Alternate states: Test 2

Before

I wasn’t planning on doing a “before” this second time, but I’ve just got home (I decided I would go out for a walk in the end) and I feel really shitty right now so I’ll take the excuse to vent about it.

I guess it wasn’t a night walk, but more of an afternoon walk. It’s half past eight now and I got home about half an hour ago. I left as soon as I uploaded the last post, which was I think around five-ish. The walk itself was pretty uneventful, I walked down and along a similar route that the bus ride I took in the last walk I made a post about went down. I stopped to sit for a while at one point, and later on I walked right past the restaurant I went to with my co-workers a few months ago.

Of course I’ve walked past it hundreds of times in my life, I used to live a few minutes walk away from it just behind the town hall actually before moving to where I live now. It’s noteworthy because when I noticed it I briefly thought about them, my co-workers that is. What are they doing right now? Well one is working I think, but most are probably out enjoying the evening doing typical normie things with good company. They’re happy, I bet. I’m not envious I wouldn’t say, I’m glad for them. I can’t help but feel like it is unfair, that’s all. It would take so little for me to be happy, not even a gf just having a couple of friends who actually wanted to spend time with me like I had when I was at school would be nice. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, but the last year it’s gotten worse than it ever has been. I have basically no one in my life.

I’ve done everything that I’m supposed to, I’m considerate and I’m a good listener and when I am able to relax and act normal people generally seem to enjoy my company. I can make people laugh, and I can hold their attention. People do tend to like me that’s what I don’t understand, but yet I’m a complete outcast. Always kept at a slight distance.

Eventually I ended up at a book store, again one I’ve been to hundreds of times before but the last time was half a decade or more probably. Notice how I say that a lot on this blog, I guess I haven’t really done anything in the last half decade.. I went up to the second floor and the history section, and started looking through the stuff they had on the second world war and the third reich. I was just trying to pass the time, I also had a look to see what translations they had of The Iliad and Odyssey as I’ve been considering re-reading them but in verse this time and there was a book about recent genetic studies from the Anglo-Saxon migration period that I almost bought a copy of.

At some point this small jewish woman started talking to me, at least she claimed to be but she also stopped herself from saying she was “part black” just before that so I’m a little suspicious. I think it was actually just a normal old (not that old, my guess would be she was in her late 50s) woman looking for someone to talk to, some human contact. She saw what I was looking at, and so decided to give a normie/ boomer take about how it’s important that we learn about that regime so it never happens again. The usual thing you’ve all heard before.

Now I wouldn’t call myself a fascist I don’t think but the idea of a socially right wing authoritarian regime seems preferable to the current state of affairs in this country if I’m being honest, I contained my power level however. I went along and agreed with her sentiment, “of course, terrible period indeed yes”. I tried to contribute to the conversation a little because I felt bad for her, she seemed lonely, but it was hard to follow along. She went away for a while and then later came back, she had this hot take about the second world war and “empire” as a concept or something and then she left.

I left the shop myself a little after that, I then sat down in this very small park right outside the shop and observed the other people around me. There were a few couples, and I noticed that while some of the women seemed like they might have been young-ish (around my age, or slightly above) not a single one of the men looked younger than 30. They all had beards as well, those well groomed two or three week old looking beards.

I realised as well while sitting there that I don’t even really see other men as “competition”, like most men seem to view one another. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, like I’m implying I’m not concerned about them being better looking or more confident or rich or whatever the fuck women want, because clearly I’m actually losing in that regard seeing as I’m still a khv and they’re not. What I mean is that I never catch myself comparing myself with other men, I never look at a couple and think “he’s more/ less [whatever important trait] than me”, which does seem uncharacteristic compared to other robots/ incels who obsess about things like “being mogged” or “being inferior”, etc. You also get a lot of complaints by robots who see men they consider as worse than them getting laid while they can’t.

Just for the record and I know this is going to make me seem like a bit of a shitty person but I don’t really care anymore, after this realisation in the park I started making a deliberate effort as I walked home to compare myself with other men who looked like they were in a couple. And I would generally say that I was better looking (and taller, something 4chan likes to remind me of the importance of every day) than most of them, and there were quite a few couples as it’s a Saturday evening in a busy area with loads of bars, pubs and restaurants. I saw plenty of women who I would consider to be “out of my league” (although again, all women are out of my league) walking alongside, holding hands with, or kissing men who as I said were not as attractive as I am.

I know that some people might start to think of the “they must be rich then” cope, but that’s not the case. These were similarly aged (late 20s/ early 30s) hipster couples in a middle class area, these were just normal relationships. They were archetypal normalfags, peak normie if you will.

I feel gross saying that stuff about how I am in comparison to other guys btw, just as gross as it probably felt to read it, but it’s true. I’m not saying I’m remarkably good looking or anything like that, but I realise now that I am reasonably handsome and I don’t need to try and do this whole fake modesty thing because I feel uncomfortable ever saying something positive about myself. I’ve had enough experiences to justify that statement and view of myself, I’ve talked about this in other posts already. I’ve been told that I am by quite a few people, including several who were not related nor had any reason to try to merely flatter me.

I think I bought into the blackpill meme too hard and started to doubt my own fucking eyes, but I know what I look like. I see myself every time I brush my teeth. Frankly holding onto the black pill when it’s false means I’m not moving in the right direction, and it is false. There’s some truth to the lookism subject, and sure for other incels the way they look plays a role in their situation more but not in my case. There’s doesn’t seem to be one “pill” meme that fits everyone in this situation, unfortunately.

I got completely distracted though, I had an insight which I thought was interesting. See I don’t compare myself with other men generally sure, but I realised that I often compare myself with or feel like I’m competing with women. Not just women in relationships in fact, any woman I see, just one of the customers I might see while working for example. There’s this idea in the blackpill/ incel community of the “looksmatch”, the idea being that in the fair world or the incel utopia or whatever that men and women will be matched with someone of equal attractiveness to themselves. This of course builds on the foundational beliefs of incel ideology, which are that

a) women and men only care about looks when it comes to a partner

b) women in modern society are able to date/ sleep with men who are far more comparably attractive than themselves with relative ease

I actually would say I agree with the second one for the most part, but the first seems untrue to me. Looks are important sure, maybe even the most important thing when it comes to finding a partner, but not solely important. The problem is that men and women aren’t comparably attractive when you take the two groups as a whole. There was this OkCupid study which showed that women rate like 80% of men as below average, whereas male cumulative ratings actually distributed women fairly evenly across the standard 1 to 10 scale usually used for rating attractiveness. I can’t be bothered to find the link, but it should be easy to find the study it’s been talked about so much. I’ve linked to it in other posts as well. So basically in the eyes of men, 10% of women are a 1/10, 10% are a 2/10, and so on.

Therefore there must be other factors as well as physical attractiveness that spread men more evenly along the 1 to 10 scale. A woman will be a 6, thanks to looks, but the male “6” that she “should” match up with is a “6” thanks to a variety of factors including but not limited to looks. As I said though, these days a female “6” can get a male “8” with no trouble at all, at least for casual sex. Of course there is no should, I might have an authoritarian streak but I can’t bring myself to suggest anything like this should be enforced. I suppose in the worldview of a lot of incels this didn’t need to be enforced in the past it just happened naturally until one day something changed.

We’ve all seen this ancient meme from /r9k/ before haven’t we? Or at least I think it’s from /r9k/ it certainly has been posted there over and over probably since it was still called robot9000.

Well it illustrates the idea perfectly, the left hand side is what incels generally speaking seem to think is the fair and natural order of things. Now, I just don’t think it is. I don’t think reality works out so neatly, as nice as it would be to have things end up that way. I would say that the right image is a little exaggerated also, as I’ve talked about before there is a weird cope I’ve noticed where some incels try to make it seem like their situation is more common than it actually is.

What I think though, is that this image and the culture that produced it have seeped into my unconscious and so that’s why I compare myself to women rather than men. Every woman I meet I think, “is she above or below me” on this stupid made up totem pole. What’s so crazy is that a good amount of the women who’ve shown interest in me or approached me I would have considered to be above me. While several of my oneitises or crushes (all of whom never seemed to feel similarly about me), whatever term you prefer, in retrospect I probably considered lower than me on there. My self perception fluctuates quite a bit though, as I’m sure any long term reader realises.

Either way though, to compare myself with women is incredibly feminine. Literally, it’s what women do. I imagine I’m not the only one doing it either, I bet a lot of people from r9k have picked up a similar habit. It’s funny I never really experience the usual macho posturing stuff when talking with other guys as well. Sure me and my two friends (if they’re still my friends, it’s been a year since we met up last and I’m starting to feel like they’re drifting away from me for good this time) joke about and insult each other in good humour, standard male friendship stuff you know. I’m talking more with men I’m not close with, my co-workers, male customers, etc. When I see two other men interact there’s this tension, almost sizing one another up. I don’t do that, like I said I don’t have this view of them as “competition”.

I’m not comfortable around most people, but generally speaking I’m a little more comfortable around men than women. Whereas most men seem more at ease in the company of females, I’m the opposite. I’m not sure what other men think when I’m around them, but I feel like because I am this way it puts them at ease. Which again you could say makes me into more of a feminine figure. I don’t know I’m just kind of speculating pretty wildly now, this was meant to be a quick little thing to vent but I got completely sidetracked.

Continuing with the walk, for the last step instead of following the street I walked back through another park near where I live. I was listening to Lonerism by Tame Impala at the time with my headphones and I eventually had to cross this big field which was filled with people. See during summer loads of groups come out to just sit there and stuff, when I was a little boy I was taken along there many times, and people set up barbecues and serve drinks or have picnics. So I was walking through the dirt path right through the centre of the field surrounded by all these people, and the specific song that was playing was Keep On Lying. See the song ends with this section several minutes long that’s intended to sound like a dinner party that you’re not involved in. It’s meant to sound like you’re at this dinner party, but no one is acknowledging you exist and you’re kept out of every conversation. So you’re surrounded by people, but yet completely invisible. I just thought there was a certain irony in the way that synched up.

I then went to a small supermarket on the street just below where I live, bought some lemon juice because it supposedly helps with the nausea from the seeds I’ll be taking tomorrow, and considered going to buy alcohol but decided against it.

I’m feeling a lot better now, it’s been a few hours since I got home, but I was not feeling good at all when I started writing this. Going out there, seeing all the normal people with their normal lives that just fell into place without a second thought for any of them, it does get you down. I just feel so insignificant, I’m nothing. I have no value, I have no desires or passions to pursue, I do honestly sometimes wish I just hadn’t ever been born. I don’t enjoy being alive. I don’t have much else to say either, but for the sake of science (really just because I wanted to vent), this is the general state of mind I’m in at the moment before going into this trip. That is, assuming I didn’t also get screwed on these other seeds as well.

After

Ok, these were definitely not duds at least, but I would hesitate to describe my experience yesterday evening as psychedelic. I’ve been going over in my head how I should explain what happened, since last night even. I tried to write down how I was feeling as it was happening but I just couldn’t concentrate. See it’s a bit of a blur now, and I think that I might miss some stuff but I’m going to go through the day’s events chronologically and hopefully cover as much as I can.

So because I wanted to avoid the nausea which supposedly comes with eating so many seeds, I originally tried 130, I decided to attempt a cold water extraction of the LSA in the seeds. So I boiled some water in the morning for some instant ramen and I poured about 100ml extra into a small container and left it to cool. When it got to room temperature I then put it into the fridge to get colder, and I wrapped the container in tin foil. A little after midday, maybe closer to one o’clock, I took the seeds and using my mother’s old coffee grinder I made a powder out of them. I then dropped about three lids worth of the lemon juice I bought the night before into the water and scooped the powder out of the grinder and dropped it in there also. I then left it in the fridge, completely covered with tin foil and went back to stir it every 15 to 20 minutes for about an hour or so.

At around half past two, I poured the drink into a glass using a folded up piece of kitchen towel to filter out the seed matter/ gunk. I then drank it all, and waited for a while. The seed matter I threw away, only eating the little bits that got stuck on my fingers. I began to feel ever so slightly nauseous after about 20 minutes or so, but that was about it. Other than that I felt pretty much normal, in fact at four o’clock I was still feeling normal and I was disappointed that the seeds had again not worked. I began to do some more reading about this cold extraction technique and realised that I may have made a few mistakes. The water was not boiled in an open container, I might have not left the seeds in the solution long enough, etc. So I took out another hundred seeds, and just chewed them up and swallowed them straight, with a can of fizzy pineapple juice to wash them down.

Now, I still experienced almost no nausea at all the entire evening. In fact the slight stomach discomfort I did already have seemed to go away after eating the second batch of seeds. What happened was I gradually began to feel very sleepy, sedated almost by the time it really got going but the onset was very gradual. It was so slight at first I thought I was experiencing some kind of placebo effect, like how when you’re a little bit drunk but can seem more so in the right circumstances. I’ve noticed this a lot, if you have a desire to be drunk and you drink a little you can almost will yourself to be more affected by it than you might otherwise be. This is something a lot of people drinking in groups will do, they are almost high on the energy of the moment. Alternatively when you’re very drunk, I find that if you really sit down and concentrate you can bring yourself a couple of degrees closer to sobriety for a brief moment. This might be what people describe as “letting go”, giving into the drug rather than trying to keep as much self control as possible.

The thing is, with this experience yesterday I didn’t feel very much like I wasn’t in control of my thoughts. I wasn’t mentally sober exactly, I was definitely in what I at the time felt was an alternate state of consciousness to day to day life (I actually changed the original title of the last post later that night because I liked that wording), but I was still lucid for the most part. More than anything my body was what was affected by the seeds, I actually felt quite detached from it. I couldn’t completely control my arms or legs, walking around was like being in a moving vehicle. I remember swaying from side to side and almost losing my balance trying to walk to the bathroom to piss. It took me a long while to will myself to go and take a piss in the first place as well, I sat there on the floor knowing I needed to go for a good 20 minutes before I managed to push myself to stand up and go do it.

When I finished I looked into the mirror, again because I was wondering if I was just being weird or if this was the drug and after seeing how much my pupils had dilated I can pretty conclusively say that I was definitely not just imagining it. I’ve never seen my pupils that large ever, they were presumably pretty big when I took 2C-B but that was in a field at night in the countryside so there were no mirrors for me to check at the time. I then came back into the main room and with any doubt I had now put to rest I was able to relax and just enjoy it. Again though this wasn’t a psychedelic trip at all, it was far closer to the experience you have with alcohol.

There were no changes to my visual perception whatsoever at any point during the evening, there were neither open nor closed eye visuals of any kind. I also didn’t experience what I did when taking 2C-B where I was connecting all these different things in my mind. I was certainly thinking about things, my mind was very active and I kept trying to start writing my thoughts down but I was so drowsy and sedated almost that any kind of expense of energy was very draining. I do wish I had gotten a few more notes down though, I think that just the ideas alone I had could have been the inspiration for a few different posts. I do have another 270 seeds left, so I will consider taking those again some other time and trying to make sure I do write down my thoughts.

The only effect I can recall that does seem to sound like what I’ve been told psychedelics are like is that the music I was listening to sounded so much better. I never really planned the evening out much see, so I didn’t have music set up in advance. Once I realised I was probably going to be too lazy to do anything other than listen to music, after taking five minutes just to walk back from the bathroom to the main room, I brought spotify up on my laptop and just scrolled through the albums I have saved looking for something. The thing is, nothing there seemed quite what I was looking for, until I saw Era Extraña by Neon Indian. Now I’ve only listened to it once, someone on /mu/ recommended it and I had left it saved but I didn’t really enjoy it very much. This time though, it was like one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard.

I was filled with all this emotion, every little sound was so much more noticeable. Often a lot of the different things going on in a piece of music can blur together somewhat. The reason I like The Cure so much might be because there’s generally a lot more “space” between the sounds so I can more easily get everything from their music. It was like that with this record, every thing about it stood out. It was very emotional as well for some reason, unlike the sounds I was finding it even harder than usual to pay attention to the lyrics but I could feel the tone very strongly. It felt a lot louder as well, all the music I ended up listening to as the evening went on, I spend quite a long time at one point just leaning over the balcony staring into the trees with the music in the background.

That’s another thing, and probably the most pleasant aspect of the entire experience. I was so unbelievably content, for the first time in god knows how long I was able to simply just enjoy things as they are without this creeping self doubt making me second guess everything. I could stare at the trees for an hour, or play some vidya as I did for a while at one point, and I didn’t have this voice in my head that’s usually always there telling me that while I do this all alone other people are out there with people they love and care about having fun. For years and years I’ve been unable to enjoy simple entertainment like videogames and so on, because this voice is there telling me I don’t really enjoy it and it’s simply a substitute for what I would rather be doing which is spending time with other people. For the first time since probably around the time I played through Mass Effect 3 (2013?) I was able to just enjoy playing vidya (I didn’t play anything for long though, as my motor functions were off and I was having trouble concentrating as I said) and watching stupid videos on youtube.

I was able to simply take things as they were, rather than getting sad because they reminded me of how they could be. Now unfortunately this isn’t something that has carried over into today, I am back to normal and when I was reading for a little while earlier that niggling voice in my head telling me that all entertainment (maybe entertainment isn’t the perfect word here, as I read for other reasons than simply entertaining myself, but it’s the best I can think of right now) is a cope was back again. It’s not a literal disembodied voice I’m talking about btw, I’m being figurative. I’m not schizophrenic thankfully. I’m just using it to describe this feeling that seems to always arise whenever I engage in any recreational activity, even writing something for this blog. The only time I don’t have it, is when I’m with my friends and enjoying spending time with them, which of course further validates that doubt.

The only thing that did carry over to today was the slight physical unease, when I woke up I was very dizzy and I stumbled around walking to the kitchen. I made myself a black coffee, which is something I almost never drink, and after that and a cold shower I was mostly back to normal. I’ve also looked in the mirror and my pupils have definitely gone back to normal. I think I’m going to order a pizza tonight, I wanted to late last night but I was not sure I’d be able to go downstairs and collect it and even if I did I was worried the delivery guy, or worse my neighbours, would see my eyes and realise something was up. All I had to eat in the end was a bowl of tinned asparagus soup, and some hard bread, which was still pretty nice but not very filling.

Alternate states: Test 1

Before

Tomorrow, Saturday the 3rd, I’m going to take four Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds (Argyreia nervosa) and I plan to write a “trip report” to document the experience. That is assuming anything of note actually happens of course, there’s reports I’ve read online that these seeds don’t actually have much or any effect on you. Now for every story like that I’ve probably read ten which describe vivid hallucinatory experiences and these seeds absolutely do contain a genuine naturally occurring psychedelic (LSA), but it’s possible there are duds or fakes going around. Now because I bought these online and not at the local garden centre I am a little concerned I got some of these, but hopefully they’ll turn out to be the real deal.

See that’s the amazing thing, these seeds are still legal even here in England, not just to possess for personal use but to openly buy and sell. No different than a bottle of whisky or a jar of ground coffee. You can go to a garden centre or a garden supplies store and they’ll probably sell them. I don’t know why but for some reason they aren’t covered by the almost blanket ban on psychoactive substances that was passed in 2016. Now if I were to try and perform an extraction and separate the LSA from the rest of the seed matter, that LSA would be illegal to own. I’m not sure I’m comfortable messing around with lighter fluid though, so I’ll just take the seeds straight (or probably ground up, and mixed with a milkshake) and push through the stomach pains and nausea that come when you use this method.

Now LSA is an interesting drug, it’s a component that is used in the production of LSD (which I’m sure everyone has heard of before) and in fact Albert Hoffman, the first man to synthesise LSD, was supposedly inspired by an experience with LSA extracted from the fungus called Ergot which also contains it. Now how true is this story? I don’t know, it could be completely made up but someone said it in a youtube video and it’d be cool if it were true. What is true is that he definitely took LSD, he was the first man to do so, and he considered that to be a profound and insightful experience. He was supposedly surprised when a couple of decades later in the 60s it had become widely used as a recreational substance as after taking it he foresaw it becoming a sort of therapy-aid. In the long run I guess he was vindicated at least, as that seems to be the direction that psychedelics seem to be taking generally speaking.

Now the effects are supposedly fairly similar to LSD, although it’s hard to figure out exactly as individual LSD trips even at similar doses can vary quite wildly, but generally the visual/ hallucinogenic element seems to be much less prominent in an LSA trip compared to an LSD trip. This is especially true at lower doses, higher doses of either will lead to some pretty crazy visuals of course but a low to medium dose of LSA will be more thoughtful and introspective than visually impressive. Which is perfectly fine with me, as cool as the funny shapes and colours may be they’re not what I’m really doing this for.

I’m taking a low dose this first time, I have 50 of these seeds in total so the option is there for higher doses in future, as I’m alone and have very little psychedelic experience. I’ll try writing my thoughts down and describing what happens as it’s taking place, but if I’m unable to concentrate or what I write ends up being completely incomprehensible I probably won’t include it. The ideal post though will have a before, during and after section. A lot of “trip reports” I read only seem to be a document of what happened written after the fact, but from what I’ve learned from reading and watching things on the subject your mindset going in to a psychedelic experience is very important. So I want to have that included in the post, and so I’ll do that now.

I’m not feeling very good this evening if I’m being honest, I had a pretty shitty day. Not an especially bad day, nothing bad actually happened to me, but nothing good happened either. Nothing really happened at all, my dad is away at the moment so I’m doing everything at home and so I did all the cleaning and washing before heading to work this morning. None of the interactions with my co-workers went very well either, which again is normal but still gets to me a little every time. Nothing particularly bad happened, I just felt like in every interaction the other person was uncomfortable. The thing is I just don’t understand it, I’ve now had several interactions with all of these people that didn’t go like that. I’ve been chatty and friendly and didn’t get any of those kind of vibes from each one of them on multiple occasions each so I don’t understand why I still do on other days.

It always feels particularly shitty when every single interaction in a given day goes this way though, like it did today. I suppose the first interaction with the deputy manager right at the start of the day was fine, I’ve never mentioned this particular co-worker before but she started a few months after I did and is always really friendly. She’s probably the nicest person there actually, and she definitely has a strong “sweet/ naïve young girl” aura about her but who knows how accurate that actually is. Later though we had to speak back and forth for a while over text about some stuff to do with the shop and while at first she was her usual warm/ amicable self her last message seemed uncharacteristically curt. At the time and until writing about it I felt like it might be because I was being “too friendly” and she was creeped out or trying to subtly tell me not to get any ideas (which I’m not for the record, not that she isn’t pretty and a pleasant person to be around but I think I’m immunised against oneitis at this point and she has a boyfriend).

Thinking about it now though it was probably not intentional at all, I don’t think I even cross this person’s mind at all when we’re not together at work (the same goes for all of my co-workers I’m sure) and that she’d even think that would be necessary. The response was too quick as well for any kind of deliberate subtext like that to have been considered now I think about it. I’m just incredibly insecure, so I obsess over these stupid things. That is something I’m hoping psychedelics can help with actually. Although frankly just writing these last couple paragraphs has made me feel a lot better, that and listening to Deathconsciousness with the volume really high as it got dark earlier this evening. The insecurity spike I’ve been experiencing since early this afternoon seems to have finally steadied.

I know it may seem like such a small concern, but most interactions I’ve had (and I really mean most, the overwhelming majority) in the last decade have been awkward or uncomfortable like today’s ones and it really does wear you down after a while. See after long enough every time it happens again you’re reminded of all the other times and how long it’s been this way. It feels more and more like it’ll never be any other way. I’m not sure what to expect tomorrow, I don’t think that psychedelics are going to be this mental panacea that a lot of people make them out to be if I’m being honest. I’m pretty sceptical about the whole thing, but I’ve got to try because I don’t really have any other options left. I’m going to make some chamomile tea, and read for a little while before going to bed. Hopefully tomorrow will be beneficial in some way.

After

Well I hate to say it but my concerns were well founded it seems, as I have experienced no effects whatsoever. Now I considered simply deleting this post, but I have instead decided to keep it anyway. There are going to be some set backs along the way, and it’ll be good to have a record of them. It’s also been a good week almost since my last upload and while I have been writing up another post over the last week it’s a long one (3000 words already and I’m not close to finishing) and will take a while to finish. I’ve noticed as well that there have actually been quite a few visitors over the last few days so clearly you want some kind of update and so I can finish this up tonight and give you that.

Now luckily I have a back up plan already in place, there is another kind of seed which contains the same substance as the HWBR seeds, Morning Glory seeds, and I did also buy a packet of those some months back. They seem actually to be more reliable, I can’t find any stories of these ones having no effect like I can with HWBR. The only reason I chose the HWBR was because you only have to take a few whereas the LSA content in Morning Glory seeds is far lower. I will have to take about 100 to 150, I’m erring towards taking the larger amount after today’s experience but I’ll decide tomorrow afternoon when I take them. This means that, assuming they aren’t also duds or something, the nausea will probably be pretty bad.

I’m not really sure what to do with myself now, it’s not like I usually have plans but I deliberately kept the day as free as possible today for obvious reasons and it’s been pretty boring. I tried reading, I tried writing some more on that other post I’m working on, but I just couldn’t stay focused as I was still nervous because of the anticipation at first and after that pissed off that I was sold dud seeds. I got a lot of cleaning done at least, the flat hasn’t looked this nice in years, but now I’ve got a whole evening with nothing to do at all. I’m considering going for a /nightwalk/, the last one I went on was a pretty miserable experience but that was almost a year ago and I used to do it all the time. Seeing all the happy normalfags out enjoying their Saturday night might make me feel even worse than I do now though, so maybe it’s best to stay home.

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.