Anyone Who Doesn’t Want Peace is Crazy

I’m trying to organize a massive Christmas dinner with friends. Everyone I know is staying in town so I want to get a bunch of people together and head to Jackson Heights for Pakistani food. I know Chinese food is technically the NY staple, but I’m South Asian. One time I was in Jackson Heights and saw a dude crossing the street with a full frozen goat in a shopping cart.

I was thinking about instagram today and the meticulous act of creating an online persona. I was talking to a photographer friend of mine and we concluded that it was less about the actual self and more about putting an idea into the world. When I was in Petra my tour guide recounted the afternoon he spent helping an influencer. She did a 6 hour photo shoot with multiple outfit changes while he stood on the sidelines, holding make up and clothes. The purpose of the shoot was to show that she was having a profound and fun experience. It’s easy to deride this as a seemingly vacuous undertaking, but there is a crucial financial incentive at play: she earns money by selling adventure.

Lately I’ve been listening to Dave Goggins while thinking about my job search. I’m working through my defeatist mindset and his content helps. One of the most encouraging statements he’s made is that it’s easy to outpace other people in this day and age because the bar for good performance is so low. I know trauma can create obstacles, and everyone is always banging on about trauma, but I don’t think it is that much of a decisive force. Sometimes I think it’s more a lack of perspective, a lack of information. Trauma molds the mind, but so does data.

Information is interesting. I was talking to a girl who left a toxic relationship and I was trying to convince her to watch content on narcissists. She thought my suggestion was weird, I thought it was important to understand the relationship dynamic. To be clear, a situation doesn’t require a personality disorder to be unhealthy. It’s eerie, but once you thoroughly understand one toxic dynamic you have, by proxy, understood all toxic dynamics. People are prone to lapsing into egotistical frameworks and acting from an ego driven place, so these situations proliferate throughout life. I guess that’s why Goggins said the bar is low. People aren’t challenging themselves to evolve, there’s no bite to the internal self. Just an ongoing empty cycle of self inflation.

I love the conversation on masculine and feminine energy that’s carving its way through dating podcasts. I think ego suffocates these energies. For example the rise of the ego driven narcissistic woman, also known as “masculinized women.” They lack feminine traits like empathy, receptivity and warmth, and focus on gaining power, control and influence.

I think ego has the opposite effect on men, it feminizes them. Ego prevents the true self from directly engaging with reality. The self cannot acquire muscle if it is actively avoiding life. There’s a guy I met years ago that sustains the entirety of his self worth with women’s attention. He has a TikTok where he gives dating advice and it’s nauseating to watch. The content is a to do list on how to treat a man. Women who invest time and energy into this shit are living broken lives. Aren’t men supposed to be providers anyways? Masculinity withers in dependency.