Well said. A lot of life is just making best guesses based on imperfect information.
I have a few thoughts on this, and as always it is going to be a bit disorganized.
I have mixed feelings about this article. I am sympathetic to young people right now - the job market is brutal and companies don't seem to be hiring. Everyone under the age of 45 has been operating under the Boomer Success Playbook - go to college, get educated, get a job, work hard. But those job opportunities never really materialized.
Also the norms around dating has changed a lot in the last decade. Even though online dating was a thing when I graduated college, Match and OKCupid were both completely different platforms in 2013 than Tinder and Hinge are in 2026. For one, they actually tried to set you up with people who were compatible - for one, you took quizzes on your values and preferences and the app would give you compatibility estimates for each person.
I am actually optimistic for the writer of the article. He(?) is at least applying himself to his writing and based on the few samples I've read, is quite good at it. The fact that he seems to be dedicated to writing suggests to me that he hasn't actually given up.
But to circle back to feedback, one of the problems that people in 2026 are facing is that we live in a fundamentally dishonest world. Everyone lives in ideological bubbles, few people venture out of their social comfort zones to even attempt to understand what other people think. So while I agree that people need to be paying attention to feedback signals that might be very very subtle, I think so many of us are so inundated with bullshit that this is much easier said than done.
Getting Feedback
Something the author said in the post is that you can’t really get feedback is writing or dating. I think there is a trap here in believing this that can cause a person to be stuck. There are plenty of feedback signals coming in all the time for all areas of life. It can just be hard and painful to interpret them.
There may not be a lot of direct feedback like “you did this wrong” or “you said this thing I didn’t like”. But by paying attention to what’s going on around you and how the world responds to your actions, then talking with other people to compare notes, you can definitely find feedback signals.
The difficulty here is that it is very easy interpret information incorrectly — to be too hard on yourself and think you did everything wrong or not be honest with yourself and believe there is just no path because of something outside your control.
Additionally, a lot of the signals we have to rely on for feedback have a lot of uncertainty in them. So I think we just have to try a lot repeatedly to get enough examples to be able to separate signal from noise. Trying different approaches and in different environments to see what changes to get different output.
I think I relate in some ways to the post. I’ve been in situations where I feel there’s no way forward and don’t think I’m getting feedback needed to adjust. But I think we should be careful when we start feeling this way and look for where we likely are getting information delivered to us that we are ignoring. There is probably information we can work with. We can probably find someone to boldly and directly ask for an honest assessment. Putting on blinders and just plowing on forward, assuming there’s nothing you can do differently or adjust is probably not the reality in most cases.
Discussing
Comments
Definitely agree about it being easier said than done to find subtle feedback signals.