Monday 1 June 2015

What Do You Like To Do?

Back on my post about Personal Time and Space is Golden for Men, commentor Anonymous shared this little gem:
When I got divorced, I did go to a counselor, a very wise guy, and the first thing he asked me was "what do you like to do"?. I had no answer. He spent the next couple of months talking about what I'd like to do. I felt like one of those escaped animals that was totally bewildered.
This especially has stuck with me: "He spent the next couple of months talking about what I'd like to do."

Given that I've been effectively defining MGTOW (again) recently - and a whole bunch of the PUAsphere has been basically telling lies about and shit-slinging at MGTOW (again) recently - I decided that it was long past time and very much worth looking into this more closely.

As per the above, a lot of men seem to come out of the divorce/frivorce bullshit-and-meatgrinder with - nothing.

I'm not talking work, money, homes, things, self-esteem, whatever. I'm not talking child custody. I'm not talking having to pay alimony or child-support. I'm not talking visitation rights. I'm not talking being forced to live on a mate's couch or in a van down by the river for a year or two. I'm not talking any of that stuff. That's simply incidental crap that you have to deal with in life. Big stuff, sure, yet it isn't the core of your life.

I'm talking the answer to the simplest question in life: What do you like to do?

For most of these shell-shocked and battered men, the answer seems to be: What?

It almost seems like their personal desires, enjoyments, and fun have all been erased from their being.

They've been around their woman so long, she's worked on and molded him so long, that he doesn't seem to have something personal left. It almost seems like a form of brainwashing: everything has been turned and fine-tuned to the purpose of catering for her and the children.

There's nothing left that is uniquely him any more.

Perhaps that's why the divorce/frivorce occurred. He's literally not the man that she married. Much or all of his individuality has been wiped away, replaced with an interchangeable robot who can do not much more than acquiesce to whatever her desires are. So she leaves because he's not what she fell in love with - no duh, stupid.

Keoni Galt recently made a comment on a post of mine, something like: Surfers surf, hunters hunt, divers dive, gamers game. Drawing the line.

Strangely enough, you can ask this of many women also: What do you like to do?

It's a peculiar thing. I wonder if this is kind of what caused feminism. Betty Frieden, The Feminine Mystique, "The Problem That Has No Name". Bored, dissatisfied, didn't have any real interests of her own. So she blamed men for her lack of interests. Blamed men for her dissatisfaction. Blamed men for her boredom.

So she wrote about it, blaming and whining about men. It went viral. Eventually blaming men and complaining about men and whining about men - aka man-bashing - became the favorite sport and pastime of women in the Western world.

Bob Wallace once made a comment on a post of mine: Women want license.

Men gave it to them.

Men are hated for it.

Ironic. Hated for giving women what they want. The old Arab proverb: "Women want fried ice." You can never satisfy them - don't waste your time trying.

We've noted before, women as chameleons - women as empty vessels - their interests become that of their man. Sometimes it's an act and you can catch the slip. Sometimes it might be sincere. You can't be absolutely certain.

Back to these men. There's nothing left that is uniquely him any more.

What do you like to do? Anonymous went for a couple of months exploring that question. I think that you found the wisest counselor possible, when he and you went over and over that.

Many shell-shocked men wander into the manosphere, trying to figure out what the fuck happened to them. They followed the socially-approved script/recipe of: marry, get a house, have kids, kids move out, retire with big bucks and enjoy your life.

Only for some reason the script/recipe fell apart there, generally well before the "kids move out" stage. They sure as shit didn't make it to the "retire with big bucks and enjoy your life" stage.

An anecdotal 51% divorce rate - I decided to check on this. I got on to Wolfram|Alpha and did some searches, however I was very unsatisfied by the results. Very unclear - maybe someone else can wrangle the right questions. So I went to the CDC to find out what the rates were in America: Marriage and Divorce (2011) (provisional):
  • Number of marriages: 2,118,000
  • Marriage rate: 6.8 per 1,000 total population
  • Divorce rate: 3.6 per 1,000 population (44 reporting States and D.C.)
Note that they don't state outright "number of divorces", only "number of marriages". They also say that divorces are reported from some states, implying that marriages are from all states (so the divorce numbers are low). Doing some basic mathematics:

3.6 / 6.8 * 100 = 52.94% of marriages end in divorce

52.94% * 2,118,000 = 1,121,269 divorces

That's a fuckload of both blank-slate and really-pissed-off Men thrashing around uselessly in American society - in a single year.

So some of them wander into the manosphere, get a whole bunch of answers from the PUAsphere, and go out there looking to get laid. Partly it can be attributed to the general "this is what a man does" attitude coupled with the feminist/leftist shaming tactics that're common out there. Plus they've got no other answer to the question of what they like to do. (Perhaps that is another reason why I didn't go down the PUA track. I had things that I liked to do. I wasn't completely erased/deprogrammed at the point of my divorce/frivorce.)

Some of these Men end up being turned into Social Robots. (As Style/Neil Strauss once remarked upon in The Game.)

Some Men come to the realization: I don't really like doing that.

So they are forced back to the basic question again: What do you like to do?

Poor bastards end up blank-faced as they say: I 'ontno.

It appears that a good chunk of what goes on visibly in MGTOW is at the stage of: "I don't really like doing that." Which is kind of hard to get across to the guys who are still in the Social Robot stage of things. Which is why the PUAsphere seems to be tossing out the feminist/leftist shaming tactics as they attempt to stereotype MGTOW as "bitter loser neckbeards who can't get laid". Anything to keep their demographic growing from the influx of poor confused bastards.

Which is no help at all for the poor bastards who are in the stage of asking themselves: "What do I like to do?" (By the way there are a *lot* who don't get to the internet to do this - they manage it by themselves. Some even come on here and find MGTOW after years of doing their own thing. They're surprised that what they do is "a thing" with a name.)

Any rate. They're trying to sort out things in their heads and they're being bombarded with bullshit shaming tactics (h/t to commentor LosAngelesKing). They're trying to answer an existential question for themselves and they're basically being dumped on with female tactics once more - they're losing their personal time and space (cue reading the linked post again) because of having other men dumping on them and not leaving them alone.

The real answer to these feminist/leftist shaming tactics is something along the lines of: "Fuck off and let me be while I try and work out what I want to do with my life."

In a weird and twisted way there is no male safe-space for Men anywhere, even away from other men, to relax and get a break from the fuckin' bullshit.

I wonder if that's why many MGTOW disappear from the internet. They need their time and space - they've got a ton of monkey-poo getting thrown their way - they finally get disgusted and say "fuck off and die you sack-of-shit cunts!" and leave. So that they at least have some personal fuckin' peace and quiet while they sort themselves out with the next stage of answering for themselves that age-old question:

What do you like to do?

7 comments:

  1. I'm glad you liked my comment.

    What my counsellor showed me as well, is that we as men, we have identified and suppressed ourselves so much in the name of our wives and families, we have lost ourselves, our very essence.
    I think that “What do you like to do”, was a form of “remembering” therapy, for me to start that great process of reclaiming the authentic and true me.

    He told me the reason that I had forgotten about me, was that to my family, I was just a utility, an accessory, just like a hand bag. The last thing society and my ex-wife wanted was to see was me was as human, with my own thoughts and feelings.

    As an aside, if you want to know how you can tell the right therapist for you? Your ex will hate them. They will make disparaging remarks about them, as they can see and are threatened by your new empowerment.
    People hate MGTOW as it gives back men’s humanity – and slaves are not supposed to have any humanity.

    I know that we hold opposite views, I'm a northern heathen and into Zen, and this does influence my opinions. The one thing that I learned from my ten years of divorce hell, is just how ancient MGTOW is. There really is “nothing new under the sun”. In fact, becoming MGTOW is a very profound, ancient and deep archetype and process outlined in Joseph Campbell’s "A hero with a thousand faces".

    In his book, Campbell outlines the journey of the hero, and our call to reluctantly start this journey is often due to divorce. The good news is that the end of this great adventure is a real and authentic masculine life (MGTOW as we like to call it). I encourage you to read this book (if you haven’t already done so).

    In the overly dramatic/poetic language of the northern shamans, I “died the day of my divorce, traveled through the land of shadows and death, to be reborn as a MGTOW man, having rediscovered my masculinity, returning to the world to share this great truth”.

    Great post, keep up the good work.

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  2. What a man - particularly as he ages - likes to do is teach. No doubt for obvious evo-psych reasons. That's why raising children is fulfilling. That why there are websites like this one. It's the soul of patriarchy, the lynchpin of civilisation: hard-won wisdom being passed down.

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  3. Not everything on the Internet refers to MGTOW directly. Do you know the 90/9/1 rule of Internet participation?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
    I read much more than I comment on.
    http://www.xenosystems.net/quote-note-167/ - a pleasure to read, especially comments.

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    1. https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/someone-should-have-warned-them/ - hahahah! Well, that works one way only...

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    2. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/06/01/theres-no-gender-pay-gap-but-here-are-11-reasons-why-there-should-be/ - Nero delivers, again. How funny to consider that he doesn't have to worry about a girlfriend browbeating him for riling the Sisterhood.

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  4. I like to crack my bat on the heads of baseballs coming my way! Great stress reliever. Money well-spent comparing to going to pro baseball games.

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  5. I think that the best part of doing this is having my own horizons expanded. Thank you all.

    @Anonymous, I will find that book and read it.

    @paulmurray, indeed - I sometimes think that it's an antidote to the general feelings of uselessness that society keeps shoveling onto men.

    @Mindstorm, Nero is right. It's not surprising though, when you consider that as a gay man - he is privileged. Even more than the Sisterhood in many ways. (And I've probably pissed off the LGBT-whatever community even more by saying all that. Oh well.)

    @Anonymous, physical exercise is good for damn near everything that ails a man.

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