The hardest thing there is to do is to give your honest opinion, even if it’s just you being honest with yourself: this doesn’t feel right, this does feel right. Even if it means holding the gods themselves accountable. That takes courage.
Built by Strong Women
The only way to escape the ‘manosphere-ish’ way of looking at the world is by surrounding yourself with women. Especially strong women. You need to be put in your place by women. You need to see that a lot of women—and I don’t want to generalize—actually understand reality in a way you don’t.
This is a hard pill to swallow. I have been in a lot of situations where I actually felt humiliated, in some weird way. But they were right. I was lacking emotional development and had to shake off old ideas.
To be clear, I am by no means a feminine man. It’s a weird experience to think you know things, only to realize that your whole interaction with women is set up the wrong way. That it’s actually way more fun to have female friends.
This may sound bizarre to some people, but I’m just not used to that. I’m used to male friends and a football club vibe. I’m used to judging women based on the question, ‘Are we going to sleep with each other or not?’
You have to take your foot completely off the gas pedal to actually see how much fun it is to just have female friends who are going to give you a perspective on life you’ve never had before.
Ego
I told my colleague that I try to use as little technology as possible because I feel like it’s making me dumber.
“AI?” she asked.
“Not just AI,” I said. “Even a calendar.”
“But you need a calendar, don’t you?”
“I have one. I can plan my entire week on Sunday.”
“Oh, right, but I do that too. So we mean the same thing.”
The tricky thing about conversations like these is that it’s hard to explain how two people can do exactly the same thing, yet it doesn’t mean the same thing to them. It’s not about right or wrong, or whether I’m doing it better than my colleague or vice versa.
It’s more about how consciously you engage with something, or whether you do so at all.
Religion is like that too. It’s not about being right. It’s about whether you engage with something in a certain way. It’s more about values and principles — a kind of framework you use to anchor your reality.
It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a higher power.