I love the energy of this post. People are finally learning to live on their own.
Hes not “so close to getting it” he completely understands the bait hes setting out.
It’s possible it was bait, but if it was it was purposeless and self defeating.
As a wise person once said…
If I have both earbuds in, don’t talk to me.
If I have one earbud in, don’t talk to me.
If I have neither in, don’t talk to me.
I hate this though because I am not just trying to say hi, I am literally trying to explain to women why they should listen to me, so if they have headphones in they will never hear the arguments in the first place that I have honed in preparation through conversations with my AI Wives.
It is rude for women to just pretend like they can go about their lives and not center me, I am a man and I am the hero of MY STORY you have to listen to me.
AI wives are a thing?
I don’t know for sure and I am too afraid to check.
It was happening before LLMs became a thing it’s for sure one now
Exactly. It’s like they don’t even realize who the protagonist is here.
Its not her story, its history. Right fellas!
Heck - even Left fellas! We need unity on this issue.
I don’t mean this in a gay way, but men have such sexier minds than women, I just wish we could transport the minds of men into the minds of women so I could stop having to deal with these complicated feelings about my bros.
It’s like there’s a wall between us
Ughh I know right women are always putting up walls, all I am trying to do is knock down walls for no reason while screaming “WHAT ABOUT ME” in a tantrum. Then my friend Kyle who is super jacked has to come over and put his hand on my leg to calm me down by stroking it.
The best bros understand
Hey, when you are stiff, I am stiff, that is what matters even if we never even hold hands.
You just need to grab it and shift into a different gear. Like a car. A mean car. Or a sexy car. A strong, soft car. A car that knows exactly how i feel
Story time! This isn’t here to say that dudes have it worse or just as bad or anything. It just made me think of this.
I have a good friend who wears wired earbuds often. He gets in a space where he doesn’t want to talk to anyone but he got to be out for one reason or other. I’ve watched person after person come up to him to talk. He rolls his eyes, takes out an earbud, make a huge show of pausing whatever he’s listening to while holding up the “Wait a second” finger. They’ll say whatever they’re trying to open with and he will nod and give the biggest fake smile. Then put his earbud back in. To continue the conversation they have to tap him again and wait for him to do it all over again. Some do, sometimes repeatedly.
Some people seem to have no concept that others aren’t just waiting for the chance to talk to them.
This whole thread is weird to me because being approached in public by people wanting to talk almost never happens. Not that I’m complaining exactly, it’s confusing and concerning when it does, but it’s hard to imagine it as such a normal thing that it has become a commonplace annoyance.
It happens depending on where you are.
In the East Coast? Mind your business.
In the West Coast:
Someone made conversation with me in the toilet. “Good water flow, yeah?” He said.
As a dude, most people only give me small talk, just to break the ice and explain nobody is a threat. But I can see as a woman, most small talk is a lead up to something else.
No this seems like some made up scenario. Complete bullshit, if you will. But, go off.
This seems dependant on location to me. In a region I lived before it would be rare that someone would talk to me in public like at the store, now where I’m at it happens all the time, people seem much more social in general. I used to be sort of confused when it did happen, now I’m used to it and it feels like a nice human moment when it does usually.
I don’t know what it is. I used to get approached semi-regularly, maybe once every few weeks when I was younger. But this dude, for whatever reason, was approached often. I think part of it is the places he was a lot of times. We’d be out at the bar (he would lend music/PA equipment to bands or small bars for a small fee and show up to basically drink for free) and there was one night I watched it happen half a dozen times. Not by the people who were borrowing equipment, but just random people who he didn’t know.
He said it never happened at like the grocery store or whatever, but very often in bars when he’d sit alone, less often in restaurants when he’d sit alone, and occasionally at the park when he’d go sit to read (headphones in). He’s good looking but not extraordinarily so and never looked especially friendly so that wasn’t it. It was both men and women, men more often but women more persistently.
Some folks just have something that makes others want to talk to them I guess. I imagine it’s worse for women for a few reasons (the way certain demographics of dudes are socialized, not knowing how a guy will react when you shut him down, etc). And some folks seem to believe that everyone is just waiting for them to strike up a conversation, even if the person they’re trying to strike it up with is obviously actively avoiding people.
It stopped happening to me. I’m not sure if I aged poorly over the pandemic or if I just look meaner these days. He moved away so I don’t get to watch that particular trainwreck anymore. I’ll have to ask him.
We’d be out at the bar
LOL! What psychopath sits at the bar with earbuds in?
A psychopath that doesn’t want to make a habit of drinking at the house because they know it’ll become a problem but doesn’t want to interact with people because they’re going through shit? Possibly a psychopath that gets to drink for free because of the gear loan? A psychopath who wants to watch his gear and take it home with him rather than leaving it in a public place or with a group of drunk musicians overnight?
Next time you talk to him, suggest that he pick up some of those over the ear noise cancelling headphones. You don’t even have to have them turned on, but the size of them makes taking them off such a visible hassle that it seems to discourage a lot of those kinds of people. And the rest you can ignore and pretend that you couldn’t hear them because you had the noise cancelling on.
I already sent him one message this week!
Seriously though, this whole thing has me curious about the current state of things so I shot him a message asking about it. I’ll pass it along if he still needs the advice.
Self awarewolf
https://youtube.com/shorts/4bpL14Z9RKE
The only guys who are going to approach you are the guys with no boundaries. Which is going to feed the confirmation bias.
What do you think the solution to that problem is?
I was going to respond at least somewhat affirming what you said and then I saw who you linked. Gross. Can’t stand BilleRaeBrandt. Nothing but an apologist for misogyny.
I don’t know who that is, I simply searched “men not approaching” in YouTube search. There’s no shortage of similar contradictory content. Women are not a monolith, so it stands to reason that some genuinely don’t want to be approached at all, and some do, but since we’re not psychic, that just leaves respectful men not approaching as a default position.
I guess she is a youtuber or tiktoker or whatever who makes short videos about hetero relationship issues that (as far as I have ever seen) always blame the woman for why things have gone wrong with their dating attempts or existing relationships, etc. It’s never the man’s fault.
“Women are so unreasonable! Amirite, guise??”
The only guys who are going to approach you are the guys with no boundaries. Which is going to feed the confirmation bias.
What confirmation bias? The confirmation bias of this straw woman you have here?
If the only men who approach you are people who don’t respect boundaries, then every man you meet has similar traits, and then it’s easy to think all men your problem when it’s not. Just because you’re easily lost in conversation doesn’t make everything a strawman. It’s not a magic incantation that makes you look smart.
The guy is not “so close to getting it.” He just appears that way because we don’t have the same bias he has. He’s actually quite far from getting it and he probably won’t even believe the truth when people explain it to him.
If he was close to getting it, he’d have gotten it already.
No haha, I didn’t take that from this at all either.
Does he usually walk up to random people on the street who aren’t wearing headphones to try start conversations? 😬
Judging by replies to that thread… yes, quite a bit. One woman described how she had to wear ear protection after ear surgery and a guy removed that to talk to her from behind. She was in pain for 2 days afterwards.
Edit: my personal experience is I had 2 different guys tap on my shoulder and ask me to remove my earbuds by gesturing. Both times they were trying to pick me up. I was just on the way home from work, exhausted and also heavily married.
Someone… touched what some stranger is wearing to remove it… and it wasn’t an emergency???
What the fuck is wrong with people
entitlement. women are objects for men to interact with and men are owed their attention when they want it. you have ear protection? well that interferes with me seeking female attention, so off it goes. that’s the mindset we’re dealing with.
Oh my god, that’s awful
What is lightly married?
It’s a thinner batter - think tempura rather than chipshop fish (or corndog if you’re of the USian persuasion).
Idk I’ve known married couples that preferred to live far apart or other married couples who were casual partners but needed marital benefits
lol, maybe engaged? So like wearing just the engagement ring instead of both rings?
Soo… Just regular engaged?
But with a chance
I think it was jus a joke…
20 years in. Nobody is taking it that seriously any more.
H…How can someone come even close to think it is a smart move to stand behind someone, invading personal space (at minimum with their arm), grabbing and taking away ones belongings aka the headphones and then expecting that person will be happy to have a nice chat with you which results in a date?
Because they think they’re hot shit and have an ego the size of Jupiter. In their mind, they’re the catch and someone would have to be a (insert slur) to turn down such a gracious offer from the world’s most attractive “alpha male”.
Some people really are just that stupid I guess.
Cavemen like that only understand a wack on the head, and even then they think the woman is into them.
One woman described how she had to wear ear protection after ear surgery and a guy removed that to talk to her from behind. She was in pain for 2 days afterwards.
Sounds like she suffered consequences while the man who harmed her suffered no consequences.
We should be able to easily call police and sue for damages in such situations.
walk up to random people on the street who aren’t wearing headphones to try start conversations?
It’s strange to me that this would be considered out of bounds. “Pickup artists” aside, this really ought to be more normal.
I wish someone would do that to me in real life. I’d tell them about how a popular coffeeshop in our city is run by a straight up cult and the employees are all members whose wages go into a “shared purse” controlled by the cult.
Because unlike the guy in the OP, I recognize I’m not the main character. I’m the NPC in the tavern who sends the protagonist on a side quest to take down a cult.
Maybe a Generation and location thing, Gen Z here from Western Europe and i definitly would not dare/think about trying to pick up a person outside of a space thats specificly labled for dating.
For me its kind of a consent thing, outside of specific dating spaces i cant be sure that the other person wants to be botherd with dating.
But I didn’t say anything about picking a person up except to explicitly exclude it from what I was talking about. The comment I responded to was specifically about starting a conversation.
They probably misconstrued “pick-up artists aside” as being very specifically about literal “pick-up artists” rather than as a generalized hitting on someone in public thing.
I do agree with them, though, in that it’s very culturally dependent on how okay it is. I remember from a long time ago now one of those “kids today are always glued to their phones” memes where somebody just responded with a photo of a commuter rail car from the 50s where every single person in the photo was reading the newspaper, and I have a similar story from my dad about my grandfather: My grandfather worked in NYC for over 20 years and he commuted by train. During those commutes, he sat next to the same man, twice a day - on the way there and on the way back - for years, and only once in at least a decade did they ever speak to each other. “Are you finished reading that?” Those were the 5 words that man spoke to my grandfather, who handed him the paper he had finished reading, and they never exchanged another word again. I don’t think they ever even looked at each other.
I would also add that it’s a very extroverted thing to do, and not in the sense of social anxiety or something, but in the sense that introverted people burn mental and emotional energy in social interaction, and by trying to engage with a stranger in a random conversation, you might be using up the spoons they have that day. I’ll talk to random people in public as well, but I keep it to one-off statements that people can either leave be or reciprocate with if they want. A joke about the traffic in trying to navigate the grocery store, that sort of thing. I’m very good at talking with people, I learned it from working a service industry job as a teen, to the point where I was basically the public face of a company, but I find it EXHAUSTING to do. I’m an introvert, pure and simple, and social interaction simply takes energy to do. At the end of the day, all I want to do is isolate myself so I can recharge and unwind.
Plus, there’s the whole “women having to handle a man” aspect. Women have to treat men differently and behave differently to protect themselves when interacting with men (ones they don’t know in particular), and so a random stranger trying to start up a conversation is A Situation that they have to analyze. It goes back to the “women would prefer to be in the woods with a bear” thing. Women would rather a random bear try to start a conversation with them in public, or something.
My grandfather worked in NYC for over 20 years and he commuted by train. During those commutes, he sat next to the same man, twice a day - on the way there and on the way back - for years, and only once in at least a decade did they ever speak to each other. “Are you finished reading that?” Those were the 5 words that man spoke to my grandfather, who handed him the paper he had finished reading, and they never exchanged another word again. I don’t think they ever even looked at each other.
Best friend he ever had. They still never talk sometimes.
Yeah 90s born here and the idea of just wandering up to someone while they’re out in the street, shopping or pretty much anywhere that isn’t like a bar (and even then unless they give some sort of indication) and running a line is wild.
My mates older brother in high school would insist that sort of stuff is how you do it. Fuck that. I hate people, mostly sales people or weirdos, bothering me when I clearly have every indication about my demeanour not to talk to me, do it. So why would I? It’s weird.
You should just talk to people to be nice. If it turns into something else, then great! But I hate when somebody starts a conversation with me and they have an agenda: like, they want me to give them money or join their religion or something like that. Just talk to people because it’s a nice thing to do!
And if somebody’s giving social cues that they want to be left alone, then…don’t do that. Because that wouldn’t be nice.
Probably it is just Americans being Americans.
Of course not, just hot women who can’t wait to speak to him. Except, y’know, those bitches who blow him off immediately. But those bitches are just getting in the way, the really hot chicks are still waiting just for him.
All you got to do is wave your hands in front of face and ask if they are using aptx HD, AAC, or some other codec. It’s an easy conversation starter.
Is there even a point in continuing to talk if they are not using LDAC?
Maybe not. Let them down easy and go on your way.
Is it? I work in tech and I would have not a single fucking clue…
Well then we’re not going to pick you up on the street!
Waiter! My steak is too juicy and my lobster too buttery!
My wallet’s too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are too tight!
Meanwhile, the dirty looks I get when I’m on a bike ride and I startle nearly every woman I pass because she couldn’t hear me say “on your left”
Only the women, though?
and they CAN’T HEAR THE BELL EITHER
put the phone down, take the ear phones out and be more aware of your surroundings
At least turn off noise cancelling, you don’t own the bike path
Noise cancelling only really works on constant background noises like an engine. It doesn’t work on bells and just kind of muddies speech, but you can still here the noise.
Bell?
Push bikes have bells that you use to ding people when you’re coming up behind them to let them know you’re coming
Would someone needing a push bike even be going fast enough for it to matter? I’d think it’d mostly be toddlers riding them.
They mean push (pedal) bike vs motor bike, not a bike that you push around.
You can break bones falling off even a stationary bike, yes, it matters. People step out in front of you at walking speed wearing headphones and cause crashes that result in not so minor injuries - especially if you’re transferring your momentum into the pedestrian and their head hits the concrete. That’s without even considering damage to bikes and equipment. Helmets need replacing after a single impact.
You’re out of your mind if you think bikes are only really ridden by toddlers? And even then, what a great experience for toddlers to have preventable crashes
I never said bikes in general are ridden by toddlers, just push bikes. They don’t tend to have the strength to push very hard. Also doubt they’d be ringing a bell for anything other than to hear it themselves anyway
A push bike is a term used interchangeably with non-electric bicycles here, I was not aware they’re something else wherever you live
Yep, that’s why I ride this around:
Maybe they’re just embarrassed about how much faster than them you are?
Took me a second to get that this was a dude missing the point. It seems so obvious I struggled to recognize how someone could be so blatantly unaware
First read I thought he meant that a lady might be blocking the path in the mall. Which happens too many times.
nathitheoblivousasshole
