Partner Needs

             Something that has always puzzled me is that there exists a very common sort of individual who always needs to be in a relationship. Perhaps it is related to testosterone or hormones in a way that I don’t really understand or find myself subject to, but this mindset is completely foreign to me although I see it nearly everywhere I look. I know a few people who are like this, and I can never relate to how they feel or put myself in their shoes.

            I understand the desire for some close friend or romantic partner as well as the benefits that come from such an arrangement. It’s nice to have people who you can rely on, tell things you wouldn’t say to anybody else, as well as (in the case of romance) have the other individual constantly giving you some sort of validation in the form of desiring you and seeing you as special in comparison to everybody else. All of those things are quite nice and I don’t mind them or disparage them in the least, but this compulsive need of them does seem to me to be some form of neediness that is not desirable or admirable.

            In the proper context, when you have the rest of your life ordered and the ability to provide for a second person squared away as well as no neurosis that is leaving you miserable, the desire for a romantic partner seems healthy and even praiseworthy. You have enough for yourself and are looking to use your excess to provide or benefit somebody else. In the context of these people who always need to be in a relationship, it seems like this is some form of distraction from internal distress.

            This might be related to a sort of insecurity and need for external attention that is completely foreign to me. I am not bragging, as I never did anything (at least consciously) hard to earn my soul’s contentment, but rather making an observation that seems logical. People who always need to be in a relationship to feel whole are fundamentally broken people. There is something wrong with how they are processing things, some internal conflict that remains unresolved, and instead of fixing these problems inside them, they are constantly seeking external stimuli in the form of other people to either distract them from their flaws. They may think that this second party will fix them, will make them whole, but it never works out and eventually they end up alone once again, even more miserable than they were before the relationship began, most likely because the problems at the root of their compulsive behavior have festered and mutated even further over time.

            Upon writing this it strikes me that I am most likely describing the type of person known as co-dependent, which makes my writings on this a bit useless for the reader. Nevertheless, I will continue as writing my thoughts out helps me go from noticing things on an unconscious and undefined manner to more concrete and thus examinable form, which benefits me. And, as I have stated multiple times prior, my writings are fundamentally beneficial for my own understanding and enjoyment before they become of any use to those who read them. Back to the topic at hand.

            Fundamentally, self-worth comes from the self. This is very simple and should be understood by everybody but somehow most people seem completely unaware, and perhaps this is the reason for people getting into these sorts of relationships that validate them but are headed nowhere. I myself am not immune to looking for validation through women and admirers, but this seems to stem from boredom, a love of novelty, as well as a lack of productive discipline rather than any insecurities or need for others to tell me how special I am. I do not believe I am special, nor do I need anybody to tell me that I am special. I am quite content to simply be above average, which is not a very high bar since the average is essentially being an ugly stupid moron who consumes resources and never has a moment of honest self-reflection in an entire life. I pass that bar quite easily.

            At the end of the day, relationships need to come from a sort of excess that is overflowing rather than being restorative. If you don’t have your income, living situation, and habits in check before you sign up for a relationship with somebody who also has those things squared away, you are simply signing up for a dysfunctional nightmare. It may take a month or even a year or three for the dysfunctional nightmare to make itself visible, for the excitement of somebody else caring about you and putting energy into what you care about to wear off, but the dysfunctional nightmare will always eventually reveal itself. At that point, you can pretend you don’t see it and allow yourself to be further consumed and eventually destroyed or made completely miserable, or you can do the reasonable things and rid yourself of nightmare via ridding yourself of your romantic partner. Of course, the people who habitually sign themselves up for these sorts of bad situations are not good at recognizing what is going on or they wouldn’t habitually sign themselves up for these situations. Furthermore, once they have eventually rid themselves of the nightmare they learn nothing and it is only a matter of time (usually only weeks or months) before they sign up to engage in another nightmare that can only end in another disaster. This sort of amnesiac behavior is disturbed and not something to emulate, but there is a sort of humor that can be extracted through observing it.

            This essay isn’t really applicable to young people, as most of us need to make some serious mistakes in order to learn why the mistakes shouldn’t be made as well as what types of stupid thinking led to the mistakes. When you’re in your mid to late teens, your brain isn’t really working and you aren’t able to make great decisions even when provided ample information that any rational self-aware person would be able to parse effectively and make rational self-aware decisions as a result. When this sort of behavior is indicative of a serious problem that needs to be addressed is in the early to mid-twenties.

            The reason the early to mid-twenties is so important to form good habits and really take stock of self-destructive behavior such as needing romantic partners for validation is that this is the period in life where you have some genuine self-awareness (should you honestly and dutifully work towards gaining it) and also the ability to change as a person. Once you’re in your late twenties and early thirties it’s increasingly impossible to change who you are. Your character and habits are pretty much baked in at that point, if you’re a loser who abuses drugs and repeatedly engages in relationships that set you back months or years, you’re most likely always going to be a loser who abuses drugs and repeatedly engages in relationships that set you back months or years.

            The entertainment industry has really messed up a lot of people with regards to romance. Love is not some fluttery feeling in the pit of your stomach. It’s not dysfunctional and it doesn’t make you crazy. Those things are symptoms that can happen from infatuation, and they’re not horrible in their proper context, but they are more phenomena that come from the combination of affection and immaturity, and immaturity is not something that should be enabled or praised outside of their healthy context, which is in youth where we flail around awkwardly and try to find how we fit into the world and how everything works.

            The compulsive need for a romantic partner is not impressive and is similar in caste as a homeless mutt humping a fire hydrant. It is very distasteful to observe and shows poor breeding. If you find your life lacks meaning without some other person to take up your time and energy, then the problem isn’t the times when you don’t have that other person, but rather some deep flaw inside yourself that you should do your best to root out and destroy before it turns you into the lowly debased thoughtless creature growing inside you that you have a tendency towards doting on and feeding.

            The fact of the matter is that if you are mildly successful in any respect and not completely hideous, it is extremely easy to find somebody of the opposite sex and charm them enough to fall in love with you. I’m not rich, I have made a ton of stupid missteps, and I find this whole process disgustingly easy. Most people (of both genders) essentially exist in the context of a very simple skinner box. If you say the right words to them, show affection in moments that are proper, and give them even a small amount of attention when they don’t think they deserve it, they will attach themselves to you like a leech in a river attaches itself to a swimmer’s unprotected skin.

            You shouldn’t get your validation from other people; this leaves you vulnerable to what you can’t control. They might change their mind, hear rumors, or simply find a better person than you which causes them to view in a less than flattering light. At that point, if you have put your self-worth in them caring about you and seeing you as some sort of god or superior individual, you will find yourself even worse than when you entrusted your worth to them.

            Get your validation from how competent you are. Do you spend your time on worthwhile activities? Do you abstain from behaviors that harm you, whether those be social activities like parties and gossip or antisocial activities like drinking and abusing substances like drugs or pornography? Do you put your energy into projects that will pay off in the future or increase your worth? Are you fit and healthy? All those things are what should be driving you, giving you some sort of satisfaction with yourself, not relationships which are good in their proper healthy context, but completely poison in the context of making you feel like you matter.

            What is also funny about this pattern of dating or forming relationships based on personal insecurities is that anybody who knows how things work will agree that the most attractive thing to potential partners is being somebody who does not need potential partners. If you want to have other people care about you, if you want to be valued in a sexual or personal light, then be somebody who doesn’t need others to care about you. No woman has ever thought less of a man who told her he was too busy to hang out or talk. The reality is that being somebody who is genuinely busy, who is constantly working on genuine projects, who is not able to waste hours a day talking to some woman, is somebody who is valuable, and quality women are attracted to people who are genuinely valuable.

            The people you interact with when you’re needy and desire constant affection are not quality people. They are people who also have this serious flaw, people who are not headed anywhere in life. Much like communities oriented around making money are filled with people who are incapable of making money, people who are attracted to people who need love are people who also lack love. And who lacks love besides those who have some problem that makes them fundamentally dysfunctional and practically useless? This incentive structure/environment is made explicit with regards to apps like tinder, where you can see how the women on it are suffering from severe emotional problems that scale in proportion to their attractiveness. If they didn’t have those severe emotional problems, they wouldn’t be on a dating app in the first place.

            If you’re somebody who this essay relates to, take stock of yourself and how you expend your energy. Do you really need to feel good that bad? Do you really need to engage in masturbation via sex (since you’re not having sex for any real purpose) habitually? No, you don’t need to do either of these things; you’re just covering up some sort of unaddressed problem. Most likely, the problem you’re distracting yourself from isn’t even that bad. Put that energy you spend into trying to find a relationship into fixing yourself and doing things that are actually beneficial to yourself, and most likely within a matter of months or a year you’ll realize how silly you were acting. It’s really simple to fix this problem, but it requires admitting that you have a problem and then realizing that it’s not that hard to improve yourself and actually take life seriously instead of constantly searching for external validation. Until you stop looking to others for happiness your baseline is going to be misery which only gets worse as time goes on.  

Arrested Development

            As I am now twenty-five, I am still quite young but heading towards being old. My perspective is sure to shift in great ways over the coming decades (if I live that long), but I now have enough data and a wide enough berth of experiences to begin to knowingly shape my behavior and habits into a manner that is both productive and mature. This ability is not unique to me at my age, but it does not really seem to be quite engaged in by many others around my age.

            I feel quite confident in asserting that most people never grow up and remain in a state of childlike mediocrity willingly. After all, the basis of civilization as a whole rests on the vast majority of people to live boring uneventful stable non-challenging lives. What sort of person besides a perpetual child would enjoy such an existence? This is not inherently bad or good and I do not seek to change, condemn, or praise it, it just is what it is.

            I also feel quite confident that this arrested development and perpetual adolescence is not a new phenomenon, although it is most likely more observable now that the opportunities to behave in an embarrassingly childlike manner  have become increasingly numerous. On the whole, humanity is a pack animal that refuses to think for itself or make its own decisions, and there is no reason to suggest that this will ever change. The only difference that should occur over time is that the majority of humanity will become more explicitly pack animals and look the part: uglier, fatter, shorter, and more bovine than ever before.

            This arrested development is what I mean by not having a soul. At a certain point in the twenties, an individual gets a choice or series of choices where they can face uncomfortable choices and ideas that disturb them but result in them coming closer to genuine truths and critical thinking skills, or they can hide from these uncomfortable choices and ideas and fit into some pre-defined societal role that keeps them distracted enough that they don’t feel the need to think or make decisions on any real level. Most people choose poorly and get increasingly stupid as they get older, having knowingly embraced the role of slave and thus gradually transforming from an implicit one to an explicit one. These people can’t be saved, but that’s alright, they made their choices and we must respect their autonomy, or rather the autonomy that lead to them giving up their autonomy.

Congress and Tech Companies

 

            Right now, the American congress has semi regular conference calls with heads of tech companies. These calls relate to censorship and “unfair” applications of rules that these tech companies are involved in. The funny thing about this is that congress is fairly powerless against the tech companies although they have a higher “legal standing” than the tech companies.

            The people who have built tech companies are smart, hard-working, and competent people. Of course, their goals and methods of operation are not completely moral or for the general public’s good, but that does not mean that these people are losers. They are just not aligned with the common man or even the country in which they operate. The people in congress are whores, they are old politicians who got elected by lying and sucking off people who held the keys to the halls of power they wanted access to.

            Every congress and tech company call goes the same way, some old congressional whore (male or female doesn’t matter) makes an embarrassing monologue disguised as a question and tries to shame the tech CEO. The tech CEO puts up with the display and gives some non-answer that doesn’t really mean anything while pretending to be respectful. Nothing changes, no policies are adjusted at the tech company, and nobody gets anything out of the exchange except for the politician feeling some semblance of power.

            A new age is dawning. The psychic economy is more powerful than the physical economy, which can be seen in how the stock market has been increasingly dominated by digital companies as physical companies shrink in proportion. The old guard, the useless whores that make up governments and prostitute themselves and destroy their dignity for titles and a pension are now only in charge symbolically. Power is molting, the physical force that nation states have is ineffective in controlling capital, as capital has been abstracted and digitized, not corralled any longer by border guards or physical impediments like geography.

            Because people in the government are generally incompetent, stupid, and lazy prostitutes, people in government do not know what is happening right in front of their eyes: which is that they are being stripped of their power and their titles are becoming insults rather than awards to be proud of. There is reputational lag that exists, but with every year that passes it becomes increasingly clear that those who seek to be managerial or involved in the government are people who should be looked down on and mocked rather than looked up to or respected.

            Tech companies are the new world government with the real power. They are the ones who organize and control the distribution of value and information. The old government, the congress and senate, the governors, the police, the social workers, these are people with power only over those who are stupid and worthless. The old government is allowed to operate not because it is too powerful to stop, but because the new government doesn’t want to stop the old government or take on the old government’s responsibilities. The old government is filled with suckers and morons, worthless fools with worthless titles. The new government gets all the money, power, and access without having to deal with the rabble or the hassle of elections. The old government gets three hour long video calls every few months where they can play the role of hectoring powerless wife asking her husband to stop cheating on her.

Personification

            Just like time, entropy isn’t a real thing but rather a measurement of change. Informational entropy is a description of the forces that degrade informational transfer. This can be further divided over time or iterations of transfer or geographical transfer. Entropy can be visualized best as a fist gripping a ball of mud, and the fist is gradually closing no matter what you do, deforming the shape of the mud. Some of the mud even detaches from the increasingly deformed ball of mud, but that mud does not disappear, it simply moves onto the hand or falls to the ground.

            I suspect, but am not sure, that entropy has to do with a lot of the personification of deities and spirits that can be found in ancient and fairly recent history. The Greeks and Romans had gods and temples to gods, so did the Native Americans, and so have a bunch of other groups. If I had to guess, priests and shamans as well as parents found it easiest to pass on knowledge and wisdom by wrapping them up in characters that could be concrete. It’s hard to abstract values and their benefits for normal people or children, so as a sort of “sugar coating” you personify these things into characters that can be understood and described quite easily.

This choosing the easy way of passing down values is a form of informational entropy, because even if the person who you are telling a slightly false story to knows that the story is made slightly false, there is a non-zero chance they will not communicate that fact properly to whoever they pass the information onto. If they don’t mess up, then maybe the people they tell will mess up, or perhaps the people after them, and so on. Eventually, what was a clear myth becomes a historical claim, and the historical claim eventually becomes disputed by some and believed by others. In this disagreement, the actual message of the information being passed is gradually lost, and you end up with Marvel movies and comic books and disgusting looking creatures being “fans” of Odin, Loki, or any other mythological figure as a bizarre personal identity.

Non-Biological Organisms

         There is a theory I have, which cannot really be proved or disproved by science, but is fun so I will elaborate on it. This theory pertains to non-biological organisms, or organisms that I believe probably exist which do not live or die in the sense that we understand life and death.

            Biological organisms take physical resources and derive energy from them in some way. For plants, they take stuff from the soil as well as light from the sun, for humans we drink water and eat food. Both plants and humans and all other biological life-forms have a life-cycle that is temporary. The plant or body breaks down and decays and eventually can’t sustain itself for one reason or another, then decay sets in and eventually death occurs, then the organism breaks down and its resources are redistributed through the environment in one form or another for some other biological organism.

            There are energy fields of some sort, perhaps electricity, perhaps ethereal, where conscious organisms exist. I think these organisms most likely float around and collect energy from other organisms of the same material. I also think they manipulate reality in some manner that we as humans are a part, and perhaps they guide and direct events to generate energy for themselves.

            The interactions these life-forms have with humans are necessarily malicious or benevolent, most likely these life-forms see biological organisms as we see plants. Perhaps they understand us as we understand animals, where most people don’t really empathize with them but don’t go out of their way to harm them or look down on them, where some people do empathize with them and refuse to take advantage of them, and where some of these life-forms are sociopathic or otherwise deranged and get off on causing harm to us.

            Seeing life as a sort of fractal of which humans are a part, I think it makes sense that the same sort of dynamics between us and each other and us and animals, and us and plants, and animals and plants, and plants and resources, etc., exists in ways we can’t really comprehend or be aware of. It seems quite silly to me to think that we lucked into being the top of the food chain, that there is nothing exploiting or directing us much like we exploit and direct animals and plants for our benefit and amusement.

            I think in the future, most likely not in my lifetime, this theory will be proven right, unless the non-biological organisms see it fit for us never to gain access to the awareness of these organisms and thus never gain the ability to exploit them. I do think, being that there is a lot of neurological diversity in humans, there is also neurological diversity in these organisms, and some do reach out or influence things in a beneficial manner in which they inspire people to do great things or take risks in ways that seem irrational but are not really irrational. Perhaps this is where true philosophy or genius stems from.

            A lot of aboriginal and Native Americans as well as ancient religions had an intuitive sense of this. This might be related to how incense or burnt offerings or even human sacrifices were decided on, the idea planted in the heads of humans via these non-biological organisms. Perhaps these were all just various forms of neurosis and imagination on the part of humans, but it seems reasonable to assume they might have served, and still do serve to feed some organism that exists outside of our current conception of what organisms are.

            Writing this is funny, because I know it sounds quite out there and indicative of mental issues, but really it is just a thought exercise of sorts. Or perhaps, it was inspired by one these non-biological organisms lending a helping hand and is completely accurate. Sometimes I get ideas and conceptions that I cannot honestly say seem like something I would think of myself, and they make too much sense for me to ignore them, and this is a concept or theory that fits that description.

            Either way, it is amusing to write these sorts of things, because by demonstrating competency in mundane and normal things such as writing fiction, programming, or running social media accounts, and behaving in a fairly normal manner when it is required, there is a sort of disconnect between these “out there” ideas and being normal. This causes a sort of uncomfortable friction between people who want to see me as simply somebody who is normal and makes jokes, and somebody who is mentally ill and deserving of ridicule or pity. Keeping a sort of amorphous reputation allows me to move in the ways I want to move and do what I want to do, a freedom that very few people alive seem to possess.

Shame & Remorse

            What is shame? It’s a negative emotion that most people seem to feel after doing something “shameful”, but what is at the root of that? Why do people feel bad after doing things -- why is this seen as a good thing rather than a weird type of neurosis?

            Shame is the result of seeing yourself as a fundamentally good person who is making the world a “better place” who has slipped into a negative action and thus temporarily become a bad person. Of course, everybody who feels shame has different conceptions of what bad people and good people are, and they view good people as being fundamentally better than bad people. Hidden in shame is a sense of moral superiority to others, an emotional judgment and form of insecurity that is vain and stupid.

            Shame is not, as those who praise it, a good thing. It is something that somebody who is too weak to follow their internal compass feels. It is glamorized by the weak and the failures who don’t have what it takes to be successful in life and thus turn their negative emotions into a sort of God that they are honoring through failure.

            Shame is a feminine emotion, not suited for generative people. It has its roots in manipulation by women who cannot control those stronger than them via honest methods and who must then turn to psychological tricks to achieve control.

            What is the proper response to doing something that makes you feel shame? It’s not to stew in your feelings and trick yourself into thinking that your actions are then absolved because of an internal mental struggle but rather to realize what caused you to do the thing you wish you hadn’t done in the first place and ensure that you don’t do it again, not because of feeling bad or social pressure but because you are the protagonist in your own life and things that you know are improper are things that you should strive not to do because they do not benefit you.

            Remorse is just like shame, a self-destructive and mentally ill impulse that distracts from productivity and proper behavior. Everybody makes mistakes and does things they know they shouldn’t have, but feeling regret about those things is indulgent and childlike. The past is the past, whatever happened has happened, and to dwell on it outside of the purpose of logical analysis is stupid and a waste of time that could be spent in more beneficial ways.

            People who are doing things are too busy to care about making sure others feel bad about their misbehaviors. The people that push shame or remorse as virtues rather than a form of mental illness are pathetic busybodies that are unable to transcend in any manner and thus must try to drag everybody around them down to their level of incontinence. It is a feminine urge to tear others down for no purpose other than to feel good about yourself, and this urge is at the core of both remorse and shame.

            Don’t feel remorse or shame, it’s a complete waste of time. Learn from your mistakes and misdeeds and improve yourself without slipping into the trap of emotionally investing into things you can’t change. It doesn’t matter if you feel bad, so why feel bad at all? You can’t afford to get caught up in things that don’t matter, and your emotions don’t matter. Emotions are useful for those who don’t have critical thinking skills, but a disability for those who do.

            Do you need the negative feelings of remorse and shame to prevent you from doing stupid or harmful things? If so, you are weak and driven by emotional impulses rather than any real willpower or self-knowledge. If remorse and shame can really convince you to do or not do anything, then you don’t really have morals or honor you simply wish to not feel bad, which means that anybody who can hijack the way you feel can get you to do anything they want.

            After your brain is fully developed, unless you are a moron who cannot figure out how to think is no reason to idolize negative or positive emotions or see them as anything other than pests. To be controlled by how you feel rather than what you know is the mark of a slave who will never become a master of their environment. It is immature and inefficient and will not lead to any form of greatness or competence.

            The reason that shame and remorse have both been pushed increasingly hard in recent times is that society has been functioning in an improper and self-destructive way that has been bearing fruit, and that fruit needs to be distracted from. Rather than admitting all the wrongdoing that is going on, those who are willfully doing wrong are generating negative emotional impulses in those that they are doing wrong to so they never wake up and see what is really going on. It is a top-down push on otherwise capable people to further distract and enslave them. While you are busy crying and “working through” improper things that you have done, others who are not burdened with this neuroticism are free to run around and take even further advantage of your inability to act in a proactive manner.

            The mind is trained to behave in the way you want it to behave, and the more you dwell on your emotions, the more emotional you will become. The way you feel is not static or set in stone, so to focus on things that provide you no benefit (remorse and shame) causes you to be increasingly neurotic and more likely to focus on remorse and shame in the future.

Shame and remorse are psychological weapons that have been used against able-bodied individuals for so long that they are not recognized as such. They are a form of control that have been internalized and canonized as healthy and proper when they are really unhealthy and improper. Once you are an adult, feeling bad or feeling good should not be what drives you to do or not do anything. Stop feeling shame and remorse and instead just do things that you know are proper to do, because what is proper to do is beneficial to both you and those around you who are also acting properly.

Riots and Looting

            What are riots? Are they the mental discontent of the masses manifesting in the physical? Is looting a violent and destructive display of lawlessness? This is what most individuals will argue, with a surface level analysis that leads to surface level solutions that sound good but don’t really address root causes. The negative externalities of riots and looting are not the causes of riots and looting, but rather the symptoms of what are causing the rioting and looting.

            To understand rioting and looting, you have to understand what they really are, which is not found in the people doing the rioting and looting, but rather found in the people who fail to prevent the rioting and looting. The breakdown of law and descent into chaos is not the fault of those behaving “poorly” – it is the fault of the people who are responsible for maintaining control and perpetuating order.

            Riots and looting are a reflection on the ruling class, not the masses engaged in the behavior. It is the duty and responsibility of the business owners, politicians, and police to ensure their safety, and when safety is no longer existent, the blame completely at their feet. To blame the stupid and undisciplined masses is like a parent blaming a wild animal for biting a child rather than admitting the wild animal should have never been in the position to bite the child in the first place.

            If you are responsible for capital such as storefronts and the merchandise in them, you are responsible for protecting those items. If you fail in this, it is your fault. If you build your business in an area where you are not reasonably able to your business, then you are negligent and stupid and you should not expect pity or empathy when you inevitable suffer the consequences of your poor choices.

If you are a politician that creates an underclass of individuals who cannot reach a decent standard of living due to their natural limitations as well as environmental conditions, you are courting disaster and should not be surprised when this underclass begins to cause problems for those more suited for success. It is your fault for not enabling the success of your underclass or completely eliminating them. If there are riots and looting while you are in charge, then you do not understand how to do your job and are clearly not worthy of the responsibility that you have agreed to take on in exchange for some power and prestige.

What are riots and looting? They are reflections of the incompetence of the ruling class. They are the consequences of poor decisions over years and decades, not some spontaneous fluke that couldn’t have been predicted or prevented. A successful society that treats its unfortunate in a genuinely humane manner doesn’t need to worry about riots, and it doesn’t allow for conditions which breed criminals in large enough number to pose a threat to the rest of the population. Looting and riots are the fault of those who are not rioting, those who run society.

How can riots and looting be dealt with? In this age of feminine emotional hyper-sensitivity, they can’t be dealt with. The ruling class is soft and weak and doesn’t have the emotional fortitude for disciplinary measures such as mass lethal force. As such, riots and looting are allowed to continue until they burn themselves out, the underlying problems never addressed or even acknowledged.

The politicians and corporations that have influence in communities that riot and loot are so detached from reality that they do not even understand or care what is causing the riots and looting. They may face some temporary embarrassment and public shaming when the reality of how they have mismanaged their responsibility comes to light, but that has no real impact on them. They can allow disorder and destruction to spread, because nobody will ever hold them accountable for their abysmal incompetence.

Who suffers from riots and looting? Not the people who caused the riots and looting, the politicians and corporations that worked in concert to create the conditions that precede this sort of behavior, but rather the innocent people caught up in negative externalities: the poor, weak, and stupid who cannot escape the chaos of destruction that surrounds them. These people may not desire to harm others and may do their best to live life in a pro-social manner, but eventually – if they wish to survive -- they will have to decide to join the mob and become predators tearing apart the society in which they live.

It’s easy to place blame on the animalistic proles destroying their local businesses and economy, but that is a counter-productive impulse. This is not to excuse their actions and claim they are saints, they’re clearly not, but rather to say that the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of those with real influence, the people who will happily migrate to other centers of control and influence once they have mismanaged their current center of control and influence to the point of chaotic disaster.

It’s hard to point to a time where the people with influence and power have been more stupid and irresponsible. Outside of cloistered sheltered communities, the majority of America is in a state of decay. Instead of doing the intelligent thing, which is to either fix the decay or isolate and destroy the decay before it spreads, the parasites we call our leaders engage in self-enrichment and greed that is embarrassing and gaudy. The “elite” do not have class or taste, they are lowly idiots who have schemed their way into power structures, and do not have any idea about what they’re doing. Because of this, riots and looting occur.

Psychotic Breaks, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

Something that psychotic breaks teach is that you are never really yourself, even when you’re sane. Before you have a psychotic break, you consider yourself a rational creature with free will that is making decisions based on some process you control. After the psychotic break, you realize just how little autonomy you ever had.

You can see this sense of self in very explicit form by individuals who worship “science” or “logic”. These people see themselves as capable of discerning objective truths better than the people who disagree with them, and in the self-appraisal is the assumption of complete internal rationality. To people who think they have free will and are not merely a product of their genes and experiences and environment, there is a sort of foolish pride that causes closed-mindedness to the possibility of irrationality or madness that blends in with those that appear to be “self-conscious”.

When you have a psychotic break, all the illusion of free will gets stripped away once your psychotic break ends. You realize that you are merely the sum of a lot of variables being processed by various internal processes, and when those internal processes become screwed up in some way, you are still the same physical person that was “rational” and “sane”, but you are not rational and sane anymore. You start seeing the world in a way that only makes sense while you are in the midst of a psychotic break, and the completely insane way in which you are seeing it seems perfectly sane to you. In fact, you start viewing everybody else who has a more functional internal process as the people with the problem, not you.

Although your personality changes as well as your behavior and thought process, your external body remains as it was before your psychotic break unless you cause it some permanent damage via self-mutilation or dangerous behavior that results in serious injury. The thing that changes during your mental problem is whatever is piloting your physical form, and that thing – your brain – changes in a way that is beyond “your” control.

After the psychotic break is over and you have recovered “control” of your faculties, an awareness of your lack of control begins to dawn on you in ways that people who have not gone insane and recovered can really appreciate. You are not outside of the system of life; you are not really any different than an animal that does not ask philosophical questions, you just have the illusion of self-awareness rather than any self-awareness. This revelation may seem like its own self-awareness, but this too is beyond your control and is simply the result of your experiences, genes, and environment leading you to this conclusion.

While this realization of a lack of fundamental control and understanding of the lack of true free will may seem like a negative thing, it is really not. Through this shift in consciousness, an individual becomes much more aware of their own fragility, and this causes them to become much more deliberate in how they conduct and situate themselves environmentally. Through the understanding of lack of control, an individual can gain more control over how they involuntarily react by ordering external variables in a manner in which is vastly superior to those who do not have this understanding. While most normal mediocre people imagine themselves to be protagonists in some movie, individuals who understand the myth of the self are able to understand that we are no different than mold that follows strict input->process internally->output rules.

To the vast majority of humans who experience shame and remorse, a psychotic break is no-doubt a humiliating experience. While insane, you do things that make you look foolish and say things to people that are ridiculous, but you only realize this after the fact. Because of this shame and remorse, it is not surprising to me that people who go through psychotic breaks can often end up broken and depressed when they recover, as they are constantly under attack by their own instincts which tell them that what they did was something they should feel bad about. As such, it makes sense why lots of people who have had a psychotic break never examine their experience in the manner in which this essay does, and thus never arrive at these conclusions.

For those who manage to get over the embarrassment of temporary insanity and can actually understand what happened, the whole experience is quite liberating. There is an ability to disconnect actions from your “self” as well as the “self” of others. In addition, you begin to realize that the impressive things you have done are not worth taking pride in, but the embarrassing things you have done are also not worth feeling bad about. There is a sort of humility that comes from having your agency and pseudo-rational consciousness (that everybody thinks is rationality) violently stripped away from you without your consent, and this humility is not really something you can buy or learn without the violent and unpleasant violation of your sense of self.

Some people who read this essay will undoubtedly insist that what I have described can be learned through the usage of psychedelics such as LSD, Mushrooms or even more intense drugs like DMT. This is not really the case. If you look at when psychedelics were most prevalent, the 1960s and the “summer of love”, you will not see any real awareness that resulted from it. The majority of people who engaged in widespread psychedelics either ended up as mentally stunted hippies or disgustingly self-entitled boomers who essentially ruined whatever country they were in and fomented generational animosity that is the unhealthy result of solipsistic pride and the lack of understanding of generational responsibilities. Some of the most pretentious and idiotic people are those who take psychedelics, as they push psychedelics on people in a tone-deaf and functionally retarded manner that indicates they have not been made smarter for their experience, but rather turned into mystical idiots who have no idea what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.

While it’s self-evidently true that psychedelics provide a unique perspective, this unique perspective does not teach reality in the way a psychotic break can. The sense of self and ego seems to be reinforced rather than broken down, and people go from fairly normal unaccomplished individuals to egotistical unaccomplished individuals who now think they have access to some “spiritual truth” that the world is all about love or empathy or some fundamentally human delusion that stems from the misunderstanding that humans have genuine free will and thus a special mission from God, a delusion that is forcefully ripped away in the process of a psychotic break and then revealed after the psychotic break has concluded if the individual who suffered the lapse in sanity is able to examine the whole experience in enough depth.

Psychedelics are a red herring towards enlightenment, and this makes sense once you realize that most people who take psychedelics enjoy what they experience. The process of self-improvement and self-awareness is not a euphoric one that makes you feel good and happy, it is a constant struggle filled with pain that you learn to enjoy for its results rather than the phenomena in the process. Physical exercise is an unpleasant process, and even though some learn to enjoy the unpleasant process (because they correctly link the unpleasant process to the pleasant results), there is no reason to assume that mental or spiritual improvement is any different.

As stated before, the fruits of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been a bunch of entitled and moronic old people who ruined their societies in a constant game of shallow pleasure-seeking. Psychedelics did not expand consciousness then, and it is idiotic to assume that they will expand consciousness now. Sure, they may help with people who are experiencing depression or anxiety, but most likely that is because they fundamentally break parts of the brain that are causing the depression or anxiety for logical reasons. If your car has a bunch of warning lights on, the solution isn’t to break the dashboard and pretend the problems are fixed, but rather to fix the problems that are causing the warning lights to warn you. If you’re depressed or anxious, you should start changing your life habits (what you’re eating, how much you’re sleeping, what media you consume, what people you are around, where you live, your job) rather than modifying your brain to stop warning you that what you’re doing is harming you and making you miserable.

Psychotic breaks are not fun or healthy -- and they can cause serious legal and social problems for you. They are unpleasant and painful in ways that really can’t be understood unless you have experienced them. Still, it is hard to not see them as fundamentally transformative in the manner that psychedelic pushers claim their drugs to be. Having a disturbed psychotic break is not going to make you a more loving or peaceful person on a fundamental level, because those things are ego related and naïvely stupid, but it will shift how you perceive things in a manner closer to how reality functions, which is that humanity is a type of mold that imagines itself not to be mold because our brains are overdeveloped.

Structural Safety Paradox

(This essay is from It Is The Secret, available at book.paul.town)

There is a pattern that tends to happen with regards to well defined structures. The
pattern, where a structure or institution becomes well defined then its definition is used to take
advantage of people who know that structure or institution for its definition by behaving in a way
that is different than how it behaved in its past. This incongruence between what was in the past
and what is now has a certain amount of lag time before observers catch on to the changes and
update the definition/reputation of the structure or institution accordingly. This lag time can be a
good thing or a bad thing, depending on what the change is and from who’s point of view (from
inside or outside the institution or structure) you’re seeing things.

To make this pattern more clear, I will use a usually emotionally charged topic but not in
a disrespectful or glib manner. I will also be saying these things in neither an accusatory or
dismissive manner but rather a more analytical case study manner. The pattern in mind is
organized religion and how it interacts with local communities. If a community is in a bad shape
and a church/temple/center/etc gets built in that community and ends up helping the community,
the church/temple/center/etc will gain a positive reputation over time. That reputation will filter
down to the people running or helping the church/temple/center/etc to varying degrees. All that
is healthy, and over time as the positive reputation grows and the community begins to trust
people running that church/temple/center/etc and rely on them, then the church/temple/center/etc
all gain influence (justifiably) over people that trust and look up to them.

Now that the reputation has been built up, the church/temple/center/etc becomes a target
for people who don’t have a reputation and don’t want to benefit the community but rather take
advantage of the lag time between a reputation accurately reflecting behavior. This is the reason
why child abuse seems so common in lots of different religious sects/denominations: the good
people built up an organization that benefited the most vulnerable, the vulnerable learned to trust
the organization made up of good people, then bad people who want to take advantage of
vulnerable people managed to trick or corrupt good people into giving them influence in the
organization. As such, a paradox of sorts is observed: the longer an organization is good, the
more incentives bad actors have of taking over an organization.

The key to this pattern seems to be linked to people attributing human elements such as
personal character or warmheartedness or honor to whatever structure/organization that the
people with those human elements is involved in. This misplaced trust/mistrust then causes them
to react to the shell of the structure even if the contents of it have changed and different people
are now involved. People don’t ever change who they really are, but structures/organizations can
change the people who make them up or manage them, which means that structures/
organizations are generally lagging representations of changes within that structure or
organization, and external peoples’ opinion/views on that structure or organization is a lagging
representation of a combination between their interactions with the people making up the
structure or organization as well as their current opinion of the structure or organization and how
those two differ, which means another layer of lag is added.

There is an upside to this in that things with negative reputations can be utilized and
move with less attention for quite some time more than an objective blank slate appraisal would
entail if utilized properly. This aspect of reputational lag is a discussion for another time and falls
outside of the scope of this essay, but it does exist.

(This essay is from It Is The Secret, available at book.paul.town)

A review of "TFW No GF" by Alex Lee Moyer

Disclaimer: Even though I will do my best to be impartial with my review and thoughts on TFW No GF, I have known all the subjects in the documentary for a few years and have genuine sympathy for them and wish them the best, so there is undoubtedly a positive bias in the way I see this project.

TFW No GF (available on Amazon prime streaming as well as illegal streaming sites that do not require a subscription of Amazon prime) is a documentary that takes a glimpse into five isolated and outsider white males in their late teens and twenties.


Documentary subjects:

The five individuals highlighted in this film are Sean(@zephfyrus), Kyle(@covid19fatality), Kantbot(@KANTBOT20K), Viddy(@viddymalchick), and Charels(@relscd).

Sean is a well put together young adult, whose most obvious distaste with the world around him seems to stem from a lack of meaningful purpose. When the film starts, he is living with his parents and getting into weight-lifting and reading books that Kantbot has recommended to him. While frustrated, he does not seem to be particularly nihilistic or self-destructive, which is a different sort of energy than the other characters in the film.

Kyle is a young Texan who struggles with his isolation and lack of hope with cigarettes and alcohol. He is not shown in a sympathetic or non-sympathetic light, the film choosing to display him in a "take it or leave it" manner which allows him to talk about how he views the world as barren, dirty, and depressing, as well as his cautious optimism for the future. How much of this is the result of internal drives as opposed to his depressing surroundings is not made clear, but this is

Kantbot is the oldest of the group and has a degree in economics, as well as being the most "well-known" of the bunch, running a popular twitter account which had ~20k followers at the time of the filming (2017) and now has ~40k followers and climbing rapidly. Despite the name and purported theme of the film, Kantbot, based in NYC, is not somebody who seems to struggle all that much with an inability to find a girlfriend, but rather talks about philosophy and general ideas in a humorous manner on both his twitter account and his podcast (available on patreon here.)

Viddy and Charels are brothers who reside together in Washington. The children of alcoholics, this film seems to show them more in depth than either Kantbot or Kyle, interspersing shots of home videos which show them as hopeful and energetic kids alongside shots of them currently, where they are living in a dilapidated apartment and spend their free time browsing the internet and taking isolated walks outside.


General format of the film:

While most documentaries set out to prove a point or push an agenda, TFW No GF does not go this route. Alex Lee Moyer does not interject herself into the film at all, there is no non-character narration, and no real questions seem to be asked. Instead of a message, the approximately hour and a half long documentary, cuts between the characters and shows what they are doing on various days, and allows them to talk about whatever it is they want to talk about, which tends to be existential angst or generally negative outlooks.

This is not a film that is trying to cast its subjects as heroes or villains. This is a project that is simply showing these people for who they are, which is generally normal people who just tend to see the world in ways that causes them to be isolated or lonely. Whether their ideas regarding the world are positive or negative, honest or dishonest, delusional or realistic, is up to the viewer to decide.


A general review of the film:

Advertised and marketed as a film about 4chan and its "wojak" meme, the final product is not very honest. None of the characters highlighted are avid 4chan users, but rather are active on twitter. They may post the wojak meme to express themselves, but there is no real reason (outside of generating consumer interest) to associate the film's contents with 4chan or "wojak". Still, this is not a very damning criticism of the movie, as it doesn't insult what is inside the movie but rather criticizes the packaging, which was most likely needed in order to get many people to watch it at all. As anybody who has made anything creative knows, a bit of tactical hype is oftentimes needed. As such, I can't really fault Moyer for hijacking the energy around chans currently seen as "exotic" and "dangerous" by people not familiar with them. The people in chan communities might dislike this film -- which is a fair reaction to being misrepresented and used for attention in a manner which can be fairly described as parasitic, although it is ultimately parasitic in a non-malicious and non-harmful manner.

With that minimally negative critique out of the way, the actual film was not bad at all. While it was not shocking or earth-shattering, it was a fair and honest (albeit fairly shallow) portrayal of individuals I have known for a decent amount of time. The individuals profiled are humanized through the lack of scare-tactics so often used to paint isolated and lonely young men as sex-deprived lunatics, but they are also not shown in a manner which suggests they are harmless weak victims who need to be babied or pitied. Agency is not removed from the characters being filmed, but it is also not heaped upon them in a way that it is dishonest.

This is a "coming of age" film that doesn't show a coming of age or any real character development, but also doesn't show any defeat or collapse. It is more of a snapshot than a story, which might be criticized by others but I personally found refreshing in the era of highly-politicized faux-art which is trying to change the world in some obnoxiously gaudy manner. The ability to pull punches as well as leave things hanging is in short supply with creative works, and Moyer does this well. Whether this was the desired effect of the film is irrelevant, the effect is still there.

Is this film particularly haunting or impactful? Not really. There are no scenes in it which I have found myself coming back to, no quotes which stuck with me and made me think about the world in some new light, and that's kind of the point. The people in this film are too young to have much truly profound perspective, they have not had experiences which are intense enough to force some evolutionary shift in how they proceed about their life. These are normal individuals who are working through problems to varying degrees of success and going on very different life paths. These people are not monsters or freaks or revolutionaries, and that's what makes this an enjoyable viewing.

Besides the immediately edifying aspects of the film, of which there are many if you are thoughtful about what you are watching, I expect this project to age well. All of the individuals involved are still quite young and it remains to be seen where they will end up. In ten to twenty years, when their roles in society are more defined and their accomplishments (or lack of accomplishments) are set in stone, it will be an interesting experience to see their outlook on the world once again, then take the contrast of what we saw in the film. Will Kantbot succeed in his media and creative endeavors? Will Sean be successful in whatever career he ends up choosing? Will Kyle still be heavily drinking and smoking or will he be putting his energy into other avenues? Will Charels and Viddy be sharing an apartment or will they be married and have kids? All this remains to be seen, and for better or worse it will be seen.

Overall, this was an honest portrayal of the individuals in the film, even though the film might have been more compelling on an emotional level if there were less people on screen and more time for personal details that pertained to hopes, dreams, and personal struggles. With all this said, it is nice to see people I know and am fond of get some form of recognition that does not try to demonize them or lionize them for ultimately meaningless political reasons, and that is the main reason I would recommend people curious about "incels" or "internet subcultures" watch TFW No GF.

The Anti-Social Age

            There are so many ways to stay entertained in the modern world. If you like food, you can eat whatever you want. If you want attention, there are near limitless forms of social media to express yourself and pass your days getting validation. If you have a proclivity for promiscuity, you can hop on an app, go on a college town bar, or find a hooker online within minutes of searching, not to mention self-stimulation via pornography. Life is not a struggle for people who crave these sorts of experiences, but rather a never-ending carnival of delights. This may sound like a good thing, but because moderation is something that is both needed and uncommon, it is a nightmare for the majority of people. Whatever vices you have -- whether food, drugs, or sex -- those vices are always a few clicks away.

            Because base gratification is near-instant for the majority of neurotypicals, genuine introspection has suffered. If you have the normal urges and proclivities that caused the previous generations to work steady jobs and go out into the world to make something of themselves, you are now at a serious disadvantage. The barrier or rather friction between humans and pleasure that used to exist has been eroded at an increasingly exponential rate, turning motivations into perverse mechanisms that remove the need to be productive in order to be content in the short-term. This can easily be observed by looking around at the average individual in most modernized countries, a slovenly, lazy, unaware, and quite frankly stupid creature who is not able to comprehend cause and effect on a time-frame longer than a few days or months.

            Even though the majority of people have suffered because of this environment, there are those who have actually benefited: the genuinely anti-social. Imagine not having the same compulsions as most of the people around you, responding in a more muted manner to what brings the majority positive feelings. In the past, this sort of person would generally underperform as they were not responding properly (in the context of their environment) to incentives that drove those around them into working hard and achieving a good start to life and then a white picket fence, a beautiful wife, and happy, healthy kids. Now, these people are the ones who are doing well.

            The anti-social are those who are increasingly benefiting from social media and technology in general, because they are the ones who are not as caught up in the skinner box of dopamine flooding and social accolades. Their internal disconnect from communities, a disconnect that was once a severe disadvantage, has now become an advantage, because they are not as distracted by the insane amount of noise and toys that normal people are self-harming with. While others are taking cues from what they see as general consensus that are really just distorted and dishonest echo chambers, the anti-social with personal motivations are more easily able to discern truth from fiction and be less swayed by the number of shares or retweets generated by some opinion piece or news story.

           This is not to say that the anti-social are the Übermensch, but rather that the technologically integrated system that we find ourselves in is increasingly being optimized into a cage that preys upon the majority of people, the pro-social.

Because this system is not designed to take advantage of psychological flaws of the anti-social, but still accessible to the anti-social, this system is now functionally a lever for the anti-social to manipulate the pro-social in ways and at scales that weren’t possible in the past. The people who used to be outcasts, because of their lack of natural motivation rather than some personality flaw or physical deformity, are now the people who increasingly wield social and monetary influence. You can see this in effect especially well with regards to most successful tech CEOs, people who generally have some sort of abnormal wiring in the brain. They understand how normal people act even though they don’t act that way themselves, and are now enabled to interact with and take advantage of hundreds of thousands or millions of normal people with normal internal motivations.

            Where is all this headed? In the short-term (the next few generations), those who are anti-social are – and will continue to be -- experiencing a gold-rush of sorts. Because the anti-social used to be much less successful than the pro-social, there are very few anti-social individuals as compared to pro-social individuals. In the past, the pro-social individuals were those who would have good careers and get social accolades for “following the rules” and “fitting in”, and thus they were the ones more likely to breed and pass their internal dispositions onto offspring. For every anti-social individual who succeeded evolutionary and passed on their genes, there were many more pro-social individuals who succeeded and passed on their genes. Up until recently, the anti-social was a maladaption for first world environments where cooperation and group loyalty were highly beneficial. The incentive structure to life has changed dramatically and thus winners and losers have essentially been inverted from the “ideal” (what was conducive to success in the past) to the looked down upon (what is now conducive to success.)

            Eventually, some form of equilibrium to our reshuffled value system will be found. Much like over-fishing causes problems for fishers, the new predatory capabilities of the anti-social will eventually be nerfed in the form of the anti-social winners making up the majority of the population while the new pro-social losers make up a smaller, lower caste group of victims that are still taken advantage of, but not in the all-you-can eat buffet style that will be the norm for the foreseeable future. At that point, the anti-social individuals who make up the upper half (or more) of society will be forced to start designing systems and tools to take advantage of each other. A small taste of this in action can be observed with regards to “Social Media Experts” selling PDFs, seminars, and courses to other would-be “Social Media Experts”, which is generally (but not always) a tacit admission that the “Social Media Expert” in question is not actually good at social media, but rather taking advantage of would be predators who are also anti-social in nature. The parallel to this in the pro-social domain would be motivational speakers who do nothing but sell motivational speeches and don’t have anything to show for their motivational speeches except for getting people to pay for motivational speeches and fall under the category of a pro-social (usually) predator preying on pro-social individuals, knowingly or not.

            While we are now in the anti-social age, not all anti-social individuals will end up “winning” at life. As alluded to earlier, anti-social people are not perfect. In fact, because being anti-social was a losing strategy for most environments up until the very recent past, anti-social people generally have more self-destructive and mentally ill problems than those who are pro-social. As a result, you can see how there are many anti-social people who seem to do really well in the short term under our new reality, then implode due to some sort of fatal character flaw that makes them expend their energy in fatal manners. What is going to happen is that the anti-social people who are not deranged will succeed long term, while the anti-social people who have serious problems will succumb to those problems and remain losers like their ancestors, and most likely die out or end up only slightly better than their fathers and grandfathers did, despite the new opportunity for success.

            An important distinction that must be made is the reality of pro-social people who may seem anti-social at first. These are the people who are clinical narcissists, sociopaths, and those with bipolar disorder. While they struggle to be pro-social, they are ultimately not anti-social. They just tend to suck at what they want to do, and live a life full of misery and disappointment, no matter their material victories. Truly anti-social people do not have the urges that these people have, and though they may behave in a similar manner at times (distant, aloof, uncaring, unempathetic, shallow, and manipulative), the internal motivations of the genuinely anti-social are different (and lacking in that form of distress) than the internal motivations of the mentally ill pro-social. Where this group of mentally ill pro-social people will end up remains to be seen, but it will most likely be above the mentally healthy pro-social but well below the genuinely anti-social who do not suffer from self-destructive environmental maladaptation. This won’t matter much though, because these individuals will exist in a form of neurotic misery much like the current pro-social upper middle-class does, where they are constantly striving to be like their betters, and unable to do so, being that they are not wired in the same manner and do not truly understand the game that is being played or the internal motivations of those playing the game better than them.

Differences in Effort for Consumption and Production Part 1: Consumption

The effort required for an activity is generally a good indicator of the type of person who is engaged in said activity. This indicator can either be positive or negative, depending on whether the activity in question is by its nature consumptive or productive. The reason for this is that the more effort required for any particular activity, the less normal people will have a desire to break stasis to engage in it, and thus the activity will select for increasingly abnormal sorts of individuals.

This dichotomy of effort is most easily seen online, where there are large social experiments everywhere you look. For example, take twitter, a website that is ostensibly built for pro-social communication, which sounds like a productive activity but is really a consumptive activity for most people, since there are generally only a few leaders who are creating something in any social circle. For the vast majority of people on twitter, communication via social media is a purely consumptive activity.

What is the generalized behavior on twitter? The vast majority of individuals on twitter are not very active users. These people may follow sports teams, media figures, or comedy meme pages, but they barely interact with any accounts or get into arguments. Because these people are not putting in any effort, the fact that twitter is a consumptive activity for them is not very negative. For these people, twitter is just a mild timewaster that is enjoyable albeit not productive.

As we head towards the increasingly active fringes of twitter, we can observe how this subset has a different average user than the one we described. True, the activity being engaged in is still consumptive, but these people put in time and effort into whatever “twitter community” they have found themselves in. These people are consuming, but they’re passionate about consuming. Whether it is media gossip, news, politics, video games, anime, or any other niche interest, you’ll find that as you view increasingly passionate consumers, you’ll view increasing amounts of mental illness.

Let’s take a look at voice chat platforms. Currently, the most popular service is called Discord. Individuals can set up private servers and text chat as well as voice chat with anybody they invite to these servers. All of this sounds rather pleasant and unassuming, but anybody who has spent a decent amount of time on Discord can inform you that it is home to a very disproportionate amount of mentally ill individuals as well as deviants.

What is the selection process that is causing a voice chat platform like Discord to have a reputation for child groomers? Once again, the amount of effort required for engaging in this activity. Since communication is consumptive for 99% of people, voice chatting is a consumptive activity. Unlike twitter or text based platforms, voice chatting has a higher barrier of entry. You need to be in an area where you can talk and listen, be comfortable with others knowing what your voice sounds like, and the transfer of interpersonal information happens in real-time rather than the flexible asynchronous manner in which written communication. These requirements and limitations mean that the people engaged in voice chat on any regular basis are generally socially isolated enough in real life that they’re willing to invest time and energy into an activity that requires a ton of effort to engage in. People with real life friends and responsibilities don’t have time to be active on voice chats with strangers, nor do most of them have the desire to jump through the hoops required to do such a thing. Much like heavily active twitter users, discord users trend towards being individuals who have something wrong with them and are ostracized from real world communities.