On this website, one of the major goals is of course self-improvement: turning yourself from the schlubby, boring, acne encrusted loser you were born as and becoming the muscular, swaggering brute that you know you can be. And why not? Such a goal is absolutely achievable, and doesn’t appear to have any downsides…right?

Well, for the most part, it indeed doesn’t have any downsides. It has for the overwhelming majority of parts been an unmitigated boon in my life. But perhaps the methodology I used to do so had a few cracks in its foundation—and ironically, it was in the midst of learning a new skill (always a goal of mine) that I had this little epiphany.

In the last week or so I have begun to meditate—vipassana (awareness/mindfulness) meditation to start, as that seems to be the least complicated and thus a good place for beginners—and I hope to learn more advanced forms in the years to come.

I have already noticed benefits to the meditation—most notably and most immediately the ability to “put aside” pain and discomfort, but beyond that a greater ability to control my emotions and put on the “smiling douchebag” face that I need in my day job, a greater ability to focus and “catch” more information from my surroundings (similar to the benefits from Kim’s Game), and even some amusing little curiosities such as what happened after yesterday’s meditative bout:

While in the midst of meditation, and well into putting myself “beside” the itches and joint pain that come with sitting stationary for 20+ minutes, I felt a fly buzzing around me. When I came out of it, I noticed that the fly was calmly sitting upon my arm…and I easily reached forward and swatted it. I like to think that my metabolic processes had slowed down so much that I was basically like a piece of furniture and I wasn’t triggering the fly’s natural jumpiness.

Anyway, I’ll be doing articles on the actual meditative process at some point in the future. For now, let us discuss the Buddhist religion, the large philosophical similarity it has to several other religions (Truth is truth and all that), and how it can apply to us in the manosphere:

As most of us should know from theological/comparative religion/whatever classes (or perhaps your own practice), the key tenet of Buddhism is to walk the “Middle Path” (or Noble Eightfold Path if you prefer), avoiding temptation and eschewing lusts and desires for a life of moderation and diligence to ultimately break free of the endless cycle of reincarnation.

Sounds pretty simple and straightforward, but the practice is of course much harder than that simplified explanation would imply. Indeed, as my friend Davis Aurini (a devout Catholic) has discussed in several of his livestreams, these Buddhist virtues are very similar to admonishments found in other religions—Cicero and Marcus Aurelius (Greco-Roman pagans) advocate something quite similar to this in their writing, as did Christ and other early Christians—as well as Old Testament Judaism for that matter. And why not, throw Germanic/Norse paganism in there too, because the Nine Virtues they advocate are in the ballpark as well. Even religions we don’t know much about such as Mithraism seem to have some degree of advocacy for self-sacrifice and diligence.

This is not to imply that there are common roots/etymologies to these religions, or that the philosophies, practices, or end goals of the religions are all the same—far from it. Rather, the men who preached these religions were wise men who had life experience, and saw that humans tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, and thus sought to create a system that would keep people on the relatively straight and narrow path. And it just so happens that the universality of human behavior means that people all around the world made the same mistakes, and thus needed similar prescriptions to fix them.

Relevant to our purposes: when we think of “lust and desire” we typically think of things in the material world—money, power, sex, drugs, and most importantly, stuff! . I’ve never really seen myself as somebody who wanted any of those things (in fact, I’m something of a minimalist myself, and I find it quite liberating). Thus, I’ve gone through most of my life proudly not buying plastic crap, and all in all thinking that I’m better than the bellowing herds of cattle that go out on Black Friday or what have you. And, frankly, I think that’s still the case.

But the epiphany I’ve had recently showed me that I am not quite as “well off” as I thought I was. Which is to say, while I am not greedy and lustful for material, I am still somebody full of lusts and desires myself. Indeed, I am quite the hedonist in the way that The Sea Wolf was:

The fanatical pursuit of self improvement and honor is my own personal form of greed:  still slavishly obsessing over achievement and legacy, I am just as greedy and lustful as some fat NEET who sits in his mom’s basement jerking off to $500 anime figurines. I’m just greedy about different hings, and thus more outwardly dignified and respectable about it.

The reason for why I have this greed are quite plain to me: let us use one of the big tentpoles of the manosphere (sexual viability/achievement), and analyze how it “got me here”..

I’ve made it very clear in my work that I was bullied as a child. Not only in the sense of just being the archetypical downtrodden, shrinking beta male, but explicitly knowing that I was the very bottom of the sexual totem pole. Throughout my tenure in public school, my peers always knew where to hit me: I was constantly told “You’re never going to have sex, you’re never going to kiss a girl, nobody will ever find you sexually attractive”. Thus as a young boy/teenager I obsessed over my sexual viability—and obsessed over being able to take revenge upon my oppressors. Needless to say, that led me down the long but ultimately fulfilling path of fitness, martial arts, and learning how to attract women and how to roger them good and hard so they come back for more. I’ve discussed this many a time as well.

But herein lies the epiphany, that I knew deep down but I chose to ignore; no matter how many women I’ve slept with (about 50 sexual partners by my rough estimate), no matter how attractive the women you sleep with (and believe me they’ve run the gamut from 8s, 9s, and 10s to 4s and 5s), I’ve always mentally been that rage-filled teenage nerd who needs to screw women to prove himself.

Similarly, while I’ve become quite good at fitness and martial arts, I’ve never quite stopped being the beanpole in gym class who made a fool of himself failing to do a single pull-up.

I kept searching for it, but there was never that moment when you’re “set” and you become a natural, free-flowing Chad. It’s always a bit of a mask that you have to put on to succeed in life, and I think that’s the case for even the Chadliest of men.

Ultimately what I found is that motivating yourself with hatred and anger is a powerful thing, and can enable you to achieve greatness, but eventually it runs its course. It will certainly get you over the big hurdle but eventually it will become a hurdle in and of itself—I for one am not afraid to admit that many people find it somewhat offputting—and I’ve also realized that having such an atavistic view of fitness is probably what made me abandon the field as a full time job.

That’s where mindfulness and meditation came in and made me realize that my fanatical pursuit of honor and legacy and trying to “bury” my past are a futile goal. Instead, I now seek to live with those things and acknowledge them, but rob them of their power over me.

Now, just to clarify, I am not saying that meditation turned me into an apathetic loser who doesn’t care about anything—of course I do. I still write, make my videos every week, and work a day job and seek to make myself more successful in all three. It’s just that meditation has helped me stand “apart” from my resentments, and not be weighed down by them. In fact, properly meditating will make you MORE aware of what you need and don’t need to do. But in doing so you’ll realize that a lot of what you think you need is really more of what you want.s

In other words, to seek success without being owned by success and the drive for it—to seek success but not be enraged when it doesn’t come, and to seek it as a positive goal in and of itself rather than pursuing it with the fanatical goal to cram it down the throats of dickheads from 10 years ago. After all, meditation is itself a form of self-improvement and diligence, is it not?

Or to put it another way: if you still think material success/fame/legacy are all you need to be happy, I suppose you can ask Anthony Bourdain about how well that worked out for him.

Try mindfulness instead. There are many resources you can use to develop it (I recommend Mindfulness in Plain English myself), and I’ll be writing a super-simplified/abridged article on the basics in the next week or two. Until then,