If you have strong bonds, if you have children, I don’t believe you are numbing out and I don’t believe you lack meaning and I don’t believe you have the following problems.
What kind of person with children to support practices quiet quitting?
Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.
“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.
We’re so saturated in this environment that people are not only numbing out, they’re kind of making a spectacle of it: from TikTok’s “quiet quitting” trend to Vetements entire “ironic” aesthetic. You know it’s bad when the corporations get on board. The detachment is so widespread that most companies don’t even have the genuine confidence to market their own products. Everything is delivered with a wink from one eye and an eye-roll from the other. We live in a mud puddle of memes, ironic hot takes, and self-conscious self-reference.
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…when dating, there’s a subtle way to communicate to men that their best behavior is necessary with you. And it’s certainly not overtly stating, “I am a high-value woman.” It’s a combination of social grace, elegance, and discretion. There’s an ideal attitude, and it’s hard to define, but it encompasses kindness, intelligence, good will, a sense of humor, sensitive understanding, and self-respect. Women with this attitude turn heads in every room they enter. People really do treat you the way you treat yourself, and the people who sense that they won’t be able to easily manipulate you will run the other way. This is a good thing.
Generally speaking, do the harder, less fashionable thing.
I’m not saying you need to be a contrarian (though that’s arguably fashionable these days). What I mean is that the harder, more thorough, less popular path is usually worth it. There are basically no shortcuts in life, and you’ll only waste your time and energy looking for them.
Work on your manners and social graces.
When someone has excellent manners, people don’t actually notice the manners, they notice the person. Some manners are obvious—saying please, thank you, and excuse me, covering your mouth while you cough, not chewing with your mouth open, respecting others’ personal space. But exceptional manners are harder to define, and the shading of behavior is subtle. For instance, the lost art of conversation.
…Try not to engage in purely attention-seeking, ultimately embarrassing behavior. And don’t divulge every aspect of your personal life on social media. Strangers who don’t know you are incapable of actually caring about you. If you need help, reach out to the people who know you in real life. Remember: discretion is extremely attractive. It is seldom wise to tell all.
Take great care with your living space.
Your surroundings certainly elevate your mood, but you don’t have to have a huge apartment and a ton of money to create a beautiful home.
…Reading is the main way to expand your mind as an adult. Media consumption simply does not cut it. If you want to separate yourself intellectually from your peers, develop serious interests and passions, feel calmer and more collected, have deeper, more interesting conversations, and rarely feel bored—you have to read.
…Meaningful work looks different to everyone, and it’s worth trying to figure out what you personally find meaningful.
…Your day job can also fuel your creative pursuits, especially if you’re a writer. No one talks about this enough. You need to meet some characters and have some real life experiences. Too much writing these days is “writers writing about being writers.” In order to write, you need to have lived.
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Huberman is one of many people aligned in the contemporary cult of optimization. Bryan Johnson is another poster child of the movement, as is much of the SF tech scene writ large. Most of these types are undergoing this optimization on smaller scales than Huberman or Johnson, but the mentality remains the same. Here are people who won’t drink not because they have any particular problem with it but because the data their Oura ring gathers suggests they sleep 7 percent better on nights they don’t, therefore allowing them to answer emails twenty seconds more quickly. Here are people avoiding coffee half an hour before meeting with their personal trainer who charges as much as a mortgage because they don’t want to reward their brain with a dopamine boost that could become habitual, concerning themselves with the precise receptors through which caffeine and dopamine interact.
It’s boring. It’s exhausting. It’s not sexy. It might not even be healthy.
One thing I’ve wondered about the Huberman story is what would have happened if he applied this same optimization mentality to his dating life. It’s possible that he did — perhaps he was only able to juggle six women at a time without them knowing about each other (at least temporarily) because he enforced this same routine of rigidity and calculation to romance. It’s also possible that he only managed all of this through sheer luck and some solid lies. One can imagine how this type of optimization could be applied to dating more honestly, but with similarly unsexy results: a common thread in several of the major polyamory stories as of late has been how packed everyone involved’s Google Calendar is. Surely plenty of people pursuing ethical non-monogamy see themselves as romantically more productive, more detailed and more modernized than the rest of us in a way that mirrors the Huberman health methods.
Regardless, the point remains that optimization will not necessarily fulfill us in the way we’re looking for. It will not stop of from behaving in self-destructive ways (which, I think, Huberman ultimately was), nor will it fill in the emotional gaps that have led us searching for solutions in the first place. It probably will help us sleep a little better, help us feel a little better, help us look a little better, and that all absolutely is worth something. All of that does count toward our broader happiness. But to treat it as our guiding philosophy leaves us empty. There is no telos to it beyond productivity and conspicuous spending.
It all begs the question, what exactly are our bodies for? For whom are we achieving this “peak” physical form? When will that “peak” even be reached? It isn’t just that we’re enhancing our bodies to yield more labor in order to make our employers wealthier, though that’s probably true, too, but rather that it feels like we’ve turned our bodies into projects so that we simply have something to do, something to define ourselves by. In some cases, it might even just be so that we have new things to buy. Spending our money on supplements and gym memberships gives us a sense of purpose. I’m not trying to critique health as some sort of capitalist psyop — the reality is likely the opposite. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be hot and fit. Those are things I want, too. But the point of this brand of optimization does not seem to be that we ought to enjoy the bounties of our healthy bodies. Rather, it is rigidity for rigidity’s sake.
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The strength and weakness of much of my analysis is that I base it on my shortcomings and then project that on to public figures who seem to have the same afflictions that have troubled me. I have had, according to one psychiatrist anyway, various personality disorders of the grandiose type, which have damaged my life and those affected by me.
When I spot public figures who seem to have similar personality disorders to what I’ve suffered and if I can see a through line that has explanatory and predictive value, then I might offer some insight from my own humiliation. Most people who comment on the news or who seek to be gurus have strong narcissistic tendencies, including me. What consistently drives our commentary is our belief that we are special and we see things that normal people don’t, such as that America is in the middle of a civil war (Dennis Prager).
I just read Gregory Zuckerman’s book, The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution. Simons and his team tried to get as much market data as possible and then they put computers to work and analyzed the data and then they allowed their computers to make automated trades based on those insights. That’s how I work. I get as much data as I can and try to combine in with honesty and life experience and look for where I might have something to add that’s unlikely to damage my life or those who listen to me. I can live with trying to add value on a live stream and failing, but I don’t want to live with the feeling that I have needlessly damaged myself and others with my comments. It’s better to swing and miss than to swing and smack an innocent person.
A lot of women are surprised and disheartened to discover that men don’t like women very much, which is yet another indication of female solipsism and lack of empathy. They’re just noticing this now? If it takes you literal decades to notice that half the population is less than entirely enthusiastic about you, you very clearly are not paying any attention whatsoever to them or their feelings…
The reason so few men like women is because women treat most men very badly.
Now, I’m not one of those men; high-status men tend to like women because women behave very differently around us. And I’m not saying women are necessarily unjustified in doing so, I’m simply pointing out the observable reality.(1) For example, I can count on one hand the number of boys who treated me as badly as the average girl did until I turned 16. The first person who ever punched me in the face was a girl: Jodi Phythian clocked me one in first grade for no reason that I can recall. And while women almost uniformly treat me in a deferential manner now, to an extent that I consider almost embarrassingly servile(2), I’m not blind to the way they treat most of the other men around them. And it’s not as if I’ve forgotten the experiences of my formative years.
Women customarily treat the vast majority of the men they encounter with disrespect, disdain, and contempt. Even when they truly love a man, they will say terrible things to him from time to time that would end the relationship in an instant if he were to say them to her. They genuinely think men don’t notice all their passive-aggressive little digs, their little tee-hee-hee, I’m only joking insults, because men so seldom respond to that sort of thing in kind, or even at all. What I find amusing, being one of the very few men who genuinely doesn’t care what women think about him or anything else, is the way they invariably respond with wide-eyed shock when a man simply responds in a direct manner to their little verbal sallies.
Vox’s observations on men and women say far more about Vox Day than they do about male-female relations.
I resonate with his observation because it’s been true of much of how I experienced life. I grew up in foster care. I live with about a dozen different families between age 1 and age 4, due to my mother’s dying of cancer. And then there were other challenges in my childhood where I was bounced off the walls and smacked around quite a bit. And I received a feminine education. My primary school teachers were female. I grew up in the Seventh-Day Adventist church, which is a feminine nurturing environment that frowned on competition and normal masculine behavior. And so I felt enraged at women as a result. It wasn’t the only thing I felt about women. I felt love, affection, awe, amusement. I had many feelings about females, but there was a through line of hatred of women in my psyche that came out of my early childhood experiences.
The lovemap is a concept originated by sexologist John Money in his discussions of how people develop their sexual preferences. Money defined it as “a developmental representation or template in the mind and in the brain depicting the idealized lover and the idealized program of sexual and erotic activity projected in imagery or actually engaged in with that lover.”
We all have an erotic template in our head, which creates tremendous attraction for us. And it largely comes out of events in the first 5 years of our life. And so in the first 5 years of my life, I often felt frustrated and demeaned and abused by women. And so I developed a particular love map.
It’s not very nice. It’s not very loving. My love map is not loving. My love map is filled with rage and anger at women. And now it doesn’t display in all relationships. I’ve had very sweet loving girlfriends with whom my very sweet loving relationships, and that element of anger and hatred was was quite muted. Right? Very little of it came out. On the other hand, I’ve had least one girlfriend who was contemptuous of me. And as a result, she triggered some nasty feelings in me towards her (in addition to love and affection and awe and comfort).
In 2006-1007, I dated the daughter of pornographer Suze Randall. She grew up in the belly of the porn beast so she was keenly aware that many men have a hatred of women, and so Holly would encourage me to take out my hatred of women on her in bed. She’d implore me to “Fuck me like a whore!” We’d play with polarity. In her real life, she had power and responsibility, and so when it came to love, she wanted to off-load that. In my real life, I often felt weak and powerless, so in the bedroom, I got charged up imagining I was powerful.
By 2007, I realized I was likely a love addict, and by 2011, I began 12-stepping for it. If you have any kind of addiction operating in your life, you’re going to have a default mode of using and abusing everyone in your life to take care of your addictive needs. So Vox Day thinks that most women treat man with contempt.
I think the percentage of women who treat men like that is about the same as the percentage of men who treat women like that. So probably a quarter.
You can see a through-line of rage in my life and in Vox Day’s life. Why won’t the world recognize our brilliance? So we devote considerable time and resources to developing a second life online where we can become the kind of superior man that we feel has been denied us in real life.
This rage explains much of my online production until about 2015, and you can see this rage at women, rage at society, rage at the West, rage at the elites, rage at the media, through Vox Day’s work. This pathology characterizes much of dissident commentary. Where does the energy come from to produce with little or no financial reward? Anger over a lack of success in the real world.
Most of us have knee-jerk contempt for people with more power than us. We think that power rightly belongs to us but we’ve been denied because of our messed up society. The easiest thing in the world is to resent those who are more successful than you are.
When I read punditry, I often think — how is this serving the compulsive psychological needs of the person who’s giving it? Is this commentary a way of justifying oneself and soothing one’s insecurity or is it a contribution to the public good?
We have thousands of military age Chinese men illegally entering the United States. And it gets no attention.
Joe Biden talks tougher with China than did Donald Trump, but has done less building up our military and building up Taiwan
During Donald Trump’s time in office, his foreign policy often seemed childish and chaotic while Biden’s administration has not leaked and has generally appeared smooth and sophisticated, but the upshot is disaster in Europe and disaster in the Middle East. How something looks and feels often bears no relationship to the reality of the policy.
There’s no connection between sounding incompetent and being competent, sounding excellent and being excellent, sounding ethical and being ethical.
Biden talks more in humanitarian terms with regard to foreign policy while Trump talks in selfish nationalist terms. And ironically, Trump’s selfish nationalist perspective would result in far less suffering than Biden’s disasters. If fully armed by the US, Israel is capable of crushing Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program. Once you have a decisive winner in Israel, then you might have a better chance for peace in the Middle East.
Ukraine cannot decisively win against Russia, and it’s madness to try to subsidize Ukraine into doing so. So the US doesn’t have to subsidize Israel for Israel to win. Israel is perfectly capable of funding its own procurement of weapons and you’re simply allowing Israel to buy the weapons that it needs. And stop regulating and limiting Israel’s fight against those trying to destroy it. So the Biden administration is consistently micro managed the Ukraine war and the Israel war and by doing so, they have made the situation a lot worse.There are some fights you don’t wanna micro manage. You just wanna let them blast so that you more quickly get to a conclusion.
Kamala Harris is pretty good at memorizing talking points. And Donald Trump is not good. He still touched on visceral issues with regard to American safety that are more in touch with reality than what Kamala Harris is talking about.
What I’m reading on Substack is more sophisticated than what you get in the Washington Post. This elite media publishes stories fit for an 8th grade reading comprehension. You get deeper commentary on Substack.
So when you’re up against someone like Robert Moses who knows how to wield power. What’s the what’s the best strategy? Probably don’t don’t fight it because you are unlikely to win.
I have been blogging since 07/03/1997. I’m a known quantity. There’s nothing I can say that will shock you. Donald Trump is a known quantity. Every minute that Democrats spend criticizing Trump is a waste. Americans have already made their mind up about Trump.
Like other commentators not employed in the MSM, I’ve long realized that my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is that I can give more honest, real, visceral, blunt descriptions of reality, while people in prestigious jobs such as New York Times column are going to err on the side of caution. My speech is less careful than the big shots at NBC News. So it is easier for me to note that Joe Biden often appears senile and Kamala Harris often appears drunk.
Alright. So for people who know me, it there’s pretty much nothing that I can say or do that we’ll be shocking.
Consciously and unconsciously I reduced my inhibition with what I say publicly and as a result of being less inhibited, more spontaneous, I have said a lot of ugly things in addition to some important truths.
Like Trump, I will sometimes say things that are not factually validated (“They’re eating the dogs”) as a shorthand for a more complicated reality that lies beyond my comprehension. Sometimes I go way off track with this and sometimes I hit on important truths.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
