. Here’s how . . .” He then offered to pay that $32 trillion cost over the decade with three proposals (repealing the 2017 tax cuts, enacting a wealth tax, and cutting defense spending) that would raise just $4 trillion over the decade — leaving him $28 trillion short. His embarrassing self-own nonetheless received more than 40,000 fawning Twitter likes from similarly math-challenged fans.
Taxing the rich is not the only source of false savings to fund a far-left fantasyland. The contribution that could be made by defense savings is also highly exaggerated.
The defense budget has fallen from 4.6 percent of GDP a decade ago to just 3.2 percent today — just slightly above the post–World War II trough of 2.9 percent of GDP that was spent from 1999 to 2001. Yet Robert Reich — again, a former cabinet member — writes that the “percentage of tax dollars spent on the military: 54%” (its actually 15 percent and declining).
Not to be outdone, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asserted that much of the $32 trillion Medicare for All price tag could be funded simply by eliminating $21 trillion in wasteful defense spending (which would be 3,500 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget). In reality, that preposterous figure exceeds all defense spending in American history since 1776.
Just a few days ago, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey claimed that cutting the $8 trillion defense budget could fully finance both the $30 trillion cost of Medicare for All and the (at least) $50 trillion cost of his new Green New Deal proposal (all are ten-year figures).
It is certainly distressing to see former cabinet secretaries and current influential members of Congress fail to display even a passing familiarity with basic federal taxes and spending.
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Yet, ultimately, these lawmakers are bluffing. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation includes no taxes at all, because no $32 trillion tax proposal exists (his website lists a menu of $16 trillion in mostly middle-class and business taxes). Similarly, when Elizabeth Warren claimed she could finance Medicare for All by taxing the rich, her proposal ultimately relied heavily on universal business assessments while still coming in at least $15 trillion short. Vermont in 2011 enacted a law mandating the creation of single-payer health care but repealed the law when it could not design a tax large enough to finance it. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal has never made the leap from a vague resolution to a specific bill, in part because no taxes could possibly fund that stratospheric cost.
In short, free-lunch socialism is a mirage. Europe finances big government with broad-based payroll and value-added taxes, and so would the U.S. The idea that taxing 800 rich people can finance trillions of dollars in permanent new benefits for 330 million people is laughably absurd. Perhaps Washington should instead finance a smaller program to distribute calculators to voters — and politicians.
ARTICLE: My Call to Jeff Bezos, the World's Very Richest Man by Michael Brownstein
Hey Jeff, Michael here. This is important, so listen up. You hit a monster home run with Amazon, there's no denying that, you're worth more than anyone else on the planet.
But there's one place you're impoverished, Jeff—your heart. You're keen to spend billions of dollars landing tourists on the moon instead of performing real service here on Earth. Like helping those humans living degraded lives under the boot heel of predatory capitalism.
It's time to stop skinflinting your Amazon workers while installing cameras to make sure they don't take too many minutes going to the bathroom. And firing them for speaking out about putting themselves in harm's way from Covid-19 by working in your warehouses without adequate protection.
That's bad enough, but something even bigger is missing in your life. Everything is not product, Jeff. I mean, it's great what you did with Amazon. We love the convenience but we do not love your robber-baron persona. Because without a connection to healing spirit you're sick no matter how much money you have.
Look in the mirror and you'll see someone preoccupied with shooting phallic rockets into the frigid reaches of space while your own world is burning up. It's time to give back, Jeff.
"Look in the mirror and you'll see someone preoccupied with shooting phallic rockets into the frigid reaches of space while your own world is burning up. It's time to give back, Jeff."
How should I do that, you ask. Good question! I'll tell you how. Turn Amazon into a co-op, let the workers own it. But above all, give back to the sacred rain forest in South America, the Amazon whose name you stole—just grab the name and run, right?
But there's more to life than scoring, Jeff. It's time for you to fly to the Amazon, get down on your knees and thank the rainforest for its gifts, its generation of endless life forms, sacred in nature, which puts to shame the sterile proliferation of items in Amazon's warehouses. It's time to drink jungle medicine and open your heart, wake up from your high-powered fantasies.
Understand that mass extinction of plants and animals is accelerating out of control. You have to work to rid us of the capitalist nightmare based on mindless greed which is raping the Earth.
It's time to help heal the lungs of the Earth that are being scorched. The Amazon is on fire, Jeff. The lungs of the Earth are saying "I can't breathe," just like George Floyd, just like the people dying from Covid-19.
It's time to swear you'll protect the indigenous people who've taken good care of the Amazon for thousands of years only to be murdered for the shortest of short term gains. You took that name without asking, Jeff. It's time to give back before it's too late.
Time to swear you'll protect the indigenous people who've taken good care of the Amazon for thousands of years only to be murdered for the shortest of short term gains. You took that name without asking, Jeff. It's time to give back before it's too late.
"You took that name without asking, Jeff. It's time to give back before it's too late."
Yes, before it's too late and the only people left to watch your rockets zoom off into the ether will be a few fellow billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, your megalomaniacal competitors racing to see who can spoil the heavens sooner by launching low orbit satellites beaming down 5G radiation from above.
Elon has a head start, he's already put thousands of bright, large, reflective, radio-interfering satellites in orbit with hundreds more to follow every month. But you're planning to catch up to him by adding thousands of your own. If you and Elon and Bill have your way, looking through a pair of binoculars in 2030 will reveal more satellites than stars.
But it's not only our view of the night sky that will be ruined. Check out what EMF experts have to say about the health risks of 5G radiation. Switzerland has restricted 5G deployment in response to a nationwide call for real-world testing. Other countries and cities are having second thoughts too, despite the telecom industry pushing to install 5G everywhere as soon as possible, no questions asked.
Can't you see what you're doing by forging ahead regardless of the consequences of your actions, Jeff? Like the Amazon rain forest, the night sky belongs to all of humanity, not simply to operators like you hypnotized by the "business impact" of your actions.
Instead of sending up satellites to track us for a coming surveillance state, why don't you play your part as a citizen of the world and send up just one satellite to track global deforestation?
It's time to drop your daydream of being a very important explorer of the galaxy and work to save where you actually eat and sleep and make your moves. Time to help turn the global climate crisis around. Because unless you do, before long there will be no companies left for you to play with. Spend your billions saving the sacred Amazon. Spend them while there's still time.
Saturday, May 30, 2020
ARTICLE: 18-year-old woman creates fake Tinder profile as a man after insisting that it's 'EASY PEASY' for guys to find matches online - but she's shocked when the experiment turns out to be a failure By Carly Stern
An 18-year-old woman created a fake profile to go undercover on Tinder to see what it's really like for men on dating apps — and she was shocked to discover that it was not as easy as she imagined.
YouTuber Alexander Grace teamed up with his friend Sada for the social experiment, providing her with photos of himself to use for her fake Tinder profile.
Sada admitted that she thought it would be 'easy peasy' to get matches with Alex's pictures, and assumed she'd be lining up dates in no time — but she was discouraged to get fewer matches than she thought, and even more frustrated to be met with radio silence when she would initiate conversation.
Surprise: An 18-year-old woman created a fake profile to go undercover on Tinder to see what it's really like for men on dating apps
Faux profile: YouTuber Alexander Grace teamed up with his friend Sada for the social experiment and gave her photos of himself to use
When Alex proposed the experiment, he asked Sada to set up a profile as a man seeking women on Tinder.
He gave her three of his own photos, and left her to write the bio information, choose who to swipe on, and send messages.
Sada said that first impression was that it would be easy to get matches because Alex is attractive, but Alex quickly told her that she was going to find more difficulty than she anticipated.
'I don't think she realizes how difficult this is gonna be,' he said.
Sada quickly got to work setting up the profile, explaining to YouTube viewers that she wanted to be 'very direct and also smooth in the approach.'
She wrote his bio to read: 'Hi, my name is Alex. I live and work in Lisbon as a psychologist. I'm looking for a nice lady to develop a meaningful relationship with and enjoy the pleasures of life.'
She called the intro 'simple' and 'good' and got swiping.
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First impressions: Sada thought it would be 'easy peasy' — and did get quite a few matches when she swiped indiscriminately
Downhill: But when she started being more choosy, her matches went way down
Not loving it: She felt 'down' and discouraged by the process, complaining that many women she matched with didn't respond to her messages
But Sada quickly ran into trouble, and was surprised to only match with five women on her first day. Worse, she found chatting with them difficult, complaining that conversing with one of the women was 'painful' because she only gave one-word answers.
'This is going to be much harder than what I was thinking,' she admitted. 'I thought this was going to be easy-peasy. I'm going to text these women and they're going to want to go on a date with me, and I'm going to match a lot but that didn't happen.'
Day two was better, with Sada picking up 28 matches. But the problem, she said, is that she wasn't discriminating in who she swiped on.
'I am just swiping like a maniac and seeing what I can get,' she said, but noted that she would be more selective going forward, attempting to 'think more like a man.'
She picked up 13 matches on day three, but just a single match each on days for and five.
'I am not motivated, I am not happy with the results,' she said.
In addition to not getting as many matches as she imagined, she was annoyed that women wouldn't reply to her messages, or they'd stop replying after one or two responses.
Ghosted: While she seems to have had at least one successful conversation, most of them petered out quickly
'How can I get these women to go on a date with me if they don't even reply to me? If we matched, why aren't we talking?' she asked.
'If I compared the experience that a woman has on a dating app and that a man has on a dating app, it's much different. And it's weird that I struggled so much. And if I changed my picture to a woman, I don't struggle at all.
'This is not very healthy,' she said. 'I'm [feeling] down now and it's not even my damn picture.'
At the end of the experiment, she and Alex talked about how it went.
'I think it was a failure,' she said, adding that she had expectations about what would happen and 'it was like the complete opposite.'
Though she had some success with matches early on, getting them to reply was a 'nightmare.'
She complained that she struggled and had to 'lead the conversation.'
But then Alex showed some screengrabs of her chats, which revealed that she started every interaction off with 'Hi' and 'how are you.'
Low effort: However, the video shows that she started most conversations with generic 'hi' and 'how are you' texts
'I just feel sorry for guys and stuff. I don't think this is good for anyone, really,' she said
'Maybe I was ignorant,' she says, explaining that she has rethought what it's like for guys on dating apps. 'I just feel sorry for guys and stuff. I don't think this is good for anyone, really.
She added that she thought it would be especially easy for her because she herself is a woman.
'I was like, I know what they want to hear, I know what they want. I was so confident,' she said, but added that now she is 'so confused.'
Men commenting on the video and on Reddit are less confused.
'Yeah dating apps are probably the most depressing experience an average guy can have,' wrote one.
'She kept pointing out that he is actually attractive and educated... Imagine what "average" guys experience,' wrote another.
Some pointed out that Sada may have had a particularly hard time getting women to respond because of the low effort she put into her messages and lack of personalization.
While many of the commenters were frustrated that it's 'easier' for women, a few pointed out that there might be good reasons they're not replying to messages.
'I'm a a straight dude who
has used and often been excessively frustrated with dating apps. Despite
that, I completely understand why the women ghost or don't replay:
They're inundated with messages and options,' wrote one, explaining that
there's simply not enough time to reply to everyone.
Monday, May 11, 2020
ARTICLE:The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months by Rutger Bregman
For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.
When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.
On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.
By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.
Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind
This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?
I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”
he article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: “Sunday showing for Tongan castaways”. The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.
I was bursting with questions. Were the boys still alive? And could I find the television footage? Most importantly, though, I had a lead: the captain’s name was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent issue of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: “Mates share 50-year bond”. Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, smiling, one with his arm slung around the other. The article began: “Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates ... The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature.” Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted island.
My wife Maartje and I rented a car in Brisbane and some three hours later arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.
Peter was the youngest son of Arthur Warner, once one of the richest and most powerful men in Australia. Back in the 1930s, Arthur ruled over a vast empire called Electronic Industries, which dominated the country’s radio market at the time. Peter was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, at the age of 17, he ran away to sea in search of adventure and spent the next few years sailing from Hong Kong to Stockholm, Shanghai to St Petersburg. When he finally returned five years later, the prodigal son proudly presented his father with a Swedish captain’s certificate. Unimpressed, Warner Sr demanded his son learn a useful profession. “What’s easiest?” Peter asked. “Accountancy,” Arthur lied.
Peter went to work for his father’s company, yet the sea still beckoned, and whenever he could he went to Tasmania, where he kept his own fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Tonga in the winter of 1966. On the way home he took a little detour and that’s when he saw it: a minuscule island in the azure sea, ‘Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, ‘Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.
It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. 'My name is Stephen,' he cried. 'We've been here 15 months.'
But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”
The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”
In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on ‘Ata. Peter’s memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours’ drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.
There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to “borrow” one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.
The boys had set up a commune with food garden, gym, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire
No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.
Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.
Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”
They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).
When they arrived home, they found the police waiting to meet them. They were arrested and thrown in jail
They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg. But this wasn’t the end of the boys’ little adventure, because, when they arrived back in Nuku‘alofa police boarded Peter’s boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing boat the boys had “borrowed” 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he’d decided to press charges.
Fortunately for the boys, Peter came up with a plan. It occurred to him that the story of their shipwreck was perfect Hollywood material. And being his father’s corporate accountant, Peter managed the company’s film rights and knew people in TV. So from Tonga, he called up the manager of Channel 7 in Sydney. “You can have the Australian rights,” he told them. “Give me the world rights.” Next, Peter paid Mr Uhila £150 for his old boat, and got the boys released on condition that they would cooperate with the movie. A few days later, a team from Channel 7 arrived.
The mood when the boys returned to their families in Tonga was jubilant. Almost the entire island of HaÊ»afeva – population 900 – had turned out to welcome them home. Peter was proclaimed a national hero. Soon he received a message from King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV himself, inviting the captain for an audience. “Thank you for rescuing six of my subjects,” His Royal Highness said. “Now, is there anything I can do for you?” The captain didn’t have to think long. “Yes! I would like to trap lobster in these waters and start a business here.” The king consented. Peter returned to Sydney, resigned from his father’s company and commissioned a new ship. Then he had the six boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all: an opportunity to see the world beyond Tonga. He hired them as the crew of his new fishing boat.
While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.
It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”
Thursday, April 30, 2020
ARTICLE:Someone Asks Why Billionaires Don’t Use Their Money To Solve World Problems, This User Explains It Perfectly BY Robertas Lisickis
t’s easy to talk about honest business when you’ve never been a businessperson yourself or have never been exposed to all of the nuances of managing one. It surely is possible to develop a business that would be capable of generating millions of dollars (or more) in a given time span, or one that would be completely ethical from an employee’s perspective. However, this result is more of a trade-off rather than a fully compatible coexistence between the two.
Theresa Searcaigh, an Irish-American author of literary fantasy genre novels, posted a tweet asking the internet why billionaires like Jeff Bezos don’t use their wealth to start fixing things like helping homeless veterans and hungry children. According to her, “he could be Batman,” but it’s all “wasted.”
A woman asked why people like Jeff Bezos don’t impulsively start fixing things with their wealth
A Tumblr user by the nickname of olivesawl posted a response to this, explaining how people who do business with a mindset of using their profits to further humanity don’t really become people like Bezos.
He continued telling a story about his dad, a businessman of 35 years, who had a business that was profitable, but it did not really expand. And the underlying reason was that it is nearly impossible to do business this way without climbing on someone’s back. He elaborates on this in the pictures below.
A Tumblr user ventured to give a little bit of perspective
Olivesawl told a story of how his dad saw and did business, not trying to take advantage of the people involved in it. He never waited to be a good human being when it came to business, always choosing his employees’ health over profits and going to such lengths as to dock his own salary in order to make sure his employees’ needs and securities were met. And he was proud of it.
Another user, earlgreytea86, added to this by also talking about his own father, and how this same decision led their family to living a good and successful life and how they don’t need to be billionaires to do good in life through their business.
Another Tumblrer joined in, expanding upon olivesawl’s story
While for some this was a mind-blowing reality check, many online were already aware of this, sharing their own stories and thoughts about business. The reblog was a success on Tumblr, garnering over 63,000 notes, but it also found its way to Imgur recently, where it gathered over 188,000 views in under a day.
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
ARTICLE: Why China Must Be Held Accountable for the Coronavirus Pandemic BY Michael Auslin
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
truly feel
i love how some things can make me feel. really truly feel. such big feelings that aren't the burden i thought they were. it doesn't even have to be something special, but for some inexplicable reason it makes my heart beat just that little bit harder with a celestial ache that echoes through my chest. books piled high on a windowsill glowing with sunlight. words, just some words that seem divine. notebooks strewn open, overlapping, pens resting in their crooks, a cup of coffee in the middle of the beautiful chaos. plants climbing up bricks, nature and manmade coexisting in harmony. classical music filtering through the room to accompany my thoughts and keep some at bay. people. people laughing and crying and feeling. it's all so cosmic.
Change your life
Saturday, February 29, 2020
ARTICLE: The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse by Ashley FettersKaitlyn Tiffany
Ever since her last relationship ended this past August, Liz has been consciously trying not to treat dating as a “numbers game.” By the 30-year-old Alaskan’s own admission, however, it hasn’t been going great.
Liz has been going on Tinder dates frequently, sometimes multiple times a week—one of her New Year’s resolutions was to go on every date she was invited on. But Liz, who asked to be identified only by her first name in order to avoid harassment, can’t escape a feeling of impersonal, businesslike detachment from the whole pursuit.
“It’s like, ‘If this doesn’t go well, there are 20 other guys who look like you in my inbox.’ And I’m sure they feel the same way—that there are 20 other girls who are willing to hang out, or whatever,” she said. “People are seen as commodities, as opposed to individuals.”
It’s understandable that someone like Liz might internalize the idea that dating is a game of probabilities or ratios, or a marketplace in which single people just have to keep shopping until they find “the one.” The idea that a dating pool can be analyzed as a marketplace or an economy is both recently popular and very old: For generations, people have been describing newly single people as “back on the market” and analyzing dating in terms of supply and demand. In 1960, the Motown act the Miracles recorded “Shop Around,” a jaunty ode to the idea of checking out and trying on a bunch of new partners before making a “deal.” The economist Gary Becker, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize, began applying economic principles to marriage and divorce rates in the early 1970s. More recently, a plethora of market-minded dating books are coaching singles on how to seal a romantic deal, and dating apps, which have rapidly become the mode du jour for single people to meet each other, make sex and romance even more like shopping.
The unfortunate coincidence is that the fine-tuned analysis of dating’s numbers game and the streamlining of its trial-and-error process of shopping around have taken place as dating’s definition has expanded from “the search for a suitable marriage partner” into something decidedly more ambiguous. Meanwhile, technologies have emerged that make the market more visible than ever to the average person, encouraging a ruthless mind-set of assigning “objective” values to potential partners and to ourselves—with little regard for the ways that framework might be weaponized. The idea that a population of single people can be analyzed like a market might be useful to some extent to sociologists or economists, but the widespread adoption of it by single people themselves can result in a warped outlook on love.
Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, argues that dating as we know it—single people going out together to restaurants, bars, movies, and other commercial or semicommercial spaces—came about in the late 19th century. “Almost everywhere, for most of human history, courtship was supervised. And it was taking place in noncommercial spaces: in homes, at the synagogue,” she said in an interview. “Somewhere where other people were watching. What dating does is it takes that process out of the home, out of supervised and mostly noncommercial spaces, to movie theaters and dance halls.” Modern dating, she noted, has always situated the process of finding love within the realm of commerce—making it possible for economic concepts to seep in.
The application of the supply-and-demand concept, Weigel said, may have come into the picture in the late 19th century, when American cities were exploding in population. “There were probably, like, five people your age in [your hometown],” she told me. “Then you move to the city because you need to make more money and help support your family, and you’d see hundreds of people every day.” When there are bigger numbers of potential partners in play, she said, it’s much more likely that people will begin to think about dating in terms of probabilities and odds.
Eva Illouz, directrice d’etudes (director of studies) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, who has written about the the application of economic principles to romance, agrees that dating started to be understood as a marketplace as courtship rituals left private spheres, but she thinks the analogy fully crystallized when the sexual revolution of the mid-20th century helped dissolve many lingering traditions and taboos around who could or should date whom. People began assessing for themselves what the costs or benefits of certain partnerships might be—a decision that used to be a family’s rather than an individual’s. “What you have is people meeting each other directly, which is exactly the situation of a market,” she said. “Everybody’s looking at everybody, in a way.”
In the modern era, it seems probable that the way people now shop online for goods—in virtual marketplaces, where they can easily filter out features they do and don’t want—has influenced the way people “shop” for partners, especially on dating apps, which often allow that same kind of filtering. The behavioral economics researcher and dating coach Logan Ury said in an interview that many single people she works with engage in what she calls “relationshopping.”
Read: The rise of dating-app fatigue
“People, especially as they get older, really know their preferences. So they think that they know what they want,” Ury said—and retroactively added quotation marks around the words “know what they want.” “Those are things like ‘I want a redhead who’s over 5’7”,’ or ‘I want a Jewish man who at least has a graduate degree.’” So they log in to a digital marketplace and start narrowing down their options. “They shop for a partner the way that they would shop for a camera or Bluetooth headphones,” she said.
But, Ury went on, there’s a fatal flaw in this logic: No one knows what they want so much as they believe they know what they want. Actual romantic chemistry is volatile and hard to predict; it can crackle between two people with nothing in common and fail to materialize in what looks on paper like a perfect match. Ury often finds herself coaching her clients to broaden their searches and detach themselves from their meticulously crafted “checklists.”
The fact that human-to-human matches are less predictable than consumer-to-good matches is just one problem with the market metaphor; another is that dating is not a one-time transaction. Let’s say you’re on the market for a vacuum cleaner—another endeavor in which you might invest considerable time learning about and weighing your options, in search of the best fit for your needs. You shop around a bit, then you choose one, buy it, and, unless it breaks, that’s your vacuum cleaner for the foreseeable future. You likely will not continue trying out new vacuums, or acquire a second and third as your “non-primary” vacuums. In dating, especially in recent years, the point isn’t always exclusivity, permanence, or even the sort of long-term relationship one might have with a vacuum. With the rise of “hookup culture” and the normalization of polyamory and open relationships, it’s perfectly common for people to seek partnerships that won’t necessarily preclude them from seeking other partnerships, later on or in addition. This makes supply and demand a bit harder to parse. Given that marriage is much more commonly understood to mean a relationship involving one-to-one exclusivity and permanence, the idea of a marketplace or economy maps much more cleanly onto matrimony than dating.
The marketplace metaphor also fails to account for what many daters know intuitively: that being on the market for a long time—or being off the market, and then back on, and then off again—can change how a person interacts with the marketplace. Obviously, this wouldn’t affect a material good in the same way. Families repeatedly moving out of houses, for example, wouldn’t affect the houses’ feelings, but being dumped over and over by a series of girlfriends might change a person’s attitude toward finding a new partner. Basically, ideas about markets that are repurposed from the economy of material goods don’t work so well when applied to sentient beings who have emotions. Or, as Moira Weigel put it, “It’s almost like humans aren’t actually commodities.”
When market logic is applied to the pursuit of a partner and fails, people can start to feel cheated. This can cause bitterness and disillusionment, or worse. “They have a phrase here where they say the odds are good but the goods are odd,” Liz said, because in Alaska on the whole there are already more men than women, and on the apps the disparity is even sharper. She estimates that she gets 10 times as many messages as the average man in her town. “It sort of skews the odds in my favor,” she said. “But, oh my gosh, I’ve also received a lot of abuse.”
Recently, Liz matched with a man on Tinder who invited her over to his house at 11 p.m. When she declined, she said, he called her 83 times later that night, between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. And when she finally answered and asked him to stop, he called her a “bitch” and said he was “teaching her a lesson.” It was scary, but Liz said she wasn’t shocked, as she has had plenty of interactions with men who have “bubbling, latent anger” about the way things are going for them on the dating market. Despite having received 83 phone calls in four hours, Liz was sympathetic toward the man. “At a certain point,” she said, “it becomes exhausting to cast your net over and over and receive so little.”
This violent reaction to failure is also present in conversations about “sexual market value”—a term so popular on Reddit that it is sometimes abbreviated as “SMV”—which usually involve complaints that women are objectively overvaluing themselves in the marketplace and belittling the men they should be trying to date.
The logic is upsetting but clear: The (shaky) foundational idea of capitalism is that the market is unfailingly impartial and correct, and that its mechanisms of supply and demand and value exchange guarantee that everything is fair. It’s a dangerous metaphor to apply to human relationships, because introducing the idea that dating should be “fair” subsequently introduces the idea that there is someone who is responsible when it is unfair. When the market’s logic breaks down, it must mean someone is overriding the laws. And in online spaces populated by heterosexual men, heterosexual women have been charged with the bulk of these crimes.
“The typical clean-cut, well-spoken, hard-working, respectful, male” who makes six figures should be a “magnet for women,” someone asserted recently in a thread posted in the tech-centric forum Hacker News. But instead, the poster claimed, this hypothetical man is actually cursed because the Bay Area has one of the worst “male-female ratios among the single.” The responses are similarly disaffected and analytical, some arguing that the gender ratio doesn’t matter, because women only date tall men who are “high earners,” and they are “much more selective” than men. “This can be verified on practically any dating app with a few hours of data,” one commenter wrote.
Economic metaphors provide the language for conversations on Reddit with titles like “thoughts on what could be done to regulate the dating market,” and for a subreddit named sarcastically “Where Are All The Good Men?” with the stated purpose of “exposing” all the women who have “unreasonable standards” and offer “little to no value themselves.” (On the really extremist end, some suggest that the government should assign girlfriends to any man who wants one.) Which is not at all to say that heterosexual men are the only ones thinking this way: In the 54,000-member subreddit r/FemaleDatingStrategy, the first “principle” listed in its official ideology is “be a high value woman.” The group’s handbook is thousands of words long, and also emphasizes that “as women, we have the responsibility to be ruthless in our evaluation of men.”
The design and marketing of dating apps further encourage a cold, odds-based approach to love. While they have surely created, at this point, thousands if not millions of successful relationships, they have also aggravated, for some men, their feeling that they are unjustly invisible to women.
Men outnumber women dramatically on dating apps; this is a fact. A 2016 literature review also found that men are more active users of these apps—both in the amount of time they spend on them and the number of interactions they attempt. Their experience of not getting as many matches or messages, the numbers say, is real.
But data sets made available by the apps can themselves be wielded in unsettling ways by people who believe the numbers are working against them. A since-deleted 2017 blog post on the dating app Hinge’s official website explained an experiment conducted by a Hinge engineer, Aviv Goldgeier. Using the Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality within a country, and counting “likes” as income, Goldgeier determined that men had a much higher (that is, worse) Gini coefficient than women. With these results, Goldgeier compared the “female dating economy” to Western Europe and the “male dating economy” to South Africa. This is, obviously, an absurd thing to publish on a company blog, but not just because its analysis is so plainly accusatory and weakly reasoned. It’s also a bald-faced admission that the author—and possibly the company he speaks for—is thinking about people as sets of numbers.
In a since-deleted 2009 official blog post, an OkCupid employee’s data analysis showed women rating men as “worse-looking than medium” 80 percent of the time, and concluded, “Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the opposite sex.” This post, more than a decade later, is referenced in men’s-rights or men’s-interest subreddits as “infamous” and “we all know it.”
Even without these creepy blog posts, dating apps can amplify a feeling of frustration with dating by making it seem as if it should be much easier. The Stanford economist Alvin Roth has argued that Tinder is, like the New York Stock Exchange, a “thick” market where lots of people are trying to complete transactions, and that the main problem with dating apps is simply congestion. To him, the idea of a dating market is not new at all. “Have you ever read any of the novels of Jane Austen?” he asked. “Pride and Prejudice is a very market-oriented novel. Balls were the internet of the day. You went and showed yourself off.”
Daters have—or appear to have—a lot more choices on a dating app in 2020 than they would have at a provincial dance party in rural England in the 1790s, which is good, until it’s bad. The human brain is not equipped to process and respond individually to thousands of profiles, but it takes only a few hours on a dating app to develop a mental heuristic for sorting people into broad categories. In this way, people can easily become seen as commodities—interchangeable products available for acquisition or trade. “What the internet apps do is that they enable you to see, for the first time ever in history, the market of possible partners,” Illouz, the Hebrew University sociology professor, said. Or, it makes a dater think they can see the market, when really all they can see is what an algorithm shows them.
The idea of the dating market is appealing because a market is something a person can understand and try to manipulate. But fiddling with the inputs—by sending more messages, going on more dates, toggling and re-toggling search parameters, or even moving to a city with a better ratio—isn’t necessarily going to help anybody succeed on that market in a way that’s meaningful to them.
Last year, researchers at Ohio State University examined the link between loneliness and compulsive use of dating apps—interviewing college students who spent above-average time swiping—and found a terrible feedback loop: The lonelier you are, the more doggedly you will seek out a partner, and the more negative outcomes you’re likely to be faced with, and the more alienated from other people you will feel. This happens to men and women in the same way.
“We found no statistically significant differences for gender at all,” the lead author, Katy Coduto, said in an email. “Like, not even marginally significant.”
There may always have been a dating market, but today people’s belief that they can see it and describe it and control their place in it is much stronger. And the way we speak becomes the way we think, as well as a glaze to disguise the way we feel. Someone who refers to looking for a partner as a numbers game will sound coolly aware and pragmatic, and guide themselves to a more odds-based approach to dating. But they may also suppress any honest expression of the unbearably human loneliness or desire that makes them keep doing the math.
Sunday, February 9, 2020
ARTICLE:The two biggest reasons dating is dead by Suzanne Venker
If one of the two parties wasn't "feeling it," the relationship pretty much ended there. If they both liked each other, it continued. At some point down the line, the relationship would either fizzle out, or it wouldn't. If it didn't, the couple got married. The end.
This pattern bears no resemblance to today's dating scene. Young people today generally don't date; they "hang out," which basically means spending time together in the same room. They don't even have to be communicating in that room — they're likely on their respective smartphones and watching TV. Or they might "hook up," which can mean anything from kissing to having sex. Whatever goes on between men and women today, particularly in college but even afterward, is often very vague and senseless.
Smartphones and social media are in part to blame, but the rules had already changed. As products of divorce, the modern generation has no clue how to make a relationship work.
The sex part they have down — that part's easy. But how to communicate, how to date, and how to love, well, it's all Greek to them.
There are two main reasons for this sad state of affairs. The first is that so many women lowered their standards. They no longer, as women have always done since the beginning of time, embolden men to bond with them before agreeing to have sex. If a woman wants love and commitment, even before marriage, she's probably not going to get it by making herself so sexually available. That's not how it works. Unfortunately, young women have been taught that "having sex like a man" somehow makes them a man's "equal."
But, of course, it does just the opposite. Women don't gain power by being promiscuous — they lose it.
When it comes to love and sex, women are the gatekeepers: Men have always followed their lead. A man can't have sex with a woman without her permission (if he does, it's a crime); therefore, the average romantic relationship travels along whatever path a woman walks. If she lets a guy know he needn't put in the effort, well then, he won't put it in the effort. But if her standards are high, if she commands respect and makes him work to earn her love, he will rise to the occasion.
Unfortunately, too many young women do the former rather than the latter; which makes it hard for the women whose standards are high. It also makes dating superfluous. With so many women putting the cart before the horse, relationships go nowhere. They don't even get off the ground.
The second reason dating is dead is that young people think of marriage as the grand finale rather than the main event. This is a huge departure from the way almost every other generation viewed marriage: as the beginning of life. The purpose. The whole enchilada. This earlier mindset guarantees successful dating because people don't waste time with people they know they'd never marry. Rather, they date with purpose: to find out if the person is a potential life match. Without that element, you're just shooting blanks.
But here's the real problem, a largely unspoken problem, with this new mindset: There's a huge psychological toll for moving in and out of countless relationships that go nowhere. The idea behind postponing marriage inevitably is that you learn about people and about yourself and about what you ultimately want in a partner, and there's some truth to this. But it is equally, if not more, likely you'll end up cynical and scarred — and more wary, not less, of how to build a relationship that lasts. This is especially true if all of those relationships were sexual in nature, which they typically are.
Each time you invest in a relationship that doesn't last, each time you pour out your heart and your soul and your body to him or her, you leave just a little bit damaged. You'll then take these wounds with you into each new relationship. By the time you do get married, if you do, your faith in love has been shattered.
If we changed just these two things — if women start owning their power in the realm of love and sex, and if young people view marriage as something to aspire to rather than something to put off or to avoid, dating will once again start carrying a lot of weight.
I don't see any evidence that young people, women in particular, enjoy putting themselves through an endless stream of broken relationships. None of us learns who we are until we get married, so the idea of postponing marriage until we "know ourselves" is just something people tell themselves. It's in the commitment that we learn what we're capable of. It's in the commitment that we finally, ultimately, learn how to love.
Until then, we're just killing time.