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Accepting Solitude, Lacking Motivation

6 years ago2,659 words

I've not been achieving as much as I'd like recently, and it's bothering me. I want to write about the reasons why here, in the hope that it might help me get back on track.

I was supposed to be having brain surgery next week, on the 18th, so that's very much been at the front of my mind recently. Or in the middle of my mind, if I wanted to make that same joke again for the umpteenth time, which I don't. While I'll probably be 'fine' afterwards, there's a chance I could die, or end up crippled by a stroke, or become blind, or be saddled with some other serious deficit that'll really throw a wrench into all my plans for the future. While that should motivate me to spend what could be my last days on Earth in the most worthwhile way that I can, instead it's just left me feeling defeated and depressed, and like I'm just waiting for the outcome before I can really properly decide what to do next.

Annoyingly, though, I found out yesterday that the surgery has been delayed by two weeks, until the 2nd of October. I don't know why. It's annoying, because I'd accepted the 18th as a reality and had been mentally preparing myself for that, but I suppose it's not too bad of a thing if it means I get two more weeks before what might be the end of me as I am now? I'm trying to see it like that, but the emotional effects of it all are still weighing me down.

Other than that, I've been feeling quite fed up recently because my life is lonely, empty, restricted, and repetitive, and I can't really see that changing any time soon.



∞ I mentioned recently ∞ that I'd been reading about things like the 'red pill', incels, etc, and I've continued to do that over the past few days. I've been reading a lot of content of what would be considered 'manosphere' subreddits, and while I only ever lurk as if observing the habits and beliefs a particular 'tribe' from a distance rather than attempting to become one of them, I'd be lying if I claimed that those beliefs weren't affecting the way that I think and perceive the world.

As I've said many times before, I've never been successful with women, but I always hoped that one day, one day, maybe if I kept up with this creative stuff, I'd build up a large enough audience that some lovely female fan would seek me out, tell me she loved my work and that it spoke to her, and then maybe we could start a relationship and I wouldn't have to be alone anymore. It was never the primary motivation behind anything I did, but it was definitely there in the background all the time.

It was extremely naive, but I suppose it came through a merging of the avoidant urges that come from my particular mental issues, and the cultural conditioning that tells us we're all entitled to love, that we'll all find our special someone, somewhere, somehow. Dating seemed terrifying to me on many levels, but since we all find someone eventually, surely it'd happen to me in this other way instead, right? Right??

The worldview these manosphere places present is a bleak one, though. They talk about how all women sleep around with a bunch of 'Chads' - swaggering, physically attractive 'bad boy' types who ooze masculinity - during their younger years because these are the men they find sexually arousing, who 'give them tingles', but eventually they get too old for this and have the drive to settle down, at which point they typically choose a 'beta' - a guy who's not sexually attractive but who can provide commitment and resources - who they lock into a sexless and unhappy marriage that often ends in divorce anyway, robbing the man of the fruit of years of labour as well as his emotional wellbeing.

It's obviously extreme, but it's supported by our biology. During my psychology course, I did a module about Evolutionary Psychology which dealt with exactly this kind of stuff, and various experiments that supported it. So it's backed by science enough to feature in mainstream education; it's not just the delusional rantings of a fringe group. Real world experiences tend to back it up, too, generally speaking. Women do benefit from producing children with the genetically superior males (the best-looking ones), so it's in their genes' interest to have as much sex as possible with them. Since those guys have options though due to the number of women who want them, it's tough for a woman to lock him down into a committed relationship, so she generally has to settle for someone genetically inferior but more reliable. Since she's not actually attracted to such a man on a visceral level, though - despite what she might say about 'loving' him - she'd hardly give him sex with the same frequency and intensity that she'd have with the 'Chads' because with them, it was about her genes eagerly desiring integrating his into her offspring, whereas with the 'beta', it's more about him wanting it, and about her giving it passionlessly to shut him up.

While this model of mating behaviour is supported by evidence and makes sense from a biological standpoint, I imagine it's easy to think of exceptions. My relationship with my ex didn't fit this model, for one thing. And I'm sure that some guys who aren't exactly 'alphas' end up with loving partners who stick with them for life without either party feeling especially unfulfilled. I wonder whether they're the lucky minority, or whether most people just have fairly ordinary relationships with other ordinary people and all this stuff about 'Chads' and 'betas' only applies to extremes.

Either way, I don't feel as attracted to women as I was just a few weeks ago. I wouldn't say that I hate them, that I'm a misogynist or anything, and I do recognise that we're all people with our own struggles and preferences and everything else. But I suppose the lingering feeling that maybe I'd one day find a relationship, and that it'd make me happy, is dead now, so my desire for women has died with it, at least to some degree.
I've accepted, mentally, that I'll never be in a relationship, and it feels like a relief in a lot of ways. I have at least had one relationship, so I have some experience of what they're like, so it's not like I'll never know. But I'm not a good catch, I recognise that.

There are a lot of posts on these subreddits mocking the dating profiles of women who are both undesirable and demanding; they're in their thirties, obese, saddled with two children from two different absent fathers, and yet their whole description of themselves is a set of requirements like "must be over 6 feet tall", or dismissive statements like "my kids are my everything, don't think I'll be putting you first". And the sad thing is that they seem to get an exhausting amount of messages regardless of how appealing or unappealing they make themselves, whereas men - if they're not 'top tier', at least - are lucky to get any (darkly comically though, men who appear to be particularly sexy can get girls even if their profile literally paints them as a child rapist and physical abuser; the girls just shrug it off and keep talking to him). Mens' mating strategy is to spread their seed as widely as possible, so it seems that on Tinder, for example, they say 'yes' (swipe right? I've never used Tinder) to the majority of women, whereas it's up to the women to be more selective about their options, since they typically have a lot of them. I feel like I'm both undesirable and picky - I really don't want to end up with an obese, jaded single mother who's older than me, much as a pretty, intelligent girl wouldn't want to be with someone like me - so entering the dating game would only lead to a loss, possibly even mockery.

My ~soulmate~ is just a fantasy that will never come true. We're not all entitled to finding our perfect partner, and very few people do. It's a bitter pill to swallow, and it's been getting me down a lot, but I feel that once I've fully accepted it, I'll be able to focus on other things and direct my focus to what actually does make me happy instead of longing for some hypothetical happiness. It's not easy to say no to our most fundamental biological urges, though. Of course the mind and body are going to object.

There's loads more I could say about all this, but I suppose I'll leave it at this for now. I might have repeated a lot from the other post, but it's a process, shedding hopes and beliefs - dreams - that were so fundamental to my worldview and sense of identity before.

I do want to say though that incels are regarded with hostility because of their misogyny, but it's not like it comes from nowhere. All their life they've been looked at by women like something they've scraped off the bottom of their shoe, often despite being as nice to those women as they could be. How should they respond to that, exactly? They've been hated by women, but they're not allowed to hate women in response? It would be better if they weren't hostile towards women, of course, but it'd also be nice if young women weren't hostile towards men they deemed ugly, also. Rejection is one of the worst pains in the world, and to be subjected to it repeatedly - as a result of genetic factors outside of the individual's control - is bound to crush even the most bright and innocent of souls into a bitter black hole.

There seems to be little in the way of empathy for the suffering of such unfortunate men, though. It's disgusting that they feel 'entitled to sex'... but then you get things like ∞ this ∞ where women say they're entitled to perfect love and will accept nothing less, which aren't socially unacceptable beliefs to hold. It all seems so unfair.

(It does annoy me though when 'men' and 'women' are talked about as if every individual is just an instance of their gender... Personality qualities surely make a huge amount of difference. Still, the underlying biology does create certain drives for sensible reasons, and each sex does have its own mating strategy that works best for it.)



I've been doing a bit of creative stuff, but my heart's not in it. I want to work on Taming Dreams in the format that I described in ∞ that previous post ∞, but I've yet to get into the swing of things. Once I come up with a 'workflow', and a visual style I'm happy with, then I'll have got the ball rolling and it'll be easy to continue, but I'm currently struggling to muster enough energy for that initial push.

I made a 3D model of Enki:



I'm not sure about it, though. I haven't finished the texture, and maybe the model feels insufficiently stylised, too stiff, or some other flaws. I've also been having thoughts about changing things. "Maybe he should be called Sam Sara instead, because I like that name and it has much more meaning than Enki. But I chose Enki because of ∞ Mardek's name ∞, but it's not like I ever based Mardek's name on Mesopotamian mythology and he as a character has no symbolic relevance to it, so... does that mean I should remade Mardek to something more significant as well??? But people will be expecting familiar things... Or maybe calling him something else would mean that people would be less likely to complain that this wasn't the same as the MARDEK of their childhood??"

There's a lot of indecision, is what I'm getting at.

What I'm going to do - what I think will help build up motivation - is continue going through those My Story posts, before trying to make this Taming Dreams thing. Their audience is limited, and they won't make me money, but some of you do seem to get something out of them, and it is interesting and motivating to me to visit my old work. I wrote the other ones weeks ago, long before actually posting them, and got as far as playing Deliverance; I'll post the one about that soon. Tomorrow, or the day after, probably. MARDEK comes next, but perhaps I'll skip over that, write the posts about the post-MARDEK stuff, then go back to MARDEK and play through that, writing posts about it as I go along. Then, I should play through the app version Taming Dreams for the first time in years. Hopefully doing those things should fill me with the desire to make the new version. Hopefully.

I just wish I could stop time to do all that though...



Some miscellaneous things:

I'm sure my mood isn't being helped by sitting in front of a computer alone, day in day out, never seeing anyone or going anywhere. I've been meaning to go for walks, but when I do it doesn't help much or at all since I just end up walking the same few routes again and again and it's so boring. I listen to audiobooks as I walk, but it still just feels like a chore with little obvious benefit. But then when I don't go out walking, I probably feel worse than if I did, but since I feel so weary from not walking, I feel too weary to go walking, and it's all so... bleh. Bleh! That's what it is! Bleh!

I have been using my Oculus Rift to work myself up into a sweat at least every other day (I've been using the games BoxVR, Beat Saber, and Knockout League), which feels good in the moment, but annoyingly whatever endorphins (or whatever) are generated by this exercise don't seem to linger long enough to be of much use for productivity.

I also seem to be 'fuelled' by music, such that when I find some really good new music to listen to, I can get a lot done while it plays in the background. Once it loses its novelty though, it loses its power to motivate, which is a shame. And it's rare that I find music I like enough to have this effect. I've been composing those ∞ long piano 'rambles' ∞ because I can use them for this reason - and they're especially potent for me because I made them - but I'm very aware that as much pleasure as they bring me, there's no real reason for anyone else to be interested in them. Music preferences are so subjective, the style of these isn't within the realm of most common genres, and they're so long that it's quite an investment of time to ask for. As such, the time and effort involved in making them feels like a waste.

Sleep habits play a huge role in wellbeing, and mine are poor at the moment; my circadian rhythm is a mess. That's something I'm going to be working on over the next few days to see how much of a difference it makes.



Anyway, yes. Venting. There's loads more I could say about all this stuff, but this is enough for now. I do feel that it helped to write it all out, at least.