What exactly is the “manosphere?”

We all know the stock answer: it’s “a loosely connected web of blogs dealing with men’s issues”… but that failed to satisfy me, so in an effort to find a more scientific answer to this question, I just spent something like four hours plowing through some 200 or more blogs – starting with the blogs I (at least occasionally) read, then looking at everyone those blogs link to, then everyone those blogs link to…

I bottomed out about two and a half hours into it, seemingly free-falling into an ever-expanding ocean of blogs, but then… somehow, the threads I was following started coming together again. You’d expect that if there is such a thing as the “manosphere,” then going through the blogs you’d eventually find most of the ever-increasing number of links pointing back to each other in a somewhat circular fashion – and that is indeed what happened. The final quarter hour of my adventure on the open seas of blog was the strangest part – I would run across a new blog I’d never seen or even heard of before, and every link in its sidebar (save one or two of the blogger’s personal picks) would already show the purple “previously visited link” color. And this happened a lot, even with blogrolls several tens of blogs long.

So there you go, the active “manosphere” is, according to my calculations, comprised of around 120-140 blogs, with several tens of old, abandoned blogs still lying around as well. It’s somewhat divided into smaller and quite heavily overlapping spheres (centered around Game, marriage issues, legal issues and MRA, antifeminism, whining, MGTOW, cultural commentary, self-improvement, etc.) and bleeds rather profusely into a distinct alt-right blogosphere through both spheres’ shared interest in the ongoing cultural decay of the Western world and how to live with that.

It basically looks a lot like one of these:

A realization I had in the process that, although not really logically surprising, still felt counter-intuitive was that a lot of the uncharted blogs I usually never ventured anywhere close to were not bad at all. I suppose we all imagine that we’ve personally picked the good ones to follow, but the truth seems much more likely to be that we simply picked those which seemed the closest, judging by whatever virtual social connections brought us into the “manosphere” in the first place. It’s the “friend of a friend” phenomenon transferring from real life onto our blog reading habits. Depending on which blogs they’ve found first, bloggers and readers both cluster into smaller groups even within one manospheric subgroup – I found at least two, or depending on how you count, possibly three distinct “Game” subgroups of blogs, all writing about the exact same stuff, but mostly separately from each other, not linking to or discussing posts from the other groups. Probably not even reading them. Maybe not even knowing they exist.

Fascinating stuff… so what do I intend to do with this information? The only thing a man possessed of his natural male instincts and drives can do in a situation like this: build the biggest auto-updating manosphere blogroll ever.

… now it’s two weeks later and I’ve done it. It was no easy task in either the labor or the technical sense, and I crashed the server at least twice, but I finally found a way to make it work: I am now linking to updates from over 140 blogs in real time.

I’m fairly confident that all the “major” manosphere blogs are covered, but that said, if some obscure blog isn’t on the list that doesn’t mean I decided not to include it. The more likely explanation is that I’ve never heard of it and didn’t find it even when I went three layers of links deep from the blogs that I usually read. That’s exactly what inspired the point of this whole exercise – to gather together the currently pretty loose web of the “manosphere” and let readers find all those good writers they don’t even know are out there, and let those writers find new readers. This is what needs to happen if the manosphere is to grow and flourish.

I’m donating the most valuable piece of internet real-estate I have – the home page of my blog – to this cause, and that’s where you can now find between 50-100 new links to freshly pressed blog posts every day. I’m betting quite a few of those will be stuff you’ll want to read, especially since many of the writers contributing to this very site write their own blogs as well, and a lot of those are featured.

Having been a bit out of the loop lately, I’m going to be using it myself to better stay on top of what’s going on in the ‘sphere, and to discover the valuable offerings of blogs that I haven’t much been exposed to before. I hope you have a great time doing the same.

Happy reading!

Cross-posted at Delusion Damage.

Whenever a news story gets out about some high-profile honcho’s career being destroyed over some shady sex crime accusation with no proof that the media and public nevertheless treat as if the mere fact of being accused proves guilt beyond reasonable doubt, I can’t help but wonder…how many of his friends and colleagues have just been inspired to turn to crime to ensure that it will never happen to them?

The ongoing criminalization of natural male courtship behavior as “sexual harassment,” the punitive alimony, divorce and child support laws that make it impossible for more and more fathers and ex-husbands to male ends meet through legal means and the growing prevalence of the “guilty until proven innocent” principle in how the courts handle rape accusations, not to mention the sheer ridiculous unfairness of these and other laws that simply breed contempt of the law and animosity towards the authorities in the minds of many men disappointed in their elected representatives, are but a few of the major causes driving a trend which for some is even a conscious agenda: the making of all men into (actual or likely) criminals.

This is not a good idea for anybody.

Government is basically a monopoly on the use of force, and crime is basically competing with that monopoly. The existence of law-abiding citizens is predicated on the government satisfactorily taking care of those situations where people need force to be used. If people need to use their own force, even in just one area of their lives, they become criminals. You can’t choose to be a violent criminal one moment and a law-abiding citizen the next – once you’re “on the wrong side of the law,” you can’t count on the law for anything anymore and you’re left with only yourself and your criminal buddies to count on for everything.

That’s how criminal gangs always form and take over wherever police don’t protect the people. They don’t “invade a neighborhood” from outside like they’ve been waiting for a vulnerable area to move into, which is the way it’s presented in the news. They form from the population of the area itself when people start realizing that no one is going to use force for them and they have to do it themselves. They are the police and the government in those areas – gang leaders resolve disputes between citizens and see to it that some sort of order is kept in the area which they control, even if they only do it in the interests of their own business operations. It is inevitable that gangs will form wherever force is used without external controls imposed on it, because people naturally form alliances with those who share their interests, and any use of force by citizens is by definition criminal, so there you have it: criminal gangs are the unavoidable emergent result of insufficient government protection.

The prevalence of the “criminal lifestyle” in the urban jungles of America is not, as many far removed from it would like to believe, a result of some genetic, racial or personal disposition toward violence and a lack of compassion for one’s fellow human beings. It’s simply what happens when people aren’t getting what they need, and it can happen to all but the rarest of us. Once you have gangs, you then start needing gangs to protect you from other gangs and “gangland” perpetuates itself.

The example of the urban jungle where crime often seems not just like an option, but the only option, is a chilling image of what laws that make a major portion of men into criminals can lead us toward, and not surprisingly, since it’s often the first place where many of society’s problems surface and can be observed before they spread everywhere else.

The more widespread phenomena like the imprisonment of innocent men based on nothing but a made-up rape accusation become, the more criminal the average man will become, and the more powerful criminal gangs will grow. Right now, most men are used to believing that in order to avoid imprisonment on rape charges they need only refrain from raping anyone – an easy task for most – but things may be about to change. When the deciding factor is not whether an actual rape occurred, but instead whether a woman stands up in court and claims that it did, what men must do to avoid imprisonment is no longer to avoid raping, but to avoid being accused of it.

How can a man avoid being accused? Clearly, refraining from rape is not enough, because there are plenty of women who’d make up a rape or two for profit or revenge. Making sure to stay in good favor with every woman in one’s life, which is what some of the “if she made an accusation she must have had a good reason” camp seem to be advocating, is not only an unfair demand but, for most men who are only human, an impossible one. It can only be concluded that nothing can protect a man against false rape accusations as long as a potential accuser has something to gain by it – and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how much could be gained from the power of perpetually holding a lengthy prison sentence over someone’s head.

The only remaining option to guarantee safety, then, is to make sure that any potential accusation brings the accuser more pain than gain. If government doesn’t provide the protection a man needs, many will turn to criminal gangs. If imprisonment on fraudulent rape charges becomes commonplace enough to worry the average man, the seeds of criminal gangs will be sown within the backbone of the population over Friday night beers:

Bobby: Hey Jimmy, did you hear about Teddy? He went to jail for fifteen years because some girl said he raped her.

Jimmy: Oh shit, Bobby! If that can happen to Teddy, it can happen to any of us! This is bad…

Bobby: Jimmy? If some girl said I raped her, and the police came and arrested me, you’d have my back, right? You’d know I didn’t really do it, so you’d make her change her story, wouldn’t you? You’re my friend, right, so you’d help me if I needed your help?

Jimmy: Yeah, of course, Bobby. Of course I would. I know you wouldn’t rape anybody, and I know if Teddy can go to jail on a made-up accusation then you or I could as well. I’d make a girl change her story for you, you can count on me, buddy.

Bobby: Thanks, Jimmy. You’re a good friend.

Jimmy: Bobby? If, you know, that happened, and I had to do something radical, I mean, like, an actual crime, to make that girl change her story and get you out of jail…which I’d do for you since you’re my friend, you know…and if the police came after me for that crime that I really did do, but I did it for you, then you’d help me, right? You’d hide me at your summer cottage or something?

Bobby: Yeah, of course, Jimmy, of course. Fuck the police if they want to jail you for saving my life.

Jimmy: And since I’d be, like, a wanted criminal, I couldn’t get a job so you’d help me with that?

Bobby: Yeah, I know this guy Tony Rigatoni from high school, he has a restaurant, I could get you an off-the-books job, no problem. In fact, now that I think of it, you probably wouldn’t even need to take care of the girl in the first place…I bet Tony knows some people who do that kind of stuff professionally. I’ve always kind of stayed away from Tony because he’s, you know, in the mob, but now it looks like maybe we need him anyway. Actually, now that I’m all worried about false rape accusations, I’m gonna call him just to calm my mind about this…

Bobby (on the phone): Hey Tony, haven’t talked in a while…so anyway, if I needed some random girl to change her mind about something important or maybe if I needed her to not show up in court or something, do you know anybody who…

Tony (on the phone): Yeah.

Bobby (on the phone): Uh…and it’d be taken care of, like, for good? I could forget about it?

Tony (on the phone): Just fuggedaboudit, just fuhgeddaboudit…

Bobby (on the phone): “Okay, thanks Tony! I feel a lot better now.”

Tony (on the phone): Hey, hold on Bob, are you just gonna ask me for a favor like that and hang up on me without askin’ what you can do for old Tony? That’s cold man, it’s cold.

Bobby (on the phone): Sorry Tony, I didn’t mean that… um, you need help with something then?

Tony (on the phone): Now that you ask, I do have a big bag of white flour that needs to be stored out of direct sunlight, if you know what I mean…would’ya help me out and pick up this bag from my place and store it somewhere the sun don’t ever shine?

Bobby (on the phone): Uhm… Tony, I don’t know, that sounds kind of criminal…

Tony (on the phone): No shit, Sherlock, what were you asking me to do, take a girl for a fuckin’ walk in the park with flowers an’ shit? So it’s like, what, Tony can fuckin’ do crimes for ya but you can’t getcha lily white hands dirty for Tony?

Bobby (on the phone): Ah, sorry man, I’ll do it.

Bobby: Jimmy, get the car. We’re going to Rigatoni’s Restaurant for dinner.

Jimmy: Okay.

Bobby: Oh, and we’re gonna take a felony amount of a controlled substance back home and hide it in our houses for Tony.

Jimmy: What? Really?

Bobby: Do you wanna go to jail on a false rape accusation, Jimmy?

Jimmy: Not really.

Bobby: Do you wanna live at my crappy summer cottage on the run from the police and wash dishes at Rigatoni’s?

Jimmy: No…damn it, let’s go join the goddamn mafia then.

The only way to uphold the rule of law is to make sure that the population can rely on it. If it can’t, it will find alternative forces to rely on. Already existing criminal gangs will grow and spread, and wherever there is a vacuum of power, new criminal gangs will form from the formerly law-abiding population.

There are areas in many American cities today that are virtually indistinguishable from lawless third-world places. The only thing that stops gangland from spreading everywhere is the faith of the population in the government. Living as a law-abiding citizen under governmental rule is not the natural state that humans gravitate toward – living in a tribally organized gang in violent conflict with rival gangs is the natural state, and wherever the artificial rule of law breaks down, it quickly takes over. The rule of law was a great invention by great men who realized how much the lives of the people can be improved when the necessity for the use of force is removed from them by providing a system which they can trust to use force for them when it’s necessary. It’s a rather complicated system that requires lots of goodwill and cooperation from the people in order to work, and its rewards are great when it does, but it is also very unstable – much more unstable than we would think looking at the colossal government buildings and public works which symbolize it. All it takes is one completely screwed-up law to ruin everything by breaking the population’s trust in the system and causing them to decide that they cannot rely on government protection any more and must provide their own.

Certain subcultures, such as some “outlaw biker” groups, have long since decided that the laws of larger society are not suitable for them, and they’ve set their own rules which they enforce of their own initiative, which is of course criminal from the government perspective, but they’ve generally been only a small group and not enough to destabilize the rule of law in the population at large. There are isolated pockets of “gangland” within many cities, but they have generally been confined to certain geographical areas afflicted with the circumstances conducive to gang proliferation, and outside those areas, to certain areas of interest such as narcotics and weapons trade. There are underground criminal organizations everywhere, but they too are mostly confined to areas of interest which involve only a small amount of the population. There are still plenty of law-abiding citizens left to support the rule of law enough that most people still trust in it.

This doesn’t always have to be the case, though. With Prohibition in America in the 1920s, something which was enjoyed by a large part of the population, alcohol, was made illegal, and all those who were involved in the use or production of alcohol were made into criminals. The entire alcohol business with all its profits was handed to existing criminal gangs, and all the regular people who enjoyed alcohol suddenly became criminals, many of whom had to get more heavily involved in crime than they would have liked since they were already “on the wrong side of the law” and couldn’t call the police when there was a problem, such as a drunken brawl getting out of hand. Criminal gangs eventually grew so powerful that government had no choice but to make alcohol legal again to reduce the amount of criminal activity.

The amount of people put at risk of a serious disruption to their lives by the ban on alcohol was large, but nowhere near as large as the amount of people put at risk by the increasingly crazy laws growing out of the feminist obsession with subjugating men to the whims of vindictive women. Rest assured that there are already Bobbies and Jimmies among us who have a contingency plan for dealing with that risk, and if the current trends in law continue, their number is only likely to grow. As long as individual victims of these laws remain few enough to be relatively isolated, the spread of criminal activity will be relatively slow, but if their concentration in the population grows to the point where “everybody knows somebody who…”, crime can suddenly explode across all the land:

Bobby (on the phone): Hello?

Mickey (on the phone): Hey Bobby, it’s Mickey.

Bobby (on the phone): Hey.

Mickey (on the phone): So, you remember when that girl accused you of rape and then had a mysterious accident and you got out of jail?

Bobby (on the phone): Yeah.

Mickey (on the phone): Well, I’m calling you from jail…

Bobby (on the phone): Just fuhgeddaboutit, man, it’s taken care of…my friend Jimmy’s on the run from the police already, if they catch him it’s the same life sentence for two girls as it is for one.

The criminality caused by a failure in the protections of the law can eventually become independent of its source and take on a life of its own, perpetuating itself even if its original cause disappears. Like crime spreads from one area of a person’s life to another, a “criminal lifestyle” spreads from one person to the next: once you are living with criminal gangs, it gets very hard not to join them. One way or another, you can always count on men to solve their problems. Will lawmakers come to their senses before the average man is involved in a criminal organization? Who can tell…we live in a very exciting time.

Before anyone starts yelling, let’s just take a moment to remember that I am not advocating crime here. I am simply being realistic about what happens when you put men in a position where they start feeling like crime is the only way they can protect themselves.

The characters and events depicted in this story are all loosely based on people you know and their real lives. Any similarity between such semi-fictitious persons or events and actual persons living or dead or actual events is wholly deliberate. Names, places and other details have been changed to preserve your anonymity, and that of these people you know.

Jim, Seth, Rachel and Cindy were born on one of those nights that seem to go on forever. The sun setting on a sweet summer’s eve, crickets chirping somewhere just out of sight, and a room full of freshly minted babies in rows and columns of identical cribs, waiting to be taken home from the hospital. At a distance, not even their mothers could tell them apart.

They all came into the world in much the same way, and no one could have guessed which ones were born with a silver spoon in their pants. Yet, two of them would end up having life, luck and the opposite sex smile upon them wherever they went, and two would beg for scraps.

At five years old, their futures were already decided.

Jim’s dad was an auto mechanic. He played ball games with his son on his sober days and slapped him around some on Friday or Saturday nights. When Jim was bullied on the playground, his dad told him to go back out and fight like a man. He wouldn’t relent even when Jim complained that the other kids were bigger and their numbers were overwhelming – Jim’s dad told him to go and take his beating or he’d give him one twice as bad himself. Jim gave the other kids a run for their money.

Seth’s dad was a payroll accountant. He lovingly read bedtime stories to his son on weekdays and played educational board games with him on the weekends. When Seth was bullied on the playground, his dad told him to just ignore the bullies, and when that just made the bullying worse, Seth’s dad bought him scale model airplane assembly kits that he could play with at home. Seth mostly stayed inside after that.

Rachel’s dad was a surgeon. He worked late and didn’t see his daughter on weekdays, but he always took her sailing with him on the weekends. When Rachel came home crying that the other girls wouldn’t play with her, he bought her the prettiest dresses and the shiniest toys any of her friends had ever seen, and she became the underground queen of the kindergarten.

Cindy’s dad was a soldier. He kept the same picture of his wife and baby daughter in a pocket of his battle dress uniform for three years. When Cindy came home crying that the other girls wouldn’t play with her, he was decomposing under a modest, taxpayer-funded gravestone. Cindy’s mom bought her ice cream to cheer her up.

The long days Jim spent outside made him strong, and practice with his dad made him a skilled ballplayer. The other boys respected his skill and feared his wrath. They looked up to him and made him a leader in sports and in other ventures as well. Jim was unofficially the king of his elementary school, and officially the captain of two sports teams in high school.

The long days Seth spent inside made him weak, and focusing on solitary, intellectual pursuits made him an unpopular and introverted child. The other boys pushed him around and made fun of him. They looked down on him and made him do their homework in exchange for not shoving him into lockers quite as much. Seth was unofficially the weird kid in class all through elementary school, and officially the president and sole member of the high school model airplane club.

The long days Rachel spent being center of attention made her a happy and delightful girl, and her fancy clothes made her appearance eye-catching. The other girls envied her popularity and valued her friendship. They modeled themselves after her and competed for the right to stroll through the school hallways at her side. Rachel was unofficially the prettiest girl in elementary school, and officially head cheerleader in high school.

The long days Cindy spent with her mom made her socially invisible, and her mother’s attempts to lift her spirits made her fat. The other girls looked upon her with pity and sneering contempt, and few of them volunteered to be seen with her. They laughed at her behind her back and spread unflattering rumors about her. Cindy was unofficially too heavy for the see-saw in elementary school and officially seeing the counselor in high school.

Jim learned to see girls as nice, sweet and strangely exciting. When he looked at them, they would smile shyly and then quickly turn away. He learned that they were really just scared to talk to him, and that by being nice and reassuring he could make them relax and let him explore their fascinating bodies. At 14 years old, he went to a sleepover party at a friend’s house where the friend’s older sister pulled him into her bedroom, lifted up her skirt and laid down on her bed for him. When he got home and shared the story of his conquest, Jim’s dad laughed heartily and gave him his first beer.

Seth learned to see girls as dangerous sirens, whose inexplicable appeal would time and time again lure him into their traps of withering rejection and social humiliation. He learned that they were impossible to understand, pointless to pursue, and best dealt with by staying far away from. Like mythical poisoned apples, they looked so good it hurt but if he tried to touch them all the good would vanish and he would find only hurt. At 14 years old, he found porn. When he forgot to hide his porn one day, Seth’s dad gave him a stern look and told him not to let his mother find it.

Rachel learned to see boys as useful idiots – they would do all kinds of favors for her seemingly expecting nothing in return! He learned that they all desperately wanted to be near her, and would do anything if only she dangled the possibility of further contact in front of them just a little bit. For just a couple of them, she felt the same way herself… it scared and excited her at the same time. At 14 years old, her feelings for a friend’s older brother overwhelmed her and she gave in to his gentle pressure against everything she’d been taught. It hurt. She didn’t tell her parents.

Cindy learned to see boys as living in a separate world. She’d see them every day at school, but she wanted nothing much from them nor they from her. She learned that they mostly orbited the pretty girls, and she appeared not to be one. She’d get a little bit of attention now and then, but none of the fawning that some of the other girls seemed to enjoy at all hours of the day. At 14 years old, she belonged to the social underclass of girls who’d never been kissed, and everyone knew. She was sure that it was obvious even to her parents, and she thanked her lucky stars every day that they didn’t bring it up – she would surely have died on the spot.

Jim applied to college with mixed feelings – sad to leave the bounteous buffet of high school girls behind, but excited at the thought of expanding his womanizing career into a bigger pool with more fish. A charismatic guy who could get along with anybody, he easily got a summer job at a bowling alley and charmed more than a few girls away from the lanes with his confident manliness. When his boss noticed that the same girls were coming back over and over but only during the shifts when Jim was working, Jim got a promotion and a raise.

Seth applied to college with mixed feelings – happy to be out of the hell of high school but apprehensive at what new torments might await him at college. Insecure and socially inept, he only managed to get a job at a burger restaurant – his eighth choice – that left him covered in grease after each workday. If he’d been unappealing to women before, this did nothing to help.

Rachel applied to college with mixed feelings – the thought of not being prom queen and homecoming queen anymore was unappealing, but she felt confident she still wouldn’t be just another girl. She was special, always had been – she felt like the social spotlight was her birthright, and she would secure her rightful position. She beamed her lovely smile at the manager of a clothing store and he gave her a summer job on the spot. She sat around reading magazines from 9 to 5 each day and collected a nice hourly wage for it. Even though she barely sold anything, her boss never got mad at her.

Cindy applied to college with mixed feelings – scared it would be more of the same, but hoping that maybe she could reinvent herself as a normal girl or if not, at least find some abnormal friends to share her misery with. She wanted a summer job at a clothing store, but none of her carefully crafted applications extolling her passion for fashion led to employment, so she eventually got a summer job at a burger restaurant and her boss made her work in the back every day.

Jim’s college experience was a four-year-long alcohol-fueled sex romp during which he racked up a notch for one in every ten girls on campus – and none of them was below average in the beauty department. He lost count halfway through his second semester. He was practically bribed into joining a fraternity and living in a night-and-day party house of indescribable debauchery for the remainder of his college years.

Seth’s college experience was a four-year-long wait for the college experience movies had promised him. He managed to finagle himself invitations to a couple of frat parties, but the frat brothers would make sure to divide up all the spoils amongst themselves, and Seth went home empty-handed every time. During all the nights spent alone in the public areas of his dorm while his roommate was having girl after girl over in his room, and on more than one occasion in his bed, he got on friendly terms with a homely fat girl who quite often found herself in the same bind. After his careful nourishing of the friendship with a year’s worth of intricate intimacy-increasing plans worthy of a decorated general, the stars and cheap beers aligned one night to open her flabby legs for him. The morning after, he felt ashamed of himself but gratefully fell into a steady relationship with her. Even a somewhat disgusting supply of regular sex was better than what he’d had until now – no sex.

Rachel’s college experience was a four-year-long walk on clouds. The sexual power she’d wielded in high school worked even better in this new and bigger pool of useful idiots, and she got top grades for all of her coursework, almost none of which she ever personally touched. During the course of her college years, she had three long-term boyfriends, all picked from among the ranks of the highest-status fraternities, and a few discreet flings on the side with the creme-de-la-creme of the college world – the top few guys for whom a fire burned in the loins of every girl on campus.

Cindy’s college experience was a four-year-long exercise in compromise. She tried to change her style, but male attention still eluded her, and she settled for having to dress slutty to be noticed. She wanted a steady relationship with a high-status frat brother, but none of the high-status guys would call her back after a night of drunken sex, and she settled for a string of orgasmic one-night stands. She wanted a boyfriend who made her feel that special way in that special place, but all such boyfriends were taken by prettier girls, and after a drunken mistake with a friend, she settled for one who would be her loyal servant but gave her no tingly feelings. Whenever the need to get her brains fucked out sideways grew too strong, she could manage a one-off with a frat stud on the down low.

Jim ended up a salesman at an electronics store. He had a natural way of making the male customers trust his recommendations, and of making the female customers too emotional and eager to please to really know what they were buying. He worked on commission and made good money. In the evenings, he picked up girls out on the town and kept at least two or three reliable ones on speed dial at all times. He figured he could do this forever.

Seth ended up a computer programmer. He studied hard, worked hard, and set his sights on a big house and fancy car – then surely he’d finally get that elusive female attention! His college girlfriend had moved across the country and he was back to porn now. Just as well – if he was going to have a woman, it should be one he could look at without cringing. He figured it was just a matter of time and effort until his hard work paid off by making him such a good provider that he could finally snag one.

Rachel ended up marrying her senior year boyfriend. Just as well – she had the grades to go to law school, med school or anywhere she liked, but she had no education or skills to actually make it in any of those places. Her husband was a relatively high-status guy, not the best, but far from the worst. He could rev her engine and he would provide for her with a promising career in finance. She figured that was just fine – at any rate, it beat doing actual work, and if he wasn’t the most sexually exciting man in the world, she’d never been refused sex before and she was certain she could always secure a discreet fling with the absolute best here and there.

Cindy ended up a lawyer. She was terribly dissatisfied with the level of male suitors she was attracting, and intent on increasing her social status with a prestigious career. It required lots of hard work, long hours spent poring over incredibly boring paperwork that only a trained specialist like herself could even make sense of, but if it would get her the dream husband and the dream life she’d wanted as long as she could remember, it would be worth it. She figured it would only be a matter of time until men impressed by her career advancement would start pounding down her door.

Jim’s wife found him at the electronics store where he worked. He was 40 and starting to notice his pull with the young things waning, she was 28 and looking to start a family with a man ready to settle down. It was a good deal for both of them, and they were relatively happy for a number of years. They had two children.

Seth’s wife found him at a software convention. He was 29 with a firm grip on a promising career, she was 29 and desperate to lock down a good one before the last traces of her once impressive youthful beauty vanished. He was overjoyed to finally have snagged himself a girl he could enjoy looking at, and she at having secured herself a provider husband who wasn’t old enough to be her father. One of them was getting the short end of the stick, but didn’t realize it yet, and they were relatively happy for a number of years. They had two children.

Rachel’s husband divorced her when she hit 35 and started sagging in various places. They had two children, whom Rachel got custody of. She also got custody of his suburban mansion and one of the late-model cars. She remarried the next year, this time a man ten years his senior. The new man had money, too, and he was away a lot, too. Sex with him was the price to pay – for her own enjoyment, Rachel had a yoga instructor, paid for with her husband’s money.

Cindy’s husband failed to materialize. No matter how successful a lawyer she became, no matter how expensive the status symbols she bought, men just would not pay her any more attention than before – in fact, it seemed to her that she was falling even further off their radar. How could this be? She had been angry before, but now a constant bitterness started to follow her wherever she went. She wanted two children, damn it, and she was going to have them! She didn’t need a husband to provide for her, and by the time she faced up to the fact that she wasn’t going to attract one she would find sexually desirable, she was 39 years old and the fertility doctors she finally decided to see gave her the pity look. Cindy never had her two kids. Instead, she got cats.

Jim’s marriage held until death did them part, although after the first ten years neither pretended to be very interested in the other any more. The leadership and seductive aura that Jim had radiated throughout his youth was all but gone, then, and he stayed with her for convenience. His job performance was experiencing an equal decline, but as a long-time company man he knew everything about the work and got to keep his job. His wife was displeased both with the financial cutbacks and her disappearing feelings for her husband, but she, too, was too old to do better any more. Their two kids grew up rather nicely.

Seth’s marriage lasted only five years. As soon as the contract was signed, his wife dropped the last shreds of her sex appeal and proceeded to balloon into a nagging seacow. Seth, on the other hand, was getting more flirtatious attention than ever from a higher caliber of girls than ever before. He decided to cut his losses and give up half his wealth before he had time to really get rich. His bitter wife took the kids, leaving Seth free to play the field and fulfill all his adolescent fantasies with gold-digging beauties approaching their expiration date. Having had his fill of that type, he found himself a second wife at the age of 38. She was exactly like his first wife had been when he married her. He had two more kids with her anyway.

Rachel’s second divorce left her 42 years old, with half of a really big house and her two now teenaged kids from her first marriage. The sex appeal she’d coasted on until then was gone, the career she’d never started was no longer available, and she ended up moving her teenagers into a trailer park where they chewed on half of the second husband’s money for a while.

Cindy’s cats kept her company into her sixties. She retired on her savings to a life of bitterness, annoying her relatives with angry phone calls about inconsequential things she found to get annoyed at every day, watching law dramas and yelling at the TV, and the occasional senior cruise where her co-passengers did their best to avoid her company. She died from an obesity-related heart attack at the age of 72. People came to her lavish, self-financed funeral out of a guilty sense of duty.

Jim enjoyed the company of his tolerable wife and his wonderful kids, as well as a couple of young grandkids, until his death at the age of 77 from liver failure due to excessive enjoyment of liquid entertainment in his old age. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth at his funeral, and it was all from the heart.

Seth divorced his second wife after a five-year marriage that was an exact replay of his first. Richer now than after his first divorce, he was able to play the field for two more years and enter into a third repeat of the same marriage at the age of 45. After his final divorce at the age of 50, he enjoyed the occasional gold-digging mistress until his death in a traffic accident at the age of 63 as he was driving his open-top Porsche high on cocaine on a freeway with a deteriorating ex-model’s head, as the coroner would delicately put it, “resting in his lap”. His six children dutifully sat through his funeral and amicably split his considerable estate.

Rachel didn’t quite manage to spread what her divorces had left her with thin enough to cover all her remaining days, but her children had been well provided for by their father and they helped her out here and there. She spent a couple of decades watching TV in her trailer and cursing God for making feminine beauty such a transient and deceptively fast-disappearing quality, and eventually drank herself to death at the age of 69. Her two children didn’t give a shit and she got the taxpayer funeral.

***

Homework: You know all these people. Who are they? Are you one of them?

Originally published at Delusion Damage on April 17, 2011.

What remains after we rid ourselves of the delusions?

What else besides nihilism?  Why not suicide?  Once we’ve come to terms with our mortality and the utter pointlessness of it all–the fact that, in the long run, no one cares and nothing matters–then what?

I’ve been in the process of untangling the lies for the last 10 years or so, but the rate of unraveling has increased so rapidly in the last year since discovering the manosphere that I am dizzy and out of breath.  As each layer is stripped away I feel smaller and weaker.  I often feel the need to stop my education, hold fast to the pretty lies, and try to forget all that I now know.  The fear of truly letting go builds inside my head until I can feel tightness in my chest and twisting in my stomach.

I can deal with that if there is something further, but if all that remains is the eternal abyss, then what?

The issue John wrote me about is one anyone who decides to think for himself will eventually have to deal with. When you stop believing the lies, what’s left to believe in? It seems like there’s nothing… what kind of life will you lead if you can’t believe in anything? It pulls the carpet out from under you – and no matter how hard you try, you can never really go back. Some people try to drown the feeling of emptiness or ungroundedness in booze, women, work or religion, but it is there… you can try to run from yourself, but you’ll end up running in circles, falling right back into the same hole you were trying to escape from. Only the hole’s grown deeper.

The only way to stop falling back into the hole and hurting yourself over and over is to stop trying to climb out. The only way to beat the hole is to accept it: “Here I am. I feel like life, the world, everything, has no meaning. I feel terrible about that conclusion. I feel depressed, and I feel afraid. I’m okay with that.”

Until you can face the abyss of meaninglessness, you will always be running from it, and it will always be chasing you, its edges yawning at your heels. Face it. Go into it. Stand at the bottom and accept that this is where you are. The fear that keeps you resisting is worse than what actually happens when you stop resisting. You can handle this. Let go.

Most people never will. Then again, most people will never really be happy with their lives. They will cling onto their delusions, and their delusions will keep damaging them – that’s what delusions do. People are scared of thinking too far – I remember what it feels like. I remember when I started looking into the darkness inside, finding nothing and more nothing – I was worried that if I let my thoughts completely free, I might discover that the hole has no bottom and I might kill myself. I didn’t want to kill myself. In that feeling, the answer was already contained, but I didn’t realize it until I’d gone to the bottom and stood there looking up.

Let’s go in now and see what we find. This quest is not new: it is at the very core of what it means to be human, and sentiments like these can be found across various genres of creative art:

“We all came in the world with a sparkle in our eye
not knowing the only thing that we were promised is to die”
- T.I.

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
- from “The Matrix” (1999)

“I cannot take this anymore
Saying everything I’ve said before
All these words they make no sense
I find bliss in ignorance
Less I hear the less you say
You’ll find that out anyway
Just like before…
Everything you say to me
Takes me one step closer to the edge
And I’m about to break
I need a little room to breathe
‘Cause I’m one step closer to the edge
I’m about to break
I find the answers aren’t so clear
Wish I could find a way to disappear
All these thoughts they make no sense
I find bliss in ignorance
Nothing seems to go away
Over and over again
Just like before…”
- Linkin Park

“The hardest thing in this world is to live in it”
- from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

It’s scary and it’s difficult, and if you don’t do it you’ll keep suffering all your life. The choice is yours: you can go join the closest cult that’ll give you a sense of purpose, or you can come with me and see what my world looks like. It’s up to you, all you really have is the self-evident fact that I haven’t killed myself yet. Any cult will give you something to believe in: it could be a “cause” like feminism or vegetarianism or something you can spend your efforts on under strict direction so you don’t have to think, or it could be a god or supreme leader of some sort that you can worship and trust to have all the answers so you don’t have to think. My world will not give you that.

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything. No afterlife, no karma, no spirits, no soul, no “the one”, no “higher connection” between any two people, no person or entity that cares about anything or anyone for any reason besides self-serving survival and reproduction instincts, no good, no evil, no purpose, no meaning, not a goddamn thing. I don’t even strictly “believe” that my wireless keyboard is in my lap right now – I think that it is, but I accept that I could be wrong. If I suddenly woke up in a lab and a scientist told me “we just put electrodes in your brain that made you experience a non-existing keyboard”, I would accept that. I don’t take anything on faith. All I believe in is partial probabilities. I find it highly unlikely that I’m experiencing a non-existing keyboard, and I find it highly unlikely that “good people go to Heaven” and “bad people go to Hell”, but I accept that I don’t know for sure.

We never really know much anything for sure. The only thing we really know is “I think, therefore I am”. Anything else is conjecture. We don’t know where we came from when we were born, we don’t know where we go when we die. We don’t know if what we remember about our life really happened – psychologists have shown that a huge portion of our memories are just wrong. We don’t know what’s outside the region of space our telescopes and gizmos can measure, and we don’t know what’s inside the smallest particles that our microscopes and hadron colliders can detect. We do not know very much at all. Most of what we do know is probably wrong. Every piece of knowledge we base our actions on is wrong, it’s just less wrong than a random action, so we can use our knowledge to make our results be closer to what we want.

We are lost, and no matter how hard we try, we will never stop being lost. The only reasonable thing to do is to accept that. Being lost is not optional. It comes with life, and there’s no getting rid of it.

The notions that there is no meaning, purpose, ultimate goal, no morals, no final judgment, no rhyme or reason to life – they all have two things in common. One is that they are the rational conclusions you will come to if you think about things long enough, and the other is that they’re bunched together under the umbrella of “nihilism” and viewed with both fear and disgust by the population at large.

Nihilism is supposed to be bad – like, “if there’s no point to anything then just kill everybody and kill yourself”. That’s the popular image of it and understandably, people are scared of that.

Those people are looking at it the wrong way.

Ridding yourself of the notion that you have anything in this world except electrical signals going around in your brain is really what makes you truly free. What’s more, it lets you make sense of the world, and that’s worth more than any amount of comforting delusions.

Many people subscribe to the belief that “some things just don’t make sense” or “can’t be explained”. I don’t. In my world, everything makes sense. Everything. If something can’t be explained, it’s only because we don’t have enough data.

Living in a world where everything makes sense is great. I see now that in my quest into the internal darkness, I was only scared of the things that didn’t make sense. As soon as I figured a thing out, I felt like I could deal with it just fine.

The question I was afraid of asking, and the question I think most people are afraid of, is:

Why should we do this “life” thing at all? It’s hard, and painful, and if there’s nothing to gain… why not simply check the box that says “no”?

Then again, most people are also afraid of death, and that’s what creates the problem: the conflict between not seeing any particular reason to live yet feeling afraid to die, or if not that, feeling like you wouldn’t want to hurt the people who love you with your suicide – that’s what creates the problem, because there seems to be no good option available.

We all ask ourselves the question – why live? – when we get old enough to conceptualize such things. Some deal with it through denial and looking for purpose in some cult, cause or leader, and others stop to think about it. Teenagers are widely known for their existential angst, as well as for their tendency to be easily drawn into anything that seems to offer a feeling of purpose.

It seems like a big question, maybe too big to really consider, and it helps to break it into smaller parts.

One part is the fear of the event of death. Will it hurt? What comes after? How will it feel to know that your life is about to end, permanently, and that the moment you are experiencing is the last moment you will ever experience? As I’ve explained, I don’t believe what comes after is anything to worry about, and I’ve already explained my thoughts on death and fear of it in this essay to a degree where I don’t feel like I have very much more to add right now. Look over there if you are scared of death itself.

Another part is the fear of losing one’s life – this is different. The life you thought you would have, all your hopes and dreams for the future – that’s something most people are very attached to and very afraid of losing. This is the “reasonable” reason for not wanting to die – basically, wanting to live. Nothing against death in particular, except that it’s mutually exclusive with life.

And that’s where the answer to “if nothing means anything, why live at all?” lies – in the notion that the experience of life itself has some intrinsic value, meaningless as it may be.

When people realize that there’s really no point to anything, that tends to bring feelings of fear and insecurity, and while they are experiencing these feelings, people can view life as a net negative. The difference between my view of life and the common view is that in the common view, life is scary, but death is even scarier, whereas in my view, death is not that bad and life is even less bad. Both balance out on the side of life in the end, but where you can run into trouble is if you learn to think that death isn’t that bad before you learn to think that life is even less bad. That’s how people end up deciding to kill themselves, and this ranks right up there with the most damaging delusions you can have.

People tend to view death as a strongly negative thing, and life – on good days, they like it, on bad days, they think it’s a net negative too, but not enough to be worse than death.

If you go ahead and have your existential crisis and decide that you should really look at death as more of a neutral, when you end up having those bad days where you think that life kind of sucks, it does indeed appear worse than death.

Is there any reason to live if life is worse than death? Basically, no, and this is what I concluded back when I was waking up every morning unhappy with my life and with how I had to spend the day. The life I had wasn’t so bad I couldn’t stand it – it was just something that felt like a net negative. The good parts weren’t worth the bad parts. I had a plan, though – I would sacrifice some time and effort to build myself the kind of life that I could really enjoy, and in the long run, the good years I’d have later would outweigh the bad years I was having at the time and my life would be a net positive, better than death. I thought that was a pretty good plan.

Of course, the ideas I had about what would be required for life to feel like a positive thing were quite different from what I eventually ended up discovering. At that time, I figured there were two things I had to change to make life feel worth living.

First of all, I was in high school and goddamn tired of it. Having spent a decade sitting in school and about 98% of that time despising every minute of it with a deep, suffering hatred, I figured that was the first thing that had to stop. Weekends were pretty much good days anyhow, but spending all that time suffering in school outweighed the pleasure of the time I wasn’t there. Some kids liked school – not me. The long version of the explanation why isn’t really relevant, but the point is that I really, really disliked it. It did not fit in with my way of being at all. So that had to stop – I would not enroll in any further studies after high school, and I would not spend my days working any sort of job that was as unpleasant as school.

The second thing was that I wanted to spend my days doing things I enjoyed. This would require money – lots of money. I thought everything normal people did was boring, and the only things I remained interested in happened to be things that I expected to be extremely expensive. I would eventually discover that some of them could be gotten without money, that some of them probably weren’t worth chasing anyway, and that there were still other worthwhile things I hadn’t considered. But at that time, the only way to a net-positive life seemed to be lots and lots of money, and I shouldn’t have to spend my days doing something boring to get it.

There did not appear to be any jobs available that fit my criteria (scientists are baffled) so I figured I would have to make my own. After high school, I proceeded to spend a number of years working on a variety of projects with the goal of getting rich. During this time, I liked my life more than I had during my school years, but still not really enough to want to get out of bed in the morning. It was still a net negative. The things I spent my days doing, I only did for the future payoff of those good years I would have once I had the money to do whatever I wanted.

The process of splitting from the expectations of the environment and going my own way with respect to that area of my life led me further onto a path of generally starting to question more and more of what I was being told, and to eventually discovering a lot of what I’ve written about in my articles. I was still feeling bad about my life and working furiously to get rich when I discovered that I didn’t really need the money at all.

I didn’t really need anything, and nothing I could get would ever “make” my life worth living, only I could do that through changing the way I thought about my life. That’s what a lot of my articles are about – how the problems we think we have are really just caused by ourselves, through thinking that we have problems. Reality does not include problems, it’s neutral. Problems arise from how we experience our interactions with reality. Some situations, like getting run over by a truck, may be impossible to experience in a good way no matter how hard you try. More often, however, your attitude and expectations of how you want to experience something has much more of an effect on your experience than what is actually happening outside your head.

Money can’t make you happy if you won’t let yourself experience the happiness. If you do let yourself experience happiness, the money isn’t necessary for that at all. Substitute anything you think you want for “money” in that equation.

A lot of people, when introduced to this notion, don’t really want to believe it. People are very caught up in feeling like their efforts are important, and they don’t like hearing that everything they worked for was sort of unnecessary. They have a hard time wrapping their head around it, too. A lot of people just won’t believe that how you feel is more affected by what you think than it is by what you do. It helps to have a personal experience of finding yourself in a situation where you’re doing exactly what you thought you wanted to but feel worse than ever and catch yourself thinking “I wish none of this was happening so I could just relax and be happy”. That’s what happened with me – once I caught myself thinking that, I just stopped doing what I was doing and I felt the best I think I’ve ever felt in my life. That day I stood waiting at an airport ticket counter for an hour and just completely appreciated every minute of it. I felt too good to even accept the ticket agent’s apology – I told her I didn’t mind the wait, because I chose not to feel like waiting, just being. She gave me something of a strange look, which I just thought was funny. It really hit me hard after that, that the things I had thought made life good or bad were just in my own head. I suddenly understood how Buddhist monks can just sit meditating all day and think that’s the greatest thing ever.

This leads, really, to the same question we started with. If how you feel isn’t much correlated to what you do, why do anything?

We have the existential question: why live?
And this question: why bother trying to achieve anything in life?

The reason I live is simple: it’s a positive experience for me. If your life isn’t a positive experience, make it into one. If you think you’re trapped in some negative situation that you can never change into a positive one, that’s probably not true. You don’t need to get rich or do something really extreme to be able to appreciate life. What you need to do is learn to appreciate it. Don’t confuse this with the often heard “learn to love the little pleasures” refrain you hear from all those people who didn’t end up getting what they wanted and gave up on their dreams – people who thought “well, if I can’t have that, I’m settling for what I can get”. I’m not one of those people. I’ve never settled for anything in my life. I was about to have exactly what I had always wanted, but seeing it from up close I realized I didn’t want it at all. I know what I am talking about when I talk about this.

All you need to do to find a reason to live is to shed your fear, and choose a pleasurable experience of life instead. It’s not necessarily going to be easy, but it will be worth it. Focusing on improving your way of thinking is much, much more important than improving your social position or your relationship with your family or even your physical health, if you aren’t in immediate danger of a serious health problem. Nothing gives you as much of a return on investment as time spent thinking about the things that matter.

And that answers the second question – the reason to make an effort in life is that it will make your life even better. Every negative influence you remove from your life will make the days you have left better and better – the strongest negative influences are probably your own limiting attitudes, but of course external things in the “real world” do have an effect on your life, too. Not as strong an effect, but still, they’re not to be ignored.

The real question is, why should you not make an effort if you can enjoy the process? I’ve already discussed this subject in the article about entertainment. If you can enjoy yourself, or alternatively, both enjoy yourself and simultaneously contribute to your future being even more enjoyable, the choice should be obvious.

Looking back at John’s problem, I again come back to the same conclusion I usually always come to: the facts aren’t causing the problem. John’s problem isn’t that everything is meaningless, it’s that he feels bad about it. The fear is the problem. The solution isn’t to try to find some meaning to life – there isn’t any, we’re just here and we don’t know why or for how long – that would be trying to deny reality, and that never works to anyone’s advantage. The solution is to deal with the fear – accept it, embrace it, discard it. Why should you be afraid of a meaningless life? Can you think of one single good reason? All the fear will do for you is ruin the life that you do have and make it feel like it’s not worthwhile.

If you had one more day to live, would you want to spend it being afraid or would you want to spend it enjoying yourself? How about if you had 27,884 days? Whatever remains or doesn’t remain after that is out of your control. There’s no reason to worry about things you can’t control. Emotions aren’t reasonable, of course, but luckily, you probably have a lot of days left to learn to reduce their power over you. Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to choose how to feel about something, and it is a skill you can learn and improve.

If I can be completely comfortable with the notion that nothing matters and no one cares, and still really appreciate life for what it is, nothing more, and not let fear of the unknown prevent me from having a positive experience of life – then it only stands to reason that you can too.

I’m not that special.

Originally published at Delusion Damage on March 30, 2011.

“I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
- Paul Bradford, The Dungeonmaster (1985); popularized by Adam Savage

This article will focus particularly on Game and the beta-to-alpha path since much of the audience is interested in that, but quite a bit of the same thinking applies to any long-term conscious effort to change your behavior away from what’s dictated by social norms and toward a direction of your own choosing.

Your journey from beta male to alpha male, or from “normalcy” to self-mastery in general, will run you into many obstacles – not the least of which is that almost everyone around you will still have strong expectations of you to act the way they’re used to other people acting. They have a set reality they’re used to and will resist your attempts to change their reality if they can.

We all have expectations. When the crosswalk light turns green, we expect the cars to stop. When we talk to people, we expect them to listen (unless we’re betas with low self-esteem). We also respond to the expectations of the environment. When we’re around children or the elderly, we (hopefully) don’t swear as much as we might be inclined to otherwise. The reasons for that can vary of course – some change their behavior out of fear, and others because they realize that the purpose of any communication is the response that you get, but the result is the same – conforming to environmental expectations.

Perhaps the strongest universal example of environmental expectations is a church – when we enter a church, we can almost feel the weight of its expectations upon us. Being surrounded by hundreds of people conditioned since childhood to believe that impolite speech or action in a church is much worse than under ordinary circumstances, perhaps even being one of those people ourselves, our brains bring up that conditioning or at the very least a recognition of it in others and make us aware of the expectation surrounding us when we enter a church.

Whether or not you believe there’s a divine presence there who notices, or cares, if you swear or behave obnoxiously in a church, you can be sure that the 300 other people in there will most certainly both hear and take umbrage. Social pressure is a powerful motivator.

Walking into a church of some faith you don’t adhere to or know much about, this effect is amplified. We wouldn’t usually have to think about what to say or do, and what not to say or do – it’s ingrained in us from endless repetition and the “filtering” process works almost by itself – but when the expectations of the social environment change, we do have to become conscious of how to act and/or not act. When they change into something nebulous, something about which we don’t know exactly where its borders are or what “crosses the line” and what doesn’t – that’s when the effect gets really strong. It causes us to be unable to relax our minds into the “normal pattern” we’re used to, where we automatically steer clear of saying things that would “normally” be socially unacceptable. You can start being highly careful of every action, you can start to feel nervous, even anxious, but at the very least your normal unconscious behavior pattern will be broken. Your normal social reality has been replaced with an externally imposed one.

Being around people who you know religiously believe in something you don’t – say, for example, that animals should not be killed for food – can have a similar “church effect,” certainly so if these happen to be people whose favorable opinion you care about. You think more carefully about what you say or do in their company, and even if you don’t particularly enjoy the vegetables they serve for dinner, you don’t bring a Big Mac with you to their house. In the behavior you exhibit while spending time with them, you substitute their reality – where one does not eat Big Macs – for your own.

We can apply this “religious” belief structure to our Game through understanding the following distinction:

You can not like Big Macs, but a girl will still feel okay about eating a Big Mac in front of you. If, however, she knows that you don’t believe in eating Big Macs, she will not let you see her do it if she gives any kind of damn about you.

What kind of “Big Mac behaviors” can you find in a girl that not liking won’t get rid of but not believing in will?

For me, perhaps the most important one is the lack of integrity. You know how girls like to play mind games with you, not answer your calls, say they’re going to be somewhere and then not be there, and generally annoy you and drive you crazy with their antics. You can ask them not to do that, and it may have the desired effect if you have enough pull with the girl, but more likely she’ll just think you’re weird for making such a big deal of something she does to everybody all the time.

She’s used to living in a reality where people wait for her and she decides to show up if she feels like it, and if not, she doesn’t expect you to take umbrage.

I choose to live in a reality where people I wait for show up, and I suggest the same for you. Simply reject her reality and substitute your own. If you ask her to change her behavior like it’s a favor, you’re beta. Make her understand it as an integral part of your belief system and she will respect it like a religion.

The difference is this:

Traditional player on the phone with a girl: “Hey, let’s meet at 7 at the corner of X street. Okay, bye.”
Breezy, non-committal. Doesn’t display lower value but also doesn’t hammer into her head that it’s important she keep her commitment. If she lives in a reality where people let her get away with not showing up as agreed, she might easily flake and later consider it not to have been a grave offense.

Asking her to keep her commitment like a beta: “Hey, let’s meet at 7 at the corner of X street. Promise me you’re gonna be there. Are you sure? Are you sure? Okay.”
Incredible display of neediness and low value, and she still might not show up. In fact, because of this, she might not show up.

Rejecting her reality and substituting your own: “Hey, let’s meet at 7 at the corner of X street. Don’t tell me you’re coming unless you are. I don’t believe in dishonesty.”
What you want to do is break her normal unconscious pattern and make her conscious of her behavior: If she doesn’t show up, she’s basically telling you she does believe in dishonesty. You want her to feel like she’s not in Kansas anymore, you want to disconnect her from her normal expectations and make her feel aware of an unfamiliar environment that has its own expectations of her. You want her thinking to herself:
You are now in the Church of Alpha.
Your regular behavior rules do not apply.
You must be conscious of the message your behavior is sending.
Flaking now is way more serious than in the traditional player scenario, and if she still doesn’t show up she either does not give a damn about you or is a pathological liar.

This can be done with almost any kind of behavior that you can justify somehow as being harmful, but it works especially well with behaviors that she already basically knows are not nice but is simply so used to getting away with that she won’t understand your disapproval after the fact. When you make her aware of your belief – not opinion – regarding the issue, she already knows that in principle, she shouldn’t have been getting away with it with other people either, and she’ll fall in line – with a heightened respect for your principled alpha self.

At the heart of this matter is the fact that women live in a reality where almost all men are betas. They generalize, and since most of them aren’t consciously aware of the fact that there are alphas and betas, she will simply assume that what she sees betas do is what “all men” do. When she meets you and ascertains that you are a man, this will, viewed through the lens of her subjective reality, mean that you are a beta. She will then apply to you all the stupid ideas she’s collected from playing betas, and subject you to all manner of silly behavior until you can pull her out of her reality and into yours. You can do this by explicitly rejecting her reality and substituting your own, or you can do it through other Gaming tactics, but you’d better do it somehow.

If you don’t, you will be putting up with behavior like what’s advocated in this excerpt from a dating advice book for women called Why Men Love Bitches. Isn’t your very own bitch who expects you to love her for being a bitch just what you always wanted?

Let’s get something dead straight before we start:

I hate wasted effort. I hate it more than you do and I always have.

Really, I do. I hunt and destroy outbreaks of it in my life and many if not most of my web articles are dedicated to eliminating it.

Why, then, do I choose to spend such a large portion of my time studying and teaching Game?

Is Game not just a big waste of effort when one could simply pay for hookers?

Quoting from this recent article by Advocatus Diaboli:

Men want women for sex- not for cooking, cleaning, having kids, moral support, caring or any other secondary/incidental reason.

…

Most readers of this post have must have heard about ‘game’, it’s practitioners and defenders. While game certainly works- have you ever quantified the total cost (direct and indirect) of practicing it? Even if you are moderately proficient in game, and can get a couple of new gals per month- is that the pussy you really want?

…

Given the nature of women, their attitudes, moodiness, mind games etc., such a guy probably spends more time trying to ‘be on top’ than enjoying life. There is more to life than chasing women and spouting Darwinian determinism. If your whole life is a series of shit-tests and challenges till you can no longer keep with the competition, is your existence any more meaningful than a bacterium or flatworm?

I have carefully considered the direct and indirect costs of learning Game – I have also considered the costs of not learning it, and they extend way beyond what paying an escort can cover:

• Without Game, I would quite possibly be like the majority of men, spending all day every day working a job I hate for money that I wouldn’t need for anything but women (whether those women are escorts or not).
• Without Game, I wouldn’t know how to control women’s bitchy behavior and would probably think, like many men do, that bitches are beyond repair. I would still have to interact with women in daily life even if I followed AD’s suggestion of limiting myself to paid escorts where voluntary interaction with women is concerned, and I would have to suffer the cost of all that now “unavoidable” bitching to my well-being.
• Without the understanding of the female mind gained from Game, I might find myself getting drawn into infuriating arguments with women, whereas a Gaming mind lets me stay aware of that risk and steer clear of it. Again, escorts cannot stop you from having to interact with women altogether – women are everywhere!
• Game is a path of self-improvement that pulls me toward improving myself in other ways.
• The understanding of human nature gained from Game’s foundation in evolutionary psychology helps me understand other people, both male and female, much better than I would from a regular person’s point of view. This saves me much of the pain of unpleasant emotions most people feel when they find others falling short of their expectations.
• Game helps me understand why women can seem, to men, to have no concept of principles or personal integrity but instead always cave to peer pressure. Many men feel anger and disgust at women for their “irrational” priorities, but because I understand and accept these priorities, I don’t need to pollute my life with such feelings.
• Game helps me understand how women think about their relationships with men, how they really work and what women are doing wrong when they don’t get the romantic success they expected. This lets me help those women whom I’m not interested in but whose well-being I care about learn what mistakes they’re making and what they really should be doing to get the men they want. I have a younger sister trying her luck in the dating market right now, and thanks to my knowledge of Game I have a lot of tools to equip her with that most men’s sisters will never know anything about.
• Thanks to Game, I know that I don’t need a big house or fancy car to impress people, male or female, which frees me from tying myself to a collection of stuff I don’t really care about.
• Game provides unexpected opportunities in areas of social interaction extending way beyond the field of romance. Without the Game to make her interested in me, I never would have had the opportunity to talk to an 18-year-old national-level athlete about what it’s like being a teen girl obsessed with a sport that gives her the muscles to lift 200 pounds off a bench.

AD says “if your whole life is a series of shit tests and challenges…”, like there’s a choice. Your life is that anyway, escorts or no escorts, and if you don’t understand what’s going on you’re just going to be less able to navigate it, that’s the only difference. You either acknowledge reality and work with it, or you fail to acknowledge reality and it automatically works against you.

What are the costs of learning Game? You just have to do it, that’s all.

What are the costs of not learning Game?
You will never know what you’re missing.

“The things you own end up owning you.”
-  from “Fight Club” (1999)

Inseparable from awakening to the truth that you are in control of your life and embarking upon the path of self-improvement, it seems, is awakening to a new perspective on the acquisition of material wealth and creature comforts, or as they’re commonly known, “new stuff”.

I’ve noticed this idea of turning your back to consumption gradually creeping into the collective focus of In Mala Fide authors’ writing: Frost wrote about cutting unnecessary expenses which really add little of value to your life, and HarmonicaFTW took it a little further toward philosophical ground by suggesting that we often buy things more for the sake of the buying than because we need them for any practical purpose.

Both conclude, essentially, that buying lots of stuff damages you because it makes you waste your life working for the money you’re wasting – you lose freedom. So far, neither has gone much further than the financial aspect of it, so I’ll pick up the baton for the next leg of the race where we cross from thinking about the loss of financial freedom into the realm of thinking about freedom in general – money is not the only thing that the acquisition of possessions costs you. Buying lots of stuff damages you even if you’ve got money hanging out the wazoo, because just having lots of stuff imposes limits on you.

It seems counter-intuitive – we’re raised to believe that more is always better. Having lots of possessions is supposed to provide more options – to say that it reduces them sounds outright crazy to most. How can having more make you less free?

The fact is that “nesting” ties you down. When you have your perfect little apartment with you nice neat perfectly picked furniture and a painstakingly built DVD collection, you become attached to it – no news there – but in the long run, the notion that your private designer-catalog castle is better than any place else can reveal itself to be a delusion, and a harmful one at that.

What benefit do you really get from owning stuff? In the case of things without which you could not perform necessary daily tasks the answer is obvious. Everything else in your life is pretty much just there because it’s “nice to have”.

What do you really need to own? I’d say I “need” these things:

• Bed. I have to sleep and unfortunately I’m not a bad enough dude to do it on a hardwood floor. The bed frame is not necessary for sleeping, I could sleep on just a mattress, but the storage space under the bed comes in handy. I probably wouldn’t buy a bed frame but since I already have one I may as well reap the benefits.
• Computer. I need the internet to work, to learn and to share information. I also need some extras like a bigger screen and a bigger external hard drive because they greatly improve my effectiveness.
• A piece of furniture to put the computer on and another piece of furniture to sit on while working. I spend long stretches of time working at my computer, and unfortunately I’m not a bad enough dude to do that on the floor or even on my bed. Working in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time might eventually also cause serious damage to my health, so it’s worth avoiding.
• Toothbrush, razor, soap, etc. Unfortunately the human body doesn’t maintain itself to the standards of modern society, and looking like a homeless person would limit me much more than having to buy these things does. The quality-of-life benefits of not having my teeth rot off are also substantial, as are the health benefits of being able to wash away the grime and bacteria of public spaces.
• Food, cooking utensils. I could eat takeaway Chinese every day but for my health, I prefer not to.
• Cell phone. I often need to find people in places too big to be searched and communicate with people driving cars. Not having a cell phone would impose massive limits on me.
• Clothes. Not that I care that much, but other people couldn’t refrain from causing me all kinds of problems if I went about my life with no clothes. A minor fraction of the clothing items I own are also necessary for moving about during the cold season and others during the sunburn season. Shoes are also pretty much a must in any weather, given the kind of stuff I have to walk on in the city.
• Medical supplies for the occasional emergency.

This is a quick list and something essential might be missing, but I think I covered most of it. Shelter, heating fixtures, electric outlets, plumbing: you don’t need to own them. You might need to own some lighting fixtures if none are included in your rented home.

Everything else is just “nice to have.” But how nice is it really? How much value does a DVD collection add to your life? How about all the furniture in the right matching colors? DVDs and matching sofas are things you can look at for a few hours, but pretty soon the enjoyment starts to fade. If you buy a new pair of curtains, how long do you really enjoy them? A day, if you’re lucky? Pretty soon every new item that’s “nice to have” fades into normalcy, and it isn’t that nice any more.

But while its appeal fades, its hold on you stays strong. You’re still attached to your stuff, even though you don’t really enjoy it that much. It becomes a part of you, mentally. Logically, you shouldn’t value your nice things any more than you value the corresponding amount in numbers on the ATM screen, but you probably do. We attach value to things that we identify with, things that we treat, in a sense, like family members. Losing them can feel like losing part of ourselves.

If a wizard appeared and offered you a deal whereby he would transform everything you own into the amount of money that you could buy a new similar item for, how many of us would take the deal? Almost everyone has a few things they regret buying, but almost everyone also has a few things they really love. The wizard doesn’t let you pick and choose – it’s everything or nothing. Assuming you don’t have a problem with spending some time on going out and buying stuff, the rational choice would probably be to take the money and then optimize your possessions by planning the complete collection from the ground up. Could you do that?

Could I do that? Most of my stuff is just stuff, and I’d be just as fine with other stuff, but I do have a few items which are quite dear to me. It would be hard to give up the scale model airplanes I cherished as a kid, and the toy car my father brought me from a business trip that was so nice I wouldn’t even play with it for fear of breaking it, which eventually ended up happening anyway and my father had to glue one of the doors permanently shut.

I would miss those things, but even so, taking the deal might be what’s best for me – and not just to save money. If that were the only reason I’d probably rather hold onto my things. But there’s another reason: as this thought experiment demonstrates, attachment to things can limit us from reaching our full potential. Realistically, even though those possessions are dear to me and I would miss them if they were gone, I probably wouldn’t miss them nearly as much as it feels like now.

I’ve had to let go of dear possessions before and I don’t think about them very much now – “out of sight, out of mind” has some truth in it. The day my parents decided I was getting too big for teddy bears and made me collect my soft toys in the basement to be donated away was a hard day to live through, but living without them once they were gone wasn’t that hard. I know my age was still in the single digits because we still lived in the house with the basement, and I’m pretty sure I loved those stuffed animals at least as much as anything I own today – even at that tender age, I got over it just fine, so I’m sure I’d be okay giving up the stuff that now feels dear to me.

Is the fear of losing something worse than actually losing it?

Are we living with a losing-things-phobia that needs to be cured by facing our fear? That’s what you’re supposed to do if for example you’re so scared of heights that it affects your life – if you take the longer route to work to avoid a bridge or something like that – you’re supposed to go to the highest place you can find and face your fear until you get over it, and that frees you to live your life unhampered by the limiting fear. The fear of losing things controls our lives, too – it’s just that nobody tells us to get over it because they all live with the same fear.

All the stuff you don’t actually use – it’s still limiting you, it stops you from moving to a better location because you’d feel compelled to carefully pack and unpack all your knickknacks and it would just be so much work… if you didn’t have that stuff, you would jump at the chance of a shorter commute. And losing the stuff really wouldn’t be that bad – I was fine without the stuffed toys once I got over the pain of the actual event of losing them, and I was a little kid for whom it was probably a lot worse than it would be for a grown man.

So if you see an ad in the paper for a place closer to your daily destinations, and you think “that looks great but moving would be such a hassle”, what’s going on is that your fear of losing things is directly causing damage in your life in the form of wasted commuting time every single day. That’s a huge amount of damage when you add it up, probably much, much worse than giving up your material things in order to achieve freedom of movement.

If you’re like me and don’t need to go to a specific location every day to work, the damage is even worse. You could go anywhere, take a trip to another continent or whatever, as long as you have the money, but all the stuff you’re attached to at home raises the threshold to leaving and having new experiences. I can and do leave whenever I can find the money, and in the between times (which is most of the time) I keep from accumulating stuff that I would then grow attached to. Everyone knows love makes you weak, and while it may be a sacrifice worth making where interpersonal relationships are concerned, love of stuff also makes you weak but stuff does not love you back. Stuff just sits there, and you don’t really enjoy it much after you’ve had it for a while, but you still feel loathe to let it go.

The things you own really do end up owning you. You think you have the things contained in your home, but really, it’s the other way around: the things have you contained in their home. Home is where your heart is – if your heart is with your things, that’s where you’ll be drawn to. If your heart is with your experiences, the world is your home.

I love hotels because of the transience. I sleep in a bed, watch a TV, adjust a radiator – but none of them have power over me. When I leave, I feel no attachment, no breaking heart at leaving my love behind – and it makes me free. From a hotel, I can go anywhere, chase any opportunity or experience that I find, moving to another hotel at a location that enables me to have more of the experiences I want.

I try my best to bring that sense of transience, and the freedom that comes with it, into my home. I don’t pick out furniture. I have curtains and carpets dug up from my parents’ storage. Nothing matches anything. It wouldn’t cost me much to replace everything so it all fit together and looked really nice and inviting, but I consciously choose to keep it industrial: everything is selected for function, not form. I don’t have a closet full of different outfits, and I don’t buy DVDs. I don’t buy paper books either when I can have them on my computer – half the books on my shelf are from airports, and if I ever get a laptop battery that can last an intercontinental flight, two shorter ones and two layovers, that collection might stop growing too.

Everything I own in the world, furniture included, might not even fill half of this van:

Everything I own, furniture excluded, would probably fit into one of these:

…and most of that is stuff I don’t even use.

It’s been my policy for years now to travel with carry-on only, no matter how long the trip will be – partially because I don’t feel like waiting at the luggage carousel, but partially because I want to consciously minimize the amount of stuff I live my life with. The way I see it, being owned by the things you own is limiting in just as real a way as being owned by a cubicle farm. I want my life to fit in a carry-on bag. I want to be able to move around chasing experiences, not be tied down and rooted in a prison of my own making.

If you don’t know what freedom of movement feels like, go to the bank and take out all your savings in cash. Hold the stack of hundreds in your hands and think to yourself: this is what I have in the world. I can take this anywhere. Walking around with your life’s savings in a backpack is quite possibly the closest you can get to a feeling of pure freedom. It’s also risky which is why I don’t do it anymore, but I remember the feeling. I also remember the feeling of climbing up from the subway into a bright day in a mythical city on a foreign continent with nothing out ahead of me but wonders waiting to be explored and the freedom to do something about it.

Coming back home, the color of the curtains didn’t matter to me anymore.

Curtains can’t make you feel the way a man setting out for adventure feels. Sofas, dining tables, computer desks, carpets, surround sound systems with massive sub-woofers, wall-sized fish tanks, sports cars, mansions, golf courses and private airports can’t make you feel that way. I know people with their own private airports – guess what, your own private airport is only worth as much as the time you spend there. First, you spend a lot of time there, flying your private planes all over and basking in the glory of being a super cool guy who has everything and then some, but pretty soon the appeal wears off.

That’s the nature of life: the appeal of everything always wears off. I have it on good authority that even the appeal of unlimited sex with an endless stream of drop-dead gorgeous women eventually wears off, and believe me when I say the men I heard that from know what they’re talking about.

Man is an explorer by nature. We always want something new. Even the men who settle into routine – especially the men who settle into routine – keep wanting something new, but for many it’s unfortunately easier to just settle into what’s tolerably comfortable.

They say “you can’t take it with you” – that all the stuff you accumulate is nothing once you’re dead. This applies not only in death but in life as well. You can’t even take your enjoyment of stuff with you as far as your breath lasts – you can only take it to the point where you get bored of the stuff, and after that it’s just tying you down, hooked into that possessive part of your brain that says “no, I can’t give this up because it’s mine“.

Your precious possessions end up possessing you.

Monks of various faiths take vows to renounce material possessions. Is it because they just want their lives to suck? That’s not why it is. They’ve found something that makes them feel better than stuff does, but focusing on that something requires that they stop distracting themselves with stuff.

Freedom is elusive – as soon as you commit to a choice, it’s gone.

Compared to men, women don’t much care for freedom. They like predictability, home, matching sofas and curtains, unbelievable piles of stuff growing perpetually to swallow the emptiness inside. It could be said that most women today live in a perpetual feeling of ungroundedness, a fear of slipping away from themselves that they must alleviate by adding more and more material weight onto their self-image – it could be said that what they really need is a man to anchor their world to… but that’s an article for another day.

“…want you to make me feel
like I’m the only girl in the world
like I’m the only one that you’ll ever love
like I’m the only one who knows your heart
only girl in the world
like I’m the only one that’s in command
’cause I’m the only one who understands
how to make you feel like a man
yeeeee-eaaa…”
- Rihanna, “Only Girl In The World“ (emphasis mine, because yeah, I see what’s going on there, even though this article is not about that)

Have you heard that women have a deep, innate desire to blend in and be the same as everyone else?

Have you heard that women have a deep, innate desire to be uniquely special little snowflakes?

Have you heard that online mischief has become an outlet for young men angry at being helpless and hopeless in the real world because they are not valued by women and feminist dominated society?

Have you heard that the American workforce takes exploitation lying down?

Have you heard that our modern age is rife with the fallacy known as argumentum ad populum; the idea that because something is popular that is proof enough that it is good?

Have you heard that men aren’t “manning up” in support of masculine values?

Have you heard that most men are unable to shoulder the burden of leadership?

Have you heard that men are not taking initiative and control of their own lives?

You’ve heard a lot, but have you heard about the underlying cause that connects all these phenomena to each other?

Have you heard about the herd?

Most people haven’t. Most people don’t even know that for 99% of the time the human race has existed, we lived in tribes of about 50-150 individuals spread out on the African savanna, and that the ways of thinking and behaving that we evolved thousands of generations ago, suited for optimal survival and reproduction in those conditions, are still what we’re using today.

Everything I’ve listed above goes back to what was, for our ancient ancestors, a fundamental facet of survival – something that’s still embedded in the fundamental wiring of the brains carried around by all modern women, and the truth about which their “equality”-obsessed institutions would give anything to hide.

Absolute deference to the herd.

Up until a few thousand years ago, a woman could not survive without the support of the herd – it was simply impossible.

A man could go out in the wild on his own, hunt his food and defend himself against predators. It would be difficult and dangerous, but he could have a decent chance at making it on his own until such a time as he decided to band together with others again. A man had options. If the herd was pissing him off, he could withdraw his support from it and go his own way. A man was naturally a power plant – his labor could support not only himself but others as well. A man was an asset to the herd, and the herd to the man, but he could take it or leave it.

Not so for a woman. If a woman were to fall out of favor with her herd, she would die. No ifs, buts or second guesses, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to an unmarked grave in some lucky lion’s den. Weak, soft and likely saddled with children or pregnancy, a woman couldn’t muster enough labor to even support herself let alone possible offspring. She needed the support of a man of her own, or the collective support of the men of the herd, or she would die.

Nothing was as important for a woman’s survival and that of her children as being socially accepted. That imperative to survive, imprinted deep into the female brain by countless years of natural selection, is still there. Even today, nothing is as important to a woman as being in good favor with the herd. There is only one general case in which women can, with any reliable frequency, be seen going against the wishes of the herd – when they’re catching a man. The scientific explanation is simple – the entire surplus labor supply of a privately owned man, caught in the net of a sexual pair bond and never set free again, can do even more for her than a share of the collective plate.

It is in this special case when the seeming contradiction in female behavior appears – where normally she’d do everything she can to be just like all the other girls, not to single herself out in any way for instinctive fear of being kicked from the herd, she must now do the opposite. In order to ensnare a man so completely that he can be relied on not to break free from her spell until he’s fed and protected the children through their helpless growth phase, she must make herself seem so incredibly special that there’s simply no other woman he could even consider sharing some of his – now, her – surplus labor with. She must indeed make herself the only girl in the world for him.

The underlying mechanism is the same – the prime directive to make sure she’s always provided for by someone else – only its target changes from the collective to the individual, and the behavioral manifestation of the dependence instinct changes to what can on the surface seem like its opposite. It’s the same instinct of unfaltering attachment to a meal ticket, with a new coat of paint.

Due to the paramount importance of fitting in for survival, the idea that anything popular is good is irremediably built into the female brain. Human brains have not changed since tribal times. Today’s woman is still looking for the approval of the herd before anything – no matter how harmful, how illogical or how ridiculous a thing is, if it’s popular, she must have it, love it and defend it with all her power. It feels to her like a matter of life or death – because that’s exactly what it used to be.

Give women money, they’ll buy what they think others are buying. Let them vote, they’ll vote for what they think others are voting for.

Give them influence over every aspect of society, and every aspect of society will be permeated with the idea that everything popular is great and all other alternatives are death. Give them control over education, and they’ll discourage experimentation, achievement and discovery, extolling the virtues of conformity, conformity and conformity. Ordinary will become the new extraordinary.

Give them a majority share in the workforce and fill the rest with boys educated by the twelve-year feminine conformity program mandated by law, and you’ll get a workforce that’ll take anything lying down. Give them sole custody and put their fatherless male children in female-run conformity training for their first twenty years, and you get a population of men who won’t lead others or even stand up for themselves.

Give them all public spaces and institutions, and they will reshape it all in their own image, leaving only the wild west of the internet as a place for that fraction of their male children who just couldn’t be beaten into the mold to lash out in reaction to the abuse.

This is simply what happens, none of us can choose to go against our innate programming. We do what we must because we can. A woman must conform at all times in order to feel safe, and she will naturally project the same dynamic onto everyone around her. You can hardly assign blame for that any more than you can for breathing or eating – we do these things because we start to feel terribly uncomfortable as soon as we don’t.

The feminine drive for conformity works nicely when it’s in balance with the masculine drive for excellence, but we didn’t have the luxury of being born into a time like that. Most of us can also thank our lucky stars for not growing up in conditions leaning too heavily toward masculine patterns either – those environments exist too, and they are in many ways even less decent places than ours.

Comparing the urban jungle with the affluent suburbs provides a conspicuous example of how the equilibrium between opportunity and security determines what position a social environment will assume on the spectrum between masculine and feminine values. The lack of security in the ghetto and the enticing opportunity of a quick fix through success in its criminal gangs promote a “get rich or die trying” approach to life, whereas the monotone stability of life in the suburbs combined with a perception of an inevitable future of more of the same until the end of time itself embeds grating, soul-sucking routine in the lives of their inhabitants.

A decrease in our society’s currently heavy skew toward feminine values will require a decrease in the security-opportunity ratio. I’m certain the imbalance will correct itself one way or another, as I’ve written about previously. I’m not seeing any increase of opportunity on the horizon – in fact, bureaucracy control of a “free” man’s life is constantly getting worse. That leaves only one option – the change will most likely come about through a decrease in security.

Women aren’t about to willingly relinquish the political power men have given them, and sooner or later men are going to realize that women don’t really “have” the real power even now – they are only borrowing symbolic exchange tokens for it. Like paper money, women’s political power is only valuable as long as the men who issue it back up the imaginary currency with real economic and military power. In practical terms, real power – life and death power – always rests with men, and the worse the pressure on men in our society becomes, the rougher the backlash will be when men have had enough and, if women won’t negotiate, unilaterally restrict the political power that’s been lent to women by devaluing it relative to that which backs it up - the only real form of power that has ever meant anything in this world.

In plain English: women don’t have any “rights” expect those that men choose to uphold through use of force – women have no force of their own to use in defense of their “rights.” Whatever of women’s “rights” men get tired of protecting will cease to be.

I challenge you to find a truth more politically incorrect than that.

Luckily, women are good at conforming to the demands of the herd and will not be putting up more than token resistance before settling amiably into their new roles, whatever those may be. Women have worked hard for their liberation, but it looks like they’re going to push the envelope all the way to that inevitable point where they can’t sneak their privileges under the collective male radar any more – indeed the very event of me writing this and you reading it is something of a sign that that time is already dawning – and when men do wake up to how free women have become to walk all over them, women’s liberties will likely be scaled back far beyond current levels. History, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

I look around, I see the smartest generation of men who ever lived pumping gas, waiting tables. This is hardly news to anybody at this point.

Men today are heavily lacking something in their lives. Something that used to come to America by the boatload from Europe in the days of Ellis Island and Titanic, something that went to Korea and Vietnam on troop transports and came back to build the suburban American Dream with its white picket fences… and then it went away somewhere, slipped out of sight when no one noticed.

Direction.

We have everything we need to accomplish whatever we want, we’ve always had it. In a sense, a man is born with all the tools he needs to make his way in the world. A man is a natural resource in himself, he has an amazing surplus capacity for labor which he can use to shape the world in his image. A man is a force of nature.

Any high school physics student will tell you that any force must have a direction. Without direction, force does not exist.

Women are wondering why men don’t seem to be accomplishing anything, and men are wondering why we don’t feel like it. After all, any of us, dropped on a desert island, would instantly be hard at work building shelter, building traps to catch food, building a world in our own image. The man who spends 12 hours a day playing a video game where his virtual wizard kills virtual monsters controlled by other men at other computers would build up his desert island just as would the investment banker making millions on Wall Street or the charity worker leaving his affluent home to build houses for flood victims in the third world.

The video gamer is not by nature lazier, less capable or more self-involved than the charity worker. He’s applying just as much force every day, but in a different direction. I have it on good authority that some of these video games are very hard work. They require commitment to a group of co-players who expect to rely upon the individual group member, they require immeasurable amounts of drudgery performing some repetitive task to slowly and painstakingly amass various sorts of points required in the games, they require periods of absolute concentration ranging up to several hours with a minimal margin for error in order to complete some task in the game – and they can require a large group of co-players to take that same hours-long period of their days to help each other in a simultaneous effort to complete the game mission.

I think building houses for flood victims sounds easier, to be honest.

Why are these men doing something that can only be described as “work” for no compensation and no apparent payoff? There is a payoff, of course, there always is. For anyone familiar with the origins of the human race and its instincts, the answer is obvious: they are hunting. They are forming tribal groups, going out on a hunt, facing adversity and challenge, and enjoying the sweet sense of victory and comradeship. This is what men are built to do, and what we naturally want to do.

The fact that the only place for many men today to do it is in a video game… that’s the worrying part.

Our jobs, our lives, our families – all is devoid of meaning in this confusing modern world. The link between survival and action has been severed. On a desert island, you’d know you had to build something in order to live, but you would enjoy the work – its purpose would make it enjoyable. If I showed you a field of rocks on the other side of the island and told you to stack them in a big pile, you’d be instantly bored – there’s no way I could get you to do it without threats or bribery. If instead I showed you a field of rocks and gave you blueprints for a stone cottage, you’d work all day and all night of your own initiative, and you’d like it. A man feels naturally compelled to do useful things to improve his life. Any boy will practice fighting skills all day, but if it gets too “wax on, wax off”, he loses interest. If the connection between purpose and action gets fuzzy, the mind loses direction.

The word “direction” means two things. One is like a compass point: an imaginary line stretching out into infinity. That’s what we talk about when we say a force has a direction. But “direction” also means advice, instruction, leadership. The two concepts are really much the same: what a leader does is point the way. A man can lead himself, point his own way and give himself direction, as in the case of a man stranded on a desert island who will naturally start building a shelter, or he can choose to follow directions from a leader – and really, what is “leading”? To “lead” is to go first, to follow a leader is to take the leader’s direction – literally – if you follow someone across a physical space, what you are doing is going in the same direction they’re going, after them.

With all the recent discussion in men’s circles concerning leadership and what a leader is or isn’t or should be or shouldn’t be, I get to questioning how much really needs to be said about it. A leader is someone who goes first, points the way, gives direction. A leader is made by a follower. All that being a “good leader” entails is making sure that to follow you is a good choice. If you go behind someone else in their direction, you’re a follower. If you go in your own direction, you’re a trailblazer. If someone comes after you, you’re a leader. All of us are all these things at times, and all are valuable ways to improve yourself. Learn from those whose path you see as rewarding. Make your own path where you need to go if none is available. Evaluate and improve your path with the input of those who follow you. Whether you’re the first or second or hundredth man to go in a certain direction is nothing but ego food. What matters is the direction you’re headed in.

And men today, as a group, are terribly lacking direction. We’ve lost the connections between our actions and their purpose. Women are hardly doing any better, but let’s just stick with men for now. Ask a man what he’s doing. Ask him why he’s doing it. Ask him what he hopes to achieve, what that result is supposed to get him, why he wants what he thinks he’ll get. It doesn’t take many rounds of “why?” to confuse the average man. Ask these questions of yourself. If you can’t trace the purpose of any action to its final destination, you’re probably lost, and you may well be applying your force against yourself. Why are we going somewhere if we don’t even know where we want to be going? Where is it going to take us?

The trouble with a lack of direction in a man’s life is not only that he doesn’t get any closer to where he ultimately wants to be going, but that all of us men, naturally, still have the overpowering urge to do something, anything, to change things for the better. So, maybe we start doing something even if it isn’t the right thing or the smart thing to do. That’s where it gets real insidious, because when we’re doing something we feel like we’re making things better, even if we’re really not. Our brains assume that what we’re doing must be the solution, because 50,000 years on the African savanna, it pretty much always was. It wasn’t hard to figure out when you needed to kill a zebra, when you needed to run from a lion, when you needed to make a spear and when you needed to fight a rival tribe. Things didn’t get muddled up very often, and we never developed instincts to question if what we’re doing is really what we should be doing.

Today, nothing is simple. There used to be one career, hunter, now there are thousands. There used to be three or four age-appropriate, healthy, available sexual mates, now there are millions. There used to be a few wise men you would listen to and a few fools you wouldn’t, now there are countless strangers on the internet telling you to question everything you believe in and you know next to nothing about them. The amount of directions has exploded into an impossible maze that our brains are not built to deal with.

We think we like the freedom to choose, but we really don’t. Too many options cause anxiety, doubt, paralysis – and we can end up not really going in any direction. We can end up playing video games all day every day. At least someone whose main life goal is to get that wizard to level 80 knows where he wants to go and knows how to get there. He feels like he’s acting with purpose when he moves those pixels around on his screen hour after hour. He enjoys it. The man who moves numbers around on a computer screen in a cubicle farm for a multinational corporation doesn’t much know or care where those numbers ultimately end up. All he really knows for sure is that they aren’t going to further his personal goals outside the cubicle farm one bit, and he probably doesn’t even know why he’s working a job that he hates anyway… he knows he needs money, but how much, and why that amount, to accomplish what goals, and whether this is the way he should be doing it… when a man starts asking himself these questions, he feels confused, unsure, unsafe even. It’s easier to just put his shoulder to the wheel and concentrate on working hard – when he does that he can feel like problems are getting solved.

What do you really want? Do you want to solve problems, or do you want to feel like you’re solving problems? When you get off the beaten path and start making your own, it can feel like you’re going backwards for a long time. And it’ll be hard – blazing a trail through the muck and the bushes and the snow and the swamps is hard. It’ll always be hard. But, you’ll be doing it for yourself. You’ll know why you’re there and hopefully you’ll have an idea of where you’re headed, and that’ll make all the difference. You have all that surplus capacity and life isn’t about doing what’s easy. Life is about doing what’s rewarding.

You have all that hard work inside you, just sitting there in storage. What are you going to do – not use it? Work is nothing. I’m not worried about running out of energy, I can always make more. Why do you think I’m writing long articles for strangers on the internet? Do you think it isn’t hard work? Do you think I don’t like it? It is hard work and I like it – because it has a purpose for me.

I could be watching TV right now. I choose not to.

If your life is less than perfect, it isn’t because you don’t have what it takes. You have what it takes. You were born with what it takes. As a man, you are a force of nature, and all that force needs in order to shape the environment in its own image is direction. Hard work isn’t hard. Hard work is the most fun you will ever have. Find your direction, find leaders to follow and trails to blaze. Don’t worry about finding people to follow you. If you make a good trail, they’ll come, and if you don’t, you’ll be alone up shit creek with your dick for a paddle, and that’s what’s known as an adventure. As a man, you naturally crave adventure. Adventure is great.

When you’re moving without direction, every step feels like a thousand miles. When you know where you want to go, you feel like running as fast as you can all the time. You feel like you can rest when you’re dead. Don’t be discouraged by hardship – hardship is only outside you. It doesn’t turn into suffering until you lose direction inside your head. If you want to live an easy and unhappy life, go with the flow and do what everyone else is doing. If you want a hard and fulfilling life, find your direction and forge ahead. Work is an unlimited resource, you’ll always have more. A journey of a thousand miles begins under your feet, and as soon as you take the first step you’ll feel like you can take a thousand more and enjoy each one. When you do that, you know why they say it’s about the journey, not the destination. You never “get where you’re going” in life, because you’ll always want to be going somewhere new. Your natural state is to be in motion. When that motion is taking you in a rewarding direction, you never want to stop.

Need help finding your direction? You’re not the first. Just take direction from those who are what you think you might want to be, and see if you like the path. If not, switch to a different path. It’s not a big deal, it’s nothing but some work. It’s an adventure and it’s the best time you’ll ever have.