When I was younger, almost all Strip Clubs were look but don't touch places.

Men would pay silly amounts of money to be teased by girls from a distance and interact with them.

That changed over time with lap dancing, etc, and once it did it became pretty much impossible to run a club as 'no touch', as the men took their money to the places that had more access. Access to MORE is the key. You don't accept less when others offer more.

There are a lot of parallels to today despite us living in a much more liberal and open society.

The young men of today, to a far greater extent do not have the access to interact with young women as they did in generations past. The types of 'going out' functions, that created opportunities for interaction have largely been abandoned. They are not learning to flirt, they are not learning how to handle rejection, they are not getting access.

So that has created the advent of Cam girls. The old school, no touch stripper, brought back in a big way. Young men hungry to see any women naked, and to have any interaction with her. You have young women playing Video games in their underwear and flirty clothes making hundreds of thousands and some millions of dollars a year by a legion of men paying them monthly to access their camera feed. You pay a premium and she will speak to you directly.

It is a horrible sad situation for most young men as it ends up being an empty exchange for them and it is what is leading to the rise in 'Incels', which are young men who say they are unable to engage in real exchanges with women and are involuntary celibate. Many of which lash out violently against women and some of which are promoting ideas that women need to be forced into relationships and marriages with men against their will.

Some people mistakenly think that dating App's (Tinder, Bumble, etc) make it so that everyone can get easy sex but that is very wrong. Every woman can get easy sex and more so now than ever before. The top 10% of men also. The next 10-20% of men can work to be noticed on those Apps but the lower 70% of men have a horrendous time often lucky to get a few contacts a month, they cannot connect with.

Few girls want the dumpy guy with no verbal game, even if they are dumpy girls with no game themselves. And due to Apps even those girls now can and will get sex from that percent of guys who just are driven by numbers. They want a different girl every night for sex only and any girl willing, gets that time for the evening.

In the prior days that guy would have had to choose at a bar or social outing who to go after, leaving the less attractive girl and the less attractive guy to pair up, most times. Now that guy, with the App gets to sleep with them all (everyone wiling) and they are not leaving anyone behind.

I genuinely feel bad for the younger men today as they do not have many of the opportunities to build the social skills we had in the past and that makes it real tough to meet women.

It sounds even crazier--but they used to give girls money just for naked pictures in magazines etc. back in the olden days

haha true.

The less access men have, the lower the bar for what they will pay for is.

Funny that in today's much more 'open' age, the dynamic for many young men is the opposite.

For sure.

Professional poker players / gamblers have a very difficult time with this.

As a whole they don't visually look healthy.

11 year olds can get porn on their phone these days. When we were kids, we had to steal the dirty mags from the local shop.

Porn, by its very nature, introduces misogyny into the minds of young men. I think, probably, as men, we are hard wired to play a dominant role in a sexual relationship. Still, it's a lot different asking a woman if you can do certain things, and expecting a priori that you can do certain things. "Please" never hurt anyone.

ahhh innocence lost.

No joke that I would say that probably most of the young boys moving into puberty int he 70's or prior, had their first explorations with self love using the Sears Catalogue women's underwear section. The lucky ones found their dad's hidden Playboy stash.


A few who had early cable tv, realized that if you went up to the last available channel, there were a few scrambled channels that were PPV only where you might occasionally get a glimpse of what was going on in seeing a blurry boob or other body part.

That was considered the domain of the truly naughty to be watching that.



Much of the time you were not sure what you were actually seeing but your imagination was good enough to fill in those blanks.

I like your ideas. I also think the endeavor is to escape reality. I have friends that are gamers and unfortunately one has commited suicide. It was a close friend i grew up with so I put some thoughts into this subject. I had 4h of sleep last night and only didn't continue to play because I had a appointment this morning (9.45 am actually not morning, but for me that is the middle of the night) before that I pulled an all nighter. This weekend was crazy and im up a ton, despite internet outage in a key game as chipleader. So was it worth it? Money wise yes healthwise no, I know and have to work on this.

I can only relate to the poker gambling (also gaming) aspect but i do know that regular gamers also get into this kind of trance state where they just continue to play and forget everything around them. That is the dangerous part. When sleep and food doesn't matter, no actual priority matters, all that matters is that your aces didn't hold in a key pot or that the idiot sucked out on you with a 2 outer, that you get unstuck or continue because you're ego tells you to. You're too good to quit, you deserve to win etc. That's your ego talking. And when this happens you will eat ****. Trust me. I have considered jumping after sessions like this. They can take every good energy from you.

So the counter strategy is to develop good habbits imo.
Because once you lost yourself what is the point. The problem I identified is bad habbits combined with being all by yourself, only you and your computer. Many people completely lost all social skills doing so. They come out and look and feel like zombies.

This is almost a verbatim quote from Point Break, Gary Busey says something along those lines to Keanu Reeves, Sears catalogue and all. Was that intentional?

Sears catalogue had lots of beautiful barely clothed women, g strings or thongs. That was the closest thing available to porn. For porn you had to go shady places and feel like a horny bastard. Nowadays all you have to do is turn your computer on.

@ deuce, camgirls do a lot more than just making faces for you. You can't rent them and they do whatever you want them too in that time. (Almost anything, they state what they won't do, mostly the blizzard stuff or things that are illegal) Almost like a real hooker. Only thing is it's virtual reality so you can't touch them. They even have vibrators that the user can activate to pleasure them. Imo that is completely stupid and I would never do this but a lot of people are apparently addicted to it. If it could make a call I would just ban it. Imo it's only causing harm and wtf is it? Virtual prostitution with the happy end in your hands. It's stupid. But a lot of girl view it as ways to make money with out having actual intercoure. Some have even their boyfriends or husbands do all the tech part of the job.

Imagine in the 1800s you were probably lucky if you had a couple daguerreotypes and a small stack of drawings

Haha no. I did see Point Break when it first came out. Really loved that film as I am an adrenalin junkie myself. Have not seen it since and don't recall that scene. I will have to re-watch now.

The thoughts are my original thoughts there but I wonder if subliminally how I delivered them was impacted by that???"

Found it! Got some of the details slightly wrong, he says it to John C. McGinley (Dr Cox from Scrubs!).

haha, ok. No I definitely did not remember that line. But I have also heard many comedians make jokes about the "Sears Catalogue' days and horny young boys waiting eagerly for it to be dropped off at the door.

it was a pretty common joke as it was the main source, for many young men of fantasy material and seeing scantly clad pretty women.

The alienating effect of rapidly changing technology is barbelled on the young and the elderly. Rapidly changing technology is very alienating for old people as well.

This post is hyperbolic but directionally correct imo.

I don't think the explanation is stress. Playing poker for a living isn't uniquely stressful. A lot of jobs are highly stressful.

I agree with Tuma that poor sleep habits are a big contributor.

Living a solitary life in front of 2-3 monitors or hanging out in casinos all day are even bigger contributors. There is an emptiness to passing huge amounts of time in that way that is hard to describe.

Word.

I guess i am different as I loved hanging out in Poker rooms all day.

After the 2002 Dotcom crash I was able too not jump in to working full time right away due to some successes and instead decided to seriously up my live poker play to see how well I could do. I play with 100% discipline. Zero alcohol while I play. No phone distractions. I want to see every hand and more importantly how each player played every hand.

I was consulting with a few companies and did so generally Mon-Wed and every Wednesday night I would take off down to Niagara and play poker, like a job, Thursday until Sunday night.

And I treated it like a job. I would play from about 5pm'ish-2am'ish, go sleep from 2am to about 5 or 6am, go back to the tables for about 2-3 hours and then back to the room to sleep again until starting again around 4pm'ish.

The 7pm-2am were just the busiest hours, and anytime after midnight you were just hunting guys who were drunk, or stuck. A lot of guys stuck playing table games who saunter in to the poker room as they lose less money per hour there but they cannot help but try to bully the game splashing tons of money into pots.

5am+ was hunting the guys who were really stuck and playing desperate chasing every big pot just trying to catch up.

I guess I was lucky as one of my gifts is sleep. I put my head down and I am in deep sleep with 10 minutes, in almost any instance. Even after a long nights sleep. That really helped with an irregular poker schedule as I was never playing tired.

And I love the mental games sitting at the table. Assessing the opponents. Studying them, sometimes for hours for a single exploit. The Chess aspects of it.

I found nothing empty about it. For me it was invigorating.

I sort of felt that way when I was younger, but not now.

After a while, bumhunting started to feel a lot like hunting bums. I don't have any moral objection to fleecing drunks, but it isn't the most rewarding way to spend time. But I still play sometimes.

That's why most poker players quit the profession.

At the end of the day, we're just being dealt a bunch of cards.

Also, taking money from degenerates donating it off isn't gratifying. That's probably the main reason I stop doing it. Seeing some fish reload the last of his account and donating it off was a very zero value way to earn a living.

None of that is going to age you or cause any real health problems to the degree of what is seen from lifelong poker players and the rest.

I'd imagine that almost everyone who entered the poker scene and stayed in it for at least a few years had at least an addictive personality at best or some degree of mental instability that leads them to other outlets that is detrimental to their health and psychical appearance.

How much of the "poor sleep schedule" is just due to simple addiction as opposed as some calculated work schedule?

I don't think some dude crunching hand ranges to make educated guesses for 8 hours a day in front of a computer is going to take years off of their life.

It isn't the computer time. It's the computer time mixed with no human interaction other than answering the door to greet the sushi delivery guy.

lol, this is exactly what civilization on earth has trended towards and will continue to do so in the future.

We aren't dying decades earlier because we facebook or post or whatever **** while eating doordash.

It's the unseen and undiscussed attributes that is often assoicated with poker players that has led to the both the deaths stated in the OP and psychical decline from those who "work whenever they want without a boss" but somehow can't manage to make a lunch in with the in-laws.

Human interaction and teamwork are vastly underrated aspects of a fulfilling job.

I turn 40 this month and have been a full time poker player (live and online) for 15 years. I started as a busto 100 dollar deposit kid that chose to drop out of university after 7 uninspired years. I'm very healthy physically and mentally, work out regularly, sleep well, have had healthy relationships etc. Poker was the best thing to ever happen to me, and even if I never made another dollar, the amazing 15 years I had beats anything I could ever dream of in any realistic occupation. I always wanted to be a professional baseball player growing up, once that failed, I floundered in life for about 7 years as an uninspired student. My only regret is that I didn't find poker sooner.

Life can be balanced, but I guess I'm not famous or a millionaire, and that might be 'the Price' I've paid for living a balanced, happy, and healthy life instead.

Despite my earlier posts, I can believe this. There are very few iron rules in life. I suspect that you are the exception rather than the rule, but if you are happy as a full time poker player, and if you look back on the last fifteen years with satisfaction, then it was probably the right decision for you.