One "Why" I Didn't Get the Ladies in Highschool

 Disclaimer

The reason I spent most of my time in high-school as a very eligible bachelor is overdetermined, even excluding all the the reasons I don't even know about. Some of those reasons persist to this very day and overlap entirely with reasons my friends periodically need a break from our friendships.

Disclaimer out of the Way

The particular reason of many I want to talk about, I only stumbled across recently. I'm a fan of adman Rory Sutherland, a cartoonish character who synthesizes a lot of pop-science and applies it. 

Anyway, this guy in one of his many interviews, possibly one cut down to a short was talking about that ambiguous class of people known as "creative people" and compensation. He made a connection for me I had never made on my own, even though I was swimming in it, like David Foster Wallace's fish. 

Rory asserted that creative people enjoy a kind of premium on their wages, because they don't need to spend a lot of money to basically, whatever. I would say "stimulate themselves" but I suspect for most people that evokes imagery of inserting some battery powered device into themselves.

Which may well be a good enough example, creative people would probably turn out to spend less on getting off. 

But if you take like a holiday... 

The Elephant in The Room

Sorry I had to interrupt to address the fact that I've just launched into basically identifying myself as creative and the rest of you as mostly not. Being someone who has long got about the arts scene, not just here in Melbourne but also in Mexico, I dislike the term "creatives" for two largish reasons:

1. The first being that "uncreatives" doesn't work as an antonym, visual artists, musicians and DJs can form snobby little cliques and call themselves "creative" but it doesn't follow that a bunch of accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers, nurses and programmers are being "uncreative".
2. The term "creatives" actually in my experience fosters a lack of creativity. It most often is referring to the "creative aesthetic" which is, people dressing in a kind of artist or muso blackface, haemorrhaging money realising what they think will pass as having something to say because Warhol or Duchamp or Yoko Ono or Arcade Fire already said it. Subculture conformity (or garden variety conformity at one remove) basically.

Personally, I think a "creative person" is someone who creates a lot of stuff, be it prose, poetry, music, lyrics, paintings, sculpture, programs, speeches, audits, excel spreadsheets or databases. 

I'm likely comfortable calling myself creative on objective grounds, I've drawn the drawings, painted the paintings, played shitty bass lines, acted, written, directed, hammered the nails etc.

JP introduced me to one attempt to objectively measure individual creativity. The one that people may know is the "write as many uses for a brick in a minute" or something, and everyone including myself gets blown away by the kid that came up with "paper clip holder" however, I now feel a kid couldn't come up with that answer, as what kid knows what paper clips are anymore?

I digress, there's basically some survey for which the average score is 0. It has all these categories that measure level of accomplishment in a bunch of creative fields, from music to art to architecture. Furthermore, even amongst creative people, the average score across fields is 0, as very few people both record an album of songs they composed themselves and have a building they designed constructed etc.

On that checklist, though I've never reached the highest levels of accomplishment in any field, I went surprisingly far in numerous fields most of which I don't identify with - like drama.

So from here on out, that's the sense in which I'm calling some people creative and others not, and putting myself in the creative camp. I think I even get points for writing a shitty blog on an ancient website.

Back to the post-Disclaimed Narrative

...So you picture a holiday, you probably picture a resort with a swim up bar in a pool with decks and lounges and then sandy beaches and then turquoise waters out to a reef that you have to fly to. 

Or even a weekend, most people might think of going shopping, going to the footy, going to brunch or hosting a dinner party.

This is the "premium" Rory asserts creative people get, without crucially employing it as a justification to not pay creative people equitably. 

Creative people don't need to spend that money to have a good time. Indeed, I am often happy to spend a day off writing a blog post. 

So to bring this back to high school dating, how much did it cost to go on a really good date?

For you, I'm going to guess $30 of late 90s Y2K money. For me? $3.20 because we could sit and share chips and gravy in Ballarat Central Square Arcade from Chequers (still in business, but $6.50) and then walk maybe across the tracks and sit in a fairly sketchy park where we would talk until we made out.

I mean I once went on local public TV dating show "More Amore" a version of the dating game, where winning contestants went on a date paid by the production to, in our case, Hoffbrauhaus a German restaurant that included men dancing and slapping each other in lederhosen. I don't need any of that shit because I can create an experience through conversation, questions.

Indeed, while I promise I will eventually thread the needle of how this hampered my ability to get the ladies, a divorce lawyer here sings the benefits of couples bonding over pizza in a park over dropping $250, because if you lead with your wallet it will "always be transactional." Which I will also at some point come back to.

But if I am reminiscing about actual dates I went on, how did you NOT get the ladies in Highschool?

I was a late bloomer, and I should take a second to acknowledge all those who bloomed after me, and those yet to bloom. I basically between mid-year 12 and 3rd year uni went through my serial monogomy phase, with relationships lasting longer and longer, but never quite being viable. For most of highschool I had crushes, and no action. Then far more crushes and minimal action. But I never felt unattractive, this is what has me captivated by Rory's assertion, because it reconciles with these facts of my experience.

On the periphery of my vision, I was aware that there were some guys who were so unattractive their value proposition to attractive girls, was to give them free drugs, and to this day, this is one thing I have noted down to warn my daughters about when I hand them a copy of Salt N' Pepa's "Very Necessary" to figure out the rest.

Assuming even pathetic weed to be reasonably expensive by the gram, beyond this, I wasn't really aware of what average joe's might be spending on their best gals.

I spend almost nothing, because I basically have never got in the habit of spending anything. It wouldn't occur to me to spend anything, not until like two weeks ago when Rory was asserting that it was much cheaper to be creative.

It makes sense right? Like we've seen enough of those lockdown epicurious videos where a pro-chef swaps $400 ingredients for a pancake with a home chefs $8 worth of ingredients, and the home chef has to follow some complicated recipe using sturgeon roe and snow crab with advice from a food scientist and I'm pretty sure the fucking recipe, while the pro-chef generally makes something better with the $8 ingredients anyway.

At pro-chef level, that's the ratio of the creativity premium - 50x. Like I literally don't know what the vast middle-band of uncreative peers did on their dates. We're all horny teenagers that weren't even thinking about asexuality back then, because it used to be sufficiently exciting to have the occasional gay or lesbian kid in the whole school. (They weren't, just very few came out until after high-school, in many cases, immediately after high-school) but anyway, if you could go out with someone, and someone sufficiently experienced to get over the frigidity hurdle, then everyone had a cheap good time awaiting them in terms of finding somewhere to make out.

But I suspect, probably a bunch of dudes bought girls they had been dating for two-weeks, and would be dating for a further two weeks, expensive apparel maybe from the surf shops, or maybe globe sneakers, an anklet, Oakley sunglasses, maybe you took them to La Porchetta's or Da Vinci's or L'Espresso or Olive Grove if she was trying to get into medicine. 

Maybe you went shopping and used the money you earned at McDonald's to get her that thing she had her eye on in the hopes of getting your dingaling touched, or maybe getting some fingers inside her.

I don't know, I wasn't paying attention. I fell in love with L when I asked her out, and she suggested we meet at the Pancake Parlour. A sensation I since saw captured in Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" when a character remarks "There goes a jazz tune." Now two creative people on a date - you are talking super cheap dates, so long as one or both aren't "creatives".

The Brick Actually Explains Much

By Andrewlister - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12018011

I've been avoiding the brick test because of my strong association with consultant hacks that tour around  businesses-that-won't-give-a-payrise-above-inflation-to-top-performing-employees but will drop $2k~$10k on some hack to run a workshop where they drop some pop-science that theoretically could be put into practice but most staff are just happy to be paid to be there. That's their pay rise.

What I would guess is the leading flaw in the Brick-creativity test, is that every time it is administered, they still have the subject of the test be a brick. 

Whereas for robust results, the test should likely be run through multiple iterations with swapping subjects - a brick, a chair, a whisk, a smart phone, a pencil, a PET-bottle etc. 

If it is a brick every time, and worse, every workshop facilitator mentions "paper clip holder" in the intro, then people can just gradually accumulate more uses for a brick with practice, so it fails the retestability. 

Logically then, if there are people who struggle to come up with 8 uses for a brick in 3 minutes and people who run out of time at 120 uses, and this is because of a variation in "creativity" trait, logically this extrapolates out to everything.

From whence, the creativity wage-premium emerges. Do you need to "get the gear" to go on a hike? Perhaps even just a Leatherman multi-tool? Or can you creatively use your regular shoes to also walk a hiking trail in, take a snickers instead of trail mix, use your hand to drink water from the stream etc.?

(Warning: By "hike" I'm referring to any kind of day trip, not heading off trail and navigating using a compass and map with a very real chance of disappearing for 72 hrs, getting hypothermia and dying. In which case the "creative" approach may just result in being dangerously underprepared. I'm referring to not needing Nordic Walking Poles, energy bars and drink bottle for a 3.6km round trip to a spring from a carpark.)

In the kitchen you may or may not be familiar with something Alton Brown popularised as the "uni-tasker" which is a kitchen gadget that only does one hyper-specific thing. This would be at the extreme of concrete thinking. But multiply out the difference of whether you can think of 2 or 10 uses for EVERYTHING in the first few seconds to EVERYTHING and creative people are just going to have way less material demands.

I caught up with a friend from high-school and was telling him about this Rory-gifted insight, and he is now expecting a child with his partner who is an artist, and remarked that when he met her he discovered her entire kitchen apparel consisted of one pot and a spatula with which she prepared everything. Possible embellishments aside, this negative correlation between creativity and material need resonated with his experience.

What the brick tells us, is that creativity dictates how much you need.

Now, back to highschool:

Indirect Defence Against the Ladies

Over the easter break, I had a one hour layover in my sweet-home Ballifornia and decided to kill time with a brisk walk up and down "the street." Covering the main drag in less than half an hour I was diverted down a side street that played host to a fond teenage memory. Albeit one my mum would probably sooner forget.

I was thrilled to see that "New Generation" clothing was still in operation. I am sure it simply cannot be what it once was due to the advent of internet shopping and Ballarat getting the internet and credit cards, but that it was there at all was a thrill to me.

It still faces target more-or-less. So the memory was that my mum desperate to find some "nice clothes" probably necessary for some funeral or something as opposed to the tatty rags I gravitated toward wearing all the time, and after a brief perusal in New Generation clothing, I announced quite publicly that none of the clothes were speaking to me and we were going to head over to Target. My fond memory is my mum's HORRIFIED expression, particularly since it was so illogical. It was not that we were forced to shop at Target, it's that New Generations overpriced range of safe bland clothing was rejected. I think I got an orange t-shirt from Target for $6 that I kept in circulation for the next 6 years.

Nowadays I would probably be more concerned that any of my clothes were made by slaves, but it's not like Target's clothes are slave labour and New Generations are not. 

By the time I graduated year 12 I think my parents had won the battle of buying nice things a couple of times, I never had polarized sunglasses but I did end up with a waterproof rip-curl watch and a cream coloured study desk and...nothing. I was incredibly successful at blocking my parents from getting me "nice things" that I, nor nobody needs.

I'm of the camp that human's are not rational but rationalizing, that our conscious thinks it's the oval office but is in fact the press secretary etc. so while I was wearing Mossimo sneakers because Quan Yeoman's wore them in some Regurgitator clip, most of my intrasexual competition were shelling out for Globe and DC shoes as Blink 182 were ascendant. Had I at the time known about Dunlop Volleys I would have been wearing those. 

I honestly felt constantly under assault to buy what to me was unnecessary shit and felt strongly enough about it, insofar as my parents were willing to buy me unnecessary shit and I didn't have to pay for shit, which again required a very active style of defence to ward my wardrobe against unwelcome gifting. I became quickly, and remain "someone impossible to buy for."

What I only recently clicked when Rory started making his sensible assertions, was that I was also playing an aggressive defence against most of the dating pool in this regard. For sure, the only girl from my own school I dated was M, a fellow school switcher and fashionista that got all her outfits from Op-shops, indeed introduced me to never paying more than $3 for an article of clothing.

The problem with that, is if there's anything that can have me spend money on clothes, it is to attain the inefficiencies of self-expression over fitting in. Custom is often expensive, but op-shops/thrift-stores/vintage stores can enable self-expression at low-low prices, indeed are just about the best way because while every fuckwit can buy a fedora or influencer hat, if you find a conversation piece in an op-shop nobody else can rush out to get the exact same thing.

If I now squeeze out some cognitive empathy though, I need to first recreate the unconscious mind which does not have a perspective, which makes perspective taking difficult.

All we can do is infer, and I'm going to have to drag up the bogeyman of Evolutionary Psychology. I personally am comfortable with evolutionary psychology because I am uncomfortable with special pleading. Certainly there are meaningful differences between the human experience and our nearest relatives like Chimpanzees and Bonobos; but if evolution via natural selection can explain dog psychology, baboon psychology, sheep psychology and all sorts of mammals, it becomes special pleading to say "selection pressures can't explain a kind of adapted human psychology." We are into God made us in His image and all the other mammals spare.

Which is to basically say if the lionesses like a lion not just with an impressive mane but a dark impressive mane as the most expensive to produce in terms of calories, it is likely that humans developed analogous unconscious preferences over the 150,000 years or so we were basically homeless drifters.

And yeah, it is clearly adaptive enough to include stuff by the 20th and 21st centuries. Such that our psychology can do things like associate brand with access to calories. This is the working backwards from an unconscious vague-awareness that if you have children with a high-sexual investment through a non-motile large sex cell like an ovum that takes 9 months to gestate and years to raise in which your own ability to obtain calories through labour will be severely curtailed - you find providers strangely alluring.

Building back from that vague awareness it might translate into a conscious rationalization that Johnny Football hero comes from a context in which he can obtain this seasons line of clothing from New Generation.

Hitting upon a central paradox - the creative premium is real. If you can spend $2,000 on a wedding instead of $20,000 that confers a real financial advantage. Such advantages tend to compound. 

But the disadvantage is going to be, that people using "costly signalling" as an unconscious proxy for "capacity to provide" then anyone who can use creativity to avoid unnecessary costs is likely not showing up on most of the dating pool's radar.

Because alas, somebody might not have the latest stuff because they recognize that it is unnecessary but also because they can't afford it. In my experience, most people are not so adept at cognitive empathy/perspective taking that they can recognize that other people don't value what they do, even highly successful people like employers routinely don't identify that their own employees aren't motivated by quarterly growth so much as surviving a fairly brutal economic environment in safe harbour. 

And I for one was completely OBLIVIOUS. In fact up until just a few weeks ago with Rory giving name to a cluster of phenomena I'd observed all my life, I had basically attributed everything to variations in esteem needs. Which is to say, some people don't need to belong, they have enough personal power to not give a fuck about others opinions. Other people really need to belong, they are acutely sensitive as to what everyone else is doing, such that any time they step off the beaten path they begin to immediately feel anxious and perhaps even existential dread.

But that doesn't really explain why I couldn't get the ladies, whereas the creative premium does somewhat. Highschool age ladies for example, found guys who were good at sport attractive and those jocks often didn't have to give a fuck about what anyone thought of how they dressed or their presentation yet wore the same branded clothing as desperate dipshit guys who were acutely sensitive to how they were esteemed.

A Neat Paradox

Who loses? Believe it or not, my psychologist proscribed me sleeping with more people. 70 to be exact. She challenged me to abandon my self-restricting unrealistic standards and massively increase my number of sexual partners. This big and likely literally hairy goal was no doubt unrealistic. 

There was also the kernal of the right solution in it for me, which was to not approach relationships as a pass/fail but being open enough for them to develop. But insofar as I pursued that 70 target, I was ready to quit after the first low-investment partner and replicated that finding on every subsequent encounter.

Where my creative material premium cost me romantic encounters not just in highschool but throughout my life, there is a case to be made that from my low-sexual investment perspective, I potentially missed out on a lot of experiences with women I'd love to sleep with but hate to talk to. 

A bigger contributor is likely that I also didn't partake in many of the judgement altering substances that can enable two people with nothing in common to hook up for sheer physical attraction.

But alas, much as I don't value the income I derive from a time consuming job I dislike; I don't much value kisses from people I have to hang around with and have painfully disconnected conversations with about a bunch of shit I don't care about.

So from my side, I don't think I lost much, if anything at all, by being such a turnoff/non-entity in this way.

The flipside I don't know. For certain, women who want a big lavish wedding lost nothing by not dating me. I suspect at some threshold, people are incapable of appreciating the creative. There are certainly people who are completely insensitive to anything but brand, failing to recognize that a Mercedes is little more inspiring than a Toyota Camry or Mitsubishi Magna, and that a Rolex is just a fairly generic vaguely gold watch in a world where there's little utility in an extremely reliable time-piece.

Where the losers most likely lie, are the people who connect spending with happiness but either don't, or take too long to notice what Chris Rock articulated so well in his episode of Jerry Seinfeld's "comedians in cars getting coffee":

"I like you, a gourmet meal with an asshole is a horrible meal. A hotdog with an amazing person is an amazing meal, it's all about the company. If we were in a cab, we'd probably be having the same exact conversation."

In many ways, if you think about a fine dining experience, amazing dishes brought out to peck at on a 12 course tasting menue, are frequent and stimulating enough to actually function as outsourcing conversation. A professional is coming in and giving you two stimulus to talk about, which is going to be far more valuable to people who cannot generate interesting conversation organically than those for whom the meal is a distraction/disruption.

So to be clear this:

 Is fine for people who have almost nothing to say to each other. There's no losers in that situation. You are only losers if this:

Is also fine, in which case, the lack of judgement/perception does not bode well for you making the successive decisions that will impact enjoying a good life together. You will probably keep losing by overleveraging your mortgage and purchasing things and hiring people because they are expensive and polished, winding up tied to (as the Onion put it in a recent headline) "a dead end 7-figure job." that you hate, losing your health, becoming depressed etc.

It's a neat little paradox because my creativity driven retardation in signalling that I was a viable provider likely filtered out all the prospective partners I would not want as a partner anyway. Especially the worst losers of all - those who don't just equate happiness with consumption, but aspire to ecstasy. The people who want a boat for their helicopter and other boat, certain in their assumption that if a little stuff makes you a little happy, heaps of stuff therefore makes you ecstatic.

I should also say, in discussing winners and losers. If you gave me a million dollars, like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have in multitudes. Nothing changes, it doesn't become a "I may as well" start dating the kind of people that cannot imagine solutions to their problems that don't involve paying through the nose. I would rather not get laid and avoid such company in which case this:

Is also meal wise, a winning outcome for me.

But Wait, There's Hypergamy

Which I have zero confidence to actually write about here in the 21st century. The social contract is very much changing without any real conversation. For example, I still feel that becoming unemployed is a better predictor of a man getting dumped by his girlfriend than a girl getting dumped by her boyfriend.

That said, when I was in my 30s I observed of many women in their 20s that they spent that decade in a relationship with a guy that more reflected a mother-child bond than an adult relationship. Boyfriends with various crippling anxieties that rendered them both emotional and financial burdens, and this completely defies hypergamy.

Furthermore, there's other strange shit that emerges from a growing wealth gap in which with wealthy countries like the former Commonwealth (including USA) as they approach the inequality of poorer countries like Latin America, India, China etc. the dating scene will likely improve, because having zero social mobility will become a norm. At the moment though, women trying to "marry up" are basically competing for an ever dwindling supply of men that will likely out-earn them.

The influencer economy also breaks things somewhat, with companies paying women to promote products to other women like meal kits, and other women paying women to pretend to be the kind of women that in past decades would have been a kept trophy wife. Except now they pay their own way.

My mistake in highschool, and in life, has been that just because I can imagine a great wedding for under $5,000 doesn't mean my prospective and actual partners can. It is a hazardous assumption. In which case, I likely should make some concession to solvency, or perhaps come equipped with a costed wedding package. 

There is also some sense to ye olde "Three months salary" guideline for engagement rings. It is a demonstration of investment, that I mean divorce statistics tell us, has absolutely no baring on the likelihood of a marriage lasting or being happy. Nor does it actually seem that anything is in place to ensure a father supports materially the raising of his own children. But its a fairly reasonable expectation in principle. 

A guy should demonstrate investment.

"You don't want to sleep with me?"

Said Luciana, my all time literary crush. I thought I better conclude with something generally applicable. And that is to point out that the creativity premium is fundamentally real.

Dating aside, people to this day, with all the information we have, are swayed by shiny baubles. The economy is in many ways, attrocious. It has long been known, for example, that most investment fund managers do not beat the market (which is to say, an index fund) while charging more. 

Rory Sutherland talks a lot about the main drivers of consumer behaviour being 1) "habit" doing what has/you've always done and 2) "sensitivity" doing what everyone else is doing. Leading to truly collosal waste.

Adman Bob Hoffman stands by his experience that "fame" is the greatest predictor of success, be it brands or politicians, dovetailing with Rory's habit and sensitivity.

So I'd like to think these observations go beyond that small niche market of women who may rue not sleeping with me in high school, to almost everybody everywhere.

An easy prediction to make, is that we have not seen the last of, nor even the biggest financial scam in history. People will get scammed by conmen in the future. They will also discover their employer was trading insolvent and cannot pay their benefits and entitlements out, which is a shame because they will also discover their employer is not a person that can go to jail, but a legal person - a corporation that always had limited liability towards those it is indebted to. And more basic than that, you will make purchases because the sales pitch was so good and they promised a lot, and the product or service will turn out to be a dud, or unreliable. 

It will all hinge on the same proxy signals as teens dating based on the ability to keep up with seasonal fashion produce: 

The great merit of costly signals, is that some people simply can't afford them. Teenagers often get confused and lack a long term vision, hence the guy who can afford to run a car (or Uber account) and pay for Grill'd burgers and not McDonald's can edge out a peer who can't but in the long run has much much better job prospects and earning potential. So it can still screw up, but less so as we move further and further from a skills and talent based economy to an asset based economy.

The great peril of costly signals, is that buying shit is something literally anybody can do. I do feel it's important progress to be honest in our discourse as to how transactional relationships are. But yeah, anybody who has $250 can drop $250 on a first date. That in essence is the problem. They could be Corey Haim or Corey Feldman, so long as they have $250. 

The same-same with job interviews. Anybody can buy a business shirt and slacks. Any employer can hire an office. Any sales rep can buy cars and watches. 

These signals need to count for less and less in our decision making process. I get that technically a bank could operate out of a garage with plastic lawn furniture now, just as well as a big stone building with doric columns, but psychologically we are just not ready for such realities. I'm not saying they should count for nothing, and you'll notice I'm saying hardly anybody, potentially nobody lost from not dating me in highschool.

But beyond this basic threshold lies everything important. Hence we have to first know what we actually want and what it is worth, then come up with rigorous ways to determine whether anyone can competently deliver that in an exchange of roughly equal value.

Start by looking for downselling. That's a good simple sign.