I tend to meet women who are logically unavailable

When a woman is thinking out loud about her romantic history, she'll often say: I tend to go for men who are emotionally unavailable.

Somewhere in Hell, Freud is sniffing another line (though maybe in Hell there are no razors to cut up your coke...it is Hell after all) and cackling as newfangled versions of his nonsense continue to confuse otherwise thoughtful people.

Let's walk through this:

So upon meeting this guy in a bar, you immediately sized him up and figured out he was ultimately going to be emotionally unavailable. While the two of you made bad small talk about micro-brews ("Have you tried the Staten Island Guido Stout? It's made with 20% Muscle Milk"), you just divined that three months down the line he was going to be "emotionally unavailable?" This subconscious insight then sent signals to your loins to GO FOR IT..?

Interesting. The same woman who will come running to you, New York Times in hand, screaming that there is a WAR ON SCIENCE!!! will in the next breath declare she was able to do the very thing no human, scientist or otherwise, has ever been able to do: forecast the future. She can't believe people still believe in psychics!!!!, but when it comes to her relationships, she talks like a madame staring into a crystal ball.

Here are some possible alternative explanations:

Maybe you're just incapable of attracting stable men.

Maybe he just doesn't care about the same things you care about. Just because someone doesn't get as emotional about something as you doesn't make that person "emotionally unavailable." Have you ever stopped to think you might be emotionally overavailable? Maybe you're an emotional 7-11 that remains open even on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe you should close once in a while.

Maybe you simply like him far more than he likes you; hence the lack of reciprocation. Even if his feelings equal yours, remember that men in general do not chatter nonstop like women. Failing to be effusive and monotonous doesn't make one emotionally unavailable.

Maybe you just go for men with blue eyes. You see a blue-eye chap, the blue eyes trigger the initial spark, and by coincidence, you happen to have met five blue-eyed losers in a row. The common denominator that grabbed you at the outset was the eyes, not the emotionally unavailability you somehow foresaw.

Most relationships, like most things in life, fail, so no matter what kind of men you are attracted to, it isn't going to work out THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE TIME, regardless of whether or not you have some fatal flaw. And because relationships have such a huge impact on us, we are inclined to construct powerful narratives and rationalizations to explain their failure. Also, there is the reality that people today play the field a lot more before getting married. When they do get married, it lasts six months, leading to more field playing. All of a sudden you've got a generation of women with 85 failed relationships to ruminate on. Combine that with the insidious boom of the self-help, pop psychology, and MAKE IT WORK! industries, and next thing you know every woman is approaching her relationships with the confidence Bambi had just after seeing her mother get it between the eyes.


Have you noticed men never talk about women being emotionally unavailable? With men and mating, the decision is binary: either a woman is attractive enough to have sex with or she isn't. If she is, and the pursuit works up to a point, fine. If not, there are several million other women between the ages of 18 and 40.

The Loud Shall Inherit the Earth

Since the financial crisis, collapse has been on everyone’s lips. The players in this general talk of implosion: doomsday preppers, gold bugs, and gun nuts, and people who are fashionably hysterical about doomsday preppers, gold bugs, and gun nuts.

So let’s say society took that silly walk over the precipice: who would rise under such a scenario? My guess is that it would be the great pandering orators; feel good folks like Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin. Substance barely matters here in the pre-apocalypse, but at least it matters somewhat. Right now people do take notice if you're Dr. Prodigy Patel, the world's greatest neurosurgeon. They may not care as much about your frontal lobe tinkering as they do about born again benchwarmer Tim Tebow, but at least neurosurgeons still get some respect.

But if society broke down and existence became more like The Road, substance would not matter at all. No one would follow a mousy brain doctor.

The people who would rise would be the great superficial talkers, the ones who could fill the threatening silence with verbal comfort food. Anyone who spoke with precision or unassuming expertise would get nowhere. The untrained ear (which comprises the vast majority of ears), barely understands subtle oration now, and would make even less of an effort to fathom it while scrounging for another unappetizing post-apocalypse meal.

Ironically, one of the people most heralded by those worried about collapse is a prime example of someone who wouldn’t rise under such circumstances: Ron Paul. Consider just some of his talents: medical training, military experience, and an esteemed track record as a high school athlete. The man has about as much substance as you're likely to find in a person. But despite all these qualities--qualities that are uncommon by themselves, let alone combined in one person--no one would follow him post-apocalypse. Why not? Because Ron Paul isn't a rousing speaker. He would either bore the survivors or go over their heads. They might even trample him in their rush to hear Oprah Winfrey's next speech.

Being a verbose dolt is always a surer path than being a learned square. It is an even surer path these days; just look at the 40 year boom in the self-help racket. Self-help exists because once people leave the nest to become adults, they still look for people to be their parents. In the pre-self-help days, when people didn't get divorced every three years and switch religions each time there was a heat wave, their spouses and clergymen acted as de facto parents. Whether they actually loved their spouses or believed their clergymen was irrelevant. They still had a stabilizing force to pat them on the head and say that everything was going to be okay. As those stabilizing forces shriveled, they turned for direction to sophistry factories likes Dr. Phil.

Post-apocalypse, we would all feel like children again, and the people who would capitalize on this would be the folks best able to recite "reality" back to us in bumper sticker form. Even without electricity the soundbyte would be king (perhaps especially, as there would be no Wikipedia to fact-check people with).

So for those who think a societal breakdown would cause a Great Purging of the Morons, I couldn't agree less. You optimists would probably be horrified by the folks who would rise in the wake of such a collapse. We would probably see a lot of pro-wrestlers become leaders; not because of their biceps, but because of their tongues. It wouldn't be a reflective Buddha-type who would take the reins. It would be Ric Flair.

Look what the shrink dragged in

I have a lot to say about the psychiatry industry, but today I just don’t have the juice to say much of it (pass the Adderall). In the interests of conserving energy, I will say a little:

As traditional religion has been crowded out by self-help and psychotherapy, deep personal introspection is probably more talked about and accepted than ever. Many view this as a sign of progress. They think that more people asking themselves more questions will solve many of the problems of the past. Instead of seeking counsel from some superstitious religious figure, modern man will instead find long lasting peace through the cool, rational science of the psychiatrist.

All of this assumes that self-reflection is an unmitigated good. It isn’t. Not everyone has the constitution for reflection. Why? is the most remorseless question of them all. Asking why doesn’t always lead to progress and breakthroughs. Why? can just as easily lead one down the path to unrelenting nihilism.

Many just don’t have what it takes to be “self-aware” in the modern sense. Remember, Wile E. Coyote didn't plunge until he looked down. Many of us are better off running in mid-air for as long as we can.