I’m going to preface this statement by saying you don’t need to be a believer or religious to benefit from religious things, or musings of religious people. Your questions relate to philosophy, morality, virtue. These are things religions have pondered for centuries. Millenia. Perhaps we should at least consider what they have to say. I’m also going to preface this with…I think I misinterpreted your first question. But I like what I whipped up & I think you will, too, so I’m keeping it. 🙂

Pope Saint John Paul II once said, “freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” Now I really like this definition because it implies that real, lasting, quality freedom of the individual still comes with some responsibilities & even obligations. In the same way “being nice” is multi-faceted, it’s got layers to it, it’s using your freedom, abilities, powers, & assets to do good things for others. To build others up.

Now on to what I think your questions are, but I’m going to answer in reverse because I think it flows better in convo: there are absolutely huge differences between acting nice & actually being nice. A big one is motivation. Are you nice to help others? Or are you being nice in a bid to gain favor, look good, or get something for yourself? Are you altruistic & trying to help others? Or are you just in it for yourself? In Rick & Morty, I liked the wedding toast where Rick says being nice is something stupid people do to hedge their bets. Some people are nice just to help themselves.

We all have an opportunity to become better, or “be good”, and it doesn’t have to be anything earth-shattering. It’s the cumulative effect of making good choices, the right choices, every single day when we’re presented with the opportunity. Will Durant, when summarizing Aristotle’s philosophy, remarked, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

It’s hard to define “a point where someone stops being nice”; I don’t view humans as one-dimensional. It’s got to exist somewhere. I go back to a person’s focus & intention, some people are “not nice” on purpose & then I’m sure there are lots of people with glaring character flaws, who are themselves unaware and/or they don’t personally view those characteristics as flaws. “Being nice”, itself, is open to interpretation. Personally, I would define being nice (to others) as seeking out & prioritizing their needs, especially without obligation or compulsion. Maybe a person stops being nice when the bad is significant, or outweighs the good. Honestly this probably plays like the guy presented in comic, but I think different people can have different relationships with the same person. There’s a difference between a man & his boss, a man & his guy friends, a man & his wife, a man & his children, a man & idk people he doesn’t like. It’s the same guy. I think how a man treats somebody he owes nothing to says a lot about “niceness” & character.

It gets messy when people act like God has an active hand in every single little thing that happens. It’s right up there with “everything happens for a reason”. You know, rape happens for a reason. You just don’t know why yet.

I like to frame it as free will & sometimes things just…happen. Accidents happen. Free will principle. Sometimes bad things happen because of bad people, sometimes bad things happen because you’re stupid…it just seems to make more sense than an overly involved god.

That’s the woman. Who, ironically, couldn’t adequately cover Trump’s body mass. 😂

There are multiple factors to work, muh both sides, but MGTOW is very much a thing. You can rabbithole for weeks. 45% of young Gen Z men aged 18-25 have never approached a woman in person for a date. It can be argued that is an active choice, not even approaching women.

I remember early 2010s, people were making funny videos yelling “YEET” & throwing things super far.

Then there’s 26, when in the US you get kicked off your parents’ insurance & you can go fuck yourself! 🤗

Also going to give a bonus, that “smarter” comment was just a quick little aside thrown into the larger & not entirely connected argument against marriage. I was referring to not having children, a second argument that could have been a separate paragraph, but I didn’t want to make the comment even longer. That’s kind of a format error on my part, and I apologize.

And yes, there is also proof of that. Web search ‘higher education lower birth rate’, verbatim, and you’ll see supporting evidence. All around the world, more education, overall less babies.

Now it’s important to not be overly reductive and actually think, “Me smart, me have no babies. You have babies, you dumb .” Not true. But all the various factors surrounding being in a first world country, having access to resources, better work opportunities, and yes having a higher education & access to more information…very much tends to lead…to having fewer and/or no children. Again, it’s playing out around us, we’re below replacement rate like many other developed nations around the world.

But there’s just no need to produce children like there is in developing or third world countries. In some countries, they’re popping out all the babies they can because they don’t even know how many will survive into adulthood. In countries with no law or support, children are the poor man’s pension. It’s a proven method that works, there’s more at stake, that’s all they know, that’s what they do. And I get that.

I find myself in very different circumstances, with very different rules of engagement & on its face extremely limited payoff for having children. Selfish analysis aside, I personally believe having children (especially now) is a little selfish & I don’t want to bring children into this world to be mere financial batteries for the state. Additionally, when polled, 15% of parents admit to regretting having kids. And if you ask me it’s at least 15%, it’s the 15% that have the balls to admit it. I have a friend like that, told me he regretted becoming a parent. And idk it’s hard to say “what might have been” & whatnot, but given my personality & my beliefs I’m inclined to think that I would also be in that 15%. After I aged up & learned more than I knew at 18-26 years old. Young, dumb, full of cum & whatnot.

1.) Well, yes. It’s reality, playing out around us all the time, for the reasons I listed. The evidence: web search ‘marriage rates in the US’, and see they are on a very steep decline. Women open the door to the bedroom, but it is men that open the door to the home, and marriage. Marriage rates are on a steep decline…because men are opting out of the institution of marriage (as it is currently configured), choosing instead to cohabitate or MGTOW.

2.) There is societal programming, and enough of it is good & right & leads to the benefit of society as well as the individual. But specifically marriage, I just don’t know how much it benefits the man anymore, but it’s still pushed. I think men need to be presented with all the facts, presented with options they might not have even considered & hard-checked like listen: have you really thought this through? One side is all pro-marriage, don’t think about it just do it. Isn’t it only fair to list some good reasons to…not? Men’s lives are at stake.

Men aren’t dumb; men are watching other men in their relationships, we know half or more of all marriages end in divorce, we know 70% of divorces are initiated by women, we see how it plays out in divorces, we see alimony & child support…we have more access to information than ever before. If you’d like to learn more straight facts & statistics, presented in as condensed of a form as possible, I recommend you check out “The Book of Numbers: Analyzing the ROI on the Pursuit of Women” by Aaron Clarey. What are the chances of getting married? Of staying married? Even if the marriage lasts, will you be, you know, happy and/or better off for having married? It’s a compelling read that makes a rock solid case for MGTOW.

It’s a red-pill movement, but not a black-pill. As outlined in Aaron Clarey’s book The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex.. Enough of society tries to tie marriage/family with life itself, and how if you fail to marry or have children, your life is meaningless. Men internalize this bullshit, and are killing themselves at record rates. Men account for 80% of suicides, and suicide is the #1 cause of death for men under 50. MGTOW teaches that regardless of whether you can’t get into a relationship, or you choose not to, or you got into a bad one & it failed, that’s not a reason to end your life. You can have a happy, strong, fulfilled life sans marriage, significant other.

As an American & living in IL, double whammy, enough of my tax dollars are stolen & repurposed for…anything they want, really, besides improving society and the lives of citizens. So that’s lost on me.

We needed to legalize gambling in IL, “for the children & roads”. We need to legalize marijuana, “for the children & roads”. With the last one, they legalized it (yay) and the money does indeed go into the fund for education & roads…but then they move that exact amount out of the fund & take it elsewhere, like it’s their own personal piggy bank. 😆 The corruption is so obvious, it would be funny if it wasn’t ruining our lives.

It’s like dealing with a bunch of morally bankrupt children, “You said it has to go into the fund…but you didn’t say I couldn’t take it out & spend it on other stuff!” Bitch, do I really have to?? It’s kind of implied, when we’re raising taxes for the children & the roads, that you spend the money on child education. And the roads. Like George Carlin, I am inclined to think this is by design.

Technically true, but if you’re not a piece of shit & you financially support, physically be there for your own children, you don’t just cum & it’s over.

Respect, and idk what your pipe is, but I want to take this moment to spread the good word of DynaVap. Seems like a receptive audience.

DynaVap is a maker of small metal pipes that bakes the weed via convection, instead of destroying it via combustion. It’s gentler on your lungs, no smoke. It allows for a fuller extraction, more high. You can even use it inside & the vape dissipates relatively quickly, even still your gf could use a boof tube. You’ll spend $40 to $240 on a piece, but let’s be real, it’s more like at least $75-125 minimum because you don’t want the $39 B model. On sales they sometimes throw those in for free. Have some respect, don’t buy it.

The best part of all, besides being healthier for you, more discreet, better flavor, and gets you more high times – you can blow $230+ on the all-titanium HyperDyn & if you’re a heavy user, I can personally guarantee you will save $400+ buying flower. Once you stop burning that shit like a caveman & switch to convection bake, the flower lasts so much longer. To buy a legit ounce from dispensary where I live, that’s $280-300. It’ll last quite a while if vaping with a Dyna.

Any convection method will do, but if we’re talking Apocalypse/off-grid options, consider the Dyna – small, all metal, battery-free. Got an o-ring in there. Provided you don’t just lose it, you will die & your great-grandchildren could pick up your used Dyna & vape weed with it.

Louis Rossmann is correct: there is no reason to let your printer connect to the internet. They’re never going to release an update that makes the printer insanely better or more efficient. It might improve the program & functionality, just slightly? But every time it connects there is a very real possibility they push an update on your purchased goods to fuck you over. It’s not worth it.

Broad strokes & bad wording. I’m mainly pointing that bad wording comment at the title, and the author. It’s obviously not a problem of figuring out how to breed, it’s just that men are looking at divorce rates, divorce courts, alimony, child support, etc & they’re saying, “Yeah…fuck all that, I want nothing to do with that.” Enough of the smart, smarter ones aren’t producing children. Technically you could say “that’s a big problem for the country”.

Hence…they need help/incentive to decide to pump out babies. A one-time $5K baby bonus is on the table, which to his credit as the author points out, is nothing. A one-time $5K payment isn’t going to flip the switch for men.

Now Hungary is offering tax exemption for life, for women that have 4 or more kids. Again, there seems to be no mention of the men, I guess they can go fuck themselves…but all I’m saying is now there’s an incentive!! At least for the women. Fuck taxes.

Man he was shilling hard for that, then all of a sudden he just stopped. I read a good number of stories about the solar shingles overheating, catching fire, burning down, malfunctioning…probably related to him going silent on them.

I’ve had my doubts about that stuff since I heard about it.

Perhaps it’s better as a concept than it is in the real world, with real world conditions.

Just in time for their $66M studies into dimming the sun!! 🥴

Take the spoon, but replace it with two. Then there’s nothing to feel bad about; you get your perfect spoon & work gains a spoon. Everybody wins.

Also idk you might want to consider browsing thrift stores…they’ve got mismatched silverware for cheap & some of it is decent quality. But only some.

Yes, Feelzgoodman420, you may indeed smoke the grass.

Tbh I think most people on Lemmy need to touch grass more often ¯\(°_o)/¯ Your friend sounds alright, for someone who pulls “facts” out of his ass. 😂

Horse-fucking jokes aside, gonna be real here: actual horse girls are fucking crazy. I’ve known a few of them over the years, and all of them care more about horses than hours of their free time, space, money…

One guy had an unemployed wife with a horse. 🙄🙄🙄 Got their horse when he was 9, IIRC. So she’s not bringing in any money, this very normal & unimpressive horse is just eating through his finances & stealing an inordinate amount of attention of his wife from him. I think that fucker lived until he was 26 or 27, so do the math, he was financing that horse for 17 or 18 years. DDG’s AI assist says: “The annual cost of owning a horse can range from about $8,600 to $26,000”. Eh. Just assume the cheaper end of like $5-6K and still…$85K+, wth, right?

It should come as no surprise this regular-ass man seemed to be financially poor, despite working two jobs.

Another fun little anecdote, though, that may or may not be true -I’m inclined to think it is true- I hear horse girls that ride a lot naturally leads to very very very good sex, because frequent horse riding develops very strong core & pelvic floor muscles. Balance. Organic movements, rocking back & forth for hours on end. Basically they ride a horse & you can bet they can ride the shit out of you while fucking; the position is called cowgirl, after all. You just have to decide between a few hours of happy-happy fun times & having any serious amounts of disposable income, financial security.

I’ve come to the conclusion that you don’t marry a horse girl, but perhaps if you’ve got a girl you like you take her to ride horses sometimes. As a treat. Hell searching prices, assuming high end $80/session, you could do that twice monthly 24x80=$1920 annually. Or she could get herself involved in equestrian care & shovel the shit or whatever, and probably ride for free/cheaper. Idk this is just a mental exercise for me at this point, but personally I haven’t found a horse girl attractive enough, worth pursuing. Just some things for you to think about, good luck to you & your girlfriend, never ever ever let her talk you into buying a horse. That’s dumb AF. Rent instead!! 🙂