I'm going to be talking about mostly just my
thoughts on dating, at least personally.
This video is going to talk a lot about, like, personal anecdotes and, you know, my
approach to dating rather than
a general, you know, overview of dating in general.
And
that
may or may not be interesting to you. Like, why do you care about, you know, random
guy's,
uh, approach to dating
and my past experiences with dating and, you know, my future experiences and my
expectations for the future?
Uh, if that is not important to you, you know, feel free to skip this video.
You might end up learning some things that are useful to you,
you know, as a byproduct of this video, but do expect, you know, 80% of this video is
going to be about me and, you know, maybe 20% ends up being valuable to you, like, in
your own
dating life, uh,
relationships or marriage or
whatever stage you're in. Uh,
it's...
It may or may not be helpful to you, but, yeah, thought it may be interesting to share.
Uh, like the last video, uh, this is going to be, again, fairly authentic video.
I have never done a lot of preparation for this video.
Uh,
yeah, I have not done a lot of preparation and, uh,
yeah, unless something is coming across as, like, too offensive, there will still be
certain extreme things that I would just, you know, not say or, you know, edit out later.
But apart from that, I'm just generally going to try to just say as many things as
possible and if people get offended, you know,
up to a certain extent, I'm just not going to care about that.
Yeah, I think there's going to be a balance I'm going to end up having to strike in this
video because, you know,
certain things, certain aspects of dating are sensitive to talk about and that we talk
about publicly, you know, on a forum where you can end up getting huge number of
followers over it. Like,
some people may find it threatening
to see these things, you know, publicly discussed.
Uh, obvious context is, you know, I live in India and India is
mostly a religious country, you know, majority Hindu, minority Muslim,
and then there are some tiny, tiny...
Like, much smaller minorities of, you know, other religions like, you know, Amethists,
you know, Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, who are just tiny, tiny minorities.
And,
yeah, that
leads to an atmosphere with, you know, certain strong opinions about dating and
people with having, you know, certain mainstream opinions having a lot of power.
Not just, you know, political power.
Like, okay, I'm not, you know, talking about, you know, politics in India.
Like, okay, that is a thing. There are certainly religious people who have a lot of power
in society.
Uh,
I'm keeping all that aside and just talking about, uh, power
among,
let's say, you know, the previous generation of our society who does, you know, wield
more power just by virtue of, you know, them being older and having more wealth and
having established careers and reputations.
Uh, I think having built reputations is the important thing here.
Like, it's
not just about, okay,
how much money you have. If you have a strong reputation, that
too gives you a lot of potential power.
It's just
people who are in, you know, let's say, 20s or
teens just haven't built a reputation and therefore they don't have power.
I kind of see it that way.
So,
yeah, anyways, the point I'm... In this disclaimer, I'm basically saying that, yeah, some
aspects of this are going to be sensitive and there might be people who do not like me
talking about dating in whatever manner I'm talking about
and,
yeah, within certain limits I'm just not going to care about that.
If there are cer- certain things they find, you know,
anyone, you know, watching this finds too offensive, i might end up censoring it out.
That's possible. But otherwise, I'm just mostly going to talk about what I want.
Yeah, I think that was the disclaimer I wanted to give.
Yeah. Now, coming to my approach to dating. Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm 24.
Uh,
past experiences, I mean, I've been in one relationship which did not last very long.
It was short fun, but intense. Uh,
I'm currently not dating
and
I can talk more about why. I'm not sure if that's the right decision, but, yeah, at least
me... As of literally today, you know, 17th May, 2025, I'm
not really attempting to date, you know, that's not
something I'm doing. Uh,
yeah, and maybe I can talk about why, like, why I have ended up with this particular
decision or at this particular moment in time, why I'm not choosing to date.
Uh,
so, there is, like, a long-term planning going on and a short-term planning going on.
You know, I tend to think about these things a lot, like, I think about things a lot in
general and especially when I realize, "Okay,
which partner I'm with is going to be one of the
primary components of, you know, my quality of life." Like, what
matters
not just, you know, six months, one year from now, but even, let's say, 50 years from
now. Like,
uh, whether I have a partner and which partner I have is just going to impact my quality
of life a lot. Uh,
it could... Having a partner, having the right partner could enable me to get a lot of
things done, it could enable me to learn a lot more about the world and about myself,
which I may not have learned otherwise.
And, I mean, these things are iterative, right?
Like, uh...Like, there's this thing about
attention being iterative. Uh, how do I explain this?
It's just, if you have attention on one topic compounded over a huge amount of time,
uh, you make a lot of progress
at understanding that topic. And part of that thing, part of why you're making that
progress is because your attention keeps getting refocused, uh,
into, you know, what's most important things. So maybe I can give you a personal example.
So,
um,
yeah. Okay, back when I was in college, there was a phase in my life I got very
interested in, like, cryptocurrency and
motivation for that was, yeah, very great political, like, you know, kind of
motivation.
I thought, okay, these technologies can
change the structure of the world, at least politically in certain ways.
And at least at that time, I had bought in a lot into, you know, the hype around how this
will happen. I was
not fully convinced on the macroeconomic thing of like, okay, Bitcoin will become the
world currency or whatever, because I'd already studied a bunch of macroeconomics before
that, like,
you know, Keynesian economics and idea of certain interest rates,
certain non-zero interest rates actually making sense.
Like, a non-zero interest rate made sense to me.
So I did have certain reservations, but I went into it with, you know, fairly idealist
state of mind.
And
after spending one year in the space seeing, okay, most of the people here are not
idealists, they're just here for the money and
that too money not just, you know, by making a product, the money is all, you know, pump
and dumps or building infrastructure for pump and dumps or building infrastructure for
building infrastructure for pump and dumps, you know?
And then becoming more cynical and realizing, okay, I'm just in this space to make money
and then, you know, I made a bunch of money and then I left the space
and I learned a bunch of things from this experience.
And that lo-... Those set of learnings allow me to then, you know, make a second attempt
on similar ideas, but now I have more clarity on what exactly to pay attention to.
So, I learned, okay, payments is less important, information is more important when
you're trying to build, you know, like, distributed, resilient kind of society.
And people in cryptocurrency space are mostly focused on payments, but that's not the
important thing. So, now whenever I think, I'm just automatically going to be thinking
it, like,
in terms of information, not payments.
If someone brings me a new discussion whatsoever about, okay, you know, here's a
distributed way to run a society, any topic they could be talking about,
you know,
how does Tor work? They could be talking about how do we distribute, you
know, scientific research across, you know, multiple
countries or cities or whatever. How do we distribute it, you know, online?
Can we do online scientific communities?
Uh, if someone talks about, you know, how do we
preserve books, you know, like LibGen.
Like, someone talks about, you know, how will journalism change as a result of
internet, like,
in all these topics, when I approach them, now the first thing that is going to,
going to come to my mind is, you know, how the information is distributed, not, you know,
how the payments distributed. And just, payments are not important.
Don't think about payments. So,
that is a filter I've got because I spent a bit of time in the space.
And
that is what I mean when I'm saying when you spend
a q-... a lot of time on the same topic,
you learn to pay attention to what's important and what's not.
And that can happen iterative multiple times.
So,
okay, now I'm paying attention to information.
Now, information is again, very broad topic.
Again, I might further say end up paying attention either to, okay, you know,
distributed search engines, you know, distributing this infor-...
like, information, like maybe LibGen, or, you know, there are more politically sensitive
kind of things like, you know, whistleblowing, which
I publish on my website. You can go look at that. But even now, okay, there are...
Even out of all of these, you know, which is the most important thing?
What should I pay attention to? What should I ignore?
You know, that's now the second step I'm here and, you know, I'm here right now
thinking about whistleblowing or whatever.
So, yeah, I think attention has that iterative kind of aspect to it and
ideally if you...
Yeah, like, my utopian ideal kind of partner can do that iterative thing with
attention,
uh,
where we both collectively are able to, you know, help each other figure out, you know,
what is worth paying attention to. And, you know, I create on that, you know, over, you
know, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years.
And,
yeah, that's very utopian ideal, you know, that may not happen.
And I can talk more why that may not happen and all the rest that entail.
But, yeah, I think that seems valuable.
Uh,
what else? Oh, uh, what type of partner do I want in a long term?
Yeah. I think there's a part of me that's given up on the idea of,
like, an ideal partner and I'm starting to think
less in terms of, okay, what ideal partner do I find and more in terms of, you know,
what systems do I build so that even when things go non-ideal, uh, they kind of
work out anyway.
So, I'll give an ex- important example of that.
So,
I've basically decided I'm going to be polyamorous.
Uh,
this may not be a lifetime choice. It might be, it might not be.
Like, I'm unsure whether I want to be in a polyamous- polyamorous marriage or not.
And the way to find that out, the fastest way to find that out seems to just be, you
know, enter a polyamorous relationship.
Uh, by the way, context for those who don't know what a polyamorous relationship is,
basically, you have a relationship with multiple people at the same time or- Yeah. ...
at least you're open to having multi-...
relationship with multiple people at the same time.And the relationships are, you know,
not just for the ex. Like, you know, you can have the ex. That's allowed.
But, uh, you're also there for emotional support, you're also there for connection.
Like,
you want all the aspects of a relationship from multiple people.
Uh,
there are some nuances of even within, say, polyamorous relationships.
You know, different people might do it slightly differently.
You know,
one person might decide, you know, both their partners are living in the same house.
You know, one person may decide both their partners, you know, barely even speak to each
other.
Uh,
oh, there's also dynamics on, you know, how this works for straight people versus, you
know, homosexual people, you know. I'm straight, so
I can only comment on what it's like for straight people.
Yeah, and most importantly, most, most importantly, uh, because I live in
India I hardly get to see examples of this, so I don't have a lot of real world data on
ways this can succeed and ways this can fail, and I think that's really important.
I think relationships in particular are the type of thing where you can't work everything
out in your head. Uh, no matter how much I theorize about, you know, ideal relationships,
ideal relationship structures or whatever, at some point you just kind of need to play it
out in the real world and see what the outcomes are and learn from those outcomes.
And I played through that game, you know, 100 times.
Uh,
that has just not happened yet in India, so
I just have, lack real world data.
I have spent some time, you know, seeing videos or whatever, but
there's a separate sort of reason why people are not going to post, you know, their
relationship difficulties on YouTube, so...
Someone who posts their, you know, ideal polyamorous relationship on YouTube, you know,
they might be having certain difficulties which they just may not talk about and I would
not know about them and I would underestimate, you know, the base rates of any
actual relationship problem coming up or how it's resolved or so on
if I just watched, you know, YouTube videos.
So, yeah,
I want my next relationship to be a polyamorous one, uh,
and I want to talk about, you know, why. So...
Ah, there it is. Make it big, I think.
Okay, so,
there are multiple reasons. Uh,
one reason is just... and this might be the main reason, is just...
Okay, so, maybe I can compare this with friendships, like male friendships at least.
You know, as a guy I have other friends who are also guys, and
if I had to pick, you know, only one male
friend for my entire life, like, you know, this is your close, close male friend and
apart from this all your other friends are just not close, you just have to pick one,
I think I would automatically have, you know, insanely unrealistically high standards
for, you know, who that one friend should be.
Like, if I think about even, you know, the,
say a few friends from school, a few friends from college, few friends from other
places I do already have,
like,
they've been good to me in so many ways and they're just good natured people in so many
ways, but if I had to just pick one person I'm just going to be like,
"No, I'm not picking any of them." Like,
some of the best people I've ever met in my life just fall short of my own standard.
Like, my standard has gone that high that, you know, even the best people in my life kind
of fall short,
uh,
if I had to pick only one.
And...
Yeah, therefore it seems insane to me to, you know, to be like, "Okay, I will only have
one close male friend in my life." Like, don't do that.
(laughs) And obviously I don't. You know, I do have at least five to 10 close friends,
and that makes sense, and that also, like, say our closest, you know, people increase and
decrease distance over time, so, you know,
one of my close friends might be,
I don't know, let's say preparing for their exam and they don't really want to be, you
know, disturbed with random crap for the next six months and, you know, I can respect
that. (laughs) Like,
it's not difficult for me to be like, "Okay, you don't want to be disturbed for six
months, I won't disturb you for six months.
After that we'll talk," and I'll, you know, make a note in my calendar or whatever and
then go back and talk to them after six months.
Uh, someone else might just have very different value systems, or...
I think this is something
I have faced a little bit even fairly recently.
I don't want to share, you know, the personal details of the friend because, you know,
respecting their privacy.
Like, from my side I'm actually okay with putting all this stuff up online, but when it
comes to, you know, other people in my circle, you know, by default I assume, you know,
they want their privacy respected, so I'm not going to share this stuff, and by extension
the details of our relationship online.
But, yeah, I mean, the broader dynamic is just, you know, my values could be a certain
thing, their values might be a very different thing, and I might have this need of I want
people of my values right now. Not like ever, but like right now I want people of my
values to talk to and maybe they have a similar need of right now they want people of
their values to talk to,
and therefore we don't end up talking a lot to each other and that's also kind of fine.
You know,
we can remain friends in spite of that and
maybe we're not the closest possible friends but we're still friends and
we can still build a really long term bond that way.
Uh,
like there are, basically there are multiple reasons why friendships are valuable and
you can negotiate a lot of these things in a more fine-grained kind of manner, uh, with
male friendships. At least I can do that.
I'm not saying I'm very good at it, but at least I have the option to do that.
And all of that gets thrown out of the window, like
decimated, destroyed, खत्म,
uh, oh, I- I'll just use English. I don't know if anyone here...
I don't know if people here are Hindi speakers or not, I'm just going to assume, you
know, they're not and just use Hin- use English in this
video.Yeah,
I was talking about why all of that just goes out of the window when you decide, okay,
you're going to marry only one person.
Suddenly your standards are insanely high, suddenly there's a binary of, you know,
either you're going to marry this person or you're not.
I mean, the people do all sorts of intermediate transitionary kind of things, like, you
know, you'll just have sex with this person or you'll just be in a short-term
relationship with them, six months or one year.
I can talk separately about that maybe, but...
Yeah, ultimately most people are going to get married and spend, you know, five to 10
plus years in a long-term relationship. Not everyone, but most people.
And I think I also want that for myself, but ideally I want, you know, five to 10 plus
years relationship with, you know, woman.
Um,
and then
until you have found that
c- type of relationship, you're basically in a search phase, uh...
And your search phase ends up very binary of, you know, either this person is the...
is potentially their ideal person or no, they're not potentially their ideal person, in
which case, you know, maybe consider breaking up with them.
But I kind of hate that dynamic.
Yeah, I have personal experience with this and that's why I really have, you know,
special hatred for that dynamic
(laughs) of, you know, either they're the most important part of your... most...
one of the most important parts of your life or
they do not exist in your life. Like, these are the only two extremes you can take.
You can't pick any between.
Like, when I was talking about the friend, no, even the friend is pre- male friend is
preparing for an exam and therefore they want to be left alone for six months.
You
can't do that as easily with the person you're married to.
And again, partly because there's certain needs that...
At least in a monogamous marriage, there's, you know, certain needs that...
of yours that only your partner can fulfill.
And I'm not just talking about sex, by the way.
I mean, you know, emotional support, you know, practical decision making, you know, you
want input on your decision making, uh...
Other people want to know whether you've taken a collective decision or solo decision,
therefore you want at least, you know, the rubber stamp of approval from your spouse
that, you know, I took this decision.
They might think whatever, but at least,
you know, they give consent, okay, this...
their approval is also there on this decision, uh...
Yeah, there are multiple reasons. You're just kind of dependent on them and therefore you
can't just be like, "Oh, I don't want to talk to you for six months.
Leave me alone," or, "Oh, I don't like your value
system, I want to spend six months more with people of my value system, then I'll come
back to you," or, "Oh, I just want to, you
know, meditate for six months. I
don't want to interact with people, like, I just want to isolate from people in general
and you're also person, sorry. And also I want to be in a celibate for six months for
whatever reason, so, you know, sorry." (laughs) Like, you're just...
like, it's a lot harder to do any of those things when you're in a monogamous marriage
and just people don't.
Yeah, I think the thing I crave here more than anything else is just freedom, like, just
freedom to think, freedom to act
and
maintaining a huge amount of freedom while also, you know, fulfilling responsibilities,
commitments with other people
requires you to, you know, be able to dial the scale up and down.
Like, you can't be like either all in or zero.
Like, there need to be intermediate options in between
if, you know, you want a lot of your freedom and you also want them to have their own
freedom and you also want a relationship.
Like,
one thing that can obviously happen is, you know,
I want my freedom, they want their freedom, our relationship breaks apart and, you know,
we go our separate ways. That's always something that can happen.
But
if you want, you know,
you know together, like, you have some level of an actual relationship, but also you have
a huge amount of freedom, I think
being polyamorous makes more sense to me.
Like,
at least in a very theoretical way, it just makes a huge amount of sense.
Like,
to me at this point it seems kind of insane, like,
let's say if I did live in a world, hypothetically speaking, where, you know, most people
are polyamorous, like,
it would seem insane to me if someone decided that, okay, they want to be monogamous.
Oh yeah, this is a very interesting thought experiment I find
worth doing and I
wish I used more often. Maybe I should use this more often.
Like, whenever you see any, like, unusual culture, like, imagine a hypothetical world
where, you know, that was the dominant culture
and then think would it s- look so crazy or not.
And this is not just about polyamory, this is...
It could be anything. Like...
Um...
Okay, so I'll give an example. You know,
I live, or at least I grew up in, you know, Delhi, which is fairly, you know...
Nuclear families are common sight, kind of community.
Y- like some people have ex- like people have extended families, some people interact
with them, but in general, compared to, you know, the median of India, you know,
people have smaller family sizes. Like, usually more often it's the nuclear family of,
you know, your parents, your siblings, that's it. At least that's how it was in my case.
And I went and, you know, spent six months in Kohima, Nagaland, where I noticed a huge
number of people living in, you know, extended families.
And for me that was new.
And then I tried imagining a world where, you know, what if living in your extended
family in the same geographic location for your entire life was just normal and that was
dominant. Like,
like that was the majority and
not being with your extended family was, you know, unusual, what would a world like that
look like?
And-Living in Koima gave me a bit of a glimpse of that.
Not fully, but a bit of a glimpse of that.
And
so, that's just an example, you know?
Someone's different cultural norm,
it's not something I'm used to. It may not even be the majority thing, but just imagine
for now that's the majority thing, you know? How does the world change as a result?
Yeah, and you can also do this with like...
I guess living with an extended family is also not that minority.
You can take something even more minority than this. Uh...
Yeah, I guess maybe like
the stuff I keep writing about, about, you know,
privacy and surveillance. Like, imagine a world where just everyone posted all their
life information on the internet 24/7 by default.
Like, right now people don't do that.
There's a handful of people, you know, IRN streamers or whatever, who end up posting a
lot of their personal information online and just broadcasting their life online.
But
I try to imagine, you know, what would it be if, you know, that was just the norm and not
doing that was considered, you know, unusual.
Like, people looked at you weird if you're, like, not posting your life online.
And, yeah, I think that's also an interesting thought experiment.
So yeah, this is this cultural reversal test, you know, whatever minority culture you're
looking at, imagine that was the majority culture and just imagine what that world would
be like. So yeah, coming to polyamory, yeah.
Polyamory just makes a lot of sense to me because, yeah, one reason is
if I apply the, you know, cultural reversal test of if, if this was majority,
would you want to be monogamous? And I'm like, obviously, obviously not.
Like, this just seems so obvious to me, but this is all just theory.
It's possible, you know, when I actually am in a polyamorous relationship, I run into
difficulties which I'm not able to foresee right now. That's entirely possible.
Yeah.
So anyways, that's what I want. How do I find it? Yeah.
The thing is,
very few people in India who are polyamorous, or at least to
openly declare themselves as polyamorous.
Like, they're honest with themselves and honest to other people about the fact that this
is what they want in life.
You know, I have my own biases, you know, I think there's a certain amount of, you know,
people stuck in
situations that won't let them be honest about what they want.
Not just for other people, like, being honest with other people is a separate thing.
First, you need to be honest with yourself.
Like, I think people, again, who are not straight, probably have experiences with this,
like, where you're, let's say, gay and you're just in denial of the fact that you're gay.
You lie to yourself. And that happens even a lot before, you know, okay, you don't want
to tell other people.
So yeah, I think there are some people in India who are probably doing this with respect
to polyamory. There's obviously a lot of people who have just never heard of the concept,
and
that makes sense. Like...
if you don't know of a good option that's available to you in life, uh,
you might just not
take it because you're just not aware of its existence, right?
Okay, even if you say, okay, maybe 200 years ago, like I just...
In most places of the world, not just in India, like even probably, let's say, you know,
in Europe, uh,
most people just did, you know, monogamous marriage, no other relationship, just first
person they marry and maybe it's not even them marrying, maybe it's, you know, them being
married off. Uh,
and it's possible they were more happy with that kind of situation than, you know,
someone would be today because
they were straight up unaware that, you know, better options exist.
Like, they could be happier. Like, they did not realize, like,
they did not do the cultural reversal test I'm talking about here.
Imagine it was possible for you to date people before you decide on your life partner.
Imagine, you know, you could pick your own partner instead of, you know, someone else
picking it for you, like...
It's possible a lot of people 200 years ago just straight up did not think about these
things.
That was a minority thing.
That was not a thing most people... That was maybe a thing only a few people did and
they could not imagine a world where, okay,
most people actually are picking their own partners.
Like, that's just
not something that entered the imagination of a lot of people, at least in India 200
years ago.
And, like, there is a happiness to, you know, ignorance.
Like, uh,
even right now, like, there is a happiness to not knowing what
utopia could look like.
Like,
I don't know, I just... I don't want to talk too much about this because I will end up
going on a very different tangent, but
I think a lot of things that upset me about the world as it exists today
and don't seem to upset other people
could be just because I'm looking at it from a very future oriented view.
Like, imagine
Samuel from 50 years in the future looking backwards, uh, at
2025.
Uh, it's just people in society in 2075...
Who the fuck is this?
Uh, imagine people in 2020... '75, imagine they had managed to figure out much
better, you know, cultural norms that were much more friendly and so on.
And they look back at our society, a lot of them- lot of things are just going to look
wrong and painful and morally, like,
incorrect. And, you know, just tragedies that we fail to solve. Like...
once you're in the much better place, you know, a lot of- a lot of things are just going
to look horrible.
But when you're in the horrible, you know, that hor- that horrible is not horrible for
you, it's just normal
(laughing) .Yeah, I think that's my thoughts on
utopia and
yeah, it's possible some aspects...
And again, this is all me speculating without actual data, but it's possible some aspects
of our society are just like
a kind of utopia for, you know, people in the 1800s.
Like,
it kind of exists, you know, on a piece of paper that most people have never read and
people have just not imagined what it's like living inside utopia rather than just, you
know, writing about it.
I don't know, I'm kind of upset about that.
Like I don't want to make this, you know, one-hour video on utopia and my thoughts on
utopia and on cultural reversal tests, but
it seems pretty damn relevant, like I'm
suggesting, you know, I want to be in a relationship style which, you know,
was
pretty unpopular just 10 years ago and is still unpopular today.
So,
it seems
relevant that I'm thinking a lot about these things, you know, how the moral fashions,
moral trends, you know, how the moral values of a culture change over time, over, you
know, generations.
Uh, what does utopia look like? Uh,
when I started making this video, I did not think I'm going to end up talking a lot about
utopia, but seems more than I'm going to end up.
Actually, you know what, I'm going to keep that topic for a separate video.
I'm not going to talk about it today, intentionally twice, yeah.
Yeah, okay, I was talking about, you know, long term no one predicted.
Yeah, I mean, the remaining things are just kind of boring things.
Okay, so one thing I've increasingly realized which is very important is, you know, which
city do I live in, like many years of my life.
For multiple convergent reasons it seems obvious to me I should
probably be leaving India and...
At least so far from the handful of people I've talked to,
like two potential options look to be either San Francisco or Berlin,
and both of those are going to require me to get funding in some way.
I think Berlin is a lot less likely,
San Francisco is a lot more likely.
Yeah.
I do wonder if there's a coincidence, like is it a coincidence that for two
entirely different reasons I'm still considering, you know, the same two cities?
Like
one reason is, okay, just career-related, you know, where
are the really good hackers, where are, you know,
just
great developers, where are the teams of, you know, Tor or Signal or Tails
or, you know, the blockchain community.
Actually blockchain is kind of distributed but keeping that aside.
Yeah, there is the open source community, there are people who distribute bugs, like,
just from like tech and early career kind of lens it seems
intuitive that, okay, San Francisco and Berlin are the two places where
I might end up wanting to go.
But I want to go even right now, like if I had the option to go today I would just go
today, I just, I don't have the option yet.
Yeah, and now when I come through an entirely different lens of, okay, what relationship
do I want, I again end up with an unusual relationship style which is more likely
to be practiced in these two places.
I mean, there's definitely an aspect of just
wealth and individualism
where, you know, the more money you have, the more
insulated
you are from other people. Like,
like when you don't have money you are more dependent on other people, like,
even for practical things, like,
you know.
Yeah, it could be straight up financial help, you know, you need a loan for your 100
dollars or whatever, uh,
to
a lot of logistics, so when you have money you can just substitute money for a lot of
logistics. So, for example, you know, I do not own a vehicle because managing a ve-
maintaining a vehicle is a bunch of logistics I can't be arsed with dealing with,
therefore I'll just pay for, you know,
you know, Rapid or Uber rides.
Whereas if someone really wants to save money it probably makes sense for them to
purchase their own, you know, bike and drive their own bike and, you know, fill the
petrol for the bike.
Like this, the vehicle is just an example, there's a lot of logistics related tasks which
you can just substitute if you have money.
That is, if you have less money you'll be depending on other people for them.
And, yeah, this is the, from the perspective someone who's young on, on the outside
looking in, like,
I have never lived a life, you know, in the middle class or even like the lower middle
class,
so I do not have a first-hand experience of what it's like.
I've always grown up in like an upper middle, almost like lower upper kind of class.
Yeah, I think I'm either upper middle or I'm like lower upper, at least in terms of
cultural norms. So,
I would say someone who has, you know, a million dollars is technically lower upper.
So, by that metric, you know, my family has a million dollars so they technically count
as lower upper, uh,
but they have internalized, you know, the cultural norms
of the middle class, like,
they would value knowledge, they would not value, let's say, ownership of business.
Uh,
again, sorry, I don't want to talk too much about my parents, again, you know, respecting
their privacy, the same, same thing.
Uh...But,
yeah, anyways, my point is that just having more money gives you more freedom.
And this is a very practical kind of thing of, you know,
you don't need people if people don't need you.
And it's possible both of maybe these two choices that we get.
I want a certain unusual type of relationship and, you know,
I want a certain unusual type of career.
It's possible both of those are
in an important way just downstream of me having a lot of freedom
or me, you know, fighting for it, or
realizing that that freedom is really important to me.
Maybe there's just an aspect of that going on. It's possible this...
I'm not sure if that fully explains it though.
Like,
uh,
yeah. And the reason I'm saying that is because, you know, people, let's say, I don't
know, in London are also, you know, wealthy. People in New York City are wealthy.
You know, people in, say, China, uh, you know, Guangzhou or Shanghai or Beijing are also
wealthy.
Uh, people in, you know, South Korea are wealthy.
But I would, at least from what I read online, it does not
make sense for me to, you know,
go to South Korea, for example.
Even though, you know, certain people who, yeah, are in, you know, upper middle class of
South Korea have a huge amount of individual freedom too.
Like, what I can do. Like, sure, they might
face more social judgment, but they're also more insulated from social judgment.
At least that's the sense I get that people are leading fairly individualized lives there
as well.
But again, I would not think of going to South Korea as, you know, my top
choice of which city I want to, you know, spend my life in.
So, yeah, there is definitely a strong, you know,
class-related reason why
there's a lot of class-related influences, you know, how I'm thinking about, you know,
what type of relationship I want. I think that's an important thing to recognize.
(sighs) Anyways, coming back to practical, you know, me and finding a partner.
Uh,
yeah, I mean, I most likely don't want to stay in India the rest of my life.
I'm unsure about that though. There may be practical things that
shift my position on that one way or the other, but at least as of right now I want to at
least experiment living in places outside of India.
And
after the experiments, you know, I can take a final decision.
And, of course, whatever type of relationship I want, it's going to be a lot easier to
find, you know, outside of India. And...
But when I say a lot easier, I don't mean it'll be easy. I'm just saying easier, so yeah.
Hmm.
Yes. I mean, one simple answer for me could just be, you know, don't bother with dating
right now. Once you get the shift, you know,
especially not just like for a one-month period experiment, but actually shift long term.
Then you can figure it out and until then just, you know, don't date, don't focus on it.
And
there's a good chance, you know, maybe that's just the answer, like that's a, that solves
the problem. Don't date for one year, two year, or however long it takes for you to get
funding. Once you get funding, you know, you shift.
It's possible that's it.
Oh, if anybody knows me and they think, you know, this solution is that simple too, you
know, just tell me. Like,
it'll
help me sort of get advice and feedback on this.
Yeah.
There's also more specific difficulties I'm running into more in the short term. Okay.
So until now I was talking about, you know, long-term considerations around, you know,
which city I live in, around polyamory,
around, you know, my career being my priority in life right now, rather than, you know,
finding a relationship.
Yeah. So those are, like, long-term kind of considerations.
There's also short-term things, like, uh,
yeah, I just seem very fixated on, like, AI risk, and I need to work on AI risk, and I
need to work on, you know, surveillance, and I have these certain specific ideas, like
I'm living in the future, other people are living in the present, and you know, I make
the... Like, I need to drag the future backwards into the present.
Like,
I feel the sense of I need to do this, like, this is
who I am.
And that makes me lonely, and that also makes me feel like I don't have a lot of spare
attention for anything else, like,
like the thing is not spare time, it's spare attention, Like,
a lot of the times nowadays when I read people talking about time, like they don't have
enough time for this, or they don't have enough time for this, or, you know, invest time
in this and don't invest time in that.
Like, I start, you know, mentally substituting the word "time" for the word attention in
a lot of these discussions,
because even now, right now, like, you know, today I'm free.
At least I have a bunch of free time.
Like, I work, you know, like six days a week.
I keep, you know, like one day free
to avoid burning out.
And
I could be, you know, choosing to do some activity that increases my odds of finding a
partner in the one day I have free,
but I'm not doing that.
Yeah, and when I say activity, I mean this could mean...
One is just, you know, literally going on dates.
So I have, you know, a bunch of people who wanted to meet me and chose not to meet any of
them.
Uh, that was a little bit painful. But, yeah, I mean, I did match with, you know, three,
four women in the past couple of weeks.
I
ended up,
yeah, distancing from all of them. Intentional
choice.And that is part of what prompted me to, you
know, think again about dating. Like, do I even want to date? You know, what am I doing?
(laughs)
So yeah, the thing is not that I don't have spare time, but... I have time.
I have time right now. The thing is I don't have spare attention.
You know, even if I go meet someone, I'm not going to be able to give full attention to
the things they care about and the things they want and the things they need and the
things they want to feel heard and understood about,
because I'm just so fixated on, you know, my things.
Like, I feel if I pay too much attention to the other person's thing,
I will lose the motivation to work on my thing.
Like, I feel this need to, you know, really safeguard my social circle.
Like, this is not even a rational thing, it's a very
emotional, instinctive kind of thing where I spend time with people who care about all
random things, like
they want to play board games, or
they just want to focus on their career, or,
or maybe slightly more ambitious than that, they want to, you know, quit their tech job
and, you know, start a startup, and they're figuring out the
difficulties that come with that, and...
Yeah, I can spend little time with them, but again, if I spend a lot of time with them, I
get the sense of, "These are fundamentally not my people."
Like, it's that in-group, out-group kind of thing. Like, uh...
You know, psychologically, you feel, you know,
these are my people or these are not my people, and I feel, you know, these are not my
people with literally everyone. I feel this with many of my friends, I feel this way
with,
you know,
lots of strangers I meet.
Like, emotionally, I'm already primed to be like, you know, "These are not my people."
And then I feel this like, "Oh, if I pay attention to your thing, I'll lose motivation to
work on my thing."
And this is a general thing I'm facing, not just when dating, but it also affects general
dating life.
Yeah, and I think it makes sense for me to just not date.
Like, if I can't offer full attention to the other person even for, you know, you know,
two hours a week, like,
I should just not date. I think that just makes sense.
There's also a thing I'm like, is most people don't have that much to offer to me
anymore. (laughs)
And maybe there are a few rare people.
I think there are a few rare people on this earth who do have a lot to offer me,
but most people just don't. Like,
I did think about this in a very intellectual, you know, what can a human being offer me,
what can I offer another human being? I even have notes from this on my website.
Uh,
but yeah, I don't care about the random crap advice that most people in my
life give me.
I don't feel emotionally supported by, you know, the emotional
support that people can offer me.
I don't want to do, you know, the fun activities like, you know,
uh,
playing... You know,
going for some hobby together, you know, visiting a new place in the city,
you know, eating, drinking,
uh,
I don't know, sports. I'm just not interested in any of these things
and that I don't care, and they see always as, you know, pulling, competing for, you
know, my time and energy.
And again, I have personal experience with this. You know, the...
Again, the only relationship I've been in, you know, when I did break up, like one minor
reason was this practical thing of, you know...
Again, sorry. See all of the examples I want to actually really discuss, I end up, you
know, not discussing because, you know, respecting the privacy of the other person.
But yeah, there was an aspect of my past relationship where, you know, the other person
wanted to have fun activities together, which
is a thing most human beings kind of want, and I didn't want that, and
that was not the main reason we broke up, but there was a minor
difference there too. But um,
yeah, I don't want shared activities.
I don't really want to talk. Like,
I...
This might just be me having gotten used to being, living in a fairly isolated way for so
long,
but I think it's deeper than that. Like,
living isolated for very long has made me used to, you know, not talking to anyone,
but also, I'm now more conscious about, you know, why are we talking?
Like, "What is the goal of this conversation?" is the question I ask myself now in
many conversations.
And that just makes me not interested in talking when I realize, okay,
I don't want their advice, I don't want their emotional support, I may not learn anything
of value. Like, they have no knowledge to transfer to me.
Uh, I don't want shared activities with them, so, you know, why am I even talking?
I end up asking myself these types of questions.
And this is not 100% true. Like, I'm sure a lot of people have some knowledge or the
other to transfer to me, but...
Yeah, it's maybe not worth... It does not feel worth the time and energy investment for
me to find, you know, that part of their personality where they do have something to
offer to me, and, you know, interpret and then get value out of that, and just... Yeah.
Because, yeah, relationships just take time, you know.
You can't meet one, like someone for an hour and get, you know, who they are, like all
the parts of themselves. You just get one part of themselves, you know, surfaced to you.
And it's probably one of the less interesting parts by default, because, yeah, because
trust will not build. I can
talk an entire video about that, you know, why people suppress information and, you know,
conflicts and how they suppress information, how they suppress the truth, how they
suppress, you know, people's true selves.
That's an entire separate topic we can talk about
in a different video.
So anyways, now the point.
The conclusion of all these, you know, societal things going on is, okay, relationships
take time to build
and it takes time to find, you know, what value they can offer
you.And I don't
have the time... Sorry, I don't have the attention, the amount of sustained attention
over time required to, you know, actually extract that out of another person.
(laughs)
I mean, this part's not funny, but I do joke at this point, like,
the only reason I really seem to want a relationship anymore is to have sex basically.
And it's possible if I had enough of that, I mean, I might stop caring about that too.
Like,
oh, yeah, this is the type of sensitive discussion some people are going to get mad at me
about. But, uh,
yeah, so, you know, when I was a virgin, I thought that, okay, well, sex seems extremely
important. And then I had sex and then I thought, "Okay,
with,
yeah, with a random person, or with a,
with a sex worker, right? Uh,
at that moment I was, okay, this is not that valuable either, but maybe I should be in an
actual relationship. Maybe that would be different. And I was correct.
Like, you know, being in a relationship is an entirely different experience from being
with a sex worker. And
then I was in a relationship and, you know, that was fun.
It was amazing and certain days. I
think I'm not going to talk a lot about that.
But the conclusion I'm trying to bring up is,
yeah, the more,
at least in my personal life, you know, the more I've had, you know, experiences of sex,
I just started to value that less and less.
And that does make me wonder, you know,
if I did have this, you know, maybe I would stop caring as much about it,
because that already seems to be happening anyway.
So,
yeah, but
at least from very, you know, practical and utility kind of point of view, you know, what
can I offer the other person, what can the other person offer me?
I'm starting to find less and less reason to, you know, be in relationships
with anyone. Like,
I think at least in the short term, and this is a short-term thing, this is not a
long-term thing, because in the long term, it's very obvious to me that
at least some people can have a huge amount of value to offer me.
Like, my life will just completely be transformed as a result if, you know, I spent my
life single versus if I had, you know, a
marriage for, you know, 10, 20 years.
Those are just going to look like completely life, different life trajectories.
So I know in the long term, people can offer a lot of value.
To me, it's just in the short term. I don't...
For
me, in 2025, what I'm making out of life in 2025, like, people just don't have
that much to offer to me and I'm not
able to find the people who do.
And it's possible some of that is, you know, my preconceptions and how I'm approaching
this rather than, you know, fault of the people themselves.
And that is something I need to think more about.
Yeah, there's also
the
practical,
yeah, the very practical, mundane things of,
you know, how do you actually do this? Right?
All, what I'm talking right now is, you know, theoretical things of, theoretical plus
past experiences of, you know, what I want, don't want, what is available, what's not
available, and so on. But then this, the actual question will be, you want X, how do you
go and get X?
And in this case, you know, it's a partner. Like, I want a certain type of partner.
How do I actually go out there and find a certain type of partner and...
Yeah, ironically enough, I think me making the YouTube videos here
is motivated by that.
Like, it comes down to basically attention and capital.
So,
you know, attention and capital, they go, go around.
They're like scarce resources in life.
And I think attention is more valuable than capital, but that's a whole separate
discussion I won't get into right now.
I mean,
it's just attention and capital are just so fundamental to my world models of everything.
So...
Should I even be talking about that? Because that's an entire video all by itself.
So when I talk about, you know, Maslow's hierarchy, what do people want?
It's like, you know, the
first stage is, like, capital, you know, shelter. You know. Not, not shelter, sorry.
You know, food, water,
uh, toilet, et cetera.
And then a little bit above there is, you know, self-esteem, status, you know,
friendship, love, and
that is attention. See, capital below, attention above.
There is, you know, how power is built in society, that means basically accumulating
excess attention, excess capital, which, you know, then you can delegate to other people
or redistribute in some way. So, you know, billionaires have capital, politicians have
attention.
Power is built by accumulating leverage, huge amounts of attention and capital.
Uh, there's that lens to it.
There's, uh,
another lens which can be, you know, more, like,
spiritual, ideological, you know.
Which ideologic- ideologies succeed and how
they get attention
from you without requiring...
without, you know, offering you capital.
So,
one way of getting someone's attention is just, you know, you pay them and they pay
attention to you, but that's often not the most valuable type of attention.
And let's say religion manages to get your attention without paying you.
And even... Okay, right now I'm talking about marriage, right?
So I
want, you know, another person's attention without paying them for it, obviously. And...
I guess my point in all this is just I realized, yeah, how much attention I acquire is,
is again, it's like instrumental convergence.
There's a lot of different things I want to do in life that will become a lot easier
if I had, you know, a huge amount of attention on me, right?
If I had, you know, a YouTube channel with 100 million subscribers, a lot
of-Completely unrelated problems in my life
just disappear. A lot of completely unrelated objectives in my life can be achieved if I
had a YouTube channel with 100 million subscribers.
One of them is, you know, finding someone to marry.
But that's not the only one. There's a lot more than that you can do with that kind of
attention.
And I'm not very optimistic that, you know, me making these random videos means I will
get 100 million subscribers. Like, if I want 100 million subscribers, that has to be, you
know, my full-time job. I spend 24/7,
six days, seven days a week thinking about how to grow the channel,
and that's not what I'm going to do. Again, intentional choice.
I'm choosing not to do that for certain important reasons.
But yeah, strangely enough, I do still think, you know...
And this is a bet I'm making. This bet could turn out wrong.
But the bet right now is, you know, I am more likely to find my life partner through my
YouTube channel than through my... Than through a dating app or than through, you know,
friends of friends, or, you know, meeting someone at a meetup.
I think those methods are less likely, and the channel is going to be more likely.
And, okay, maybe this is me registering a bet, and, you know, maybe two years from now we
can see
if I found a partner in two years, or five years from now if I found a partner in five
years, you know? When that happens, we can, you know, come back and see if the bet was
correct or not.
Yeah, and this is something I've thought a lot about, you know, just
why does the internet suck so hard at connecting people with similar, similar anything,
you know? Similar thoughts, similar values, similar interests, similar
beliefs, similar needs, similar wants, similar things to offer.
Like,
why does the internet just really, really suck at this?
Like, again, this is the thing about utopia.
Once you imagine in your head what utopia can look like, then you realize how much the
real world actually sucks.
Yeah, so for example, why can I not just have a,
you know, like, a...
or should I say text document of every polyamorous person in India,
and
I can just run a bunch of AI filters through that and get it down to maybe 50 people.
And then I can browse those 50 profiles manually and, you know, email a bunch of them,
right?
Like, this entire process can be just done in one day.
Like,
why are people strategizing for months on end on how to find a partner when you can,
like, start the first important step in one day in an ideal world, right?
And the practical reasons why this don't happen, by the way, you know?
People are not on dating apps. There are societal reasons why people will not
openly tell or even think about their relationship status.
Uh,
dating apps are very short term, kind of.
Like,
if you're not on the app for one week, you know, your profile goes off the app.
And
that places selection effects for the people who are mostly on the app, such as people
who are on the apps all the time.
So someone like me who's not...
Who sometimes ends up using a dating app but is not, like, using it, you know, every day.
Like, there are many months of my life I just... I'm not using a dating app.
I don't care. Including right now.
And
yeah, that means my profile is not going to be shown to someone, even if, you know,
they're the ideal partner for me or whatever.
Yeah. Then there's, you know, deeper things advice.
You know, some dude in, uh, probably the US because...
Dude, it's a woman, right? Uh, the... Who's the CEO of Match Group?
I mean, so bunch of these dating apps, uh, Tinder, Hinge, uh,
I think Coffee Meets Bagel, uh, basically a bunch of them are all owned by this one woman
who maintains a very anonymous friend's profile.
Uh,
yeah, I read more about it and I forgot. I have notes on... about her.
I mean, you basically just check who's the CEO of Match Group and the shareholders of
Match Group, and then you can go do some research on them if you want.
Yeah, so there is a thing where, you know, connecting people over the internet has become
a game of, you know, who can acquire the most amount of power that way.
Again, it comes back to attention, you know?
You need to keep sustained attention in a relationship.
If there's someone, an intermediary between you can aggregate a huge amount of attention,
that attention gives them power. They can, you know, then go win an election with that or
whatever.
And
when I want to find a partner, I'm not thinking about, you know, which intermediary will
help win an election because they helped me find a partner.
(laughs) But yeah, the world does work in that sort of way, you know?
The
way attention works on the internet has not yet figured out. And...
yeah.
Yeah, I mean, ideally...
I mean, I am convinced that the way to
do anything unusual is to do it over the internet, not through real life,
because you can directly be instantaneously connected with other people who also want to
do that weird thing.
But there is also a sense in which, you know, your society has failed if all these
individuals are just sitting individually in their different pockets in society versus if
they had actually succeeded and built a community.
Like, uh... Again, actually I've talked a lot about dating apps.
Let me just take a non-dating example for now.
Uh...
Things for which community don't exist.
Uh...Yeah,
I mean, I can give us big board games as a simple example, actually.
Bangalore is a place... You know, I'm in Bangalore right now.
Bangalore is a place where you'll find,
like, a lot of
(music drowns out speaker)
... board games. But if you're in a smaller city in India, you're just not
going to ever attend a board game meetup.
You might be interested in board games, but the only way to play board games with other
strangers is to go play online.
(music playing)
Yeah, but I think that's how you... That's slightly different example of in a small city
versus, you know, big city.
(music playing)
I don't know. I'm not able to think at the top of my head, like what are some unpopular
hobbies for that? I don't know. Anime, maybe. Oh, yeah, okay.
Let me take anime as an example.
I don't watch anime, but I know people who watch anime, and
there are not a lot of, you know, anime meetups or events or conventions or whatever that
go on,
but there are, you know, a fair number of people in India who are interested in anime,
and they mostly connect online,
but there's no, like, in-person community.
Yeah, and part of the reason there's no reason for an in-person community beyond a
certain point, like, it's just watching a bunch of shows at the end of the day.
It's not an in-person thing. Like, let's say board games or badminton or something, you
need another person to actually play with, so there's more immediate incentive for you to
enter an in-person community. With dating also, there's
more immediate incentive to enter an in-person kind of community.
Like, you would want to enter a community where...
The community doesn't have to be aimed at dating, but the community could be over
something else, but you know, directly, indirectly, through that community, you may end
up finding a partner. Like,
that seems efficient.
Like, if you want, uh...
I, I know in some circles, people do exactly this, like, you know.
If you're a Tamil Brahmin or whatever, you want another Tamil Brahmin as a comm- as
a, you know, life partner, you'll
hang around in the community of Tamil Brahmins, and you'll...
Within that tool, you can, you know, search for men and women of your interest.
So, for some communities, that works, but for a lot of others,
ideas again, let's talk about anime, or let's talk about, you know, polyamorous
relationships or whatever, just, you know, communities don't exist, or at least, you
know, where I live right now, they don't exist.
(music playing)
I think I'll
have to live in a few more cities in this...
in the world to get to know more about, you know,
what communities exist in university cities.
Actually, I can Google a bunch of this and get information online.
Like, a lot of these meetups get posted online too.
So, if I want to know, you know, is there an anime community in London, I can just Google
it and, you know, find out.
And maybe it exists in London and it doesn't exist in Bangalore, and maybe there's some
reason for that.
(music playing)
Yeah. Can you say, like, what... Very distracted I was talking, but into practical
reality of how do you get a lot of attention so that you find a partner?
And there are multiple ways of getting attention.
One of them is a YouTube channel.
It... You can basically broadly divide it into online versus offline, and online methods,
you know, dating an app is one method, or YouTube channel is another method, uh...
Yeah, and I see both of these as kind of failed.
Like, if you're doing either of these, you're kind of failing.
The ideal would be
Google Search, find the right community, and then just go meet the community in person.
And the reason you have resorted to either of these is because you're
not trying to find a community, you're trying to find an individual who's just as
isolated and autonomous as before,
and
that's bad. Like, from the
perspective of, you know, utopia, that's bad.
Like, if I imagine the utopia, I'm like,
yeah, spending multiple years of your life to find a partner when you could have found
him in one day instead, like, that's just a horrible waste of time and energy.
(music playing)
But, yeah, I think practically, when it comes to me, I think,
yeah, I'm going to spend more time focusing on this.
Yeah, maybe once a week, once or tw- in two weeks, I'll...
On some frequency, I will post videos online, and
maybe after one or two years, I don't know, I don't...
I don't actually know how this experiment will play out, and I think that also makes it
kind of interesting.
But, yeah, it's possible, you know, one year, two years later from now, you know,
I end up marrying, you know, someone who I identify through the YouTube channel.
That seems plausible. (laughs)
(music playing)
And, oh, to be clear, obviously, that's
not
the
only reason I'm making the channel, like...
If you're watching my videos, don't get the impression, oh, I'm making all this for my
future partner. Like, no, that's, (laughs) that's, that's a side benefit, that's not the
goal, you know? Like, attention is valuable to me for more reasons than just finding a
partner, and
I am making these videos to get attention which I can use towards other goals than
just that.
Yeah, I think my YouTube channel so far is kind of selfish in a certain way, you know?
Like, again, this comes back to, you know, the YouTube channel is not my main goal.
If the channel was my main goal, I would be focusing a lot more on what value can I offer
you,
because that's what is going to get you, you know, like, subscribe, whatever, and just
pay attention to me. Like, I need to offer something of value to you in return.
And hearing me ramble about my dating challenges does not offer exactly value
to you.
And therefore, I will get less subscribers or whatever.
As in, I'll be, I'll be aware of all this.
Uh,
but I'm doing this anyway. I'm making a bet on a slightly different thing.
I'm not making a bet on, oh, I will get 100 million subscribers and that's the way to go.
Like, if that happens, as a side effect, that would be amazing, but that's not the
primary thing I'm betting on here.
(music playing)
Yeah, I think I did not explain some things a lot in detail, like, why do I
immediately, you know, reject all the in-person methods of finding a partner?
Why do I immediately go to online methods?
And
I did not explain
a lot about the whole, you know,
individualist lifestyles versus, you know, living in family kind of lifestyle. This...
That's a entire topic you can speak on for hours about, and I did not speak a lot on
that. I spoke a bit, but not a lot.
Uh, I did not talk a lot about, you know, career versus relationships as a topic.
I think that is, again, a topic you can speak for hours about. I did not.
Yeah, I think this is like a one-hour summary kind of video, but
I think, yeah, one hour is a good length, and
I've briefly covered everything I wanted to,
so I think I'm going to just end the video right now.
Bye.