In the beginning, people lived in tribes. Stone Age tribes treated each other as a large family: men hunted animals, women gathered berries, and anything hunted and gathered went to feed the tribe rather than the person who gathered it. This distribution was ensured by the tribal chiefs, kings, alpha males, or whatever you want to call them, with little difference from any wolfpack. Just as in a pack of wolves, the alpha males (and only the alphas) would freely mate with the females, resulting in many offspring without a clear picture as to their fathers. These children were extra mouths that the hunters and gatherers had to work even harder to feed, which meant more food coming in to the tribe, which meant more reproduction, etc. The cost of supporting everyone in the tribe was shared by everyone; in other words, socialized. Incidentally, Sub-Saharan Africa operates under this system today, which is why they are constantly starving and fighting civil wars – not because they live in socialist states, but because the culture itself is collectivist. That's a story for another time.
	The Agricultural Revolution led humans to quantify exactly how much food was produced and how much each person consumed. Early man, now providing his own food instead of relying on nature, realized that with the unchecked reproduction of the tribal system, births could potentially outpace the output of the tribe's farms, leading to famine. Early man devised a solution to this problem: by restricting males to mate with only one female each, and making him responsible solely for that female and her children instead of an entire tribe, he would only produce so many children as he could feed. This institution, which has lasted from then until recent times, is known as “marriage,” and no civilization in history has existed without it.
	This was not the basis of civilization in and of itself, but its ramifications are. All people, and animals for that matter, experience the “biological imperative,” the urge to reproduce. Before marriage, only the previously discussed alpha males got this opportunity. Marriage offered beta males with a voluntary exchange: they, too, could reproduce if and only if they could acquire the resources to feed a wife. Labor and trade were invented as a means of acquiring these resources, and as promised, men who worked were able to marry and have children because now there were women to be had.
	The marriage system worked so well that it completely supplanted tribalism everywhere that it was known, be it Mesopotamia, be it Egypt, China, or the Caspian steppe. It is an institution older than writing, older than money, indeed even in Genesis it is the first social institution God ever devised. For thousands upon thousands of years it was unquestioned that any man who could support a wife could marry one and would only have as many children with her has he could support. It was implicit and universally recognized that a man would be loyal to his wife and not mate with any other females, and that a woman would be loyal to her husband and not mate with any other males.
	In the West, this all changed in the 20th century with an event now known as the Sexual Revolution. The invention of birth control meant that people could mate without any fear of overreproducing, so mate they did. Anyone could mate with anyone they wanted as long as both parties agreed. It turned out that the natural selection of tribalism out of the societal pool did not mean it had been naturally selected out of the gene pool; females once again gravitated toward the alpha males, those who had looks, power, and resources, just as they had thousands of years ago before civilization existed. Marriage continued to exist, but divorce became rampant because the trust in chastity and loyalty had been destroyed, and consequently so had those marriages.
	Modern Western society is one where marriage is a thing of the past. Most young adults are not married and have no plans ever to be. Social media facilitates men and women to find each other, giving both more options for mates. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality typically used to calculate how unequal countries' economies are, and Tinder's Gini coefficient has been calculated to be 0.58, or higher than 95% of the world's nations; it is not a stretch of the imagination that the bar scene is similar. People have become so absorbed in their apps that striking up a conversation with a stranger in public is no longer socially acceptable.
	All this means that men no longer have the guarantee of a family and a legacy. Above all else, fulfilling their biological imperative was the incentive for men to work. The destruction of marriage and the newfound ability of women to support themselves removed that incentive. It is not a coincidence that many tabloids now complain about how young men are dropping out of society. The truth is this: thousands of years ago society made a contract with non-alpha males whereby they trade their time and effort for the right to reproduce, and society no longer holds up its end of this contract. There is no longer any reason for those men to hold up their end, either.
	I still idealize marriage, but I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that it is no longer a possibility. Western society has abandoned its foundation; I can work and work and work and there is no woman who would be pure and chaste, certainly not who would be interested in an aloof redneck like me. Men are abandoning work because it simply isn't worth it. The social contract is void. Until society wants to negotiate, I am on strike.