Kinda late in the game

I’m going to be responding to a youtube video I saw recently, it’s from this guy called Monday (a pseudonym obviously) and I know I have always tried not to mention e-celebs and internet personalities by name but this video really helped me stay sane and I want to talk about it. I want to grasp onto it and not let go, I’m scared that if I forget this feeling that I’ll slip back into the dark pit I’ve been stuck in this last week. Now I’ve been watching his videos for a good four or five months now and some of them have been really helpful, or at least thought provoking, but I think this just found me at the right time. He has several channels, but one in particular where he specifically talks about what I guess he would call “the foreveralone phenomenon”, and the video I just saw was on that channel. Now this video, I saw it at the end of what has been a particularly difficult day for me. So I was kind of on the look out for anything that might help me feel better, and perhaps that means I’m finding meaning or a sense of hope that isn’t really there because I’m just desperate, but it feels a little bit real right now and I don’t have much else.. so I’m going to write about it.

Ok, so I’ve tried to explain what happened several times over and had to keep deleting it all so I’m just going to give the briefest summary possible of what happened today. I had a long discussion with my dad, almost seven hours, I told him all about the many ways in which I feel resentful towards him. I told him that I blamed him for me turning out to be so weak willed and spineless, that I blamed him for me losing most of my friends, and because of that I felt like he was also indirectly responsible for me slowly becoming completely isolated and cut off from the world. Now we talked about all of that and a whole lot more as well, and I just felt worse after the conversation was over. I only want one thing, I want him to leave. Now I know how that sounds without the proper context, but I have kind of explained my rather unusual living situation in this post, so maybe give that a read it’s very short. In fact it’s one of the worst posts I’ve ever uploaded, but it’s the only time I’ve talked about my living situation here so it’ll have to do.

I can’t leave, so if I want to be able to try and even start to build some kind of a life he has to be the one to go. Yet he never does, he promises month after month, year after year that he’s making plans to move out and let me have some independence and yet he’s still here. It’s horrible, and I feel bad because as much as I do have a lot of anger and bitterness towards him he is my own father and I’m not strong enough to force him to leave even though I could legally evict him. He has to choose to do it, and if not I’m going to be his age (55) before I can even start my life. That thought is soul destroying, and I don’t see a way out. I’m incredibly “far behind” my peers in terms of the standard set of accomplishments people are generally expected to be working on throughout their lives, and I can’t get started catching up (although I don’t ever see myself on the “standard” path, but just having some kind of life where I feel in control and have something to work towards/ a goal) as long as he’s still around. I mean I could, I could move out and find a place of my own but I’d literally be throwing away several hundred thousand pounds. Also like I said, every time I start to get desperate and say if he won’t leave I’ll just have to he promises again that he will actually leave soon and then I spend another six months to a year just in my room waiting for him to leave so I can fucking do something.

I don’t know if I’ve actually mentioned this story on this blog yet, it might not have come up, but I told him for the first time in the conversation today about this incident which happened to me not too long after I got my job and I think it illustrates what I’m talking about perfectly so I’ll mention it here. I was working a sunday shift, and this Spanish girl came into the shop and asked if she could plug her phone charger into one of the sockets until her bus arrived. Now she was kind of looking at her phone most of the time but also kept stopping to talk to me and for whatever reason I found it surprisingly easy to talk to her. Usually I have a lot of trouble talking with people, women especially of course but it’s certainly with other males too. I can quite vividly remember this one moment where I corrected something she said, and she just gave me this incredibly warm smile while looking directly into my eyes from only a foot away. She was pretty too, not stunning by any means but I’m sure most guys would be perfectly happy with a girlfriend who looked like her.

Then just before she was leaving, she pulled out this big notebook and opened it out on the desk right in front of me and asked me to write down my phone number. So I was a little confused, and I was starting to explain to her that if she gets lost or something it would make more sense to actually call the british transport police rather than me… and then she started laughing. Only then did I actually realise she was asking me out, and she must have assumed I was joking but I really did completely misunderstand her at first. The idea of it was absurd, I actually remember laughing openly immediately after realising what she wanted because of how out of left field it was. Which was probably misinterpreted also, as me laughing at the “joke” she thought I had made.

See this kind of thing doesn’t happen to me regularly because I’m never around women, the idea of getting a girlfriend or even just losing my virginity is always distant, it could happen but it’s not going to be tomorrow, or next week or in half a year. Yes I meet the customers but I’m pretty sure an attractive female customer asking for my phone number is a one in a million event that won’t happen again. The reliable way that most guys find a gf is through a social circle, that’s also the way they find friends more generally speaking and frankly jobs and opportunities as well. Life stems from this nexus in almost every regard, and if you don’t somehow plug yourself into one and instead fall through the cracks it can be incredibly difficult to get by.

Anyway that incident in particular is unusual as I said, but it’s not the only time something similar has happened. I mean, some kind of interaction that has left me convinced that the female was interested. This isn’t me trying to brag, despite what r9k says you don’t need to be chad to attract women, by my age something like 96% of men have lost their virginity. I’m talking about this because it has a greater point, which is that it happens just frequently enough that I never change. It’s why I never fell into this total hopelessness about it that some people on r9k seem to have, because every time I’m getting close to accepting that I’ll just always be alone something like this happens to remind me that I could have had a chance if only something went differently.

Yet nothing ever actually works out, take this example in particular of the Spanish girl. She texted me later that evening, and wanted to meet. I said I couldn’t do the first suggestion because I was working that day, then I made a suggestion and that was “too long to wait”. She was apparently only here for a few weeks, so I don’t even know what her plan was but I kind of felt like my time had been wasted so I deleted her number and the conversation thread. I was also kind of developing oneitis for my co-worker, the one who had a boyfriend (although obviously at this point I wasn’t aware of that) of the two I talked about in my very first few posts. So perhaps that somehow affected how I acted in that situation, I can’t know but it’s a possibility.

Well I just think that it’s kind of an interesting parallel, nothing ever actually happens in my life and I’ve made no progress in any regard. Not just in finding a girlfriend, in any area. See most people are not “go getters” from the start, they have to realise that life isn’t going to come to them, but there are people in the world who don’t need to do anything and it’s easy to convince yourself that could be you. It takes a long period of things not going your way to motivate most people, at this point I’ve read countless stories from normies who claim to have been “robots themselves once” and they always talk about how they had to hit rock bottom first, and in my case especially I think my ability to get excited or motivated is diminished. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean the region of the brain that governs that sort of thing is somehow damaged, but I’m going to get into that later in this post when I talk about the video.

Now every time it gets really bad and I start to reach this breaking point that a lot of people need to get to, something happens to prolong my lethargy. A girl shows some kind of interest in me, which convinces me I don’t need to make any effort because eventually if this keeps happening I won’t spill my spaghetti or somehow fuck it up, and I never grow the spine to take matters into my own hands. Whether it be online dating, or trying to go back to study, or find some kind of career. I probably will end up alone and with no accomplishments. I’ve also got some other problems with online dating that I’ve talked about here, if you’re interested. So I consciously recognise this, but I don’t feel like it really is that way.

As I say, something prevents me every time from hitting that point where I recognise this reality on a deeper level. Yes I know this doesn’t reflect well on me, a stronger person wouldn’t just keep up the inertia that is slowly destroying them, but obviously I’m not a stronger person. I’m like the frog that’s slowly being boiled alive, but every time I start to perhaps figure out the water is heating up the water is cooled down slightly. There’s a big difference between being able to consciously recognise what is happening and being able to actually reroute these damaging thought patterns. It literally is biological, there is something deeper. I’ve tried for half a decade to “think my way out” of this way of living and I can’t do it.

So in the discussion I had with my dad I brought that story up for a different reason, it’s only upon reflection after talking with him and both things being on my mind that I had this eureka moment where I realised there was this pattern in both areas of my life. There is a big difference as well, in the case of him constantly promising to leave he’s deliberately stringing me along rather than me perhaps stringing myself along you could say in other regards. On top of that, it is my own father doing this to me so there’s an added feeling of betrayal. Because we all understand that as a parent the one thing you should prioritise is the success and happiness of your offspring, I don’t think anyone would disagree.

Yet if I actually expect him to live up to this I’m called entitled, I’m blaming my parents for my own character faults, and I’m the kind of person on which that kind of line of thinking actually will work. I’m very self critical, I’m always trying to make sure that I’m not just “coping” or lying to myself. Yet when I really think about it, this kind of pattern started when I was in my early teens and he had taken over the role of main carer. I actually can accept that it’s kind of a “bad look” to blame your parents for all your troubles in life, but surely it’s even more pathetic and shitty to blame a young teen who is in your sole care for them failing on the most fundamental level.

The reason I mentioned the story with that girl when talking with him was because at one point he asked if I thought I’d find a girlfriend soon, the implication being that would perhaps make me happier, and I said I found it incredibly unlikely. Now maybe it’s because I just never talk about this sort of thing with him, the subject has come up maybe three or four times ever, but he seemed really surprised that I would say that. So he kept trying to move back to that subject, and I guess I thought that that story would better explain. It’s not that I don’t think I can find a gf, it’s that I don’t think I will. Again I mean I don’t rationally see it happening, of course in some sense I still feel otherwise but I’m somehow aware this is self delusion.

I don’t see myself changing certainly not while I’m still living with him. As I said I’ve become a very resentful person and I just get angry when I can even hear him in the other room. I’ve been getting violent intrusive thoughts more and more frequently over the last year or so. He said to me that in these trips away he takes a couple times a year I don’t seem to change, but I’m going to need to be away from his poison for longer than that to get better and in fact I actually am noticeably more productive and happy when I’m away from him for more than a week. Here’s an example, despite the whole situation that I was going through last time he went away right around the start of this blog I wrote almost twice as many posts in that month than most since. It took a while to return to normal as well, as I wrote quite a lot in the second month as well, and then after a few weeks of him getting home this depressive fog settled over me again.

Anyway, the conversation accomplished very little. My dad is more aware now of how bitter I am towards him and he says he’ll try to find a job and a place to live but I can’t help but feel like in a year’s time he’ll still be here leeching off of me and the government teat. I’ve just lost all respect I once had for him, and it’s really sad because there was a time when I was a small boy where I respected him more than anyone else in the world, and I remember what it was like. The only interesting turn the discussion took was just before I decided I couldn’t stand being in the same room as him anymore, we started talking about my lack of motivation. I mean generally speaking, and also how that coincided with the period of the last five years where I feel like I’ve been on this downward spiral into total isolation and apathy.

Now obviously my lack of motivation or desire to do anything is something I’ve struggled with trying to overcome for as long as I’ve experienced it, but I’ve never really spoken about it with a real person. Not in depth I mean, I’ve only really been able to vent about it and talk about how to perhaps overcome it with people online. Even with the girl I talked about in this post, I never really got to talk about it much despite the fact that I was quite concerned about it at the time having just dropped out of my A-level courses because of it. I mean we did, but not really, I’ve never been able to have a conversation with someone that was in depth. I’ve never been able to get someone else’s opinion on my specific version of this problem. Like I said though it wasn’t that helpful yesterday either, and I kind of gave up and just ended the talk but it did serve to remind me that this is the crux of it. This lack of drive, it’s what everything else kind of rests on.

Yes, I still do hold my dad’s poor parenting responsible for me losing my friends/ turning down the invites and attempts to pull me along with him that one friend in particular made. I think if I had a social circle I would have found it easier to just push through with my education and I would be working on something to this day even if there was this underlying lack of willpower. I suppose, the isolation basically intensified it quite drastically. If I’d had gone along to these social things, met up with this friend and all the new people he was trying to introduce me to I would have maybe even found a girlfriend by my late teens in the same organic way that most fucking people on the planet do. I’d have probably gone on to university after finishing my A-levels, and met more people there that I liked. I think I’m always going to feel like he took that away from me, but I am still young as people love to remind me and while I can’t go back and redo life the “normal way” I can try and solve the deeper issue. I can try and fix my brain, and this is the conclusion that I came to after watching this video I said I’d talk about.

See my dad’s perspective when I started going into detail about this problem I’ve faced for the last half decade was that there wasn’t really a problem. That I don’t need to have motivation, that I only think of the idea of working towards a goal as something I should have because of social conditioning or something like that. Basically he had the most typical cynical Gen Xer take on it you can imagine, the exact kind of toxic attitude that makes living with him so fucking unbearable. He also kept focusing on the university example I used, it’s like he’s incapable of abstract thought. He is not a very intelligent man, if that wasn’t already clear, and I hate saying that but it’s true. I was using that as an example of something that many people do aspire towards, getting a degree (something he actually did himself, a law degree, even though he did nothing with it) is a goal for many people. It could be travelling, or starting a business, or having a family. These are things that people live for, these are reasons they get up in the morning. That’s what I don’t have.

The problem is I’ve tried, I’ve thought about all of the standard things like those I’ve listed and some more unusual ones and they all just sound really shit. Every time I think I’ve found something that could be “my thing”, I start to instinctively pick it apart and think about how it would be pointless and unsatisfactory if I actually pursued it. The thing is, most people today in the western world have been raised as godless epistemic materialists. It’s incredibly rare to find someone who has a sense of true or objective meaning or purpose, now you’ll quite frequently be told to “find your own meaning”. And that right there is the difference, somehow most people are able to do that but I can’t. Ennui is the unfortunate side affect of prosperity, and you see that all around you, but it doesn’t make most people practically catatonic. It’s not normal, it’s actually very unhealthy and it’s destroying me as it has destroyed my dad. The difference is he isn’t consciously aware of it, he thinks that this living death is normal which is why he doesn’t care that it’s happening to me.

It’s the video that made me realise this, see in it this Monday guy talks about a conversation on his discord server between two men and they seem to end up talking about the same issue. One of the guys talking doesn’t know what he wants, just in life generally speaking, and the video explains how that is actually not just normal but incredibly concerning and unusual in a way that is better than I ever could so I really think you should watch it. Anyway like he said, if you’re 14 or 15 and you don’t know what you want to do with your life that’s one thing, but it’s in the years following that where you go on to find out. I’m 21 now, nearly 22, and I’ve made no progress. In fact I’ve regressed, because I had some kind of idea that I would try and pursue a STEM subject in my mind during my teens and now I have nothing.

It’s not just these two men on his discord server though, and they were men, he specifies in the video that they were on the older side. This is the exact kind of behaviour you see on 4chan, I actually mentioned it in a post here recently I’m sure but I can’t be bothered to check which one, you go to 4chan to have any “big idea” be torn apart and revealed for the dumb gay stupid silly waste of thought it really is. People talk constantly about how it’s like the crabs in a bucket mentality, that people want to just bring others down to their level. Well I now think that’s not quite accurate, I think this is just how the kind of person who ends up on 4chan or at least on a board like r9k is all of the time. We are both the crab trying to escape, and the crab pulling him back down at the same time. This ability to shoot down ideas is just something people like us have got really good at, the neural pathway for it is particularly strong.

In fact in the video he goes on to talk about brain chemistry, that’s the real meat of it. He mentions an article, which I wish he’d been able to find and link to because I couldn’t find it based on what he says about it in the video, and it is about this woman who through brain damage lost her ability to experience emotion. I think that’s perhaps an exaggeration though, because it seems rather ridiculous to entirely lose the ability to feel emotion, but I’m pretty sure what he meant was that the region of the brain responsible for emotion (the limbic system) was the damaged area. Now what’s so interesting is that this led to her being unable to make decisions, she lost the ability to have preferences you could say. Now her case was extreme, she couldn’t make the simplest decisions we do in day to day life like what to have for dinner, but the point we can take from this is that the two things are inseparable. As he says in the video, without feelings we can’t make decisions.

So then the logical next step is that perhaps people who suffer from this lack of motivation also have damage in this region of the brain, and it is interesting that a lot of what he calls “FAs” and maybe I’d call incels or robots do seem to experience this. If you did a Venn diagram of both lack of motivation and “identifies as incel/ FA/ robot etc.” it’d probably look more like a simple circle. Now he talks about child abuse specifically, and the link between childhood abuse and FAs is something he’s talked about in quite a few videos, but I’ve never experienced that. It’s interesting, and worth talking about, but I haven’t experienced it and talking about it won’t help me which is what I was focused on at the time when watching the video. I did however have an experience which does parallel this phenomenon of “emotionally shutting down” that supposedly is very common for children growing up in abusive households. My mother’s suicide.

Now I’ve said before that I’ll probably write a whole long post about that situation, and I still probably will, but this isn’t that post. I’m just mentioning it because, as I said, there is a very interesting parallel. See immediately following the news I remember how I almost didn’t react to it. I don’t just mean externally, that I stayed calm while emotions were raging inside me, I mean I somehow suppressed almost all feeling. It wasn’t a decision I made, it was like the autopilot took over. I was going through the motions, there was a funeral to plan and the matter of where I was going to live and who would look after me and I basically didn’t experience any emotion at all for days. I remember going to see her in the chapel of rest, I think that was the first time I felt anything and it was difficult because at the same as this realisation that she really was dead and I’d never be able to speak to her again was hitting home I was also going through the horror of seeing a corpse for the first time.

Ever since then I’ve had long periods of very little emotion, which always culminate in a period of a few days to a week of rather intense depressive episodes I guess you could call them (although I must say, I am not diagnosed with anything) which are kind of like low tier panic attacks that are drawn out over a longer period of time. That’s what the last week has basically been for me, and why all these thoughts I decided I had to tell my dad about were dredged up. Now there is a slight difference, rather than slowly learning to suppress my emotion over a long period of time like many abused kids seem to do, it kind of happened in a flash for me. I do think that the ultimate effect seems to be similar though, after all I’m very similar to a lot of other FAs or incels I think.

So at the end of the video I went to check the comments and one of the comments someone left struck me, it said “I want to want something”. Now I know he was probably just trying to be poetic, but I got to thinking and actually that is a perfectly noble goal. If you really are somehow damaged, and the more and more I think about it the more it makes sense, then to want to fix yourself makes the most sense. It also might finally provide me with that goal I’ve been so desperate to find. In fact I think it already has, I think this is going to be “my thing” at last. My thing will be, the mission to restore my ability to identify my thing. Once it’s complete, it will of course naturally lead right into whatever burden I find for myself next.

I use the term burden, because that’s what I want, a load to bear. Yet if anything realising this has made me feel light in a way I haven’t in a while. I don’t want to go overboard now, I’m still the same person as when I started writing this post yesterday evening (I also wrote the vast majority of it last night too, I’m just trimming it and finishing it up tonight), I’m still just as bitter and resentful. I’m still stuck in this small bedroom as I have been for close to six years, I spent my entire day in here today other than to get food, but I do have a feeling of hope that I can do something here. In fact the specifics of my plan going forward are what I’ve been thinking about and reading about while in here today. It’s something I was actually already on the right path towards before I had a major setback, psychedelic drugs. As any long term readers will remember, I was growing a crop, or whatever the right term is, of psilocybin producing mushrooms a few months ago but it got infected with mold spores and the entire things was ruined. It went a bright yellow colour, and only some very tiny little caps seemed to have appeared on the surface of the mycelium mat.

There’s been a lot of fascinating research in recent years into the effects of these drugs and they really do seem to have long term affects. There have been studies where people who have been trying to give up cigarettes for decades are able to do so after a few psychedelic sessions. This means that they literally can rework your neural pathways, which is exactly what me and people like me need. It’s these trained habits we have, of picking apart every decision, that need to be unlearned. Now I have to be careful with the terminology here because I’m not a neurobiologist obviously, I’m a layman. I don’t think I’m saying anything that is untrue or misrepresentative of the results of these studies but I’m not able to accurately explain the minutia of it all. You should look this stuff up yourself if you’re interested, it’s not hard to find.

On top of the stuff about the reworking of your established mental patterns, there has also been a lot of research into the effect of both psychedelic drugs and MDMA and substances similar to it on depression. Now I don’t know if this suppression of emotion I experience is “depression”, it does seem to fit the description kind of but it’s maybe more like a particular strand or variation I’d guess. The point is these drugs, especially if taken in the right circumstances, can permanently alter your brain chemistry and shape. These aren’t just something you can take to feel differently for a while before going back to normal, like the idea seems to be in drug culture.

Speaking of drug culture, I know that a lot of robots will have a kneejerk resistance to what I’m saying because they have a lack of respect for people who take drugs and it’s completely fair because I do as well. Potheads, junkies, crack addicts, even just clubgoing normies who engage in recreational drug use are all people I have very little respect for. Nevertheless, if there’s something that will help me fix myself I’m going to take it, and you should as well. In fact I often rant about normalfags who go to r9k to give their shit tier advice, it’s like a pet peeve of mine, but I’ve always felt like the normies who advise we take psychedelics are the most sincere of the bunch.

I don’t know if this will work, as I said I did have this plan before and it didn’t go well. The difference is, last time my idea was something like “perhaps these substances will help me out somehow” and now it’s more that I’ve set this goal of fixing myself and these drugs seem to be the best means of achieving that. I’ll admit though that I’m kind of putting all my eggs in one basket, the problem with that expression though is what else can you do when you only have one basket available? Now I don’t ever get any comments, so it’s probably not worth me even bothering to say it, but if you have read this far and you think you have an alternative suggestion by all means please tell me about it.