He's so laughably close to why woman don't want him. That maybe the Lucas Repulsion System isn't caused by Gen Z greedy bigots. Maybe, just maybe, it's something else, but everyone knows the light bulb will never click for him.
I feel like he probably knows, on some semi-conscious level, that it's his own behavior that makes him repulsive to women. In my experience, most people like this do. They'll brush right up against the truth, sometimes even touching it very briefly like the graph of a tangent line. The problem is that, if they were to acknowledge (to themselves or anyone else) that their own behavior was the source of their misery, it would open up a whole can of worms.
Addressing your own mental health issues and character defects requires a lot of time and effort even in the best case scenario, along with a willingness to accept that your woes won't be resolved quickly and that your aspirations will likely have to sit on the back burner while you deal with the underlying issues that make them unattainable. On top of that, there's really only a certain critical period that you can spend stagnating in the depths of misery before your life starts to decay irreparably. People get older, their bodies decline, they run out of time to attain certain goals, and the consequences of their actions add more and more weight as time goes on, dragging them down deeper and making it harder to pull themselves up.
Lucas has gone well beyond that critical period. At this point, he's living in a home, hasn't held a job since before the start of the millennium, has allowed his brain to twist itself into such bizarre delusions that his psyche is probably going to be fucked even if he gets on the right meds, and has had run-ins with the legal system. If he'd taken that difficult first step and started to get his shit together sometime around 2012-2014, when he was in his mid-30s, he might have been able to live a relatively normal life and maintain relatively healthy relationships. Now, though, accepting the truth would mean accepting that his future is incredibly bleak and the best he can hope for is to arrest his decline, hold onto his room in a nursing home, spend his days watching shitty cable, and
maybe find an unattractive partner with serious mental health issues of her own to have boring, uncomfortable, and loveless sex with once every week or so. He'd probably become genuinely suicidal if he dropped his delusions now, and I'm not sure that I could blame him if he went through with it. They got him into this mess, but now they're a a form of legitimate self-preservation.
