Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log
You know you who it is already. Can't recall my old password or even what email I used so here we are. I promised I'd st
2. Religious service is a bonus, but if somebody manages to exhibit pro-social behaviours or impart these upon their wife and children that's just as good. For most couples, your wife is basically like your first child and needs guidance/raising in a way. When this dynamic is inverted, relationships often collapse. Yes, I do consider Dunyain to be very alpha in my framework, ho
I would bet a lot against Dunyain "raising/guiding" his wife like she's his first child. I wouldn't be shocked if it was almost the opposite.
I would bet a lot against Dunyain "raising/guiding" his wife like she's his first child. I wouldn't be shocked if it was almost the opposite.
sure, exceptions don't disprove rules though. I won't try to speak for him, but he's also literally autistic/aspergers by his own admission. The fact that this dynamic is often inverted with neurodivergent men is probably part of why these men struggle so badly with romantic relationships.
I'll let him offer his insight if he wants to, it's a private matter and maybe he doesn't want to. That's fine.
sure, exceptions don't disprove rules though. I won't try to speak for him, but he's also literally autistic/aspergers by his own admission. The fact that this dynamic is often inverted with neurodivergent men is probably part of why these men struggle so badly with romantic relationships. I'll let him offer his insight if he wants to, it's a private matter and maybe he doesn't
Well, in fairness the part of leading your wife like a child came a few posts later. If that had been in the post I was responding to, I certainly would not have suggested or implied my own life mirrored that in any way.
Yugo's musings of my marital dynamic are more or less correct. My wife gets her way most of the time. But I wouldn't' say it is because she is leading me as much as I accept it is the most expedient way to marital harmony, and it matters more to her.
If I have a very strong opinion that what she wants is a real bad idea, I will put my foot down. But generally I believe she means well, and what she wants we can make work out in the end, so I dont put my foot down very much.
As far as whether I actually have Aspergers, I have never been formally diagnosed. But 9 year old me would have checked off most of the boxes, and mid 40 year old me still checks off quite a few. And for me it doesn't matter that much one way or another as far as how I approach the world. Shrug.
FWIW my wife went through a symptom list at one point and was like "Yeah, that's you."
Well, in fairness the part of leading your wife like a child came a few posts later. If that had been in the post I was responding to, I certainly would not have suggested or implied my own life mirrored that in any way. Yugo's musings of my marital dynamic are more or less correct. My wife gets her way most of the time. But I wouldn't' say it is because she is leading me
This is just standard "picking your battles". Doesn't mean she is "leading you...like a child" either. I'd guess that most relationships which truly have that kind of dynamic in either direction are kind of facked up.
Question I didn’t have an answer for last night when Giants traded up for Dart….have the Giants ever had a black QB start for them? I couldn’t think of one, certainly since Eli
had a,bad botched session last night. its not uncommon to sleep much worse the first few days or weeks with cpap and my back really hurt from different sleeping positions. still managed to hamstring curl 46x17 and do all my shoulder prehabs so its a win. i couldn't even sit in the leg extension without back pain, but I've also read mirabegron can cause this so i will drop it. Ostensibly managing sleep apnea and lower caffeine should help with night time urination. im taking next week off diet and just try to not come back over 97kg. I've been 96 all week but harder than the photos at 94.5.
May 3 when i come back ill move retatrutide back up to appetite suppressing doses as i will be only 18/15 weeks out then, no longer time to worry about burning off too fast. race down. 2mg per week
I'm curious about the CPAP. Is it just you've gotten big enough (<100kg?) that it weighs down on your airways and, in theory, will improve sleep quality through better breathing?
My experience with CPAPs is either straight up fat ****s or strongman/HW WLers/etc. Dudes who are massive and kinda fat. I think Strongest Man in History had a segment where everyone talks about their CPAPs, which was weird and eye opening.
Anyway, I'm not at a point where this would ever affect me barring some sort of reverse Thinner moment. But I'm just super curious about how you came to this conclusion, how the process is working, and whether it works, etc etc.
In my case it was likely an uncorrected overbite and resulting very notable jaw recession coupled with nasal pollyps, but size didn't help. I used to think it was just size related because when I'd diet down it'd get more managable. But it was actually just the bronchodialation of the clen, not the weight loss itself. Because when I lose without clen the sleep apnea was still very present and even at heavier bw as soon as I have clen in there it goes away.
Upper yesterday
incline db: 35kgx10x2
chins: bwx10, 13, 9 second 2 sets neutral grip with a large arch. This very VERY good and my lats were on fire. I think i found the secret to doing chins for lats and it was right in front of my nose all along...
Chest supported tbar row: 2ppx15, 10, 8
another chest supported row machine: 1ppsx10, 10, 8
pullovers: 3 sets
triset: ez curl, db skullcrusher, db prone delt raises
Lower today
Same bi/tri/delt triset
Leg extensions: 3 sets
seated ham curl: 3 sets
Paused RDL: 120kgx15
rfess: 10kgx12, 15kgx12x2 setup much more stable than at my home gym. I'm just gonna go back to ffess until/if I get the proper wheel/rolly machine for the back foot.
Not sure if I'm getting sick or just typical bangkok pollution wrecking my lungs and making them feel super inflamed. No sore throat, fever, or weakness.
Mirabegron had to drop as it caused a very unusual side effect of lower back pain which was actually crippling on the day I was flying and one day after. A few days of not taking it and my lower back is fine and I was able to sldl without any issues. Very weird side effect, that medicine scares me a bit yet I medically seem to need it. I was taking kind of a lot at 100-150mg/day, I'll try 50.
my boy mercer got a bunch of videos deleted. Being pro male is much more dangerous hatespeech than anything else, even if you literally make a video explaining why the alt-right or ethnonationalism is bad for low value males and explain carefully and logically why this is not in the best interest of romantically unsuccessful men, they still nuke your video for even acknowledging the ever-growing swath of incel masses as a large political problem.
I'm not at my usual home setup so it's hard to type, but the excess male problem is literally the 1st or 2nd more important political problem of our time along with fiat currency and central banking. AI encrochment might end up bumping them down to 2nd and 3rd. More thoughts on this later, maybe. But frankly maybe no, I'm sure my readers are smart enough to realize why this is true, especially given where I'm living right now and how numerically severe the problem is here...
don't worry bro, as long as young boys and young men are properly given feminist education about why it's bad to rape, consent is sexy, and why we need more women in STEM (but not in oil rig work or construction, ewww) the problem will vanish. If men were collectively more feminist, this problem would never exist!
I'm just saying that I'm not sure how Dunyain is "alpha" by your definition. This is not meant to be discouraging. I think it should be somewhat clear I am a fan of the Dunyain and have been for years.
Yugo,
Shockingly and quite unusually, I think you're missing the forest for the trees here; perhaps I'm grafting my own interpretation onto what Evo is saying (and it's certainly true that we don't align totally and would probably emphasize different things on this subject due to our respective LIVED EXPERIENCES), but as my sons get older, I think the pithiest way I can express my fundamental hopes for them with respect to life in general and marriage specifically is "become the kind of person your ideal partner would want to be with."
Not to psychoanalyze Evo too deeply, but "your wife should be like your first child" and "**** entitled Western women, I'm moving to Southeast Asia" are pretty congruent thought patterns that (along with pretty much everything else in this log) indicate that he's intentionally and purposefully living a life that aligns with his values and desires as opposed to, as my old man frequently admonished me against, "floating through life like a leaf on a stream." Likewise, my relatively low stress upper tier salaryman lifestyle aligns essentially exactly with what I've always wanted, and I married someone with those same desires from a very similar socioeconomic background. That she is nowhere close to my first child doesn't obviate my alphaness (alphaquatulence?), though certain other aspects of my life (running? infrequent alcohol instead of frequent tren use? baldness?) very well might.
All of this is to say that, to the extent I will be pushing my boys to retain/develop their alphacity, it will be to think deeply about what they want, how they want to live, and the implications of those desires with respect to what they'll need to do professionally, where and how they'll want to live, etc. Having life just happen to you is very much not alpha, and, as I have told them a few times, it is their life, ultimately.
guy, i checked out that channel of that guy you shared
kinda surprised you found him because his following is incredibly small and he very much identifies as an incel
it's honestly the best version of incel i've ever seen, usually it's pretty whiny/mopy "i'm uggo that sucks" whereas he's more real politik incel "don't join the kkk it won't help you get laid even though they may try to recruit you"
also curious about his avatar, no ****, but his avatar is a reasonably attractive male in good shape, is that supposed to represent him or a parody of his mortal enemy, the chad?
Yugo,
Shockingly and quite unusually, I think you're missing the forest for the trees here; perhaps I'm grafting my own interpretation onto what Evo is saying
He was kind of specific when coming up with metrics for Evoken Alpha (TM). And then he mentioned Dunyain. So, yeah, maybe he means something else and Dunyain is Alpha AF. That's cool too.
Anyway, I will stop before this just becomes some kind of strictly semantic exercise that takes away from Guy doing Guy stuff, which is the real porpoise of this log anyway.
Yugo,
Umm... other than being kind of an overthinking weirdo... what does DunDun miss out on?
Monte,
Not really sure I agree with that framework. But perhaps I'm putting too much emphasis on the goal rather than the state of being? Then again, people are dumb as ****, for example I just thought I was smart enough for two people and banged a bunch of elite hotties. Then I realized that talking to myself all the time (NB: I still talk to myself a lot. Like most people. Gotta spend time with your fave person.) was kinda ****.
On what PaPaMonte said: Great advice. I actually moved abroad because I felt like I'd ultimately end up going down that path where I was upper middle class, had a wife I kinda hated but banged anyway, kids I claimed to love but somewhat loathed, and a lifetime of wonder on "what could've been". I'm sure you know a dozen people like this and it strikes me as kinda sad. Granted with years of retrospection I can understand why people don't make the same choices I did, it is somewhat miserable at times and doing semi-hard things is not really a thing that most people wanna do.
rick,
I'm actually a huge proponent of the MGTOW movement which is essentially moving to a cabin in the woods with your dog, getting away from the man, and being the best version of you that you can possibly be. But somehow this a far right radical misogynistic view. But if you live in a brownstone as an elderly spinster with 12 cats and no desire to practice basic sanitation... that is not. k.
In a weird twist, my wife actually really likes that MGTOW view. So it happens that we're both moving to the woods (we're rich, so its likely closer to an estate) with our dog and being as crazy as we want. Which is mostly hobby gardening, and bullshit home improvement projects. (Do I want to build a pump fed spring with a waterfall? Probably yes at some point. Obv by hand. Cause need that GPP.)
But don't glom the the various elements of the MR movement together. It is like talking about nationalists. George Washington, Lenin, Mao, Hitler. All staunch nationalists. Literally nothing else in common. Except I think 3 had mostly real teeth and 3 were white. Happy incels are p dope. Unhappy incels are like most unhappy people. Kinda shitty and useless.
Yugo,Shockingly and quite unusually, I think you're missing the forest for the trees here; perhaps I'm grafting my own interpretation onto what Evo is saying (and it's certainly true that we don't align totally and would probably emphasize different things on this subject due to our respective LIVED EXPERIENCES), but as my sons get older, I think the pithiest way I can express
You guys have latched onto my "your wife is your first child" comment heavily, but I guess part of this is that my longest lasting relationships were both 6 years younger and Chinese grow up a lot slower and stay immature for a lot longer. My model of what marriage even is only really examines Chinese marriages, where year almost universally the wife is the 'first child'. So lack of familiarity with how marriage even really works in the west is probably hugely biasing.
Good post. Two things.
1. I do not want to date another Thai. Last time sucked. Chinese or foreigners in China. Not familiar with other SEAs but probably not happening.
2. Bolded: I have changed my views on this quite a lot over the past 5 years. Let me explain....
There is nothing unique about western women or about political feminism. The behaviour of western feminism and rise of political feminism are results, not causes, of the gender crisis. Women age out of the sexual marketplace much more quickly than men, perhaps not aesthetically but functionally. Most people are not dating purely hedonistically and do desire marriage/family/children, and women past a certain age are SOL on this. That said, as many tinder experiments have proven, even a 62 year old 1/10 woman will get more matches and dates than a 10/10 25 year old male. Birth rates fell and this resulted in an inverted demographic pyramid where there are not enough young people. This means fertile aged women are just a smaller % of the population overall. This means more competition for them and this allows them more leverage within society broadly, but in particular when coupled with their economic liberation, it allows them to act on their "real" preferences rather than functional economic preferences. Many older people are just shocked or simply won't believe it at all if somebody demonstrates how extremely looks focused women are when in their prime fertility window, but admittedly their preferences become something a bit closer to what boomers and genxers experienced when they were young. Even without western feminism, if we still have the demographic problem of scarcity, there's still going to be large swaths of men left out of the mating game, it will just be on different criteria. Right now, young men are left out largely based on height, skull shape, and facial features, but things like educational attainment and socio-economic status still do matter and become increasingly important with age as the physical features diminish. In a more traditionalist system, it's just going to mean things like socio-economic status, income, net worth, educational attainment etc are the criteria from an earlier age and reduce women's agency overall. So we still have a ton of incels but now women are unhappy too. Returning to more traditionalist patterns seems like basically a net loss for everyone. That's why I'm not strictly "anti-feminist" or 'trad' even though I joked above about how "men are incels b/c misogyny". The sort of tired, played out, default, univariate "feminism fixes every problem" thing is funny to mock and seems relatively common among internet women, but I imagine most real women irl aren't dumb enough to subscribe to this asinine world view.
Western women aren't 'entitled', they're just rational actors optimizing within their current circumstances.
Now this may surprise you but: Chinese women are more misandric and more "entitled" than their western counterparts. That word is almost hard to pinpoint, but in this context I mean their expectations for marriage and for their romantic partners are way more severe and strict than western women. Is there anything unique about China or Chinese culture that would cause this? They're less feminist, so why would this be the case? Because the scarcity problem is much worse here. Chinese women have far more disdain and outright hatred for low attractiveness men than western women do for unattractive men. But me and probably most (not all) western men with at least a bachelor's degree are going to do way better here because we're going to have a much easier time meeting those extreme demands than all but the top X % of local men. Being native English speaking still just commands a huge premium here because nobody wants to ***** live here since it's so inconvenient, hard to adapt to, and harsh overall. In Korea/Japan, westerners don't command nearly the level of status or salary despite multiple times higher GDPs per capita because these are pleasant places to live that are very easy to adapt to, and predictably it's then much harder for foreign men to date there compared to foreign men in China. Last I read, the amount of Korean male/foreign female marriages outnumbered Koream female/foreign male, but this may be biased by rural korean men with SEA mail-orders.
This word "entitled" is kinda loaded... if you're scarce and everyone wants something from you, it's natural that you try to bid up offers and get the most you can for that thing. Am I "entitled" for leaving my job for better working conditions, salary, and location because my skills are scarce and highly sought after? If you're a 27 year old woman who's a 6.5/10 attractiveness with a bachelor's degree and you live in a country with 35 million extra men over women in the marriagable age range and in your culture material possessions, real estate, and "face"/social status are very important, why would you NOT demand a house worth 10-30x the median annual family income, a car, and a dowry worth 3-4x the median income? Lots of unsatisfied men grinding away wagecucking and getting their whole families to donate generations worth of savings to get access to vagina+reproduction to carry on their genetic line... Why ask for any less? You can probably ask for that AND a hard height requirement of 175cm and a reasonably handsome face and you'll probably get it.
I suppose there are some Chinese women who don't quite understand male preferences and ask for those things at advanced ages and tend to believe that men do/should value things like their educational attainment or assets more than they actually do while downplaying how important fertility is. That makes for amusing stories and maybe could be called 'entitled' in that pejorative sense.
More on this 'demographic black pill', a video he made 4 years ago and then disappeared.
No war is definitely a great thing. A great question to ask is this: Why do we not see a large increase in wages in these places where labour became scarce due to depressed birth rates? Japan, for instance... is it just because of entitlement programs, taxes, and redistribution from the youth to the old? Does the post 1971 fiat regime break this cycle somehow? Why are there no more 'baby booms'? Is it because of people staying in the labour market "too long"? Normally when there's a population collapse, especially when a lot of young men get killed off, labour is scarce, men are the scarcer sex, wages increase, each individual man has a lot of romantic options, lots of marriages and kids because median housing price is 1.5x median income. Why did this not happen in Japan/korea? To what extent is income/wealth inequality fueling birth rate collapse? There does seem to be some empirical relationship, but it's difficult to say if this is causal or to what extent?
I don't have any answers to these questions, just throwing them out there if anyone happens to have insights.
It makes me sound like a commie libtard, here's my unsupported diagnosis: Wage stagnation and growing wealth and income gaps give people a feeling of hopelessness for the future and lock them into zero-sum status signalling games spending too much time in education competing for bullshit jobs that are basically corporate UBI as Dunyain beautifully explained. Coupled with general pessimsm about the future, this leads to people not desiring children and then we end up in the demographic death spiral of too few young people, too few young women specifically, accelerating competition for that diminishing % of the population which is a fertile aged female, even more time spent in zero-sum status singalling games withe ducation and credentialling, and then even lower birth rates and rates of pairing and the problem becomes self-reinforcing.
How can we reverse the wage stagnation, divergence between productivity growth and compensation growth, and wealth/income gaps? I don't know, but it's probably not going to be a ******ed marxist revolution because we've tried that a couple hundred times and it ends up being a disaster every single time. It's a mystery to me that some seemingly very intelligent people think this will work if we try it again. UBI? maybe idk. BTC and dismantling of fiat regime? I'd like to believe this but I don't think so. I don't have an answer... but I'm a guy with a master's degree and an IQ in the high 110s or low 120s, it's not my job to solve this problem, leave that to the heavyweights.
Tangentially related to all of the above:
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-...
I reaaalllyyy enjoyed this read. Part of the reason my current school is failing so badly is because they don't recognize that education is goodhart's law minmaxing trying to get the highest exam scores in China. They bring their British model of "holistic" education and don't understand that parents don't want this and are trying to optimize 2 things: 1. University Matriculations 2. Exam scores. They want heavily exam focused teaching and efficiency, where we want sign language bees (I'm not joking), weekly 70 minute assemblies, dress up as a character from a book and have a costume parade days, and a school poet laureate. When Chinese people bring their kids to a British school, they want the posh image, the teachers to not use corporal punishment, and have some access to more exotic extra-curriculars to put on the CV but they're being done still solely to signal social status and to facilitate university applications. But they want the core of 'sit down and practice past exam paper questions over and over again' intact and for these extra-curriculars and other activities to not significantly reduce the time available for this core.
The Chinese parents can't articulate what they want from education to the school because this is the default model of education to them (repetitiously studying exam material to max out test scores) and can't even conceive of a world where you just sorta teach the subject, don't ask a lot of past exam paper questions, and let the high IQ kids score high and the low IQ kids score low and you focus on a holistic balanced education with varied school days that aren't super grindy. And the admins are too foreign to understand exactly what this Chinese "goodhart's law" default model of education is either and ignore or dimiss the dozens of voices explaining it clearly, not just my own.
But stepping away from my personal situation, I like this article because it so well articulates what I kind of realized intuitively around year 4 of my journey in this profession but I always had trouble expressing in a broader context and explaing the 'why' of this Chinese educational model.
Where I disagree with this author is in the idea that doing what's required to pump up standardized exam scores is 'useless'. No, it's actually pretty good as practice/approximation for what you do at most jobs anyway... do some process over and over again and optimize it repitiously. You really can't practice the A-Levels further math paper hundreds of times, earn an A*, and not be very well prepare for real analysis, differential equations, and multivariable calculus.
I have no thoughts on his whole immigration connection, not my area.
Even if you are objectively prosperous, if you feel like you can't grant your offspring an even more prosperous life you're probably not going to have offspring. Gen Z has what... 10% of the purchasing power of Baby Boomers at the same age? Housing/SP index fund/health care services are several times more expensive when measured in labour hours than in the past? What will you think will happen in the future? you want to bring kids into that future?
Back when I entered university over 20 years ago. I ended up going to the shittiest school I got accepted by since it was free. (They actually paid an amount for room and board as well, so you got a stipend if you lived off campus. Nizz.) This was mostly since I didn't get into anywhere "great" (Not even NYU/Cornell smh). Mostly this was due to the 6 fig price tag and my folks basically saying "lol no". It is now ~90k a year (estimated cost) to attend. If I manage to work a bit to save money for beer, I'm only in for 360k in very cheap unsecured personal debt, so I'll only owe 18-20k a year in interest payments for that "education". Math ain't mathing.
Part of the problem is that people think that going to a slightly better school or some other asinine thing is meaningful. You see this with upper middle class/fringe rich folks a lot where they fret about sending their kid to the 2nd best kindergarten instead of the best one. Pretty sure you don't need to pay 30k a year for your kid to puke and piss themselves in a room with slightly less people.
I think a lot could be learned from the European style of education. Granted they blow absolute ****ing ass at setting research universities, but for churning and burning bachelor degrees at cut rate. Amazing. Cut all the culture bullshit. Stop funding basically anything. Just random classes in random nondescript urban buildings and send folks on their merry way.
But the gubmint funding and the expansion of the administrative caste is what really drove this. Cut the grants/funding/loans and it'll magically solve itself. But if there are a bunch of HS kids who can take nearly half a milly in debt (or more) and the gubmint laws support this (enabling bankruptcy to discharge this debt would solve this and also render every 18y old completely unbankable like they should be), then we'll stay p ****ed.
Even if you are objectively prosperous, if you feel like you can't grant your offspring an even more prosperous life you're probably not going to have offspring. Gen Z has what... 10% of the purchasing power of Baby Boomers at the same age? Housing/SP index fund/health care services are several times more expensive when measured in labour hours than in the past? What will you t
Boomers grew up without fridges, TVs, and a ton of **** that isn't calculated into those adjustments. Life at that point was ****ing dismal and people lived in what we consider squalor. You can even look at homes from the 60s/70s and be astounded. No linen closets? What if 30 people come over to shower at the same ****ing time and everyone needs a towel? What if I just changed the sheets and someone shits every single bed? 2x? Better have that 4th set of spare sheets.
On a more interesting note, it was incredibly common to carry knives and stab people on a routine basis. You'd grab the blade of a pen knife and just give them a small (.25inch) stab in the kidney area to let them know whats up. Then you'd likely schedule a fist fight or whatever. Seems bizarre. But that time period is ****ing weird as ****.
Overall I agree, the "future prosperity" thing is less of an important factor than demographic youth/gender imbalance. it's maybe important to a small % of the paralysis by analysis population but most people don't exactly do any informed calculation about having kids and it just happens.
I also read the link. In something that will shock exactly no one, I learned fairly early on that the goal of school is not to learn something, instead its to get a sheet a paper with some cool embossing or extra tassles or whatever they give to signal "you did reel gud". Somehow I managed to graduate 5th in my prep school class of ~30, and ended up with the highest GPA in my college dept (and prob top 3ish overall, they did not reveal ranks). But class was basically figuring out what the teacher wanted you to learn, learn that stuff, **** it out on a piece of paper and move on. This also resulted in taking a lot of night classes and weekend classes with 30smth black women (lol lifelong learning) where the class was pretty much designed to give passing grades to anyone.
A couple anecdotes:
1) I took Stats 101 in a night class. I had worked out by the final that if I didn't take it I'd have an A. (Clearly an excellent predictor of my statistical acumen.) Wrote my name down and handed it to the teacher saying, "Think I have an A without completing this." He looked up at me and responded "No. You have an A+."
2) Stats 102 is offered as a Sat morning 9-12 class. Somehow I convinced some of my fraternity bros who were dumb and bad at math they should take this class. Think we had half the sessions and the ones we did have were only 1.5hrs. You could effortlessly skip the classes as well. Since a 3 strike rule with 9 classes is lol. This had a take home final. Think the dumb bros both got Bs when they would've legit failed a normal class.
So yeah, realizing the game you're actually playing (get good grades and move on) instead of what they're telling you the game is (learn stuff) is very important and has implications on the rest of your life (dating, career, etc).
My mom very strongly instilled the opposite of the truth you're speaking in me as a youth, much to my detriment. But alas, I've repaired things with her and had a great time vacationing with her. She's the exceedingly rare instance of the low/mid IQ white woman who paired with a very high IQ black man and I inherited his cognitive profile and it made her hard to relate to. It's not her fault.
On the topic of my dad, not sure if I've talked about it in this log... I'm loathe to be too vulnerable on the internet, but he most likely passed away during covid. We actually don't know... his email de-activated automatically after non-use, social media went dormant, and none of his other children (he has 3 baby mama's and 5 kids total) are able to contact him. Nor are his surviving 9 of 13 siblings or anyone. He just sort of vanished... It's most likely he died during covid.
I sent him an email in 2019 about my first bodybuilding show with pics and he was incredibly proud of me and wanted to fly to China to come see me and we had the whole trip planned and tickets bought, then covid hit and he wasn't able to come. He had always been a lifter, although he was a soccer goalkeeper at a high amateur level predominantly. He benched 4 plates for like a 3/4ths rom TNG rep at age 52 weighing around 240 fat 5'9. Never trained legs hard hahahaha... but regardless he was thrilled when I took up lifting as I'd been a fairly sedentary child. And when I got on the bodybuilding stage he was just ecstatic as he'd been a fan of the sport himself. He was planning to come next time I competed too...
Like anyone, I lose motivation or feel sorry for myself or question what I'm doing with my life. But when I remember how he felt about me doing this and living this lifestyle, it definitely does provide a boost. "Would your father/mother approve of your lifestyle" is not exactly the most sophisticated life optimization criteria, but it's certainly a cool narrative and it keeps me going...
lmao that's emo AF. Raw. It's okay though, happy times. Posing with one of the founders of the fed I'm competing in tomorrow. Hopefully i get some clarification on qualifying for the show/lack of needing to qualify.
I busted through Thus Spake Zarathustra in record speed. Enjoyed it thoroughly. I tried reading Notes from the Underground on some shitty youtube "hc" video creator's recommendation and couldn't stomach it, boring AF. Zarathustra was great, if at times inscrutable. It made me less emo, not more.
Something without purpose or meaning that will never materialize into anything complete or coherent:
Spoiler
The small Peruvian city who's name he could neither remember nor pronounce had a strange light in the late afternoon. The sky pulled into a soft violet mid-healing bruise-colour over the mountains, a kind of hazy indigo. Street vendors started packing away their knit alpaca dolls and salted corn tamales, while the tourists became easier to spot—slower, sunburnt, quieter now that the altitude was hitting them.
Elias watched from the shaded patio of a small cafe just off the plaza. His espresso sat untouched, the crema having collapsed into a thin ring around the rim. He had opened his book three times and closed it four. It didn’t matter. Being seen reading was more important than reading itself. Just one of many costumes.
He had worn a few today already. The well-mannered luxury traveler to the concierge. The benevolent digital nomad to the hostel bartender earlier, leaving a tip large enough to be mistaken for an accident. The bored, slightly aloof businessman on a Zoom call with people who said things like “scalable synergy” unironically and actually meant it.
Behind the mask, another mask. And behind that one yet another mask. These personas came easily now. Rehearsed. Automated real time switching. His life had become a nauseating procession of curated scripts. A 2021 Excel Spreadsheet. A series of python programs. The only thing that changed was the setting.
He wasn’t even sure why he was still traveling. At first, it had been the novelty—the illusion of changing one's environment as finding meaning, purpose, and "perspective". New cities, new people, new cultures and ways of life, new small talk to run until the batteries died. Now it was just the same grid in a different skin. The same questions. The same gazes. The same unspoken audits. He stayed long enough to be remembered for a few weeks or months, but never long enough to be missed.
What do you do?
Where are you from?
What do you have?
Each answer weighed, scanned, interpreted. Some did it gently, like it was a formality. Others didnt bother hiding the calculation. While Elias still resented it, now he also just saw it as the cost of the engaging in human interaction.
The chair across from him screeched slightly as someone pulled it back.
“Mind if I sit?” she asked, already halfway down.
He looked up. She was in her thirties, maybe a few years younger than him. German or Dutch, he guessed. Pale red sun-burnt skin, hair tied up with the kind of deliberate messiness that takes time. A lulu lemon outfit which shouted to the world what her lifestyle was. Comfortable in her body the way people are when they’ve never been penalized for it.
He gestured to the seat. “Sure, of course”
She smiled, dropped a canvas tote by her feet. “Everywhere else is packed. There’s some seminar happening in the square.”
He nodded, vaguely disinterested. “Always something.”
“I’m Nele.”
“Elias.”
They shook hands. Her grip was firm. Everything about her was done with a practiced and poised ease.
“I’m here for a yoga retreat,” she said, as if it explained something fundamental. “Third time in Peru.”
“Are you becoming enlightened yet?”
She grinned. “No, but I’m becoming more flexible.”
He smirked. “That might be more useful.”
They talked about Arequipa. She liked the volcanoes but found the altitude gave her strange dreams. They talked about Ají de gallina and how it was too salty in some restaurants while being undersalted in others. She asked if he’d been to Lima, and he told her the truth: yes, but he didn’t remember much of it beyond the rooftop bars and the smell of car exhaust.
Eventually, as it always happened, came the question.
“So what do you do?”
He paused.
This was the moment. The unspoken exam.
He could lie—say something romantic and disposable, like writer or photographer. He’d done that before, in countries where he didn’t plan to linger. But it always felt like delaying the same disillusionment.
He took a breath.
“Venture partner at a growth fund,” he said. “We invest in early-stage AI, biotech, climate tech. Stuff like that.”
She nodded. The change was imperceptible, but it was there. A soft pivot in the air between them. Her eyes became slightly more focused. Her posture shifted. She saw him now in a different light, more structured, more valuable.
“How long have you been doing that?”
“Not long. I got lucky. Exited a small startup last year. Got asked to join the fund. I mostly float now. Sit in meetings. Nod when the numbers look good.”
“Still,” she said, tucking her hair behind one ear. “That’s impressive.”
He smiled tightly. “Thanks.”
The truth was, he had no illusions anymore about what it bought him. This life. These signals. The invitations, the glances, the upgraded seats on flights, the women who returned his messages more promptly than they used to.
It didn’t feel like winning. It felt like finally being fluent in a language he never wanted to speak.
They talked a little longer. She told a story about locking herself out of a train bathroom in just a towel, and he laughed, genuinely. It was the first time he'd laughed genuinely at anything all day long. It reminded him of something from when he was young and poorer and stupid...and free.
He asked what she wrote. She said fiction, mostly. Short stories. Sometimes travel essays that no one read unless she used the right hashtags. She used the word “narrative” a lot.
She checked her phone. “I should go. Dinner and breathwork at seven.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A curious sequencing.”
“Apparently it’s about integration,” she said, smiling. “Or maybe just branding.”
“Same thing now,” he said. “Integration sells better than disassociation.”
She chuckled, brushing dust from her pants. “This was fun. In a strange way.”
He nodded. “Novelty without consequence. Low entropy. No reputational risk.”
She tilted her head. “Is that how you think about people?”
He looked at her then—really looked. Not with charm or calculation, just the quiet weight of too much awareness.
“No,” he said. “Just the ones I like.”
A pause lingered for what felt like a lifetime. She seemed unsure how to respond. Then she smiled, softer this time.
“I hope I see you again.”
He almost said something. Almost. But the sentence collapsed before it formed.
Instead: “Non-zero probability”
She lingered just a moment longer, then walked off into the square.
He didn’t watch her go. But he noticed the formless grey space she left behind.
He had spent his entire youth believing he had to become something to matter. Now he had. And it didn’t.
Because the thing no one told you was that it didn’t matter whether you were broke or wealthy, ugly or beautiful—everyone was a resource to someone. A utility. A shortcut to something else. Some were just more polished tools than others. Even love had its ledger. Even kindness kept score. Everyone was weighing everyone, all the time.
Even when they smiled at you. Especially then. And if you pointed this out to any normal person, they'd berate you, call you bitter, or twist what you were saying to advocate such explicit commodification of human beings rather than simply observing how we make decisions in reality. It was saying the quiet part out loud... The cognitive dissonance of seeing us for what we are, cold calculating hyper-optimizing rational agents. In a way he sympathized as laying it so bare in this way almost stripped us of our "humanity", whatever that even means anymore...
He left a tip far too large, like always. Walked out into the dusk. And as he did, he could feel it again...that quiet math ticking away behind every smile, every glance, every half-interested hello.
He had become a number. A very flattering one.
And that, somehow, was worse.
this album aged incredibly well. Ulcerate post 2016 kinda sucked. This earlier record is somehow much more twisted and defiant of musical convention yet never seems to get the praise or recognition i think it deserves among extreme/experimental music listeners.
Actually I kind of want to finish this and write a whole book. I have a rough storyboard outline and 3 chapters done already. Does anyone have any experience with publishing/editting/writing?
That is great. I would have pulled out a mic from my pocket, dropped it, and then put on shades as I sauntered out of the room back to the 3-4 hot women following me around campus.
It's okay to have feelings every now and again. EmoKen lives on!
