2026-02-08
Update
Because my bar is not particularly high (for people to have sex with, or people to consume substances with), I don't seem to see any reason to pick one person over another. At the same time, I think long-term relationships are worth it.
- Wanted to point out a minor issue I seem to have with the wording. Regarding long-term relationships, I said that my bar for women is not particular high. This might not be true in my specific case.
- What I actually meant was, I don't really believe in having a long list of criteria for who to date. It is better for your list to be short instead, for most people. A lot of potential sources of friction in a marriage can actually be worked over with enough effort, if you do love each other and are willing to commit to stick long-term with each other.
- Every additional criteria you add is making your love for them more conditional.
- It is yet another restriction you're placing on their ability to grow and change with time. Suppose your partner matched your criteria on day one, but they evolved over time to not match it anymore. They will probably suffer during that whole time period. You might eventually realise your criteria are more flexible than you thought. Or you might break up. Or they choose to not change, but suppress their resentment for you instead.
- I would be completely unsurprised if having close to zero or literal zero items on the list, is what turns out to be what makes most people the happiest. I don't mean arranged marriage with a stranger picked by your family. I mean meet a stranger (by any method), and spend some short time period like a few months to figure out if you a) find each other attractive, a) "vibe" together, and c) have good conflict resolution skills. If you do, then commit to marrying them.
- I don't actually have the data though, so I am speculating here.
- Following this probably does make your bar low. As in, there's probably many people you could have married instead of this person, and also been similarly happy with instead.
- I'm not actually willing to keep my bar this low. For example, I want to find someone who is polyamorous, which narrows my search space by a lot.
- See also: I dislike dating as status game
- There's a bunch of incentives to deliberately keep your bar high, and to pretend to keep it high.
- Society seems to me to be deeply confused on whether there are any traits that make for a good match, that are universal across most people. I even mean this for the most basic criteria like whether they have money to self-sustain themselves, or whether they are physically fit, or whether they have good hygiene. For instance, I think the number of people who can successfully marry someone with average/below-average hygiene is surprisingly high, and is way higher than the number of people will end up marrying then.
- And if this is how I feel about basic criteria, you can imagine how I feel about trying to marry someone who is a millionaire or is a supermodel or whatever. Like, how do you actually know this increases probability of happy marriage?
- See also: Being ignored doesn't mean being disliked
- I am making yet another accusation of people based on status/groupthink, so I again want to be especially careful about it.
2025-12-31
Useless people
Disclaimer
I have clearly been struggling with the question of "who should I spend time with?" for multiple years now. One conclusion I am increasingly realising as of today (2025-12-32) is that most people are of no use to me. Here's some quick notes on this. Not specifying the full context here. I still consider all these questions unsolved.
Useless people
- Professional life
- 99.99% of people are basically useless to me for my professional life, i.e., trying to fix AI risk.
- Since most people are trying to solve different problems than I am, they aren't that good at providing advice or at making me feel seen.
- Full explanation for why these people are trying to solve different problems than me, is out of scope for this post.
- Maybe there is some minor value they can still provide to me, if I was skilled at extracting it from them. I am not that skilled at this, and learning this skill is not my priority.
- A handful of people are useful.
- Mainly this is a few people working on plans to fix AI risk that are explicitly adversarial to AI companies, and also are generally power-seeking and not naive about how power works.
- I will meet some of them in-person next year.
- I expect some of our interactions to be transactional at first (which deteriorates any happiness you can get out of the relationship), but if I work long-term with someone, possibly as a cofounder, I have some hope this can change.
- Personal life
- Atleast 90% of people are basically useless for me for my personal life.
- The primary people I find slightly useful are people I can have sex with, and people I can consume substances with.
- I definitely care about having sex less than I did as a teenager, possibly as a result of having more sex and maybe also hormonal changes. I still care about it a fair amount.
- I think sex with a longterm partner is better than sex with a shortterm partner who still actually cares about you, which is in turn way better than a shortterm partner who doesn't care. Full explanation of all this is out of scope for this post.
- I don't really enjoy most hobbies a lot for very long.
- I don't think this is for lack of trying out new hobbies.
- Full list of which hobbies I enjoy how much is out of scope of this post. The short version is that if I look at all the hobbies I've tried over last few years, then consuming substances seems like the primary hobby I enjoy that is also social.
- I don't enjoy most intellectual conversation anymore.
- I consume a lot of content online (long-form, non-fiction), but this is a more of a solo activity and I don't enjoy discussing it with others as much.
- Some intellectual people in my circles only care about acquiring knowledge as some sort of intellectual game completely detached from our real world actions. I used to be a bit like this, but am not anymore. I've shifted from MtG Blue Red towards more MtG Blue Black.
- Both sets of people I actually like, seem highly expendable to me.
- Because my bar is not particularly high (for people to have sex with, or people to consume substances with), I don't seem to see any reason to pick one person over another. At the same time, I think long-term relationships are worth it.
- Maybe the conclusion of this is to just use a greedy approach - pick the first people you meet in life who can satisfy these, and then commit to them long-term. I am not sure about this conclusion and need more time to figure it out (via thinking, more experiences, etc).
- See also: The Little Prince
- I prefer hanging out with happy people.
- Empirically, people who accept reality as it is (MtG Green) seem happier on average to me than people who value don't accept reality and want to change it (MtG Black). I am non-accepting and unhappy, and I think many people around me are also non-accepting and unhappy. This makes me sometimes not want to hang out with such people.
- I prefer hanging out with people whose life plan makes sense (even if their plan has nothing to do with my plan).
- I am atleast mildly judgmental of most people of my upper-middle socioeconomic class (net worth above 10 lakh INR) because I think they have a responsibility to improve the world, but they choose not to. The few people who do try to improve the world often work on plans that make no sense to me. In particular, I think many plans people make are not power-seeking enough, or naive about how power works. This judgment I make deteriorates the quality of our relationship atleast a little.
- My expectations of people have gone down now but they are not zero. I think this expectation hurts me, but I can't not have this expectation because it seems grounded in real data, in my head. I might need to write more about why I am judgmental, and if I should be.
- I seem more accepting of people with lesser money just pursuing a normal career.
- Other people prefer hanging out with happy me.
- Lots of other people also prefer hanging out with happy people, and the fact that I am not actually that happy has made multiple people not want to hang out with me. It is possible some of these people are making the right decision.
- I would ideally want long-term relationships where both of us are better off together than apart over the long run. I think parasiting off of someone's energy can be okay in short-term but bad in the long-term.
- Maybe no one on Earth seems extremely useful to me.
- In my entire life, I don't think I have met a single person I would like to hang out everyday with as of today. I have tried to hang out with people everyday (for example in college, or in previous relationship), but I don't think I want to go back to hanging out everyday with any of them.
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