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indeed.
I don't recall reading this, but I have a comment from a year and a half ago...
I'm often bothered by the directions young people are pushed in. I think it's leading to them having worse lives than they could have had and it's severely damaging our culture as a result.
yesssiiir.
I routinely come back to this... going to college was a mistake (#980195).
...BUT, do you think your judge of character/the sort of person you/most people were with at age ~17 is a) best for you, b) perhaps inferior in some character match-sense but good enough so that starting a family with them in your 20s would have still put you in a better place 10-15 years later?
Basically, it's not the who you're with but the when? But if, as you say, the who is so incredibly important... maybe it is/was better for most youngsters to wait until college/after to find their partner?
Note that my advice isn’t to settle down with your high school sweetheart. Rather, it’s to give those relationships enough time to decide if you’re with the right person.
I do think there’s a lot to your b) point. In search theory, the optimal solution isn’t to hold out for the very best thing to stumble across your path. The optimal outcome involves weighing the ongoing costs of search against the benefits of taking the best option currently available (intentional oversimplification).
Basically, if you found someone who you can be happy building a life with, lock that down because you won’t encounter it often.
The optimal outcome involves weighing the ongoing costs of search against the benefits of taking the best option currently available.
I recall this "37%"/Secretary rule (had to google the name, lol) that you should go through slightly more than a third and reject everything, and then pick the best you see thereafter. I can't grasp the logic behind it (@SimpleStacker or whoever needs needs to write up the rundown of this: https://statwizard.substack.com/p/when-you-should-marry-and-settle).
It's as good as any way to balance accumulating search cost with running out of time. (And, I posit: we also suck at knowing what is/isn't good for us or who we are, so just doing it will both teach you that and become good/good enough over time)
I feel like most of this rant has aged well: #496016
Here’s the big question though: Why is matching getting worse across the entire world?