Sleep Hygiene Is Not For Regular People

There needs to be a name for a piece of advice, given as part of a programme, that almost everyone would not be able to follow, and so, when they complain that the programme “doesn’t work”, the guru can say “Did you do the thing I put in there that I know almost nobody every does?” and you say “No, because almost nobody can” and the guru says “Well, that’s the most important part of the programme”.

In the self-improvement / recovery business, that thing is usually “sleep hygiene”. This says we should go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, and get at least five full circadian cycles of sleep, waking up from shallow sleep. Everyone’s circadian cycle is different in length, and the default number is 90 minutes.

Now think this through. You have to go to work. Starts at (say) 09:00, but it’s best to get there around 08:30 so you get a seat in the open-plan office. Say it’s an hour’s commute. So that’s 07:30. An hour for dressing, breakfast, showering and the like, 06:30 wake-up time. Seven and a half hours’ sleep plus dozing-off time, means getting into bed at 22:30 the previous evening. That means you’re winding down - no exciting TV or we-need-to-talk conversations - around 22:00. You left work at 17:30, were on the gym floor at 18:00, exercised and showered and on your way home at 19:15, arriving home at 20:15, leaving you 105 minutes to deal with life at home. Maybe you caught a movie at 18:30, which stopped at 20:30, so you were home at 21:30-ish, and straight into your wind-down routine. Weekends? You’re up at 06:30 while the rest of the world doesn’t even get started until about 10:00.

What you didn’t do was go to the theatre at 19:30, because that’s letting you out at 21:15 or so, adds fifteen minutes to the commute, so you’re home at 22:30, and oops! Nope.

Sleep hygiene is often incorporated into self-improvement and recovery programmes. Not because sleeping consistently is good for you (though it is), but because of all the things you stop doing in order to sleep consistently. No more late nights. No more parties. No theatre, ballet, concerts, gigs, or Above and Beyond all-dayer’s. No drinks after work. No chasing after potential partners of your preference. No weekend city breaks (what is the point of going to any major European city if you’re not going to party?).

It’s a terrific way for people who want to minimise their contact with the rest of the human race to do just that. I’d love to join you, but pumpkin time comes early for me.

Usually those same recovery programmes will suggest that one spend more time with friends, family and “like-minded people”. Rub that tummy while patting the head of your sleep hygiene.

Also, try sleep hygiene when you have young children. Or you have to deal with your partner’s snoring / restless leg / need to start sharing when you get to bed.

Nah. Sleep hygiene for regular people with actual lives is, well, aspirational.

We’re not supposed to practice sleep hygiene, anymore than we’re supposed to abstain from alcohol and sex. Abstaining from any of those is for people like me who would be far worse off if we indulged. Sleep hygiene, like sobriety, is either a productivity hack (for e.g. athletes) or for messed-up people who need to avoid screwing-up. It’s not for regular people.

Real people are supposed to get tipsy and laid from time to time, and they are supposed to be short of sleep now and again.

What they are not supposed to be is permanently sleep-deprived, running on six or less hours of sleep a day. That has all sorts of horrible effects on our short-term functioning. But sleep hygiene does not, take it from me, have all sorts of beneficial effects on short-term functioning: one does not feel better, one just doesn’t feel worse.

So given the unrealistic demands it makes, why is it included in self-improvement or recovery advice?

So the gurus can blame you for not following the programme when you tell them it isn’t working.

How to Maintain Emotional Sobriety

"Emotional Sobriety" sounds fairly deep or scary or spiritual or all of those. If physical sobriety is not letting booze mess with the way we feel and how we act, then emotional sobriety is not letting people, places and things mess with the way we feel.

Notice the verb is "mess with".

We still mourn when someone dear to us dies. We are still delighted by the happy laughter of our children (if we have them) and we are still concerned when the teenage daughter is late home. We are pleased when a friend does well, and when we do, but modest in our celebration of it. We are angry if someone steps over our boundaries or we do not get the recognition we deserve for the work we have done.

We still feel the emotions that regular people feel.

What we don't do is respond to the drama queen. We don't fall for the manipulations of users and abusers, and we don't spend time feeling bad with the losers. We don't jump in to rescue people who dived into the lake of their own free will. The second time someone gets wilfully drunk and hurts themselves, and it's clear this is a pattern, we call a taxi to take them to hospital and ask them if they have the fare. We don't act out when someone tugs at our co-dependent heart strings. We try to stay calm when the boss punches our buttons or someone at work lets us down and makes us look bad. We don't make events about our reaction to them, we understand that almost nothing is 'about us'.

Staying away from wet places, and from heavy drinkers, is one way of reducing the need to manage our physical sobriety. Reduce the temptations.

The same applies to emotional sobriety. Stay away from the crazies, the emotionally needy, the users, losers and abusers, the emotionally volatile, the people who use their feelings to manipulate those around them. Do not become one of the consequences of people who made bad life choices.

I know what you're thinking.

If you're an ex-drunk, that's a lot of people. And nearly all the ones who turn us on.

It is. I'm not going to pretend there aren't days when life seems a little dull.

It's why a lot of people don't go for emotional sobriety. They still want some physical attraction, and they know that drama goes with that.

If the sex is worth the drama, go ahead. But you're just being dumb if the drama isn't worth the sex.

Which sounds a lot like MGTOW (or WGTOW).

Because it's the same principle. If it doesn't work for you, stop doing it, and do something that does.

Dysfunctional Men Don't Have Standards, But Should

There is a very good video by Monday FA Monday called Men Have Preferences but not Standards. Approach this with care, because it could trigger all sorts of hidden firecrackers you didn’t know you had.

My preferences express what I would like, but could live without. Standards are what something has to meet to be a functioning instance of what it is. Preferences are whether you want it in red or green, tall or short, shaken or stirred. Standards are deal-breakers: stuff that doesn’t meet the standards are reajected or excluded.

Would you drive a car with brakes that don’t work? Take a job that pays less than minimum wage? Go to a holiday hotel when you know there’s building going on? Buy an umbrella with a hole in it? Sit on a chair with a missing leg? Eat uncooked chicken? Go out in the equatorial sun without sun-block? Swim near the Red Flag? Marry a Borderline? (Why does that last feel different from the others? And yet it isn’t.)

A man who has only preferences can be talked round. A man who has standards can’t be. When mavens talk about “settling”, they want you to think they are asking you to go easy on your preferences, but actually they are saying you should abandon your standards.

It is dismaying that givens actually need to be adopted explicitly as standards. Monday’s examples for a potential partner are “I like spending time with this person”, and “This person is kind to me”. He points out that some men will take anybody, no matter how awful, because they believe that any relationship is a win for them. Those men don’t have standards.

Now imagine you have standards, deal-breakers. It doesn’t matter for what. Assume that you are not being silly, that your standards are what should be givens, rather than wanting something from the top one per cent. Now imagine that you never meet anyone, or find anything, that meets those standards. Not even basic stuff, not even what should be givens.

And then other people tell you that you’re afraid to take a chance, that you’re too picky or fussy, that you can’t commit, that you expect perfection. That you should be prepared to compromise and make it work. That you should take a partner who may not really like you, or has a personality disorder (remember, I’m an alcoholic, and no-one should have taken me). Because that’s what grown-ups do.

Would you think there was something wrong with you? Or something wrong with the people telling you to drive a car with no brakes? A lot of people think there is something wrong with them. I did. Until I understood what was really wrong with me, got sober, and understood that some of my actions for many years were way smarter than my thoughts. (Some of my actions were dumb, however, especially around my career.)

Towards the end of the video, Monday asks if we really are living in a world where we can either have standards or relationships, but not both. He doesn’t want to believe it, and I don’t blame him. People like him and me live in such a world. That’s hard to accept. Here’s why it’s true:

Functional people are good at recognising other functional people and also at avoiding dysfunctional people. So functional people marry other functional people, and the rest of us are stuck sharing our varying degrees of crazy, damaged and nasty with each other. So far, so well-known. Now let me throw some stats out:

Estimates vary, but about ten per cent of the population suffers from psychiatric disorders at some point in their lives.

By age 16 almost half the children in the UK will not be living with both their birth parents.

Even when they do live with their birth parents, around twenty per cent live in self-reported unhappy marriages.

Coming from a broken home, or an unhappy home, can serve as a proxy for emotional damage. Perhaps half of the population may have lacked the experience of seeing how functional adults manage intimate and domestic relationships. Never having seen this, they lack the upbringing and skills successfully to manage family life and long-term relationships.

How surprising is it that someone can go through their whole lives and never meet anyone who meets the minimum standards for a relationship? Not at all, when you understand that it’s half the population and the only available people they meet will be from that messed-up half.

Dysfunctional people need standards too. Especially if we want to have lives that are not miseries. Having and living by standards means missing dysfunctional and unsatisfying relationships with possibly high exit costs.

Wait. How is that missing anything?

Sounds more like dodging an artillery bombardment to me.

Recovery Is A Means To Sobriety, Not Fun

When I first got sober, the task itself was a challenge and a source of excitement and discovery. After a good few years, when I had regular employment and some degree of emotional sobriety, the thrill of physical sobriety was gone. I have to remember that it’s something I do every day, and can lose any day. That’s why I still go to meetings.

The same has happened with the self-development stuff. Early nights needed for the early mornings prevent the parties and even the opera and the theatre; the careful diet discourages blow-outs and gimmick food; sobriety cuts out booze and drugs, and that has serious consequences for anyone’s sex life, let alone mine. Life has turned into a stream of comforting and bland white-food experiences.

At which point, you said all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Which is one of those things people say without really understanding it.

What is work? One answer is that it’s something we would only do if we were being paid to do it. I like that one, but that misses the essential bit. Work is anything we do that is goal-directed, rather than for the fun of the thing itself. Employment is work, because the aim is to get paid by doing whatever the boss need me to do. Shopping for food is work. The gym is work, and so is making the bed, ironing the sheets, reading a non-fiction book, tidying a room, cleaning the car, making a painting, taking photographs, networking in the pub after work, chasing girls… a lot more things are goal-directed than you might believe. Sleeping is goal-directed activity, and so work, which is why I wake up exhausted every morning.

Being dull is about being poor company, withdrawn, shy, not being funny, amusing, pleasant, not knowing how to take part in the chatter, the teasing, and the all-round bonhomie. It’s about Jack not being fun for other people rather than having fun for himself.

Being a dull boy may not be such a bad thing, if the only company you have to keep is forever getting into fights, debt, unplanned pregnancies, and going in and out of jail, or if the people you know are gossipy, back-biting, empty-headed, and don’t do much more than eat, drink, shop and get high.

What is it about work that makes Jack a dull boy? Trick question: it only makes Jack dull if it’s that kind of work. Drudgery for someone else’s benefit.

A lot of the self-improvement stuff can be habit, but habit does not mean drudgery, and it is all for oneself.

The trick is to remember that there was a time I didn’t do it, and how I felt then. I could consider that I could stop, and what the consequences of doing that would be. And sometimes, instead of saying “this is just this again”, to say “this is what I do”.

Loneliness Is A Symptom, Not A State

The feeling of loneliness is your soul’s way of telling you that you’re keeping the wrong company. Maybe they’re just too square, man, maybe they are just too hip, maybe they talk about their stupid jobs and petty careers, maybe they talk about football, or maybe you want to be with people who talk about their promotions and how they sold a piece of crap to some dumb client.

The point is, whoever you’re with, if you’re feeling lonely, it’s not someone you want to be with.

It’s not about the quality of the connection. I knew a lot about some of the people I didn’t really want to be with. We had similar problems, because we were at the same stages of our lives. There were plenty of similarities, and really, not that many differences. The only real turn-off then was what it is now: holding and expressing a certain kind of pop-culture idea. Show me a mother who believes that the triple-shoot will harm her child, and I’ll be polite, make my excuses and leave.

So I didn’t feel lonely because I didn’t have deep, meaningful, intimate connections with other people. Given my frakked-up emotional state at the time, that was never going to happen. Other people can’t have a relationship with a walking, talking neurosis. I felt lonely with other people because I didn’t want to be with myself, and being with other people stopped me distracting myself with books or movies or whatever else. Hence the neuroses were raw. It took sobriety, the Steps and a lot of other stuff before I got more comfortable with myself.

In the movies, that recovery would be a story about how I learned to love and trust, and learn the true value of friends. However my life isn’t a movie, so it doesn’t end like that. It ends with me reaching peace through acceptance.

What they don’t tell you about any kind of therapy or recovery is that, when the patient succeeds, whatever that means, they are still where they are: they don’t get the time back, and they don’t get the life they would have had if they hadn’t had whatever it was. It’s not an episode of Buffy, where killing the witch makes all the spells reverse and undoes all the damage. They are still where they are, they just don’t feel the same way, and they know how not to make it any worse.

So there the patient is, at some point in middle-age, and try re-building a life at that point. Everyone is married, divorced and spending Saturdays with their children. They have their social circle, and they have their stories and memories and loyalties and secrets and that is a lot of doors to open and hurdles to jump. His challenge is not to try to build the-life-he-would-have-had-if… because that is impossible. It is to find a way of living that satisfies him and avoids raising feelings of regret, self-pity and loneliness.

Contrary to every pop-therapist ever, one very effective way of avoiding loneliness is not to hang out with random people who have no idea what he has been through. Before you ask, work does not count as ‘hanging out’.

Part of the cure for loneliness is not more people. It’s less people. Anyone who tells you to find some like-minded people knows nothing and is repeating empty advice they heard once.

The other part is not faking for too much of your life. If you know you're putting on an act for the people you are with, because that act is all they will take, you're going to feel lonely. Or resentful. The fewer people you have in your life you have to be fake around, the less bad you're going to feel. The therapists can suggest you find someone you can be honest with, who will accept the real you. Sure. Any idea where? In the house where the rainbow ends in the garden?


I was caused to think about these things by a remark someone made in a You Tube video, about how, though he had had quiet the time with girls when younger, it began to feel lonely. That’s what happens when you have to sustain being someone you’re not, and that seems to be common among PUAs. He didn’t really want to be with those girls, however easy it was to get them to bed, and much more, he didn’t want to be with the man he had to be to get them to bed. That’s loneliness.

Yet Another Therapy Totally Misunderstands Addicts and Drunks

I had a good hearty chuckle on the District Line into Hammersmith the other Saturday morning. Quite a sustained chuckle, in fact. Therapists! Dont’cha just luv ‘em? Richard Bandler and John Grinder to be specific, in their book Reframing: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Transformation of Meaning.

The claims I am making would be outrageous to anyone in AA, andalso to the belief systems that most therapists have been taught. Theyare not incredible if you approach addiction from an NLP standpoint.From that standpoint, all you need to do is 1) collapse anchors on the dissociation, 2) get communication with the part that makes him drink, 3) find out what secondary gain—camaraderie, relaxation, or whatever—the alcohol gets for him, and 4) find alternative behaviorsthat get the secondary outcomes of alcohol but don't produce the damage that alcohol does. A person will always make the best choiceavailable to him. If you offer him better choices than drinking to get all the positive secondary gains of alcohol, he will make good selections

Why was I chuckling? Because there was no secondary gain. Not for me. I didn’t drink to get relaxed. I never felt camaraderie after a couple of pints. I have no idea what any secondary gain of drinking is. I drank for the buzz: I drank to get slightly drunk, but not because of what being slightly drunk did for me, because it usually didn’t do a thing. I got drunk because it was a good feeling in and of itself. I got drunk because I liked the buzz, but sometimes I would have to get through a couple of drinks before that hit. The first cigarette was usually pretty horrible as well: but the third was just fine. Chocolate and ice cream are good from start to finish, just not very buzzy.

Most therapists are ordinary people and have as much understanding of addicts and drunks as they do of complex one-forms. Addicts do stuff for the high, and it doesn’t matter if the addiction is to drugs, booze, sudoko, chess, programming or gardening. I cook because I need food: but if I cooked because I just love flames and knives and ingredients and utensils and chopping and sample-tasting, because being in the the process made me feel good in that special way, then that would be addiction. It’s just not called that when the process produces something and seems to take a lot of energy and skill. Because capitalism.

But now I have a question. If on the one thing I do know about, they are incredibly wrong, are they also incredibly wrong in the rest of their book? Or did they just step way, way outside their expertise?

I read the book because someone whose blog I follow had it on his “must-read” list. Now, of course, I’m wondering about the others on that list.

Chasing The Scream - The Opposite of Addiction

For a (very) short while way back in the day I dated a girl who did heroin: I’d watched her chopping lines upstairs at a party. A week or so later, we were fooling around (no sex) in my rented flat in Putney, and when we stopped and were lying there kinda peacefully, she said “This is how heroin makes me feel”. She was taking heroin just so she could feel like she’d been fooling around for a while? How freaking bad were the rest of her hours? It turned out, as I slid into alcoholism, that some of my hours may have been as bad as some of hers.

Addicts and drunks are made, partly by genetics and partly by upbringing. Psychologists are learning that harsh emotions are real, chemical storms and floods that destroy one set of synapse links in the brain and make others, and affect the autonomic nervous system as well, so that stress hormones are released at the slightest provocation, because when the addict was small and helpless, the provocations were always serious. I’m sure we will learn that good experiences also create permanent changes in the brain and autonomic nervous system that lead to increased an attraction to, and pleasure from, social events and the company of people. Those without the good experiences or with too many bad ones can learn to behave like an emotionally-balanced person, but they will never feel like one.

In his insightful book about the War on Drugs, Chasing The Scream, Johann Hart suggests that isolation keeps addicts addicted, and connection with people and society helps them get off the drugs. Addicts do improve when they have a job, a medical-grade supply of their drug, someone to listen to their stories, a partner and a place to live. The people who run those programs are decent, caring and practical and the world needs more of those programs and less bullying by politicians. Normal people who find themselves using drugs to cope with extreme situations - the Vets who came back from Vietnam and the patients who come off heavy post-op opiates - don’t live without the drugs because they have “human connections”, they live without the drugs because they are normal people and they don’t need to cope with an extreme envirnoment anymore. The addicts who don’t stop are people whose intolerable environment is internal, not external: that’s why “geographicals” - moving or travelling for months on end to try to make things better - don’t work.

“Connection” is either an euphemism for sex, and that’s just drugs, or it’s about doing stuff together or sitting around talking, and that’s like watching British TV: it seems okay at the time, but when you’re on your own again, you feel cheated. There are a handful of people I can spend time with and feel that time is well-spent, but most hanging-out time is not, minute-for-minute, worth an episode of Elementary or Angel.

There’s a reason people in the 12-Step programs call themselves “recovering alcoholics” or “recovering addicts”. They understand that no-one stops being an addict, and alcoholic or any other kind of dysfunction. What they can stop is acting out on their addiction. The opposite of (acting out on) addiction is living a routine life without excitement or drama, and it’s the vanity and obsession to attend a day job, keep orderly digs, exercise, eat right and read challenging books so that you don’t turn into a tub of lard. It’s getting out of bed and go about your day because you woke up alive again. Most of all, it’s taking chronic low-level emotional un-rest, dis-ease and emptiness, and handling the occasional flare-ups into real emotional pain. It’s those flare-ups that send so many addicts back out again, and what attending 12-Step meetings is can help manage.

Some addicts reach a moment in their sobriety when they finally accept that nothing and nobody can make them feel better. It can be an awful few weeks while they deal with the idea that they never will know peace and rest and love. They really are on their own, and they learn that the reason for telling the truth is the same as the reason for having a day job is the same as the reason for being honest and thoughtful is the same as the reason for being healthy and organised is the same as the reason for keeping people at a polite distance: it’s less effort, it keeps their lives simple, and you don’t have to remember what lies you told to whom.

But in this realisation lies freedom. The sober addict, in their emotional emptiness, can live for any reason they choose, except the search for an impossible emotional rest and ease. It’s the people who can make “human connection” who wind up as slaves to marriage and fatherhood and all the games that women and children play, and all the threats that wives and employers can make. The sober addict, knowing that “connection” is for them ultimately unsatisfying, can reject the idea that “the real meaning of life is other people” and find a meaning for themselves. Even if that meaning is simply a simple defiance of their condition: showing up and living sober despite. This isn’t easy, but that’s a whole other story.

Whisky, Cigarettes and the Meaning of Life

RooshV is a smart guy and playing a long game none of the rest of us get. He’s found his audience, and is cultivating them well. Some of it is good, some is okay, and some is just old-fashioned twaddle. Like this...

Lifestyle design has become so popular among both men and women because meaning and purpose have been removed from their lives, particularly god, family, and tribe. Without those, you have nothing to ground your existence on...

No. No. No.

The meaning and purpose of any person’s life cannot be found outside of them. We can decide to dedicate ourselves to a goal that is external to us, but it isn’t the goal that brings meaning, it’s the dedication. Any athlete, artist, scholar or entrepreneur will tell you that. Children don’t bring meaning, they bring the opportunity for the parents to find meaning in the task of raising those children - an opportunity that a noticeable proportion of parents don’t take. God cannot bring meaning, since there isn’t one (or a hundred): what makes the meaning of the religious life is the devotion and dedication. Meaning isn’t an object, it’s a process: it isn’t a goal or an objective, it’s the manner of one's living.

I read somewhere a story about a man who was having a slow recovery after heart surgery. One day the doctor suggested he put something on his bedside cabinet to remind him of why he was getting well. A couple of days later the doctor returns and is shocked to find a bottle of whisky and a carton of cigarettes on the man’s cabinet. “What’s all this?” the doctor asks, and the man reminds him about his suggestion. “Well, I meant a photograph of your wife and children, or some pastime like walking or sailing,” the doctor stutters. The man looks at him. “I’m not married,” he explains, “and I’ve worked hard all my life. I have no hobbies. This, the whisky and cigarettes, this is what I like to do, and it’s why I want to get better.” And the doctor did indeed notice that the man had improved even over the last two days.

That man understood. It wasn't whisky and cigarettes: it was smoking and drinking and all the things that go with that. The process, not the products.

God, family and tribe were never purposes, but institutions to whom we owed something for providing social order, support, welfare and work (maybe, if you were lucky). Today we discharge that obligation by working and paying taxes.

Roosh is right about one thing: find your purpose and your "lifestyle” will follow. Mine, as an ongoing amend for being a drunk and a psychological mess for so long, is to be a quiet, modest, useful worker and a quiet, considerate neighbour, as well as a reasonable brother, son and friend. From that, the early nights, training, work and quiet living follow.

Walking To Krasnoyarsk (2)

The story isn’t about walking to Krasnoyarsk, a town I picked simply on the sound of its name and its remote location. If I had chosen Aberdeen or Cape Town, there may be people who would regard the thought of walking there as quite pleasant, and the point of the story would have been lost.

There are things that happen in our lives that have long-running consequences and change the way we deal with the world. Bereavement, sustained unemployment, debilitating illness, malicious accusations, nasty divorces, personal bankruptcy, addiction, prison sentences, long-running legal cases – to name just a few. These threaten, or actually ruin, our finances, career, reputation, skills, assets, wealth, health, and even our bodily integrity.

Sometimes, surviving one of these events changes us. We have to focus on one goal to the exclusion of almost everything else. Ordinary life, whatever we thought that was, fades into the background. At some point we stop feeling anything about our situation. We can’t afford it. We won’t get get through this if we carry on feeling self-pity, or loneliness, or abandonment, or sorrow, or fear, or uncertainty. And to feel anything else would be insanity. So we feel nothing about ourselves. We have feelings within and from ourselves: we are hungry, tired, weary, footsore, cold, wet or thirsty. But these are feelings as information, not feelings as emotions. And we silence the thoughts and feelings about other people and what they do. We ran out of the energy for that in the first week. They can help us or not. If they do, we thank them and don’t ask why. If not, we shrug and don’t think about it.

Thinking about how we might be living, and how everyone else we know is living, if this thing hadn’t happened, becomes almost painful. We want it to stop hurting when we remember what we used to do, and the only way to do that is to stop remembering that it was enjoyable. We cut the link between what we did and the pleasure it brought, and so save ourselves the pain of missing that pleasure, and the fear of never feeling it again. What we don’t know is that the link can’t be re-made: the psychic surgery is permanent.

When we get back, we try to re-establish our old lives. After all, isn’t that what we were going back for? It is then we find that the psychological changes we made can’t be undone. We can go to the leaving drinks, or a dinner party, or a weekend away with the crew, or a match, but it isn’t the same. We can’t connect the event and the people with the pleasure anymore. On the surface we are as cheerful as we ever were, perhaps oddly, more so, and that is real, as are our polite manners, engagement with the economy and interest in culture and sports. These things can be done with the head. Ask us how we are, what we’ve been doing at the weekend or on holiday, and you’ll get the sense that we don’t really seem remember what we do. Our day passes and is forgotten. What we did was just a way of passing the time that was better than watching some dumb TV show, but it wasn’t our life. We can go through the motions but we can’t feel the feelings. If belonging is about enjoying being there, we don’t belong anymore. Anywhere.

Walking To Krasnoyarsk (1)

Imagine you wake up somewhere you’ve never seen before. It’s cold and damp. There’s a lot of rain outside the window. The light is unfamiliar. So are the smells. There are people talking downstairs, and you recognise it as Russian. What are you doing in Russia? And where, exactly in the vast area where they speak Russian, are you? The people downstairs aren’t surprised to see you, but they don’t seem to know who you are. They give you some tea and bread. Eventually you find out you’re in a village two hundred miles from the nearest large town, Krasnoyarsk. You know enough to know that you are in the back end of nowhere. You can’t speak the language, you have some money but not much, and you still have a credit card but you have a distinct feeling that’s no use to you here. You get bars on your smartphone but no 3G, so you don’t have GPS or maps. Mostly you have no idea how to get back home. The people in the house draw a simple map that points you towards the main road and the next village. There’s no public transport, no trains until Krasnoyarsk, and they have work to do today. Just before you leave, one of them gives you a piece of paper and you gather you should show this to other people.

Over the next couple of days your friends, acquaintances, Linked In network and Facebook buddies learn that you are trudging through the rain in Siberia. They don’t know how you got there. You can’t explain it, because nobody ever knows how they wind up heading for Krasnoyarsk through the rain. Some of them think it’s a crazy stunt, some of them can’t even understand it, and the few who have a sense of what may be happening are worried. They looked up Krasnoyarsk on a map, and when they did, their hearts sunk. They knew you were in the middle of a wasteland.

None of them have the resources to send a helicopter or a rescue party for you. Many are in debt, with children to feed and mortgages to pay. None of them know anyone in Russia they could call to help you. After a very short time, even the most well-meaning are reduced to platitudes about “hanging in there”, “reaching out to people”, “at least it’s not snowing”, and how they are praying for you. Some of them do a calculation like this: it’s two hundred miles, at 3 miles an hour for eight hours a day, he’ll be there in less than two weeks. Anyway, someone must be passing with a car or lorry who will give him a lift. That makes them feel a lot better. But it’s three hundred miles allowing for the curves in the road; and you can’t walk for four of the hours because when it gets hot, it gets too hot to keep up that pace, there’s nowhere to buy bottled water, and you’re not a Marine, but an office worker, and walking that far every day for a week turns out to be exhausting and painful. And outside the towns, Siberia has one person per three square kilometres. There are no cars on the country roads.

Your friends put the phone down, go back to watching television and eating lunch. You go back to a damp room to try to sleep. You sense they are embarrassed because they can’t help: your calls are making them feel bad because they are reminded of how powerless they are. You went to all the office leaving drinks parties, and talked to everyone, getting drunker as the evening went on. With your single friends you went on weekends to Amsterdam or Barcelona or Copenhagen, where you rented flats and went to bars and clubs. Home or away, you and your friends would sit around until two and three on Sunday morning talking nonsense about life, philosophy, football, women, music and anything else, then crawl into bed and wake up in time for a shower, a cup of coffee and a trip to the restaurant for lunch. Your mobile buzzed several times an hour with messages and texts. One day on the road you start to miss all this, suddenly, you feel an emotional pain. As much as you enjoyed it, now it hurts when it isn’t there. For one afternoon, you sat unmoving, and felt how much you would be missing if you never got back. You walked that evening and night to make up for it.

And you decided you could not afford to think of life back home. Of how you would be living if you weren’t here. If you were going to survive, if you were going to get back home, you were going to have to think only about walking, and finding shelter and food, and resting when you needed to. You looked at the stars and understood for the first time how men could find their way by starlight. You don’t know the names of the birds here, but you realise you can hear the different songs. You are going to need to get whatever interest and enjoyment you can from the walk. You send one text a day to confirm you’re still alive and on your way. You stop doing that after the second week.

It takes weeks to get there. You thought it would be days: one long-distance lorry, one farmer needing to go to the town, and you would be there. But no. A few cars go by, some with families, some with businessmen, a few with partying kids, but none stop. Some even shout things like “Best thing I ever happened to me” or “Just be yourself and don’t get depressed – you’ll find someone to take you there”. Each night you find someone who looks at the piece of paper, shrugs, or grunts, or shakes his head, or says something that probably isn’t complimentary, but who lets you sleep on the floor anyway. You would help them, but they can see you aren’t a farmer and can’t help them.

Since that awful afternoon, all you think of is taking the next part of the journey to Krasnoyarsk. You don’t think about what you’re going to do when you get there. You stop anticipating anything, you stop wondering why nobody stops to offer you a lift, you stop wondering how you got to Siberia, you just think about walking. You learn to recognise when you need to rest, when you are about to faint, when you need to get shelter from the heat. You got smart enough to shelter from the first drop of rain in the first week. You don’t wish for better boots or clothes: you have to do with what you have, and wishing would make it worse. If it was winter, you would be dead by now, but it’s late spring, it gets hot during the day. It rains a lot around Krasnoyarsk in the spring. So you walk through flies, midges and god knows what else with wings and teeth that nip and for all you know can leave all sorts of poisons behind. If you get to the next village or farm, and find somewhere to sleep, and someone who offers food and tea, that is a successful day.

Eventually you get to Krasnoyarsk. You find a big hotel where they can take your credit card. You’re too tired to feel anything, and when you can use the hotel internet, you look at your bank account and realise that you’re on your overdraft. Your employer has stopped paying in your salary, but your landlord and everyone else are still taking out their charges. You have just enough money to get home, if you do it cheap. The concierge tells you there are three Aeroflot flights a day to Heathrow via Moscow. The prices are low and you snap up a ticket for tomorrow. You don’t bother telling anyone back home you’re in Krasnoyarsk at last, because it’s only another staging post. Your journey isn’t over. It isn’t over when you board the plane, and it isn’t over when you pass through immigration, and it isn’t over when walk through your own front door. Because you have the fall-out to deal with.

Your employer accepts your story, doesn’t think you’re crazy, is happy to take you back, but hey, you missed work and they won’t pay what you’ve missed, so you’re months in debt. It takes almost a year to get your debts paid and your overdraft cleared. When you see your friends and colleagues, there’s a slight awkwardness. Your very presence reminds them they couldn’t help you, that they were powerless while you were heading for Krasnoyarsk through the rain. You in turn had to forget about them and their lives so you could make it through another day. If there ever was a connection between you, it’s broken. You never do feel a wave of relief at being back home. Because you will always have something else to deal with. It’s no longer a relief. Everything and everybody is now something to deal with.

It puzzles you that strangers helped you on the way to Krasnoyarsk. One day you show someone who speaks Russian the piece of paper they gave you at the start of your journey. He reads it and looks at you with a mixture of pity and surprise. What does it say? you ask. He tells you it says: “this man is lost and has no friends. He is going to Krasnoyarsk. For the mercy of God help him if you can.”

Principles Not Personalities

Every now and then, someone points out that the AA co-founders were far from calm, balanced, morally sound people. Matt Forney just did so in an article on RoK. Then he made a claim about the high failure rate of AA. As opposed to the high success rates of all the medical treatments for alcoholism. Oh. Wait. There aren’t any. Because if there were, all those movies stars and rock stars would pop some pills instead of going to meetings. However, I’m not going to deny that a lot of newcomers start the program, and a lot of them drop out.

So. Personalities first. I don’t give a damn that Dr Bob was the worst doctor in his small town and a degenerate opium addict to boot. Nor do I care that Bill W took all sorts of highs, 13-Stepped and mooched on his wife. Partly because they are both dead, so I will never have to deal with them at dinner, but mostly because I don’t follow their example, I follow their program. As do all the other 12-Step people I listen to in meetings. Alcoholics learn to put principles before personalities, because the principles aren’t bad, but a lot of the personalities are pretty flawed. civilians still confuse the two. After all, if you insist that you will only adopt ideas that come from morally flawless people, you can keep your brain idea-free for your entire life. Judging ideas by their creators is what conformists do.

Sure there’s a high recidivism from AA. If I stop taking my Lanzoprosole, my acid reflux comes back within about forty-eight hours. Does that mean it’s useless? Acid reflux is what happens when a sphincter at the top of your stomach goes wibbly. There’s no cure or surgery for it. All I can do is take a palliative, and thank my lucky stars that it’s one that works, rather than a piece of chemical toxic junk with a name ending in “statin” or “formin”. Well, it’s the same with AA. There’s no cure for alcoholism: if there was, all those movie stars and rock stars would be paying for it. But no, they go to meetings just like the rest of us regular drunks. What it gives us is a palliative. Treatment centres can help start, but the recovering drunk has to prove it every day on the street. For. The. Rest. Of. His. Life.

There’s a phrase we know by heart:

“Rarely have we seen someone fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest."

A 12-Step program is tough to work, or rather, it’s tough to take the consequences. The hardest thing to accept is that sobriety comes before everything else. Job. House. Relationships. Fun. Fitness. Name it. This is not how normal people live. They juggle priorities, they compromise on their goals and principles if that's what's needed to advance something else they want to do. That includes getting drunk at and taking cabs home from a leaving do that over-ran, in the name of "networking". Alkies don't live that way. If something or someone clashes with what we need to do to stay sober, guess what? It gets or they get dumped. But then not having a drink today is the foundation of all the rest of the good stuff in my life: I lose it and all the rest goes. I turn back into a pathetic little jerk with the social skills of a resentful teenager.

AA is not a cure, and anyone who tells you it is? Don’t trust them when they tell you the time either. But then, don’t trust anyone who tells you there’s a cure for addiction, acid reflux, wilful stupidity, being a jerk, chronic lack of fitness or excess weight. There isn’t. There is only endless vigilance and practicing the programme.

And the next time someone tells you that something must be a bad idea because the person who invented it was a Bad Person, remind them that if ideas were only as good as their creators were moral, we’d all still be living in grass huts.

Normal People Don't Need Self-Improvement

I ran across this little rant...

My grandma is dead and she went demented before we could have these deep spiritual conversations. She grew up in the Great Depression. She held the family together. She recognized that family comes first. You sacrifice and do anything for your family. There are not many like her left. Now your family comes second to your smart phones and computers and Internet pornography and your self-indulgent lifestyle. Your Baby Boomer parents were checked out, and now the Gen X parents are checked out. My generation is not maturing. There is little spiritual evolution, little wisdom. Look look at my peers. Men my age and older still talk about their parents! They cry about shit mommy and daddy did to them. “I’m this way because of how my dad/mom treated me.” That is a sign that they have not left the childhood stage of development. People are in their 30s and 40s and still overgrown children crying about mommy and daddy.

Most of it is shaming and grandparent worship (what is with Americans and their grandparents?). The more I looked at it, the more it cames across as a cry of rage and frustration. This is a man wanting guidance and, surprise!, not finding it from his parents or their generation. The give-away is that little phrase “spiritual evolution”.

The cliche is that “religion is for people who believe in Heaven: spirituality is for people who have been to Hell”. I’ve spent some time in Limbo and Purgatory myself - maybe a short spell in the Fifth Circle - and I’m inclined to agree. Spirituality is for people who want to avoid further pain and suffering, who need to manage their inner demons and dysfunctions. It’s not for regular people.

Our author has previously said his mother is bi-polar - which is a nasty thing to do to your child, as that stuff is hereditary - and he has spoken of depression when younger. He has inner demons to fight. He needs the focus on exercise and work, the relentless self-improvement, as I do. The alternative is chaos, decay, weight gain, depression, self-pity and all sorts of other undesirables.

But, and this has taken me a good few years to understand, regular people do not need that focus. They look at the self-improvers and somewhere in their autonomic nervous system, the same one that recognises bad smells, they recognise us for the damaged goods we are. They watch us grind round the gym and see something unhealthy. Which is why they drop the gym attendance six weeks after New Years’. Regular people know they got their genes from their parents, and they spent the first third of their lives with them, so who the hell else was responsible? Regular people say they want to be happy, but above all they want drama and the noise of humanity around them. They want to feel part of the crowd, they want to “be there”, they want to part of a team, they want to belong. They want to brag on a minor success, and relish the drama of a minor failure. The men want to hang out and bullshit about sports, and the women want to hang out and play status games. This and so much more is normal life. They may run half-marathons, but for a good cause, not to prove something about themselves to themselves. They may read, but for entertainment and escape - you can escape in a history textbook. They get something hormonal from being around each other.

Regular people do need instrumental advice - about how to handle a squatter, or an industrial tribunal, or the best route to Swindon from Birmingham - but they don’t need to know how to live. Any more than a squirrel does and for much the same reason. Normal people do really dumb things and they don’t usually make sense, but there’s no point shaming them. They couldn’t change if they wanted to, and they wouldn’t want to. Normals have no advice for people with demons, no more than cats do for lions.

Behind the realisation that the Normals can’t help you is the realisation that you have demons. Rather than accept that, it’s easier to lash out at the Normals. Our author is doing that. He thinks he’s being a better man, not that he’s keeping chaos at bay. The Normals don’t need to keep chaos at bay, because they don’t see it as chaos. They see it as Life. Accidental pregnancies, decaying marriages, bi-polar relatives, bullying bosses, entitled girlfriends, thieving cousins, Type 2 diabetes, weight-gain, marital infidelity… it’s all part of Life to them. It’s what living is all about. They see the carefully managed lives that I and our author lead, and shudder.



It’s not easy being Green.

What does a young man born and raised in fog and chaos do?

This series of posts has been an attempt to find a way of talking about people’s behaviour without falling into gender stereotypes: “women do this, men do that”. Doing that involves some stylistic changes: use quantifiers like “most” and “some” instead of implicitly talking about “all”; give a swift nod towards the good before describing the bad in detail; talk about men, but not explicitly about women; talk about “people” rather than genders.

I can say most of the things Rollo Tomassi says, but without his generalisations and underlying assumption that there is an underlying Nature of Women That Is Just Different And Not In A Good Way. I see it as all part of a human condition that applies to and affects men as well as women.

Certain kinds of women do this, certain kinds of women do that. Sweeping generalisations do not help. We need to know what kind of flaws and chaos we are dealing with. If all women are like that, there is no point filtering. Rather, while all women have something wrong with them, they don’t all have the same things wrong with them, and it matters exactly what is wrong. Same thing for men, as well.

Throughout this series I have rejected dozens of generalisations and snarky comments about women and men, as well as whole paragraphs of theory about marriage, the effect of the development of digital-based cultures, and other such good stuff. I did that because I was rationalising my own behaviour and thoughts. And I of all people should not do that. Because I’m an alcoholic / addict / ACoA. I have a short attention-span, do things because it gives me a high, or am driven by a vanity only another formerly-pretty person would understand why I hold on to. (I do a damn good impersonation of a normal person. I pay my taxes and due bills, I wash and iron my clothes, I have a job and I even have a garden shed and a lawn. But get close and you will feel the self-centredness and dis-ease, the constant need for distraction and new. One day at a time I can do many things for many years, including staying sober, and one-day-at-a-time I might even hold down a relationship for many years, but that’s not what she wants.)

I started with the idea that everyone is flawed, and those flaws will turn into life-changing cracks. Everyone will mess up the lives of those around them: sometimes from malice or irresponsibility, and sometimes from sheer bad genetic luck. There are no right decisions for the long-term: the world will change in such a way that everyone will regret a choice made five or twenty or forty years ago. All we can do is cut our losses and change in response.

The idea that floated up while I was writing this stuff was the Marketing 101 thing. Women don’t want men, they want what men can do for them. And men don’t want women, they want what women can do for them. This has been behind all inter-gender behaviour since people started to notice that there was a difference. What is new, is that men and women now have the resources to do without each other, and that a fair chunk of them seem quite prepared to do so. What makes it hurt is that these MGTOWs and WGTOWs are reasonably high quality - who would care if they were only weirdos and un-dateables?

But they aren’t locked into it. If someone comes along who does what she needs doing, she may just team up with him. (The other way round is a movie fantasy involving Manic Pixie Dream Girls, so it isn’t going to happen.) Hence the need for self-improvement and Game: one of the things those career girls want is some fun and diversion. They are still women, and they still want attention, fun, diversion and fuss from non-creepy men.

What does a young man born and raised in fog and chaos do? There is no right answer. If there was, it would not be chaos and there would be no fog. Any given sequence of decisions might lead to bliss and fortune for one person, and horrors and poverty for another. Some are pretty slanted one way or another: becoming a junkie is pretty much going to wreck your life, but I’ve met some reasonably successful recovered addict-alcoholics.

He must filter potential long-term partners for psychiatric disorders and undesirable personality traits. I say nothing about children because I don’t approve of irreversible decisions. That aside, there is no decision that ensures the long-term, only decisions that can make the near-term a reasonable bet. Get into the gym, become familiar with the rich culture of our age, learn Game and don’t live in a distant suburb. Do what you want, have a way out and always be prepared to change.

Self-Improvement Has Consequences

“Know thyself” said Socrates, “and lift weights” adds every Manosphere guru. Confidence and self-knowledge are supposed to be attractive to women, who like men who know what they want from life.

Well, it’s messier than that.

What does a well-brought up young man with a STEM degree, an in-built desire to make sense of the world, a strong work ethic and a quart of mind-bending testosterone in his bloodstream do?

(i) He takes an inventory of himself, his ambitions and resources
(ii) But first, he needs to know what works and what doesn’t to achieve his ambitions
(iii) Then he drops the stuff that doesn’t fit, or makes specific plans to fill the gaps

The catch, of course, is the second one. As I’ve argued before, as soon as other people’s decisions are involved, the process becomes random. Investors look for different opportunities and take different risks; employers choose as much on “cultural fit” as they do on observable qualities; your placing in a race depends on how fast your competitors run as well; and as for cinema audiences? Who knows?

However, our young man has plenty to do just fixing his obvious weaknesses. It might not work every time, but it sure improves the odds, and lets him go in with more confidence. And that confidence can be off-putting.

Shrews are looking for a man they can wear down; parasites are looking for a man who will support them without making demands; users are looking for a man they can manage; low-libido girls are looking for low-libido boys… so when a confused young man decides he’s going to stop being confused, set and enforce his boundaries, call people out on their BS and be swift kicking the users and abusers to the kerb, he is going to get through a lot of people at the start, before he learns to spot them out of the corner of his eye and treat them like traffic. His self-improvement opens his eyes to the fog, chaos, flaws and complacency of the people around him. Women who may have seemed acceptable for a relationship now become suitable, if at all, for a short-term sexual fling. And they can see it in his eyes.

This isn’t just about women, but also employers. Abusers hire unpaid interns and use zero-hours contracts; pay under the market rate wages for over the market rate hours; demand weekends and overtime at short notice; and lay off staff at the slightest pretext. Parasites don’t make it easy for their staff to develop their marketable skills, and sometimes subtract value from them. A young man with some self-respect and skills will soon learn to speak Recruitment and recognise which firms he is and is not prepared to work for, and which ones will reject him the moment he walks through the door, because something in his manner says “Not a Victim”.

Raise your standards, and you shrink your supply. In an responsive consumer market, some suppliers will raise their standards and prices to meet the demand from that niche. But people aren’t responsive suppliers. You see men in the gyms, but not women. You see employees getting skills, but employers are reluctant to upgrade their software and equipment.

Raise your standards and the competition gets tougher. Our self-improving young man is competing with all the men who weren’t as confused, and all the men whose degree of confusion is less important that their superior resources. There aren’t enough good clients, jobs in the Top Fifty Firms To Work For, hot women or supportive investors to go round. Nor, we should mention, are there enough cool centrally-located apartments, restaurants, cafes, holidays, or anything else of quality.

In the meantime, a man gotta eat, gotta rest his head someplace, and what a long period of incel does to anyone is not a pretty sight. Our young man has to learn to separate the mediocre world with which he has to do in his daily life, from his own life and ambitions, and to dip into it when he needs money, or sex, or even food (sometimes Pizza Express is all there is), but not to stay any longer than he needs.

So, sure, the upsides in his life have been made harder to get, but he has reduced the downsides by orders of magnitude. Something else has happened.

A world that once seemed full of possibilities is gradually changed to a world full of flawed people who seem inexplicably ignorant or tolerant of their flaws, and who, while he may work with them, he would never socialise with them. He sees the weakness or arrogance in the men, and the entitlement and delusion in the women. He knows he is not perfect, and that others may see him as a nerd who doesn’t quite fit into the regular world, but he doesn’t care about that. The regular world now seems to him a slack place, full of mediocrity and compromise, with which he engages only when there is no alternative. There are good people in it, but it’s too chaotic, too messy, too unaware of itself.

In the Manosphere, this is called “Red Pill Isolation”, but it’s a much more general phenomenon. Young men and women coming out of the Armed Forces regard their civilian counterparts as slovenly, disorganised and under-motivated. Those of us with toned bodies look upon the softies as, well, a bit slack. Self-discipline and increased self-understanding, the urge to create a coherent person of ourselves, separates us from the majority. After a few years at it, I really do feel like I’m walking through a world of ghosts.

Being Mature, Shame Traps and Being A Mensch

Over at The Rawness, they asked over several parts "What is maturity?" And all of them walked straight into the trap. They accepted that the concept had moral freight that could be shame-dumped on transgressors. I say, faced with any concept that gets used to shame people? Screw it. Stop using it and replace it with solid descriptives instead. Who cares what someone else trying to con you into behaving in such-a-way call "mature"? 

You have respect for your body, and so exercise and eat well; you have respect for your mind, and so read challenging non-fiction, and avoids junk culture; you have respect for your soul and emotions, and so choose your friends and acquaintances well - avoiding users, vampires, dis-respectors and other vexatious and turing people; you pay your fair and due taxes, and you pay your due bills; you work in the private sector or in law enforcement, fire-fighting, the military or medicine; you are considerate to the similarly well-behaved, and co-operate with those who bear you no ill-will. Mostly you don't do stuff for free, though you do "give" if you can. You have strong boundaries, and above all, you do not enter into any contract with high exit costs (cf marriage and almost all large outsourcing contracts). 

You do all that, and you will not care if anybody calls you "immature". 

I would add, but this is optional, that you don't identify yourself with the values, traditions and social and religious practices of your family, friends, employer, society or economy. Sure, go along with it to get done what you need to get done, but belief? I don't hide behind religion, culture or any other of Mommy's conceptual skirts to defend what I do or how I feel.

Do all this and you will come across as polite, considerate and co-operative - to those whose behaviour and attitude qualify them. You won't let others spill your feelings all over you, and you won't trouble others with yours either. You are going to come across as pretty darn self-contained and distant, though among friends you will be just the opposite. You will be the guy who, well, when someone falls sick in front of you, you will call for an ambulance and stay with them until it gets there, and then get on with your day.

If you're that guy, do you care what someone else out to shame you counts as "mature"? Thought so.

Thanks For Sharing - Review

Now this is how you make a movie about sex addiction. A swift digression brought on by a little scene at the start of the movie: one big difference between the 12 Step Fellowships in the USA and in the UK is that the American courts do order attendance at 12 Step Meetings, and it's clearly been the conscience of those groups to co-operate. I was the joint secretary of a reasonably large meeting for a year, I've done committee service and I've read the manual (yes, there's a manual) and I have never been approached by anyone asking to have me sign their card, nor have I heard of it, or even read about it in the manual. I think this is because the Courts here don't regard 12 Step Fellowships as suitably official enough, but I have a feeling that UK AA and others wouldn't co-operate even if it was asked. Can you see the headlines? "Driver who killed Annie (4) pronounced cured of alcoholism by AA". That's the British press for you. Nah. I don't think I'm voting to put anyone in the way of that.

Hollywood portrays 12 Step Fellowships sympathetically - a LOT of industry people are in it, and it's worked for them. But this movie isn't cute about it. Okay, so none of the guys will ever look like Mark Ruffalo, nor will any of the gals look like Pink (who appears as Alecia Moore and is Jolly Good Too). And I doubt there are as many slim good-looking women in New York as there were in the movie: America is the land of the obese. And of course, nobody her age looks like Gwyneth Paltrow. Not even her. 

There was just one scene that had me muttering "yeah, right, as if", when the Tim Robbins character has a row with his son after presumptuously and falsely, as it will turn out, accusing him of stealing some Percocet. Robbins goes into a Korean grocer and can't take his eyes off a black girl with hot pants and an afro who clearly time-warped in from the early Seventies, while he orders a bunch of lottery tickets and a fifth of bourbon. Just in time, his mobile rings and he's saved by the call for help from a fellow addict. My problem is that his character was a gajillion years sober, and while YMMV, mine tells me that I couldn't make that much sobriety if I reacted that strongly to anything. The people with long-term sobriety I know are nice enough and polite enough and they do their duty when called on, but they are pretty frikkin emotionally stable. After my friend's funeral, I blew off the rest of the afternoon, went home, ate some cake and chocolate (but not stuffing it), watched Rent and burst into tears over the "Will I lose my dignity / Will someone care" song. (As indeed any human being with feeling would.)  That was it. It didn't occur to me to take a drink or light a cigarette. However, I've heard people with fifteen years talking about their slips, so…

I'm not going to talk about the rest of the movie: it's full of scenes that ring true, or are true, because I've been there. The writers clearly know what they are talking about. And if you've ever worried that maybe you look at too much porn, or think about what some random woman would be like in bed too often, or your partner thinks you want sex too often, then go see this movie, and watch the scene where Josh Gan rubs himself up against a Chinese girl on the train. Yeah. You don't do that and nor do I. But those guys do.

Oh, and there was a killer line about triggers. "Anxiety, that's a big one". 

Identify? Moi? Meme pas!

The Men's Version of the ACoA Promises - Part Two

Okay, it's time to deal with the "intimacy" stuff.Because this is about the same place asthe feelings of loss and emptiness I mentioned at the start. So let's take a look at the ACoA promises:
1. We will discover our real identities by loving and accepting ourselves.
2. Our self-esteem will increase as we give ourselves approval on a daily basis.
3. Fear of authority figures and the need to "people-please" will leave us.
4. Our ability to share intimacy will grow inside us.
5. As we face our abandonment issues, we will be attracted by strengths and become more tolerant of weaknesses.
6. We will enjoy feeling stable, peaceful, and financially secure.
7. We will learn how to play and have fun in our lives.
8. We will choose to love people who can love and be responsible for themselves.
9. Healthy boundaries and limits will become easier for us to set.
10. Fears of failures and success will leave us, as we intuitively make healthier choices.
11. With help from our ACA support group, we will slowly release our dysfunctional behaviors.
12. Gradually, with our Higher Power's help, we learn to expect the best and get it.

I'm right there with 3), 6), 9), 10) and 11) and using words loosely, I'll go with 2) as well. I have no problem with 12), though I'm not good at expecting the best, nor with 5) and 8), though putting both into practice in this town could leave a man with an empty diary.

What give me the heebie-jeebies are 1), 4) and 7). And until I was half-way through this, I thought that was my fault.

"Discovering our real identities", "sharing intimacy" and "learning to play and have fun" arethe promises held out by therapists and self-help authors everywhere. That's because those goals appeal to women of both sexes, who make up the main market for therapies, and everyone gotta keep the customer satisfied. I'm a man of the male sex (there are men of the female sex as well, and I get on rather well with them), and those things don't describe my way of being in the world at all.

The dictionary says "intimacy" means something along the lines of "comfortable familiarity". However, that's not the freight it carries in these circumstances, where it means a mixture of closeness, empathy, trust and mutual understanding. And that's not the freight it carries for the insecure and needy people who fill therapist's rooms and read self-help books: for those people it means "making me feel as if someone cares about me and that the huge hole inside me gets filled up just a little".Dealing with needy and insecure people, our provisionof "intimacy" gets judged by the easing of their pain, which is a recipe for disaster, and anyway, their pain isfor them to pay a therapist to treat.And let's just say something else while we're at it:regurgitating the minutia of Her Day or Her Fears when you get back isn't intimate and it isn't sharing, it's dumping the garbage, and it's just rude and thoughtless.

Okay. I'm done with that.

ACoA and the therapists claim that we will feel connected with others by sharing our past experiences, hopes, fears, ambitions, circumstances and dreams. That happens to be true, but it also happens to be as rare as a big Lottery win. A prudent life has to be built on the assumption that, after we leave university,we will not meet anyone with whom we will connect, let alone connect and want to have sex and live with. (This is one reason a lot of clever young men and women go into accounting and consultancy, so they continue to be surrounded by clever, personable and ambitious young people for another few years. From my experience, regular companies do not have many pretty people working in them. And the people in the hip companies are painfully intent on letting everyone know just how freaking hip they are. Way too hip to get next to co-workers.) Whether or not you lead a good life should not depend on having the luck to meet someone who doesn't put their meanings to your words. If you believe in Evolution (or God) you have to believe we Evolved (or had Created) mechanisms for that. And we did: it's called art, literature, drama, comedy. (Only some art communicates, the rest is entertainment.) Art can let us know there is someone else who shares our views, beliefs and concerns.12-Step movements tell us that we will find such people in their Rooms, and for some alcoholics, druggies, adult children and the rest, that might be true, but it's not true for all of them. (I found getting sober changed some things but not everything: I couldn't make friends when I was drinking, and I can't do it sober either.)

After all, if it was easy to find people with whom to share in this marvellous way, why would the human race have invented booze, drugs, maypoles, dancing, travelling theatres, fireworks, the printing press, the movies, chocolate, nightclubs, painting, sports and free weights? Our forefathers did it because they needed stuff to add pep, zest and contemplation to their lives. I have a friend who can remember as a young girl sitting round the village fire listening to the adults talking and telling stories to make the evening pass. If that was as much fun as it needed to have been, those adults would not have TV's in their houses now. But they do. The human race needs diversions and accomplishments.

So in a manly no-nonsense spirit I'm going to replace 1), 4) and 7) as follows:

1) We will exercise, eat well, groom and dress well, and experiment with anything we fancy until we find some stuff we really like. We will avoid junk food, junk culture and junk people, and if necessary sit in peaceful silence until something or someone worthwhile comes along. We will not go on being limited by what those SoB's in our past told us we can't do.

4) We will find the confidence to: choose the right people to work with so we can advance our ambitions and plans; choose attractive, well-balanced people to form relationships with; and to handle the occasional crazy person who just makes life more interesting.

7) We will make damn sure we entertain ourselves the way we want to be entertained at least once a week.

Sure I would love to meet someone who "gets me", and who hears what I say, but in the meantime I have to go on breathing. Even if I did, I would still need to earn a living, iron my shirts, stock the fridge, cook my food, commute and exercise. Also sleep and commute.Instead of talking about the benefits of something that may never happen in the ACoA's life, it would be better to talk about how one lives with hope, self-respect and an immanent sense of disappointment that one's feelings could be more vibrant and rich, but just not today.

The Men's Version of the ACoA Promises - Part One

I was reading the official Big Book of ACoA recently, and as I always do when I go near that subject, had mixed feelings: loss, emptiness, relief and irritation. Let's deal with the irritation, because that came from the fact that I started to be convinced I should not be feeling the loss and emptiness.

ACoA's have low-level but chronic psychological pain: they feel empty, unloved, rejected, ignored, fraudulent, isolated, cut-off, unheard and generally are pretty sure that everyone else is having a fun time except them. They feel this all the time, not just now and then, they feel it like the skies in England are grey. They get breaks every now and then, like the famous "sunny intervals" of an English day, but then everything goes back to grey and empty. And here's something you will not read: this is hormonal, it's body chemistry, it's a drug no-one would buy the second time if you could synthesise it. It's not just a belief, or a habit of thought, or an attitude, it's natural drugs, triggered by years of upbringing and experience. That's how it was for me, and I don't imagine I'm anything special.

ACoA and the therapists claim to be able to do two things. The first is to help the sufferer stop feeling that pain, to silence the inner harping voice, to loosen the grip of all the shitty things that people told them about themselves, and after a while, generally to stop feeling bad about themselves. That can be and is done, and I don't have a problem with that claim.

It's the second claim I have a problem with. That is the one where, not only can the sufferer stop feeling bad, they can start feeling good about themselves, without the aid of external props, validations, pills, potions and paychecks. I have two problems here.

First, "feeling good" is hormonal. It's not what you feel when your body has no downer-hormones circulating in it, it's what you feel when you have upper-hormones circulating. When you have none, you feel like I do most of the time: which is nothing, much, except it's a nothing against a long history of horrible, so I appreciate it. Think of my emotional state as one long progressive house track.



Civilians wander around in a much more active hormone state than that, going from blissed-out on oxytocin to jacked on adrenaline in the course of even an hour. Me and mine can do the adrenaline, but not the oxytocin / endorphin bliss. Our bodies never acquired the habit of letting the bliss hormones loose: we were too busy with hyper-vigilant monitoring of our environment and so we could set off the flight or dissociation reactions before whatever it was hurt too much. We never learned to "feel good".I've said before that I don't do oxytocin, and I'm betting I don't do endorphins either. I do some kind of thrill-hormone, these days brought on by very special music



and a few things around peace and contemplation and serenity, but I have nothing around feeling so good I can greet the one hundredth straight grey day with high spirits.

The idea we can "love ourselves" and "feel good" independently of any and all events in the outside world is not a serious suggestion about any real world we live in. It'san over-reaction to the way ACoA's try to fix themselves. Feeling awful, we go to parties, take exotic holidays, pick up girls, get promotions, buy toys, try to win awards, tell jokes, ... and, of course, none of it works. None of it fills the Inner Emptiness.

This is because the Inner Emptiness can't be filled. We can't feel as if we belong, even when other people tell us we do, and may even mean it. This makes external validation all the more important. Not validation from other people, but from progress in our chosen endeavours. Depending on what those endeavours are, this progress might make us better people, but it probably won't make us friends, and it certainly won't fill any empty holes in our emotions. But it does give us a reason for feeling good about ourselves. It gives us a reason to deserve our own respect.

We learn to win our own respect, and so gain self-respect. We wake up and go to work, earn money and pay our taxes and due bills because that's what a responsible member of a post-modern urban economy does; we exercise and stay in shape because that's how we respect our own bodies, and we avoid junk food and eat well for the same reason; we avoid junk culture and read science, mathematics, philosophy, law, economics, history and other non-fiction, because that's how we respect our minds.The validation is external because it comes from measured progress in an activity we perform in the world-lived-in-by-us with the equipment ready-to-hand. It is our engagement with the world.The progress is not progress-towards anything: reaching goals is never satisfying - exhilarating maybe, but never satisfying. "It is progress we seek, not perfection" - the satisfaction is in the process.

You may be thinking that this sounds as if it doesn't really need people, and isn't the whole point of ACoA recovery to be able to have proper relationships with people? Especially girl-people, for, you know, intimacy? What's the point of being a well-read Adonis if you still can't get laid, I mean, have satisfying intimate adult relationships? This isn't the time to go into Step Two and outcome-independence, but the short answer is that practising both is essential for your dignity, sanity and mood.

A Year At Debtors Anonymous (DA)

I've been going to a D.A. meeting in Chelsea for a year now, and I should probably look at my progress. DA is good for dealing with a number of financial behaviours: debting - taking credit card or unsecured debts; under-earning - not charging enough or collecting money owing; over-spending; and under-spending - not spending enough to have a minimally enjoyable and provisioned life. Along the way it will also take care of your four-Starbucks-a-day habit, if you want it to.

Let's look at the under-earning part first. I've been interviewing this year, and basically I'm doing about right for the level of work I'm doing and the expertise I'm bringing to it. I could earn more gross income working somewhere else, but I wouldn't be able to work 8-4 and the post-tax value of that extra gross income against the full package would not be significant. I don't have invoices to collect on, as I'm on salary. I am fed up with losing three per cent of last year's salary to this year's sub-inflationary pay rise, but where am I going to go that doesn't do that?

How's my saving? Right now, saving is a joke with interest rates as they are. I am putting away money for my annual season ticket, and have silly amounts of money left at the end of the month that go into an account that pays as much interest as any instant access account will. I do need as of time of writing to review all that stuff about now.
Is my spending out of control? No. Which is not the same as asking: could I spend less? Sure I could. But that's not the point. Am I under-spending? That's a subtle one: there's a fine line between living austerely and not spending enough to provide a pleasant life. I have a budget, but I don't have a spending plan, which is a different idea. A spending plan is intended to make sure you do things you want or need to do, or enjoy doing. If what you like doing is going to the theatre, then not spending your intended amount because you stayed in gets a tickle across the wrist, because you're disappointing yourself. I don't think I underspend - I don't deny myself stuff because I shouldn't spend the money. Heck, I even bought a pair of Randolph Engineering sunglasses recently.

When I started going to DA, I had a ton of resentments about not being paid enough and not being able to do "cool stuff" at work. I don't have that now, and the steps I took around revising CV's, contacting agents, going to job interviews, and discussing the whole money vs quality-of-life thing with trusted colleagues were all steps I took because going to DA prompted me to do it. Re-arranging the exact location of my savings last August was also something I did because of DA. I keep my figures, though I don't write them up in a spreadsheet, and it's depressing doing so, as it's very repetitive, much like my life. So has it been worthwhile? I think so. Even just for the journey from the West End to the Kings Road of a Tuesday evening, and the exotic pleasure of the 170 bus from the Albert Bridge to Clapham Junction after the meeting.

I have stopped thinking that A Man Of My Talents should be making six-figures from royalties alone, going about with beautiful women and travelling the world over. Business class. Never was going to be me. (I know, I should have figured that our earlier? Maybe when I was thirty? Well, I kinda did. But there is a huge difference between knowing you're going to be a suburban drone for the rest of your life, and being comfortable with the idea. Actually, I'm not comfortable with it, but I have accepted that, given the fuck-up that I was, and the low energy level my mind and body run at, plus I cannot handle relationships with organisational superiors with any aplomb, and my general attraction to all all the wrong kinds of people, and it's pretty much a miracle I'm still employed and have a roof over my head.) I think being around people who really have made a mess of their financial situation has convinced me that I have actually managed my life reasonably well. I'll take something that makes me feel better about myself for actual good reasons.

I Could Have Screwed Up Royally...But I Didn't

So where are we, now that we're back where we started?

I'm one of the people who lives for sensations and pleasures, and I was somehow smart enough in my teenage years, reading Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas as it came out in Rolling Stone, to realise that if I let myself go to those sensations, if I ever found a drug that got me out of it, then I was not coming back again. I channeled it into the abstract thought of philosophy and mathematics, and taught myself to appreciate jazz and composed music. That's where I get my kicks. I understood somehow, from somewhere, about "the pram in the hallway", long before reading the book. I knew from when I was five or six that I never was going to get married, and I have never changed my mind. I have wanted to get laid, I have wanted a girlfriend, I have wanted a "relationship", but never in the depths of any misery did I ever want to be married. I could cite my Chinese horoscope, which has a strong Rat influence: we Rats never get into anything we can't get out of. Or I could just accept that I'm an addict with the sense and luck to stay away from the really destructive addictions.

Like many young men, but not the majority of them, I had a long and painful dry spell when I should have been getting laid regularly. This gave me a bitter view of the world: women were the enemy, because they had what I wanted and wouldn't let me at it. At some point this passed, and I think it was in my late twenties, when I started working and did get laid now and again. It didn't take a lot to make me feel way better. Then all the other stuff happened. I knew the girls wanted some kind of relationship that I wasn't able to provide, and because I didn't understand much about myself, I thought that was my failing. I was "wrong". And that was where we came in.

I could have screwed up my life a dozen ways and royally each one. I could be twice-divorced with three estranged kids: two from the first marriage, one from the second. I could be a suffering alcoholic - though I would be long dead by now. I could have been a drug addict - and even longer dead. I could have picked up the gambling bug, but the last races I went to, one horse didn't make it out of the stall, and one lost a shoe on the way down to the stall. I stopped after that. I would have needed a big win to get hooked, and I never had one. I've survived some nasty bouts of unemployment that sent my career back to zero when I was forty and then fifty. I climbed back out and have had my nose above water for a while now. I've even survived a car crash that other people thought would have killed the occupants.

I used to think I messed-up my career, and while I made some dumb moves in my first job, but after that, I didn't. I know now that strong corporate careers need a lot of energy and people skills, as well as a capacity to do stuff now that you believe may not pass the Regulator in the future. I don't have that energy, and I don't have that temperament. For many years my intellectual thinking was confused, first by hormones and then by booze. It was only when I got sober and calmed down that I began to be able to think clearly. In a great many ways, I am in better shape now than I was when I was thirty. Just not as pretty.

It is, all in all, a freaking miracle I am still standing at all, let alone standing as tall as I am. When my energy levels are up, I can carry on with life and feel okay. I look confident, I don't feel down, but look at what I do, at how I live, and you will see that really I scuttle from home to work to gym to home and that's basically it. I haven't approached a woman in years, nor tried to find another job, nor, well, anything outside the scuttle-path. Either I've decided to retire early, or something is still wrong, or it's just plain time I got off the bench.

This has been one looonnnnggg investigation of the idea that "something is still wrong". I mean, of course, on one level, there is something wrong. I'm an addict, alcoholic and ACoA, and I'm pretty sure others would add other non-flattering adjectives. I am not going to do trust, fun, intimacy^TM, authority figures or relaxing, and I am going to take myself too seriously (whatever that means). I was never going to be a great father, nor anyone's loving husband. I get bored way, way too quickly for that. I can't be anyone's rescuer or amateur therapist, and I'm no-one's mentor or guide. I'm not that promotable, and I have no desire to slave-drive younger people (aka a "motivational manager") or sell clients something they don't really need (aka "consultancy").

Well, this is "wrong" to a gold-digger / husband-seeker / status-groupie / princess / career-girl / entitled-wall-slammer-in-denial. It's also not what the older woman wanting a substitute father for the kids / replacement husband / fund to pay off the debts (all aka "someone to share my life with") is after either. And in London, those groups make a lot of the female population. Fine, at my age and hormone level I can live without them. The task is to find a woman who isn't one of them, ask her to join me for coffee so we can engage in mutual inspection and see if we can keep a reasonable conversation going for twenty minutes. If so, I'll follow up with an actual date. And I'm talking 30-45 here (probably 35-45, the 30-35 is aspirational). How do I have the temerity to aim there? 

So there's this twenty-seven year old at work I have a crush on. (I always have a crush on one of the girls at work. It occupies those feelings with someone unavailable. It reminds me I'm alive.) Except she doesn't yet realise she's attracted back (Girls! Sooooo in touch with their feeeelings). Her friend can see the attraction, and has made indirect jokes about it a couple of times. I am not going to make a move, because work, and because I don't want to deal with someone who can't recognise her own feelings, and who is just a little bit of a princess. The point is, those girls don't see me as their kindly Uncle. They see me as a viable man. Otherwise I would have heard "Eeeeugh" noises.

So it's about getting my Game going.