# Markets used to cultivate 2/24/26 I was reflecting on what it is about the “job market” that is theoretically so *short* of people to solve all the unsolved problems, within firms and outside of them — and yet equally involves so many people lining up for the same, scarce openings. And a similar thing for the dating market. It feels as if markets used to be emergent from “cultivation” — where the cultivated would discover each other in the process of their cultivation, and transactions would clear. The internet unbundled discovery (easy) from cultivation (hard). The old-world cultivation mechanisms have both lost their own edge chasing that internet, but have also failed to understand it well enough to do a good job. Maybe this is where self-improvement — the poor man’s lookmaxxing — comes from. It’s presumably why the “twitter is a dating app” people are onto something — twitter cultivates certain kinds of people, and those people incidentally find each other on twitter. It’s why everyone is weirdly nostalgic about the layout of a college campus, where you have no choice but to develop in tandem with the — selected-for cohort of — people around you and maybe become compatible in the process. Most of the complex “markets” that have relocated to the internet either seem to be failing ones that have nevertheless found their equilibriums as tarpits, or successful ones that are illegible as “markets” to most people overly fixated on discovery; or legible to the sharpest of them who know how to “play the game,” and in the process of “playing” it start to legibilize them towards their eventual dissolution. It’s unclear what you’d do about this other than directed, inspired, cultural production and social entrepreneurship; but it’s hard to imagine any of it *lasting* in an environment in which information travels with such little friction, barriers to entry ultimately lower TAM, and the people who have the most actually figured out, have the least to gain by trying to “work on this.” Maybe it was always this way! Maybe the hard part is *choosing* smaller TAMs and narrowing ambition — skipping out on the [inner ring](https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/), wanting less, something like that. Maybe it’s partially finding a way to convince *everyone* else to do the same. Maybe the people who actually want or need “twitters” end up finding them; and the new markets have always been here. My gut sense is we’re still short so many.