Why Men Who Stay Single Are Demonized - With Dr. Orion Taraban

One of our commenters here exemplifies this perfectly, that there is plenty of pressure from our social circle. You mention it yourself, a lot of pressure to, hey, how come you haven't settled down yet? How come you haven't found Mrs. Right yet? You know, when you're going to make an honest woman out of her? When you got a girlfriend next to you, you know, at the Christmas dinner or whatever it is. And sometimes that pressure gets pretty nasty. And for example, Jay here— not to pick on you— Jay here from YouTube says A bachelor is a selfish teenager. You were born able to support far more people than just yourself, but you just want to keep that given abundance for yourself. How childish. I think that perfectly encapsulates the mind frame for a lot of people, a lot more of religious conservative people that really push somebody towards, you know, marriage, settling down, is that, you know, to keep all these riches, so to speak, for yourself, not necessarily monetarily, just, you know, everything for yourself is the ultimate in selfishness, and you are not contributing to society.

Well, I don't think that that's true. Bachelors can certainly contribute to society. What we're getting at, I guess, is the sin of gluttony as it was initially defined. Gluttony today means that you, like, eat too much or you drink too much. But I think it was first meant to mean like you hoard, like you hoard money or you hoard food or you hoard value. And you don't share it, but you amass it for the sake of amassing it. So there's, there's a difference between hoarding value and being married. So for example, if I were married with children, it would be much less likely that I would have made a YouTube channel, that I would have written a book. Like a wife and children take a great deal of time, energy, and money. I've on some level chosen to benefit a larger swath of humanity versus a couple of people. And it's not for me to judge which one is right or which one is wrong or which is better. I think each man has to decide that for himself. But under no cases should a man amass value and hoard it. But the idea that the proper use of his skill and resource is simply to provide for a nuclear family, I think, is actually fairly short-sighted. I think that's within the bounds of the average man. But for anybody who might have a wider scope, that actually might be limiting in ways that— and more guilty of hoarding value than spreading it across a wider audience or humanity. So that would be my rebuttal to that comment.

Perfect. And Jay is here saying, yes, but men are born with massive ability and strength. Jay, what Orion is saying is like, yeah, he recognizes that he has all this ability, but you can either focus it on this you know, family we have here— wife, kids, presumably— or you can— what he has done and what other men like him have done is blast that energy, so to speak, out to millions and millions of people potentially and helped out thousands and thousands of individuals, something he couldn't do probably, let's be honest, if a lot of your time and money and everything else was focused on two kiddos and a wife.

It would be very— it would be very— it would be much more difficult, let's put it that way. And you can make the argument, it's like, okay, so I've reached millions of people a month, but in a very superficial way versus, so you can put that on one pan of the balance and the other one is to help 1 or 2 or 3 individuals very, very deeply, like what is actually of greater impact. And I think it's a non-rhetorical question. I do think that there is probably some threshold, some kind of equation that I can't extrapolate that says, you know, at a certain point one is going to make greater impact than the other. And to say that going down one path doesn't necessarily foreclose others, or that taking on certain commitments doesn't allocate resources that might be deployed in other ways more effectively is absurd because we have to make decisions out of limitation, limitations of time, energy, money, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like if the idea here is to use your strength and to use your resources to create positive impact to those around you. Well, okay, just to define those around you, and to what extent of an impact do you think that you're going to make? And to have the tolerance to understand that not everyone's going to make the same decision as you, and that's okay.

Yeah, that's huge, that last part. The tolerance towards others are not going to necessarily make the same decision as you, and that's okay. You're asking a lot, Orion. People, you know, this is, this is the way you do things, gosh darn it. This is life. This is the prescription. We have this all figured out. Stop trying to rewrite everything.

Well, that goes to Jung's I always say it wrong. I've been corrected. Jung. Carl Jung's definition of the shadow. We often think of the shadow as sort of like the disavowed evil or badness or immaturity that lives inside of us that we prefer not to look at. And that, I think that's a good definition and that's a juicy concept that we can get into. But I don't think that's how Jung initially confronted or defined the shadow. The shadow wasn't necessarily evil or bad. The shadow was the path not taken. So when we choose certain pathways in life, we on some level permanently close certain others. And the shadow is the self that you could have been if you had made different choices. The married man's shadow is the bachelor. The bachelor man, the bachelor's shadow is married life. This sort of goes to the grass is always greener on the other side, right? It's like the, the issue is no matter what road I take for my own psychological wellbeing, I need to feel like it was the right one. So if I got married young and had a family young, that clearly foreclosed on other possibilities, but I need to feel like my decision was the right decision. And so the shadow is anyone who mimics the decisions that I didn't make. And if I'm not insightful, if I'm not careful, I'll project my own need to be right in my own decision-making process onto other people in a moralistic framework. And if I'm really not insightful, I will try to purge the world of those who remind me of the paths that I didn't took that might undermine my faith and commitment that I took the optimal path for myself. So of course, more or less, people get behind the decisions that they make. Like, I've, I've never heard a, a father— I'm sure maybe they exist, but I've never heard a father in all the consultations that I've done say that they regret having kids. It's a permanent, unrevocable decision. So it's like, the best thing that you can do is get behind it There's nothing you can do about it. You can't unmake them, so you might as well get behind the decision 100% that they were the right thing for you, best thing that ever happened to you. Maybe that's true, maybe that's a rationalization in defense of the shadow.

And circling back to a lot of people pressuring you to marry, have children, and so forth, we have to realize though that what that's rooted in isn't necessarily they're thinking about this from some holistic, almost metaphysical way of it's better for the universe and the world, but no, really the root of a lot of it is old-timey thinking. We need to reproduce more because kids die and you need to reproduce or else our civilization's going to die. That's in essence a big chunk of it.

That's part of it. Like we have a population collapse problem. For most of my life, we, I've been told that the world is overpopulated and we need to have, stop having babies. But it turns out in recent years that many industrialized nations are well below replacement rates and that's gonna create all kinds of social challenges. Let's put it that way.

Economic.

Yeah, I don't necessarily feel like I have a duty to the human race to reproduce personally, but I can see how other people might feel that. I think that it's important for those who— so here's the thing. It's like I haven't been ready to get married. So if the social pressure for me to get married was successful, all it would have done was push a man who wasn't ready for marriage into marriage. And how would that actually end up good for my wife or any children that I had? It makes it much more likely that it's going to lead towards divorce and the dissolution of the family unit. It's like part of the reason why I haven't been married, a big part of it is I haven't felt ready to do that. Mm-hmm. You can judge me for not being ready, I suppose, but like it would be irresponsible of me to sign up for something that I didn't feel capable of discharging. Mm-hmm. I, I just think that it's in everyone's best interest to not, to not force people to do things that they don't feel ready or equipped to discharge. It's like, what are they thinking?

It's like, I won't say they become ready because in their mind they're thinking of a grand, so many people. And this isn't a gender thing. There are women out there, young women right now that are saying, kids, no, it's not happening for me. And they get the pressure from the grandmas and the moms that will, a lot of these women here, oh honey, you'll change your mind. Trust me. When you get to a certain age, maybe.

A lot of them do, some of them don't.

But if she doesn't, let's not hold a gun to the woman's head saying, reproduce, gosh darn it, because that doesn't go well. If she's not wired for it, she's not wired for it. And there's, as far as I'm concerned, there's no advantage to introducing chaos to an already chaotic situation.

Yeah, and I'm for vive la différence. It's like, I don't have a problem with people having different ideas and living in different ways than me. I think that on the whole, it's probably great that we have, just like genetic diversity, that we have cultural diversity as well. And that means The people aren't going to live the same way.