I’ve been pretty depressed today, but not in a bad way.

At least, that’s the modulation of interpretation I am aiming for. Sure, I have felt low all day and I don’t have much enthusiasm for life at the moment and I feel sad and down for no particular reason, but that doesn’t have to be a crisis or even a bad thing.

I’ve just switched into a particular mode, that’s all. Might not be one of my favorite modes, but it’s not all that bad, really. Nothing wrong with being a little melancholy now and then, especially if you are wise enough not to try to fight the tides of sadness and instead you open your mind and your heart as wide as you can in order to experience the emotions as fully and completely as possible.

And I am actively working on acquiring said wisdom. There is a time and a place for being able to set negative emotions aside, but it is a system meant to get us through crises and we end up using it for every god damned thing.

The result? Billions of us walking wounded dragging a massive dead weight of frozen emotions behind us until the burden grows so heavy we can no longer move at all.

And that is called “depression” and it really sucks.

So I am doing my best not to fight the blues that have come to haunt me today. Instead I will muddle through as best as I can while remaining open to feeling whatever feelings are here that need to be felt.

I don’t have to be happy all the time. I can accept that life will always have highs and lows and whether or not I “deserve” them is an odiously wrongheaded question, along the lines of asking whether you “deserve” to be hungry.

It’s going to happen whether you deserve it or not. Might as well learn to handle it instead of fooling yourself into thinking you can just keep putting it off forever.

And trust me, the more you put it off, the worse it gets. Like an unpaid debt that just keeps accruing penalties and interest the longer you let it slide.

Like the old song and the Bible says, there is a time for every purpose under Heaven.

And if we are patient and wise, instead of trying to stop time during one of the good times (thus turning them bad), we simply wait and watch the wheel spin unhindered, knowing it will bring us back to that place eventually.

Right now, I am on a space marked “low point in the mood cycle”. Before long, as long as I let the wheel spin, I will be back on the way up again, a little bit better off for having learned not to try to fight the natural cycle of my being.

And if I keep on feeling everything, that weight holding me back will get smaller and smaller like a melting iceberg, until one day it will be gone like yesterday’s dew.

More after the break.

---

A thing about women

I wrote this in a YouTube comment last night before realizing it was a total tangent and not related to the subject of the video at all, so I snipped it out :

Women wield extraordinary power over men. They are the gatekeepers to a man’s entire value because in our society, men are nothing if they can’t get sex and if they CAN get sex, they are judged by the hotness of the chick they can bone. The only men immune to this are us homosexuals – we have our own issues. The approval or disapproval of a woman can make or break a guy, and I know women did not ask for this power but they have it anyway and they should take that into account when judging men and what we do

me, last night

This has always been the problem with the whole “men only want one thing” line of thinking they used to feed women.

Those older ladies meant well. And they weren’t wrong : men in that era, and to a lesser extent today, really do want that one thing.sex.

But that one thing is everything. It is a validation of their entire being and proof positive that they have some worth as a man.

If you then translate this into the incel community, you can see why a nerdy man, whom society deems the very definition of unfuckable and therefore less than worthless as a man AND as a human being, might be driven a wee bit nuts by this double message.

Given that intolerable position, it is not a big leap to conclude that the system is rigged against you, and to blame that on the apparent source of your pain, women.

And for many man, that overheated conspiracy theory about a castrating feminist cabal is far easier to take than the truth, which is most likely that they don’t get women because they don’t try very often and they don’t try very well.

Because once you strip away all the intellectual trimmings, what the incel movement is really about is an excuse for not trying.

Trying is hard. Trying is risky. Trying is scary as hell.

But if you can convince yourself (with the help of others) that getting a woman is literally impossible for you, then you are off the hook. And you can protect yourself from all the bad messages society is sending your way by retreating into bitterness, misogyny, conspiratorial thinking and all the cold comfort those things can bring.

It’s a very sad solution to the problem. I would much rather see my straight nerd friends ditch the entire system of hateful gendered bullshit and have the courage to treat women like people and find one you can be human with, without all the games and rules and the rest of that nonsense.

But until then, we are going to have at least a couple of generations of young men who are caught in the gears of gender politics and therefore will be prey to the numerous traps and dead ends that the incel movement represents.

I have great sympathy for my straight nerd brothers. They are in a terrible position in society. My heart goes out to them even when my mind cannot agree with or endorse the hateful madness in which they find their solace.

I can only hope that Gen Z finds another way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.