If you’re an attractive woman, you live in a world that is completely different from that of most men. The opposite sex is desperate for your attention. Perhaps the bottom 70% of single males in status would drop what they are doing tonight and hang out with you if you just asked. They may not be the 70% you are most attracted to, but the point is that there are a lot of options out there, and you can be very selective about who you give your time to.
Males start to experience something similar when they are high status. In the status game I am playing, I have achieved something. Nobody would care about me if I went to the premiere of a major Hollywood movie, but in the circles I am involved in, “people interested in right-of-center politics” or “rationalist-adjacent intellectuals,” I have done quite well.
A lot of people want to be in touch. When I first started publicly writing, some rando would message me and say they’d be in my town and they wanted to meet. I wouldn’t ask too many questions or really filter out anyone, since there weren’t a lot of people seeking my attention. Today there usually has to be a good reason for me to meet someone. Maybe they wrote something interesting, or have a very important job, or can provide some kind of connection or benefit I can’t get elsewhere.
To a large extent, I find myself filtering by where people go or went to school, especially when they’re young. It sounds harsh, but this is rational in social relationships, just as it is in the labor market. An undergrad from Harvard is almost certain to be more interesting than one from Ohio State! This is one reason to try to go to the best university possible. Your classmates themselves will be more interesting, it’ll open up more doors outside of school, and your classmates will have the same advantage, making them over time even more interesting than they were when they first started college. I hate conservative nonsense of where they pretend state school kids are better than those who went to the Ivy League. No sane person can possibly believe that. But this is mostly a filtering device for young people; someone who went to Harvard twenty years ago and now lives a completely ordinary life and has a boring corporate job is probably not worth meeting.
But all this doesn’t mean I only befriend accomplished geniuses. When people who on paper (to use a sports term) don’t have much to offer reach out, sometimes I do end up keeping in touch with them. This got me thinking, what makes me like some people more than others?
I think that one of the key features is persistence. There’s a young man, let’s call him Raul, who has texted me nonstop for years. Sometimes I won’t respond for weeks or months. He is of a certain ethnic heritage that makes him care a lot about the politics of the Middle East – one that is known for its verbal fluency and funny hats – so, due to current events, recently I’ve started to check his messages more often and argue with him. The thing I really like about this guy is that, no matter how long I go without responding, he never loses heart. He dropped my name when meeting a female friend of mine once and she was not nearly as charmed. But with me, his style works well.
