My greatest real underlying motivation is
Wanting to create something beautiful and great. That’s where the startup dream comes from the videogame stuff the fiction stuff everything from that central desire and the fact that ill regret if i dont
Wanting to create something beautiful and great. That’s where the startup dream comes from the videogame stuff the fiction stuff everything from that central desire and the fact that ill regret if i dont
For the first time in my life I stopped going to church. After about a month of not attending, a couple things I remember.
The last day I went, a girl in my cell group was engaged, nearing marriage, and she was almost in tears as she described the feeling she had, that “she really felt in her heart that God wanted her to be happy,” as she described the newfound good things that happened to her. Maybe she meant that she had simply found joy in God alone, but from the context of describing all the ups of life coming her way, I lightly interpreted it as “Good things are happening – God must want me to be happy.” But after mulling over it for a couple weeks, I disagree with that sentiment. God makes you happy despite the circumstances. Actually, he may give you miserable circumstances, and He will still command you to joy. I say this from the perspective of someone that is chronically unhappy. I was afraid to say this before because I was afraid people would not believe God because of me or turn away from Christianity, but I am chronically unhappy. I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy in my entire life. In the few moments I have felt genuinely content, I’ve felt a deep sense of fear, longing, like something was off and everything would implode the next hour.
During my last cell group, I described how two months ago, I just gave up on the whole thing I was doing with faith, everything, because I couldn’t do it anymore. I was just miserable, and faith was making me more miserable. They looked concerned and offered me kind words, and said I should take some time off if I was struggling. I’m certain they actually cared. I was grateful for that.
New things:
My mind feels much more receptive to the vast possibilities of the world and life. My relationship with theology, the Church, was that there was a right answer, and that I was bound under tight moral quandraries. There were places my mind was allowed to go, and places where it was not. Things I wanted to say but did not let myself, now I speak freely. I feel the chains falling away. Maybe this is what other people just normally feel like all the time? It’s rather nice. I feel more human. I feel less trapped. I’m letting myself be a little delusional, chase ambition, the rather inconsequential things of this life that other people chase, and whatnot. Things I was already chasing before, now I chase more eagerly, openly, and guilt-free.
I realize how much of a time and energy sink going to church on Sundays was. Now I feel like I can actually relax on the weekend.
I’m trying more to do things I wouldn’t do because “a good Christian wouldn’t.” In some ways, I kind of hope I hit some kind of rock bottom. Maybe I just need to hit it hard enough to bounce back.
How did I come to associate the whole thing of Christianity with only the negative, so much that I detest even the idea of talking with other Christians, and going to church at all? Was there really so little happiness in that entire ordeal that I remember nothing positive and only the negative? To me right now, it seems even the positive was always tinged with the negative, the underlying feeling that I was not enough. Guilt. Punishment. Wanting to kill myself. Self-denial. Forcing myself to do things I did not want to. Emotional repression. Common themes.
Some days when I am sleep deprived and lonely, I just want to see the world burn, and on those days, my mind goes into dark, but also weird places.
Some symptoms are
When i see despair in someone’s eyes i feel extreme happiness
I visualize a violent death for myself and feel the same extreme happiness
I would say though that typically the dark thoughts I have are directed inward instead of outward. I usually have no desire to harm others. But I do sometimes visualize myself on a strange operating table, bound by thick metal wires, and the flesh on my limbs spread apart in half with a straight cut down the middle to expose bone. The happiness I feel is even stranger, a frenetic happiness that causes deranged laughs to escape from my lips. It’s a combination of feeling stimmed and despairing at my life and hating everything that I am. And because I feel pain and feel isolated from others, I wish the others could be just as unhappy as me and know me through that. So this culminates in a wish for the world to burn, along with an exciting, violent end to my existence.
Yena entered a state of certain death when playing TFT. Dead in multiple ways. The way her eyes were glazed over, dead. The way she was hardstuck in Emerald IV, 37 LP, never deviating more than 30 LP from it over the course of the entire season, dead. The way her she couldn’t hear Janice until she was literally screaming into her ear, also dead.
“WHAT!”
“Jeez. It’s like you’re dead when you’re playing that game. When you could have more fun with me!”
Yena didn’t respond. She was rerolling like crazy, click, click, click on the virtual slot machine Riot Games had created to keep her in the game, hoping that she would win this one, and the next, and maybe another one. That one day she would become Challenger, just like the cool people. Champion profiles flashed as they were replaced by others, creating pairs, pairs of pairs, pairs of pairs of pairs. She had some success. But not enough.
The next battle, her fluffy, white Poro King was slain by a hail of blades unleashed by an Irelia chibi. Before her screen went gray, Janice got a glimpse of the other player’s name. “ILOVEARMPITS”
“Ew. Is your name in this game I love armp—”
Yena slammed the table with a tiny fist, and immediately withdrew her hand to her face, blowing profusely.
“Now that you’re dead, we can do something! It’ll be great Yena!”
“Shaddup.”
Yena queued again with trembling fingers.
“I’m going to pee. If I get matched, press accept for me.”
Janice began to count. She was so focused she didn’t hear the sound of a match being found. Yena opened the door. Janice held out her fingers.
“Five. It took you sixty-five seconds to pee. You were holding that in for a long time, huh? You should take more bathroom breaks—”
“FUCK YOU!”
Yena tried to push Janice aside as she stomped to the computer, queueing again.
“You can’t even press accept for me. You’re useless. Get OUT!”
Janice pouted. Then stopped pouting. She jumped onto Yena’s bed, hands behind her head.
“Hahhh, I love this bed.”
She turned over, buried her face in what used to be white pillow, now lightly yellow, darker yellow around the edges. No pillowcase. Breathed in deep, like a vacuum, attempting to suck every molecule of air from within the pillow.
“Ohhh fuckkk…”
Janice moaned, and took a desperate, deeper breath, like she was trying to suffocate herself. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and in this case, the pillow definitely needed to be put in the trash due to how it looked and smelled, but to Janice it was treasure. If you put it into the dumpster, Janice would sift through heaps of trash to find it again.
Yena wouldn’t have cared if she knew, and she definitely didn’t care now. TFT was on the menu. Janice sidled up to Yena, and began to trace the contours of Yena’s arm with her nose, breathing in as she went, eyes closed. She nudged Yena.
“How long haven’t you showered for?”
“Stop bothering me.”
“How long?”
“Go away.”
“Two days?”
“Four.”
“Pay attention to me, not that stupid game.”
Silence.
“If I play this game, will you play with me?”
“No. You’re bad.”
“You could teach me.”
Janice sighed. She only had one option left. The nuclear option. She didn’t like to exercise it as of late, because when she dressed up, cosplayed as Kasane Teto, it felt like Yena was staring at her, but not at her. She was staring at the cosplay. Janice got into the outfit even though she didn’t really want to.
“Look.”
“Look.”
“Look.”
Yena finally looked. And smiled for the first time in hours. Tousled the red, fake hair styled into pointed drills at either side of Janice’s head, mouth agape. The game was still on, but Yena wasn’t playing anymore. Janice cried. She took the wig off and threw it on the floor. Yena looked at the wig, then at Janice again. A confused look on her face. Janice stumbled out of Yena’s dorm room, vision clouded by tears. Yena looked at the wig, then at the open door. Yena looked at her bed. Janice had left her bag on it.
Yena jumped on her bed and looked up at the ceiling. She pulled a handful of hair onto her nose and inhaled. Crinkled nose, coughing. She turned over, sniffed the pillow. It was worse. She didn’t understand.
The exhaust engine that is my heart runs best on hate and spite. The pureness of my desire to rise above individuals, groups of people, or whatever organization that I despise has always been my strongest motivator. The feeling of “I’ll show them!” while angrily shaking my fist at the sky. Or whatever. Koreans call this 독기.
I know it sounds like I’m experiencing chuunibyou syndrome, and I should have moved past this a long time ago, and I kind of did, but recently it’s been coming back. The more I get isolated, the more that I feel that I don’t ever fit in anywhere, and the feeling that I never will. It enveloped me in a miasma of hopelessness and depression. Then I realized I should just give up, and channel all that hateful energy into actually doing something with my time.
It works best when you have a specific object of hatred. In high school, for me, it was a classmate I had that was basically Ms. Perfect. Popular, academically great, good at sports, loved by teachers. I know it was immature, and I honestly didn’t even hate her that much, but whenever I needed motivation to get through a dark time, I hated her and it gave me the energy to push through. I guess it resulted in me going to a good university. But she got into Harvard LOL. So I never won I guess.
But now, who do I need to hate? In order to keep going? Maybe my younger brother? He has a lot of friends, has a girlfriend, things seem to be going pretty well for him. This is so stupid, HAHA I love my brother. But for now, I’ll just use him to become a better creative writer and programmer. Sorry broski, I don’t have any friends, and I have to make something of myself, right?
The only drawback of this is that, as I get older, the emotional toll gets bigger on me, and sometimes, my heart, LITERALLY, begins to hurt. I hope I die.
and then get pegged by a girl. Is that so bad?
Yena had her head clasped between her hands. Sighed, looked up at Janice.
“Janice.”
“What.”
“I’m so lucky to be chasing my dreams. So few people get to do this. But it’s also risky, y’know?”
Yena took another shot.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Why I even try anymore. I know chasing your dreams is supposed to be hard, but I didn’t know it was this hard.”
Janice nodded.
“I feel like I’ve hit a wall. An insurmountable wall. And it feels… so hopeless, y’know?”
A tear dribbled down Yena’s cheek.
Janice sighed.
“Yena, no matter how much you bitch and cry, you’ll never be able to marry Kasane Teto. She doesn’t fucking exist.”
Yena screamed in lowercase.
“NO! YoU can’t sAY THAT! NONONONO”
Janice rolled her eyes. Yena was saying crazy shit again. But it was fine. It’s what made her so entertaining.
“Yena, even if Teto existed, she wouldn’t like anyone like you. You’re stinky, 3 foot 10, insecure, and clingy. When’s the last time you had a shower? I can smell your pits from HERE. I had to take a smoke break earlier just to escape the waft coming off of your jacket.”
Yena took heaving breaths, and braced herself.
“TETO. IS. MY. WIFEEEE!!!!!”
Everyone in the restaurant stared. Janice left for another smoke break. Yena took another shot and kept eating the raw tofu in her plate. Yena was fucking autistic. They were at a Korean tofu stew joint, and she had insisted to the waiter, despite being told no multiple times, that she deserved. Absolutely deserved. Being served the tofu stew deconstructed in its entirety. She was a regular here. The waiter ended up shrugging, and ferrying the request back to the restaurant. Five minutes later, he came back with a raw egg, tofu, hot water, kimchi, and tofu stew base. He whispered an expletive under his breath, and swore that if she didn’t tip, he would kick her through the window.
Janice came back. Nobody knew why Janice hung out with Yena. When asked, Janice never gave a straight answer. Sometimes, she said it was because she needed help with homework, but they were in completely different majors. Sometimes, she said it was because she was really poor, and Yena had helped out with money once. But Janet was loaded from various side hustles she’d spun up “for fun.” Sometimes, Janet just shrugged and looked up at the sky. Nobody really knew except her. Janet sat down in front of Yena and leaned in.
“Yena, what if I dressed up as Teto? How do you think that would make you feel?”
Yena frowned.
“I don’t know if you have the look for it.”
Janice, mildly annoyed, turned away.
“Actually? I think maybe you could pull it off.”
Looked back, with a faint smile.
“Give me a second.”
Janice left for the bathroom with her backpack in hand. Yena took the moment to slurp the raw egg directly from the shell. She had nearly finished her tofu when Janice returned in monochrome red, from head to toe.
“Tada!”
A blob of tofu dropped from Yena’s mouth.
“Fuck. Fuhhhhckkk.”
“You like what you see?”
“Yeth.”
What’s classified as rejection. If they say no under any circumstance. Doesn’t matter if they’re taken, they don’t like your face, etc.
I’m currently at 7. I want to get to at least 100 by end of this year. 33 weeks left in the year, that’s roughly 3 rejections per week.
At this point I have dissociated away all sense of self to the point where rejection does not faze me anymore. Well, maybe a little. But I am deluding myself into levels of confidence reached only in my younger, more sprightly years. And whenever I imagine the women telling their friends about how they were approached by some crazy person, I’m comfortably able to push it away. There’s vulnerability involved in having to approach someone and expose yourself to the chance of rejection. Women typically don’t understand it because they’ve never tried. Their equivalent of asking someone out is smiling across the room and wondering why nothing happened. Generalization? Yes. But also who cares, I’m right.
Another thing that has helped approach women better is that I’ve stopped giving them as much respect. After careful observation of female family members and my friends’ girlfriends, I’ve realized they pull a lot of selfish and emotional shit where the men just have to take it. The societal justification implicit behind it is that it is all fine because they are women. And so logically I was at a crossroads. Either I give them a lot of respect and have an internal seizure when they pull stupid emotional shit because in my head men and women are subject to the same standards of conduct, or I just give them less respect and live with the bullshit. Crazily enough, the latter mindset will help you to be a better husband or boyfriend because women typically enjoy it when they can just be a child around their partners engaging in “I’m just a girl” behavior. Of course, there are exceptions, but this is probably typical. Am I becoming an incel? LOL
I cant do it any.ore people like me dont deserve to live im wasting life that someone would want i should just die and die and die and die and die. What is the point of all this struggle to overcome, only to be met with new challenges? Is life simply an obstacle course and at the end you’re met with death all the same?
Im going to start my self harm glowup journey. It is going to be so great i cant wait to tell all my friends (me myself and i) tune in and keep getting updates until i finally kill myself! I’ll have an ai write a eulogy for me. My dying wish is that my remains are fed to electric eels and whatever is left is thrown into the sun.
The only reason i live is to keep listening to music. That’s it. A moment of silence, time spent away from the sounds that make me feel is the same as time spent dead.
I can’t bear being perceived anymore. I hate when people stare at me. I have always hated taking photos. I never want to leave my room again.
These shitheaded thoughts of mine would be met with sympathy if i was a woman, but im not, so having these thoughts are unacceptable. Of wanting someone or some being to put up with my neediness, constantly reassure me of my worth, and tell me they love me. Nobody’s going to give it to me, and im always going to have to be the one to provide, even if I get a girl. The exaxt reaction I would get if i said this to anyone in my life is that they are going to wrinkle their nose in disgust, tell me to pick myself off my feet, get over it, and solve my problems myself. There isn’t anything i can do to change that either. Such is the life of a man, probably since forever. So to get it off my chest, i need to voice it here, my little public diary. I know nobody reads this shit, but I just need to feel like someone is listening. Otherwise, ill feel even worse.
Maybe i should create an ai girl that keeps telling me im worth it. I mean, nobodys gonna do it, nobodys gonna solve my problem for me, so i guess ill just have to take matters into my hands. It’s no longer a matter of “ai isnt real find real people” it’s a matter of im going to kill myself and maybe this will stop me. Should make it open source for people like me.
I kinda blame God for this. He forgot i was a guy and dumped a shitton of estrogen into system that was meant to run on testosterone. I know you dont want me to think these thoughts or feel these feelings because it is all sin, but i cant help but do that in my current situation. What is the reason for creating something like me, i wonder. Just for the love of the game? For fun? A “i wonder what would happen…” thought experiment? To make other people feel better about themselves? I fear a bolt of lightning will drop on my head for writing this.
I feel better after writing this for some reason. I feel like i can do anything. Well, not anything, but i feel like i can handle my life again. A weird sense of peace has washed over me. It is peobably the combination of getting it off my chest and listening to zutomayos haze haseru hatermade. Art and music reflect the beauty of existence and make you want to keep living. I wonder how many people zutomayo have stopped from killing themselves.
Why do i feel so better suddenly? Where is this self esteem and confidence coming from? For the first time in weeks i can visualize my own face and not cringe and like how i look. Im doing a couple things rn – extreme sleep deprivation, haze haseru haterumade on repeat, and im reading Noa-senpai wa Tomodachi, a manga series where Noa, an art director with similar mental issues to me (except shes a hot girl), is improving her issues through a long term friendship that later turns to romance. Maybe Noa’s story did something for me? Will i feel like shit again in a couple hours? Who knows?
I was sitting on a curb having the kind of revelation that only hits when you're at the exact intersection of self-pity and dehydration.
The context is that nobody wants to date me. I've tried the apps. I've cold-approached strangers on the street like some guy handing out flyers for a restaurant nobody's going to. I've asked friends to set me up, which is the romantic equivalent of having your mom call the teacher. Nothing has worked. People tell me I’m a fashion terrorista — okay, fair, but you don't have to volunteer that information unprompted. I'm also short, which means I’m automatically ugly to most women. So there's that.
I'm mid-20s. This doesn't mean anything about how life turns out. I know that intellectually. But I was in the pit — the real pit, the one where your brain starts looping I'm gonna kill myself like it's a Hatsune Miku song stuck on repeat — and somewhere in the middle of that loop my brain just went: wait. Why do you even need to get married?
Like actually why. Life is short. People try to convince you it's some great thing, and I mean yeah, feeling loved and loving someone is probably wonderful. That's why so many people do it. But there are a lot of different things that can bring you fulfillment and happiness and satisfaction, and it's not like the point of life is to sustain those feelings forever, so why is this one particular arrangement elevated above everything else? I don't get it. I've never gotten it. I'm sitting on this curb and I genuinely cannot produce a reason.
And look, even the people who do get married — even the happy ones — it's not like it's this smooth, pleasant experience. My parents are happily married. They're also in the same argument they were in ten years ago. You can't fix people. You really can't. Whatever the issue is, it's going to be the same issue at year one and year twenty and year forty, and you're just going to have to live with it. Men have their specific faults. Women have their specific faults. And because they're so different from each other, sometimes one side genuinely cannot understand or sympathize with what the other side needs. It's not malice. It's just that you're wired differently and some gaps don't close no matter how much goodwill there is. Maybe if you're gay or lesbian it's easier. Same wavelength, at least. I don't know. But the point is that marriage is not this effortless beautiful thing people make it out to be. It's a grind. It's a daily grind that you're signing up for permanently.
And the divorce rate is insane. People will stand at an altar, say “till death do us part” with their whole chest, and then three years later they're splitting a Vitamix in mediation. I think of marriage as something you don't break. Period. That's what the commitment means. Unless someone is under genuine imminent threat, you stay. Personality difference? You stay. You're annoyed? You stay. That's the deal. That's what “till death” means. And yet people treat it as the most important decision of their life and then bail when it gets hard. So either the commitment doesn't mean what they said it meant, or they didn't think about it seriously enough before they made it. Either way, I'm not seeing a great advertisement here.
So I'm doing the math. Let's say I die at 65. I have 40 years left. 40 years is not a lot of time. If I get married I spend those years on kids, family, all of that, and I guess it can be very fulfilling. I'm not denying that. But you shouldn't have a kid to give your life meaning. You shouldn't need a family to feel like your existence has a point. There are things that fundamentally have meaning apart from all of that. If you're a Christian, the essence of life is to love God, love your neighbor. Being single doesn't subtract from that. It's not even in the equation.
I spent a good 30 minutes on this curb — which is a long time to sit on concrete, for the record, my ass was completely numb by the end — and I could not produce a single reason why you need to get married. Not one. I tried. I sat there and I tried to argue the other side and I kept coming up empty.
Thought experiment time!
I ran this thought experiment on myself. Let's say I wake up tomorrow and I'm inexplicably attractive. Just overnight, something changed, and now there's a horde of people who want to date me. They're knocking on my door, telling me I'm handsome, the whole thing. Do I want them?
No. I'd hate every single one of them. Because I know what happened. Yesterday they wouldn't have looked at me if I was on fire, and today some switch flipped and now they're interested. That's not real. They don't like me. They like the version of me that crossed whatever arbitrary threshold they have for attractiveness, and that version didn't exist 24 hours ago. Everything I actually am — all of it, the good and the bad and the boring and the weird — none of that changed. The only thing that changed is my face or my height or whatever, and that was enough. That tells me everything I need to know about what they actually value.
Or let's say I got rich. A billion dollars, just appeared in my account. Suddenly everyone thinks I'm interesting and attractive and worth their time. That doesn't draw me towards them. That makes me want to walk into the ocean. You didn't want me when I was broke and invisible, and now I'm supposed to believe this is genuine? We both know what this is. Get out of my house.
I realize I'm getting increasingly worked up about hypothetical people who don't exist. I'm developing resentments towards women I have never met over scenarios that have not occurred. This is probably not a sign of great mental health. But the point underneath all of that is real, I think. What I actually want — what anyone actually wants, if they're honest about it — is someone who likes them when they're not impressive. When they're sick, broke, annoying, ugly, boring. Not just when everything's going great and you're easy to love. The love people actually crave is the kind that doesn't have conditions.
And that kind of love is almost impossible to find between two people. Parental love comes close, but even that has limits. If your kid is a three-time serial killer, even Mom is going to have a hard time. Really the only place you find truly unconditional love is God. That's it. That yearning you have — that deep, bottomless thing that makes you feel like you'll die if nobody ever really knows you and loves you anyway — that's pointed at God whether you realize it or not. Romantic love is great. I'm not trashing it. But it's not the answer to that particular ache, and it never was, and treating it like the answer is how people end up devastated when it doesn't fix them.
So where does that leave me.
I think the issue was never that nobody wants me. I think the issue is that I was staring at the wrong scoreboard. I've been depressed about something that doesn't actually matter as much as I thought it did. My priorities were misaligned. I was pouring all this energy and anguish into the fact that I'm not valuable in the dating market, and the whole time the answer was just: so what? It doesn't take away from the things that actually matter. It doesn't diminish my life. It's fine. It is genuinely fine.
And I mean that. I'm not just repeating “it's fine” to myself like a mantra, trying to brainwash myself into believing it. I actually sat with this for a while and I cannot find a hole in it. There's no reason this should be ruining my life the way it has been.
I think I can own it. I'm a chud. Possibly an extreme chud. I have zero aura. I get nervous in big open rooms and feel safe in capsule hotels where everything is tight and enclosed and nobody can see me. I am most at peace in a basement in front of a computer. Complete self-deception can fix a lot of things, but there are some objective truths that no amount of gaslight-yourself energy is going to override. I am who I am. The dating market has weighed me and found me wanting, and I have decided that the dating market's opinion is not one I need to care about.
Do I talk to anyone about this? About any of it? No. Should I? I don't know. Will I? Absolutely not. I keep everything buried all the time. Everything is embarrassing. Everything is shameful. I don't know where that comes from — this feeling that any interior thought, once spoken aloud, becomes humiliating — but it's been there as long as I can remember. Sometimes I think I would rather die than describe what's going on inside my head to another person. That's probably its own problem. A big one, actually. But I'm choosing not to engage with it right now because I can only have one crisis at a time and this curb is not comfortable enough for two.
I do all my thinking alone, which means my thoughts are becoming increasingly feral. I'm drifting further from what normal people think. I'm aware of this. Every week I spend processing things in complete isolation is another week my worldview gets a little more strange, a little less compatible with polite conversation. I'm developing opinions and frameworks that I could never say out loud because they'd sound insane, but they make perfect sense inside my head, which is either a sign that I'm onto something or a sign that I've lost the plot entirely. I honestly don't know which one it is and I'm not sure it matters.
I wanted to write all of this down before I forgot it. That's the only reason this exists. I thought about something for 30 minutes on a curb and I want to be able to come back to it later and remember what I was thinking, because usually these things just evaporate and then I'm back in the pit again with no recollection of ever having climbed out. So here it is. My ass hurts. I'm going inside. I don't know if I'm convinced or if I'm just tired, but either way I'm done sitting on concrete.