beating games and women
winter depression essay
I’m old and I finally feel like its probably not gonna work out. I always feared this was the case of course, but now I genuinely cant see a way forward. Before I would have great anxiety, and a great imagination – I would imagine vividly, all the kinds of things that wouldn't work out. Now it’s all less vivid and yet much more tangible. In youth, even failure looks more splendid.
I’ve decided to write for at least one full hour every day, no matter what. “Not necessarily publishing every day, but writing at least an hour”. That’s my new years resolution. No matter how tired or whatever excuse I might have – usually the problem isn’t that I’m ”tired” physically, or even mentally. I’m just very lonely. And writing is confronting that, because for all my faults, this is honest. This is a way I have learned to be honest.
I have the same problem today as I did when I was 20. It is two-fold. There is nothing that my environment, my society, my time-moment in history-space, offers me that I want. I cannot be satisfied by the things that the worldly powers that be offers: spectacle, candy and never-ending novelty. I don’t want to own a car. I don’t want to own things. It simply, for whatever reason, doesn’t work on me like it does on everyone around me. I can deconstruct it and understand it – I can put it into all kinds of fancy abstractions and patterns and say how, it’s really a game of status-optimising, and so on and so forth, and I can perfectly well understand it. I just don’t want to play. It’s like chess, it’s a solved game. For me, the fun of games is not playing them. it’s breaking them. Solving them.
I solved chess when I was 6 years old. I think I told that story before. My parents had bought their first PC, and I was playing around with it, playing battle chess, on my own. One day I proudly tell my mom I’ve beaten the computer on the very hardest difficulty – which would make me a child prodigy, probably. This was in an era where they still remembered the cold war chess psyops. So she asks me to show her how i did it, and I start a new game, then go into the options menu and changed all my pieces to queens. Haha, children say the darndest things. Here’s the kicker: I didn’t realise I was cheating. I just saw the totality of options available to me within the framework of the program, and optimized.
I’m still pretty smart though. Just, if I had had a human to teach me chess rather than a toolbox to fiddle with on my own, I might have been better socialized. Or maybe it’s all in the genes. Maybe it’s all predestined by God.
So, back to the two-foldedness of my problem. I can play the game, I can even be good at it. It just doesn’t make me happy. What does make me happy? Women. Woman. Partnership, intimacy. How do you get woman? By being good at status optimising – or, or course, cheating. Breaking the programming. Solving Chess. Being a famous local artist. Saying her name on stage.
The programming breaks down. If I make Woman the goal of playing the game, and status optimize and impress her, then because of the way I am in my genes or in my fate, I can only do it by lying. I have to partake in the whole system, play the game I don’t enjoy, and I have to pretend I do.
I got a girlfriend once by beating her at chess. To be fair she had already invited me home after a party we were at. But beating her at chess was the last thing that happened before we had sex for 6 hours.
Here’s what I want in life. As little as possible. As few things as possible. As few variables. but I can’t see a way to have that and a woman, or at least, to have that and make her happy, because woman like things. Even those that say they dont, and want to go live in a tent and be a dirty hippie. They all like things. It comes sooner or later.
The whole world is rotten. Everything I do feels like lying. We live in an advertisement-based economy, and all advertisement is lying. purposefully trying to convince you that you want something that you otherwise would never think to want. The world doesn't run on the petro-dollar, it runs on lie-coin. The very structure of our economy is based on the primal concept of sin: the first evil. Adam lied to God about eating the apple.
But I feel like at least something like this, what we are doing here, is different. It could be different. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make money by being interesting. Previously, there was an inherent problem, like my lifeproblem about buying things, status and women, a collapse in the game-logic. Something like youtube, generally speaking “content” - monetization is all add-based. And you can’t do good with evil tools. Heidegger proved that. Presumably. Or he would have if he was a moralist like I am.
They say the cure for depression is finding something that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. I wake up every day at 6 sharp and get out of bed immediately. So it’s not that.
I can’t see a path forward. I can’t see the end goal, I don’t have a vivid image in my head. Kids, family, compound, sure these would all be very nice things. But I can’t see the path there. And I’m pretty good at breaking games. I formed the roman empire in eu4 before 1600 (without being a horde). All I can see is the right direction. I don't want to lie any more. But I can’t see where it leads. I think that’s learning to play the game right.
I'm reminded of the ending of Dune Messiah: "I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me." I'm the same way -- I violate the Tao and wonder, why am I not happy?
What I think I'm arriving at, after taking a long, meandering, roundabout trip a la G.K. Chesterton, is just being honest. Just being truthful; just being myself. It's funny because it's really meta -- I care about studying the nature of truth and its various derivatives (beauty, meaning, semantics, value, etc.) probably more than anything else, and the first thought when talking about it is, nobody wants to hear that. Maybe that's true too -- maybe that's why Adam and Eve hid. Maybe that's why we hide.
The dumbest and stupidest and most wonderful thing about life is that it never plays out rationally. But also, the reality of it not playing out rationally is totally rational. There are exceptions to every rule -- except this one. You could philosophize about this for years and never figure it out. More Dune: "Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic." God has put eternity into the hearts of men, yet we cannot find out what he has done from beginning to end -- a riddle for which the only answer is He. Law and Gospel: perfectly distinct, diametrically opposed, yet tangled up in one Person, harmonized by the God-Man.
Being honest to people solely for the sake of being honest (provided that they don't hate your guts) breaches all reason in favor of a greater Reason. There's no reason to be honest -- that's the exact reason you do it, because by simple elimination the honesty can be nothing other than beauty. It's a gift freely given, nothing expected in return. Aslan on the Stone Table. Christ on the cross. And yet, by the virtue of being freely given, the gift evokes a response also freely given. God's law is to be followed not because he holds a gun to our heads, but because, when we follow it, we progress toward being the best possible versions of ourselves -- the most satisfied, most joyful, most beautiful, us.
But that line, breaching reason in favor of a greater Reason -- that's where we go astray. Because this is the fine line. The fine line between self-sacrifice and self-humiliation/self-exaltation, between virtue and vice, between marriage and divorce. Ambivalence. Because God created everything to be good; everything that exists is good if enjoyed in the right context, the right structure, the right framework. Enjoying it outside that context, the accident in the act -- that's where we trip up. Fuck Kant and his stupid "Jesus was a good moral teacher but not Deity" bullshit. C.S. Lewis is right: either Jesus really is the Christ, the God-Man, or else he's a raving lunatic. Either his sacrifice breached all reason in favor of the Greatest Reason, or it breached all reason and the Greatest Reason above all. I know which one I believe.
This is very un-PUA of me, but I think, in the particular case of women, what generates attraction, for her, is that you *choose* her, for the simple reason that she is herself. Like I said, full circle. You first need to have the capacity to choose her -- the potential to choose, the "right" to choose, not unlike how Jesus has to actually be God in order to be a perfect sacrifice. (This is acknowledged, as you've said, when she smiles at you.) And then you need to actually choose her. (You need to talk to her.) Because that's what relationships are, what *all* relationships are. Sacrifice. Not self-humiliation or self-exaltation, but sacrifice -- "self-humiliation" and thereby "self-exaltation." Honesty, vulnerability. The gift is the blessing of the giver. It is better to give than to receive.
Truth is marriage. Language is the bride of existence, time the bride of reason, the church the bride of Christ. Melody is the bride of rhythm. The pixels carrying these words are the bride of whatever these words actually mean, if they mean anything at all at this point. Your architecture post fits somewhere in here. Man makes a house to survive in; woman makes it a home to live in.
You say you don't want to cheat to get ahead. You don't want to play the status game. Neither of us do. So we simply shouldn't. Are women who are only interested in status-gaming really worth having? Does Solomon not talk about this in Proverbs? We should be honest with women about ourselves and let them sort themselves out -- not self-humiliating or self-deprecating or self-exalting, but honest. Some will be dishonest in return, but you'll know -- in your heart, you'll always know. My experience (albeit limited) has been, women worth caring about crave honesty and meaning.
Often the reason people don't fit into modern society is not because they're asocial psychopathic manipulators, but because they aren't asocial, psychopathic, or manipulative *enough*.