*increasing coherence*
So I was directed to this article over the Twitter machine, and I have some thoughts about it. His assertion is that we all owe the world massive amounts of productivity, and must, to make our fortune and be worthwhile people, work a 14-hour day, abolish the idea of weekends and just work another 2 14-hour days, and really get things done. We must also stop watching movies, except maybe documentaries, those we may watch. We are allowed high culture such as an opera or symphony once a week, because those are done by similarly high-achieving people and are therefore acceptable. We must never let ourself slow down, so if we have a success at work, we don't take too long to celebrate, just pump our fist and keep going. This, according to the article, is what we all must do to be productive, happy, and people he would personally find worth talking to.
The first mistake this article makes is wildly projecting the author's problems and mistakes onto his audience. Not everyone spent their life gambling and traveling the world leading, by his own account, a very privileged and wealthy life on winnings, and then having a crisis of identity at age 30 about producing things. Therefore, not everyone feels the need to work 14-hour days to make up for what they perceive is lost time. Neither are all of us objectivists who worship at the alter of Ayn Rand. This is all the author's problem. And he's coping with it admirably, but the idea presented in the article that this is our collective problem and we all need to do just what he did is false. Everyone's unhappy life imbalance is arranged differently, they all require a different solution to find their own future happiness.
Second, the degree to which he sneers at those not working 14-hours a day for massive wealth and downplays the importance of love and relationship is astounding. He's not going to date or try for kids until he's earned 10 million dollars by working hard. In the meantime he will maintain the human relationships he values, but only so much. Not all necessary and worthwhile hard work leads to fortune, and his assumption that it does is wrong. Are teachers, firefighters, police officers and soldiers misguided in pursuing career paths that improve our collective condition but do not lead to personal wealth? He admits he always thought he was one of those people who would be a millionaire by age 25, and now feels guilty that he got there by gambling instead of "working." Again, this is not everyone's problem, and no one on earth is owed fabulous wealth for working hard no matter who they are and no matter what they were told about their specialness as children. If they were, there's a lot of extremely hard-working people in this country who should be much wealthier than they currently are. And to look down on people who aren't working to make up for a perceived lack of achievement the same way you are is just foolish.
As far as his attitudes towards love, I'm not sure what to think. He's a self-admitted pick-up artist, and believes he can just spend a year using those skills to find the perfect mate after he's made his fortune. I don't know where to start with this. For one, thinking pick-up artistry is the best way to find and meet a genuine, intelligent, super-captialist woman that will add to his fortune is such a wild fantasy I can't believe no one in his circle has called him on it. Pick-up artistry is what you do when you think of women as some alien other/robot that requires x input to get y output. Using lines, and games and ploys is NOT how you build a successful, intimate, loving relationship between two human beings of equal worth. And if you don't have the socializing skills to meet people, you certainly don't have them to maintain a successful relationship. He claims he needs it because he's a nerd and has not focused on his social skills, but there's a better answer than developing pick-up artistry: developing your social skills. I know it can be done, because that is what I have been doing for a couple years now with some success. He would be far better served avoiding the short-cut, and learning to socialize with women and relate to them as human beings. Getting to know them as friends (even women he might not want to date!), express interest when genuine, taking a "not interested" in stride and move on, having hobbies, interests and put him into contact with women outside of bars and being open to someone who makes him happy and shares MOST of his important life philosophies without necessarily hitting every point on his imaginary "perfect woman" checklist, would yield such better results that trying a new line on a new woman every night. Beyond all this, encouraging others to avoid dating, and focusing on work, just because that's where he's at, is just wrong-headed. There's a variety of literature by hard-working artists he would admire that deals with how unhappy pursuing success at the cost of friends, family and love can make you and he might want to work some of those into his nightly reading routine.
Finally, there's his definition of work. This is a guy living simply off of his remaining fortune in an RV. He doesn't have a day job, he just spends his time programming, presumably to build a website/software package of worth that he can sell to someone else or that can make money in it's own right. That's great. His blogging software REALLY does kick ass, and he's good at it. But how many of us have that option? If this is a paean to disaffected trust fund kids who have this kind of time and freedom, then color me distinctly unimpressed. What would his advice be for those working bottom rung in corporate america right now, possibly already working more than 8-hour days? Who face a long time to any sort of success within their company itself, who are too exhausted at the end of the day to try and find the magic bullet to wealth? What about people who have families and children who would laugh in his face at the idea of working 14-hour days at the expense of those relationships? Are they doing it wrong because getting rich to them might take 30 years? Or may never lead to anything more than a comfortable life no matter how hard they work? Is the time spent raising their kids, and feeding their relationships wasted? What would he be doing in their place? Should we really all be working towards building massive piles of cash before we are allowed to find love and companionship? His vision of people who are independently wealthy and can afford to spend all their time working on becoming the next dot-com millionaire is so narrow, that I don't possibly see how most people could utilize his advice as offered. To me, he just seems to be yet another capitalist prophet, proclaiming that gold is good, and the only true success is measured by the fortune you amass, which is a philosophy I absolutely reject.
Having said all that with some snark in my voice, let me say this: he has a good point in there somewhere. Work IS good. People sometimes DO need to fall in love with hard work. This is especially true of me, for some of the same and some completely different reasons. In as much as he is stressing turning your brain off less, and trying to grow, and think and learn and change and just be better MORE as much as possible, I absolutely agree. But that's because, yes I'm one of those people who feels I haven't achieved as much as I can, but I'm also one of those people who's turned off and powered down entirely too often and really, really wish I had spent that time working much harder on artistic pursuits, educating myself more, and yes, working harder on my job. So I think his advice would be vastly more useful, if he simply broadened his scope to: spend far less time avoiding hard things, and spend far more time engaging them. For some people, that might mean working 14-hours a day for a while. For others, working less and spending more time with their family or learning to build a network of quality friends. Lots of people might find learning to express themselves artistically is what they need to move forward. I can't say what those things are for you specifically, and neither can he. But I do absolutely agree, in general, that it's better for everyone to keep their critical thinking engaged and working hard for a life that feels accomplished, helpful and satisfactory and trying to avoid turning-off/zoning out/slacking off as much as possible in the face of challenges or frustration.
Even so, I can't really tell you what you need. I can only tell you what my problems are, and what I think I need or what has worked for me, and he can only do the same. And it's an absolute mistake to think that you can just blindly apply someone else's solutions to your problems and expect it to work the same way. Life just doesn't work that way. There may be SOME helpfulness in other people's solutions, but you have to actively assess and decide that for yourself. Our individual damage requires an individual growth and repair plan for each of us and only YOU are in the position to develop that plan. There are common elements to many solutions true, but we all have to do our own work on our own selves to sort out the issues keeping us from a satisfying life. We outsource that work to someone else at our own peril.
Hey,
ReplyDeleteI of course have a ton of objections to what you've written, as could be expected of anyone whose writing/advice/life is being criticized, but I have to admit that this is actually one of the more reasonable harsh criticisms of myself that I've read. Although your ideas on pickup are flat wrong and based on knee-jerk assumptions, I'd say that the rest of the misunderstandings are primarily a result of my failure to communicate well.
I think that I did a poor job talking about my views on money, but your biases may have colored your perception as well. I don't think that everyone should try to get rich. I don't really even think getting rich is that important, although you were right in guessing that I like Ayn Rand and capitalism and all that. My real goal that is actually important to me is building SETT. If someone said, "hey, quit SETT and I'll teach you how to make a million dollars daytrading", I wouldn't do it. But I very much like the idea of building something that is good for the world and profiting as a result.
I also don't think that everyone should work hard, and certainly don't think that everyone should be trying to get rich. It depends what your goals are. My dad worked hard for his whole life, and now he's 65, semiretired, enjoying spending time with his wife. Should he be killing it working 14 hours a day? I don't think so. The article was written for people who WANT to do things that are going to require a lot of hard work, and was an effort to share things I learned on the way to becoming a hard worker. In the article I talk about giving stuff up like weekends, dumb entertainment, and even dating, not because those are horrible things, but because they are major impediments to this sort of very hard work. I think it's easy to pick apart certain aspects of the post and label them as unreasonable, an in some contexts they ARE unreasonable, but if you want to tackle really big things that will require hard work, they all become reasonable.
As you may imagine, I've discussed pickup with a LOT of people in the past nine years or so, and in that process I've observed certain patterns. A person whose objections to pickup are like those that you've brought up will never be convinced otherwise, even in the face of volumes of evidence to the contrary. All I'll say is this: every female in my whole extended family knows about pickup and supports it. Every girl I've ever so much as kissed (after learning pickup, of course) has known about it. I've dated girls who I would have never even met otherwise who are really excellent people, to the point that my grandparents are asking about them years after we've broken up. All of this is fact and at odds with your perception of pickup, leaving you with the choice of assuming I'm a liar or admitting, at least to yourself, that you don't know anything about what pickup really is.
As for the slightly more approachable "find the perfect woman after making 10 million" thing, the idea is that I believe that to do the projects that are important to me, I have to sacrifice things. Dating is one of those things. Once I finish these projects, or get to a point where working ever waking hour on them isn't the most important thing in my life, I'll refocus on dating. Whereas earlier in my life I was more interested in relationships that had no chance of leading to raising a family, I'm no longer interested in those relationships. And so for me to be in a position to have the time and money to raise that family, I'm going to have to build a business first. That's why that comes first right now.
Anyway, I actually appreciate you taking the time to respond to my post and thought you were objective enough that a response might be well received. Back to work for me...
Tynan
Thanks for responding,
ReplyDeleteTo be clear, I'm not trying to get you to change anything, you're free to live your life how you want, of course. I just don't like large chunks of your philosophy and how you sell yourself and so will not be following your blog. I only wrote this post because it bothers me to see my friends thumbs-upping some of your ideas. I disagree that I just misunderstand you. I mean, you repeatedly asserted that I just don't get it, and I'm just jerking my knee (and perhaps I don't and am to some degree), but you didn't really counter any of my points in a way I found convincing.
I'm never going to agree that objectivism is a great life philosophy, because it's severely lacking in the compassion department. Beyond the obvious problems with Ayn Rand as a human being of course. But I mostly think it's severely hypocritical of you to, after 10 years of not working hard, suddenly turn around and declare you're now above befriending people who don't work hard and encourage other people to be the same way. If your current friends had held you to the same standard, they wouldn't be your friends. Work as hard as you want, your track record is not so great and your horse is not so high that you can look down on the rest of us quite so much.
To me, selling PUA seems like preying on the vulnerable by giving them false hope that they don't actually have to work hard at improving themselves (beyond superficially). In my experience, guys who aren't insecure, immature or afraid of women don't need a system to date successfully. They just talk to people naturally, act like themselves, and sometimes hit it off with people they find attractive. As a nerdy introvert who has been learning these skills, I know that these are skills nerdy introverts can learn.
There's no shortcut to figuring out dating. It is, like most of the rest of life, something you have to try at, fail at, and learn from yourself. The skills most necessary for maintaining a healthy, long-term relationship are the same required to approach women (or men) without a system: Good communication skills, honesty, self-awareness and confidence and a certain amount of humility and perspective (just because someone is rejected by one woman, it's not the end of all things).
Ironically, Nathaniel Branden, a former acolyte of Ayn Rand's, turned into a self-help/relationship guru in his old age and writes a lot about what it takes to have a successful relationship. Independence is part of it yes, but it's mostly about self-esteem and being honest and knowing what you want. There's not much in there about "picking people up." It's about how to be a person who's appealing to other people and being ready for a meaningful relationship. I have a lot of friends who have very happy, long-term relationships. And not a one of them ever needed anything like PUA.
The most ironic part to me about all this is, you of all people don't need PUA! You led an interesting life for 10 years! You traveled the world! You have interesting things to talk about when you meet people! No system necessary. Just talk to people, and when they inevitably ask what you do, tell them. If they don't like what you've done, what you're doing now, or who you are, YOU SHOULDN'T DATE THEM. Jesus.
Your advice would be far more meaningful if it came from a place of having a marriage, kids, and 10 million dollars. Trying to sell yourself as an advice guru before you've done anything like that seems like putting the cart before the horse just a smidge.
Anyway, I think we can agree to disagree on this stuff. I don't really find anything compelling in your arguments (other than the stuff I mentioned at the bottom of this post)and I don't really want to argue about it anymore. Who knows, you may in ten years have millions of dollars, a wonderful wife and fat, happy babies running around. Best of luck to you.
H