Being Your Own Mental Point of Origin

“Be your own mental point of origin” is one of those phrases that for a long time I never really understood. Something about it kept slipping through my fingers.

Recently I saw a video called 15 Sacrifices You Need To Make If You Want To Be Rich


Alux can have some silly videos, but this is a good one, though you need to get past the Alux Lady’s voice and listen to what she is saying. It comes down to this: if you want to be rich, it’s going to take a lot of work over many years, and that work is not going to leave you a lot of time to give a wife and children the attention they deserve, or to hang out with loser friends, go for junk entertainment, and dozen other time-wasters, and even maybe for your health and sleep. You’re going to need to defer some of those things, such as family, and just plain drop others until you’ve achieved your goal or made an honest effort and failed.

This applies to a lot more than making a lot of money. It applies to training and competing for an Olympic medal; acquiring the skills and connections needed to establish yourself as an artist, writer, photographer or other creative; establishing oneself in a profession, trade or industry; or even working up from an entry-level job to one that pays enough to let live in your own place and save some money.

Now imagine someone leaving university and pursuing whatever demanding goal it was for ten years or so. Maybe they succeeded, maybe they didn’t. Either way, they know what it is to have an absorbing, sometimes frustrating but sometimes satisfying life that has nothing to do with women and children. If they were successful, they will place a high value on that. The idea that ‘all this success is just meaningless’ is a social cliche, not an emotional reality: the meaning isn’t in the reward, it’s in the competition. So they will still place a high value on the process, even if the results were disappointing. The idea that failed strivers reject all the behaviours they learned as ‘empty and meaningless’ is a cliche for losers. Nobody who has spent ten years filtering out junk, drama and losers is going to embrace any of it. They have turned into a person with self-discipline and self-respect, and those are things nobody trades.

So a lot of those temporary sacrifices are going to be permanent, but won’t be sacrifices, not to someone who has succeeded or put in an honest effort at achieving their goals. Because doing that changes the kind of person you were.

You can see where this is going. A man pursuing a goal over an extended period is going to look a lot like a MGTOW-with-short-term-relationships. If he doesn’t blow it by turning Beta when he makes his goal, he will be a de facto MGTOW-with-short-term-relationships for life. Not because he isn’t ‘Alpha enough’ to handle long-term relationships, but because he has evolved an idea of value in which the cost of LTR’s is not worth the benefit.

Anything that looks like MGTOW brand is anathema those Men’s Writers whose audience is men who want to know how to manage long-term relationships with women. That audience does not want to be told to get themselves a demanding goal. It wants to be told how to bump along with what it has, but with less pain per bump. It wants long-term relationships with women, because those are a substitute for demanding goals. (Though if they have a family and try to raise two decent kids, well, that’s a demanding goal. Such a pity most parents don’t treat it like one.) What those men want to hear is that they should not be the servants and ATMs of their wife and children. What they need to know is how to work that trick: how to have a life of their own, but no too much of a life that might cause them to look at their marriage and wonder what exactly they are getting from it that’s so much better than what they can get from their own devices? And don’t nudge and wink and talk about sex, or no-one will take you seriously.

Having-a-life-but-not-too-much-of-a-life is what’s meant by “being your own mental point of origin”. Because if you have a demanding goal, that goal is your mental point of origin, not yourself. Until you decide to change it.