Tag: society

Daily Life, woke

Do Men Need Adventure?

Every once in a while I stumble across writing that makes me go wow. This essay, Pixel Valhalla, is one of those. Good writing is an art and I envy people who can do it. For me, when I have an idea or a thought, it’s something that’s a blurry figure off in the distance. I know what it is, but I struggle to bring it close. I try to get it into focus, but most of the time I end up simply writing around it. I get my point across, but it’s not clean. I rarely capture exactly what I was thinking. The author of Pixel Valhalla provides a perfect thesis for why the western world is driving itself off a cliff and I’m jealous of his writing.

There are many threads woven throughout the essay but one really struck me, as it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – like it or not, men are genetically engineered to hunt, kill, wage war, and travel in search of adventure and the spoils of conquest. You can deny it if you’d like, but history tells the truth. It’s in our DNA. The need for adventure is in our genes. And it’s being bred out of us.

Broadly speaking, the Generation Z and Alpha kids have completely lost the spirit of adventure. They have no interest in getting drivers licenses. They don’t care about exploring. At 14 I took the bus, alone, 500 miles to spend the summer working. At 17 I was driving into Mexico to sleep on the beach and surf. A 17 year old today at most might jump in a car, that was given to them by their parents, and drive to In-N-Out or Top Golf to take Instagram photos. They can’t read a map, navigate, or function without their electronic devices. Their world is one of prepackaged experiences, curated by digital reviews, and above all – safe.

Unlike my generation, Gen Z’s wouldn’t dream of jumping in a car of questionable reliability and driving cross-country in a world where your only form of communication was a pay phone outside a sketchy looking diner. A world where finding your next freeway exit was done by trying not to drive off the road as you looked at a badly folded AAA map spread out on your lap. My nephew is returning from college in the midwest shortly. He has a car. When I suggest he should drive back by himself, everyone looks at me like I’m asking him to walk through a Taliban-controlled city in Afghanistan at night. Mom and dad are flying out so they can drive him home. Our generations are not the same.

Meanwhile, just the other day it was announced that the term “boy” will be removed from the “Boy Scouts”. While the scouts were neutered years ago, this change echos where we are as a society. Men are no longer allowed to form groups and have the bonding rituals that the male species have required since the beginning of time. Taking away the notions of duty, honor, adventure, and self-reliance young boys develop in groups like the scouts (of old days), robs them of what it is to be a male. It strips them of the future desire to explore and take risks in life. I don’t think the feminization of men will end well for our society.

I know this is shocking to the current societal mindset, but men and women are not the same. We each bring a different set of DNA to the table. And a well functioning society needs those differences, working together, to thrive. No I’m not suggesting we go back to the 1800’s or some dystopian handmaidens tale world. I am suggesting that suppressing the male desire for adventure and self reliance is harmful to a society in the long term.

Our birth rate is falling off a cliff, the concept of a nuclear family is quaint, and the woke ideology rules the public discourse. The kids of today would rather be gaming or staring at Tik Tok on their phones instead of taking a road trip somewhere. It’s not their fault. It’s the world they grew up in. Football was too dangerous to play. Mom drove you to school and picked you up. Instead of being forced to go outside and make up your own fun, kids are shuttled to a never ending series of engineered playdates and art camp. Spontaneously meeting up with the other kids in the neighborhood to play flag football, baseball, and run around in the mud building forts is a thing of the past.

I suppose this would all be fine in some sort of utopian science fiction world of the future. But we don’t live in that world. Our society is becoming weak. It’s collapsing under the weight of a woke, liberal ideology. And the wolves are circling.

Is it too late to change course? Probably. Something catastrophic would have to happen to force men to become self reliant again. If you believe in the concept the Fourth Turning, it’s going to happen. Weak societies don’t survive. That’s not politically correct to say today, but history has shown it to be true time and time again. Hopefully, it’s after my time. I don’t envy my nieces and nephews. I suspect they have turbulent times ahead of them, and we haven’t prepared them for what’s coming. Keeping them safe and isolated didn’t do them any favors.

So the message is, find a way to encourage the young men in your life to have adventures. We’d be much better off with a generation of young men eager to jump in the longboat and sail across the ocean looking for exploration and conquest. Men who travel to the plains to see the buffalo before they’re gone. Men who aspire to Valhalla more than achieving the high score on a video game. Our future may depend on this more than you think.

“You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.” -Alejandro “Sicario”

Daily Life

Are Dark Forces At Work?

My entire life I’ve been a good sleeper. As in I lay down, close my eyes, open them and it’s the next morning. I rarely remember dreams (if I do, they tend to be disturbing in some way). I’ve never worried about sleeping… it just works for me. Until recently. For some reason lately I’ve been waking up at 3-3:30 am every morning. It’s weird. It’s instantaneous. Suddenly my eyes are open and I’m wondering if maybe I heard something? I often have the feeling that I was in the middle of a dream, but I don’t remember what it was. At this point I’m wide awake. Going back to sleep is not an option.

I don’t understand why this is happening. I’m not stressed. It doesn’t matter what time I went to bed. It makes no difference how tired I am. It just keeps happening. While annoying, I haven’t really thought much about it. Then today, a writer I follow on Twitter/X posted this:

“There is definitely a strange energy in the air. “Dread” isn’t really my emotional struggle. Mostly it’s being flat or too intense. Been feeling those demonic emotions tho and others are noticing same, as well as 3 am waking up feeling weird. Zeitgeist change. Not a good one… Some really dark shifts occurring / stuff is at work. If you’re tuned into the fields, unmistakable sense of something being or about to be ‘off.'”

There was a flood of replies to that post all saying, “me too; started waking up at 3am a month ago; I never woke at 3am in my life, now have every day for weeks…”

I’m not a religious person, nor do I subscribe to the idea of the supernatural. But I will admit, this made me wonder. What if there is an alternate plane of energy or reality out there? Could there be forces of evil or good that exist in an alternate dimension that most of us aren’t tuned into?

All the ancient peoples, from the Norse up to the native Americans believed in good and bad forces that occasionally entered our world to attempt to influence us. All religions have some elements of this in their writings. In our recent “modern” era, it’s easy to dismiss the idea of the supernatural as rantings of hard core religious folks or primitive peoples who were uneducated and believed in witchcraft and magic to explain the world around them. But maybe those pre-modern era folks were simply more tuned in to their environment than we are?

It certainly would be easy to look around at the world today and feel that dark forces have become more powerful. The level of evil that permeates modern politics is disturbing. The lust for power, money, and war truly frightens me. The near daily videos on the internet showing unchecked looting, violence, and complete disregard for any sort of societal norms is depressing. I watch our young people, university indoctrinated in a vapid left leaning ideology, eager to demonstrate in the streets in support of murdering and kidnapping innocent civilians and wonder who’s influencing them? What sort of demon convinces someone to tear down a poster of a kidnapped child?

Again, I am not a religious person but I do wonder if our move away from more traditional Judeo-Christian family/societal values, and towards a more secular society, have invited in dark forces? The United States and Western Europe have lost their national identities. In the name of multiculturalism and globalism, the sense of community you once held is gone. It’s blasphemy to be a proud American, Swede, Englishman, etc…

By destroying the tribe, we’ve become collections of individuals. And individuals are easier to corrupt and influence as they have no allegiance to their neighbors. Lacking that common bond of familial and tribal norms that help regulate behaviors – the individual is easy prey for external and dark influences. Has traditional society collapsed enough that demons are crossing over to find easy prey and further spread dark energy?

I’m starting to think our large tech overlords may be the dark force that corrupts us all. Tech and AI is influencing everything we read, it suppresses truth, and strives to keep us enslaved to our devices. I was traveling the last few days and got a data usage warning on my phone since I wasn’t connected to wifi. I investigated and discovered I’d consumed an ungodly amount of data on Instagram. Why? I’ve gotten hooked on those stupid 30 second reels. Car crashes, funny animal videos, etc… the system is designed to keep you mindlessly scrolling for hours. I thought about it and realized I’ve been sucked into it. Every 15 or 30 minutes or so, all day long, I catch myself scrolling for a quick five minutes (or so I tell myself).

If I was a demon and wanted to drive a wedge between human interaction and create sloth, greed, and envy… what a perfect way to do it. The tech influencers are creating a dopamine dependency that makes going out and experiencing the real world seem exhausting and not worth the effort. Now that they have your zombie-like attention span, what other messaging can they begin to push?

Then again, maybe there is no demonic force that’s preying upon people. Perhaps it is just human nature in an environment of excess and no natural predators. When your day is no longer filled with physical work and you have the availability of instant information – and no need to put the effort in to study to understand the world around you, it may be that the dark forces are simply the byproduct of weak and lazy minds. Fat, bored, and fueled by easy dopamine hits, we exist in a globalist world that celebrates a lack of identity. It does seem like the perfect recipe for succumbing to the worst of human behavior. The traditional guardrails of society seem to be disappearing.

I’m not sure what to think. What I do know is that something seems “off” in the world right now. Drifting around the edges, there’s a sense that something doesn’t seem right. This worries me and I don’t know what to do about it.

All I can do is hope that when I do run into the Wendigo in the forest… I recognize it for what it is.

Daily Life, Motivation, woke

Mr Rogers Neighborhood

As we sit back and watch the various wars kicking off across the globe, it’s tempting to wonder how we got here? The best summary I’ve seen so far was from a meme on Twitter (X). It said in reference to the Hamas attack – all of this could have been prevented if Israel had just put “Gun Free Zone” signs up near the border. I’ll pause a minute while you ponder that.

Normal people want to live in a Mr Rogers idealistic neighborhood. Prosperity helps foster that dream. What people don’t want to talk about is the other side of the coin – A polite society can only exist with the threat of consequences for bad behavior. We’d like to think we can achieve a kumbaya, crunchy granola world if everyone would just practice being nice. That unfortunately ignores the entirety of human existence.

Until very recently, a polite society existed only because of the threat of having your skull split was the consequence of bad behavior. Nowadays we worry more about harming peoples self-esteem than deterring them from crime. I think of this every time I see the ridiculous climate protestors who block streets and glue themselves to paintings in museums. The only thing that will happen to them is they’ll be peacefully arrested and immediately released, thus achieving their protester merit badge. They make the news and get their idiotic message out.

Now, if angry mobs of blocked motorists started dragging them by their hair to the curb and giving them a bit of a pummeling… they might start thinking twice about how to get their message across. Now I’m not advocating for violence, but without consequences for your actions you can do whatever you want.

Take Israel for example. They are surrounded by nations that openly declare the desire to wipe them off the map. They have been attacked on the regular, from all sides, for 70+ years. And every time they punch back the collective world screeches for a “proportional response”. Uhm, if you haven’t been much of a student of history, here’s a dirty little secret – a disproportionate response is how you end wars. Otherwise your enemy simply regroups and attacks again. see Gaza for the last 20 years

Hamas, PLO, Hezbollah, et al., have chosen time and time and time again to be feral animals. They have decided that the destruction of Israel is more important than trying to normalize relations and build some sort of society for their people. I suspect Hamas finally pushed the envelope a bit too far this time. As the old saying goes, if ye fuckith around, ye shall findith out. If Israel doesn’t end them, it’s only going to happen again as soon as they regroup. Let’s just hope their neighbors to the north sit this one out. I’m not sure we can put the genie back in the bottle if that conflict pops off.

My point? Much of “civilized” society today has decided that worrying about hurting someone’s feelings is more important than maintaining a functional community. As you watch brazen, unchecked looting and stealing from your local Walmart, ask yourself “how’s that working out?” When glitzy Hollywood has to be told don’t risk wearing jewelry when walking around because the police can’t/won’t do anything about crime… that’s a sign things have gone sideways. Much of Europe probably secretly regrets allowing unchecked migration. Sweden now has 20+ areas that are classified by the police as “no go” areas due to crime and rape. The US is just barely starting to wake up to the consequences of allowing the cartels to control our border. It’s hard not to laugh at the Mayor of New York realizing that his sanctuary city policies aren’t working out so well.

We’re living in some strange times. Everything seems a bit upside down and opposite. I sometimes wonder how far off we are from retreating back to tribal villages that band together to protect themselves and maintain their own customs and beliefs. ’cause that whole one world globalist thing isn’t panning out so well. But that’s a little Mad Max apocalyptic I suppose. I blame it on my blocked eardrums from a dive trip last week. I can’t hear anything and it’s making me grumpy.

But then again any society, when pushed hard enough, will eventually lash out. As H.L. Mencken once wrote:

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”