Inside the box.

 It's common knowledge that the red pill is a bitter pill. The truth will sear your mind, it will weigh heavy on your guts and leave a horrible taste in your mouth.

But at least for those who can handle all that, they will be free. Handling that, though, can be a tricky thing for so many people, and everyone has their own coping mechanism. Some of us manospherians (is that even a word?) have families who're red-pill as well, others have causes they can throw their energies and frustrations into. I suppose even the action of blogging in and of itself is a form of coping with knowing the truth - shouting out to the world and trying to find someone in this sea of madness who will listen.

As M3 points out: "The sphere is poison. So is chemo. And when when you're fighting cancer...all bets are off."

To that end, he unplugged for a couple of weeks and took a break, but now he's back. People suffer from burnout all the time and have to drop out for their own reasons, but as I mentioned in my MGTOW post, the glory of the manosphere is that whenever one falls back, there's always a fresh face filling the empty spot in the ranks. Yet it's all too hard not to stare into the abyss, especially when it hasn't just stared back at you - it's already taken up residence on your couch, monopolised the contents of your fridge and is hogging the remote.

It's imperative you get into this box, our existences depend on it...and I wouldn't lie to me, would I?

To that end, I have the box.

Of course, it should be obvious that the box isn't a physical box I've lugged home and put over my head whenever I feel that the abyss is getting a little too close for my comfort, although I'll say that my room feels that way sometimes. I lived in a converted storeroom from the ages of 6-16, so it's not a big surprise.

Enough about that, though. I was a fantasy novelist - still am writing, although not at the pace that I used to back when I had more free time. And when I go back and look at the stuff I've written over the years and think back on it, it's really true that writing does make you bare your soul to whomever ends up reading your manuscript. Your principles, your beliefs, your desires - even though you might write a character who, say, had a different point of view on a particular issue than you and you had the temerity to not make them stupid or evil like so many authors do, your writing will still be influenced at some level by your views on that opposing viewpoint. It's hard to escape that, unless you're a machine, an AI.

On the other hand, I've found it to be a release of sorts, building a world in my head. Sort of like a thought experiment on "how would you order the world if you were a deity?" only writ large. If you could reshape the world according to your will, how would you go about it? The end product would be a summation of both your conscious and unconscious desires, a world suited to your reality - although not the realities of others. There are two sides to every equation, a zero to every one, as they say. You can't grow as a person unless you accept that your reality doesn't apply to others, and it most likely doesn't match up with objective reality as we red-pillers know it.

But it's nice to retreat into a dream world for a little while and write about worlds where people treat each other with respect and decency, where rulers try to do the right thing, where karma actually exists and things happen for a reason, where human beings and elves and octopus people are actually rational beings who try to work things out and everyone goes home at the end of the day, if not happily ever after.

Well, the alternative is stewing in a cloud of rage and wishing Sodom-and-Gomorrah-esque destruction on all of existence.

***

"You don't seem angry about it."

"Anger would be futile, wouldn't it?"

"Well, yes, but aren't you accustomed to futile anger?"

I felt something like a dry chuckle attempt to escape my throat. I suppressed it and said, "I'm working on that." 

- Phoenix, Steven Brust 

*** 

That's my box. That's where I go when the precipice draws near. And I stay in there, wrap the chains about the wood and click the padlock shut until I'm ready to face the world again, which usually isn't too long. I open the word processor and write, just like when I did after reading this post by dear Glorious Bastard.

Remember to keep a coping mechanism at hand, folks. It's all so easy to spend hours being plugged into the sphere, watching the assembly line of emotions both low and high tick by. Get up from that seat. Spend time with the people you love. Throw yourself into that hobby or sport you have. Do something to prevent yourself from going mad at the world.

The sphere is poison, but there's a Chinese saying: "clear (alternatively, fight) poison with poison". The sphere has to be poisonous in order to have any chance of clearing the rot in our system, or at least die an easier death. No one said the truth was easy.

It's all too easy to let that nilhilistic feeling creep up on you, but as Aurini points out - the flip side of there being no innate meaning means that you can create it for yourself.

So go out and make some meaning, because the alternative's not pretty.