Greentext

Touch grass, work on your mental health, get a hobby, start participating in society in a constructive manner and start showering.

All good advice on its face. But they do call it "Getting Lucky" for a reason. You can be the perfect specimen and still strike out (with people you're attracted to in kind). Past that, celibacy and the resulting depression/insecurity has an impact on your mental health even if you're getting all the other boxes checked. "Don't be a fucking sad sack if you want to get laid!" is easy advice to give and hard advice to live. Doubly so when you're a moody anxious teenager, already.

And it is this hyper-individualist "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude is a big part of what drives people off the deep end. The Mean Girls tier prejudice stretching to naked hostility that single people experience - particularly as they get older - is just the other side to the incel coin.

One of the things that gets to me is how often they mock the advice that actually helps.

There's a degree of selection bias. The loudest, proud-boy-est incels are inevitably the ones that have made a brand of the identity and are trying to sell PUA bullshit. There are plenty of people who struggle with "good advice" in silence. And plenty more who take it, improve, start meeting people, and stop being incels.

But the Self-Help industrialization of dating is often flooded with the same simple "Why can't you just be normal?" tips and tricks that seem ignore how many perfectly normal people are still incredibly lonely. Meeting new people can be scary, putting yourself out on an emotional line is emotionally taxing, finding the time and money to date is often a luxury, and plenty of people who initially fall for one another discover - sometimes painfully - that they aren't compatible.

When you trivialize love, you aren't being helpful. Your cavalier attitude towards other people's pain can even be abusive. Is it any surprise that a person who feels mocked and insulted isn't fun to be around?