"tw*tt*r is formula 1 racing. Formally you watch it because you’re interested in the race stuff, but informally/pervertedly you are just waiting for someone to miss a turn and die in a horrible crash"
"idea: I start selling t-shirts with the entire text of blogposts on them"
"To my critics who say I am a accelerationist provocateur who seeks to cause division and suffering, I say: No, I am severely mentally ill and I need help. Get your story straight, guy. You fucking guy. It’s not my fault I’m just better at it than you are at helping me. "
"henry bemis was a villain and he got what he deserved (to go to hell)"
"If you think women are winning, if you think women are somehow getting one over on the fellas, if you think women are happy. Then I think you need to stop shitting yourself and trying to read the future in your soiled pants like they were tea leaves "
"wearing shorts and particularly short shorts is memed as being “lame” and “icky” because it impacts women the same way it impacts men to see a low cut dress and a pair of huge tits, and they instinctively react strategically/competitively in the sexual marketplace sense and use collective bargaining to secure their own group-position"
"spelling errors? Needing an editor?
The only editor I need is The Holy Spirit and the real “spelling” error is witchcraft "
Have had similar experiences with mine, especially with the fixation on career and money, but she's calmed down somewhat since I hit 30. She may not like it, but you will be just fine.
The reason why we have the testosterone pandemic is multifaceted. I accept that biochemical, material explanations for it have a place. And I also think the argument that men are sexually oversaturated holds water -- everyone watches porn and women wear basically nothing, and men are forbidden from consummation.
But the real reason why T levels are plummeting is because we allow the next generation of men to be raised *entirely* by overbearing, tyrannical, emotionally abusive women who use them as outlets for their own guilt, as vehicles for self-expression, as sponges who are just supposed to absorb these oceans of guilt and shame and one day convert them into plastic gold for women to spend like water, both physical gold in the form of becoming factories for USD and metaphysical gold in the form of social credit.
I'm not allowed to simply exist. I'm not allowed to be myself, in the real, true sense of the phrase and not the plastic one. I'm required by the women in my life to fit nicely and neatly into the neoliberal-or-whatever system of thought, and since white men can't really be explained by neoliberal-or-whatever thought, my existence can't be explained. So because I can't be explained, and therefore my existence isn't meaningful, my entire internal existence is based around hedging against the guilt that I cause other people to feel by simply existing.
That guilt is pacified, in part, by being performative and pretending like my existence is actually definitely totally explainable by neoliberalism. So I go and have my career, not because the career means anything to me but because it means things to my mother, because it makes her feel less guilty, so she isn't constantly causing me to feel guilty. But there's no actual meaning in that. My existence is entirely about me paying interest on her guilt, on the guilt that she actively causes herself to feel, and it's never, not ever about me doing things that actually matter, because they actually matter, because I'm the one who wants to do them. Literally nothing else about the career matters, other than the fact that the irrational amount of emphasis on careerism and credentialism can be rationalized by appealing to me being a "provider" in the biblical sense, or being "responsible" in the neo-orthodox boomer sense, and even those rationalizations aren't remotely about being grounded in reality since I'm not married (you can tell this because I'm an anon writing on the Internet) and so I'm not a provider and I'm also not responsible, not because I don't want to be but because I don't have to be.
Rather, the existence of my career is entirely about appeasing her own guilt that my existence means nothing to her. The number on the paycheck is more valuable to her than anything meaningful the paycheck could ever do for anyone in my life, because you don't need actuality to take out a loan on social credit, just potentiality. Meanwhile the money piles up in the account, left unspent because I have nobody and nothing to spend it on, because I have nothing meaningful in my life, nothing in my life worth spending it on. (This is why men give money to e-girls, because money exists to be spent.)
Overbearing, emotionally tyrannical women never raise boys to develop into their own people, into the protagonists of their own stories. I'm just a fringe character in other people's stories; my existence is just an abstraction upon which people can place their guilt. I never developed into an actual person because I was never intended to be an actual person, none of us were. I'm a recurring character on the tv shows of other women's lives; I show up a couple times per season.
We used to teach men from the beginning that there was a space for them in this world that was being prepared for them, that a place was being carved out for them to step into upon reaching manhood. They could do what their father did and find meaning that way, they could be apprenticed to a tradesman and find meaning that way, they could go off to war and find meaning that way, they could become a monk and write a book on the Trinity and find meaning that way, they could go to a university and study law and find meaning that way -- in each case, taught by a veteran MAN in the field. They'd (unironically) meet their real friends along the way, and they'd kind of unintentionally find a nice girl and marry her (because sex is a powerful motivator) and have a kid with her, and then they'd realize with a start upon seeing their firstborn for the first time that life has no meaning except in the covenants you make with individual people, and a lot of those covenants are happy accidents.
Now, they're all sad accidents. Now, it's like, I should consider moving cities to upgrade my career, destroying my covenants in that city. I should abandon my religious tradition and go to a different church, destroying my covenants in my local community. I should send my kids (hypothetical kids, that is) to a public school, so they can be raised by women who use them as sponges for guilt, so that my covenant with them can be broken too.
(There are two kinds of women-teachers. There's women who teach because they like kids, and there's women who like kids because they teach. You want to marry the first kind; you want to not have any contact with the second kind.)
All men need four kinds of covenants: someone to follow, someone to lead, someone to befriend, and someone to love. This is hierarchy. This is patriarchy.
If you think we have free will, you're insane. This is all a way to cope with not being able to create meaning and only being able to name it (see Genesis), to merely assign labels to what was already and always there. Sin is thinking that the labels are the meaning. They aren't; they just describe it, lend shape to it. You can't create money (in the true sense) by printing it or by teleporting it in from the future or by tinkering with numbers in a glorified Excel spreadsheet. You can't declare a career to have meaning and expect it to actually have meaning. Money must be baptized in the sweat of labor expended in the production of something holding actual value. You must be baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit to remove your guilt.
this is all true, genuinely, completely correct, but its also true that you can live whatever life you want, that you can still have all this, its just a whole lot harder now, you choose not to have it
Yeah you're right, and I am choosing to do something different. Knowing is the first step.
I wandered through most of my student days with some kind of vague checklist sitting in my subconscious that directed my behavior as I transitioned into adulthood. It was like this list of things that I guess I thought, when I checked off, I'd become a Real Adult or something, like I'd become a man in the true sense when I finished performing these tasks, going through this ritual. I don't remember all the items on the list, but I do remember that the last two items on the list were "Graduate from college" and "Get a job." Because, again, credentialism and careerism cloaked with bullshit like "being a provider" and "being responsible."
The night before my graduation from college, I'm finishing up a last-minute assignment to make sure I pass this one class so I can actually graduate. I upload the assignment and submit it, and like immediately, I can kind of see this checklist subconsciously, like a vision almost. I watch as "Graduate from college" gets checked off. I'm a bit startled by it I guess, but it's also happening somewhere between my conscious and subconscious, so I only really see it by thinking back to that moment in time.
Time passes. I graduate. I quickly find a job that pays really well, in a city far away, where I basically knew nobody. I move there. My dad helps me move into my apartment, stays a day to make sure I'm settled in. Then it's time for him to leave. I give him a hug (I love my dad, he's great) and watch him get into the car and pull away. I'm watching him pull away when the checklist reappears and I see "Get a job" is now checked off. Everything's done. I graduated from the school of neoliberal personhood. I'm nobody.
At that moment in time, I realized that I could spend the rest of my life not ever really progressing as a person, not ever developing myself as the protagonist of my own story. I could literally watch myself spending the next forty years of my life working 8-10 hours a day, coming home, grinding video games as a second job for another 5-6 hours, and then going to sleep. On a loop. Forever. I did it, I did everything, I got all the achievements, there's nothing else to complete. I'm done.
I didn't want to kill myself at that moment, because I didn't feel like it. But I consciously knew that there wasn't a difference between killing myself at that point in time and waiting fifty years to die. Time stops when change stops, when character development stops, and I couldn't see myself changing or developing in those fifty years.
My story since then has been about trying to find meaning in a world that has deliberately hidden it from me and discouraged me from pursuing it. I reignited my Christianity; that helped immensely. I made a couple new, incredibly deep friendships; that helped immensely. I gave up the high-paying job and returned to an area where I had friends and family and a church that loves me and gives me a sense of belonging; that helped immensely.
Martin Luther says in Bondage of the Will, the book that made him famous, that free will is one of the greatest lies we've ever made up. Even the term "free will" is itself deceptive, that the state of the will described as "freedom" is actually total slavery to material desire, to want for pleasure. But he adds that, if we insist on using the term "free will" to describe an aspect of our lives, it's the ability to creatively use the resources we have at our disposal to construct some kind of meaningful life that points to God. Salvation is a canvas, "free will" the paint.
Along those lines, I've been blessed with material means beyond most of my peers, and that is a true blessing, even if the intentions behind it weren't genuine originally. It may not bring me meaning now, but it could bring me meaning in time, lots of meaning. It's good enough that it's not totally out of the realm of possibility to have the 50's white picket fence dream -- my wife could stay home so my children don't have to be raised by the sorts of women I describe in my diatribe, assuming of course that I select carefully the woman I marry.
At the same time, we have to bear in mind the words of St. Augustine: "The mind commands the body and the body obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance." I'm permanently psychospiritually damaged by my upbringing. The organ of thought and reason itself is ill, and it can't heal itself. The disease comes from within.
I don't want to kill myself anymore, because I find some/many things in life to be beautiful and therefore worth living for. But every interaction that I have with women is permanently tainted in a way that I'm only just beginning to grasp. My confidence is completely shot. I experience guilt and shame simply in addressing or talking to a woman. I'm insecure about my appearance. These are all things I can work on, but significant damage has been done. There's resistance.
Despite all that, I got the number of a cute girl and I've been texting her. She's really nice. God is merciful.
Do you think that in some cases the solution might be going "no contact" with a parent or that that's an extreme/unhelpful/coward move? (I'm not talking about your situation but rather a hypothetical case.) I've been enyoying your newsletter lately, cheers.
Not only "never", but "impossible" as they will still live in your head. Practically, maybe in fringe edge cases but not statistically relevant. Like if your dad raped killed and ate your children, edge case. Other than that I'd say no. Is your dad Zeus by any chance
Lol no. And you're right about them living in my head anyways. What I mean is when you Really suck at setting boundaries, do you need to learn to do that from a distance or it's preferable to learn as you interact with them (likely with some undesiderable outcomes)?
I would say the distinction is entirely academic, and an attempt to postpone it by thinking about it/strategizing instead of just doing it. It's going to be equally terrifying no matter what, and just like "going up and talking to a girl you like", there is never going to be a better moment than now and it will only get harder and worse the more you postpone it
tw**t ideas:
"tw*tt*r is formula 1 racing. Formally you watch it because you’re interested in the race stuff, but informally/pervertedly you are just waiting for someone to miss a turn and die in a horrible crash"
"idea: I start selling t-shirts with the entire text of blogposts on them"
"To my critics who say I am a accelerationist provocateur who seeks to cause division and suffering, I say: No, I am severely mentally ill and I need help. Get your story straight, guy. You fucking guy. It’s not my fault I’m just better at it than you are at helping me. "
"henry bemis was a villain and he got what he deserved (to go to hell)"
"If you think women are winning, if you think women are somehow getting one over on the fellas, if you think women are happy. Then I think you need to stop shitting yourself and trying to read the future in your soiled pants like they were tea leaves "
"wearing shorts and particularly short shorts is memed as being “lame” and “icky” because it impacts women the same way it impacts men to see a low cut dress and a pair of huge tits, and they instinctively react strategically/competitively in the sexual marketplace sense and use collective bargaining to secure their own group-position"
"spelling errors? Needing an editor?
The only editor I need is The Holy Spirit and the real “spelling” error is witchcraft "
I'll take a spelling errors t-shirt, Randy.
Also, sorry about your time with your mom.
Have had similar experiences with mine, especially with the fixation on career and money, but she's calmed down somewhat since I hit 30. She may not like it, but you will be just fine.
The reason why we have the testosterone pandemic is multifaceted. I accept that biochemical, material explanations for it have a place. And I also think the argument that men are sexually oversaturated holds water -- everyone watches porn and women wear basically nothing, and men are forbidden from consummation.
But the real reason why T levels are plummeting is because we allow the next generation of men to be raised *entirely* by overbearing, tyrannical, emotionally abusive women who use them as outlets for their own guilt, as vehicles for self-expression, as sponges who are just supposed to absorb these oceans of guilt and shame and one day convert them into plastic gold for women to spend like water, both physical gold in the form of becoming factories for USD and metaphysical gold in the form of social credit.
I'm not allowed to simply exist. I'm not allowed to be myself, in the real, true sense of the phrase and not the plastic one. I'm required by the women in my life to fit nicely and neatly into the neoliberal-or-whatever system of thought, and since white men can't really be explained by neoliberal-or-whatever thought, my existence can't be explained. So because I can't be explained, and therefore my existence isn't meaningful, my entire internal existence is based around hedging against the guilt that I cause other people to feel by simply existing.
That guilt is pacified, in part, by being performative and pretending like my existence is actually definitely totally explainable by neoliberalism. So I go and have my career, not because the career means anything to me but because it means things to my mother, because it makes her feel less guilty, so she isn't constantly causing me to feel guilty. But there's no actual meaning in that. My existence is entirely about me paying interest on her guilt, on the guilt that she actively causes herself to feel, and it's never, not ever about me doing things that actually matter, because they actually matter, because I'm the one who wants to do them. Literally nothing else about the career matters, other than the fact that the irrational amount of emphasis on careerism and credentialism can be rationalized by appealing to me being a "provider" in the biblical sense, or being "responsible" in the neo-orthodox boomer sense, and even those rationalizations aren't remotely about being grounded in reality since I'm not married (you can tell this because I'm an anon writing on the Internet) and so I'm not a provider and I'm also not responsible, not because I don't want to be but because I don't have to be.
Rather, the existence of my career is entirely about appeasing her own guilt that my existence means nothing to her. The number on the paycheck is more valuable to her than anything meaningful the paycheck could ever do for anyone in my life, because you don't need actuality to take out a loan on social credit, just potentiality. Meanwhile the money piles up in the account, left unspent because I have nobody and nothing to spend it on, because I have nothing meaningful in my life, nothing in my life worth spending it on. (This is why men give money to e-girls, because money exists to be spent.)
Overbearing, emotionally tyrannical women never raise boys to develop into their own people, into the protagonists of their own stories. I'm just a fringe character in other people's stories; my existence is just an abstraction upon which people can place their guilt. I never developed into an actual person because I was never intended to be an actual person, none of us were. I'm a recurring character on the tv shows of other women's lives; I show up a couple times per season.
We used to teach men from the beginning that there was a space for them in this world that was being prepared for them, that a place was being carved out for them to step into upon reaching manhood. They could do what their father did and find meaning that way, they could be apprenticed to a tradesman and find meaning that way, they could go off to war and find meaning that way, they could become a monk and write a book on the Trinity and find meaning that way, they could go to a university and study law and find meaning that way -- in each case, taught by a veteran MAN in the field. They'd (unironically) meet their real friends along the way, and they'd kind of unintentionally find a nice girl and marry her (because sex is a powerful motivator) and have a kid with her, and then they'd realize with a start upon seeing their firstborn for the first time that life has no meaning except in the covenants you make with individual people, and a lot of those covenants are happy accidents.
Now, they're all sad accidents. Now, it's like, I should consider moving cities to upgrade my career, destroying my covenants in that city. I should abandon my religious tradition and go to a different church, destroying my covenants in my local community. I should send my kids (hypothetical kids, that is) to a public school, so they can be raised by women who use them as sponges for guilt, so that my covenant with them can be broken too.
(There are two kinds of women-teachers. There's women who teach because they like kids, and there's women who like kids because they teach. You want to marry the first kind; you want to not have any contact with the second kind.)
All men need four kinds of covenants: someone to follow, someone to lead, someone to befriend, and someone to love. This is hierarchy. This is patriarchy.
If you think we have free will, you're insane. This is all a way to cope with not being able to create meaning and only being able to name it (see Genesis), to merely assign labels to what was already and always there. Sin is thinking that the labels are the meaning. They aren't; they just describe it, lend shape to it. You can't create money (in the true sense) by printing it or by teleporting it in from the future or by tinkering with numbers in a glorified Excel spreadsheet. You can't declare a career to have meaning and expect it to actually have meaning. Money must be baptized in the sweat of labor expended in the production of something holding actual value. You must be baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit to remove your guilt.
good tweet
this is all true, genuinely, completely correct, but its also true that you can live whatever life you want, that you can still have all this, its just a whole lot harder now, you choose not to have it
im extremely mad about it as well, dont get me wrong
we must use the rage as fuel for our journey not as our map
Yeah you're right, and I am choosing to do something different. Knowing is the first step.
I wandered through most of my student days with some kind of vague checklist sitting in my subconscious that directed my behavior as I transitioned into adulthood. It was like this list of things that I guess I thought, when I checked off, I'd become a Real Adult or something, like I'd become a man in the true sense when I finished performing these tasks, going through this ritual. I don't remember all the items on the list, but I do remember that the last two items on the list were "Graduate from college" and "Get a job." Because, again, credentialism and careerism cloaked with bullshit like "being a provider" and "being responsible."
The night before my graduation from college, I'm finishing up a last-minute assignment to make sure I pass this one class so I can actually graduate. I upload the assignment and submit it, and like immediately, I can kind of see this checklist subconsciously, like a vision almost. I watch as "Graduate from college" gets checked off. I'm a bit startled by it I guess, but it's also happening somewhere between my conscious and subconscious, so I only really see it by thinking back to that moment in time.
Time passes. I graduate. I quickly find a job that pays really well, in a city far away, where I basically knew nobody. I move there. My dad helps me move into my apartment, stays a day to make sure I'm settled in. Then it's time for him to leave. I give him a hug (I love my dad, he's great) and watch him get into the car and pull away. I'm watching him pull away when the checklist reappears and I see "Get a job" is now checked off. Everything's done. I graduated from the school of neoliberal personhood. I'm nobody.
At that moment in time, I realized that I could spend the rest of my life not ever really progressing as a person, not ever developing myself as the protagonist of my own story. I could literally watch myself spending the next forty years of my life working 8-10 hours a day, coming home, grinding video games as a second job for another 5-6 hours, and then going to sleep. On a loop. Forever. I did it, I did everything, I got all the achievements, there's nothing else to complete. I'm done.
I didn't want to kill myself at that moment, because I didn't feel like it. But I consciously knew that there wasn't a difference between killing myself at that point in time and waiting fifty years to die. Time stops when change stops, when character development stops, and I couldn't see myself changing or developing in those fifty years.
My story since then has been about trying to find meaning in a world that has deliberately hidden it from me and discouraged me from pursuing it. I reignited my Christianity; that helped immensely. I made a couple new, incredibly deep friendships; that helped immensely. I gave up the high-paying job and returned to an area where I had friends and family and a church that loves me and gives me a sense of belonging; that helped immensely.
Martin Luther says in Bondage of the Will, the book that made him famous, that free will is one of the greatest lies we've ever made up. Even the term "free will" is itself deceptive, that the state of the will described as "freedom" is actually total slavery to material desire, to want for pleasure. But he adds that, if we insist on using the term "free will" to describe an aspect of our lives, it's the ability to creatively use the resources we have at our disposal to construct some kind of meaningful life that points to God. Salvation is a canvas, "free will" the paint.
Along those lines, I've been blessed with material means beyond most of my peers, and that is a true blessing, even if the intentions behind it weren't genuine originally. It may not bring me meaning now, but it could bring me meaning in time, lots of meaning. It's good enough that it's not totally out of the realm of possibility to have the 50's white picket fence dream -- my wife could stay home so my children don't have to be raised by the sorts of women I describe in my diatribe, assuming of course that I select carefully the woman I marry.
At the same time, we have to bear in mind the words of St. Augustine: "The mind commands the body and the body obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance." I'm permanently psychospiritually damaged by my upbringing. The organ of thought and reason itself is ill, and it can't heal itself. The disease comes from within.
I don't want to kill myself anymore, because I find some/many things in life to be beautiful and therefore worth living for. But every interaction that I have with women is permanently tainted in a way that I'm only just beginning to grasp. My confidence is completely shot. I experience guilt and shame simply in addressing or talking to a woman. I'm insecure about my appearance. These are all things I can work on, but significant damage has been done. There's resistance.
Despite all that, I got the number of a cute girl and I've been texting her. She's really nice. God is merciful.
Is this Freud or portnoys complaint where am I please send help
You have convinced me to start a public diary. Thanks for poasting.
https://minordissent.substack.com/p/dunning-kruger-trusting-experts-and
Do you think that in some cases the solution might be going "no contact" with a parent or that that's an extreme/unhelpful/coward move? (I'm not talking about your situation but rather a hypothetical case.) I've been enyoying your newsletter lately, cheers.
Not only "never", but "impossible" as they will still live in your head. Practically, maybe in fringe edge cases but not statistically relevant. Like if your dad raped killed and ate your children, edge case. Other than that I'd say no. Is your dad Zeus by any chance
Lol no. And you're right about them living in my head anyways. What I mean is when you Really suck at setting boundaries, do you need to learn to do that from a distance or it's preferable to learn as you interact with them (likely with some undesiderable outcomes)?
I would say the distinction is entirely academic, and an attempt to postpone it by thinking about it/strategizing instead of just doing it. It's going to be equally terrifying no matter what, and just like "going up and talking to a girl you like", there is never going to be a better moment than now and it will only get harder and worse the more you postpone it