The MGTOW / Bachelor / Self-Improvement lifestyle, especially when combined with intermittent fasting and an 05:30 wake-up time, can rapidly lead to a fairly austere lifestyle. No drugs, no drinking, no Rolexes, no fancy weekends away with expensive girlfriends, no bespoke suits and shoes, no using the latest phone, nor other bling. Some people might even forego the Apple gear and decent Northampton-made shoes for a mid-range Dell and shoes from China, but for me that’s going too far.
Maybe it’s a consequence of being on the AA program, or it’s a consequence of the austerity bit, but I find I have lost sympathy for the chaos, emotional squalor, health problems, financial difficulties, and hangovers of regular people, let alone for their material wants, desires and fantasies.
To me those are choices they have made, but to them, I have realised, none of it is a choice. They call it life and it just happens to them. Choice for them is about what to consume, not how to live. Because they don’t think of themselves as deciding, they don’t experience anything as a consequence, just as more stuff that happens from outside. They hear people saying things like ‘actions have consequences’ and they nod along because they know it’s an Approved Thought, but they don’t think it applies to them. Decisions are something other people make.
AA has a koan: nobody held you down and forced whisky down your throat. Which they didn’t. I picked up the drink and poured it down my throat. My actions. My choices. The day I heard that AA koan, or more accurately, the day I understood it, I felt a sense of relief and of revelation.
I made choices that got me drunk. Now I could make choices that kept me sober. Getting drunk didn’t happen to me, it was something I could stop doing to me.
(Some things do happen to us - losing a job when the company downsizes, drowsiness from hay fever, getting a cold - but even then we can try to do something about the situation we get tipped into. That’s a choice.)
Even if regular people accept that they make choices, they don’t do the math around those choices. Someone told me that they had been putting off having children because it wasn’t the right time. Then one day someone said to them: it’s never the right time to have children. The math on children, for Western people with good jobs and a pleasant lifestyle, is all negative, as the declining birth rates all over Europe attest. It’s poor people who have children because, it doesn’t make their lives any worse.
If you’re a Westener with a shot at a decent job, defined as one that lets you live in your own place and still save some money, the math says you live pretty much as I do, though with more partying. If you don’t make that much, there’s some bad math that says two of you can maybe afford a place of your own. It’s bad math because it doesn’t factor in the expected cost (cost x probability) of the break-up, and the probability of break-up is 40% plus.
Regular people don’t do the math. This matters because if you hire them to manage parts of your company, they are not going to do the math there either. How many business plans for marginal but career-enhancing projects, with utterly fake numbers, do you see? Right. All of them. Regular people do stuff because they think it will enhance their lives, and they don’t look at the downside that will hit them like the tide in the Bristol Channel.
What do they gain, in their private lives, by ignoring the math and even not thinking about consequences? I have no idea. It may be the sense that they don’t want to be me and mine. They don’t want to be That Guy who thinks about tomorrow’s hangover when contemplating another round tonight. Why they would want to be the guy who has the hangover, I have no idea.
And I still see it as a decision that they make. Because it is.
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