I have been sourcing on a hike, dog park, outdoor workouts, and post workout or run. I am still approaching. Anybody who says that pandemic is not affecting them is talking ****. It is specially made a lot of crazy.
One thing I would like to add, I noticed IOIs and choosing signals prior to the Julien media scandal were a slam dunk. Today, they are a lay up but women are ****ed. They will give choosing signals and still be ambiguous.
It is good that you are sourcing outdoors. That's the best in-person approaching option now.
IOIs have changed. From my experience, the Julien Blanc scandal has nothing to do with it. I moved to a new city in the early 2010s. As soon as I got to the new city and was attempting to meet women, I noticed immediately how much things had changed 2004-05. IOIs in bars were less common in 2011-12 than they were in 2004-05. The advances in technology between the two time periods were what I noticed most. In 2011, I became friends with a guy who was quite skilled with women. He's also younger than I am and came up a little bit later in the smartphone revolution. He would do approaches at bars with no IOIs. He felt at that time that IOIs were difficult to come by. He's a 6'4" ex-college athlete and white. He didn't need IOIs as much as a 5'10" guy like me who came up in the game in the early 2000s where I was taught to look for IOIs. The IOIs I have looked for over time have been eye contact and a smile.
As I shifted more to day game in 2013 and beyond, I found IOIs still challenging to get but still easier than night game in the same era. In the second half of the 2010s, I started to observe more women wearing earbuds in the grocery store, which I think was being done to avoid in-person approaches. I have lived in a singles dense and fitness oriented part of my city, which is one of the most pretentious in the United States. It wouldn't be surprising that women would refuse in-person approaches in the grocery store. While most men don't have the stones to in-person approach in the grocery store, there are enough men who do it and do it poorly to annoy Millennial snowflake women.
I am enjoying the decline. Pillaging what I can. The SMP is a dumpster fire. The amount of girls that have been through rotation and or dropped, smash and ghost. Throater and ghost... It's hilarious. The amount of left over women is going to be astronomical. I can't wait.
Being a woman in a state of involuntary solitude (insol) is a better existence than being an incel man. An insol woman can still have a decent amount of sex. Even a post menopausal, 55 year old woman will be heavily chased as long as she's not fat and she puts a profile up on Match or OurTime. What she does with all that interest is up to her.
Men go through several lifetimes never having had a chance at that level of desire.
Very few men achieve a state where they are quite desired. The hierarchy of the sexual marketplace as I perceive it is as follows:
The 90th percentile and up of men (top 10% of men)
The 80th percentile and up of women (top 20% of women)
The 80th to 89th percentile of men
The 50th to 79th percentile of women
The 30th to 49th percentile of women
The 30th to 79th percentile of men
The lowest 29th percentile of women
The lowest 29th percentile of men
Your outcomes in dating/mating depend upon where you fall in the hierarchy. The Atlantic article was written by a woman around the 50th percentile.