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.