Singles and Dating

[beechnut79]

(09-11-2021, 02:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-11-2021, 01:06 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: I do not follow horoscopes religiously the way some do, but there is a local magazine that comes out in my area that has what they call the daily weather for each day of the published month. Unlike a publication I used to get annually that ceased publication after 2013, this is not zodiac sign specific. Under today's date was the caption that it's time to let your hair down and have some fun. It got me thinking once again about how the fun loving, let your hair down, dance the night away single women seem to have made the list of endangered species.  This coming from one who for whatever reason never had any luck picking up women in bars. I meet the majority of my dates in other ways, such as organized singles dances (a coworker of mine actually met his wife at one of those). There was also a radio station that had a dating service at the time, as well as low budget dating services. Being within reasonable distance of the Chicago lakefront beaches, that was a common second home for me during the season whenever I had time off.

Quote:Much of what is offered as popular astrology is banal advice... "Today is a good day to salt some money away" or " it's a good day for a shrewd purchase". Boring! 

Quote:The bloom seemed to begin coming off the nightlife as well as beach going rose circa mid-1980s when AIDS effectively killed off the sexual revolution. By the end of that decade there had been a significant decline in nightlife venues and activity as what was known as a cocooning movement took the helm. Baby boomers ending up becoming what so many had once ridiculed, couch potatoes. These were the same folks who had pretty much craved their nights on the town, and staying in on a weekend night was akin to blasphemy. Often the party started as early as Wednesday even though most folks still had two full workdays ahead of them at that point.

End of the awakening... the party is over, at least as Boomers understood it. Generation X redefined what a party was and even introduced the word "party" as a verb. The style was different, with different music. It was awkward for late-wave Boomers, as I can attest. As real wages stagnated, people gave up on going out for a night on the town. Cable TV was cheap even by the standards of the day, and if one could not throw a party one could at least have "party" foods like beer and chips. 

Quote:It might be easy to lay nightlife's decline at the feet of the economy, but the fact that folks were still going to hotsy totsy restaurants with high price tags as well as concerts and theaters to me discredits that. Some restaurants have cocktails that can be as expensive as the food. So I do not buy that theory.  Once the folks who were heavy into the scene became empty nesters as their offspring moved on, I would have thought they would have changed that much overworked buzz phrase to been there, let's do it again, thinking that they would have sorely missed those days of going out and kicking up their heels. Yet that never occurred either. Not letting the sweet energy of those earlier times infuse the Spirit.

The people who either had money or pretended to have it -- or were still living with their parents and maintaining teenage patterns of spending could do that. For young adults in the 1980's, life was holding onto a hideous job that one saw as at most a stop-gap and often became a career by default, a time in which one took two cr@ppy jobs to make ends meet, and in which people in retail and food-service businesses lived under the order to suffer with a smile. I've known that all too well. I hated life when I thought too much. It's hardly surprising that fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity made a comeback... "pie in the sky when you die, but only if you comply". Suffer, but always make sure to express your undying love for the Master Class and neoliberal social order... and the sweatshop for which you toil. ARRRRGH!

Quote:Previous post mentioned decline of bar scene being related it to COVID, but it was in decline long before that hit, and this post focuses on that. When I saw that horoscope post, I began to think, just where could I go in my area if I wanted to dance the night away somewhere and couldn't really think of any place. And I am situated in the country's third largest market. Sometimes I think there are actually a greater proportion of live music venues and such in some of your lower populated areas for whatever reason. Am also amazed how few people seem to miss those freer, more swinging times I came of age in, and often feel like I am just about the lone wolf.  I am definitely not a lover of the world we currently live in, especially the political correctness fervor.

Parallel in many ways. Getting sick from a respiratory disease that supposedly no longer happens in advanced industrial countries or getting sick from a venereal disease that actually kills and has no cure? They are not the same  diseases, but the social effects are parallel. 

Quote:An interest sideline of all this is that it was in the midst of disco fever that Jimmy Carter gave his legendary Crisis of Confidence aka Malaise speech which hastened his departure from the political landscape. When the 40th anniversary arrived two years ago I challenged folks on the forum to craft a malaise speech for the current time. Even prior to COVID we had a societal malaise much more acute than what occurred at that time.

So, do any of you think we were ever see a time like that again?

Jimmy Carter was the one thing that a politician could not get away with any more: rigorously honest. Ronald Reagan was a masterful liar, a glib flim-flam man artist who got people hooked, burned them, and got them to say that it was all wonderful, Scam artists are like that, and neoliberal economics and a new harsh school of management that treated workers as livestock at best and vermin at worst took hold. Reagan was perfect for that.    

Sometimes i lament that we don't live in those freer, more swinging times anymore. These days I never hear about, for example, singles only apartment complex anymore. I often wonder if some so-called politically correct folks cried wolf about them being discriminatory. I live close to two complexes in Chicago's western suburbs, International Village and Four Lakes, both of which were a singles paradise back in the day.  So-called singles bars were on the wane long before COVID, even though these establishments were number specifically limited to singles. There were supposedly many married men (and perhaps a few women as well) who supposedly went there looking for side hustles so to speak.

Singles scene is no doubt, like just about everything else, mostly online today, and most participants would probably be young enough to be a daughter or even grand daughter today. I fooled around with Tinder for a little while then gave it up when you began to have to pay for some of the features that used to be free. I now have had predominately one lady friend for the past twenty years though I usually see her only about once in two weeks due to the high price tag for social life these days. Often I marvel at how we were able to all that we did some half century ago, as that was also a period of relatively high inflation and the beginning of more employment instability. 

Might a new type of singles scene emerged in the coming years? Will the current younger generation want sex more than the Millennials seemed to? Any more thoughts on why even the younger folks aren't out kicking up their heels the way many of my generation did, COVID notwithstanding?

[pbrower2a]

The devil-may-care hedonism of a 3T wears thin and proves ineffective or exploitative, if not both. The means may vanish, and the fun is either no longer available or priced out of range. What you said of Tinder applies to much that used to be a free enticement for many things in the 3T from journalism to pop music. It's gone from "Try this" to "you get what you pay for" to "you pay, and oh, do you pay, for what little you get". People may discover that they can live without newspapers, cable TV, and overt hedonism.

There may be a justification for "you pay, and oh do you pay, for what little you get". Raising prices for a smaller number of customers may be what is necessary for preventing another economic meltdown such as those of 1929 and 2008.

This may also create opportunities for undercutters in every imaginable field of economic activity.

[beechnut79]

The hedonism I am thinking of was actually more in the 2T, that halcyon period after The Pill and before AIDS. Actually the culture I describe had its balloon popped once the AIDS scare came onto the horizon. I cannot honestly say that there were more things people thought they could really live without once COVID hit. Life has for the most part returned to what it was before, albeit with a bit more caution.

Have said many times that we should begin to reduce automobile dependency in this country but more and more I do not expect it to happen within the lifetime of me or most of the posters here. Been nearly half a century since we were warned with that huge gasoline shortage, which many actually thought was fake.

[pbrower2a]

HIV/AIDS may have done as much to bring the last Awakening Era to an end as any political (rise of Reagan) or economic cause (the then new neoliberal order depending upon super-cheap, but still competent labor in services and retailing, especially as American Big Business chose to become importers instead of manufacturers). Prosperity may have been delusional, as it was mostly in rising housing prices that created a wealth effect for those who had already (sort of) Made It and real hardship for those consigned indefinitely to cheap-labor roles. Because HIV/AIDS largely hit drug addicts (seemingly eternal pariahs in American life) and male homosexuals, such served the Schadenfreude inherent in the Religious Right.

Such hedonism that develops in a 3T is often divorced from any semblance of intellectualism or self-discovery, intense, short-lived -- and costly and often destructive. That is exactly what one expects in a grim world of severe inequality, economic insecurity, harsh management, and lengthened work hours.

(Hey, worker in the post-industrial economy! Do you hate your mind-numbing, soul-crushing work that falls short of meeting your economic needs? Work another such odious job so that you can pay more rent!)

[Tim Randal Walker]

Compared to what I remember of the 2T and 3T, I would describe today's mood as sober. We are at the wrong end of the cycle for a party mood.

During 2T, especially early 2T, the outer world felt secure after a stultifying, if productive, 1T. Society began to break free from 1T strictures.

Celebrity circus/hedonism of 3T may have been superficial compared to that 2T mood, but now even the 3T mood is gone. It became unsustainable as the outer world became harsher; it faded away.

[Tim Randal Walker]

Will we see freer, swinging, party times again? For me, personally, I very much doubt it. We have to get through 4T okay, and then we may expect a 1T, which tend to be socially conservative. I am 66 years old. It is conceivable that I may get a glimpse of very early 2T-on television, in the nursing home.

[pbrower2a]

Probably -- when the Crisis mood comes to an end. Once the perception of dangeris over, people will be in a celebratory mood.For the full-blown next Awakening it will be around 2040. I hope you got to enjoy the last one!