The great social experiment

Salamu

Perception is a funny thing. One person will see a potato as a source of nourishment while another person sees it as a dirty vegetable. Technically both of these aspects of the potato are correct, it just matters on the point of view you are looking at it.

I must say that I have a unique mindset when it comes to many things. I am not your conventional person

who will think in one particular way. In fact, many people ask me if I go home to a mental institution every night. I think that my rationale is quite revolutionary, others beg to differ.

Take for instance night clubs. Many people think night clubs are social gatherings. But there is no way on earth that a night club is anything but a social experiment.

A social gathering is a gathering of two or more people where a variety of events can take place. A braai (which is a barbeque for you non South Africans) is a social gathering. Here you can drink, dance, eat, watch sports, hit on women and perhaps see some action. There are very rarely fights at braai’s.

A social experiment is a situation where limited activities are on offer in order to see the human reaction to things. Realistically, there are only three things you can do at a club: drink, dance and hit on women. People go to clubs and dance as some form of perverse mating ritual which will hopefully attract the fairer sex. If this is successful and you get some action, you will no doubt then get into another ritual of dominance with a guy that has had his eye on her the whole evening. For you uneducated out there, this is called a fight.

Dating in a sense, is also nothing more than a social experiment in order to see if you can effectively pursue a relationship with the other person. A relationship is nothing more than a social experiment in order to see if you can marry a person. This is the ultimate social goal that most humans aspire towards.

And this is just conventional dating. Now internet – or social media dating –  is even more of a social experiment. With conventional dating, you get to interact with the person on a personal level and you can see whether you are compatible. You make these judgements on various factors such as her smile, her nature, her demeanour during the dates, common interests and her personality. I recently joined Tinder and I found that on Tinder, you make assumptions on a person’s look and nothing more.

What defines a social event from a social experiment? Well the presence or absence of controllable variables. To get me to like a girl on Tinder, three things need to occur: Does she have beautiful eyes, does she have an awesome smile, and does she have a good body. If she’s blonde, it’s a bonus, but it will not exclude a girl if the other criteria are met. With a conventional date, it is harder to manipulate the controllable variables because your personality dominates.

A club is a social experiment because the controllable variable here is alcohol and the lack of other activities to entertain our primitive minds other than dancing and drinking. It is easy to manipulate these variables. The absence of alcohol frankly makes a club shit. But the absence of alcohol at a braai is not such a train smash.

You need to look for common denominators with all of this. And the overriding one is emotion. Which is why dating is nothing more than a social experiment, marriage on the other hand is less so because emotions are settled down significantly from when you were dating. The overriding factor at a night club is emotion (how you feel towards a song, how you feel towards a girl, how you feel towards getting involved in a fight) there are far less emotions involved at a braai.

How do you know the difference between a social event and a social experiment? There is a very easy test you can conduct which I call the Judge Judy test.

Judge Judy is a US television show based on a judge who rules on court cases brought before her. She needs to do this unemotionally. I often find myself sitting and watching Judge Judy and making my own mind up as to whether the person is guilty or not. I do this without having any previous training in law and I am only using common sense. This is also done unemotionally.

So the Judge Judy test is: look at the situation or event and UNEMOTIONALLY force yourself to look at it from the point of reason of common sense and then make a judgement call on the number of controllable variables are present. If there is more than two, it’s a Social Experiment.

Mei jua daima kuwa kabla yenu, na vivuli nyuma yako!

Being single at 30

Salamu

Being single in your 30s is not fun. It’s the time in your life where a chilled night having a few drinks with friends over dinner looks way more appealing than getting shit faced at a club.  All of a sudden, the music at

Great lyrics bro! Took you all day to come up with it.

these places are too loud, young thundercats are running around trying to make a name for themselves either as the next big MMA fighter of his generation or the next big drinker of his generation, the music that these thundercats listen to (that Hardwell Tomorrow Land bullshit) has absolutely no soul, and it takes you three days to recover from a hangover.

These are some of the challenges that being single at 30 presents. But there is another challenge, a far deeper one.

What type of woman do you go after at 30? If you are targeting the age group of 26 years and under, you will still have to go to clubs and listen to that Hardwell Tomorrow Land bullshit music that has no soul. And do you really want to be that 30 year old at the club? If you are targeting the age group of 26 to 30, you will find them at a hipster bar drinking a craft beer trying to ‘define their life’ during their quarter life crisis. And if you are targeting the age group of over 30, they come with the challenge of divorces and quite possibly kids.

We live in interesting time my friends.

So…if the prospect of going to a club and a hipster gathering scares the shit out of you, what’s left? INTERNET DATING.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are a lot of internet dating success stories. I’m just giving you my point of view. My 8 things you have to come to terms with when internet dating:

11)      There is no such thing as a free lunch. You will be expected to pay for internet dating. Yes there are free sites like OK Cupid. But the decent ones will cost you.

22)      Be prepared to scrape the bottom of the barrel. A supermodel or a cute girl can pick up a guy standing in the line at the Department of  Home Affairs. All she needs to do is flash him a smile and lick her lips seductively. A Plain Jane or a girl who is not looked at twice at school will be on the internet. Don’t go onto the net expecting to find a supermodel or a cute girl.

33)      Be prepared to encounter psycho’s. There is only one other reason that a decent looking girl will be on

the internet. She’s mad. This girl has escaped from a mental institution and is completely Loony Tunes. She might be relatively normal around you, but she has regular imaginary conversations with Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.

44)      Be prepared to enter the Twilight zone. And no, this is not the Twilight zone of teenage porn vampires and werewolves. This is the Steven Spielberg Twilight Zone of freakiness. You must remember, to date on the internet, you must lose a bit of shame. So, be prepared for weird requests. I met a girl on Tinder and we got talking. Not even 10 whatsapp messages later she tells me her prepaid internet is up and asks me to by some for her. And then she still gave me shit because I asked her how she can do this after only starting to talk to me.

55)      They will be needy. Sometimes needy as F##k. Because of points two and three above, there is a good chance that these girls will be needy. I met a girl on OK Cupid and we got talking. And it was nice for the first few days having someone to talk to, you know, to get you through the long day at work. But there are times when you don’t want to talk to a person who sits with their phone in their hands waiting desperately for you to reply to them. And when you don’t chat to them EVERY SINGLE DAY…THE WHOLE DAY you get messages like: Did I do something wrong? We don’t chat as often as we did. And then when you don’t answer her because you are driving….you get 15 messages where there are just question marks (?)

66)      You will be asked stupid questions. As much as I love technology, it is a curse at times. It is definitely a curse on relationships. But before you venture out and meet the girl from the internet in person, you have to chat on social media first. The same girl who asked me if she did something wrong once asked me if she was awesome. Now I mentioned to her before what she was awesome to talk to because we had a lot in common. But I don’t feel that there is a need to tell a person that they are awesome every day unless you are dating them and are serious about them.

77)      Don’t expect the perfect woman. Ok. This applies to both real dating and internet dating. Just like the

perfect guy is a unicorn, the perfect woman is a unicorn. A mythical creature! But this is even worse with internet dating. A girl you meet at a social event usually attends social events and has a relative idea on how to carry herself in such environments. A person you meet on the internet does not have this skill. Be prepared for awkward silences, the dreaded one word answers to questions like: yes, no, ok. And don’t expect to talk for hours on end without stopping. More like, be prepared to sit in silence for hours upon end without talking.

88)      Make sure you are on the same page with things. Interests are funny things. Many people share interests, but there are some people who have specifically unique interests that cannot be shared. I have very unique interests. I love sport to the extent that I am a fanatic about it. I am also very interested in ancient civilizations. Now to find a girl that has the same level of interest as me is hard. And if you cant. You will be able to communicate for the first week, and then it’s the one word answers.

Relationships are hard work at the best of times, but to date the female version of Sheldon Cooper is another beast altogether. Internet dating is definitely not for everyone. One thing you do need is a well-planned exit strategy.  Talk and get to know her on whatsapp or BBM. There is a great function on these apps called: Block contacts.

It’s like bug spray on steroids. Because sometimes you use bug spray and they just keep coming back at you. With block contacts, only you can unblock them, and why would you if they are bat shit crazy?

Is there hope for people who are single in their 30s? Of course there is. You just can’t use the same tactics you did when you were 20. At 20, you wanted to bang anything that had beautiful eyes, a cute smile, and licked her lips seductively. At 30 you need to be a bit more selective. Look for inner beauty as opposed to outer beauty. Because if shed is smoking hot…but single at 30, someone kicked her to the curb for a reason.

Mei jua daima kuwa kabla yenu, na vivuli nyuma yako!