Personally, I’ve only ever been on three dates my entire life — all of them with women I met on Hinge while I was active on it last year. None went past the first date. When my account was new, I got more matches than I could reasonably handle. But that slowly changed into a trickle, and eventually no matches for months on end. I had lots of motivation to meet someone in the beginning; now I begrudgingly feel resigned to my reality. Who knows, maybe it could’ve been a different story if I was a bit taller, went to a different school, or was a different ethnicity. But there isn’t much I can do about those things. In the meantime, I’m just trying to keep in shape and take care of myself in ways that I can.
Oh, I have confidence alright. I’m confident I can single-handedly cause a sev at work. Jokes aside, I think I know where I stand compared to my peers skills-wise. I try to make up for it in other ways though, and it hasn’t been a problem for my employer so far.
I guess that’s the kind of advice that I’m trying to avoid. I can understand and appreciate someone telling me to be more assertive, take care of myself physically etc. and I’d have no problem with it. But a lot of the pickup artistry stuff goes beyond that into things that even I can tell are unhelpful.
Another piece of anecdata: a major bank and credit card issuer on the East Coast has started staffing in Mexico. You’ve definitely heard of them or even actually use their services if you’re American. They led a multi-year long tech “transformation” for which they hired heavily, especially new CS graduates. That’s now been scaled back considerably, and it’s H1B contractors as far as the eye can see. The irony is that the Indian H1Bs that undercut the local workforce are now being undercut themselves by Mexican contractors.