SkookumTree
5d ago
I know one guy who did. I'll call him the Carpenter. He dealt a shit ton of weed in the 90s and made an assload of money before he went legit and had a big carpentry business.
SkookumTree
5d ago
Do you really think I might be able to get a book or movie deal out of the Hock? That would be cool as fuck.
SkookumTree
5d ago
Update: training for the Hock, buying ski gear. Planning on going in February in the Brooks Range. Running and biking as training.
SkookumTree
5d ago
Suicide hotlines, funeral homes. If you want something really goddamn heavy - try to find a way to volunteer in a pediatric cancer ward. Hospice is second - but in a pediatric cancer ward you'll see families that are more or less broken by grief. If an old man with a pack-a-day cigarette habit he's had for 60 years is dying of lung cancer, few people are surprised. Even the old man himself often shrugs and says something like "I knew the smoking was gonna catch up to me". When it's a twelve-year-old, it is different. I was a medical student in a cancer ward for a month. I don't have the words to describe it: if we could resurrect Wilfred Owen and have him walk those halls, he might be able to write poetry sufficient for the task.
Daniel Abse and Dante might be sufficient too.
SkookumTree
5d ago
I heard "hock" used by my father as a slang word meaning "to throw": he once told me "Son, you can't just hock that wet log onto the fire like that..."
Of course, I also like the sound.
SkookumTree
6d ago
What the hell would an effective or valuable version of FDS look like other than simple-but-nontrivial stuff like "be thin, don't be addicted to drugs or alcohol, don't be batshit crazy, have self respect, have a job"?
SkookumTree
6d ago
Great. A Faustian bargain where - as is customary - the Devil actually holds up his end of the deal. If pressed, I would suspect that the very popular and the very social have just as cynical views about humanity as the isolated neckbeards, if more measured and refined. However, that is basically just pulled from my ass as well as conversations with friends that knew politician types.
SkookumTree
6d ago
We're both in the healthcare field: we both know that human beings can habituate to an awful lot of disgusting shit and deal with it with a smile.
SkookumTree
6d ago
I've heard "hock" being used in this sense. Apparently at least a few other people have. The Hock spawning a slang etymology debate is an unexpected outcome here...
SkookumTree
7d ago
you do observe women who seem like they want any below average sexually attractive man to be sent into the frozen wastes
Are you telling me that a subset of weird angry jackass feminists invented the goddamn Hock many years before I did? Independent invention, eh? I suppose if you chucked a bunch of unattractive dudes into the Alaskan wilderness, those that survived would on average be more attractive than those that did not, and they'd all at least be fit and determined.
SkookumTree
7d ago
What would you think - as a person and a future psychiatrist - of a man who attempted the Hock and lived to tell the tale? Would you admire his strength and resilience, while condemning his stupidity? Would you find it amusing? The Hock is at least a testament to hard work and...brainpower, even if possibly misguided and foolish.
I believe that the Hock provideth for all who attempt it, either through victory or death.
SkookumTree
7d ago
@f3zinker has seen the Hock and is undoubtedly aware of it. The Hock is best when it is freely chosen to freeze weakness off of one's character or soul and allow a person to become Hock hardened. Every man should consider whether or not to Hock and if so, what his Hock looks like. Not everyone's Hock takes place in the Alaskan wilderness. There may be many Hocks, but the Alaskan Hock is mine.
SkookumTree
7d ago
Hmm. I'm a 28-year-old virgin, although I disagree wholeheartedly with the self-identified incels' descriptions of having been wronged. I cannot point to a single person or group of people that have wronged me. If I was forced to say, I might put the blame at the feet of social media or whatever was leading to atomization, but even that is a stretch. I think I am probably just roadkill on the superhighway of progress, dead critter 8,201,974. Nothing personal about it, any more than the Luddites' complaints in their time. It looks like there's a kind of quiet forest fire clearing out the dead wood and the people that would have maybe done OKish under an agrarian patriarchy but suck in modernity in one way or another. Hell, if I was a Luddite, I would not have been a very good weaver - perhaps a passable one, but not a great one.
I don't intend to come off as misogynistic and mean to make it very goddamn clear that I do not blame women for doing what they are doing; I would probably do the same in their shoes. If I was an equally unattractive woman I'd probably be a somewhat bitter and misanthropic feminist writing about how society enabled men to suck and how current systems weren't very well suited for women (or unattractive ones); there would probably have been traumatic experiences as autistic girls and women are very vulnerable to piece of shit predators.
As far as effortless mastery: the Hock may provide this. If you've looked death in the face, been exhausted hauling a sledload of gear through the Arctic mountains, etc. your desk job looks like a piece of cake and you don't really give a shit about a lot of things. So too, "effortless mastery" may be very effortful from the inside...Olympic athletes make it look easy but they're working their asses off while they're doing backflips, professional dancers collapse and gasp for air when they go backstage.
SkookumTree
7d ago
When women do become attracted to a man after he did something retarded, it's in spite of retardation
I do wonder. Perhaps the Hock is Jackass meets Into the Wild; however, was Johnny Knoxville more attractive for riding off rooftops in shopping carts? I would think a high-school sophomore might be more attractive to his peers for doing so. A grown adult? Maybe if he makes a bunch of money off of it or becomes notorious. Then again: consider the fate of Eugene, Oregon's Nutsack Man, a man who suffered brain damage in a motorcycle wreck and then spent several years riding his bike around Eugene, yelling "Eugene Transit can suck my sweaty NUTSACK! NUTSAAAAAAAACK!" He certainly gained notoriety, although I have no clue if anyone was attracted to our hero. I heard tell that he had a girlfriend at one point - and this while sleeping rough and screaming NUTSACK at passersby.
Also, the origin of the term "Hock" is simple: Hock participants are chucked or Hocked into the Alaskan wilderness. "Hock" is a slang term that can mean "to throw".
You're also telling me that a solo cross-country journey in temperatures as low as 40 below zero, on skis, with a homemade sled and a bunch of gear, isn't at all cool? Hell, there are other people who did things like this, solo or in groups, in the same terrain...Andrew Skurka isn't cool for his journey? Chris McCandless wasn't noble or heroic for his ultimately futile attempt...and would it have been different had McCandless survived his adventure to return to society? Jon Krakauer was just a dumbass for trying to use a couple of curtain rods from a hardware store to protect himself from crevasses during his 1977 solo climb of the Devil's Thumb?
Perhaps the Hock is polarizing; I will also contend that the Hock produces a change in the character and personality of he who survives. The point isn't to go on the Hock and tell everyone about it; I suspect that if you survived the Hock you wouldn't talk about it much except perhaps with people who had survived similar experiences, and then only at certain times. The point is to alter your character and become Hock hardened.
SkookumTree
7d ago
But. If you OD AND THEN GET CLEAN you might have perspective and wisdom and maybe be more attractive. I think it would definitely hold true if heroin dealers only sold to those that had first climbed a mountain or run a marathon in a decent time or something. Have to have done at least one Feat to buy dope. A clean former mountain climber might be okay.
Is the Hock addictive?
Yeah, agreed.
EDIT: I do think that he would probably have been better off had he attempted and survived the Hock. He at least would grok that he needed to work for things, confronted his own mortality, learned that Nature doesn't give a rat's ass about Daddy's money, and become physically fit and determined. Military service might have been even better - especially if he saw combat and got back in one piece and able to hold down a job. These things only work well if they're more or less freely chosen...I don't know how well drafting this dude for Vietnam or something would have worked out.
SkookumTree
8d ago
SkookumTree
8d ago
I am sorry if I wasn't sufficiently curious about the experience of unattractive women; I've said before that I think their experience of sex and relationships is even worse than that of their male counterparts. However I'd feared that any curiosity would be seen as salacious or ham-handed. Suffice it to say that unattractive and disabled women have a lot of genuinely traumatic experiences trying to date, and it is terrible. Let's say that I know a lot of autistic women and most have been raped or abused.
SkookumTree
8d ago
I also vote for guys being chucked out into the Alaskan wilderness or some other life-and-death challenge, willingly undertaken. It'll harden the survivors up and we have what, 105 boys born per 100 girls? We can afford to lose a few of the biggest chumps.
SkookumTree
8d ago
Yeah. The washing machine and things like it were a pretty big deal and were arguably inevitable once we got the electricity, running water, and affluence to afford them on a large scale. An underrated factor here is also penicillin; before penicillin, syphilis was basically the AIDS of its day. The cutting edge treatments of the time were giving people arsenic and hoping that that killed the syphilis before it killed the person.
Intentional malaria infection was also used.
Both of these won the Nobel Prize in their time.
We might converge on a sex negative chastity culture, but it would probably look like the most sociosexually restricted 10 percent of people's desires/ideals become the mean. Casual sex would be seen as...ungentlemanly, possibly low class, and risky.
SkookumTree
8d ago
Thus the paranoid obsession with the idea that all women are secretly fucking “chad” while the nice guys (like them, or like them before they became redpilled) are left with the scraps or nothing at all. They’re not angry about male promiscuity, they’re (as I said to @raggedy_anthem last week) angry that they’re not Chad, that they’re not Russell Brand, that they don’t get to fuck around with many beautiful young women very easily. Or, in cases where they have worked to be more attractive to women, the fact that beauty is superficial has ‘blackpilled’ them in the same way. So, as ‘temporarily embarrassed chads’, they must defend bad male behavior.
If a few assumptions are true:
-
"Chads", as a group, are not only better looking but more conscientious/determined/virtuous than average Joes, and
-
Average Joes, without the opportunity for a wife and family, are NOT going to either stop contributing to society or attempt to violently reorganize it to get wives and families...
then why the hell is this a bad thing? Future generations will have more Chad genes and fewer genes of guys that just kind of sucked but were doing OK under agrarian patriarchy. Even if our civilization collapses and we wind up living like African peasants, germ theory was a big deal and means that infant and maternal mortality will likely never be as low as it was centuries ago. That has some implications for the structure of families and societies.
I say bring it on: why doesn't Chad deserve a literal harem, if the kids are doing OK?
Also: people are shallow. The experience of being very unattractive, or of having a large change in either direction of attractiveness, breeds cynicism. If you're friends with anyone that got surgery for a jaw so puny that their doctors recommended it...ask them how they were treated before and after surgery. I haven't had the experience and I don't know anyone who does, though.
SkookumTree
8d ago
One of the more difficult paradoxes to resolve is having the pure unadulterated self-confidence to believe that you're a great catch, worthy of getting a high quality woman, and really believing it, and yet also being 'happy' for another guy who ends up with a high quality woman you were eyeing.
A possible resolution: you are fundamentally disgusting but also an exceptional individual, very conscientious and determined and also caring. As such, your exceptional personal qualities mean that you are in theory worthy of a good relationship with a good woman. However, you also understand that ordinary Joes, lacking both disgust and exceptional characteristics, are also worthy and admirable. Also, you feel that your existence and whatever disgust your kids will inherit is partially a burden on the commons, which you repay through hard work and altruism; it is admirable if Joe gets the girl (meaning that she doesn't have to endure disgust) and if you do (because you have managed to through sheer strength of character to inspire someone to endure disgust to make you happy, and because she is willing to endure as you are for the greater good).
SkookumTree
8d ago
He believes that surviving such a challenge will make one more interesting at parties/otherwise increase one's socio-sexual market value.
In some way, yes. Leaving aside any benefit that comes from surviving life and death struggle, consider what a person who boards the plane to embark on the Hock is like, compared to how he was a year ago:
He is more physically fit, having worked at strength training and aerobic conditioning.
He has carefully considered his selection of outdoor gear and equipment, building his planning and preparation skills.
He has made peace with his own mortality and considered deeply what was meaningful in his life.
So too: the Hock tests. Those who have garbage conscientiousness, or who are physically unfit, or who lack a certain relatively low level of intelligence...do not survive the Hock.
Therefore, I would argue that the median Hock survivor would be more attractive than average...or at least, this would be so if you simply rounded up a bunch of random people and offered a million bucks to those that survived, or just forced them to Hock but gave them time to train.
SkookumTree
8d ago
I am rooting for you...but suspect that Uncle Sam is going to be very much not amused and that this stunt could potentially land you in prison. Good luck. Consult a tax lawyer first - the very best you can find.
Something like this was already tried; I suppose that they could have killed a lot of people if they had been able to get their hands on lots of poison. With fifty smart people willing to die for the cause you can accomplish a good deal of destruction...
However, even a few dozen 9/11s' worth of casualties, hell a few hundred, wouldn't bring down technological society.
More options
Context Copy link