Reader Comment on Male Sex Drive during Middle Age

I received an interesting email from a reader (thanks, K.!) regarding my last article Male Sex Drive from Teenage Years to the Middle Age, and thought I better share it with you:

Aaron, 

maybe I'm an anomaly, but I'm just about as horny as I was as a teenager, and don't need little blue pills to get horny, hard or stay hard! Maybe a little motivation for those guys heading into their 30's and 40's, as I'm 59! I attribute it to not smoking, eating healthily as in organic whenever possible, staying away from red meat and keeping in shape at 5'9" and 175 lbs with a flat stomach. Partly genetics maybe, because I have longivity in my family tree on both sides.

I've met some guys in their late 40s and 50s who were in phenomenal shape. No, I didn't ask them how often they had sex, but I think they perform better in the bedroom than all those downtrodden 30-somethings you see everywhere.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!

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Male Sex Drive from Teenage Years to the Middle Age

I received an interesting question as part of a longer email the other day. The guy who wrote to me was curious about my view on how the age difference between you and your woman might influences your libido (i.e. are you better off with a younger woman), as well as how your libido changes in general throughout the years:

What is your view about age when dating and chasing girls who are interested in you but significantly younger than you? At what point people stop having sexual libido/desire or their desire decline as they age?

I'll cover the second question in this article, and the other in a follow-up.

Let me tackle the problem of declining libido in several steps. First, male sex drive declines as you get older, but I'll hypothesize that the change is largely due to lifestyle choices and constraints, and not so much due to biological factors. About teenage boys it is said that they would bang a hole in a tree just as well. This is certainly exaggerated, and just another example of the misandry of the mainstream media. Young girls are horny, too, yet no mainstream media buffoon ever wrote that they would shove anything in their vagina.


Regardless of whether teenagers really are hornier, I think it should be highlighted that sexual activity in teenagers seems more pronounced simply because many of them have more time to spare. They are exploring sexuality, and as an added benefit, having sex is a great way to overcome boredom. That kind of behavior is quite obvious among students who have no genuine academic interests, and it's pronounced at so-called party schools, too. Some days ago a commenter on the blog referred to the YouTube channel "I'm Shmacked", which offers OCD-friendly clips depicting the party life at US college campuses. Universities with a stronger academic reputation are conspicuously absent, but you'll find plenty of videos showing students at larger universities getting wasted.

Thus, it seems quite safe to assume that sexual activity among teenagers is not universally higher. It's well-known that a large fraction of incoming freshmen at elite technical universities like MIT are virgins. I doubt that many of those guys will turn into "players" later in their life, even though it's not hard to see how those people could fall for the empty promises of PUAs. In high school the geeks found different ways to occupy themselves.

The general theme is that the amount of spare time and opportunity determines your level of sexual activity. Sure, if you're a journalism freshman at OSU, and there are thousands of women around you could imagine banging, and if just to fill your time, your mind probably starts to wander on occasion. On the other hand, the diligent MIT student who tries wrapping his head around multivariate calculus and who calculates how much sleep he can afford to take the next few days, would view women as a mere distraction.

All those behavioral patterns will be evident later in life too. Even if your sex drive at age 30 was as high as at age 20, the mere fact that you now have to work a day job, commute two hours a day, and have to run errands in the evening will be enough to make you think that your libido has been plummeting. Instead, just like the hypothetical MIT student described above, you have too much to do and too little time. If you worked less, you probably would have more energy to fornicate. Of course, then the problem is that office environments are a pretty bad place to pick up women.

Looking at the situation of men in general, I don't want to dispute that libido decreases with age. However, it is an open question how much of this is due to inevitable hormonal changes, or simply a consequence of lifestyle choices. True, you don't have much of a choice since you'll have to pay your bills somehow, so it's more of a problem of how society is set up. If you're particularly hard-working, you might need a vacation to replenish your energy, before you can think about getting laid again.

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Three Billion Women, and what this means for One-Night Stands

My post on The "three billion women" argument was primarily about finding a partner. This is not the goal of everyone, but for every chest-pounding virgin on PUA forums who claims that he wants to bang more women than Genghis Khan has there are hundreds who secretly wish to just have a girlfriend. Of course, part of the problem is that some of those guys have the twisted idea that women would only have sex within relationships, while one-night stands are reserved for studs and guys which coke, but that would be a different topic altogether.

Let's say you're a reasonably well adjusted guy and you want to sow your wild oats for a while. Women don't just marry anybody, but their criteria for a one-night stand are often much lower. This is particularly true if she's got self-esteem issues and thinks that having some random dude bust a nut in her would make her feel desired and accepted. There's no shortage of such women out there.

Let's just take a different branch in the previous Fermi estimate, and continue at the point where we had whittled down the number of available women to about 5,000. Social class will still plays a role, but women are a bit less strict about that if they only want your cock instead of your wallet. So, if you're in the middle of society, then we'll be a bit generous and assume that you'll have no access to the top 10 % of society, and that you have no interest in getting involved with the bottom 20 %, for a variety of reasons. Both seems to be rather plausible percentages. So, you're down to 3,500 women, vs the previous 2,500.


Let's say your standards are slightly lower for women when it comes to one-night stands, so you only exclude 50 instead of 60 %. This leads to 1,750 vs. the previous 1,000. That's already an enormous difference. However, you'll probably find it easier to bang a chick whose worldview you detest --- it may even give you an extra incentive --- than one that physically repels you. Maybe you'll even say that no matter what she thinks, if she's hot, you'd bang her. It's just for one night anyway, or maybe for a week or two. Then you're at 1,750 vs. 500 women, and since you only want to get laid, you couldn't care less about whether your personalities are compatible. Then you're still at 1,750 women to chose from, while the guy who is going for relationships is down to 100. Those 100 he first has to find, while the other guy will relatively easily bump into women belonging to the other much larger crowd. All of this will make an enormous difference for their relative success rates.

Of course, the problem is that when it comes to one-night stands, women are more interested in your looks, so the better looking guys couldn't even fuck all the women who are willing to spread their legs for them, while guys who had less luck in the genetic lottery and thought that surely some women will find man-boobs sexy might have much less success. It's not as if any guy would have the same variety to chose from.

But what was the point of all of this? First, you might think that those Fermi estimates are a bit stupid. Well, they are used in science, for instance when eyeballing possible results of an experiment, before making any measurements. They are also quite popular with some HR departments, so you might find yourself confronted by an HR ditz straight out of ASU who asks you, "So, um, like, how many pingpong balls would, like, fit in a bus to make it, like, totally full."

Sure, you can dispute some of the number or percentages. But the assumption is that the errors in over- and underestimating values would cancel each other out. It's not at all perfect. However, if you play around with those numbers, and then use real data whenever it's available, you'll reach some pretty plausible numbers. Speaking of the first part of this article, I was looking for an explanation why it seemed so difficult to find a girl suitable for a relationship. In this article, on the other hand, the guiding question was why it is so much easier to get laid than to get a girlfriend. I won't claim that I have presented a proof that it's 17x times easer to get a one-night versus finding a girl that might make a great girlfriend. The former is certainly a lot easier. You have probably experienced that of the girls you bang, you can barely stand any of them once you spend more time with them. This is all due to their personality. More concretely, it's due to the extent and severity of the difference between your and her personality. Yes, PUA-tards, I know that your angle is to change your personality on the fly, but we all know how well this is has been working out for you.

Also, an aspect I have not considered is that aspects like traveling --- let's use Spring Break vacations as a particular infamous example --- can boost your sex life dramatically. If it's 17x times easier to find a girl for a ONS than a relationship back home, it's probably hundreds of times easier to get laid on Spring Break than to find a girlfriend there. Further, living in a tourist town will give some guys many opportunities to get laid, at least during season. Then there are college towns with a large transient population. It may not be so great if you wanted to find a wife, but you'll probably have a few good years banging incoming freshmen students.

What do you think of all this? Let me know in the comments below!

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The "three billion women" argument

One of the more asinine PUA statements is that there are "3 billion women" (google that in addition to "PUA" and be surprised) on this planet and therefore plenty of chances to get laid, and oh-so-many ways to experiment and refine your "game". The sheer stupidity of that number is hard to stomach.

Okay, let's say there are 6 billion people on Earth, 3 billion men and 3 billion women, and let's ignore the slight gender imbalance. We're working with huge numbers, so a few measly hundred million don't matter. So, Joe PUA, how would you go about hitting on all those three billion women? Well, first you would probably realize that you're neither a pedophile nor a gerontophile, in other words, you neither fuck children nor the elderly. Then there is the problem that a good one billion of those women reside in India and China. Too bad, bro!


As you think some more about it, Joe PUA might realize that he would not only want to not fuck some granny, but instead mate with a healthy, attractive young female instead. Also, he doesn't want to leave the country or state he lives in. In fact, he doesn't even want to leave his city. Then it hits him that he's actually constrained by the number of available women in his city. I know, I know, there is now talk of cities turning into megalopoleis, but they're getting nowhere near billions of people.

Let's give Joe PUA some variety to work with, so we'll locate him in a trendy US city like Portland, Oregon. Wikipedia tells me that there are 600,000 people living in it. Joe PUA is white, and he'd much rather fuck a white girl. Not that he's racist. It's just his sexual preference. This narrows his pool of women down from about 300k to 225k since about three quarters of the people in Portland are white. Now the PUA-tards might think that 225,000 women are more than they could ever fuck in a lifetime and can barely sit still in their excitement. But, dear PUA-tards, don't move to Portland yet, because it's getting worse:

"The age distribution was 21.1% under the age of 18, 10.3% from 18 to 24, 34.7% from 25 to 44," and you're probably not looking for anyone beyond the age of 40 anyway. Those statistics are not fine-grained enough. I therefore had a look at the most recent US census information. It wasn't a pretty sight:

Note that these data are for the wider Oregon region. So let's just assume that the percentages, which are shown in the right column more or less reflect the situation in Portland as well.

Joe PUA has no easy access to 19 year-olds, so the age category from 20 to 29 has to suffice. That's a mere 6 per cent of all women. Suddenly, Joe PUA went from 225,000 women to just about 13,000. Bummer, eh, Joe?

Let's continue playing around with the numbers, and take into account that a certain percentage of the women might be married. Let's say it's 30 %, and then some more might be in some kind of relationship, possibly another 30 %. What's left for Joe PUA then? About 5,000 women. Yes, yes, Mystery and Tyler, if you fucked a new woman every weekend, it would still take you about 100 years to get through all of them. However, in reality, all 5,000 single women of your desired age range in your city of 600,000 don't line up in front of your house. You've got to find them somewhere. At this point, your socio-economic status starts playing a big role. Popular fiction in the US is that they've got a "classless society", but if you believe that, then you're probably actively looking into buying a patch of land on the moon, too.

Just thinking of the number of women that would be available in the best possible situation versus the number of people in that city should be quite sobering for any PUA spouting out nonsense of "three billion women". What's even more sobering is that you're not the only one competing for them. Then, since women like to "marry up" you should be of at least the same socio-economic background, but ideally a bit higher. Let's say Joe is more on the average side, which will then cut the number of available women in half again: 2,500! It's starting to get depressing, isn't it, Joe PUA?

So far, we have not even considered physical attractiveness, their interests, or their personality. Let's say you've got some standards, and don't like to bang fatties. She should at the very least be slim. Let's be very generous and say that this excludes 60 % of women. Only a very small minority of women stays in shape, so I'm being very generous here. What's the total now? It's 1,000. Then some women have interests or a world view you can't stand. Let's say it's half, and, again, I'm being very generous here. The number is now 500. Now let's finally talk about personal compatibility. This is very tricky, and you'll probably find that you only ever really "click" with about 20 % of women, and that's a really generous number. What's the final number? It's a shockingly low 100 in a city of 600,000. You could easily fit them into a bus.

Please note that you will compete with other men for those women you desire, and those more desirable women might have higher standards which you may not be able to meet. But let's assume Joe PUA drops his PUA nonsense and follows a saner approach to dating, and doesn't repel 95 % of the women he talks to within the first five seconds. He then still has the problem that he has to find all those girl, and this is the big problem. Instead he'll encounter many women he'll have absolutely nothing in common with, doesn't find attractive at all, and who might have obnoxious personalities. Sure, for a one-night stand you may be able to ignore personality defects, but for any kind of relationship toxic personalities are to be avoided.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments below!

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Real-Life Example of a PUA who Creeped Out an Entire Campus

In my last post on Wannabe PUAs and Social Exclusion I mentioned how the complete absence of tact can easily make socially inept guys alienate their entire surroundings. In the comments this discussion was enriched by a number of people, such as Johnny who chimed in that when he makes a new friend, he learns through Facebook that they've got a handful of mutual "friends" already, or an anonymous with the observation that he's bumping into the same people in a city as big and vibrant as NYC.

So, there certainly is some awareness that you're not as anonymous in the crowd as you might think. But what happens if you are a PUA who thinks that the world is his oyster and, just like in an arcade-style video game, he can always just insert another credit or hit the reset button? Well, "Sean Larson" is what's going to happen. (Thanks to another anonymous commenter for the tip!)

"Sean Larson" managed what you might consider impossible: He hit on so many girls at Ohio State University (OSU), and in such an indiscriminate manner, that his reputation grew and travelled far and wide. His reputation wasn't a good one, though. Here is a discussion on Reddit with hundreds of comments about a "Guy who harasses girls around campus", which started with this post:

Have any other girls out there ever been stopped by a short Indian guy named Shane or something? This guy has literally tried to stop me a grand total of six times, and every time he tries to ask me if I'm from LA or something cheesy. Does anyone know who this guy is? Does he even go to school here?

As the saying goes, karma is a bitch. I don't even know where to start with that guy. He has certainly proven that it is possible to completely wreck his reputation by utter stupidity. Have a look at the top ranked comment on Reddit:

YES! He's tried approaching me like four times, twice in Thompson. The first time he approached me, he just came straight up to me, kissed me on my hand (he kind of just yanked my hand up, because he took me by surprise), and tried to stroke my hair. I was like WTF?! Second time he tried to approach me in Thompson like we were supposed to be friends or something and I'm like nope Nope NOPE! I had to literally push past him, as I was leaving the downstairs bathroom and he confronted me in the hallway. I was then "Get the fuck away from me. I don't know you." He was still trying to persist and corner me and literally no one, in the crowded library, tried to step in despite me being obviously distressed. Maybe, it's just me, but if I saw someone in the same position I was in, I would've stepped in. 

So, when I've seen him try to do similar things to girls on campus and on High Street. I try to step in every time I see it happen because no one had the courtesy to do that for me. I've been seriously ruminating about trying to file a complaint against him but I don't even know his real name or who to go to, at least on campus. So yeah, that's my story. He's a creep and I seriously get sick to my stomach every time I see him.

Sounds like a charming little fellow to me. Like totally. And when I was reading that I was so "YES! I totally, like, want more of that!!!" Consequently, I dug around some more, and found out that the reputation of "Sean Larson" has been growing rapidly. The discussion on Reddit spawned articles in, for instance, the website of the student paper of OSU:

The 22-year-old man goes by the pseudonym “Sean Larson.” He said he uses the pseudonym to protect him from physical harm and stalking. 

“Campus is very tribal, so it’s like a tribal psychology place,” Larson said in an interview with The Lantern Oct. 26. “If you get found out for doing that kind of stuff (sleeping with many women), you can get extradited from the whole thing.”

Of course, Sean Larson tries the old PUA shtick of claiming that approaching a ton of women also means that he's sleeping with a ton of women. The problem is not that he's such a womanizer that all the other girls are pissed off because they have to wait for their turn until his dick is free for a few minutes so that they can hop on it. No, the issue is that he has approached so many girls on campus, and in such an awkward manner that he gained a reputation not as some kind of uber-manly Casanova, but as a complete creep.

Of course, according to that guy, the problem is that the women are such bitches. Here he is, verbatim:

They’re two-faced. When I’m actually meeting them, they’re all friendly and bubbly and give me their number,” he said. “Behind my back, when they go home, they’re talking s—.

PUAs are well-known for not realizing when they start annoying people, and they can't distinguish mere friendliness due to social norms from sexual interest either. But, hey, I guess if your plan is to just approach a few hundred girls then those subtle differences don't matter.

A commenter on that website described the situation very well:

You know, as women, sometimes you are approached by men and it is a really uncomfortable situation. So you figure, maybe if I’m nice but detached he’ll go away and won’t drag me into an alley and rape me. That’s not being “two-faced”, that is just self-preservation. That guy needs to find his kicks in some other way than harassing women.

I burst into laughter when I noticed that "Sean Larson" just had to chime in with a typical PUA comeback:

Some stupid rumors going on. Girls touch me, I don’t touch them. I’m the victim. The girls are sexual predators.

Of course, since there are so many girls after him, he doesn't have to approach a single one, and the OSU student newspaper just ran an article in which they implored all girls not to harass this poor little guy.

There was a surprising revelation at the end of the article, too:

Columbus Division of Police Officer Joshua Urlaub said Larson could be toeing the line of legal and illegal if he is too persistent in his pursuit of women. 

“It just depends on how far he goes with it,” Urlaub said. “If he’s continuing to harass them, and he won’t take ‘no,’ he’s definitely on the line of a harassment charge.”

Urlaub said anyone who is continually harassed should notify the police immediately.

This wasn't the end of it, though. The story spread to Jezebel, and some site called BroBible, of which I hadn't heard of yet, wrote a long investigative article on him with the lovely title How Ohio State Used Facebook and Reddit to Turn Against Its Campus’ Most Notorious Creeper.

I find it amusing that "Sean Larson" chimes in himself in the comments, thinking that all the negative attention he is getting is actually good for him.

The college kids posting there seem to have a pretty decent view of "game", though. Here's one commenter:

You aren't some sort of sex-wizard, you're just some dumbass who keeps flinging shit at a wall until it finally sticks. And then you brag about how well that shit stuck to the wall.

...and here's another:

What you're about to read is a tale of "pick-up artistry" gone wrong—how one dude in Columbus, Ohio managed to single-handedly piss off an entire college town and face an unprecedented amount of public shaming on Facebook and Reddit.
.... You know that's a bad thing right????

Following some more trails, I then came across an article in Business Insider. That PUA is apparently getting "famous". Their article had the rather unflattering title, Ohio State University Students Have Come Together To Shame A Notoriously Creepy 'Pick-Up Artist.

Compared to that guy some amateur who barely manages to creep out all the women who hang out in his local bar doesn't even register on the radar, though.

What do you think of that guy? Is he a creep or your personal hero? Let me know in the comments below!

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Wannabe PUAs and Social Exclusion

One of the most fascinating aspects of "pick-up artistry" is that it is commonly men who are socially excluded who are drawn to it. Think about it, if you were the popular jock in high school who had cheerleaders falling over themselves to suck your cock, you probably wouldn't google a phrase like "how to get laid". It's fairly safe to assume that the typical guy who falls for the many snake oil salesmen in this corner of the Internet has a deficient social skills already.

This puts him at an enormous disadvantage. Not having undergone a typical socialization process, he is unable to adequately evaluate the teachings of his new "guru". I mean, if you were socially savvy and saw what guys who actually got laid did, and what they looked like, there is no chance in hell you'd believe that PUAs who look like clowns actually get girls. Gullible guys don't know that, so they don't question them. Instead, they lap up their nonsensical advice. Approaching chicks randomly, dozens a day? Sounds good to him. "Plowing" in the face of complete disinterest? Sure, he'll try it.

What prompted me to write this post was in fact a Facebook status update I found in my email inbox some days ago. Here it is:

That guy looked as if he was (easily) in his 40s. Frankly, if your goal is to get rejected instead of finding girls who might be interested in you and trying to get laid, then you don't get the point of hitting on girls. It's about getting laid and, by extension, if you so desire, find a girl for whatever kind of relationship you're interested in. Getting rejected is not the goal. Of course, if you think that getting rejected ten times a day builds some kind of useful skill, then you'll probably disagree with me.

The vicious circle is already obvious: you've got guys who were not fully integrated in society to begin with. They lap up nonsensical PUA teachings, and therefore they adopt behavior that will only alienate the people around them even more. Sure, if you live in Manhattan, you could meet lots and lots of people. You won't really connect with the transient population, though, and once you try to meet people in places where people go to meet other people, you'll realize that you're living in a relatively small world. Even in big cities it won't take too long before you start bumping into the same old faces over and over.

On a side note, I knew guys who were "hardcore" into pickup in cities with millions of people. One guy had taken off three weeks from work to hit on girls on the street. What he realized was that people have routines, and that it's not so difficult to get recognized. This is not good if you're a "PUA" who dreams of pulling girls off the street into his bedroom. Your street corner is not so different from the bar down the road. Humans are creatures of habit, and most people will just do the same thing over and over.

This now leads to a problem for people who aim to become "the biggest reject" in their city. It's not as if he'll encounter hundreds of new faces every day. There were a few instances were "PUAs" were outed on Facebook for instance. There was this dude David DeAngelo associated himself with, "Dr Paul". That guy managed to build quite a reputation in a city as big as Chicago. His reputation wasn't a good one, though. Take a bad plan and stick to it despite repeated failure, and you'll achieve the unimaginable: creeping out an entire city.

The solution would be very simple. Guys would just have to stop doing completely absurd things like approaching dozens of girls a day, or hitting on any chick in the club. If you're in a small scene then it wouldn't take long until you can't show your face anywhere anymore, but even if you're attending a busy campus university, or if you live in a big city --- if you are really stupid and try to leave a bad impression with a dozen women a day, and if you take her friends into account, easily a number two or three times as large, then you'll eventually succeed turning yourself into a pariah.

Seriously, how many women are there, even in a big city, you would be interested in? Now subtract all those who are unavailable for whatever reason, and you'll realize that it's not millions. If you now further subtract all those who are not interested in you, then you end with with a fairly small number. That number is certainly a lot smaller than the number of girls that joker wants to get rejected by.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!

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Friendships in the Real World

A lot of men who end up typing "how to get laid" into a search engine seem to have a pretty strange understanding of how social interactions work, which gets readily exploited by shady PUA marketers. In recent years PUAs have moved from claiming to teach you how to get laid to some kind of all-encompassing lifestyle advice. Now they tell you how to make friends and become popular. Sadly, their approach seems to be about as flawed as their pickup advice was. PUAs tell you to go out and hit on chicks indiscriminately, and unsurprisingly this is also how they tell you to build your social circle. However, you normally don't make friends just by talking to someone. So, let's step back and look at how "friendships" in the real world work.


I think there are just two main factors: Randomness and common interests. The latter is pretty much irrelevant for the majority of people who have no real interest in anything, so I won't focus on it. Instead, the "friends" your average Joe or Jane have come primarily from the first category. This means that they draw almost all their friends from those people they interact most with, be it high school, university, or the workplace. This is pretty much all there is to it. They don't necessarily have much in common with those guys, apart from an accident of fate that put them in the same building. The implications are obvious: If you're an average bore and you want to go out, then you probably pick some of the guys that just so happened to attend the same school, and go out with them.

Some of you may now think, "Wait a minute! There are so many morons in my school, and I was just a fortunate accident that I met Jim in my Calculus for Beginners and Artists class." Sure, but it just so happened that some admissions officer drew a few random numbers, or looked up your dad's net worth, if we're talking about the Ivy League, and sent you an offer to attend their esteemed seat of learning. You would have found a new best friend at any university you had chosen to attend, or any company you joined. Some places are toxic, so you will avoid spending time with your colleagues, but those are statistical outliers.

In fact, whenever you meet a big group at a bar or club, they're mostly from the same school or workplace. It could be that the entire office trotted down to the bar at the corner to start the weekend with a nice pint of beer. Or maybe the younger guys are all new in town and want to get laid, so they team up and go out as a group to ogle chicks so that they've got something to jerk off to before falling asleep. People in general are terribly afraid to be on their own because they have so little to occupy themselves with, and therefore the prospect of getting drunk with people they vaguely know is pretty appealing.

I'm making some huge generalizations here, but for "normal" people this is pretty much how it is. Only a small minority actively seeks out their peer group through common interests. Heck, plenty of people will be afraid to try this or that hobby because they're afraid it'll make them look weird. Allegedly, this is one of the reasons why there are so few women in computer science and engineering. If you're a guy studying such a field, you are quite likely to fall somewhere on the Asperger spectrum, and therefore you may not always take the feedback of your "well-adjusted" peers into account. Or maybe you just gave a fuck what they thought because you realized that there are more interesting things to spent your time with than gossiping about celebrities, some "slut" from 12th grade, or obsessing about what kind of sneakers one was supposed to wear this season.

So, if you are concerned about your number of friends, then just be visible to enough people, and make sure it's a setting that allows you to meet the same people over and over and over again. However, instead of taking a course in Modern Set Theory with five other nerds, pick an Intro to Communications course, and attend all their social get-togethers. In general, people need the feeling of belonging to some kind of group, no matter how artificial it is, so if you're feeling alone at university and value quantity of social contacts over quality, then just follow the herd and practice your beer pong skills. On the other hand, if college is behind you, and working 40 hour weeks still doesn't make you value the time you could spend all by yourself, then join your colleagues for a drink. Don't worry, they don't really want to be around you either, but after a few drinks this won't matter so much anymore. Alcohol is often described as a "social lubricant", but, really, any kind of excuse that allows you to get together will do. Alcohol is just cheap, and easy to get, so you getting a bunch of guys together to play FIFA Soccer on the PlayStation while getting wasted is much easier to do than, say, getting enough coke for 12 people.

People generally aren't that smart, and they aren't particularly selective with regards to anything. You're a "friend" once they've seen your face a couple of times and made a bit of smalltalk, and if you think you don't have any chance to get laid, then just being around enough single women --- as long as you're borderline attractive --- will lead to enough opportunities. Sure, it's tough if you have to "cold approach", but if she has seen your face before it's absurdly easy. It just depends on your standards. My "lay count" could be three or four times higher had I gone home with any chick that hit on me at work or university. However, don't discount just being around many people either, since it will put you in a better position to meet at least a few interesting people like, say, some guy you genuinely like because he's got a similar world view and interests, or the very rare girl that is smart and good-looking. So, there is some value in "knowing" a relatively large number of people. It's just a question of whether you want to pay the price.

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