Addictions & obsession
HOST
This is how most people operate. Most people are walking around and they think their real change comes from bombarding yourself with thoughts. Essentially, most people are under the impression that if you walk around and you tell yourself no continually when you want to act out, when you want to lash out, when you want to do things and indulge in behaviors that you know could be potentially self destructive, most think if you just say no over and over in your head that you're gonna win long term. And it couldn't be farther from the truth.
You will always lose the battle of attrition. When you're. You're on a very thin string. When you're operating from a place of self resistance, there's.
There's absolutely zero percent chance that you're gonna defeat any demons that you have internally. If you're operating from a place of constantly resisting and action is very clear that what it is on, on the on underneath is that it's actually want to chicks. But they have no balls, they have no courage, they have no game. So what they do is they resort to these passe activities as, as a.
Almost like a mask. It's a form of masquerading what the true desire is. So the only way to affect real change is to stop suppressing. That goes down into your soul, into infinity.
And you can't win telling yourself no, you want a cookie, you can't. How many times can you tell yourself no before you're gonna break? It's a very weak mechanism you're playing with. You have to transmute the energy.
So the energy has to be applied, especially if you have a very addictive personality. And here's the other thing. You cannot ascend this current society, the current landscape that we're in, without some sort of affliction. You have to have some sort of obsession, some form of mild personality disorder to ascend how gay everything is in society.
That's just what it is. And you have to also understand that developing maladaptive personality traits is a correct, healthy response to how gay everything has become. That's what's creating a lot of these mental disorders and crazy obsessions and fetishes. That everything in society, there's no real rites of passage, there's no real gauntlets or trials and tribulations that are offered to young men to prove their worth.
So people are succumbing and they're secluding themselves into all these warped forms of fetishisms and just very bizarre, obscure ways of dealing with not achieving what you want in life. And so my Point is, is that ultimately you're very blessed if you have an addictive personality because it's, it's a double edged blade and there's two ways out of it. I just tweeted about this and I'm, I'm convinced that it's true because I've struggled with addictive tendencies my entire life. Everything that I like, I do to excess.
Doesn't matter what the it is, if I like it, I'm going to do it until the wheels come off. One thing I've noticed, and we all know a dude, everybody knows at least one dude who seems to be unkillable, right? We all know a guy who drinks like a should be dead. But for whatever reason he's gifted chance after chance and he continues to squander it away and tempt the kiss of death and is playing with his fate.
And this is kind of what the heroic journey is all about is you have to understand that any undertaking that's going to be impressive in life is going to be dangerous. That's just how it's always been. It's like people, It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. There is a day will come when you will drop the bike.
It's just a matter of how bad it's going to be. And people don't understand. People have this, this very romanticized view of death, that death is somehow this very peaceful thing where most people are tucked under the covers with their gray hair on the pillow and you just get tucked in and you just pass away and fall into Elysium. That's not how it works.
Most death is very painful and gruesome. Even in later years, even in elder years when people say, oh, they died in their sleep. No, no, no. Most death is gruesome.
So you have to pick your poison in life, every path you take your, the poison is in the dose and you can drink, you can take a teaspoon of poison every day. It might not kill you, but it'll make you sick. And it's important to understand that no matter what path you choose, you're, you're, you're edging closer to death every day. So it's like.
One of my biggest heroes is Mark Fu that surfed Mavericks Half Moon Bay in California. And he died on a wave. He died, he got pinned in the undertow and I think his leash got stuck on some reef under the ocean and the dude just suffocated. But my point is, is that in my opinion has one of the most Glorious deaths that you could possibly imagine.
Because he died literally doing what he loved, which was big wave surger surfing. And he started an entire media movement. Quicksilver was involved. I mean, he was one of the originals.
And so it's like, I don't know what people are saving their wad for. Like, most people are literally just. Most people don't shoot their wad. They're saving it proverbially because they think that death is just this sort of engine that you just kind of peacefully fall into, and it's just not the case.
And so my point is this. If you have an addiction and you have some sort of affliction, or you have an obsessive personality, you have the highest upside and you have the highest downside, right? We live in a world where you have to understand that if one roll of the dice goes one way, you're living under a bridge. But if one dice of the roll goes the other way, you're fucking the hottest bitches in the world.
You're on yachts. So the, the, the. We've never been in a position, the overall state of society where you can ascend higher, you can climb higher than you ever could before, but you can also fall lower. And I think we have to embrace that because it's central to the human condition.
And my own experience with addiction is that I should have been a statistic. If you look at my profile and you look at the action that I have played, placed, and I have all the receipts, I have action that would knock your socks off if I posted the kind of bets that I've placed in Vegas and the kind of chips that I've dealt with. And one thing that I know for sure is that there is a way to binge something that is obsessive so much that you literally consume its spirit that it no longer has power over you. No.
Now that's a very, very, very dangerous undertaking. And it's, I think a very tiny majority minority of society could actually get away with that. But the other, on the other hand, you don't want to be the motherfucker who indulges really early in life, burns out, loses self control. And now your entire identity is based around sobriety and based off quitting your addiction.
Because that is. That level of self resistance is going to build a titanic snowball that will come back to haunt you big time. I've. If you go, if you look at literature and you look at people who go to aa, Alcoholics Anonymous, these programs, and they.
The recidivism rate is close to 99. You'll get, who get 20 years sober, right? They'll go, they'll go 20 years and they're singing the party line, the line. They're getting accolades, they're getting praise, they're sponsoring people, they're helping other addicts.
They're seemingly on top of the world. And then the very next day they are on the most epic alcohol binge that you've ever witnessed and they're on the brink of death. How could that possibly happen after a 20 year stretch of sobriety? And then the next day the wheels come off.
It's because self resistance and making your entire identity around, quitting a specific behavior builds up all that latent energy. You're building a thunderball that is very, very spooky because that jackpot is gonna burst and it's gonna burst in your face. So that's one element of it. And then the next element of it is that the energy, the addictive energy has to be used to build yourself up in other capacities.
That's why the gym, if you look at the gym, the gym has in all likelihood kept more dudes out of incarceration, psych wards and graveyards and penitentiaries than probably any other place. Because the gym is filled with people with maladaptive personality traits, insecurities. It's a medley of it. It's a, it's, it's.
If you want to see every stereotype and every caricature amplified, walk into a gym. It's a bunch of broken people that are putting band aids over issues that they haven't figured out how to solve mentally. But it's better than being incarcerated. So my point is, is you have to pick your poison.
Is it unhealthy to train twice a day and, and four hour days? Of course it is. Is it better than injecting needles in your arm? Yes.
Objectively, yes. So the, that this is, the human experience revolves around replacing things. It's what humans always do. Humans replace with shit.
So you have to substitute. And that's kind of what I'm getting at, is that. Look, in my own life, I quit porn about a year ago. And I equate there's a lot of dudes that scroll all day online and just look at beautiful women.
And you have to understand that's the same thing as watching porn. If you are scrolling through pictures of beautiful women all day that you will never meet, that you will never talk to, that you will never have sex with, understand that you are fracturing and fissuring your brain, you are sending unconscious signals to your unconscious mind, to your lizard brain, that you are on the bottom of the totem pole. And when you cut yourself off cold turkey from indulging in this kind of behavior, you leave yourself with no choice but to go in the real world and only look at beautiful women that are right in front of your face. That's just an easy patch.
The biggest ROI I had in my 20s was keeping a barren bedroom. No electronics, no TV, no nothing. Why? Because I would wake up every morning and there was.
I was bored to tears. There's nothing to do in my house. So guess what I have to do. I have to go outdoors.
You have to go immerse yourself into the real world. You have to go meet people, talk to people, because it's boring as staring at white walls all day. But most of you have these extremely complex setups within your home. You have computers, you have Netflix, you have Amazon.
Everything's delivered to you. You have zero reason to leave your front door and actually go and meet people. Literally zero. And you've done it to yourself.
But when you constrict yourself and you cut that off at the dam, then you're just. You. You are left with no choice. And that's why I always say it's very ironic that a man with very narrow choices has true freedom.
I'm going to say that again. The narrower your choices are in life, the more freedom you have, because you don't have the more options. The more TV channels you have, the more porn, the more porn genres you can, you can scroll through. The more you're.
You're imprisoned, the more you're imprisoned. But when your choices are narrow and you no longer have access to porn, you no longer have access to Instagram, you no longer have access to electronics. Guess what? You're gonna get outside and you're gonna start hitting the gym and you're gonna get out and realize that you are dying because you're going to experience the soul rot of sitting indoors with nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs up.
And so I guess that's my whole central tenant, is that you need to be very observant with the way. With the. The poisons that you're picking that absolutely destroy your brain on, on your phone, on your computer. You're just consuming all day content and it's not getting you anywhere.
What. What has come of it? Every. Everything's too easy.
And so I'm trying to usher in this idea that you need to go interact, you need to be out there getting rejected, putting your heart on the line. And this is never going to go out of style. The real world will never go out of style. Doing dinners, writing contracts on cocktail napkins at bars with your boys, that type of is never going out of style.
And I think a lot of you are hiding on the Internet and it's creating very bizarre addictions that you don't even know you have. When's the last time you held a conversation eye to eye with somebody and actually was present without wanting to check your emails, check your phone, check Twitter, check Instagram, check whatever the fuck you're doing? I had it the other night, and it was glorious. I had a chick sitting on my lap for like two hours.
Two hours passed, she was sitting on my lap. I was staring at her in her eyes the entire time, had a great conversation. And it dawned on me when it was over, I was like, I wonder how many people actually experience this anymore? Because I didn't have a care in the world.
I was present as I didn't give a what was going on the Internet. I didn't give a what was going on anywhere. And it really kind of put me in check to realize how much I'm checking my phone, because I have a severe phone addiction. And the key to that, too, is this is pretty profound.
All the habits that you have to form to get wealthy and get yourself situated are the exact habits you have to break to keep it. And what I mean by that is you pretty much do need a phone addiction and you need a computer addiction if you wanted to start a business, if you want to get wealthy, if you want to get yourself established. But then once you get established and you're making enough money to take care of yourself, you have to go the complete opposite route, complete opposite character formations and habits that. Because when you have money, why the are you still on your phone every day?
You should be immersed in the real world, doing real. But I see a lot of dudes making money, and then they're in a deeper catatonic, cataclysmic fall, just continually fraying their dopamine circuits on the Internet. So it's like you need a ton of bad habits to be successful. That's what I'm trying to say.
Bad habits, ironically, will lead you to chances and opportunities that ordinary people will not be able to take. And then once you win, once you win resources, you need good habits to maintain it. So you've got to almost pull a complete form reversal. So understand that.
Understand that if you have character defects and you have things that you want to change inside your spirit that you know are probably harming you. You have a greater roi. Not trying to remove those flaws, just integrating them into your overall overarching personality and just keeping them there and saying, you know what? I'm just going to take all my flaws and all my mistakes with me.
I'm gonna huck them on my shoulders and I'm gonna continue the pursuit of excellence until I have some threshold of success. And then I can work on healing, then I can work on healing, then I can work on removing defects of character that aren't suiting me. But if you have defects of character and bad habits right now, I guarantee you that's your edge. And if you dull your edge too much and you build your entire life around saying no and sobriety and self resistance, you no longer have an edge.
You're a dull blade. You're like everybody else and you have to find your edge. You need something that makes you sharp, that makes you different than everybody else. And maladaptive personality traits are that thing.
And they're there for a reason. Your body is speaking to you. It's trying to usher you to take different forms of action. So you can focus on healing in the end game, not in the pre game.
In the pre game you need to be a little bit up and you need to be a madman to be successful. That's just a objective fact. Then you can relax and get cozy and start. Start fleshing out these issues.
Once you got some money and you got the time on your hands, sure. Start journaling. Start going deep into your past. Figure out why the you are the way you are.
But until then, until then, your best chances of success is running around like a madman. A little bit jaded, a little bit in pain, a little bit of suffering. It ain't gonna kill you. And that's what you need because that's the catalyst.
So trying to remove all these things and being obsessed with just constantly resisting your natural desires, that's what's actually killing you. I can say that for a fact. I have enough experience. I've seen it happen over and over and over again, time and time again between people who build identities around quitting certain behaviors.
That's why the no FAP thing is so gay. Because you're building an entire identity around quitting a behavior that you know is self destructive, when really all you could have done is just pursued excellence in other facets. It's all you had to do the entire time. All you had to do was get bigger, stronger, faster, meaner, tougher, and you could have done it.
And that all would have. Would have slopped away on its own. And that's the other thing. What's interesting is, I've noticed is when you take your character flaws along with you and you're not obsessed with removing them, when you do find some threshold of success, oftentimes that naturally kind of rubs and sloughs off those character habits anyway.
It's almost like just by osmosis, just by the proxy of winning in the first place. It irons out a lot of mental fog that you have uncertainty about your past insecurities. A lot of that goes away when you just actually get a victory. That's the irony is you don't really need to sit there and plow through your past trying to figure all this out, because that's a huge circle jerk.
And you can do that until infinity. And there's no objective measure that you've actually gotten over it because it's all fiction in your head, right? We can. I can rewrite my history a thousand times in my head right now if I have to.
I could put my best metaphors on the table. I could say it more articulately. Maybe I can sensationalize it a little bit. And that's what we're all doing.
We're all embellishing our past and making our demons and our pain seem greater and more profound than everybody else's. And it's fucking not. It's fiction. It's gone.
Move on from it, because you can just rewrite those stories until infinity. It's entertainment. You're not accomplishing anything. So if you have obsession, which I've already established is a prerequisite to success, it's a blessing.
And understand that any pursuit of excellence is going to be dangerous because you're going to have to put yourself at stake. Things about yourself that you love dearly. Sometimes you got to get rid of that in order to achieve something. That's all I want to say.
I love you all.