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.

Lessons from 2018

In 2018 I went on doing what had worked in 2016, and was okay in 2017, but stopped working for me in 2018. Why? Because I’m not a youngster anymore, and at my age, apparently, changes can be step-like, not gradual. Or I passed a tipping-point. Or switched regimes on a catastrophic surface, or whatever metaphor you want.

It was so bad I even watched this Sunday Motivational video from Alux. Don’t be put off by the crassness of their Instagram, the video has a lot of sensible advice.

It occurred to me I should consider changing anything I’ve been doing consistently for the last couple of years.

Except the waking-up-and-going-to-work bit. I would love to stay in bed until 07:00, but the commute would be horrible. And leaving work at 17:00 would throw me into the gym at nearly peak time. Retiring is not negotiable until at least summer 2020. When I will be 66.

Weight-training leaves me feeling tired, not just on the day, but on the day after as well. I’m taking longer to recover during sets, and doing fewer sets. Not the way it’s supposed to work.

I switched to body-weight exercises. I’ve already got a Spin class in my schedule, and as I write this, I’m on my way to the second Extreme class of the year. Saturday morning 09:30 to 10:15. They must think I’m some weird old man, humping it through those routines. The next youngest kid in the class is half my age. You did when you were nineteen and it damn near wasted you. (*)

The only way I can lose weight is by eating almost or actually nothing in the evening. I’m already on week two of intermittent fasting: I’m eating between 06:00 and 14:00, and not afterwards. As part of that, I have to get a decent, preferably hot, lunch. With meat. The trick is to drink water or Jasmine tea in the evening. Don’t even think of eating.

Between these two changes, I’m already waking up feeling more active.

I’m getting a sports massage every week until the knots are out of my legs: the first one was a world of ouch. It made me realise that for the last year I’ve been fighting the muscular mess in my legs just to walk upstairs.

A while back I made a decision to take on a commitment at an AA meeting, and I’m keeping that up. My attendance at meetings had been erratic for a long time. I don’t know if it’s doing me any good, but I’m still sober.

I have to cut right down on most the websites and You Tube channels I’ve been reading and watching. Most are not suited for me. Been working on that.

I have to look at blogging as well. I’ve been at that for nearly nine years, with over 1,100 posts. It’s always been a diary for me, and just how little sense many of the posts make outside my inner monologue was brought home to me when I thought about putting together a compilation (ah that alcoholic grandiosity!). I’ve found it harder to produce pieces, or even photographs, at the rate of two a week recently. Many pieces have started off, and then I’ve rightly abandoned them.

I wanted to get to the end of January before posting this, so that I was on the way to forming the new habits.

(Added two weeks later: and then at the end of January, I got a cold and it all skidded off the road. I’m just about back on form now.)

(*) Spot the movie quote.

I Have The Two-Part Cold

That's the one where I get the cold over one weekend, and miss my Saturday class, and then feel better the next week, book the Saturday class on Thursday evening, and on Friday I relapse with an even worse version of the previous weekend. In fact, on Sunday morning, I thought my life might actually be over. Because I'm not being melodramatic.

A cold is good for an instant half-kilo weight gain. Overnight. It puts my weight loss / body fat reduction program on hold. It puts my life on hold. I am reduced to watching Lord of the Rings.

So this week I am going to take it eas(ier).

In the meantime, I have been getting into restoration videos on You Tube. This one is simply breath-taking...



And this one is one of many that reminds me I have no manual skills at all because I would have cut myself to shreds doing what this guy does. Craftsmanship is a real thing.

It Ain't Me Babe

I always thought that Dylan was apologising.

Now I now he isn’t.

All those things she wants, he’s not the one to provide them.

Not because he can’t.

But because he won’t.

And as for the lyrics, try the first two lines..

Go away from my window

Leave at your own chosen speed 

Dylan, like Hemingway, makes me wonder if there's a parallel English language, that the rest of us don't speak, but in which lines like Leave at your own chosen speed are available to those who do.

Why I've Had Enough Red Pills

I wrote a long piece about the core doctrines of the Red Pill. Crafted it over many days when I should have been doing something more useful. I’m not going to post it. I don’t understand the predicament of the men who find the Red Pill a solace. I’m a born bachelor with the attention span of a five year-old, an ACoA with a drinking problem, and an addict who managed to stay away from drugs because I knew that stuff would kill me. Somewhere in all that emotional chaos and pain I knew that nobody else could help me feel better. It took me a long time to find AA and many years later to understand that my exercise + work + culture life was not instead-of but actually-it. What can I tell you, I’m an engineer / logician not a guru / psychologist.

Sometimes I discover what I believe by contrast with other beliefs. The core ideas of the Red Pill are built on the pseudo-science of evolutionary psychology, can be read as normalising a wide range of dysfunctional behaviour, and produce a cultural-conspiracy theory that mirrors the Feminist conspiracy of the Patriarchy. I’m a Brit: I don’t do totalising ideologies, I do cock-ups, follow-the-money, and logic-of-the-situation.

So in my book, it doesn’t matter why someone behaves badly. It only matters that they do. If there are significant attendant benefits, I may tolerate the bad behaviour. If I don’t want to be around it, I walk away.

Walking away has to be legal and affordable. Always. Never have anything in your life that you can't walk out on in thirty seconds flat, if you spot the heat coming around the corner. Make an exception for the time it takes to find another job before quitting the one you’re in. The point is: you can quit your job, usually with a minimal cost, even though it takes time. Married men and Baby-Daddies can’t walk out, except at high cost.

Why did I read the Red Pill for so long? I went there because I wanted to understand why my only long-term relationship turned into a sexless habit, why she behaved they way she did, and why it had to be me who broke it up. I found those answers, though it took me a while to translate them from the original evo-psycho. I stayed out of habit, and because some of the gurus say things I agree with. But lately…

I’m a bachelor. Born that way. Never was going to do domestic relationships. Bachelors like women, but the same way they like city weekends and beach holidays: it’s a nice break, but it’s not when we pay the bills and live our lives. The Red Pill guys, and even the MGTOWs, regard life without women as less-than. Not an attitude I share. I really don’t.

St Paul was right when he said that we should live to please God, but that a married man has to please his wife. I’d rather do the secular equivalent of pleasing God: work and pay taxes to discharge my economic and social obligations, exercise, eat right, don’t spend money I don’t have buying things I don’t need to impress people I don’t like, and otherwise, do as I please as long as it’s legal. You don’t have to want to live my life, only I do.

Stay Away From the Freakshow

Dog bites man is not news: man bites dog is.

That defines news-as-freak show.

Right-wing freaks tend to be scary. They have short hair and boots. Or they are big and fat and coarse. They have very firm beliefs about who this country belongs to and express those beliefs in simple, Anglo-Saxon, terms. Even if they are suave, they come across as harsh and unsympathetic. It is very difficult to express right-wing ideas in a way that gains public support.

Left wing freaks are more friendly. They are victims. They are often female. If male, they are soft and squidgy. They want to give shelter and welfare to everyone. They want Equality. They want to be nice to people from other countries they have never met and will never live near. They look helpless and sympathetic in photographs, and better still, some of them look sexy. They REALLY BELIEVE. They are sincere. And somehow they aren’t threatening. They espouse beliefs that many of us think we should have if we were Good People.

So the left-wing freaks get the media coverage.

So people with real political agendas, with real consequences for taxation and quality of life, use the left-wing freaks to front their message. Someone organises those marches. Someone decides who gets hit by #MeToo. Someone chooses the targets for the SJW Twitter Army. Someone arranges the caravans from South America through Mexico. It’s not the same someone, and those different someones might not know each other. Someone else, many someone else’s, fund them. For reasons best known to themselves.

The same way that certain activist groups look around their communities for men who are psychiatrically-troubled and can be manipulated into driving a truck along the promenade at Nice. Or blowing themselves up in a nightclub. The activists can hide behind the man’s mental illness. The Police will go no further. MI5 will, but the public won’t see that, so the commentators say nothing is being done.

The point is, the mentally-ill truck driver and the left-wing marching protestors are fronts. Useful idiots. The issues the useful idiots promote aren’t the real issues, but are there to achieve other ends.

The freak-show isn’t real. What’s real is what’s behind the freak-show. If there is anything behind it except mislead, deluded rich people donating money to a cause that only exists to provide its organisers with salaries and grants. Sometimes, that’s all there is: a bunch of charities and activist groups whose first purpose is fundraising so they can meet the payroll.

Stop paying attention to the media coverage of the freaks, or of the latest faded forty-something to take down a man who got rich by luck, and is now going to be less rich because he’s dumb as rocks about women, or of the latest outrage faked up by a charity that has a big grant up for renewal.

You’re smart, you’re media-savvy. You know when it’s fake.

It’s all fake. Right now. Even more than it ever was. Lord Rothermere said it, Randolph Hearst said it: the news is what somebody doesn’t want the public to know, all the rest is advertising. Editors know this, and all they publish is advertising. Do you really think scandals about MPs’ expenses and rich people’s tax arrangements are news? These are stories that suit the Liberal-Elite Narrative. Advertising for Good Think.

Read a good book. Watch a black-and-white movie. Take a walk. Clean your kitchen.

You’re not disengaging.

Because you never were engaged in the first place.

Not through the media.

Wise Words Hard To Live By

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Rather than crazy people, ugly people, second- and third-rate pop culture, why there are so many Quisling politicians who want to sell the English people into slavery to Brussels in return for avoiding some customs forms, why and how the so-called 'liberal elites' hate ordinary people, and all that other stuff. Put the headphones on, take out a book or an iPad with a keyboard and shut out the world.

Sunset in November 2018 over my Air Park.