[The Lizard of Oz]

The post below was written as a reply to a remarkable, and remarkably honest, post by Phoenix in the forum lounge on the subject of sexual resentment. Here is the link to Phoenix's post:

thread-9856-...pid1166974

I felt that his post was extraordinary, and merited a reply that would not be appropriate for the lounge. And I hope Phoenix does not take amiss my passionate response to his passionate post.

*************************************

Phoenix,

It may sound like a strange thing to say, but I love reading posts like this. This level of emotional honesty is extremely rare. A great many men experience resentment -- specifically, the kind of sexual resentment you describe here -- as one of their strongest and most burning emotions. Indeed, for many men, it is the defining emotion of their lives. But virtually no men will ever straightforwardly admit to it; there is nothing more hidden from public view and more persistently and cagily lied about and dissimulated. To the extent that men lie about their psychology -- and they do -- varieties of resentment are what they lie about with the greatest care; so it is bracing, and good, to see it laid out in an intimate and unadorned way in a post like yours. I can feel its sharp and bitter sting, across the screen and across the ocean; the pixels themselves seem to burn with it.

It is truly excellent that you did not keep this resentment to yourself, but had the instinct to bring it out into the open. And now you should seize upon this opportunity to examine this resentment, to reflect on it, and most importantly, to rid yourself of it as completely as possible.

You should let go completely of this sexual resentment and the attendant regrets about the past. There are few things that are more insidiously corrosive to a man's mind and heart than resentment felt -- even intermittently -- across a long period of time, years and years of a life. Resentment evacuates a man's best energies, thoughts and feelings; and over time, it makes him curdle into something as small and bitter as the emotion itself. It is a dreadful spiritual fate, and it is not a fate that any man should want for himself; yet it is one that befalls many men, to a greater and lesser extent.

Men like to attribute this diminishment to the world around them, saying that it has changed for the worse, and has lost its lustre; but it is they that have changed, it is they who have curdled into smallness and bitterness because of resentments that have been allowed to fester for too long and corrode their hearts and souls. The world is still there, in all its splendor; but not for them. What could be more terrible?

How do you let go of an emotion so deep and seemingly insuperable? It seems impossible. As you say in your post, all the reminders about the sexual success you've had at various points in your life don't seem to touch this bitter resentment of other men who are having it right now, and the feeling that one has been robbed of it in one's youth and can never get those years back. It seems as if experiencing an emotion like this is not a choice; you can't help but feel it once it wells up. The only remedy seems to be ever more "self-improvement", in the hope that getting back what's yours will relieve the sting. What else can one do?

But this is not so. What most men do not understand is that feelings, emotions -- and particularly powerful and persistent ones -- do not occur in a vacuum. All feeling proceeds from thought. The reason you can have this lingering emotion of resentment, which is sometimes tamed but sometimes bursts into the open, is because there are certain thoughts and ideas about the world that you hold. It is these thoughts and ideas that lead to the emotion and make it possible. If those thoughts and ideas were to change -- truly change, from something you believe to be the case to something you no longer believe -- the emotion, soon enough, would change as well.

What are the thoughts and ideas that lead to this emotion of intense sexual resentment? They are, more or less, the following:

-- Sexual success, as such, is the greatest good in life; there is no other good that compares to it.
-- The part of sexual success that makes it a great good is its purely psychological component, the validation received by being able to seduce sufficiently attractive and high value women. The physical pleasure of the sex itself is secondary at best.

You would not experience the kind of intense and bitter sexual resentment described in your post if you did not believe both of these statements to be true. Of course you may tell yourself that you do not believe one or both; but the emotion proves that you do.

Why is that? The intensity of the emotion is enough to show that you believe the first idea. If sexual success were merely one good among many others, its absence at periods in your life, and its possession by others, would cause at most a mild pang; you would not feel a world-enveloping resentment -- and what you describe is nothing less -- unless you believed that sexual success is, in fact, a good that dwarfs all others and without which they might as well be worthless.

As for the second part, let me note that the kind of resentment you feel is essentially unrelated to the idea of sexual pleasure as such. As you remark, women were not even on your mind that particular night. If you were to think back, you would find that you feel this resentment most acutely not when in a state of sexual excitement -- even unsatisfied sexual excitement -- but indeed, in states where that sexual excitement is largely absent. Thwarted appetites -- as such -- can lead to frustration; thwarted lust or being "blue-balled" can lead to intense sexual frustration; and you will recognize that this is an entirely different emotion from what you've described. Resentment is something completely different from frustration, and its source is always psychological, not physical.

It follows, then, that not only do you believe that sexual success is the great and ultimate good before which all others pale; but also, that the part of sexual success that makes it such a great good is the very fact of the success itself, the validation and achievement that it represents; the physical pleasure derived from it being a mere bonus at best. These beliefs are what enables the burning emotion of resentment of other men who enjoy sexual success while you don't; and also the terrible regret of having been deprived of this success in the past.

Now we come to the point. Both of these beliefs are false. And if you can come to see that they are false -- not merely to say it, but to actually see it -- the emotion of resentment that proceeds from them will no longer be able to exist in your heart, because the thoughts that lead to it will no longer reside in your mind. And so you will be rid of an emotion that, if unchecked, threatens to corrode and lessen your spirit and to curdle it into something less than what it can and should be.

The fundamental reason these beliefs are false is that, very generally, they greatly overvalue psychology and subjectivity, and greatly undervalue objectivity and the world outside the self. One's personal success or failure, and all that attends to it, is simply too narrow a field to constitute the greatest good. Subjective psychology, and all its paces and iterations, is something quite finite and limited; whereas the world at large, the world outside the self, is endlessly various, complex and unlimited. To be fundamentally absorbed in one's psychology is an error -- not so much a moral failing as a cognitive error. It simply misses the fact that the greatest and most important part of life is what happens outside the self.

Almost all intelligent men are guilty of this error to a lesser or greater extent; and indeed sexual psychology or the psychology of eros is the one that they privilege most often, but there are other varieties as well. And in very large part, this error is due to the literary conventions that intelligent men imbibe virtually with their mother's milk. For a very long time, these literary conventions have privileged inwardness and psychology as their subjects of inquiry and concentration; they made it seem as if these were the most important subjects. As a result, there is no other belief that is more characteristic of the intelligent literary man than the notion that the entire play of life unfolds, more or less, within the theater of the psychological self; and that the psychology of eros is its grandest and most serious stage, the locus of life's most profound tragedies and most intense melodramas.

But to see through that belief is to realize just how limited and narrow in scope it really is. The greatest part of life does not consist of the harshly constrained dramas and tragedies of the self; rather, it consists of the vast and endless comedy of the world outside the self. No psychological boon, no level of success no matter how vertiginous -- and conversely, no psychological lack or failure -- will ever add up to as much as the endless agglomeration of seemingly modest facts, objects and occurrences that make the world what it is. They don't -- simply because they can't.

A man who truly understands this will therefore see that as long as some very basic physical preconditions have been satisfied: good health, freedom from extreme material want or financial anxiety, and a reasonable level of physical safety -- he is always free to attend to what is the true greatest good, and that is the world around him in all its endless interest, variety and comedy in the deepest sense of the word. He may and will strive for other forms of success, and for pleasure where he may find it; but he will not lose sight of the fact that the vagaries of psychology -- whatever they may be, including that hot and narrow band of sexual psychology and its attendant defeats and triumphs -- are never for long to occupy the topmost position on the podium of his mind. That place of honor should be reserved for the only thing vast enough and various enough to reward endless concentration and attention, and that is the objective world outside the self and all its manifestations, large and small alike.

[iknowexactly]

Filipina girls fucked me until I was too exhausted to be pissed off at anyone. Good medicine!!

And I WAS very pissed off as you discuss, and wasted years because of it.

[Disco_Volante]

'All I can think is "that should've been me when I was 20". What that kid that was Phoenix, what his life was then should never have happened. Never. No one should have had to suffer that, whilst people like those guys were off getting their dick wet like it was nothing."

edit: I assume you're from a religious upbringing where you were taught that chasing tail is wrong.

Every year a new crop turns 18 man. and the carefree young people you see hooking up will perish in droves when the economy collapses soon. that sounds very shadenfreude but it's true. all the young people partying it up will probably suffer or at least have a shitty quality of life down the road. These are the same types of young people who live carefree, in the moment are the ones politicians will fuck the hardest, as like you said, they are positive, happy people who avoid negativity. but reality is quickly becoming negative for many people...economically and physical security. They don't know how to handle adversity or adapt to a changing economy.

You value women too much, you shouldn't take them seriously. they aren't meant to be 'understood' so to speak. There's nothing profound about who they decide to fuck.
That's like going to a dog park and getting mad a dog wouldn't chase your Frisbee because a shiny tennis ball stole its attention first.

[Quintus Curtius]

@Phoenix

I like reading posts like that too. It reminds me that all of us have the same experiences.

I have had moments like that. And I still have them. It's natural.

The anger comes from rage at knowing that you were lied to, that no one was there to help you learn about women, and from the sense of lost time.

It is really a melancholy reflection on the brevity of life, and the loss of perceived opportunities.

I remember having one pronounced experience like that. It was a long time ago. I was in a movie theater, alone, and saw two guys and two girls come in. The girls were very attractive. The guys were (in my opinion at least) not.

I knew very little about attracting and dating women. I was awkward and inept around women. But I knew I had the raw materials. But I was so furious at my lack of success, and the idea that someone was getting more than I was, that I had to get up and leave.

It was a moment of transcendent rage.

That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I said: No. More. Failure.

I was sick and tired of failing with women. I would not accept failure any more.

So I forced myself to change. Everything: clothes, habits, dress, conversation, everything. I attached myself to guys who had smooth social skills and imitated what they did.

And on a modest scale, I began to see results.

But you are still haunted by the old memories of failure, even today. So I understand you, Phoenix, man.

But you have to let go of the anger. Let it go. Here's why:

1. Your parents were just as clueless as you were. They probably did the best they could but didn't have the tools to help you.

2. Focusing on the injuries and resentments of the past will blind you to the opportunities that exist now. You might miss new opportunities if you keep thinking about the old stuff.

3. Maybe your old failures helped you in some ways you cannot yet appreciate. Maybe those failures made you a man of iron. Maybe they shaped you into being what you are. Don't underestimate the power of failure to produce good things.

4. You will always feel like someone is getting more than you. It is human nature. Don't focus on that. Focus on your own level of virtue. Be satisfied with the things you have, not what you don't have.

You'll be fine.

[Fast Eddie]

Quote:

But to see through that belief is to realize just how limited and narrow in scope it really is. The greatest part of life does not consist of the harshly constrained dramas and tragedies of the self; rather, it consists of the vast and endless comedy of the world outside the self. No psychological boon, no level of success no matter how vertiginous -- and conversely, no psychological lack or failure -- will ever add up to as much as the endless agglomeration of seemingly modest facts, objects and occurrences that make the world what it is. They don't -- simply because they can't.

I liked the overall gist of your post but I can't really agree with this thesis. Unless I am interpreting it wrong, you are saying that the best part of life is simply observing the world, and that anything above and beyond that is more or less trivial. In that sense, a 30 year old virgin working a dead end $10/hr job and Lebron James are basically on an even plane. They both possess "good health, freedom from extreme material want or financial anxiety, and a reasonable level of physical safety" and are thus able to "attend to what is the true greatest good, and that is the world around [them] in all its endless interest, variety and comedy in the deepest sense of the word."

And yet we all instinctively know that neckbeard guy and Lebron James are in fact not on the same level, and it is completely fanciful to imagine that there isn't a vast chasm between them. Isn't this why we one this forum place so much emphasis on self improvement? Why bother with lifting, making money, and chasing women if the true meaning of life is to convince yourself that all that really matters is enjoying the view as life passes you by?

[Gmac]

Chalk it up to the game and realize how far you've come - which I realize is an easy thing to say and a much harder thing to internalize in your own head. All I can say it with a lot of time and effort it's totally possible to no longer allow situations like this bother you. This is part of growing up and realizing that it's just not worth getting upset over the things you can't control - such as other guys going home with a girl, or worrying about the past and what might have been.

Look back to reflect and learn from the mistakes and successes of your past.
Look around to best make decisions and live more happily in the moment.
Look forward to map out who you want to be and how you want to live.

Never worry about the things that are out of your control. It's just not worth the stress or the time. If you can manage conquering that, you'll be much more successful and content in life.

[CleanSlate]

(12-10-2015 01:25 AM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

The anger comes from rage at knowing that you were lied to, that no one was there to help you learn about women, and from the sense of lost time.

These are the parts that angered me far more than seeing some dude run off with a hot chick.

Realizing that your entire view of opposite sex relations was based on one big fat lie is part of taking the red pill. Or having the red pill shoved down your throat, for that matter, in the case of divorce. It's natural to feel angry as one of the stages of grief, the grief in letting your closely held fairy tale beliefs die.

But in the end, you emerge as a new man. Like a snake shedding his skin... maybe not the best metaphor, but you get the idea.

[The Beast1]

It'll be alright Phoenix. My father didn't learn game until his mid 50s and had 7 notches.

Dude learned some game and has been smashing milfs and cougars from 30+.

I tell him daily to not let the anger seep in and to acknowledge it for what it is. That feeling of lost time is the worst and I don't have much to say to be able to calm it.

Take solace knowing that there are some men who never learn. The worst punishment any person can take.

[UroboricForms]

This is a great thread. One of the reasons I like this community so much is that we can be brutally honest about things that would get us laughed at and shamed by feminists and manginas in the real world. A few years ago I once had a feminist woman (who I had been in an "open" LTR with for a couple of years....) tell me sexual frustration was just something made up by "men who think they're entitled to sex". At one time I almost believed that. Here we know better: the truth is that men require regular and consistent sex to function properly. I should know. We all should know. We're the fucking men, after all!

Sexual resentment. I know this feeling all too well. My entire adolescence and early adulthood was defined by it. It was a constant burning hatred and confusion inside of me. Hate can be a powerful fuel and I thrived on it. Secondary school and especially college were particularly agonizing times of my life in this way. I got through it, thanks to the limited success I had here and there, but mainly thanks to the bitterness and anger burning away inside myself. Its quite perverse, really. Of course, you can imagine I have a great deal of regrets about my past too. This kind of posthumous anger can be very damaging to your well being in the present. I fully appreciate that it can be hard to ignore.

I'm in my mid 20s now, and I first started becoming conscious of game and the red pill around 22 yrs old. You can bet that a lot of my thoughts, then as now, were "if only I knew all this when I was 16...". Where I am now may be better, but it doesn't undo the past. I'm predisposed to being quite nostalgic anyway. My formative years were full of as many profound and seemingly magical heights as they were pits of despair. Its a very bizarre, almost schizophrenic dichotomy to still feel that longing for simpler times, now with an added resentment for what you didn't know back then. Of course, this is compounded by the realisation that you weren't *meant* to know this stuff, just be a good beta and roll over on command, and that you may lose friends as a result of your new-found knowledge, maybe even by them feeling threatened by your success. That's one of the worst parts for me.

I have long since lost count of the amount of times I felt I was losing my fucking mind from being deprived of what I need. For all I know I am already slightly mad as an effect of that and other things in my life. All we can really do is try our best to improve things going forward. I am no slayer, but where I'm at now is a marked improvement to where I was before. You've come this far, that absolutely counts for something. There are still guys out there who haven't woken up, some who never will. As bitter as the truth may be, to stay blind to it is a fate worse than death.

[AnonymousBosch]

(12-10-2015 01:25 AM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

4. You will always feel like someone is getting more than you. It is human nature. Don't focus on that. Focus on your own level of virtue. Be satisfied with the things you have, not what you don't have.

True words. From my experience:

No matter what you desire to possess, someone else will always have more of it.

You'll often get what you desire only to discover it adds no more happiness to your life than what you already possessed.

Your desires are transitory and can be taken away from you at any moment without resulting in your destruction.

Your desires being frustrated strengthens your emotional resilience, adding maturity.

Let go of resentment, and count your blessings. One benefit to this is you become immune to those who try to manipulate you by playing on your insecurities.

A woman I know has been mourning her imperfect childhood for twenty-five plus years now and constantly uses it to score points against her father. Her parents were divorced and he drank. He never hit her or abused her, and worked hard despite his failings to put her through a very good school that's given her a great career where she's very comfortable.

Instead of moving forward with her life, she's constantly-looking back into the distant past and mourning a phantasm of an envied 'perfect childhood' that she believes all other people must experienced. She's too wrapped up in her victimhood to even conceptualise that most other people's childhood experiences are imperfect too.

I guarantee you this: she will carry the weight of this resentment to her grave and is making a daily active choice to do so. She's fixated on mourning a past that she can't change, whilst ignoring a future that she can influence.

Let go of it.

[Bill]

Probably many have felt something like that me included. But now I am much older and I can have 10 times more sex than in the past funnyly I don´t want it so much anymore. I already developed so many other interests that my sex drive is no more a priority.

Everybody knows as a kid at one point we wanted something so badly. Truth is couple of years later we don´t even care about that stuff anymore. So basically there is a great chance that one gives something more value than it has.

To be content means maybe to be able to have many perspectives and switch when it fits. If you have only one perspective you get stuck without alternatives.

I am living in a little appartement I am thinking about getting a bigger one. The thing is I am totally happy with my little one as my interests are mainly mental. For that a litte cave is sometimes even better than a bigger appartement which may trigger more materialism.

Bottom line: Don´t believe your biology. Nature is not there to make you happy. You have to work for it with logic and brain.

[zombiejimmorrison]

I definitely felt that resentment before I learned game and got my mind straightened out. I don't have the psychological need to care about other guys getting laid now. Might say "lucky bastard" if she's my type but no visceral jealousy or hate. Learning how to breathe and meditate helped me a lot. As did talking to good people, and understanding my psychology.

You mentioned your parents and wanting to send them something nasty. I don't know what you went through but from personal experience, having a parent that is critical, abusive and never satisfied with your achievements stays in the mind forever if not dealt with. Feelings of under achievement are always present or manifest into different negative emotions in other areas of life. More success never helps, if the trauma is deep. A little therapy helps in that regard.

[ChickenLover9T9]

When I was 16-18 I had a different girlfriend for each of those three years. Every one of the three was pretty and adorable, the highschool romance was sweeter than sugar. Great right?

In those years I didn't consciously know anything about girls. Some things about me made me "good" with them, other things made be "bad". One of the latter was that I was a rigid cunt. I set very high standards for myself in every aspect of life: academically, in the gym, hobbies, and of course, the girls themselves. I would desire a girl from a distance, make my move and by luck, social circle and being technically a good "catch" I would get the girl I wanted. A month or two passed, I saw her for the human she was, and I felt lingering disappointment.

There was one girl I could have gone for, but never did. We had grown up together since pre-school finger painting at 3 years old. Before we could even speak it was us two. As we entered puberty at the end of elementary school, we stood outside in the middle of her street with rain and wind lashing down on the two of us. We didn't even embrace, I regret that. I looked at her and felt weird, something I had never and still have never felt for another girl in my life. I don't think I ever will, because I have swallowed a red pill. We just looked at each other, all the kids had run inside. We just stood there, staring at each other. As we turned twelve all we knew how to do was tease each other, and sometimes it went too far. This girl grew up to be the most beautiful in my highschool, although some might have reasonably preferred my last highschool girlfriend, who was very well proportioned, graceful and typically feminine. On paper if I had chosen one to marry, it would have been my girlfriend. Although from 16 to 18 there were fleeting moments of electric contact, my high standards and expectations of what feminine behavior "should" be halted me for accepting my childhood sweetheart enough to even embrace her, just once. No matter what happens, no matter what women sit on my face, no matter the level of suffocation until I am purple in the face; no amount of declarations of love could make me feel like the girl who used to pour buckets of sand on my head in preschool.

At my peak in highschool I was pretty shredded. My girlfriend was waiting for me outside the school so that we could walk home together, but as I walked to my locker to get my stuff, the girl appeared in the other direction, placed her hand on my rippling abdominals, and said, "your girlfriend is waiting outside", then left. When you have never cold approached once in your life because you blissfully had no reason to, when lovestruck highschool girls do half the work for you, it's god hard to do anything when a girl has a place in your heart, and there is no logical reason why, and you are just paralyzed. As the person I was at that time, it was impossible for me to do anything about it, yet to this day my heart might occasionally skip a beat with a passing thought of brief moments we had or could have had, and I can't help but regret my paralysis and chide myself for it. Because, at the same time, there was both nothing and everything in the way of making happen what was, as it felt, written to happen into this universe billions of years before we existed, yet I could produce nothing. Fucking nothing.

I wasn't even desperate. I just loved this girl. I don't know why. No one knows this, not even her. I don't even think about what she may be now, because it would definitely be too depressing and much worse than the occasional passing thought I have of her from time to time.

One moment for no apparent reason I remember above all others. She was standing in the entrance, waiting for somebody. Maybe her boyfriend, maybe a friend, you would think I might have kept track of these things, but I just didn't, I blocked her out. I was a rigid cunt. I didn't approve of her being "hot" and even having fucked one other guy, which she definitely had (and then some). Was I right to dismiss her because, compared to my faithful, feminine, virgin (when I met her) girlfriend, she was relaitvely slutty? Because she dared to put on makeup and challenge me? She used to say in math class that me and my girlfriend were in love and going to get married, both in a teasing manner and almost as if she was happy for me. She was bad in ways that I stubbornly did not forgive, possibly to the approval of a community of "red pill" thinkers, but she had also grown up without a father, and I was there when people asked her where her dad was and a well held back tear would finally make it out and down her cheek. She partially at least had a good heart, and could be exceptionally warm to me, turning back the clock ten, fifteen years to when we were kids. Now to all of us she is just another slut. This hurts my heart.

So on that otherwise non-exceptional day, when she was there waiting, one of the greatest regrets of my youth was not walking up to her, putting my differences aside for just a few seconds, just enough to embrace her. I don't know what would have happened. I may have cried, she may have cried. I would have clasped the back of her hair tight and she would have known I loved her. The world is such that it could never have lasted beyond these few seconds, but still I regret.

This is the only resentment - that of myself for my inaction - that exceeds observing that small percentage of men who at least appear to "have it easy". When I see a "hot girl" with these largely average men, I try to think of the things more important, and that she could never beat what I felt all those years ago. I don't beat myself up so much anymore for letting that go, because I had no conscious awareness of what I was doing with girls, I was an 18 year old fucking dumbass. The older you get, the more you realize that you actually didn't know as much as you thought you did when you were a teenager. The first twenty years of your life, you are like a leaf in the wind. Any semblance of true control is an illusion. Don't beat yourself up for things you cannot - and could never - change. All you can do is your best going forward, and try to take lessons from those painful times of intense negative emotion so that you can mold your future into something that you can be proud of.

[Off The Reservation]

(12-09-2015 11:34 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

The post below was written as a reply to a remarkable, and remarkably honest, post by Phoenix in the forum lounge on the subject of sexual resentment. Here is the link to Phoenix's post:

thread-9856-...pid1166974

I felt that his post was extraordinary, and merited a reply that would not be appropriate for the lounge. And I hope Phoenix does not take amiss my passionate response to his passionate post.

*************************************


The fundamental reason these beliefs are false is that, very generally, they greatly overvalue psychology and subjectivity, and greatly undervalue objectivity and the world outside the self. One's personal success or failure, and all that attends to it, is simply too narrow a field to constitute the greatest good. Subjective psychology, and all its paces and iterations, is something quite finite and limited; whereas the world at large, the world outside the self, is endlessly various, complex and unlimited. To be fundamentally absorbed in one's psychology is an error -- not so much a moral failing as a cognitive error. It simply misses the fact that the greatest and most important part of life is what happens outside the self.

I am going to have to reread this entire post a few more times to make sure I get it. Thankfully, there is no alcohol involved in my lack of understanding this deeply. I just need to absorb it. TLOZ, I do have an immediate question - does this apply to all forms of resentment?

[AnonymousBosch]

(12-10-2015 03:48 PM)ChickenLover9T9 Wrote:  

I wasn't even desperate. I just loved this girl. I don't know why. No one knows this, not even her. I don't even think about what she may be now, because it would definitely be too depressing and much worse than the occasional passing thought I have of her from time to time.

The thing about phantasms of regret and resentment is they're always idealised and romanticised in a positive way.

You could have ended up with that girl, only to have her fall pregnant at 16 and balloon up like a hippo after the shotgun wedding. She might have blamed you for ruining her life and future for knocking her up, and passive-aggressively taken it out on you until you turned to the bottle.

Here's another example:

"If only I'd kept up my high school football career." No-one ever fantasises about the neck injury they potentially-escaped in a game that would have left them a quadriplegic.

Or in Phoenix's case:

"That man is going off with a beautiful woman - the woman he'll identify later as the one who gave him Herpes."

See how no-one considers negative possibilities? This is why it turns into negative self-flagellation. The feelings are pointless intellectual masturbation. If you're feel envy, always turn the mirror back to yourself, detach emotions and simply ask 'why do I feel like this'? Let it initiate self-improvement if it has that potential, but let the resentment component go.

There is the threat of being swamped by these emotions as you age, which is why the sooner you learn to control these feelings the better.

I've never really felt this about women. In my younger childhood, it was knowing I was poor. In my twenties, I used to feel this a lot about music when I'd see a band I thought was terrible being praised: "They're crap and my music so much better." Now? I genuinely think 'Good for them'. You'll be surprised the stronger network you can build when people can sense you're genuine and sincere in your praise of others.

Leave this passive-aggressive mindset to the women: "You're getting married? OMG I'm sooo happy for you."



This is why women can't stand each other.

[The Lizard of Oz]

(12-10-2015 01:42 AM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Quote:

But to see through that belief is to realize just how limited and narrow in scope it really is. The greatest part of life does not consist of the harshly constrained dramas and tragedies of the self; rather, it consists of the vast and endless comedy of the world outside the self. No psychological boon, no level of success no matter how vertiginous -- and conversely, no psychological lack or failure -- will ever add up to as much as the endless agglomeration of seemingly modest facts, objects and occurrences that make the world what it is. They don't -- simply because they can't.

I liked the overall gist of your post but I can't really agree with this thesis. Unless I am interpreting it wrong, you are saying that the best part of life is simply observing the world, and that anything above and beyond that is more or less trivial. In that sense, a 30 year old virgin working a dead end $10/hr job and Lebron James are basically on an even plane. They both possess "good health, freedom from extreme material want or financial anxiety, and a reasonable level of physical safety" and are thus able to "attend to what is the true greatest good, and that is the world around [them] in all its endless interest, variety and comedy in the deepest sense of the word."

And yet we all instinctively know that neckbeard guy and Lebron James are in fact not on the same level, and it is completely fanciful to imagine that there isn't a vast chasm between them. Isn't this why we one this forum place so much emphasis on self improvement? Why bother with lifting, making money, and chasing women if the true meaning of life is to convince yourself that all that really matters is enjoying the view as life passes you by?

Fast Eddie, thank you for this question which really cuts to the heart of the matter. You are essentially asking, what constitutes the good life -- is it really simply a matter of "enjoying the view", as I seem to be saying? And isn't that idea contradicted by your juxtaposition of LeBron with the imagined "30 year old virgin working a dead end $10/hr job" (aka "neckbeard")? Isn't LeBron's life self-evidently better than the neckbeard's, never mind their respective abilities to "enjoy the view"? And the implicit question is: what does this "enjoyment of the view" amount to anyway, what is it really all about?

These are important questions, and I would like to address all of them. To do this I will have to bring together some strands of thought from a number of other threads, and this will require a series of posts. I hope you and others will find them of interest.

To begin with, I will note that the crucial dichotomy I made in the OP is not the one between activity and contemplation, as suggested in your question; nor is it the one between ambition and quietism. Rather it is the distinction between psychology and objectivity. What I contend is that it is the privileging of psychology over objectivity that most deprives intelligent men of the ability to live a good and enjoyable life; and of all varieties of psychology, it is the psychology of eros that is particularly privileged in this way (and sexual resentment, the subject that spurred the post, is just an especially corrosive consequence of this privileging of the psychology of eros). Finally, I noted that the privileging of psychology in general, and of the psychology of eros in particular, is part of the default cognitive predisposition of intelligent literary men.

I discussed this very idea previously in an earlier post that I am reposting in full below. It was written in reply to Icarus in the Mark Ames "Meditations on Misogyny" thread, and I'd like to bring it to bear here because it touches on this crucial part of the OP, as well as on what it is that constitutes the good life as I see it.

I will continue answering your question in subsequent posts.

(04-27-2014 12:04 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

Icarus, I never said Ames was a beta (or not), only that he glorifies the knowledge born of the beta's experience a little too much for my taste.

My impression of Ames himself is that he is an extremely literary guy in a way that is unpleasant to me; I find his writing in this passage annoying and bordering on cringe-worthy. So many writer types are overrated -- they preen and psychologize and leave you with very little. Really, almost all literary writing is poison: a thin and mannered reduction of the world rather than a lively addition to it. This is doubly true at the present time for reasons that I outlined in our previous exchange.

Further, one of the real problems with literary and intelligent men is that they overvalue the sphere of eros quite generally, making it the locus of absolute concentration of their psychology; this applies both to men who are relatively successful with females and to those who aren't. Almost all these men are obsessed with eros and its highs and lows, its supposed Garden of Eden and its hells and purgatories, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

This is a terrible mistake; the erotic band, while it is a very hot one, is much too narrow to sustain such concentration. As a result of this, men often lose the world, because they never really become interested in life quite generally. That is why their writing, if they do write, often feels so dead on the page -- all the details that are mentioned seem rote and rehearsed since they are not the organic distillation of a sustained loving attention to every part of life; such a loving attention is impossible to a man continually consumed by the psychology of eros in all its manifestations.

Indeed, this applies even to these men's apprehension of the ostensible point of eros: the act of fucking and the purely physical aspects of sexuality. For it is quite true that in the right circumstances, using a woman's body with the appropriate concentration and avidity is one of the very greatest physical pleasures that a man can experience -- and that is a big deal. But intelligent and literary men are so absorbed in the useless morass of erotic psychology that they often lose even the pure appreciation of the thing itself, and their relation to what I called elsewhere the moving meat becomes as abstracted as their relation to all other parts of objective reality. And that is a terrible waste.

So while is is of course necessary and important for a man to acquire a good understanding of female nature and female psychology, it is perhaps even more valuable for literary and intelligent men to deflate and de-emphasize the psychology of eros very generally. It is no Garden of Eden; it never was. It is a sphere where great and superb pleasures can be had, and they should be sought when possible; but while these pleasures should be properly attended to and appreciated, it is a bad mistake to let the psychological ambiance surrounding either their presence or absence become one's main focus in life. There is maybe nothing that an intelligent and literary man can do to give himself a chance at an unusually interesting and enjoyable life that is of more value than seeing through the lamentable literary cliche of valuing psychological eros and its ecstasies and depredations above all other parts of life.

Finally, what I mean by "other parts of life" is not "algebraic geometry", as it were (though of course that is of very great value). But all too often for a certain kind of intelligent man the world divides a little too neatly into two spheres, one of them encompassed by an abstract and purely technical field of work, and the other consisting entirely of some variety of eros and erotic psychology.

So by suggesting that such men should de-emphasize erotic psychology, I do not mean that they should therefore concentrate entirely on their often quite abstract and technical field of expertise (although that may be fine in some cases). Rather, I really mean a much more subtle and not so harshly delimited interest in the world at large; in what one sees on the street and in the coffee shop, so to speak. I really feel that there is no better and more rewarding way to live one's life than one that allows a man to enter into a state of relaxed and thoughtful openness to experience and to the world around him. Life has the characteristics of depth and subtlety, and it rewards nothing so much as unforced, relaxed, organic attention over quite long periods of time; a man only comes to love and embrace the world if he allows himself to marinade in it for years and years.

Nothing distracts a man from the world and its subtle depths as much as the continual absorption in this or that psychological morass; and for the intelligent and literary man, that morass consists of the world of eros in 9 cases out of 10.

[The Lizard of Oz]

In this post I will continue to address Fast Eddie's question about LeBron and the neckbeard. It seems that they are both in a position to "enjoy the view"; but isn't LeBron's life necessarily better?

I believe that this question proceeds, in part, from a misunderstanding of the way that a life, lived over time, acquires value and meaning. One of the crudest cliches that the literary -- yet again -- are guilty of is their reduction and hollowing out of everyday life; their thoughtless dismissal of the cumulative effect of modest efforts, interactions and activities sustained and marinaded in time. The literary have nothing to say about the reality of a so-called "9 to 5 job" (for example), other than the utter banality of calling it "soul-crushing". They are blind -- they make themselves blind -- to the myriad possibilities that are involved in almost any endeavor that brings the human being and its mind in contact with other people, and with the material world that we humanize and permeate through long companionship and that we ourselves are, in turn, permeated by.

This is a subject that I addressed in another thread (about a supposed banker who at 46 decided that his life had been "wasted") and again I will quote my post from that thread in full below:

(12-13-2014 10:29 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

The real waste of life is not working a "9-7 banker's job" or whatever this fool thinks is his problem.

The real waste is being a whiner and an ingrate who still imagines -- at 46 -- that ludicrous banalities and cliches like writing a worthless novel or traveling to "help the poor and homeless" are the things that make life worth living.

The real waste is working a banker's job for years and not being enough of a man to have a thousand different thoughts, impressions, and feelings about that job and all the myriad things and people that it involves. The waste is buying into the idiotic cliche that such a job is necessarily "empty" or "soulless", as if it is not a part of life that accrues depth and interest over time if one only allows it to, and keeps one's eyes and one's mind open to what life truly is, to its everyday modest charms and possibilities.

The real waste is being so foolish and conventional as to believe that the true depths and subtleties that make life worth living are only contained in the exotic locales that one has failed to visit or in some thin and conventionally defined literary achievements imagined in one's youth -- as if a very young man could ever have anything of real interest to say.

There is no greater vice than ingratitude -- not because it is morally wrong (which it is) but because it so cognitively evacuating. In the search for a thinly imagined ideal, it hollows out and reduces the actual lived life, depriving it of the true and rich meanings. This is where the real waste lies, in the ingrate's turning away from life, in losing the world. How terrible.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Next, I would like to make another point. Just as intelligent literary men misunderstand the life of activity and its charms and possibilities, so too they misunderstand the life of contemplation. The notion of the contemplative life, as conceived of by most intelligent literary men, is not only not the same as my idea of "enjoying the view"; it is, in fact, its exact opposite.

This is because for intelligent literary men, the idea of a life of contemplation is always animated by the need and desire to turn away from the world, to escape reality and life as it is, and to turn inward. And as ever, what really spurs this need for escape is these men's psychology, and the psychology of eros in particular. Intelligent men who wish to abandon the world and make their way to "nature" and to the contemplative life that they associate with it are, more often than not, simply fleeing eros and its depredations.

In contrast to this, the good life as I see it -- the life of "enjoying the view" -- is the opposite of such an escape. It is, rather, the life of the mind that seeks the world as it is arrayed before us, in its true and endless variety and complexity; it is a life that seeks to join itself to the world, rather than escape it in favor of the vacuous and harshly limited contemplation of the self.

I discussed this subject in an earlier post in a thread about an ostensible hermit who chose to live on $5k a year in a so-called "hobbit hole", and I am reproducing that post in full below:

(11-07-2013 01:36 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

thedude3737 brought up Thoreau and "Walden" in a previous post, and indeed this is something worth talking about in this context.

The literature of nature worship that is exemplified in the writing of Thoreau and other writers like Emerson and Rousseau is, in my opinion, one of the most overrated and pernicious strains of the literary.

It is a literature of bookish men who grossly sentimentalize their experiences of "nature" because for all their brilliance, they can't get a good handle on the world around them. The real world of men and, importantly, women.

They find "nature" pleasant because it offers them a blank canvas on which to project their petulant and thwarted sensibility -- thwarted particularly by unfulfilled eros and the inability to control the female as they think they deserve; and they surround this experience with empty rhetoric born entirely of their book learning, the one thing that they really have. "Nature" is never worshiped by those who inhabit it natively; it is worshiped by the brilliant, solipsistic and wounded outsiders.

To be clear, I'm not saying that these men were necessarily "losers" in a conventional or even erotic sense. But I am saying that they were sensitive, bookish and intelligent men who could not truly get a handle on the world, which is what they thought was owed them by dint of their cleverness and assumed superiority. The literary are immodest, self-absorbed and impatient; when they saw that they had no control over the world and particularly over the thing that meant most to them -- women -- they skulked away to "nature" in which they chose to see their genius reflected back at them.

All very understandable, but the literature that it produces is grievously overrated. Yet many have been suckered by its rhetoric.

It is worth hearing what a truly great writer and thinker, Dr. Samuel Johnson, had to say about these subjects:

http://www.samueljohnson.com/cities.html#263

Quote:

"No wise man will go to live in the country, unless he has something to do which can be better done in the country. For instance, if he is to shut himself up for a year to study science, it is better to look out to the fields, than to an opposite wall. Then, if a man walks out in the country, there is nobody to keep him from walking in again: but if a man walks out in London, he is not sure when he will walk in again. A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life."

http://www.samueljohnson.com/london.html#30

Quote:

"Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists."

http://www.samueljohnson.com/london.html#77

Quote:

Johnson: "The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say, there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit, than in all the rest of the world." Boswell: "The only disadvantage is the great distance at which people live from one another." Johnson: "Yes, Sir, but that is occasioned by the largeness of it, which is the cause of all the other advantages." Boswell: "Sometimes I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desart." Johnson: "Sir, you have desart enough in Scotland."

http://www.samueljohnson.com/london.html#238

Quote:

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Lastly, one must note that conditions have changed to an almost magical extent; there is vastly more learning, interest and experience immediately accessible to anyone with an internet connection than there was in all of Johnson's London. We all live in "London" now. But this does not change the truth of his thinking. When a man is tired of "London" -- meaning, of the true and complex life of the world of thinking and action that surrounds us -- he is tired of life.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Finally, I would like to answer Fast Eddie's question directly. Isn't LeBron's life necessarily better than the neckbeard's? And doesn't that contradict what I say about what I see as life's greatest good, namely "the vast and endless comedy of the world outside the self"?

The answer to the first question is, of course not. A life of outward glamour and even of surpassing achievement can still be a failed life if the man who lived it has neglected to take stock of the world and to respond to its true depths and possibilities; and a life of no great outward achievement can still be a superb one if it has had a wealth of thought and feeling in tender and attentive response to the world and its subtle riches.

To see an example of the former, it is enough to look at a recent thread about someone who might as well have served as a substitute for LeBron in the juxtaposition, namely Tiger Woods. Here is this thread:

Tiger Woods has "nothing to look forward to"

When a man of such great accomplishment and such great wealth as Tiger makes so terrible an error as to imagine, as he turns 40, that he has "nothing to look forward to" -- and even though this complaint is made somewhat more excusable as the result of some long-standing physical injuries -- you see that no amount of ambition satisfied beyond all possible expectation is enough, in itself, to guarantee that sustained thoughtful engagement with the world which alone vouchsafes us a good, enjoyable, and varied life over the full arc of a lifetime.

Conversely, there is nothing that prevents the "neckbeard" -- and yes, even a "30 year old virgin working a dead end $10/hr job", to take that figure of amiable caricature -- from living a life of almost endless depth, interest and variety. To take but one example, this character has at his disposal and at his leisure access to the greatest art that the world has ever known, the art of film, and its unparalleled flowering during its great height of the last century. I wrote down some thoughts about film in a post on another thread, and I will quote the end of that post below:

(10-10-2015 05:38 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

There is too much to say about this subject for a brief post, or even a long one, so I'll add just two things:

First, my point about film was not that its existence was enabled by technological advances (even though it was, of course). Forget about how or why it came to be -- all that matters is that it happened, that this art flourished in the past century and produced countless masterpieces that are, as great and permanent art, beyond anything mankind has created before. My point is not about the film as abstraction -- it is about the immense bounty, the unthinkably luxurious harvest of the hundreds and thousands of beautiful movies that have been made; not just a few hoary classics, but an explosion of creation unlike any other.

Second, the most important way in which film is different in kind from the art that precedes it is not, in fact, technological (though again these things cannot be separated). It is precisely the fact that film is not the creation of a single author; it is not the director's movie in the same way that it is the writer's book or even the playwright's play (and when it is, when film is too harshly directed and too constrained by a single artist's vision, it usually fails of greatness). It is that magical freedom -- the happy and profound felicities that can come about in a fundamentally collaborative art beyond the control of any single mind -- that gives film at its best its special companionable warmth, that allows us to step into it and live alongside it as if we were at large in it, not driven forward by the necessarily limited and straitened conceptions of a single mind.

*******************

I have seen hundreds and hundreds of movies, and yet I know for a fact that I have hundreds more to see, some of which are as great or greater than any I've seen before. This is not some abstract consideration; it's like knowing that you have been granted an endless bounty of beauty, warmth, interest, texture, and truth -- enough for many lifetimes of the most pleasurable concentration that the human mind is privileged to enter into. The least I can do with such an embarrassment of riches is to acknowledge it, and that is why I mentioned the movies as a particular gift that was bequeathed to us by the last century.

A true immersion in that greatest of all arts, a sustained heartfelt response to its unspeakable marvels, would -- in and of itself -- be enough to grant the imagined 9-5 neckbeard a life of great interest, depth, and intensity.

That's not to say, of course, that the neckbeard is likely to have such a life; he is not. The greatest part of the life of such a man would, in all likelihood, be wasted in varieties of corrosive sexual resentment; and the rest of it would likely be straitened by an adherence to one or another reductive and limiting ideology. Most conventional "losers" are not men who have immersed themselves in objectivity -- quite the contrary, they often burn with the insult of their psychology as much or more than anyone else. Conversely, a man of great worldly achievement will be forced to deal in a serious way with reality and with the world as it is; and this engagement with objectivity will distract him from his own psychology -- whatever it may be -- and tend to improve his mind and his life.

That said. There is nothing, in principle, that prevents the neckbeard from throwing away his resentments and his ideological commitments alike, and living a life of thoughtful and relaxed concentration in the world as it is; indeed, this is a possibility that exists for nearly all of us; but every man must find his own way out of the limitations of the self and into the peerless comedy and glory of the life outside the self.

I hope I've also answered your question, offthereservation.

[Zep]

Some heavy answers in here. Not to be glib, but sometimes I just watch the following to help me keep perspective.

[doc holliday]

You know, I read this a lot where guys discover game as they get older and start having success with women, but then they feel ashamed and angry about their failures when they were much younger. Quite honestly, I don't think guys should beat themselves up like this. Game is like any other skill, it takes lots and lots of practice to get it down.

However unlike many other skills one strives to acquire, game requires not just physical ability but mental and perhaps most difficult, emotional intelligence. In my mind for most men, it comes as you get older. Sure, some guys get it intuitively when they're really young, but for most guys, they gotta work at it. And that takes time, effort and repeated failure before finally achieving success with it. The most important thing to do once you start having success is to forgive yourself and embrace your past failings, not dwelling on it.

As a guy getting out of a 20 year marriage, I'm now having to relearn the game, a game where the rules have become much more daunting than they were 20 years ago. I have no doubts though and that's in part because I remember my failures and their lessons and my ability to overcome them without feeling bitter about it.

[Constitution45]

When I was younger, sex was on the pedestal, I thought it was everything. As you get older and you start getting lots of it, especially with women you find very attractive, then it's value just plummets. The mystery just goes away. Of course it is a need, and It is something that needs to be itched every once and a while. But there are more important things to life. Ironically enough, when you start developing this aloof attitude, then getting women becomes way easier.

Getting a high 'notch count' does have a positive effect, once you have achieved your person goal, there is this feeling of accomplishment and just a zen state, is the best way to describe it. But mainly because of as mentioned above, it no longer becomes a high valued prize, which can be used to be yielded against you.

In places where there is a proper balance between the sexes, like Russia, Eastern Europe (Even mainland Europe in comparison to the U.K, U.S), parts of Asia etc. Men don't seem to care about notch counts that much, or going out getting laid. Focusing on having fun, or getting their goals is more of a focus in their lives.

Compare this to men in Britain or America, where you can just hear the frustration in their voices.

A big part of the problem, is that there is a heavy bombardment of over the top sexual images. Instagram, music videos, advertisements, is all too much. This leads to men constantly thinking with their monkey brain, and being over stimulated. It actually makes men weak and dysfunctional, especially if you start removing their ability to attract women and to have sex, by teaching their erroneous self emasculating beliefs.

[Quintus Curtius]

[Ingocnito]

I grew up in a household with a very dramatic mother. In theatrical arts we know most all "acts" can be described as either (Shakespearean) drama, or comedy. Naturally with such a drama queen mother, and a father who just ignored it unless it got too extreme for even him to handle, I became nearly the exact inverse of her.. a comedian. Not the clown type, but it taught me a lot about introspection.

The ability to laugh at one's failures. This isn't to say laugh foolishly without brief hindsight admonishment towards myself, especially if I fell into the same trap I did before with a girl (just with a slight twist that threw me off 2nd, or 3rd time around), but rather laugh at the process, the fickleness of it all.

These are my most at peace times, and frankly happiest. Basically saying to myself:"Ah HA! That's what I was really supposed to learn there, maybe I'm behind the curve, maybe I'm the leader changing shit for better around me, who knows, but I'm living a life I don't douse with deflectors like booze, drugs, workahol, or women to wash away the pain."

So here's how I view things now. Get addicted to the pain itself. This is what I tell recovering addicts of just about anything. Pick that one thing that eats at you, that has control over you, zero in on the pain, and make it your addiction. Eventually what ends up happening is you've run your own results-focused simulation over n over so many times, with the worst case scenario's results playing out - via your personal experiences - that you can lock that bitch notion consuming your mind, your emotions, into a little box, and throw it away, burn it, wipe your ass with it, because now you own it.

And what happens is you're no longer focused on the results at all, and all that dysfunctions you bestowed upon yourself becomes function instead, you get your edge back, this time it's sharper than ever.

[Brian Shima]

Why would he want to send an angry letter to his parents? He sounds like a hater, guys do not really like to see other guys get women in front of them. I used to get mad many years ago, until I started watching guys to see how they did it..