Matt Walsh Reacts to Dumb Gen-Z Trends

So today we have another wonderful opportunity to correct some very bad relationship advice from the internet. This time it comes from a viral video with over 12 million views on Twitter and who knows how many on other platforms, which features a young woman explaining the math behind what she has dubbed breakupology.
Now many comments, mostly from women, have hailed this as a brilliant analysis of relationship dynamics. They say that there is a lot of wisdom and insight in this video, a lot we can glean from it.
And they are, of course, wrong about that. And I'll explain why.
But first, here's the video. If you're a boy who has ever been dumped by your girlfriend for seemingly no apparent reason,

and you're looking for answers, this is what happened. Okay, this is you guys.
You guys are

in a happy relationship, and now all of a sudden, you have one simple, fixable problem. For this

example, we're going to use no good morning text. Then your girlfriend who loves you, she's really

happy with you. She comes to you, and she tells you, she's like, hey, do you think we could start

doing good morning texts? It'd mean a lot to me if you text me good morning so you her loving boyfriend agree to give her good morning texts but something happened and for whatever reason you stopped giving her good morning text so now we have a bigger problem she now thinks that you don't care enough about her to send her good morning texts even though she asked but she's gonna be like you know what this is still kind of a small problem i'm just gonna remind him she reminds you you're like oh my gosh that's right i did agree to that okay i will text you good morning unfortunately though you didn't follow through again now we have confirmed that you do not care enough to text her good morning even though this is a simple fixable problemable problem. This is now a big problem.
So now your girlfriend, who has never picked fights before in her life, starts picking a bunch of little fights about all these different things because she believes that you do not care enough. Through all of these picking fights with you, though, she still loves you and likes you enough to want to be with you, even though you have all these little problems now until one day these become unattractive to her she's gonna realize that all of these little things that you do that remind her that you don't care about her enough are unattractive and so now the problem is not these things it's not even that you don't care enough it's not even that she never got good morning texts.
It's that she literally does not like you anymore. Does not like you.
Now, unfortunately, she has to break up with you. Okay.
So this is all wrong. Now, to be clear, this TikTok girl isn't wrong when she says that women sometimes operate this way in a relationship.
That is true, but she's wrong in the deeper implications as we'll get into. The first problem becomes apparent about three seconds into the video.
I don't know anything about this girl, but I'm going to assume, I think quite safely, that she has not been married for 10 plus years. Okay? I don't know anything, but I think we can assume that.
I'm guessing she isn't married at all. And as you know, if you listen to this show, one of my basic fundamental rules when it comes to this sort of thing is that you simply cannot take any relationship advice at all, ever, from anyone who has never had sustained meaningful success in a relationship.

And sustained meaningful success must mean, just to start with, that they have been married to one person and stayed married for at least several years. Taking relationship advice from someone who has only dated a succession of random people and never moved to the next stage with any of them, it's like taking advice on wilderness survival from someone who has never even camped out in their backyard, much less survived in the woods for a week, okay? It's possible technically that somebody might acquire survival knowledge just by reading books or whatever.
But if I was dispensing wilderness survival tips and you asked me about my own experience in the area and I responded that, oh, well, you know, one time I slept on an air mattress in the basement of my in-law's house. You're going to promptly ignore everything else I say on the subject.
Of course you will. In fact, it would be suicidal to take my advice with you into the wilderness.
And the same goes for relationships. The only people who should ever be giving advice about romantic relationships are those who are married, have been married for several years, and preferably have kids.
Because that means that those of us in that camp have successfully moved a relationship from first introduction to dating, to engagement, to marriage, to family life. And we've been tested along the way, and we've endured, and we've gained experience and insight that might be useful.
It doesn't mean we're right. We could still be wrong, obviously.
And of course, someone who's been married for eight years might be divorced by next week. We all understand that.
So it's not that all married people have great relationship wisdom. It's just that only married people have great relationship wisdom.
So if you're going to hear great relationship advice from anyone they're going to be married which doesn't mean that all of them have that advice but the only the the the uh category of like that's the only category where you're going to get the good advice from now um some 22 year old whose longest relationship was six and a half months just has nothing interesting or useful to offer here. It's like you don't know anything.
You haven't done anything. You've never demonstrated any ability to have any form of success in this world.
So why would you think that you're in a position to give anyone advice about it? Now, since we have that established, we'll move to the video. Okay.
She describes a scenario where a woman decides that she wants something from her boyfriend, good morning texts in this case, and she doesn't get it consistently enough. And so she starts inventing other problems and complaining about those until she decides one day that her boyfriend's failure to comply has made him unattractive.
And she breaks up with him only to, she doesn't say this part, but invariably, this girl moves on to the next guy and repeats the process again and again and again, et cetera, and so forth onto infinity. Again, she's correct that some women, certainly not all, do function this way.
But what she doesn't mention and doesn't seem to realize, presumably because she is this kind of woman herself, is that what she has described here is incredibly toxic, narcissistic, shallow behavior. And the girlfriend in this scenario is just wrong.
So if you're a woman who operates this way and you look at that video and say, yeah, that resonates, you're wrong. You need to not be this way.
So if you look at that chart and that's you, it shouldn't be you. Stop doing that.
Stop being like that. You're being wrong is what you're being.
The only mistake the boyfriend made was in not pulling the plug and breaking up with her much earlier. So let's go through the red flags that this hypothetical woman is waving around here.
Red flag number one, she gave her boyfriend an assignment. Now asking him to do good morning texts, as silly as that might be, is not wrong in and of itself.
She's allowed to want things in the relationship, even silly things. It's true that she wants to feel loved and valued, and she should feel that way, just as he should.
But in this scenario, she asks for good morning texts. She gets them.
And it's fine. And then life intervenes, as it does.
The guy has a few mornings where he forgets to send a text. And she gets mad.
And he starts doing the text again. And then after a while, he misses a few days.
And she gets mad again. What we see here is that this is not about the text.
And it's not about feeling loved or valued. Because this point, like you're just berating him and harassing him and nagging him for this little thing that you want.
It's not about if he does it, it's at this point, he's only doing it to shut you up. It's not, you're not, it doesn't show that you're loved.
He's just complying. So when you're demanding this rather meaningless ritual and have no tolerance for a lack of compliance What you're really looking for is not love but obedience Subordination is what you're looking for Now it's easy to see this if you think that I'm being a little harsh about it It's easy to see this if you just reverse the roles That's all you got to do If this was a man drawing up a complicated graph explaining why he gets angry when he doesn't receive a good morning text on schedule every morning from his girlfriend, everybody, and especially every woman celebrating this video without exception, would agree that that man is toxic, manipulative, overbearing, and insecure, and probably abusive.
Now, it's true, of course, that men and women are different, and so this reverse the roles thing doesn't work in every case. But manipulativeness and narcissism are bad no matter which sex is engaging in it.
Red flag number two. The woman starts picking other petty fights just as a way of venting her frustration over this other thing, which is also petty.
This is called being a selfish, immature, incredibly unpleasant

person. It's just not okay.
So again, if you're a woman and you say, oh yeah, I do that when I'm upset, you shouldn't do that. You're wrong for doing that.
You are just wrong. It's inexcusable to do that.
Starting fights on purpose intentionally because you're upset about something else is a very bad thing to do. It's very immature.
It's childish. And you should not do that.
And starting the fights constantly, not just once, but constantly. And if you're doing that, the problem is you every time, period.
If you are starting a fight on purpose, you are automatically wrong about the substance of the fight. You're the bad guy in the situation, especially in this case, as one of the fights on the graph is, and I quote, didn't remember her dog's birthday.
Now, I hope I don't need to tell you this, men, but if you're dating a woman who expects you to remember the birthday of any non-human creature, you need to break up with her immediately. Don't even wait till this podcast is over.
I want you to pause it right now. Call her and just say, I break up and then hang up and then move on with your life and finish the podcast.
Okay. Red flag number three.
This woman decides that she doesn't like her boyfriend anymore because of his alleged failures in a bunch of areas that mean almost nothing objectively. This woman who loved her boyfriend can apparently have that love extinguished by a lack of texting and the fact that he forgot to put her dog's birthday into his Google calendar.
Well, what exactly does the word love mean if this is the sort of thing that can destroy it? In what sense did she ever love her boyfriend? It's not a rhetorical question, by the way. I'd love to hear this girl explain how this woman in this scenario loved her boyfriend.
What do you mean he loved her? She loved her. Him.
In what way? What does that mean? Because I would say that if your love hinges on text messages, then your love doesn't exist and never did. Which brings us to red flag number four.
Finally, you notice the thing that is never mentioned anywhere in this whole breakupology equation. We never hear what the woman is actively doing to maintain the relationship with the man.
I'm juggling life as a husband, father, and show host. Trust me, things are generally chaotic around here.
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That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Walsh. Well, cosmetic surgery is on the rise across the country, especially among Gen Z, and not all the procedures are the traditional type, if you can call any cosmetic surgery traditional.
This new generation is getting innovative, often in the most grotesque ways imaginable. So, for instance, one of the hottest procedures on the market is called keratopigmentation, which, along with being a great Scrabble word that I think I pronounced correctly, actually, is also a surgery to change the color of your eyes.
The New York Post reports, quote, don't want to be a brown-eyed girl anymore if you're not afraid of the risks, including going blind, iris color changing surgery, the latest procedure to go viral online, might be for you. The process known as keratopigmentation involves using a laser to create a tunnel in the superficial cornea in order to place pigment, but experts are warning it could lead to many terrifying conditions, including blindness, not to mention it's not approved for cosmetic use.
Just last week, the French company New Color experts in keratopigmentation shared footage of one patient who changed her brown eyes to a stark, vibrant blue in a clip scoring 16 million views on TikTok. But for one model, it cost her her precious vision.
Nadine Bruna traveled to Colombia to change her hazel orbs to a bright gray, undergoing a different procedure that uses a silicone implant, only to lose 80% of her vision in her right eye and 50% in her left. Well, that is surprising.
Apparently, if you let someone burrow a tunnel into your cornea and inject it with ink or, I guess, an implant or whatever it was in that case,

you know, it might do some damage to your eyes.

It turns out that intentionally damaging your eyes will result in damaged eyes.

Who could have known?

And by the way, if you're wondering what the end result of this eye surgery looks like, well, here it is. It's really the color I wanted.

It really looked like all my lips that I've worn all my life.

It's it. bizarre, you know, like some kind of AI recreation of herself.
But this is the effect that most cosmetic procedures have on people. And that's a problem because cosmetic surgery, as mentioned a moment ago, has never been more popular.
Long gone are the days when only aging, upper-class, 52-year-old women got work done. Now everyone is doing it, especially young people.
Plastic surgery procedures increased by 20% from 2019 until now, according to PlasticSurgery.org. The same source tells us that the Gen Z crowd accounted for nearly 40% of all nose jobs in the previous year and 25% of all cheek implants, because cheek implants are apparently a thing.
Meanwhile, my generation of millennials seem to be particular fans of buttock augmentations and have accounted for more than 40% of those. Perhaps not surprisingly, liposuction is the most popular cosmetic procedure of them all, right ahead of breast implants.
And all of these surgeries are being performed more often, and they're starting at younger ages. The New York Post again reports, As celebrities scramble for doses of weight loss aid Ozempic, Gen Z is booking cosmetic procedures more now than ever.
In fact, 75% of plastic surgeons saw a spike in clients under 30, according to data released last week by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, which is a consistently higher plateau over the five previous years. Board-certified plastic surgeon Dr.
Ashley Amalfi said that she's seen an uptick in young clientele at the Quatalla Center for Plastic Surgery in Rochester, New York, and now about one-third of her patients are Gen Z. Quote, I really see that as sort of this extension of the beauty market.
She called the trend great. They are a population in general who's just taking really good care of themselves.
Now, I'm not sure that taking good care of themselves is the first attribute that I would associate with Gen Z or any other current American generation. Over half of Gen Z are obese, first of all, so it's hard to say that they are particularly adept at self-care.
And they may use the phrase self-care and talk about it a lot, and they make TikTok videos about it, but the results tell us a different story. And of course, plastic surgery is rarely an example of taking care of yourself.
Now, sure, here and there, you might find a person who had a procedure done, and they actually do look better because of it. I mean, that does happen.
I'm not denying that. There are people who have deformities or other sorts of visible physical afflictions, burns, that sort of thing, where plastic surgery could truly change their lives for the better.
But those cases are likely in the minority, probably a rather small minority. And most of these people, especially the 26-year-old women going to the surgeon for cheek implants and Botox and lip fillers and so on, they wind up looking significantly worse by the end of it because they look less human.
Like that woman's eyes, I don't know what that looks like. Those are not human eyes.
It doesn't look like a human's eye. I don't know what that is.
It looks artificial. And that's the general effect of so many of these procedures.
They make you look less real, less authentic. And looking less real and less authentic automatically means that you look worse because to look less human is to look worse as a human.
Because as it turns out, you as a human being are a whole, complete creature. You are not a potato head doll.
You cannot mix and match your parts and reassemble yourself however you choose. Well, you can do that, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, but everyone will be able to tell that you've done it.
You know, we'll look at your reassembled face and think, hmm, something's a little bit off about that.

It's not quite right.

So you may not like your eyes or your lips or your nose or whatever, but those are your eyes and your lips and your nose. And if you go and get different eyes, lips, or nose, they're not going to be yours anymore.
Your cheek implants may look like cheeks, but they probably won't look like your cheeks. it will appear as it is, like parts have been artificially attached to you or artificially inflated to resemble a size and shape they were never meant to be.
Certainly the case for every lip augmentation that's ever been done. And that's what makes plastic surgery so uncanny.
You know, the weird thing about it is that, like, if I see you for the first time and I never knew you before, I never saw you before, most of the time, I, like anybody else, will still be able to tell if you had work done on your face. It'll be obvious that those artificial or artificially accentuated features are not your features, which is kind of interesting when you think about it because I don't know you.
I've never seen you before. But I know that how you look right now is not how you really look.
That's because the picture doesn't quite make sense. The features don't fit together.
It doesn't match. It's not real.
There's something asymmetrical and inauthentic and out of balance about it. You don't look how you were made to look.
And even people who don't know how you were made to look can tell. But of course, people don't believe that they were made these days at all.
That's part of the problem. The reason cosmetic surgery is as popular as it is, is exactly that.
Many people think that they basically materialized out of the ether for no reason and for no purpose, and now they are gods over themselves. They are in charge of their own self-creation.
They set to work then rebuilding their own bodies. And at the end of the whole process, if it ever does end, which often it doesn't,

they have become some pale imitation of what they were before.

Some weird Picasso-like rendition of themselves.

Which, like any remake, is only very rarely an improvement over the original.

And that is why the plastic surgery craze is today cancelled.