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Comment by janandonly | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep believing that politicians and strippers really love them and care about their emotions?

> One of them is a 31-year-old semiconductor assembly technician who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. He said he spent nearly $20,000 on OnlyFans over four years before learning he’d been fooled by chatters. “I was lonely,” he said. “That’s really pathetic that someone is trying to take advantage of you.”

I guess lonely, horny and hungry people make for the easiest clients . What a sick world we live in.

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I think the problem is both loneliness and a completely warped sense of attraction.

In part, I don't blame these men for falling for that scam. The idea of "engaging into a relationship with people I find pretty" is an almost ubiquitous human trait.

I think that the problem for them, is that they're exposed for so long at OF models that real women, with varying body types, simply fall of the insanely high standard set by the models.

And I'm sure that the brain, at its most primal self, can't distinguish between a PNG and "a super attractive woman that lives in my tribe near my hut".

That, and a really lonely life that sets the standards for a relationship really low.

$5k/year is cheaper than an IRL relationship.

20k is a lot of money to spend on pornography though. I wonder at what point does one ask themselves if they have a problem or not?

Or not alot of options...

With 20k in 4 years you should be able to switch handful of hobbies that will potentially allow you to attract a real woman.

20k on porn means you need to see a shrink asap.

He didn't think of porn at the time I bet.

I mean if he met the girl(s?) on another platform, like Tinder, it's more explainable. But OnlyFans...?

He was chatting on OnlyFans with a model, he wasn't chatting on a dating platform.

Regardless if he was chatting wit the actual model or some guy pretending to be her, they still would have told him ANYTHING he wanted to hear as long as he was there to pay.

I've had some first-hand experience with people like him and trust me - there is usually a very good reason why people like him need to pay to get attention from "women". You can blame the porn/sex industry as much as you like but there is a type of man that will never be satisfied by a normal relationship.

> You can blame the porn/sex industry as much as you like but there is a type of man that will never be satisfied by a normal relationship.

There are also men who, due to the brutal realities of dating and the "relationship market," will likely never have access to a normal relationship. I'm not sure we can 100% blame the user here, either.

That depends heavily on the IRL relationship.

Because cost per year is totally how normal people value their relationship.

If cost per year exceeds available cashflow? Everyone starts to think about the relationship that way at that time.

If you’ve been around long enough, unless you’re really lucky, you’ve had that experience before.

My wife and I recently did a model for how we expect our expenditure to increase once we have kids. We obviously will love our children but we find it irresponsible to not have done the exercise of how much our kids will cost per year (and what that means for our own personal savings etc).

If only it was just that type of situation.

There are the ‘I must be a stay at home mom/dad because I can’t handle the stress’ type situations.

There are the ‘I need to buy x we can’t afford to be happy’ type situations.

There are the ‘we have kids now and he/she can’t leave, so I can do whatever I want’ type situations.

I had someone actively sabotage my job (in a very difficult to detect way) because they were worried I’d leave them if I was too ‘independent’, or got promoted.

And I’ve seen many other people have spouses do that to them too. Everything from dramatically increasing stress levels at home, to sabotaging sleep, or creating health issues until the spouse stopped ‘getting away’. All the way up to creating false accusations and trying to destroy them unless they got ‘under control’.

Wow that's horrifying - sorry to hear that you were in that situation and thank you for being willing to open up about this.

It doesn't have to be just partners - a friend recently told me about her husband's younger sister who would regularly spend beyond her means then rely on her brother / parents to bail her out of her debts.

That's also one of those impossible relationships where you feel obligated to help but the relationship has a real cost.

Yup. A friend of mine had his wife do something similar (first time) during an economic slowdown after he got laid off - she all the sudden started spending waaay beyond even their pre-layoff means ($60k something on credit cards) while hiding the bills and stuff she was buying.

Luckily he figured out something was wrong before they went bankrupt on top of everything, but yikes. And at that point, divorce won’t solve his joint liability for the balance.

At least the younger sister can only guilt the family into trying to cover her butt financially, instead of - well whatever that was.

I guess for most people it's not about how expenditures increase, but how the income decreases when you lower the work time from 200% to ~150%.

Honestly, if someone is staying home it’s likely going down to 90% overall.

Even if no one if staying home, with the impact of a young kid, 150% is generous.

Because if the other party works as hard/long as they used to, expect resentment and turbulence.

Food, plane tickets, cots, nappies, child care, education, extra curricular, upsizing house/car - these are all pretty large expenses for kids...

Sure every one of these can be squeezed but living solo/without kids is definitely leaner but yes its a double hit of expenditure goes up and earnings go down

> If cost per year exceeds available cashflow?

How would that problem be solved by ending the relationship? You'd then have to pay even more for seperate rent, cars, etc. Or are you talking about one partner spending excessively and dragging the other partner into this financial mess?

There is almost always one larger earner, and one larger spender.

For this to be coming up, necessarily someone (or both) has to be overspending.

If both are low earners, and aggregate earnings are insufficient to cover the lowest set of available expenses, then someone (or both) need to be living in with their parents. Or they’re going to be homeless, or similar.

Often; it’s one or both parties overspending on unnecessary expenses. In which case, splitting up almost always changes the dynamics so at least one of the parties can stay solvent.

But there are infinite ways to screw this pooch, of course.

I think modern dating via apps made this very transparent: if you're usually paying for dates (or even if you're splitting) you will start to develop an intuition for some kind of cost per interaction and this can be quite important if you're dating in any kind of volume because the expenditure can add up. Eg I had someone tell me in NYC they're spending almost 1k a week on dating.

That's obviously an extreme example but when your expenditure is that high it necessitates being analytical about how you're spending your time and money.

Then if you already had that mindset, it's natural to see how it can extend into relationships (and friends and family).

Ultimately, relationships are about give and take and we can only give as much as we can give etc. But there's always some implicit assumption of parity and even if you don't care for perfect parity, it's worth doing the audit once in a while to assess whether you're happy being a net giver or a net taker or if you need a reset because relationships of all natures can and have been broken over money.

If the other party don't have a job maybe.

Expenses in an IRL relationship are a side effect of the relationship, not a direct price. And it depends on the person. While most people expect financial stability from their partner, some don't mind having simpler settings in dates.

While it may be more expensive anyways, the payoff is a real person inerested in you, your life, and wanting to be with you.

To an extent, it's like comparing living a happy life and doing drugs, because after all both of them end up translating as "dopamine in the brain".

5k a year buys some really expensive sugar daddy / GFE professionals...

Dividing it it is not that much money. Less than 100 a week or 420 a month. Those numbers don't actually seem that high, if you want more than one experience every couple months.

Admittedly off-topic:

There's this massive disparity in the signals I'm getting about inflation and cost of living.

On one hand there are people spending $20k (over four years, which softens my point a bit), and extending that, there are enough people spending enough money to keep OnlyFans ... performers (is that the right word?) able to hire "chatters" and their various production teams, and this covers all the various 'socials' where cough influencers can make their livings via donations from their subscribers (I want to use a perjorative term).

On the other hand, cost of living pressures are forcing people to choose between paying for food and heating their homes (so my local media headlines tell me).

Is this "just" the increasing wealth inequality in the world?

Inflation being "sticky" feels like it's being driven by most people not really, actually needing to tighten their belts in the face of inflation. The number of new cars on the road, the number of people out shopping retail doesn't seem to be shrinking.

Having said that, unemployment numbers have been surprisingly good up until the last print.

P.S. I know someone who pays for regular "youtube coaching" sessions. Maybe I'm just old and don't get it, but... :rollseyes: sigh.

> performers (is that the right word?) able to hire "chatters" and their various production teams

It's a business expense. They hire them because they bring in more money than they cost.

Yeah, the guy working in the fab is probably making more money than the people who can't pay their heating bills. It is in fact increasing wealth inequality. New car sales peaked in 2015 or so and have been dropping since then. The average age of cars on the road is at an all-time high. Unemployment doesn't reflect underemployment or people who have just given up on finding work. The federal minumum wage hasn't shifted at all since 2009.

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