Ariely says at one point during the interview: "I mean, imagine that you basically had to drive six hours, three hours each way to have coffee with somebody, and, you know, coffee usually ends up with just coffee."
This analogy is false, because even if the average is six hours, you're free to allocate them however you want. One hour a day for a week, half an hour on your lunch break here, a couple hours on your laptop while watching TV there, etc. If surfing some profiles and exchanging some e-mails is considered the equivalent of driving from New York to Boston to go on a date, that's absurd.
How is it not a poor ROI?
My experience of "real world" dating has been: 1) Social or physical activities that I enjoy regardless of how many dates I get 2) Meeting/knowing/connecting with people within those activities 3) Flirting with some of those people, which naturally progresses to something more.
It beats wasting 5 hours surfing the web looking for dates.
Bingo! If you're constantly pretending to be someone else, and doing things you despise, just for the chance of a date, of course you're miserable!
If you have no interests with many women in it, cultivate others. I used to be all code code code, and other nerdy endeavors, but that simply won't do. There is so much out there, surely you can discover something that suits your interest AND has a population of women?
I moved to Seattle about a year ago - so far as dating goes, this place is a bit of a wasteland (MANY single and desperate software folk here), and while I don't do anything specifically to meet women, I have no qualms about opting for some activities over others. Be yourself - be an optimized version of yourself.
What if you're surfing the web as a social activity that you enjoy anyway, instead of explicitly looking for dates?
I waste easily 5 hours/week surfing YCombinator. I'm tempted to start hanging out on OKCupid. Not necessarily to find a date, but because then I get to spend my online time with girls instead of guys. (No offense to the guys here, it's just that most of my workday time is spent with guys too, and it gets repetitive after a while...) If it leads to something more, great. If not - what have I lost?
In my experience the etiquette on OkCupid is completely different from elsewhere on the web - it's extremely common for someone to ignore your message entirely.
So "hanging out with girls online" can translate to "being ignored by girls online", which is hardly good for one's confidence.
