The post about there not being much left for me to say, while encouraging other guys to carry on

I’ve said as much before, so maybe this one won’t stick either, but I think I’m basically done writing Red Quest. After more than five years of writing, few, if any, of my original goals for Red Quest have been accomplished: I thought, to cite one example, that writing about sex clubs and non-monogamy would make a bunch of guys try some of the strategies I suggest, then report back on what they found, but, instead, I’ve moved closer to the view that most guys interested in or peripherally orbiting this space don’t get laid at all, or minimally (a view elaborated in most guys don’t care much about getting laid, I hypothesize). Most guys feel they are doing good enough and thus don’t try to do better, or they are so mired in their existing problems that they think the path to improvement too long and arduous to start.

You’re probably more normal, in many ways, than you think: rules and breaking rules

Maybe you’ve heard about the book: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, by Richard Reeves. There’s an interview with Reeves here, and he’s been on a bunch of podcasts too. OF BOYS AND MEN shows that boys and men underperform women in education and, eventually, work. Rates of male suicide are rising; more and more men are doing video games instead of work, socializing, hitting on women, or raising families; rates of obesity and sexlessness are rising; and yet these ideas are getting little play in the legacy media, which is wedded to a narrative of women as helpless, hapless victims of men. In the media, the social power of women is too often wrapped up in victimhood. Although the data have changed, the media narrative hasn’t. What’s going on?

In THE MATRIX, there is a famous scene in which Morpheus tells Neo that some rules can be bent, and others broken. It’s a good scene! We all want to imagine ourselves being the rule breakers, not the dutiful rule followers (who are inevitably presented as boring, droning cucks in legacy media products), but I’m not so sure that this ideology of “breaking good, following bad” is universally good and adaptive. We live in a world with lots of temptations and lots of justifications for seizing those temptations. Temptations are everywhere: high-sugar foods, driving instead of biking, messing around on the Internet instead of learning, arguing with strangers instead of meeting your neighbors, hyper-addictive opioids… the list could go on. I’ve been rolling an idea around in the mind: “What is good for the average or median may not be ideal for the extremes.” This applies to things like education through the school system and, for very smart people, following direction. Some drugs enhance the lives of highly capable of people, while other drugs ruin the lives of those who become addicts. Are “drugs” good, or are they bad? Both, and neither. A key skill in life is figuring out which rules can be bent or broken, and which should be followed. For most people, in most situations, following the rules is probably wise.