The other day I was pissing in the woods and a wild boar appeared. I froze like a chicken, my legs were trembling but my body wouldn't move. I feel humiliated knowing that the same will happen in a fight or warfare. War is pretty common throughout history, and I doubt that most men from the previous generations were brave, like those boomers say. Someone, somewhere must have written something, like a war general to boost the morale of the cowards in his group and turn them into brave men? Or is it the genes and I am doomed to fail?
nope, you just go out into danger again and again and be a bit less of a pussy each time.
Hoe did the military handle this during sudden warfare?
Through giving recruits a sequence of experiences. You can't redo someone's genetics, or childhood.
Physical and mental preparation and desensitization do work. Then throw booze and bad company into the mix, and you can have a b***hmade introspective nerd running around being a violent felon (firsthand knowledge lol)
How do you suggest someone who isn't in military learn this?
Sorry if this disappoints you, but I did it in the most obvious way.
The sequence was lifting, boxing, adventuring, hanging out, and making friends with bad people. Sprinkle this with a constant supply of Nietzchian ideas and booze. Eventually I became very brave and quite dangerous.
I think being self-destructive, and having personality disorders, really helps with this path.
But do think you can be brave when you actually experience warfare?
Yep
Lifting and boxing haven't been able to make me any less of a pussy.
Do you actually spar?
Not as often as I'd like. Getting hit isn't the main problem. I'm afraid to hit someone else.
Haven't trained in a while, since I moved to a new city and haven't found a new gym yet.
That's the gayest thing I've ever heard.
You're fricking up everyone's training if you're not trying to hit them.
Three years of training. Could never get over that flinch.
I can tell they get frustrated because I don't want to hit them. They keep telling me "hit me" but I still hold back. I don't even know why, they are annoying.
Next time I go, I'm just going to throw punches as if I were trying to break their fricking skull open.
How about you just spar like a normal person by trying to hit them with an appropriate amount of force
Do you flinch or do they? Because making other people flinch while sparring is hilarious.
I don't know how to spar like a normal person. If I don't hit hard, I hit too slow.
Maybe it's because I am new at this. How many weeks until I stop looking like a spastic that can't coordinate and hits like a tard?
I sucked for about five months, then just randomly got gud out of nowhere.
The easiest way to hit without hitting hard is to control your distance, so you're hitting them at the very end of your reach, so it becomes more of a tap than putting your fist through their skull.
Another good rule of thumb is not to tard rage 15 hit combos on their face, if you hit them hard, take a step back and ask if they're good.
I flinch. I instinctively pull punches. I aim at their gloves instead of their head.
You should have someone hit you lightly successively harder until getting hit feels normal instead of traumatic. Both wearing gloves with your guard up and just have him smack at you. That's what my teacher does.
We used to run drills where he stood me with my back to the wall and took shots at me so I physically couldn't back away.
Honestly, getting hit can be kind of invigorating. Still never got comfortable hitting someone else.
You're supposed to have unresolved anger issues that motivate you to get into striking sports.
I had it backwards. I find it hard to get angry about anything. I thought maybe taking up boxing would help me be more proactive and forceful in life.
Are you medicated or something? How are you alive in 2024 and just go "oh yeah, I guess this is all fine"
I take no medication. It's hard to get viscerally angry about abstract circumstances.
I don't really feel any need to be upset
None of this helped. And I cant just make friends. How the frick does that even work? Theres nobody to even talk to anymore
Change location
I can't. I'm trapped in this shitty city. Besides I'm in a big city on the coast. How can it get better than here for meeting people? I'm so fricking lonely. I'm going to die alone and unloved. I'm unlovable.
It's literally everyone. Everyone is atomized and in their phones.
I lived in five different states over the past ten years. Moving changes nothing.
You probably haven't even done anything that dangerous. At most I bet you got drunk and had a tussle at a bar. Try and do that sober.
You're mistaken
The word sissy is more fitting but it's been taken over by troons. Pussy is used to call out someone who won't do something. Sissy is used to call out someone who failed at doing something or to do anything at all. One is for a hypothetical often a soft tease. The other was meant as a real dig. Too bad gays, ESLs, and coomers have ruined the English language.
It'a genetics+upbringing+experience. You can only influence the experience aspect, by leaving your comfort zone and adventurig in the world.
You can't intellectualize or rationalize yourself into bravery... You're probably a scrawny little twat, and no amount of reading will change that.
Fix your hormones and your body. You're a coward because you know you are weak, and your hormones render you a subject to external forces.
You can't stop a bullet or even torture no matter how much you lift. As fir the hormones, is it true that they change to such an extent that they can your personality, just by getting IQfy? Or is it just bro science?
Yes, becoming fit turns you into a right wing chud.
When you improve your body, your confidence will naturally increase.
Yes, your hormones can literally change your personality. This is why men on steroids will change drastically.
But the fact that you mentioned bullets and torture suggests to me that a lot of your cowardice comes from watching too much violent shit on the internet. Youve probably spent hours watching gore and shooting videos. The real world isn't like this. You've developed a personality based on a perception of the world that is excessively skewed.
This isnt true for me. My confidence went down if anything.
Then you probably have a mental illness and your brain isn't wired right. Improving your body makes you a more capable man. Not to mention, you'll simply look and feel better. If that lowers your confidence your brain is wired incorrectly.
Ok cool, but you guys suggested this to me because I said I was sad. So you're not really saying anything I don't know.
It made me realize how worthless I am so my confidence plummeted.
Not the person you replied. Don't take his claim about you being mentally ill seriously. People these days love to abuse and misuse that word.It is true that for a lot of people, including me, their confidence does go up once they start working out and the gains start rolling in. The same not happening for you is unusual, but that doesn't mean you're defective. Just different. You become confidence when you do something that matters to you. All this means is that working out/looking better does not matter to you. So the question is, what does? What matters to you, anon? What do you feeling a calling for? What interests you? What is it that you want?
I don't have anything like that sadly.
That is unlikely, but not impossible. Whats common is for people to not know what their 'thing is. What gives them meaning/what matters to them. You'll have to look for it by doing some introspection and getting acquainted with yourself. A lot of people in life don't know themselves, and the sad thing is a lot of people go their entire lives without ever knowing themselves. Its a waste of a life imo. So get to know yourself. The hard part is being able to look within yourself and accept what you find without any judgement. Unconditionally accept yourself. The kind of social programming every person is brought up on and is subject to through life in society makes this hard to do. But its worth it. You'll find meaning, and you'll find confidence once you start working towards what matters to you. Its how you live a fulfilling life, by being honest to yourself about what you find fulfilling, even if other people don't understand or agree with it. But thats the point. Its about you. Its your life. Meaning is a deeply personal and subjective thing.
Procrastination is a b***h, isn't it?
Well I can't do that anon. I've had plenty of time. I've thought about these things and experimented for decades. No answers.
Do you think its possible you haven't looked deep enough? Or looked in a way that truly sets you free from within? I'm sorry for using vague language here but I don't know how else to talk about this specific thing. Do you feel sadness ever?
I'm always sad.
Focus on that sadness. Sit with it. Get to know it, and where its coming from. Part of that social programming I was talking about earlier is the kind that makes you feel ashamed of being sad, it says its your own fault if you're unhappy and you must immediately stomp it out within yourself the moment you feel it creeping. This is a very harmful way of thinking about things, so don't. It basically treats sadness as a useless emotion, but its not. No emotion is useless, especially not sadness. The purpose of sadness is to point you in the direction of whats amiss, and it can become fuel for you to work towards bringing in your life that thing thats amiss. You just have to embrace it in the right way. This is all part of that introspection and looking within.
Are you a different person or are you the same person leaving me separate replies? If you're a different person, what do you think about my suggestions to the other anon?
Anon I've already done and do everything you're saying and it hasn't helped. I am perfectly capable of introspection and focusing on my thoughts and emotions. It doesn't point me anywhere. I'm just miserable.
I'm going to kill myself soon. There's no way out. I'm a useless worthless person.
I'm actually in a very similar place as yourself. I think my days are over too. I have an appointment with a therapist scheduled for the end of this month and thats pretty much my last shot at seeing if the situation is salvageable. If she can't help, then thats it I guess. What makes you want to end things? I can see not being able to handle fear bothers you a lot. But what else? What has caused you to come to this point where you feel you can go no longer? For me, its that most people in my family have abandoned me and left me to fend for myself. They know I'm suicidal but they don't really care. Its changed my perception of relationships and bonds and what it means to be a family completely. From the inside, I'm empty. I feel misplaced in the world. Like I wasn't supposed to be born in it and I don't belong. In a nutshell, these are my reasons.
So you're not OP? Do you also have the same problem as OP or do you have different reasons for seeking meaning?
I am not OP, but I relate to his post and mentioned my experiences with boxing earlier in the thread.
I just dont think I have a future. I think any concept of self agency was destroyed for me before I was even born. I just can't bring myself to respect myself at all or any of my efforts. I'm a very helpless dependent person and that disgusts me but I also can't rise above it. I've wasted so many years. I don't have a single thing I can do. I deeply wish I could go back in time to when I was a kid and just restart my life. I wish I could have stood up for myself and been more extreme. But now I have lost. I am a dead person. I wander around my city just to pass time and haunt it like a ghost.
Have you tried therapy? Can you?
Consider an extended and inescapable time to yourself.
After having reached the pinnacle of my professional ambition I found myself still haunted by personal demons.
In retrospect I understand that I had never been directly taught how to manage the intellectual process, despite my own personal best efforts to study and apply stoic philosophies and etc. for decades of daily practice.
After not seeing the sun for 300 days straight (seattle, rained continuously from the day that I moved there) I was doing suicidal rehearsals with my pistol and then decided to take an extended leave from work.
Got dropped off in the desert next to a river in a canyon with some food, water purification, my pistol, and a sleeping mat + bag.
The first 4 or 5 days were difficult. I sat on a rock and meditated, which I had never done before, because I had nothing else to do. It turned into a continuous waking hallucination, like a psychedelic trip with a fully sober mind. I was seeing things, feeling things, and experiencing things that weren't real, and then after a week, my mind was clear, and I was at peace, and all my worries were gone for good. There was more to it but I wasn't interested in suicide anymore after that.
There are centers for extended meditation retreats and the like, so I'm not saying someone should do what I did. But I believe based on my own experience and what I've witnessed in others that most of what passes for peoples' mental health issues would be solved if they just shut off the fire hose of the collective data stream for a bit. 10 days is the sweet spot.
I think people should be more courageous and go out on their own, and not rely on others to take care of them, it's a bit of a crock imo to do a retreat with others but to each their own.
The foundation of the human experience is good. It is good to be alive. It is what the human organism wants, without getting into the metaphysical weeds of it. The accumulated nonsense of false living is what drives men to kill themselves. Once that strips away, which happens naturally, the only thing left is yourself, and recognition of your own goodness. This is basically a universal truth.
I dream of doing a journey. Like buying a motorbike and just going. But I don't trust myself to survive. I think I'd get murdered or worse. I don't think I can really own a gun either. Gun laws when crossing state lines get weird.
part of the torture for me are all the conflicting role models from the different fiction i consume. they're all very different . i strongly self insert in every media i consume. im very unsatisfied with who i am. i don't have an identity at all. i can actively feel it hurting my head when i consume media and start hating myself fo all the ways im not like the protagonist
>part of the torture for me are all the conflicting role models from the different fiction i consume. they're all very different
Same anon. The only commonality between them is that they're all better than me.
>Are you a different person
There are definitely two of us giving you similar answers (kind of comforting, really)
I often feel sad, but knowledge of that does not guide me to any insight. It points me nowhere. It simply is. Like weather.
Platitudes.
I've been looking inwards for decades. There is no direction there. None of my achievements have brought satisfaction.
grizzly guy here. I wanna go back and do a masters degree in math. but I'm too much of a lazy homosexual.
well, not literally. literally lazy, yes, just not .. you get it.
I'll die with that monkey on my back
>What matters to you, anon? What do you feeling a calling for? What interests you? What is it that you want?
I'm afraid there is nothing like that for me.
If you do not have a proper neurological response to a particular stimulus, then the chemicals in your brain are messed up. That's mental illness. It's not meant to be an insult; I'm telling you, you probably need professional medical help.
For example, if the closest person in your life died and you felt nothing, that suggests something is very wrong. It is not merely unusual, it suggests your brain isn't working right.
This doesn't mean you're a bad or worthless person. We all need help sometimes, there's no shame in that.
There is also a spiritual route that can be helpful to many people, but the efficacy of this largely depends on your predisposed beliefs and your openness to changing them.
I actually did lose a parent when I was really young and felt nothing.
No never. I'd never ever do that to myself.
Why don't you want to try therapy? If you need someone who's gonna sit with you and work stuff out alongside you, then thats the best available option. Besides having a friend or a close family member who cares about you enough to do that, which I'm guessing is not possible for you. So therapy, then. What makes you wanna not try it?
I will never do it. Period.
Yeah, and I heard you loud and clear. I'm asking why.
I don't need a why.
If you think I won't respect your reasons or try to belittle you if you tell them to me, then I won't do that.
I'm never going.
Well what else then? I think this anon
put it nicely. Being brave isn't the act of being fearless, its the act of allowing yourself to feel fear and doing what you want to anyways. Its about consciously resisting it. Have you thought about signing up for the army? They'll probably have some ideas that can help, at least when it comes to being brave and/or not letting fear seize you up.
Genes? Lol dude. You think soldiers are born? They are made. No book can turn you brave. Books may INSPIRE you towards being courageous or brave, also known as not being a pussy. But there is nothing brave in READING a book. If you want to be brave, you have to face your fears. If you live a full life you will be brave, if you go after what you truly want you will have to overcome your fears.
Your view of the human mind is woefully misguided. You assume that a particular reaction is due to mental illness, when it could just be about where he is in life. If you are in a "bad place" in life, you aren't going to empathize well with others. That doesn't mean you are "mentally ill". If you want medical help then go for it, but I don't believe you know what you're talking about or you lack life experience if you narrow down being unempathetic as mental illness.
>If you are in a "bad place" in life, you aren't going to empathize well with others.
Yeah, and what if that "bad place" is simply a chemical or hormonal imbalance? If you're perpetually in a "bad place" mentally, you're not going to be able to think or read your way out of it. There are billions of humans all over the world who are in a severely worse place than all of us, yet who are able to find some happiness in life. You cannot blame external circumstances for how you feel all the time, because there are people with drastically worse circumstances that can find happiness.
If that anon says he's tried everything else; exercise, diet, introspection, etc. and still feels exactly the same, he needs medical help.
Do not give up if your therapist can't help you. Most people are incompetent, so you might have to try a few people.
Your life has value and you are not worthless. The issue is not that you are worthless, rather, you simply cannot see your worth. I promise you that your worth and value are there.
it is hard to understate the influence of your hormones on every level of your life.
Eating whole foods, drinking water that isn't full of xenoestrogens, getting regular exercise and enough sun, getting lots of sleep, and socially interacting with people who do the same is quite literally world changing and the overwhelmingly vast majority of personal and societal problems that people struggle with every day would be solved in a matter of months if this was the norm.
The fact is that most men nowadays are completely neutered and might as well be eunuchs for all that their body does not work properly. But once it does, quite literally every aspect of that person's life improves, and they (shockingly) start to think that maybe they shouldn't be working so that another man can pay his wife so that they can pay another man's wife to raise his children; they start to think that maybe the idea that race is a social construct is a bit of a lie; they start to think for themselves and be happier for it; they start to become men.
For someone who has never had a functioning body in the first place, this is just crazy, because basically every kid in the west born after 2000 has been drinking estradiol (birth control) from the water supply since they were little kids, so they actually just never had a chance to generate a healthy hormonal system and are functional adolescents.
In other words, yes, getting your hormones right is probably one of the top 3 most important things you can do in your life, because it is just so foundational
Good post. Good posts all around. The normals are such strident materialists but refuse to apply their determinism to their problems. I suppose because they don't want to admit their problems will be mostly cured by regular sunshine
The Bible obviously
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
>The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
If you force all the smart people to be warriors and send them out to die, wouldn't that be a bad thing? Isn't it more logical to keep smart people safe so they can continue solving problems rather than die like a common foot soldier? But I agree in principle, if there was a way of balancing the brains and brawns in a person, that would be preferable.
there are grizzly bears where I live.
kinda hope one day I'll get Legend of the Falled. good way to go..
>it was a good death
homie, wild boars are dangerous as frick. Those motherfrickers will literally kill you. You don't need to worry about fights or wars. You need to worry about the fricking boars living around you.
Also, most people in the past couldn't read, or they definitely weren't reading books. You posted Thucydides. (He didn't actually write that quote btw) But anyway, most of the citizens in Athens at that time could probably read some, but they were like 15% of the population and not all of them were reading books. Definitely the average Hoplite wasn't reading books. Their bravery came from a combination of peer pressure and culture.
It's kind of interesting, because in the case of the Peloponnesian war it kind of worked against them in some ways. After the Persian war, the Athenians built big ass walls around the city. When the war with the Spartans happened, Pericles' plan was just to keep everyone inside the walls and wait them out. The Spartans fricked up all their farms and shit, but that was all they could do. They would stand outside the walls and call them pussy ass homosexuals for not coming out and fighting, and then the Athenians wanted to go out and fight them and Pericles had to tell them yo don't go out there, you fricking dumbasses. Stay inside this nice fricking wall we just spent the last 20 years building, morons.
You're not brave because you don't need to be, simple as. Don't get hung up on it. A lot of Americans have this insecurity from not being multilingual. But they don't need to be, so whatever. If you needed to be brave, you would be, or you'd be dead. Or both. But you don't, so you're not. Just get over it.
I guess you could read Jocko Willink and David Groggins, but honestly why?
There is nothing more shameful than a man who isn't brave. All men must be brave. All men must be stoic(not necessarily philosophically).
We should all act like main characters from a western or a samurai movie
>>>r9k
Life may not really demand you to be brave. You can carefully avoid any real danger or risk taking in life and never truly need to be brave unless you really live it. Such is the quiet and comfortable shame of cowardice.
If you believe in something that is more important than your own life, even to protect the lives of those you care about, then you have to be brave. Few things push people to a threshold where they believe it is necessary to risk or sacrifice their life.
Consider the burglar. I've had to deal with robbers breaking into my home a few times. Each time, I've managed to scare them away through action and intimidation. Mentally, jacking my TV or whatever is not worth confronting me running at them with a hammer or machete with the full intent to legally kill.
The burglars made the calculation in their head. It is about fear and psychological domination. Whatever I had to steal was not worth risking their life, so they chose flight over fight and were dominated. I took pity on them and offered them a bit of food or cash (like Bishop Myriel) and they were so afraid they refused, so I just let them go.
Hmmm...honestly this might explain why the hinduss got conquered.