Welcome Avatar! We had our Frankfurt post ready to go but the people have chosen! In a great mood now that the year is almost over. Everyone in the know is aware that things have slowed.

If you prepared, you were a subscriber here! You’re already sitting pretty and won’t be surprised when cuts come from industries outside of tech.

Outside of the economy, we enjoy summarizing our views of the US and the cultural trends. The trendy thing is to make fun of young girls on podcasts and have a bunch of weird dudes larp that they are amazing catches themselves (they are not). So. We can connect the economy to the transaction nature of US culture in a single post. It’s all connected and the result of logical conclusions.

Part 1: Rich or Poor

This is the trend. It’s not getting better any time soon.

2020-2022 was the most absurd change in wealth disparity we will ever see in our lifetimes. Even the masses know that this is the case.

The division was so fast that everyone knows at least one person who went from a nobody to retired in under a year. It’s too obvious and too painful to ignore.

On the other end of the spectrum, the people who got pummeled by government intervention, lock downs and income volatility were crushed. Pushed down from being upper middle class straight into the lower middle class. COVID undoubtedly caused tons of families to break apart.

Was any of that fun to write? No not really. No one reads this side of the web for fun. They read it to get a direct view of what happened and what the future likely entails.

Thesis - USA Now a Culture of Transactional Relationships

When you put economic stress into peoples lives they are *forced* to think more transactional.

If you’re struggling to pay bills you have to think about every decision you’re making and how to maximize your future. You’ve been tossed down the economic ladder and want to get back to where you were. Can’t be wasting time with go-no-where relationships.

Reflected in Dating

Assuming you agree with that premise now you understand why the dating market is completely broken and won’t recover any time soon. Unless you’re naive, the easiest way to understand the differences between men and women is simple:

• Women want to improve their lifestyle and have a hard/impossible time going backward. Ideally the guy is funny, tall and good looking as well

• Men want women who are more attractive than they are. They don’t want women with a rolodex of 50 boyfriends all of whom were richer/better looking and more successful than them. They know they will always be compared. Ideally the girl enjoys cooking but being honest if the guy is ultra rich he doesn’t even value that very much either since it’s a drop in the bucket to the expense line

If any of this is offensive it’s probably time to move your mouse to the X button and click close. It’s the way the world works *generally* and the 1% exception to the rule is unlikely going to happen (unless you’re watching Disney).

Assuming you’re still here we can move onto putting these pieces together to explain the transaction nature of the USA going forward.

Mobility is Down: Since we can agree that COVID-19 increased the massive divide between rich and poor, we can agree that the middle class got pushed down quite hard.

• If an attractive girl was used to living a $100K a year salary lifestyle… she’s being pushed down into a worse situation with roommates or living at home etc.

• If a decent looking guy was able to afford a nice date once a week or so, he is now down to once every three weeks despite making the same amount!

The majority are in the two bullets above. Again. The vast majority are there and they can’t understand the other side of the equation.

Both men and women have no self awareness. They believe everyone is special (especially if younger). So. They both say things got worse.

Reality? Economic pressures are causing relationships to mirror business meetings in many situations.

Flow to the Top: Guess what that means? The rich and good looking guys take everything. Sorry but that’s a natural by product of the situation. If the top 20% of guys used to take 80% of the dates it’ll now be the top 5% taking 90% of the dates. This has negative consequences for both men and women as you’ll see below!

Assuming you agree with this then you can see how the problem gets worse in two simple bullets again:

• If a girl dates an extremely top tier guy, her lifestyle expectations explode. This can occur in less than three months. A truly well off guy does not care about some $400 dinner bill on Tuesday or a business class ticket. It is a rounding error.

• If a guy goes on tons of dates every week, he realizes really quickly that he doesn’t “need” women (more on this later). If you can wake up whenever you want and spend whatever you like there is a zero percent shot you will struggle in the dating market unless you’re 400lbs, bald, 5’0” and green (like us!)

Click Fast Forward: Now you can see how this messes things up. Fast.

If an attractive girl lives in a major city full of rich guys, the chances she’s never experienced this is effectively zero percent. Again. This is just the reality of life in mega cities.

On the rich guys side it is the same. If the girl is attractive and gives him any sort of issues he just calls it quits. Logic is simple there. He has 5,000 other messages already in his phone so why bother? Already have enough stress from work. No point in adding another headache.

Women hit late 20s men hit late 30s/40.

Surprise! Now your body is slowing down and you’re both past your prime. We’re well aware that a billionaire guy would be fine but the majority of people (even the top 1% are not “Chris Evans”).

Brutal wake up call for both since neither have any self awareness!

The rich guy with tons of options (if he wants to be a decent parent) realizes he won’t have the energy to really keep up with kids. Who wants to throw a baseball with a 67 year old? Don’t bother with your Donald Trump example since he is a celebrity billionaire.

Now The Culture Is Stuck: Is this going to change? LOLOLOLOLOLOL no.

No it isn’t.

The Logan Paul fiasco is going to big up the egos of women since a rich guy with millions of options is choosing a girl with 7,000 ex-boyfriends who are all just as rich as him (many better looking than him as well).

In addition. The average dude is going to point to Donald Trump, Chris Evans and Elon Musk saying “See those guys did fine so can I!”

There is a zero percent shot people will develop self awareness.

Anyone with any experience with online sales will agree with that. Everyone looks for the next magic diet pill, the next magic skin makeover to look 25 again and the next magic slot machine to make $40K a month with this ONE WEIRD TRICK.

Implications

Now that it’s clear as day that none of this will change it’s pretty easy to see where this leads us. It leads to lots of depression, loneliness and a void for the vast majority. We’re not here to sell dreams. This isn’t going to “go back to how it was” since that never happens.

It’s going to continue in the same direction.

We’ve probably successfully enraged both men and women with this post which just goes back to the same concept: people have no self awareness. If a rich dude who is 45 marries a 19 year old girl from Russia that “loves him” 99.99999% of the time he is delusional. If a 30 year old girl thinks she’s going to find Logan Paul at the last second, 99.9999999% of the time she’ll be wrong and is delusional.

Solutions

The solution is easy to see hard to execute!

If you’re a rich guy you have to predict when your personal looks will peak (usually around 30). At that point you have to decide *with certainty* if you want kids or not. If you do, you have to swallow the bitter pill and avoid the rolodex of girls begging you to go on dates that you have zero interest in (and know it). If you don’t want to have kids and are certain, then it just doesn’t matter.

Similarly, if a girl is attractive and is in her early 20s, she has to vet each guy she dates. Avoid hook up culture and avoid the extremely alluring stuff rich guys will throw her way. If she is certain the guy is never going to commit to her, better not get on that first class flight to NYC from Los Angeles! The “fun experience” has a real cost to it.

Will either of these solutions actually occur? LOLOLOLOLOLOL NO WAY

99.99% of people cannot say no to those situations. A good looking girl who just graduated college meets a handsome 29 year old willing to fly her first class to NYC to live it up for a week in Manhattan in April… 99.99% will say yes.

On the other side, a rich dude meets a great girl but she is giving him headaches for the past week. He sees 700 messages from other good looking girls begging to go out “for just one night”. You already know what is going to happen.

Note on Ultra Wealthy Before Moving On

We’re well aware that people will say “omg that’s such a waste of money, you’re inflating their egos”. Once again. They. Do. Not. Care.

If a normal guy can spend say $3K a month on dates (20% of his earnings), certainly the above is a waste of money.

Take it to an extreme. What if spending $100K in a month was only 5% of your income? Now you see the problem. They are spending massively less (percentage of earnings) so it is just funny money to them.

If you don’t think people like this exist, think again! We all know the meme of girls being flown out to Bali, New York, Dubai etc.

Part 2: The Middle

You can see how everything is ripped apart at this point. It only gets worse. An attractive middle class girl gets flown out by a baller. She posts it on her Instagram. All her friend see it and say “OMG why can’t I get that” (since women are socially competitive) and then it just continues to perpetuate. No really stopping it as explained in part 1.

Resort to Cost Cutting: This is the typical mechanism to survive. The vast majority believe in crazy stuff like frugality and finding the cheapest bidder for everything. Since the middle is basically going the way of the dinosaur, there is no other option for them temporarily

• Middle class people all cut costs, men and women

• Vast majority of women unable to secure a date with the elite

So what’s the next best thing? You guessed it, being good looking!

If everyone in the room is of the same socioeconomic status (middle and declining) the next best status signal is attractiveness which is why you’re seeing grown adult men obsess with something called “Looks Maxing”. You’ll see this trend get worse and worse.

Since the vast majority of women won’t interact with the true elite they’ll go to the standard post college move of going for the “handsome ex-Water Polo player who makes the same as them - $70K at KPMG”. Sadly, that type of person typically doesn’t have the drive to really figure life out (create income - cutting costs doesn’t work) so they don’t see any lifestyle improvement over time.

Living at Home: This will only get worse. It went from scraping by in a cheap studio —> living with a roommate —> living with two roommates —> now people living at home. The strategy is once again based on cost cutting.

Now you can see why “Looks Maxing” is the only option. If you’re living at home you better be good looking (as a guy) to have any sort of value on the dating market. Sure it doesn’t matter if you’re 3 months out of college but the trend is for people age 25-34 to live at home!

Absolutely crazy times.

More Screen Time: Add that all up and you guessed it… more internet screen time. People will be glued to their computers and smartphones even more. If you’re at home what else is there to do and how else do you get any shred of privacy? That’s right. The internet!

Online dating apps, online video games, online marketing/sales, E-tail etc. There is no stopping this trend. While people can claim to be living an amazing life with their photo shop and video editing, the reality is that they are posting rare occurrences. Otherwise they wouldn’t feel the need to brag about them.

Continued Lack of Self Awareness: Make no mistake. The rich guys. The 10/10 girls. The middle. The bottom. It doesn’t matter. All have this standard human trait.

Minimal self-awareness due to an upbringing based on Disneyland fairy tales.

Since someone in the middle wouldn’t understand part 1 they go and blame politics. This is why you’re seeing the USA turn into a bigger circus than Cirque de Solei.

Impact to Politics

Now that you see the theme: lack of self awareness… This means the US population will have no ability to predict how current actions will impact them in 5-10 years.

Combine all this and it is no wonder that we have everyone obsessed with politics. People are living at home, struggling and working longer hours to purchase less stuff than a year ago. Have to blame someone. In the meantime, they’ll continue to be tricked by the latest fad and run with near nothing for savings.

Part 3: Conclusion

In our cartoon opinion, this direction is set in stone barring some world changing event. Don’t see any of those coming soon and if we do we’ll be sure to post about it here.

In summary

• Majority of attractive women have had at least one encounter with the true elite for a few months. This forever changes their standards. Unable to see that they were essentially being used

• Majority of men are bleeding out over time. They think they can get the same outcome as celebrities like Chris Evans just because they turned 30 (or whatever the perfect age is according to the internet)

• All of this is being accelerated and backed by wealth inequality, work from home and internet usage

If any of this is remotely depressing it shouldn’t be. You now know with certainty what industries will do well. We’ve written about them many times and it’s really just up to you to take action. Most won’t.

They are hoping that the exact same people who got us into this mess will save them.

Perhaps the next president!

Good luck with that.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce. We’re an advisor for Synapse Protocol 2022-2024E.

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