I am procrastinating on my work (which is boring yet high stakes and important) by reading Jacob Falcovich's blog posts on dating.
An important thing that stands out is that I don't actually want to be with most women? Like, my standards for casual sex are fairly low (I'd have sex with almost 2/3rd of women on Earth, if offered) but my standards for LTR are extremely high?
casual sex
I'm not going after casual sex because I think the pursuit itself will distract me (as it previously already has), and my goals are too high stakes for me to waste even one week more of my life on something frivolous. I have a death clock ticking in my head everyday.
Also, even if some woman magically came and offered to sleep with me, I think there's a significant probability this will make me feel even worse than I already do. Like, my guess is the median outcome is it'll just be, meh, whatever. Mildly fun but also not that important, will somewhat boost my self-esteem, and eventually we will argue over some dumb shit and break apart. But the worst case outcome is significantly worse than this, it's that I waste multiple months of my life on someone who doesn't deserve it, I get back to consuming substances, I go write some more unprofessional professional emails, I take even further hit to my self-esteem and so on.
So okay, fine, I am not going for casual sex. That's not what the topic of this post is about.
high standards
The topic is about long-term relationship. I just implicitly know at this point, that if I don't figure out actually effective selection filters, this process is going to way too fucking long, and I don't have time for that. If I take out even half a day per week of my life to work on this, I need confidence that I have found an efficient process. I don't have time to go on 20 dates and filter through 20 different women over a period of multiple years. I am not interested in random hobby groups with randos.
To be clear, under normal circumstances, going to 20 dates over a couple years, and finding a LTR that lasts atleast another 5 years, is not bad actually. Couple of years is a small investment to make for a goal this important. I don't have a couple years, not at my current stage in life.
Being poly but not leftist in India obviously uses way too many bits (I have lots of personal experience indicating this), I could just remove the filter and increase bits.
honestly even writing this post feels like a distraction right now, I'll cut it short and get back to it later.
variance
I think the short version of the point I wanted to convey was that my future self is extremely high variance. Men's lives are already higher variance than women, and marriages tend to reduce men's variance in life outcomes. But I am an outlier even by those standards.
My best case outcome in life is literally become someone more impactful than Assange and Snowden and Swartz combined, because I pre-empted all their failure modes. I could literally become one of the most important people in human history.
My worst case outcome in life is to get many innocent people killed, spend my life in prison, lose my partner, and have no regrets over it. And then I can watch while either nothing happens, or artificial superintelligence causes the hardest acceleration of history.
I really don't think most women are ready to be with a man like that. They might they they are, but they're not. For instance, I am not actually that surprised that Assange married his lawyer for example. His lawyer has a better understanding of the stakes than most normal people.
If the other person is not truly ready to be with me and accept these stakes, then maybe I also don't want to be with them? I'm just going to eventually destroy their life, by taking it in a direction very far from what they initially intended. Destroy as in, not literally kill, but eventually they will go listen to their parents, or get afraid of the cops, or something equally lame, and they will then think I worsened their life. Late breakups are much worse than early breakups.
Nowadays when I randomly cold approach people, I often wonder, look this is low EV, high hit rate required, should I even bother? I still do it sometimes for the heck of it, just so I don't lose the confidence required for it, but like, I am not super optimistic this is the best approach. At this point I think I sometimes do it just because I am bored. My life might look exciting or scary from the outside, but from the inside, it is often boring as hell. Maybe because I am not moving fast enough. I need to move faster. And get more successes.
Okay and now I will end post. I need good filters basically.
single track-ness
okay ya another point is I have zero interest in most hobbies. I just force myself nowadays to do hobbies because it'll be good, they said. I dont actually care. I am the type of person to obsess on one thing at the expense of everything else. I have always been this person. Go big or go home.
This works good in professional life but this also means I don't actually have that much interest in random hobbies with random women, which is what first dates tend to be about. Like, even for that, I need to know there's some efficient process at play, and we aren't both wasting each other's time here. Actually it depends on the woman, with the right person sure, even hobbies are interesting.
(zoom in here - what does "right person" mean?)
2026-03-07
Update
I think it is very important that when I write posts like this, I don't fall into status games myself.
It is very easy to justify sexual jealousy in this way. "Oh look at all these people having sex they enjoy, I wish I could have that" -> "Unfortunately I cant have that right now, hence I am sad" -> "I must not have wanted it anyway, this is not right for me anyway". sour grapes basically
It is straightforwardly true that I am jealous of a lot of people who have more fulfilled dating lives than I currently do. I am not sure if I am jealous for either the guy or the girl specifically, I don't literally want any of my friends' partners for example (if I did I couldnt write about it online). But I do believe true love is real because I've experienced it, and I am jealous of people who have that, both online and irl.
It is true that the number of women who I want who would reject me, is larger than the number of woman who want me but I would reject.
All that being said, I think the point in the above post also holds true. Even if I had a magic wand that I could wave and seduce women, I think it is straighforwardly true that a lot of women would only be happy with me for the first few months at best, and then the reality of what they've signed up for will hit them.
I want to pre-empt all this time lost, and just get to the end goal.
It is possible that that can't be done. Maybe hit and trial is the only way. I want to go from doing pure hit-and-trial to doing zero hit-and-trial. This is maybe too ambitious jump to make via theory alone. I should maybe aspire to go from pure hit-and-trial to a bit less hit-and-trial? But also I don't know if I should prioritise time for that honestly. I can make time ofcourse, but should I?
It's not a priority right now, we will see later.
2026-03-07
Increasingly feeling like the "I will figure out dating stuff later" thing is an excuse lol. Like, yes, technically I could just stay single for the next 5 years of my life while I fix ASI risk, and maybe my life will go fine that way. I will be lonely, sure, but I am already plenty lonely for reasons unrelated to women or dating, and I seem to manage regardless.
Finding the right person could accelerate my plans instead of act as an impediment. Especially since I'm often bottlenecking on vague hard-to-specify things like how to relate to the AI company people who are going to kill me (many unintentionally), or what my moral values are in response to people who I respect literally trying to kill me. I can imagine an outlier woman who would accelerate my process of figuring all this out, even if the average woman clearly can't. Honestly the higher neurotransmitter levels of being in a relationship alone, could help me figure out more shit on my own.
I really want to find someone with growth mindset for sure. They don't need to be as intense about it as I am, but it is painful for me to hang around people with zero growth mindset and willing to just accept problems. (I have personal experience hanging around such people, can't share here.)
ok fuck it we are adding "growth mindset" to the date me doc.
I'll be more precise. I want the downside in terms of lost attention and time spent on looking for a partner, to compensate atleast equal value in terms of accelerating me towards my goals once I actually find one.
Seems increasingly clear to me this whole curve is non-linear, like, you spend multiple years doing hit-and-trial, and suddenly you get quite good. And I'm like ugh, do I really wanna climb another non-linear curve in parallel with the one I'm already trying to climb? Two ideas can't stay at the top of my mind at the same time, as PG puts it.
update - reading jacob falcovich's blog is amazing, holy shit
reading this makes me want to put stuff in my dating profile - if I'm successful, I'll be in the history books, or something similar
"if you got something that few men want but even fewer women offer, that’s an advantage, not a disadvantage"
Clearly this is not a plus for most women (beyond just the generic, wanting a man with some goal). but I can imagine a few rare women who would be into something like this.
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