What is it about being queer that makes loneliness, isolation, and rejection so much more intense than enduring than what our straight friends and family purport to experience?

Are we just being sensitive, or egoistic? Do they perhaps feel these emotions with the same severity as we do, but are better at coping with it? Or are they perhaps just made of tougher stock than us?

Much yarn has been spun in recent years of the loneliness epidemic–especially concerning male loneliness.

News outlets, magazines, and blogs discuss incels with the same faux empathy as a national geographic narrator describing a gazelle that’s about to become a lioness’ dinner, all whilst trying to side-step the glaring vitriol that festers in communities that self-identify as such, which really makes it hard for anyone involved to stomach.

For context, incels are straight men that want to have sex with women, but are unable to.

If it were just that, it would be an unfortunate problem with an easy solution: Learn social skills and mingle with promiscuous, available women.

Instead, they’re plagued by pick-up-artists and manosphere grifters that try to press their anger buttons. And what they have become is something universally recognized as worse. They’re misogynistic to a cartoonish degree. They confront their feelings of inadequacy and insecurity by rejecting reason and proclaiming themselves superior to the female gender. They decry sluts and sexual promiscuity. They scorn men who are able to have sex, and yet want their power.

Ironically, the deeper they go into this worldview, the more repulsive they become towards everyone that hasn’t subscribed to it.

If this is starting to sound like a cult? It kind of is.

However, this is not a blog post about incels.

Where has all of this angst and social isolation come from, and why is it affecting everyone?

It’s complicated. Just to name a few factors:

1. Social media and the impulse to be inauthentic to elevate one’s own esteem; to share highlights, not behind-the-scenes footage; to elate one’s own status and vie for the respect and admiration of others.
2. Recommendation algorithms, which prioritize content that keeps eyeballs on apps long enough to be served advertising.
3. The advertising and data broker industry, and the enshittification they conjure.
4. Our economic and political systems, which reward the advertisers, marketers, and financiers that play with people’s emotional levers in order to extract more profit from us all; and do not hold them meaningfully accountably when they misuse their power or influence to harm the masses.

   After all, when a person shoots the CEO of United HealthCare in a Manhattan street, there’s a manhunt of epic proportions to identify and arrest them. But when Martin Shkreli raises the cost of drugs by several thousand percent for purely selfish reasons, and many poor people die as a result of losing access to affordable treatments? Well, that’s just business. Nothing to see here.

5. Rapid technological growth coupled with the downside of fungible humanity, which is only likely to be exacerbated by corporations embracing Large Language Models.
6. Purely natural reasons, like hormones, sunlight, and seasonal depression.
7. A noted increase in natural disasters due to anthropogenic climate change.
8. Targeted misinformation and disinformation campaigns from other nations directly against citizens, rather than military targets.

And if you take a step back from some of these causes, and squint at it, it’s pretty clear what the root causes are.

Money and power.

Queer people, at large, lack both of these things.

Dearth of Hearth

When upper-class queer people reveal themselves to their families–especially families with generational wealth and strong “traditional” values–they tend to get cut out of their inheritance and ostracized.

The incentive structure here is clear: If you want to inherit money or power, you will remain closeted.

Incentive structures like this are present at all level of society, too. Many queer people do not want their bosses or coworkers to know their identity, for fear it will be used against them.

(This is undoubtedly more extreme for trans people, who cannot hide their transness in person until years into their transition.)

So we create online communities, where we can be ourselves without these downsides.

And then, well, you already read the list of bad things above.

Is it any wonder that anti-capitalism is extremely enticing for queer people? To believe there can be no queer liberation without class consciousness; without a challenging of tradition and hierarchies?

You could argue that queer people find loneliness and related emotions more than the rest of the population through simple statistics: There are fewer of us, and we’re not all queer in compatible ways. It’s a multidimensional matrix of identity, none of which fit neatly into the normal buckets of “man seeking wife” and “woman seeking husband.”

If male loneliness truly is an epidemic–to the point that incels are an occasional talking point–despite the abundance and distribution of straight women throughout the populace, why would anyone expect queer people to be better off?

It gets better, but…

There’s a storytelling effort called “It Gets Better,” which aims to give LGBTQ+ youth hope for their future.

The idea is, if they can hear the stories of older queer people, the struggles they faced, and how much better their lives are now, they’ll realize that being queer doesn’t mean you’re doomed to suffer more than you can cope with. And just maybe they won’t choose to die, instead.

It’s a damn good project, but their slogan’s only half the story.

It gets better, but we have to make it better.

I say “we” here because “you” could be both singular and plural, and I won’t want anyone to think you’re in it alone.

Nothing good ever just happens. It always takes work.

Past Writing, Laid Bear

A while ago, I wrote a blog post titled Furries Are Losing the Battle Against Scale. The title was meant to be a wordplay on the oft-imagined “furries vs scalies” conflict that precipitates memes.

In that post, I made a pessimistic case for what will happen to furry conventions if an explosive exponential growth continues without any community organization effort to cope with the pains it will case.

This was strategic: It was a subtle call to action. This was enough to get covered by a few YouTubers, and got a lot of people on social media to at least acknowledge the issue.

When convention attendance numbers continued to break record after record, in line with the projections I estimated when I published that blog post, my writing was shared again and the conversation persisted.

As the year went on, Anthrocon even announced an Attendance Cap for next year’s convention.

But something happened yesterday, which gave me pause.

An advice column called Ask Papa Bear, run by a long-time furry that goes by Grubbs Grizzly, answered a letter from a reader concerned about that blog post.

The fandom is, indeed, growing by leaps and bounds, and a number of furcons have extremely high attendance rates. However, as much as I like Soatok, I think they are spazzing out a bit.

…

The headline of Soatok’s article (“Furries Are Losing the Battle Against Scale”) is self-defeating and presumptuous. What are our options here?

…

Already things are happening that indicate Soatok is jumping the gun on offering dire warnings of impending doom.

Grubbs Grizzly

And, like, okay. I guess maybe the point and tone was a little too subtle, so people didn’t pick up on it.

Everything I said in my previous blog post will definitely come to pass… if we don’t recognize the growing pains and step up to alleviate them.

That is a load-bearing “if”!

Each and every one of us has the power to choose whether we contribute to that outcome, or against it. If we rest on our laurels, we’ll all say, “Oh, someone else will step up,” and then no one will, and things will keep getting worse.

Does anyone remember that episode of the Rugrats, where everyone brings coleslaw to a potluck? Because they thought nobody else would think to bring it?

It’s kind of like that, but with apathy instead of coleslaw.

Furries could absolutely conquer these scale challenges. But as we saw when Anthrocon announced the attendance limits for 2025, we’re reaching the earliest stress points for the affordable hotel and convention center options.

It’s true that hotels won’t let things get out of hand, but the sense of unfairness that already divides us will get worse before that happens unless more furries recognize the challenge that lays before them.

What I can promise is that exponential growth will continue until we hit a limiting factor. If we fail at capacity planning and resource management, other environmental factors will do our job for us, and they’re much less kind.

In such a conundrum, do you expect me to use a calm, neutral tone when introducing the problem to everyone?

Hell no!

That would be disingenuous–or worse, boring.

The iron is hot right now. We’re only a few doubling periods from most conventions buckling under external pressures or needing a large infusion of money and volunteers.

Do the cities they exist in even have a hotel or convention center large enough to accommodate them? If not, those take time and money to build, and they aren’t going to do it just for us.

Most people have a poor intuition for exponential growth. When I say “a few doubling periods”, you might think we’ve got a couple decades to sort it out, but each doubling period is only 3-5 years.

Two decades from now, those ~1000-attendee conventions might be staring down the 100,000 attendee milestone wondering how to cope with it all.

If you’d like to check my math:

• If you assume a consistent 3 years for doubling periods, you expect about 7 to occur in a little over 20 years. (This is a growth rate of about 23.1%.)
• If you start at 1,000 even, and double 7 times, you end up at 128,000.
• If you assume the 20th year will have a little less than the 21st, starting at 64,000 for the 18th year (the sixth doubling period elapsed), you still end up near 100k for the 20th year.

Now, 20 years is a long time. But between an extreme outcome and today, we have a lot of intermittent milestones along the way.

A furry convention could falter at any one of those, if not prepared for it.

Of course, I cannot predict nor choose the actual outcome.

I can challenge you to recognize a risk and mitigate it (and, as a security nerd, this is something that I enjoy greatly). But I do not have a large audience. My words carry no prestige nor the weight of officiality.

I’m just some guy who really doesn’t matter.

I accept the limits of my reach, influence, and persuasion. But everyone who reads my words? They each have their own potential, far beyond what I can muster.

It is wholly possible to read my words and acknowledge the risks described within, but wholly reject the future they spell out. People with more clout, more connections, and more ideas giving a shit about the problem is how we tackle it today–i.e., before it hurts to tackle.

It is not entirely correct to describe recognizing one’s limits and fundamental weakness as “spazzing out”. Though if it was read that way, the fault for that is mine for erring in what I wrote, not in Grubbs for reading it as such. Nor is it Boyesh’s fault for missing the subtle nudge that was intended.

And if it turns out that I’m even more limited than I even imagined, and I can do absolutely nothing to inspire others to give a shit about the road ahead? At least I can take solace in knowing that I did try.

Hope isn’t a strategy, but despair is never an option.

I think I successfully resisted the urge to fill this entire section with “bear” puns.

Next time, though? It’ll be grizzly.

…

“God dammit, Soatok!” the void screams back.

Uncomfortable Truths

It isn’t just the sparsity of queer folks that make rejection, loneliness, and isolation so potent.

It’s easy to confuse boundaries for walls. A healthy boundary is something that can be negotiated over time, especially as your relationships grow with you as a person. A wall is immovable and no one ever comes in without tearing that sucker down.

Many queer people carry their closets with them. I forget who first made this observation, and search engines’ usefulness have been eroded by enshittification, so I can’t find it today.

I’ve been single for many years, and before that, pretty much my whole life. Hell, I didn’t actually have sex until I was almost 30. It’s difficult to overstate how much this can weigh on one’s self-esteem. In many ways, you could see me as pathetic.

Nigh-uncountable numbers of furries complain about popufurs and their perceived cliques as a uniquely furry problem, when in fact this is a human problem.

I’m certainly not saying that social climbers, influencers, and the like aren’t often problematic.

But when a YouTuber decides to go to a private gathering with their closest friends, that’s not them “excluding you” because you’re “not popular.”

Can We Conquer Loneliness and Insecurity?

You cannot defeat your inner demons. They know all your weak points, and all your dirty little secrets, and what words will hurt you the most.

But your demons do not know my weaknesses, and mine do not know yours.

It only makes sense for a social species, like humans, to be able to overcome them with the support of each other.

You won’t find happiness in a treasure chest after following a sketchy map. You also won’t summon it into existence through sheer force of will. Happiness is cultivated. It is found in-between.

What Does Any Of This Mean?

We each have a superpower that we seldom use, and often unintentionally misuse:

Whenever something happens to us, good or bad, we have the power to decide what it means for us.

I can’t tell you what your last relationship ending in break-up means, except perhaps that it didn’t end in death (which is logically the only other outcome over a long enough time scale).

I can’t tell you what meaning to derive from your parents disowning you for being gay, or trans, or whatever. Neither can your parents! It’s up to you.

That is, in fact, the only superpower we all share.

Tangential Corollary on Ethics

How do you usually distinguish good people from bad?

I’ve found a simple algorithm that works pretty damn reliably:

• Observe when a person experiences misfortune–big or small. The bigger, the more effective this is.
• Do they…
  • Demand that everyone else should suffer too, because they had to?
    – OR –
  • Hope no one else has to go through the same unpleasantness?

You can place most people into these buckets and make reliable predictions from that. The second option being the “good” one, obviously.

However, people are sometimes inconsistent, so you should always be open to their answer being different for a different situation (especially when there’s cultural or political influences).

And don’t worry about the need for misfortune in order to measure this: Life provides an abundance of that without anyone else’s intervention.

Where Do We Go From Here?

As I write this, the world’s largest furry convention (Midwest FurFest) is kicking off in a few hours.

Many of the people that will first read these words are not at the convention. Some of you may feel like you’re missing out. Perhaps a little bit lonelier than usual?

Don’t be ruled by the pressure to fit in. We’re mostly queer here anyway, so fitting in was never on the menu.

I didn’t attend any furry conventions this year. I’m not sure if I will attend any in 2025. I kind of have a lot going on.

There are more furries today than there were last year. If convention attendance is any indication, this growth is also exponential.

If more people just did their own thing, a lot of the pressure we all experience would lessen.

If more people built their own websites (or blogs, as it were), rather than relying on the whims of corporations and social media platforms to connect us, and normalized doing so, we could make a sizable dent in the loneliness problem.

And if you ever feel like you’re at rock bottom, just remember: The only way left to go is up.