The tweet about millennials becoming middle aged, and only seeing a world in decline really hit home for me. I'm 41, and I got a glimpse of American pride and optimism in my youth. Joined the Marines, and then contracted for a while, and fighting a useless war ground me into dust. Watching the debacle and degeneracy of the Obama regime wasn't enough to wake me up completely but made me realize we were on a bad road.
By the time of the COVID bullshit, the insane acceleration of social justice and gender/tranny shit, and after watching everyone seemingly lose their goddamn minds I lost whatever respect I had for the masses, for my long-held ideals of populism and libertarianism, I felt compelled to take the shadow box my wife made for me and throw it in the trash.
I was embarrassed that I didn't see what was going on sooner. I was embarrassed I was a pawn in Globohomo's game.
My wife stopped me from trashing it, and I suppose I'm glad she did. It still, sometimes, brings good memories of youth, virility, brotherhood and camraderie and strength. That being said, I feel like a tired, out of shape old man.
I feel every ounce of the fatigue and exhaustion you describe, and I couldn't have put it better. I'm still trying to figure out the "do something" part and struggle with just giving up. "There might be hope for the youth, but not me", my defeatist side says.
Eh, sorry, just griping, but wanted to let you know that the article got to me.
Yeah bro I think we all went thru the same emotional journey, at different times and different speeds.
I was so proud of this country as a kid! And now it's like a shuffling zombified corpse.
Anyway it gets easier when you emotionally process the grief, and then forgive yourself, move on, overcome the shame and feelings of loss, lack of spiritual meaning... then reorient towards a bigger goal.
Somehow find a way to get excited about the future that's possible.
Right now is actually the hardest time, because we're in a transitional period, the brief twilight of rampant decay between the Old Equilibrium and the New Equilibirium.
What I mean by this is that, 20 years ago, you lived in a functional community. If you were having trouble, you could ask for help, maybe friends or family could lend a hand. Now that's gone. We just have an adversarial government which hates us and tries to crush not only White Christian men, but also anyone who is strong or self-reliant or aspirational. It's just an ugly, dysfunctional culture.
One productive person, such as a scientist who tries to do his job, is an inherent embarrassment to all the fake jobs people who are just taking a paycheck and pretending to work. So anyone who tries to build useful products, to seek a better future, is seen as a threat and is torn down by everyone next to him.
Right now, people like us who are "Extremely Online" are 3-5 years ahead of the curve. Normies will wake up, on a slower timeline, to the realization their government is trying to destroy them.
So what this means is, you get all the negatives of living under a hostile tyranny, but none of the positives — common people are just kind of dazed and confused, deer in headlights, frightened cattle walking into a meatgrinder. You don't get the 3rd world apathy of Latin America, where people agree the government is corrupt, so everyone looks the other way as you pay bribes, break rules, skirt taxes, whatever. You're surrounded by prison guards from above, snitches from below.
The future will involve low-level friendships, brotherhoods between trusted friends. None of that has built up yet, and anything overt immediately gets infiltrated by government informants and turned into a criminal investigation.
So, right now, just keep your head down — just build for the future, look out for your family, make money, raise your kids, etc.
The future is to organize around job networks — all of the productive white guys who can't get a job, all that talent has to go somewhere. "Exit" and "New Founding" are both organizations which are trying to get rich by tapping into the suppressed talent pool.
But remember, keep your head down, look out for your family.
William, I think you would enjoy this essay by Bronze Age Pervert which talks about the failure of American leadership, and the Frog culture that's formed as a result:
Are you me? 41 but ex-Army. Fed instead of contractor. Different journey, same outcome. Feeling tired and broke.
I’ve spent a good bit of time in Latin America and it has really contextualizad my understanding of where we are headed. Things are going to get weirder.
Dang brother, I feel your pain. Im about to turn 32 and I already feel tired. I just started my family and we are struggling to pay our bills. I refuse to allow someone to raise my child, so we are now heading into poverty. Im in the coveted tech sector, by all accounts I should be doing well. But Im tired over worked. Surrounded by clueless boomer light gen xers and boomers who will clog up the bureaucratic positions til Im in my mid 40s if I can make it that long.
I keep thinking Ill get ahead of this, Ill work out Ill recapture that energy I had as a youth outcompeting my peers, no one matched my energy. But I cant imagine being able to build up that kind of energy, I feel hopeless. There will be no position for me even in the nee better world built by the strong zoomers. Ill be far too old to participate in a tribal brotherhood. I really don’t know what to do. There are hardly any other good paying jobs out there and my job is “good paying” considering what Ive made most of my life. But its just not good enough pay for a family. Great for a single young man. Not so great for 32 and sole breadwinner.
I graduated and believed the world was my oyster. Year year after year I told myself don’t worry you are getting your bearing you will get a better job, and I did. Over time I did advance, but my advances were just much too slow for the pace of the spiral and now its like damn… its like being in a race and seeing a guy 3 laps ahead of you. You’re like damn, Im gassed and this dude looks like he is finishing laps faster and faster each time! Ill never catch up! I dont know man. I hope we can all make it through this.
honestly sounds like you are doing good. My advice is to get the wife to get a small, part-time $20-40k job, it would help smooth over your family finances.
You are in a good position now and are just upset about what you did before this (or more accurately, what you didn't do). Keep in mind this is an emotional and subjective internal condemnation of yourself.
Hey that’s very true! It’s like you cut through the bull and saw what was really going on. Sometimes I really do loathe myself for not taking more action before now.
And exactly too, thinking at some point Ill hit that lottery. Ill land that 6 figure tech job and love every day I wake up for work! But it never quite happened. Yeah there has been a massive emotional shift over the past few years. Ive started to realize exactly what you are saying. Things move very slow, I guess Im impatient. Thanks for the advice
A big mistake you need to avoid: Don't overextend yourself and push too hard right now, then blow up your current moderately happy position, in order to chase a feeling of being behind, feeling trapped or inadequate, feeling regret.
I restack-quoted so many passages from this most excellent poast! You do a wonderful job articulating what so many people have sensed but struggled to formulate about the problems of postmodern life. A really masterful job tying together all these different but related threads and analyzing what the big picture means. One of the best things I've read in a while!
Thanks Daniel, I'm glad you enjoyed it! Also I'm gratified you shared the vision I had for this piece, and could see what I was driving at. There was a creative risk in designing the piece this way and I thought it would work but you never know until people actually read it, whether the aesthetic feels the way it's supposed to.
Most of what you're saying isn't wrong, but this is six to eight different articles smashed together ramshackle. Nothing is substantiated in a serious way. Most of it is pronouncement and insinuation. To use Ryan Faulk's old term, you are a "sayer of things."
If you are embedded in the dissident e-right, much of your subject is either taken for granted or a literal repost of other people's greatest hits. If you aren't embedded in the e-right much of it would be impenetrable or nonsense. A friendly audience will take the whirlwind of pronouncements and unexamined graphs for granted, while everyone else is backing away slowly from the stream of inchoate concepts. I am sure there will be much acclaim in reposting other people's winner tweets and green texts.
The original topic of your article; moral authority, pornography, young men and economic explanations, is lost in a sea of "but wait, there's more!" There would be an excellent article in proving your points that porn is a cope for economic ruptures and decay.
There is a good article to be written here. If you had restrained yourself to examining and criticizing Hawley's statements, you might have achieved something more enduring. What you have at present is a wide ranging criticism of liberal modernity that falls short of completing the job on every count. It fails in this way, not because your conclusions are wrong, necessarily, but because you have cast your net so wide you can't haul in the fish. Put more tritely, you've bitten off more than you can chew and taken the reader along with you for every feverishly over heated bite.
This is an excellent point. The essay shares the same form and behavior as leftist struggle sessions: if you agree with the premises emotionally you will nod your head, fill in the multitude of gaps and feel emotionally satiated, but if you don't agree, or just poke and pull at some threads, it pretty rapidly starts to unravel into a pile.
I've been struggling for a while to understand why so many people find it appealing, and as best as I can tell that is why.
I'll explain the aesthetic design principles to you if you're curious Doctor Hammer, and why they resonated. If not, you're welcome to criticize me and this essay, I don't take it personally.
That would be an interesting explanation, thank you. I would not be at all surprised to find there are many forms of argumentation or writing that simply do not appeal to me for reasons that have to do with me and me alone :D
Obviously I use a lot of nonsequiturs. This particular aesthetic is based on a blogger from the Golden Age of Blogs, called the Last Psychiatrist.
He had a standard technique, where he would tell a story in part one, a different story in part two, a different story in part three, part four would jump back to a previous section, then part five would take all these random threads and combine them into a stunning epiphany.
It's kind of like the final scene in The Usual Suspects, when the detective assembles all the clues and realizes everything the villain told him was a lie, and secretly the lone surviving witness was the criminal mastermind.
The Last Psychiatrist was a huge influence on most of the Extremely Online frogs, so a lot of people understand what I'm doing.
The presentation style doesn't fit a conventional style... but when you read a classic article in proper format, it's very predictable, and therefore boring, because the audience can sense the rhythm of the piece, even if they don't know the exact data points you plan to present. You will start with a thesis, then provide 3 examples, then expand on the argument, cite data and sources, then resolve with a Call to Action. Technically this is the "correct" way to write, but in a standard article, I can read the headline and guess about 80% of the content. Often I read an interesting headline, and if you squint, the majority of the essay is indistinguishable from hundreds of other essays — maybe there will be 3 cool sentences per every thousand words, or so.
A standard article is read in 5 minutes, it's enjoyable, then almost instantly forgettable. That's the business model of modern content farms... churn and burn.
But economics dictates that sort of low-effort, factory assembly line production, where every writer has to write 4 short essays per week to stay relevant in an oversaturated digital landscape of thousands of competing news sites.
I'm not getting paid anything... I'm free to ignore business logic and craft something which makes zero commercial sense.
This article was crafted, and refined over a period of roughly eight months...
what I sought to create was one single Primer where people could read it, and get a macro and micro understanding of what modern life is dysfunctional, and see how all the puzzle pieces fit together, and how the modern world was created. That's hugely ambitious... but an important distinction here is that, this Substack is intended to be read, reread, and digested in 3-7 viewings. It's not intended for anyone to read, start to finish, in one session... purely because the massive, bulky length.
Although several people have told me they read it in one morning, and loved it. So, I can create the product I want, and the reader can choose to consume it in whatever fashion they want, even if it's not what I intended, I lose control of the piece as soon as it's published.
That makes sense. Now that you mention it, I do recognize the similarities in style between you and TLP, and indeed I stopped reading him after a few years, in part because he stopped updating very frequently and I got out of the habit of checking his site, but also because his posts started losing my interest. I personally prefer more substance than style, and while a Usual Suspects style move (great movie choice, by the way!) can work, dancing between seemingly unrelated stones in a stream before getting to the other side and seeing how it is all related, I find it immensely frustrating when those stones turn out to be merely foam floaters that don't hold up. The style in that case demands a rock solid foundation for the reader to make it to the reveal on the other side.
Thanks for taking the time to write up this (and the other two!) responses.
"you have cast your net so wide you can't haul in the fish. Put more tritely, you've bitten off more than you can chew and taken the reader along with you for every feverishly over heated bite."
"Nothing is substantiated in a serious way...To use Ryan Faulk's old term, you are a "sayer of things."
Yeah bro, you're reading a blog... it's a discussion, that's kind of the whole value proposition. Do you go to a restaurant and complain that they're distributing food?
The correct analogy would be the quality of the food. You set out a premise for your work and what you delivered on that premise is under cooked and mushed together. To carry the analogy, the burger is half sticking out of a pile of mashed potatoes and the whole thing has puffed rice cakes hidden in it for some reason.
I don't think you presented your article as a humble discussion piece. I think you presented it as a serious work of analysis and I will continue to critique it as that for as was long as it exists in its current form. I am unaware of any reason that your work should be uniquely immunized against such critique.
Being a "sayer of things" means not showing your working, nor taking account of your truth claims. It's an acceptable practice in any number of frivolous venues, but you chose to take on the wounds of modern man and the decline of our age, so get used much harsher words than anything you've earned from me.
I didn't call you a fool. I critiqued your writing in a most accurate and specific way.
I will re-emphasize everything I have described as deficient in your work is fixable and within the abilities you've demonstrated, if you chose to use them. You could order and edit the work properly. You could take account of each of your truth claims with evidence and reason in the body of your work. You could refrain from unnecessary and haphazard quotation.
My intention is not to stop you from writing, but to mark where your work, to date, has fallen short. Good luck and I look forward to your next piece.
I rage read it yesterday and found this comment accurate. The first section really helped me keep my cool. Ironically, I was procrastinating to distract myself from a topic at work, so I had an example of a coping mechanism at hand.
The rest was mostly repetition. I hastily screenshot quite a few sections, because they made me smile. Your strong proclamations about culture being downstream from economics made me think about the link more and. Ultimately however, any feedback system is a circular graph to a degree. It reminded me of the https://thezman.com/ claims about economics being downstream from biology.
Looking at the comment section, you seem egomaniacal for positive bias. As an antidote I'd recommend:
"I rage read it yesterday and found this comment accurate. The first section really helped me keep my cool. Ironically, I was procrastinating to distract myself from a topic at work, so I had an example of a coping mechanism at hand."
I'm confused, I don't understand who you are talking to or what you are saying here.
I don't think anyone can truly sum up everything going wrong and broken in the West today... but damn it if this doesn't come the closest I've seen. Very impressive. There's a lot of great stuff collected from Twitter here, too.
There's really too much to even touch on since there's so much great content here, but, suffice to say, excellent job, here.
Very honored, thanks my friend. I wrote most of this in like ten days in December and then was collecting the tweets and photos and just tweaking random sentences during the following months, then I finished the ending 2 sections a couple weeks ago.
Lmao thanks not everything will be this long or spicy, but you know how it is, you try to craft the project "honestly" according to the aesthetic vision and the message to be communicated. Appreciate you bro.
The problem with modern "man" is that quite frankly men have taken to the habit of judging their value based on the opinion of women not other men. This has led to acceptance of many unhealthy things in today's society. Acceptance of quite frankly ludicrous behavior in society that it is man's not women's job to put a stop too.
If you are (or women perceive you to) a leader of men they will give themselves to you. Another wisdom only acquired in my middle age. In a broad sense I think we need to do a better job of providing wisdom for young men, they want it and need it.
The commodification of every aspect of life makes for a war of all against all, a Wind-and-Wolf Age where women sell their bodies online to the very men who in another, better, time would build a home with them and provide for them. God designed men and women as complements to one another; nothing is more fundamentally dysfunctional than having us compete.
The imagery of the rib is profound. There is a term for when a body part spreads beyond its natural function: cancer.
The illusion that women complement men has been shattered; and the Christian - I criticize myself here - deludes himself that the correct woman can be a "suitable helpmate;" she cannot be, even Solomon wrote hundreds of years before Christ that only one in a thousand is any good; and who can find her? The story of Lilith is a story made up by priests too embarrassed to admit Eve is Lilith: the twentieth and twenty-first centuries allowed Her to remove the mask.
Self-deluded Christian men refuse to admit Eve walked away from Adam when he was full of the glory of his creation; and she chose the Serpent: she chose the bad boy, the high status male - more so than the good man - and the more powerful male; who catered to her solipsistic desire to have her own wisdom above Adam: this sin is epigenetic to her very sex.; she even prefers the son of her illicit liaison to that of Adam. The Bible declares Adam was an hundred years old before he once more went into Eve and begat Seth: that was one pissed off man.
I only pity the fact that few I could share this with would be bothered to read its entirety, because the further in I got the more illuminating the work became. But regardless of this, everywhere I look, and to all the corners of the internet I cultivate, I see this same fractal pattern repeating - the same brotherhoods you describe forming, and the same realization dawning. We're on the way to that success. It won't come tomorrow, but what in life is immediate?
I do wonder; what's the point of words, thought, discussion... when we are considering the inevitability of historical forces moving a clear direction, on a scale so much bigger than us. But if nothing else, understanding the macro perspective allows us to come to peace with the volatility and uncertainty of life, and just to relax during chaotic times.
One of the core pillars of the modern system is to keep ordinary people so stressed, distracted, demoralized, and hysterical that they feel too weak to defend themselves. Preventing that offers tremendous personal benefits.
But you can't really educate people who don't want to see it; this reflects the saying that fools are madder at the person who tells them they were tricked, than with the person who tricked them.
🗨 socioeconomic, political, and historical forces ... do not exist as pure abstractions, but become manifest only through the behaviour of human beings; interplay of personalities and social processes.
Because, it is as Vox Day often says, we have the opportunity to plant trees under who's shade we will never sit. The future traditions will be the ones we make. We have the peace and remnant prosperity at the moment to ponder which principles should guide the future so that we and ours can be proactive now, rather than merely reactive forever.
The pondering, the questioning, the imagining must be done if we don't want to become just light skinned africans, living in perpetually short sighted scrabbling for tonight's dinner and maybe some booze while foreigners extract all the wealth from our soil and our bodies.
This is gold on so many levels. It’s funny how what in one generation represents freedom becomes oppression in the following generation. So one must travel light, be nimble and clear-headed to spot the truth, the ever changing truth, burn past ideas when they become stale and fake, and look for the next generation’s path to freedom. It will always be a subtle path at first, hardly noticeable in the wild, much less enticing that the official superhighway, but once seen, impossible to ignore. And what was true before and became evil will become true again, but changed, morphed, mutated, rid of some parts, enriched by others. And follow it we must, if not for us because change is so slow and inertia so powerful that we will not see it fully realised, at least for our children and grandchildren, to leave them mentally ready to understand the world and for them to have a fighting chance to be, at least, content. To sleep well. To be strong. To see far away, understand their own world, and leave their succession as ready as they were.
Postmodern society is so frustrating at times. There is no healthy way to express one's sexuality (honestly, there probably never has been), and we're presented with two extremes: hypersexuality or complete celibacy that men (specifically) feel has been thrust upon them.
Brotherhood is most certainly the answer. I personally love the modern Gen Y/Z aspects of the internet that talk about philosophy and self-improvement. Even though the digital world is never as good as the real one, it still provides the framework for a brotherhood, at least in my opinion.
Maybe this is just the old-school feminist in me, but I also hope that women embrace sisterhood and come together to improve, reflect, and be stronger. Society needs strong women, too.
The answer is to do what you want to do, what feels natural, even tho it's irrational... but just you have to pair classical romance with a sort of cynical paranoia and hyperalert discernment that wasn't necessary in the past, being careful to evaluate whether you are dealing with a woman who shares your dreams of a family, marriage, kids, religion, etc..
Think about it like this... One of the main things we want in life is a beautiful romance. If we let fear persuade us to abandon that dream, well maybe we can play it safe and avoid problems, but we have basically lost in a major area of life by forfeiting the competition before it's even begun. On the other hand, divorce can wreck you in horrific ways. So there's that balance — pursue romance, pursue a family, embrace a sort of reckless idealism, but you have to bring your game and life habits to an unfair, historically abnormal level in order to make it work.
Women will basically conform to the strongest man in their proximity. So if you fix yourself, you will (theoretically) fix your future wife too. Obviously there are some holes in this theory... but it's a useful way to approach relationships.
Was a child of an immigrant. Parents liked to tell me amazing stories about our home country, & I also liked reading & learning about American history & brilliance. My father, especially, was very impressed by the incredible American spirit & hoped his kids would benefit. None of us have, both parents are depressed, we are losing our money: I almost cry sometimes. What a beautiful future turned to chaos.
I think you will be fine for a long time... I don't expect the current order to collapse until the Boomers die off around 2030 and the pension system officially goes bankrupt.
Martin Armstrong is a fascinating insider/outsider who - if you’ve not heard of him - created an AI for financial projections that also projects social/political unrest. His timing model shows 2032 as a peak in the current wave. His context is financial, but finance is indivisible from politics. His model is not specific about how things play out, but he asserts we’ll have a different political organization after that turning point. His personal story is interesting because the intel boys tried to roll him, he said no, and they made him rot in jail for seven years on a contempt charge until scotus had to tell them to let him out.
Fascinating. Yes I have come to roughly the same conclusion, based simply on projecting when the American national debt and Boomer pensions should go bankrupt.
Here via John Carter. A long read but necessarily so to incorporate the many-threaded concepts involved. You managed to bring them into sharp focus with a gut-punch call to action over the finish line. Thank you. Our time will come.
The tweet about millennials becoming middle aged, and only seeing a world in decline really hit home for me. I'm 41, and I got a glimpse of American pride and optimism in my youth. Joined the Marines, and then contracted for a while, and fighting a useless war ground me into dust. Watching the debacle and degeneracy of the Obama regime wasn't enough to wake me up completely but made me realize we were on a bad road.
By the time of the COVID bullshit, the insane acceleration of social justice and gender/tranny shit, and after watching everyone seemingly lose their goddamn minds I lost whatever respect I had for the masses, for my long-held ideals of populism and libertarianism, I felt compelled to take the shadow box my wife made for me and throw it in the trash.
I was embarrassed that I didn't see what was going on sooner. I was embarrassed I was a pawn in Globohomo's game.
My wife stopped me from trashing it, and I suppose I'm glad she did. It still, sometimes, brings good memories of youth, virility, brotherhood and camraderie and strength. That being said, I feel like a tired, out of shape old man.
I feel every ounce of the fatigue and exhaustion you describe, and I couldn't have put it better. I'm still trying to figure out the "do something" part and struggle with just giving up. "There might be hope for the youth, but not me", my defeatist side says.
Eh, sorry, just griping, but wanted to let you know that the article got to me.
Yeah bro I think we all went thru the same emotional journey, at different times and different speeds.
I was so proud of this country as a kid! And now it's like a shuffling zombified corpse.
Anyway it gets easier when you emotionally process the grief, and then forgive yourself, move on, overcome the shame and feelings of loss, lack of spiritual meaning... then reorient towards a bigger goal.
Somehow find a way to get excited about the future that's possible.
Right now is actually the hardest time, because we're in a transitional period, the brief twilight of rampant decay between the Old Equilibrium and the New Equilibirium.
What I mean by this is that, 20 years ago, you lived in a functional community. If you were having trouble, you could ask for help, maybe friends or family could lend a hand. Now that's gone. We just have an adversarial government which hates us and tries to crush not only White Christian men, but also anyone who is strong or self-reliant or aspirational. It's just an ugly, dysfunctional culture.
One productive person, such as a scientist who tries to do his job, is an inherent embarrassment to all the fake jobs people who are just taking a paycheck and pretending to work. So anyone who tries to build useful products, to seek a better future, is seen as a threat and is torn down by everyone next to him.
Right now, people like us who are "Extremely Online" are 3-5 years ahead of the curve. Normies will wake up, on a slower timeline, to the realization their government is trying to destroy them.
So what this means is, you get all the negatives of living under a hostile tyranny, but none of the positives — common people are just kind of dazed and confused, deer in headlights, frightened cattle walking into a meatgrinder. You don't get the 3rd world apathy of Latin America, where people agree the government is corrupt, so everyone looks the other way as you pay bribes, break rules, skirt taxes, whatever. You're surrounded by prison guards from above, snitches from below.
The future will involve low-level friendships, brotherhoods between trusted friends. None of that has built up yet, and anything overt immediately gets infiltrated by government informants and turned into a criminal investigation.
So, right now, just keep your head down — just build for the future, look out for your family, make money, raise your kids, etc.
The future is to organize around job networks — all of the productive white guys who can't get a job, all that talent has to go somewhere. "Exit" and "New Founding" are both organizations which are trying to get rich by tapping into the suppressed talent pool.
But remember, keep your head down, look out for your family.
William, I think you would enjoy this essay by Bronze Age Pervert which talks about the failure of American leadership, and the Frog culture that's formed as a result:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/americas-delusional-elite-is-done/
Are you me? 41 but ex-Army. Fed instead of contractor. Different journey, same outcome. Feeling tired and broke.
I’ve spent a good bit of time in Latin America and it has really contextualizad my understanding of where we are headed. Things are going to get weirder.
Dang brother, I feel your pain. Im about to turn 32 and I already feel tired. I just started my family and we are struggling to pay our bills. I refuse to allow someone to raise my child, so we are now heading into poverty. Im in the coveted tech sector, by all accounts I should be doing well. But Im tired over worked. Surrounded by clueless boomer light gen xers and boomers who will clog up the bureaucratic positions til Im in my mid 40s if I can make it that long.
I keep thinking Ill get ahead of this, Ill work out Ill recapture that energy I had as a youth outcompeting my peers, no one matched my energy. But I cant imagine being able to build up that kind of energy, I feel hopeless. There will be no position for me even in the nee better world built by the strong zoomers. Ill be far too old to participate in a tribal brotherhood. I really don’t know what to do. There are hardly any other good paying jobs out there and my job is “good paying” considering what Ive made most of my life. But its just not good enough pay for a family. Great for a single young man. Not so great for 32 and sole breadwinner.
I graduated and believed the world was my oyster. Year year after year I told myself don’t worry you are getting your bearing you will get a better job, and I did. Over time I did advance, but my advances were just much too slow for the pace of the spiral and now its like damn… its like being in a race and seeing a guy 3 laps ahead of you. You’re like damn, Im gassed and this dude looks like he is finishing laps faster and faster each time! Ill never catch up! I dont know man. I hope we can all make it through this.
32 is still young
Well I will try to turn it around
honestly sounds like you are doing good. My advice is to get the wife to get a small, part-time $20-40k job, it would help smooth over your family finances.
You are in a good position now and are just upset about what you did before this (or more accurately, what you didn't do). Keep in mind this is an emotional and subjective internal condemnation of yourself.
Hey that’s very true! It’s like you cut through the bull and saw what was really going on. Sometimes I really do loathe myself for not taking more action before now.
And exactly too, thinking at some point Ill hit that lottery. Ill land that 6 figure tech job and love every day I wake up for work! But it never quite happened. Yeah there has been a massive emotional shift over the past few years. Ive started to realize exactly what you are saying. Things move very slow, I guess Im impatient. Thanks for the advice
A big mistake you need to avoid: Don't overextend yourself and push too hard right now, then blow up your current moderately happy position, in order to chase a feeling of being behind, feeling trapped or inadequate, feeling regret.
Yeah. It's really distressing to realize that I pine for the halcyon days of the Clinton Administration, of all things. :-/
I restack-quoted so many passages from this most excellent poast! You do a wonderful job articulating what so many people have sensed but struggled to formulate about the problems of postmodern life. A really masterful job tying together all these different but related threads and analyzing what the big picture means. One of the best things I've read in a while!
Thanks Daniel, I'm glad you enjoyed it! Also I'm gratified you shared the vision I had for this piece, and could see what I was driving at. There was a creative risk in designing the piece this way and I thought it would work but you never know until people actually read it, whether the aesthetic feels the way it's supposed to.
Most of what you're saying isn't wrong, but this is six to eight different articles smashed together ramshackle. Nothing is substantiated in a serious way. Most of it is pronouncement and insinuation. To use Ryan Faulk's old term, you are a "sayer of things."
If you are embedded in the dissident e-right, much of your subject is either taken for granted or a literal repost of other people's greatest hits. If you aren't embedded in the e-right much of it would be impenetrable or nonsense. A friendly audience will take the whirlwind of pronouncements and unexamined graphs for granted, while everyone else is backing away slowly from the stream of inchoate concepts. I am sure there will be much acclaim in reposting other people's winner tweets and green texts.
The original topic of your article; moral authority, pornography, young men and economic explanations, is lost in a sea of "but wait, there's more!" There would be an excellent article in proving your points that porn is a cope for economic ruptures and decay.
There is a good article to be written here. If you had restrained yourself to examining and criticizing Hawley's statements, you might have achieved something more enduring. What you have at present is a wide ranging criticism of liberal modernity that falls short of completing the job on every count. It fails in this way, not because your conclusions are wrong, necessarily, but because you have cast your net so wide you can't haul in the fish. Put more tritely, you've bitten off more than you can chew and taken the reader along with you for every feverishly over heated bite.
This is an excellent point. The essay shares the same form and behavior as leftist struggle sessions: if you agree with the premises emotionally you will nod your head, fill in the multitude of gaps and feel emotionally satiated, but if you don't agree, or just poke and pull at some threads, it pretty rapidly starts to unravel into a pile.
I've been struggling for a while to understand why so many people find it appealing, and as best as I can tell that is why.
I'll explain the aesthetic design principles to you if you're curious Doctor Hammer, and why they resonated. If not, you're welcome to criticize me and this essay, I don't take it personally.
That would be an interesting explanation, thank you. I would not be at all surprised to find there are many forms of argumentation or writing that simply do not appeal to me for reasons that have to do with me and me alone :D
Obviously I use a lot of nonsequiturs. This particular aesthetic is based on a blogger from the Golden Age of Blogs, called the Last Psychiatrist.
He had a standard technique, where he would tell a story in part one, a different story in part two, a different story in part three, part four would jump back to a previous section, then part five would take all these random threads and combine them into a stunning epiphany.
It's kind of like the final scene in The Usual Suspects, when the detective assembles all the clues and realizes everything the villain told him was a lie, and secretly the lone surviving witness was the criminal mastermind.
The Last Psychiatrist was a huge influence on most of the Extremely Online frogs, so a lot of people understand what I'm doing.
These are a few of his most famous essays.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_woman_would.html
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html
The presentation style doesn't fit a conventional style... but when you read a classic article in proper format, it's very predictable, and therefore boring, because the audience can sense the rhythm of the piece, even if they don't know the exact data points you plan to present. You will start with a thesis, then provide 3 examples, then expand on the argument, cite data and sources, then resolve with a Call to Action. Technically this is the "correct" way to write, but in a standard article, I can read the headline and guess about 80% of the content. Often I read an interesting headline, and if you squint, the majority of the essay is indistinguishable from hundreds of other essays — maybe there will be 3 cool sentences per every thousand words, or so.
A standard article is read in 5 minutes, it's enjoyable, then almost instantly forgettable. That's the business model of modern content farms... churn and burn.
But economics dictates that sort of low-effort, factory assembly line production, where every writer has to write 4 short essays per week to stay relevant in an oversaturated digital landscape of thousands of competing news sites.
I'm not getting paid anything... I'm free to ignore business logic and craft something which makes zero commercial sense.
This article was crafted, and refined over a period of roughly eight months...
what I sought to create was one single Primer where people could read it, and get a macro and micro understanding of what modern life is dysfunctional, and see how all the puzzle pieces fit together, and how the modern world was created. That's hugely ambitious... but an important distinction here is that, this Substack is intended to be read, reread, and digested in 3-7 viewings. It's not intended for anyone to read, start to finish, in one session... purely because the massive, bulky length.
Although several people have told me they read it in one morning, and loved it. So, I can create the product I want, and the reader can choose to consume it in whatever fashion they want, even if it's not what I intended, I lose control of the piece as soon as it's published.
That makes sense. Now that you mention it, I do recognize the similarities in style between you and TLP, and indeed I stopped reading him after a few years, in part because he stopped updating very frequently and I got out of the habit of checking his site, but also because his posts started losing my interest. I personally prefer more substance than style, and while a Usual Suspects style move (great movie choice, by the way!) can work, dancing between seemingly unrelated stones in a stream before getting to the other side and seeing how it is all related, I find it immensely frustrating when those stones turn out to be merely foam floaters that don't hold up. The style in that case demands a rock solid foundation for the reader to make it to the reveal on the other side.
Thanks for taking the time to write up this (and the other two!) responses.
No worries you are allowed to dislike my work, like I said I'm fine with it.
"you have cast your net so wide you can't haul in the fish. Put more tritely, you've bitten off more than you can chew and taken the reader along with you for every feverishly over heated bite."
"Nothing is substantiated in a serious way...To use Ryan Faulk's old term, you are a "sayer of things."
Lmao
"a "sayer of things."
Yeah bro, you're reading a blog... it's a discussion, that's kind of the whole value proposition. Do you go to a restaurant and complain that they're distributing food?
The correct analogy would be the quality of the food. You set out a premise for your work and what you delivered on that premise is under cooked and mushed together. To carry the analogy, the burger is half sticking out of a pile of mashed potatoes and the whole thing has puffed rice cakes hidden in it for some reason.
I don't think you presented your article as a humble discussion piece. I think you presented it as a serious work of analysis and I will continue to critique it as that for as was long as it exists in its current form. I am unaware of any reason that your work should be uniquely immunized against such critique.
Being a "sayer of things" means not showing your working, nor taking account of your truth claims. It's an acceptable practice in any number of frivolous venues, but you chose to take on the wounds of modern man and the decline of our age, so get used much harsher words than anything you've earned from me.
Pearls before swine; "Speak wisdom to a fool, and he calls you foolish." —Euripides
I didn't call you a fool. I critiqued your writing in a most accurate and specific way.
I will re-emphasize everything I have described as deficient in your work is fixable and within the abilities you've demonstrated, if you chose to use them. You could order and edit the work properly. You could take account of each of your truth claims with evidence and reason in the body of your work. You could refrain from unnecessary and haphazard quotation.
My intention is not to stop you from writing, but to mark where your work, to date, has fallen short. Good luck and I look forward to your next piece.
yes, I called you a fool
He’s the guy who went to the theater for excitement but was annoyed when Booth interrupted the play
Hahahahahahaha
I rage read it yesterday and found this comment accurate. The first section really helped me keep my cool. Ironically, I was procrastinating to distract myself from a topic at work, so I had an example of a coping mechanism at hand.
The rest was mostly repetition. I hastily screenshot quite a few sections, because they made me smile. Your strong proclamations about culture being downstream from economics made me think about the link more and. Ultimately however, any feedback system is a circular graph to a degree. It reminded me of the https://thezman.com/ claims about economics being downstream from biology.
Looking at the comment section, you seem egomaniacal for positive bias. As an antidote I'd recommend:
https://expressiveegg.org/key-posts/ (lot's of content was removed to monetize https://expressiveegg.substack.com/, but I found that feedly RSS still has most of it)
"you seem egomaniacal for positive bias"
Lmaoooooo
"I rage read it yesterday and found this comment accurate. The first section really helped me keep my cool. Ironically, I was procrastinating to distract myself from a topic at work, so I had an example of a coping mechanism at hand."
I'm confused, I don't understand who you are talking to or what you are saying here.
I don't think anyone can truly sum up everything going wrong and broken in the West today... but damn it if this doesn't come the closest I've seen. Very impressive. There's a lot of great stuff collected from Twitter here, too.
There's really too much to even touch on since there's so much great content here, but, suffice to say, excellent job, here.
Honored by the kind words, thank you Yakubian Ape.
Fantastic piece as always
Very honored, thanks my friend. I wrote most of this in like ten days in December and then was collecting the tweets and photos and just tweaking random sentences during the following months, then I finished the ending 2 sections a couple weeks ago.
I am in awe of how spicy and long your posts are. Keep it up, comrade.
Lmao thanks not everything will be this long or spicy, but you know how it is, you try to craft the project "honestly" according to the aesthetic vision and the message to be communicated. Appreciate you bro.
This was an absolute epic of an essay. Really brilliant and worth the long read.
Thanks bro, very flattered to be praised by the men I respect and admire.
The problem with modern "man" is that quite frankly men have taken to the habit of judging their value based on the opinion of women not other men. This has led to acceptance of many unhealthy things in today's society. Acceptance of quite frankly ludicrous behavior in society that it is man's not women's job to put a stop too.
Agreed, well said.
Big mistake I made for a long time.
We all have my friend.
If you are (or women perceive you to) a leader of men they will give themselves to you. Another wisdom only acquired in my middle age. In a broad sense I think we need to do a better job of providing wisdom for young men, they want it and need it.
The commodification of every aspect of life makes for a war of all against all, a Wind-and-Wolf Age where women sell their bodies online to the very men who in another, better, time would build a home with them and provide for them. God designed men and women as complements to one another; nothing is more fundamentally dysfunctional than having us compete.
The imagery of the rib is profound. There is a term for when a body part spreads beyond its natural function: cancer.
Agreed.
😏 i.imgflip.com/su208.jpg
lmaoooo
The illusion that women complement men has been shattered; and the Christian - I criticize myself here - deludes himself that the correct woman can be a "suitable helpmate;" she cannot be, even Solomon wrote hundreds of years before Christ that only one in a thousand is any good; and who can find her? The story of Lilith is a story made up by priests too embarrassed to admit Eve is Lilith: the twentieth and twenty-first centuries allowed Her to remove the mask.
Self-deluded Christian men refuse to admit Eve walked away from Adam when he was full of the glory of his creation; and she chose the Serpent: she chose the bad boy, the high status male - more so than the good man - and the more powerful male; who catered to her solipsistic desire to have her own wisdom above Adam: this sin is epigenetic to her very sex.; she even prefers the son of her illicit liaison to that of Adam. The Bible declares Adam was an hundred years old before he once more went into Eve and begat Seth: that was one pissed off man.
I only pity the fact that few I could share this with would be bothered to read its entirety, because the further in I got the more illuminating the work became. But regardless of this, everywhere I look, and to all the corners of the internet I cultivate, I see this same fractal pattern repeating - the same brotherhoods you describe forming, and the same realization dawning. We're on the way to that success. It won't come tomorrow, but what in life is immediate?
I do wonder; what's the point of words, thought, discussion... when we are considering the inevitability of historical forces moving a clear direction, on a scale so much bigger than us. But if nothing else, understanding the macro perspective allows us to come to peace with the volatility and uncertainty of life, and just to relax during chaotic times.
One of the core pillars of the modern system is to keep ordinary people so stressed, distracted, demoralized, and hysterical that they feel too weak to defend themselves. Preventing that offers tremendous personal benefits.
But you can't really educate people who don't want to see it; this reflects the saying that fools are madder at the person who tells them they were tricked, than with the person who tricked them.
🗨 socioeconomic, political, and historical forces ... do not exist as pure abstractions, but become manifest only through the behaviour of human beings; interplay of personalities and social processes.
🤷😉
Because, it is as Vox Day often says, we have the opportunity to plant trees under who's shade we will never sit. The future traditions will be the ones we make. We have the peace and remnant prosperity at the moment to ponder which principles should guide the future so that we and ours can be proactive now, rather than merely reactive forever.
The pondering, the questioning, the imagining must be done if we don't want to become just light skinned africans, living in perpetually short sighted scrabbling for tonight's dinner and maybe some booze while foreigners extract all the wealth from our soil and our bodies.
Kek your second paragraph is hilarious, and I do agree with you
This.
Very well said. Napoleon "found the crown lying in a gutter," we remember him because he decided to be the one to pick it up.
This is gold on so many levels. It’s funny how what in one generation represents freedom becomes oppression in the following generation. So one must travel light, be nimble and clear-headed to spot the truth, the ever changing truth, burn past ideas when they become stale and fake, and look for the next generation’s path to freedom. It will always be a subtle path at first, hardly noticeable in the wild, much less enticing that the official superhighway, but once seen, impossible to ignore. And what was true before and became evil will become true again, but changed, morphed, mutated, rid of some parts, enriched by others. And follow it we must, if not for us because change is so slow and inertia so powerful that we will not see it fully realised, at least for our children and grandchildren, to leave them mentally ready to understand the world and for them to have a fighting chance to be, at least, content. To sleep well. To be strong. To see far away, understand their own world, and leave their succession as ready as they were.
Thanks brother
First time here, and WOW that was great!
Postmodern society is so frustrating at times. There is no healthy way to express one's sexuality (honestly, there probably never has been), and we're presented with two extremes: hypersexuality or complete celibacy that men (specifically) feel has been thrust upon them.
Brotherhood is most certainly the answer. I personally love the modern Gen Y/Z aspects of the internet that talk about philosophy and self-improvement. Even though the digital world is never as good as the real one, it still provides the framework for a brotherhood, at least in my opinion.
Maybe this is just the old-school feminist in me, but I also hope that women embrace sisterhood and come together to improve, reflect, and be stronger. Society needs strong women, too.
The answer is to do what you want to do, what feels natural, even tho it's irrational... but just you have to pair classical romance with a sort of cynical paranoia and hyperalert discernment that wasn't necessary in the past, being careful to evaluate whether you are dealing with a woman who shares your dreams of a family, marriage, kids, religion, etc..
Think about it like this... One of the main things we want in life is a beautiful romance. If we let fear persuade us to abandon that dream, well maybe we can play it safe and avoid problems, but we have basically lost in a major area of life by forfeiting the competition before it's even begun. On the other hand, divorce can wreck you in horrific ways. So there's that balance — pursue romance, pursue a family, embrace a sort of reckless idealism, but you have to bring your game and life habits to an unfair, historically abnormal level in order to make it work.
Not every guy can do it... but some can.
Women will basically conform to the strongest man in their proximity. So if you fix yourself, you will (theoretically) fix your future wife too. Obviously there are some holes in this theory... but it's a useful way to approach relationships.
Dan you are hopelessly dumb
Was a child of an immigrant. Parents liked to tell me amazing stories about our home country, & I also liked reading & learning about American history & brilliance. My father, especially, was very impressed by the incredible American spirit & hoped his kids would benefit. None of us have, both parents are depressed, we are losing our money: I almost cry sometimes. What a beautiful future turned to chaos.
Stay tough bro, much love.
Thank you. Love your writing
Very kind, thank you
This is the absolute BEST thing I've read in years!
And... considering that everything is going to shit, it might be one of the last BEST things I read. But let's hope not.
Thanks bro.
I think you will be fine for a long time... I don't expect the current order to collapse until the Boomers die off around 2030 and the pension system officially goes bankrupt.
Martin Armstrong is a fascinating insider/outsider who - if you’ve not heard of him - created an AI for financial projections that also projects social/political unrest. His timing model shows 2032 as a peak in the current wave. His context is financial, but finance is indivisible from politics. His model is not specific about how things play out, but he asserts we’ll have a different political organization after that turning point. His personal story is interesting because the intel boys tried to roll him, he said no, and they made him rot in jail for seven years on a contempt charge until scotus had to tell them to let him out.
Fascinating. Yes I have come to roughly the same conclusion, based simply on projecting when the American national debt and Boomer pensions should go bankrupt.
So you have roughly 7 years by that projection to get your life into a strong place.
This is a magnum opus. Nothing else will suffice to describe it. Well done.
Thank for the kind words
Here via John Carter. A long read but necessarily so to incorporate the many-threaded concepts involved. You managed to bring them into sharp focus with a gut-punch call to action over the finish line. Thank you. Our time will come.
Thanks for the kind words, stay strong