We are in the mountains. No one is happy.
I don’t mean literally no one. Well, probably literally no one too but that’s a different point. I mean my wife, my son, and I.
It’s not the mountains. Though they are not helping. Not much snow, lots of mud. And the place we are staying in is not helping. It’s a friend’s timeshare but it has no wifi, no mobile data, no extra blankets, no TV, and no humidifier. We didn’t know this when we decided to come up, otherwise it could have been better. But that’s not even the issue anyway. It’s just amplifying the cracks of the actual issues that were already there.
No one is happy. I don’t know when it started. My wife and I have always had an amazing relationship. I still think we do. She definitely used to be happy. I have never really been. Just tolerant. I don’t think she’s miserable exactly. But just tolerant now. Existence is mostly suffering. She’s not as dark about it as me. I think it’s mostly just due to the cumulative lack of sleep over the last year, as well as the fact that our families want in return as much as they give in assistance, so we feel mostly on our own in raising our son. Well and that I haven’t been quite engaged.
No one is happy. The problem with women is that you can’t directly make them happy. If you try to take things off their plate they will simply find more things to worry about. If you try to solve their problems, they will usually resist. And yet they either don’t know how to or don’t want to solve their own problems. Even smart library girls like my wife. It’s probably not really a woman thing. I never dated a man. Probably an agreeableness thing, a neuroticism thing, or a lack of Ti or Ni thing. There are Ti and Ni dominant women, but they are extremely rare. And they don’t make good mothers. Why would nature waste otherwise perfectly good baby ovens on being really good as problem solving? Things-orientation (in contrast to people orientation) is for the expendable sex (men). Things-oriented women probably have all the downsides of women without all the upsides anyway. The INTP girl who can code for eight hours straight but hasn’t brushed her teeth in a week? Hard pass. Being the kind of woman who makes a good wife and mother and someone you could actually love just inherently makes them mediocre at problem solving. And us men are dumb and think that this means they want us to solve their problems. But this video doesn’t have 22 million views for no reason.
Paradoxically, the only way to truly make a woman happy is to care less about her happiness. Not to care not at all, just less than your own. Be mostly self-directed toward your own happiness and compromise occasionally for hers. Whether it should be 70/30 or 60/40 or 80/20 depends on the relationship. But it’s definitely never correct for her to be the dominant focus. It’s just by the nature of women’s innate vulnerability. For all of human history they have basically been perpetually handicapped from puberty to menopause by being pregnant or carrying a baby or taking care of a bunch of kids. Having a man less narcissistic—less willing to fight for his own needs—than them just doesn’t really work. She wants a “gentle dick”—a guy who is nice to her but narcissistic and confident and power seeking enough to go out and conquer the world so he can provide safety and status and resources for her and her offspring to better survive. Disagreeable women will settle for less gentle if it means more power and resources, and agreeable women will settle for less power and resources if it means more gentle. But all want that “sweet spot”, the guy who, to them, is a “gentle dick”. I think my feminism post is mostly wrong, but the dick-power matrix still seems mostly right.
I know most of my readers wish I would talk more about the gender relations stuff. But It’s hard to be motivated about it. It’s complicated and everyone gets triggered and the amount of effort necessary to be as precise as I should be just makes me lose interest. Of course, There is more to women. There is more to men. But the interesting questions are the questions everyone ignores. This stuff is more supplemental to shit everyone knows rather than a replacement for it. This is beside the point. The point is:
No one is happy. My wife’s happiness has been dwindling at least since her second pregnancy started. Maybe even since our first son was born fourteen months ago. She thinks she’s net as happy, because when our son is not being a monster he fills her with so much joy, but when I see her I mostly see tired and frustrated.
I partially married her because she was happy. She is just so capable of joy in a way that I am not. I have never enjoyed much in my life. Minus the couple dozen times I found some new obsession for a month or two at a time that I loved until I bled it dry to then spend the next few months chasing the dragon until something else came along.
We go places and do things and I rarely enjoy the things themselves. But she does. And the way her eyes light up and the giddy school girl she becomes could melt the heart of even the most hardened man. I’ve never enjoyed a sunset. But I go on walks with my wife during sunset because I can enjoy her enjoying them.
My wife does not want me to fix her problems. I, a man, cannot understand this. To me, as long as I can systematize, predict and prevent disorder, I am at least satisfied. I then get bored because everything is too stable, but that’s a different problem.
My wife does not want me to fix her problems. She wants to connect with me. But I don’t know how to connect with people. I only know how to solve problems. With minor exception, I’ve never enjoyed an engagement with a human directly. I’ve only enjoyed when they presented me an opportunity to solve problems. It doesn’t have to be their problem—though it often is—just a problem, any problem. Fix a car. Learn how something works. Study a field. Teach me something I don’t know about. Improvement and refinement are the primary levers by which I find existence tolerable.
But women don’t like when you solve their problems. And to men this is frustrating because so many of these problems seem so solvable. And unlike most men who solve problems mostly cause they like solving them, I solve problems mostly because I hate when they aren’t solved. So we’ve begun this negative cycle, where I’m angry because there are so many problems (both in the world and in our personal lives) and I’m always thinking about those, and I’m mad that she both can’t solve hers herself—at least not at the rate I would like—and yet is resistant to me solving them. And then because I’m so grumpy and off obsessing about all the world’s problems she feels lonely and then she has my monster of a son to take care of and doesn’t get much sleep and now she’s at half capacity because she’s pregnant again. And thus...
No one is happy. I guess I can’t use my wife as a crutch anymore for feeling joy. At least for now. This is probably a good thing. I need to focus on my happiness again.
Women have this magical gift of making you care about them. When I was younger, this slope was paved with ice, and I would slide too far into only caring about them; slowly removing my eggs from all other baskets and investing it in the women I was seeing. And then eventually everything would blow up. Because women can never be happy as a man’s primary focus. It’s not women’s fault. Men who let a woman become their primary focus are the ones with the dysfunction. Seems this dysfunction is increasingly common in recent generations.
Imagine if you joined a space mission to mars and the captain instead of leading you and directing you and protecting you and leveraging you so you could help the team get to mars and accomplish your big important mission just like sat around feeding you grapes and making sure your butt never got sore. Would you feel important? I guess. Would you be happy? You’d certainly be comfortable. But would your mars mission succeed? Probably not. Would existence feel worth it? Probably not. I can assure you, you’d feel infinitely more important and existence would feel infinitely more worth it if you were the first woman on mars than the mistress of some loser whose never even been there!
She doesn’t just want attention. She doesn’t even just want your attention. She wants your attention because you’re powerful and a leader and useful and respected—or at least have all the ingredients for achieving them. She thinks she loves you for you, they always think that, but what she really loves is your temperament because it’s a temperament that will lead to all the things her biology needs.
She doesn’t want to connect with just any man, just as you don’t want to stick your dick in any woman! Are there things you value beyond beauty in a woman? Of course. Are there things women value beyond power in men? Of course. But they are supplemental. Sure, they may even be the most important part. But that’s only because the other parts are like water. You may love working in IT and hate working in healthcare, while someone else may love working in healthcare and hate IT, but I can assure you that no one likes working a job in which they don’t get paid.
Intellect’s job is to makes the implicit explicit. Everyone implicitly understands that you won’t work if you don’t get paid, and they won’t hire you if you don’t provide value. But do this same analysis of the sexual marketplace and everyone loses their minds!
This SMP redpill is a hard pill to swallow for most. The good thing is, you don’t need to swallow it as long as you will act as if you had swallowed it—I have plenty of very disagreeable friends who are just obsessed with their mission or job or some other external thing meanwhile shitting on the red pill all the time because they don’t understand that many if not even most men don’t have that.
Many men need to be taught how to feel and be kinder, many other men need to be taught how to be tougher and more selfish. The red pill exists to teach these latter agreeable men to achieve the strength the other men already have. And feminism and all the “taming” activities modern women do are to try and get these stronger men to be nicer to them (making losers strong is 100x harder than just making strong men nicer to them) which is why they think TRP is their enemy.
Maybe this shouldn’t have to be something you manually teach yourself. The world is better when you don’t understand how it works. If you can get away with believing all the cute shit and survive, you absolutely should. To destroy all the wonder and romanticism with cold and materialistic calculation is not something one should seek. But when the wonder and romanticism have sent you to hell one too many times, you are really left with no other choice. But this is once again besides the point. The point is:
No one is happy. Because I am too focused on giving my wife what I would want and not what she actually needs. I still need to solve problems, even around her life and our son, but I first and foremost need to be engaged. Right now I feel somewhat resentful. And I want to escape. I can’t wait for when they go to bed because it means I can finally be free to do what I want when I want. This is not a good trajectory. Many men will tolerate this for years or even decades. I am not one of those. It’s been a few months and I have had just about enough of it.
So what do I want? How can things get back on a better trajectory?
I think part of the issue is that I have never had someone credible who I can ask about children, so I basically just had to wing it. I’ve read plenty of books. I reparented myself and went to therapy. But the world is changing so fast that what worked for the previous generation almost universally sucks for the next. And there are just so many different philosophies on children, and it would take a decade of study to truly map it all and figure out which of it isn’t trash. And it’s not a topic I felt interested enough in spend thousands of hours on.
So I just didn’t know what to expect. I thought that my wife could basically manage the kids and I could make the money and work on philosophy and show up occasionally and teach them shit. But that’s not working. I have abdicated the responsibility of raising my son to her. I didn’t know I was abdicating. I just thought, you’re the woman, you have the food bags, division of labor, you solve the kid thing I’ll solve everything else. But it just doesn’t work like that. Kids are not like taking out the trash or doing the dishes.
My wife was working a part time job up until this month. I thought that if I had her quit and took on the expense she would have more time and energy for our son. Ironically, she has only seemed to get more unhappy since quitting. In retrospect, particularly of writing my MBTI piece and really thinking deeply about how Si makes decisions (my wife’s dominant function), this makes more sense.
Point is: this was a dumb and foolish vision on my part. It doesn’t work. The 1950’s weren’t real. Relationships never functioned like this and they never will. I am increasingly finding that all of reaction in all forms is just The Golden Age Fallacy ad infinitum. Sure, no one is happy—just selectively oblivious to all the suck. But also, no one has ever been nor will ever be happy. The conservatives are just selectively oblivious to all the ways in which the past sucked, and the progressives are selectively oblivious to all the ways in which the future will continue to suck.
But once you establish that misery is forever, you unlock something unexpected: no one is miserable. No one has ever been miserable. No one will ever be miserable. Just oblivious to how wonderful everything was, is, and will be.
Everyone chronically miserable today would have been miserable ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years ago and would still be ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years from now. Happiness and misery are more personality traits—or at least mindsets which are highly influenced by personality—than states of being. Look no further than the Existentialists to see this. Minus of course slums and concentration camps and other states of absolute squalor and pain (and even that is debatable, a la Existentialism): the only unhappy people who become happy don’t achieve such because circumstances in their lives changed but rather because they changed the way they think about their lives and their circumstances change as a side effect. This is why “finding Jesus” works for so many people. It’s a new OS. It may be old and out of date, but it’s better for many if not most than the spaghetti code trash in abundant supply today!
Most happy people have terrible lives. Most miserable people have fantastic lives. Both are just oblivious to the side their mindset prevents them from seeing. When you realize this, when you realize that joy and suffering are ever present, to feel joy or suffering now become a choice.
I need to want to be involved in my sons life. I need to want to hang out with him. I need to want to hang out with my friends and family period. I think I’ve over prioritized ideas the last year or so. Yes, I have my mission and it’s important. But it’s also important that I have a life and relationships I like. No one cares about your cool ideas if your life sucks! And I’m probably way past the law of diminishing returns anyway. How many tweets do I spend a half hour on that only gets one like? I know it’s not about the tweet, because that idea is always compounded on, but if my life was more joyful and motivated by things I want to run toward, rather than frustrating and motivated by things I want to run away from, I will be more effective at ideas. And even on the off chance I’m not, the opportunity cost is worth it.
TRP taught me to never commit to anything besides my mission. And that was a good pendulum swing away from the directionless hedonism that preceded it. But this is still an ultimately naïve, temporary, and one-sided perspective. I realized this a while ago, which is why I wrote the Burgundy Pill stuff, but—as is the case with everything I write—I was writing it to myself as much as I was to others; still trying to figure out what TRP was missing—clearly missing something I just wasn’t quite sure what it was—so I could apply that wisdom to my own life.
And the truth is that you should be careful and intentional about what you commit to but you must ultimately commit. In the same way that you should be careful and intentional about what you eat or watch or think but that you must ultimately eat and watch and think. Sure you can fast for a while but ultimately you will need food and new information and new thoughts. And commitment—relationships, love, intimacy—is the same way. Committing to the first thing that comes around is dumb. Committing to nothing is just as dumb. Maybe even more so.
Since TRP, I was careful and intentional about the women I dated. And I chose my wife. Our son was not as meticulously planned but he was only a year earlier than the plan. And if anything it was a good thing. Because I would have just procrastinated dealing with all this for longer.
The truth is I am still afraid to commit. Both to my wife and my son. I am in love my wife. But for some reason I do not want to fall in love with my son. When he does something really cute I try to resist my heart from melting. Why? Well, because what if I fail? What if I screw up? What if he dies? What if I become too soft on him and ruin his life? No, it’s what if I become dependent on him. I am afraid I will become emotionally dependent on my son in a way that my mom was emotionally dependent on me. A toxic situation that crippled me for over a decade. And a pattern I repeated that destroyed the first dozen relationships I ever had with women.
Perhaps I have still yet to learn how to have a healthy relationship. Or at least I am not certain I have learned it. I only knew how to anxiously attach until I was like 25. Then TRP taught me avoidant attachment. And I’ve slowly been learning how to securely attach since meeting my wife. Progress is made, but progress is slow. My fear is that if I fully commit I will become who I used to be. There is so much danger in commitment—as TRP rightfully points out. But avoidant attachment comes not from abundance but from fear; of being let down one too many times that you say “I will only depend on myself”. This is not masculinity, this is not “alpha”, this is a scared little child who doesn’t want to be left alone again. All TRPers—at least all who aren’t just straight up dark triad Machiavellians—are scared little children with broken hearts. Burgundy Pillers are just the only ones who will admit it.
I think I am being foolish about this fear. Afraid of a danger that no longer exists. I am competent enough and self aware enough that I can identify dysfunctional patterns quickly before they get out of hand. This post a perfect example of that.
Our second son is on the way. I think we are both dreading it to some degree. We are of course excited and ready too, but there is a secret dread. Our son is a lot of work. There will now be two. One of my fears is that I will end up like everyone warns. Where you feel “trapped” and wish you never had kids. I hate to admit it, because I am supposed to be plan guy who never makes mistakes, but I do feel trapped.
I wanted to prove to everyone that kids are easy and they are just stupid. I was wrong. It’s not a problem intelligence can solve. In fact, it’s a problem intelligence makes worse. Because the solution involves submission and humility something arrogant thinkboi controllers like myself are universally retarded at. Having kids is probably actually easier if you are oblivious and good at lying to yourself. Sure, you will probably be punished for it later or at least society will, but it’s far less work while you’re doing the raising.
But I think most of my difficulty is just because I refuse to fully commit. I wanted to have children. This is what having children is like. You don’t get to go on trips every month and do whatever you want all the time. That’s just how it is. But also I could probably do those more than I think. I just don’t. For some reason. Out of “solidarity” with my wife? Maybe. If yes, that is dumb. Mostly I think just laziness. Usually my friends would just plan events and I’d tag along. I don’t think I’ve ever actually planned an event myself. Something I will need to do.
So what’s the takeaway with all this? Well a reminder that you first must be happy before you can make anyone else happy. And second, I’m locked in. Trying to pretend like I’m not isn’t really working. I need to reframe. I need to fully enjoy the decision I’ve made. My wife cannot raise our sons alone. And I can’t avoid learning how to connect with humans forever. I need to fully commit to my family and take charge once again of our direction.
“If you can’t avoid it, double down”.
Life is like the ocean. The waves crashing, day in and day out. You can resist them, sure. They won’t mind. They will gleefully crash on your head. Over and over and and over. Every minute of every hour of every day until you die.
Or you can stop being a fucking moron and and learn how to surf.
Whether you experience life as a long grind of suffering and pain or as an exhilarating ride of joy and challenge depends predominately on whether you choose to resist how it works and whine or accept how it works and figure out how to make it work for you.
Time to get back on the board, retard.