Men should define their own goals ...
Zed posts on
Spearhead
I think that Novaseeker is about the only guy here
who really groks what kind of freedom men now have the chance to
experience, and it really doesn’t have anything to do with getting women.
I’m on the far side of “The Game”, not
Game, “The Game”. Fifteen years ago I was in a position where there were 3
people between me and the CEO of one of the mult-nationals. I was making
more money than I, as a single man, could spend. I didn’t own a big fancy
house, just a decent one, and I didn’t have a trophy wife and a bunch of
rugrats to dress up and send to prep school. But, I owned a pickup, an
RX-7, two motorcycles, and a boat. That’s 5 “vehicles” for one man. I once
added up how much I was paying for insurance, and it was staggering. I
went shooting at least once per week, and would burn up as much as $200
worth of ammo.
I had a closet full of
suits, and the cheapest one cost over $1,000. I had a stereo system worth
at least $20,000, maybe more because I never kept track of how much I
spent on anything. I had more than a dozen cameras (up to 4×5), complete
darkroom, walls covered with art that some art broker had marked me as a
pigeon and conned me into buying as an investment, and a place in the
country.
I had no shortage at all of
interest from women.
Was I “doing
well”? Some might say so, but only if that was defined in terms of
materialistic trappings.
Inside, I was
a powderkeg of rage, operating at redline all the time, and probably
certifiably insane. Every morning I would get into the shower and make the
conscious decision of whether to go to work or kill myself. My average
work week was over 70 hours, frequently over 80, and sometimes over 100.
One morning as I was getting ready for “work”, and turning myself into a
“suit”, a woman who had spent the night remarked that I looked like a
warrior getting dressed for battle. It was a very astute comment.
Inside, I was most definitely NOT
“doing well”. I was on a death-trip headed for either explosion or total
meltdown. Know all those stereotypes of 50-ish guys having heart attacks?
I was on track to be an early achiever.
One day the proverbial straw broke the camel’s back, and I turned
in my resignation.
What does a man
profit if he gains all sorts of material goodies but loses his soul? Not a
damn thing.
I had lost the ability to
feel anything whatsoever – not pleasure, not pain, not joy, not sorrow. I
had become a working-earning-spending-consuming machine.
What sucked me into the trap? The
tyranny of the provider role – the old thinking that in order to get a
high quality woman as a mate that I had to be a high quality provider.
That was the way in the 1950s, and that was when I grew up.
The problem was that none of the women
who really liked how big my … (paycheck) was, were people that I liked or
could even stand for very long – neurotic, self-centered, narcisistic,
petty, ungiving, dishonest.
Remember
the old quip about “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Well, getting laid was
easy, but getting loved seemed impossible.
You are only “doing well” if you are feeling well about doing it
and while you are doing it. Otherwise, you are trapped on a
self-destructive path by social pressure. “Only a fool would swallow it.”
I took a few years off from work to try to find my soul which I
had lost while I was trapped on the corporate hamster wheel. During that
time I let a long-term (>25 years) buddy of mine harass me into taking a
group motorcycle ride that I knew I was too tired to take –
“I’m too tired to take this ride.”
“Nah, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
“No, I mean it. I’m too tired to take this ride.”
“Nah,
c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
“Really, I’m too tired to take this ride!
I’m turning around and going back and going to get some sleep.”
“Nah, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
So, because he was my buddy and
I didn’t want to have to tell him to go to hell, I went on the ride. And,
I low sided and slid into a guard rail which kept me from going down about
600 feet of California mountainside. And, 2 of the bikes behind me were so
close that they ran over me.
I got
busted up. Real bad. Fortunately I didn’t lose any body parts and the
broken bones eventually healed.
And, I
learned a real valuable lesson from it – even people who you think are
your friends will not necessarily put your well-being ahead of what they
want. Today, it is absolutely no problem for me to tell someone to go to
hell when they are trying to get me to do something I know is not right
for me.
A man has to decide what
“doing well” means to him, and then do that. Caring too much about what
other people think of you can get you hurt, or killed. |
|