self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
16hr ago
It is difficult to overstate how different your love life is from mine. I am in almost every way the opposite of you. Partnered for ten years, soon to be married. Almost constitutionally incapable of big romantic gestures, inclined to focus on the smaller day to day things. Generally into women who are healthy, sane, and on the other side of the kids conversation.
Lucky man. I'm jealous, but also grateful, because it proves there's hope for the rest of us.
A large part of my struggles isn't just stochastic. It's awkward to date with intent when you keep hopping between countries, and are unsure where you will be or can be in a particular place. It's almost like the UK training scheme is designed to reduce medico fertility to nil. On a few occasions, I've met people I could see myself being happy with indefinitely, with minimal drama, but either or I they couldn't stay.
It sucks.
But damn do I enjoy reading about it.
Thank you. I suppose we all need a reason to be grateful for the eggs that did hatch.
I wish you luck. You've had a hard run of it. But there's no rhyme nor reason to these things. Sometimes it works until it doesn't, or doesn't until it does. There's little more you can do than try and learn from your mistakes, and you're doing that. I hope you find all the happiness of stability while keeping hold of the passion. My dad likes to say the most important thing we can do in life is find the one person we're going to share it with. If you do that right, the rest all falls into place.
Thank you, I mean it. I'm doing my best to minimize the role of luck. Every girl dreams of being lucky enough to find Mr. Right. It's worth considering what that gentleman had to do to get there.
Good luck with your upcoming marriage. Given the track record, I can only assume it will be happy and productive. You sound sane, and that's more than many can say. Probably me too.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
17hr ago
Hey. My condolences. One of the scariest moments of my life was when my dad to go in for a thryoidectomy after a biopsy found something too suspicious to let lie. He also has a heart condition that hospitalized him once, so I can relate even harder.
Hoping yours pulls through, and I'd say it's better to cry in front of him if that's the cost of seeing him. If he has any wisdom (which most fathers do), he'll know it's your way of saying you love him when words fail you.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
17hr ago
Since you're here, can you confirm if a 5 hour marathon is good or bad, relatively? I seem to recall that the 4 hour mark was a huge milestone in athletic history, so I'd presume 5 would be solid for an amateur.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
18hr ago
I'm sorry for my lack of inclusivity. I will listen, I will learn, and you will pay for a Substack subscription. Well, probably not, that's just an OnlyFans for "spice" addicts and I want to hold on to the last tattered shreds of my dignity.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
18hr ago
Thank you. I thought myself congenitally incapable of living in the moment, but that's probably not true!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
18hr ago
We all have our ways of coping. Writing just happens to be mine.
(It's far less than 95% if I'm being honest. Only the highest highs and the lowest lows make me feel like bothering. Squeaky wheels, grease, all that jazz)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
22hr ago
This is why I hate race-mixing. It exponentially increases the number of stereotypes.
I Can Just Do Things
People like to say that if you know your destination, you’re already there. These are usually the same people who claim that "pain is just weakness leaving the body" or that a kale smoothie tastes "just like a milkshake." If they are correct, however, I am currently residing in a state of pre-emptive heartbreak, a destination I seem to book a ticket to with alarming regularity.
I had flown back to India to escape the Scottish winter, a season that is less a weather event and more a personal attack, a psychic shearing of the very paltry amount of wool keeping me warm. The goal was to thaw out. Instead, I found myself running a familiar experiment: meet someone nice, become infatuated, and then watch as reality arrives like a wet dog at a picnic.
Some time ago, I had attempted to catalog the women I’d dated, which is the sort of neurotic bookkeeping one does when procrastinating on actual work. There was one particular entry: a fashion designer. My notes described her as "very cute, very sweet, and very depressed." It sounds like the tagline for a memoirs section at a bookstore.
Our early courtship was a non-starter. A few dates, no touching. Then, inevitably, the dramatic medical emergency. She messaged me in a panic because her brother was at the ER. I went, of course. I’d like to say it was entirely out of altruism, but I was mostly willing to brave a hospital haunted by my ex-girlfriend just to get in the good graces of a new one.
I arrived to find the brother sweating and complaining. He’s a difficult person under the best of circumstances, and kidney stones rarely bring out the best in anyone. The doctors were performing that unique hospital dance of terrifying the patient while offering absolutely no useful information. I worked in Oncology before I caught the psych train, I'm not an emergency physician, but I took a quick history and laid hands on him and felt fairly certain it was a stone. This was soon confirmed by imaging. The hospital staff, sensing a customer with insurance, wanted to perform surgery on a pebble the size of a grain of couscous.
I couldn't exactly go argue with them. In India, contradicting a senior doctor is a social crime on par with kicking a cow. So, I did the passive-aggressive thing and slipped the brother some medical PDFs, instructing him to argue his own case. It worked. He peed it out, he was fine, and I got a pity date out of it.
It went well enough, though I got the distinct impression she was only there to pay off a karmic debt.
There was also the time she called me in the middle of my shift, suicidal. I was in the ICU. People were literally dying around me, monitors were screaming, and I was on the phone using my "soothing voice", which usually just puts people to sleep, to convince her to put down the scissors. It worked. She went to bed, and I went back to restart someone’s heart.
Then, silence. She vanished. I was in Scotland. I had my share of problems. I had more than my share of other people's problems, that's just my job.
Months later, I noticed her Instagram was deactivated. In the language of modern dating, this is the equivalent of a boarded-up house with a pile of newspapers on the porch. It means a breakdown. I messaged her. Four days later - an eternity when you are waiting for a reply from a pretty girl and genuinely concerned about her wellbeing - she wrote back.
"Heyoo pretty boy."
She was back in town, living with her brother and sister-in-law, having traded fashion design for financial calculators. She was studying for her CFA. It was a pivot from fabrics to derivatives, which I suppose is just a different way of obsessing over tiny details and patterns.
The texting... It was sublime. I began feeling uncanny, like it couldn't possibly be real that a pretty girl would laugh at all my jokes, even the really awful puns. And that she'd make me laugh too, hard. That we would get each other. It made me wonder why it hadn't happened the first go around. Had we learned from our mistakes? Or had we simply been battered by the passage of time, had our rough edges sanded off? Had we learned to settle for "good enough" and call that good?
We met at a café. She refers to herself as "smol," a spelling that makes my teeth ache, but she looked fantastic. She spent the entire time insulting herself, and I spent the entire time telling her she was wrong. We laughed until she claimed she was in physical pain. She said her cheeks ached. I pointed out the innuendo, and asked her to wait a while. I dropped her off home, and accepted an invitation that I hadn't thought I'd ever receive. Come upstairs. Her brother would be home soon, and she told me that he usually threw a fit if she wanted to bring a boy over. But when she told him it was "the doctor", he only expressed calm acceptance that in a more expressive person, might constitute outright approval. I guess good deeds remember their names.
I left at 3 am, after drinking quite a lot of her lemon rum. It didn't quite drown the butterflies in my stomach and the aching desire to see her again.
We both told each other that our date had been the highlight of a rather dreary year. I know I meant it, and I choose to believe she did too. Fuck that qualifier, "choose", I genuinely do.
Then came the family vacation. My mother dragged us to the nicest beaches India has to offer, a tropical paradise where she immediately developed a swollen cornea because she refuses to listen to her ophthalmologist, or her doctor son about contact lenses. Between applying eye drops to my mother and drinking beer by the beach, I spent most of my waking moments texting her. When my mom's eyesight recovered, she had to ask who I was talking to all day, with a goofy grin on my face.
We wrote essays to each other. She told me about her anemia, which she treats with chia seeds sprinkled on her chocolate pancakes. I told her pretty girls will do literally anything but take their iron tablets. She told me she’s terrified of needles. I told her about the time I almost died of appendicitis because I was too scared to go to the hospital. In my defense, I was six years old. We debated whether she was "vanilla" or a "sex goblin." I had made the mistake of assuming the former. I was pleasantly disabused. She sent me a picture of herself in a saree that was so attractive it actually made me angry. I tried keeping the messages light, PG-13. Suggest, don't tell. I was rather shaken when she threw caution to the wind and made it rather clear that she wanted me. I blushed. I tossed and turned in bed till 4 am with a boner because she was an utter tease who I could tell was deriving great satisfaction from making me squirm.
On December 12th, I got my exam results. I had crushed them. The sensible thing to do was to fly back to Scotland, return to my job, and accept that this was just a holiday romance.
Instead, I stood in the ocean, ignoring the coral reefs and the fish, and changed my flight. I bought VIP tickets to a concert I didn't want to see. I delayed my return to the real world for a girl who thinks her uterus is a "pink balloon."
They say if you know your destination, you’re already there. My destination, apparently, is standing in the surf, staring at a phone screen, waiting for a "trash panda" to tell me she wants pasta. I've saved a bottle of my best scotch for her. It costs more per shot than the whole bottle of her rum, but it's a fair trade for her company.
Man, self_made_human, you know this can't work. You have a job. You live a very large and a rather small continent away. You aren't incapable of loving well-adjusted women, they're just thin on the ground, few and far between. Probably snatched up in uni and happily married by now, unlike you. You tell yourself they you're happy in the market for lemons, you bite into them, skin and all, and enjoy the juices running down your face, staining that one floral shirt you intend to wear till it's ragged. You let your dumb-ass heart override that frontal lobe, and you enjoy your limbic system running itself ragged too. You know she doesn't want kids, and she's adamant on that point even when you tactfully, haha only joking, attempt to suggest otherwise. You know you want those. You know you're in for pain. You write essays about it. You intellectualize, you rationalize, you romanticize.
You're a poor bastard trapped between two kinds of death: the slow death of "stable but boring" or the fast death of knowing exactly how the crash will feel before you even take off.
You're a doctor who's seen too many terminal cases, except the patient is your own capacity for unguarded hope. You're grieving the version of yourself who could still be excited about a future with someone without immediately cataloging all the ways it won't work. The undefended, optimistic, "butterflies and bees" version of you who could look someone you loved, talk with her and laugh and imagine and not immediately start writing the breakup essay in his head. You've spent several hours tracking down all the essays you once wrote about falling in and out of love. You've charted your trajectory: it's a biased random walk through a minefield. You've looked over every explosion, remembered the pain of amputation, jettisioning who you once were, the slow healing that left your heart sclerosed and cramping. You've seen yourself become a better writer at the cost of becoming cynical. Your muse drinks your blood and in turn pisses out digital ink, with just enough ground glass in it to hurt.
Fuck it, fuck me, fuck you. You're just tired, enjoy the ride and don't look at the expiry dates on the bottle, liquor keeps.
(Is it a postscript if it's written before publication? I think that's just script.)
That was going to be it. Another neat little vivisection, another essay where I dissect my own heart while it's still beating and call it insight. File it next to all the others in my ever-expanding catalog of romantic catastrophes, each one slightly better written than the last because at least I'm getting something out of the wreckage.
Except here's the problem with pre-writing your own eulogy: sometimes you don't actually die.
I had spent half my vacation in a state of wanting. Not the casual kind, the obsessive kind, the kind where you check your phone every thirty seconds like a lab rat hitting a lever. I wanted another date. I told her as much. The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother's place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They're not tyrants. They're just Indian parents, which means they're constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved. Mine can be guilty of the same, but I am thickskinned enough to threaten to decamp to a hotel if they kick up too much fuss. They love me enough to relent.
The surveillance wasn't the worst part. She could physically leave. But she was drowning in guilt, the kind that only comes from having tasted freedom and then having it revoked. She'd had her own apartment, her own money, her own life. Now she was back to being a broke student and a daughter under parental scrutiny, except with the psychological damage of knowing exactly what she'd lost. The thought of dolling herself up to see me, of explaining where she was going, of lying by omission or commission, it strangled her.
I liked her too much to push. I told her I'd give a great deal to see her again, and soon. I left it there. Sometimes the best move is to wait and see if someone wants you badly enough to navigate their own obstacles.
She did. She dropped the "going out with friends" bomb in the middle of a conversation about groceries and fled before her parents could cross-examine her. I did my part. I got the best haircut I'd gotten in months, the kind where the barber actually listens instead of just buzzing everything down to institutional length. I did skincare, which for me is practically revolutionary. I unpacked the suit that had been living in my luggage like a well-dressed corpse, travelling across continents but never actually getting worn. I looked good. Better than good. I looked like someone who gave enough of a shit to try.
I had a work meeting first, because apparently my job follows me everywhere like a well-trained dog, including on vacation. The moment I could escape, I bolted. I showed up early at our meeting spot, flowers in hand, but this time I had a plan. That cutesy Japanese store, the one that assaults you with pastel aggression the moment you walk in, I'd spotted something there last time. A plushie. Hot pink and goth black with a little skull, the kind of thing that was so perfectly her that it felt like fate. Or at least like good pattern recognition. I bought it. I wanted to see her face light up. I wanted to be the kind of person who notices these things and acts on them.
I'd offered to come get her when she arrived, but she was too proud to accept the offer. I will admit to some schadenfreude when she got lost in the building. Of course she did. The floor plan was designed by someone who hated intuitive navigation. I talked her through it over the phone. I ambushed her at the elevator, flowers hidden behind my back like some kind of rom-com protagonist. There she was, a tiny short-haired tomboy with an accent I found delicious. She'd dressed up, and she looked ravishing.
When she appeared, I kissed her hand (who even does that? Apparently I do now) and produced the bouquet. She beamed. The plushie came later, hidden at the restaurant table. She loved it, then immediately started catastrophizing about where to hide it from her parents and her klepto friends. I told her I was good at gift-giving when properly motivated. She told me I'd motivated her quite effectively.
The date was absurd in the best way. We ordered Long Island Iced Teas, which is what you do when you need liquid courage to have conversations you've been avoiding. They were great, or had copious amounts of liquor in them, which are interchangeable if I squint. She dabbed carbonara sauce from my moustache at the exact moment I realized she'd seen that scene from The Lady and the Tramp. We were disgusting. I loved it.
Then we had the talk. The real one, not the pleasant surface chatter and smoldering flirtation. The fact that I'd be flying back to Scotland while she was stuck here, treading water. The kids thing, that perennial dealbreaker lurking in every serious conversation like a landmine you both know is there but keep walking toward anyway.
It went easier than expected, which might mean something or might just mean we were drunk enough to be honest. I told her I'd be back if she wanted me back. I suggested, with the kind of boldness that only comes from Long Island Iced Teas and desperation, that I could fly her over for a few weeks. The idea made both of us dizzy. We sighed about the kids. We acknowledged it was big, maybe the biggest thing. She'd already told me her brother's marriage was crumbling because his wife had sprung the no-kids revelation on him after the wedding, knowing full well he wanted them. I'd already told her they should divorce. There's more to that story, but not for here.
We unpacked her reasons for not wanting children. The body horror of pregnancy, the way it transforms you into something alien. I told her the right man wouldn't care about stretch marks or loose skin, which I believe is true. If it's not, he was never the right man. Labor terrified her, the sheer physical violence of it. I reminded her that c-sections exist, that my entire family of gynecologists chose them. She told me about past boyfriends who'd been astonishingly tactless about the whole thing, who'd made her feel defective for not wanting what they assumed she should. I deployed all the tact I had like a drone strike. Call me Clausewitz. It's one of the few things I'm genuinely good at.
The concert became collateral damage. I'd bought a single VIP ticket earlier, planning to confirm she'd be free before getting hers. She wanted details. I, being an idiot, let her see the invoice. Her eyes watered. She said I absolutely couldn't spend that much on her. I pointed out I'd spent three times that just changing my flights at peak season, but she wouldn't budge. I didn't push, although I told her I'd been imagining her on my arm, showing her off to my friends like some kind of trophy I'd actually earned. We compromised: I'd go to the concert, get respectably drunk on the drink vouchers, then meet her at a hotel after. It's not ideal, but it's something.
Here's what I didn't expect: we never stopped talking. Hours of conversation without a single dead zone, without me having to fill silences like I was spackling drywall. Most women I've dated have required constant verbal maintenance. I can do it (I can hold a conversation with a brick wall if it's the polite kind), but it's exhausting. With her, words just kept coming. Machine-gun banter, jokes that built on jokes, puns that made us both groan and laugh simultaneously. Vulnerability disguised as stories. The kind of rapport that's rare enough that, once tasted, you notice its absence everywhere else.
She said I was spoiling her, ruining her for other men by setting standards the locals couldn't match. I told her that was the entire point. When I lovebomb someone, it's scorched earth baby, carpet bombing, not a single daisy left standing. I told her this was completely out of character for me. My previous ex had to formally demand flowers like she was filing a complaint with management, and even then I only did it once. Changing international flights at obscene cost? Buying VIP tickets to shows I don't care about in the hopes I could take her with me? Six months ago, self_made_human would have assumed he'd suffered a traumatic brain injury. Now I'm calling it something else, though I'm still working out what.
If this was just about sex, I could achieve it for a tenth of the investment. There's something else happening here. I'm figuring it out in real time, which is either growth or just a different flavor of self-deception.
I told her about this essay. The version I'd written before our date, where I'd already scripted the ending. I laid out my neuroses like medical specimens: the way I sublimate my own wounds into fixing others, the way my ex with BPD recalibrated my tolerance for chaos so thoroughly that stable feels boring and volatile feels like home. The way I've sabotaged perfectly good relationships by simply losing interest when they proved to be well-adjusted. I told her I thought this would end in heartbreak, that the odds were stacked against us in ways neither of us could control.
She asked me not to show her the essay. She said it would hurt, that it would make her cry. I promised I wouldn't. Not yet. Not until the dust settles, if it ever does.
Then she recalibrated everything. She told me she'd thought I was out of her league the first time around, that she'd been into me all along. I'd spent months assuming she was there out of obligation, paying off some karmic debt from the kidney stone incident. Apparently I'd just been too oblivious to notice. If we'd gotten this right the first time, my entire year might have been different. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, just with different timing. I'm not sure which possibility disturbs me more.
We fucked up by not checking the time. Too busy staring at each other like teenagers. By the time we looked up, it was late. Her parents called, asking when she'd be home. Fuck. It was already ten. I offered to bring her to my place, break open the bottle of scotch I'd been saving, before it aged to the point where it was too expensive for me to drink. We both knew exactly what would happen if she ended up on my couch. She couldn't do it. Guilt about being late and disappointing her parents, again. We compromised on one more glass of wine, then another, until we realized eleven o'clock was bearing down on us like an oncoming truck.
I insisted on dropping her off in an Uber. Every minute felt precious, like something I needed to hoard against future scarcity. I was taking a puff on a hookah of aerosolized gold and pixie dust, I just had to hold it all in my lungs until I gasped, till my very blood glittered and fizzed. And then I'd do it all over again. She agreed.
The car ride was everything. We were all over each other, making up for lost time, making out like we'd just discovered the concept. I won't give you a blow-by-blow. You're not here for erotica, and I'm selfish enough to want to keep some things private. But I will tell you this: the best moment was when I pulled her into my arms and let her rest her head on my chest while I kissed her hair. That's the image that keeps replaying. I felt obligated to tip the driver generously for being discreet about it, since we were anything but.
I'm glad she lived far away. By the time we reached her building, we were both wrecked. Flustered, craving more, feeling like addicts who'd been Narcanned mid-high. I said goodbye with all the recalcitrance of a toddler being dropped off at daycare for the first time. She looked like she felt the same.
The moment I got home, the texting resumed. Except "texting" is far too innocent a word for what we were doing. No holds barred. Every ounce of my wordcel vocabulary bent toward crafting the filthiest prose I could manage. She matched me, word for depraved word. We're both wordsmiths when properly motivated, it turns out.
Eventually, after what felt like both an eternity and no time at all, I told her to go to bed. I said I'd do what I always do with feelings I can't quite process: write them into submission, pin them to the page like butterflies in a collector's case.
So here I am. The taste of her still mapped on my lips. An essay that needs its ending rewritten because I'd already decided how this would go before it even started. I thought I knew my destination, thought I was already there in that state of pre-emptive heartbreak.
Maybe I bought a ticket to the wrong place. Maybe this me realizing it's possible to reschedule certain flights, and stay on the beach just a tad bit longer.
I've got things to figure out. The distance, the kids thing, the fact that I'm pathologically attracted to women who come with warning labels. But for once, I'm not writing the autopsy report before the patient dies. I'm not cataloging the failure before it happens. I'm just here, wanting this badly enough to be stupid about it, willing to believe that maybe my diagnostic abilities can do more than just identify the disease. It feels good to undon the cuirass of cynicism, set my back straight and let the tension bleed out for once. Music hits hard - every lyric dripping with cosmic significance, the world seems brighter and more vivid. Is this what happiness feels like? Is this- no, don't jinx it.
Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
The writing did wander
That is the biggest tell. I did ask the AIs to try their hand at editing (I just didn't use it). They always spit out something more... polished. Streamlined. Less fluff. Fewer details. That's just not me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Well, I would certainly be the last person to tell you not to contribute more. I was surprised to see that it was stuck in the filter, but you got unlucky and had one of us scrutinize it in the small gap between post and explainer.
On Reddit, that would be a death sentence, but this forum is set up such that the front page evolves rather slowly. Very few potential eyeballs lost - no harm, no foul.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I can't disagree. I mean, I could, but that would be a lie and insulting to both our intelligences. The savior complex will be the death of me. Pray I get better, or find someone actually worth saving.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I actually didn't use AI for this one! I sometimes feel the need to do things the old fashioned way, but I use them so much that I've probably internalized something or the other. I'm even tempted to use em-dashes, but I'm scared of the inevitable hissy fits. It would have been nice to notice that they were an option—before they became borderline taboo.
This essay was heavily workshopped. I used the bots for feedback, and oh boy were they pissed. Apparently even LLMs have soft spots for women in distress and pattern match to bad behavior. To my relief, gently asking them to justify their takes while refraining from revealing authorship reliably gets them to chill out.
And when I include most of the other essays I've written about my romantic misadventures? Poor bastards want to buy me a drink. I'm not inclined to disagree with them on that one.
As regards the story, there’s plenty unsaid that you’re not yet ready to admit to yourself, especially around your offer. But you know that.
I genuinely don't know that. Believe me, I've tried. I maxed out messages on multiple platforms asking for psychoanalysis, and only found a minimal amount of it helpful. The essay, in conjunction with my lengthy argument with Here, that sums up everything about my understanding of myself that I feel is defensible.
Thank you. That's high praise. I remember you being very engaged with the prequel, it seemed to resonate with your own experiences, so I was wondering if you'd have anything to say about this one.
Say what you will about the drudgery of junior-level psychiatry in the NHS, it at least keeps me too busy to make questionable decisions. I land back in town, and realize that I don't have quite as many friends left there as I'd like, and there's only so much I can pet my dogs before they go bald. Idle hands are the devil's workshop, even if I think my behavior has only been slightly impish.
Because it constantly reminded me of my own boredom, my own looking around for people or other's life situations in distress, so that i can try to be the white knight, the rescuer, the solution provider, the philosophical guru who has all the answers for others (but almost none for myself). And it was a painful reminder.
Hey man, if you're anything like me, you do have the answers for yourself. The problem is executing upon them. And that? Easier said than done. I am undoing my cynicism by falling madly in love again, it's worth a shot.
horrible themes to write about so openly. horrible because they have so much truth in them. reality about human nature but all the bad ones about it. manipulation, lies, secrets, no-trust. but still very humanly connected.
I agree that it is ugly. Having written the piece, I was on tenterhooks about actually posting it. I still am, since you don't see me shilling my Substack. I try to bring clarity and an incisive edge to my observations of others, sometimes turning the scalpel inwards hurts. But I also value honesty, I'm not a perfect individual, and I do not wish to present myself as the flawless observer who does no harm., who always observes the system without disturbing its mechanisms. I certainly harm myself, on occasion.
i can only thank you for showing me, the reader, a mirror. (ignore if this doesn't make much sense).
It makes perfect sense. My essays are snapshots, time capsules, photographs of a state of mine and a very particular time. I hope to look back at this mirror when the cracks have healed. I hope you do the same, for yourself.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
You think pretty highly of yourself despite being a cad (if your story is true — more likely it is fake) and not particularly bright.
It is a blessing that my self-esteem doesn't particularly hinge on validation from strangers. If I'm not so bright, then your words of wisdom are lost on me. It helps to recall that adage of not wrestling with pigs in the mud or arguing with fools.
There is a reason the Greeks had more than one word to describe love. I’m suggesting the highest love needs choice
In a coincidence that makes me marginally respect you more, I was considering pointing out the same fact. Unfortunately, for the opposite reason - namely that you chose to start by using eros to make claims about philia. Fortunately, I'm not horny for my dogs. Yeah, no fucking shit that your daughter doesn't love you like your wife. I'd certainly hope so.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Funny I have the same reaction when I see your name on a post.
I don't think of you at all, and that's for the best.
Honestly, spend a minute or two thinking about your own argument. Heard of feral dogs, dingos?
Love requires the ability to say no and to be able to say "fuck you" and bounce? Well, I suppose no child has ever loved their parents till the age of ~12.
"To put it in erotic terms" is a phrase that almost invariably precedes a terrible argument.
You seem to be operating under the belief that love is only valid if it is conditional. You imply that affection is only real if it is withheld until specific performance metrics are met. That is closer to an insecure attachment style than it is a philosophy.
If your definition of "true love" necessitates that the other party is constantly adjudicating your worthiness, constantly holding the threat of rejection over your head like a sword of Damocles, then I feel pity. You are describing a courtroom, not a relationship.
Dogs can reject you. Try mistreating one. They bite. They run away. They cower. Sometimes they just don't like the cut of your jib. When a dog looks at you with adoration, it is not because they are biological automata programmed to worship. It is because you have proven yourself to be a benevolent leader of the pack. You've earned that trust through consistency and care.
Narcissism? I call it a relief from the exhausting, transactional nature that is human interaction (on occasion) that I detailed in the post above. Humans "judge" and "reject" based on tax brackets, social standing, and their own untreated neuroses. Dogs judge based on character and kindness. Perhaps they also weight how stinky your feet are in the equation, but I don't hold that against them.
If you think preferring the latter degrades society, you clearly haven't spent enough time in the dating market. Or perhaps you lucked out, that's been known to happen. The narcissism isn't in the dog owner. It is in the human who believes they are too complex and special to learn anything from a creature that figured out how to be happy fifty thousand years ago.
And in case, if it's not obvious, the majority of dog owners have... normal relationships with their pets. A healthy one, even. They've been shown to improve mental health, though it's hard to prescribe a golden retriever unless the patient is blind. I should hope it's clear that I'm open to more complicated relationships, while finding solace in simple licks.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
That is a sensible take. I don't really disagree. You have to understand that she's a very small component of my life, I've gone the better part of a year without thinking of her or being drawn in. Now that I'm back, I'm curious and slightly bored. I've been spending time with friends and family, treating my dogs to premium Scottish leather chewtoys (my shoes). I have a second date with someone I already feel limerence about. She (the model) even wanted to meet me yesterday, I demurred.
The previous assistance I offered her was born of genuine pity. There's far less of that now.
You offered marriage with the strings attached so that she'd refuse it
Strings attached? I live in Scotland. That's where I'm going to be for the foreseeable future. I'm not marrying someone who isn't willing to relocate to be with me, and I think my unwillingness to do the same isn't unprincipled when I'm doing a residency. That's kinda sorta important for my career. Some spoiled daddy's girl who's too good to wash her own knickers? Do I want to sign up with a funeral home early?
I had hoped it would be clear that the whole point of that gambit would be to show her that what she was asking for was untenable. All the polite excuses I'd used till date didn't do the trick.
What would you prefer I said? "Sorry beautiful, I was already against marrying you because I think you're too dumb for me. We might have really fucked up kids. Wait, that was before I found out that you have the morals of an alley-cat."
That finally put it through to her that I'm not an option. I mean, I say finally with less than 100% confidence. I think there's a real chance that she's back to begging me to fly back and rescue her before this message goes cold. Even after becoming tired of her shit and pushing her buttons, I'm still a far superior option to any at hand. If you're inclined to disagree, look at her behavior.
What you insinuate, and which is absolutely, categorically false, is that I did it to lead her on or assuage my ego. I know I can have her, a snap of my fingers and she'd be on her knees with a ring, or for other reasons. "Babe, I'm willing to stay back for you. But you ought to know, I have a try before I buy policy, a sad consequence of being burned one too many times. Let's get you a drink and out of those stuffy clothes." Boom. Done. The only thing stopping me is a conscience, and I'm loathe to lose it.
You wanted her trotting around after you like a little dog, but you disliked her enough not to want anything serious
I... uh... What do I even say to this? You might want to do less off-the-cuff pattern matching and look at the whole thing in context. God knows I worked very hard to provide said context. Was it all for naught?
I'm the one who wants her trotting around me? Hardly. I'd pulled away well before I was due to leave, I didn't bother her one bit while I was away, and I wouldn't have called her if she hadn't texted me first. Do you see any mention of me texting or calling first? No? After I've been brutally honest, and even penned an unflattering description of myself?
In contrast, I am distressingly close to being guilty of orbiting her.
This is the polar opposite of me jerking her around, making her dance to my tune. All I'm really guilty of is being guilted into playing along, and deriving some voyeuristic pleasure from seeing things play out.
I do think she's better off without you, and you may be better off without her.
Quite possibly. Unfortunately, she keeps coming back. I'll avail myself of a baseball bat should it happen again. I'm talking about me being better off without her.
Would she be better off without me? That's the debatable hypothesis. You do realize that I'm the least bad man in her life, by a country mile? I've been the voice of reason. I've gone hoarse. I'd dare say I was too nice, to the point of enabling more bad behavior because of her delusion that I'd always be there for her. It would have been better, quite definitively so, if she never knew me. Then perhaps she would have already shed many a tear alone and settled. I suspect she will eventually. Her lifestyle is unsustainable. She is a grown-ass woman almost my age, not a child who can't be expected to know better.
A woman you dislike, feel contempt for, and can't ever respect but damn it she's a human female, you're a straight human male, your biology goes "bong!"
I would like to note that the overwhelming bulk of my attitude towards her, until very recently, was genuine pity rather than contempt. The things she told me struck me as beyond the pale, out of character even. I'm an imperfect judge of that, even if I think I do alright. Do you feel her actions aren't worthy of some contempt? If not, extend that Christian charity to me too. Besides:
If all men were wise, psychiatrists and clergymen alike would be out of a job. I've let my dick lead me to places I wouldn't go without a gun. There really is no solution, barring bumping into someone I actually want to marry and then doing so successfully. I'm hunting for the happily ever after. I'm working on it. I'm a lovesick fool, who mostly disguises his disappointed romanticism with performative cynicism. That isn't mutually exclusive with liking sex with pretty women.
You really won't get that. Not for any fault of your own, but a deeply religious, middle aged women who I believe professes chastity (I could be misrembering the last bit, genuinely do correct me if I'm wrong) is not in a position to grokk it. The men here? They're sighing or chuckling.
that's not a situation that's good for anyone involved
Incorrect. I'll be fine. I've found someone else I like, a lot. I have a date with her tomorrow. I have that pleasant giddiness at that prospect. I have flowers ready. I intend to buy a soft toy, but because I care, not because I needed to kill time. Unfortunately, the realist in me knows even that isn't unlikely to work out, but I'm ignoring him. He's a real drag. I could do with a fling during an Indian Summer, and who knows, things might work out. I might not ache forever.
The damage to me is bounded. I've done my best to minimize the damage to others. But you can see how well that worked I'm sure.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Thought so. That didn't strike me as modern picture of the situation in either Britain or the US, which are the Default™ expectations, or at least what I assumed without this context.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
But you do want to use her, and here is where I get off the bus and hop aboard the Dumb Bitch wagon.
Look, ma'am, if you are going to litigate against male sexuality, you had best pack a lunch; court is going to be in session for the next ten million years. If you win the case, you'll be the first person worthy of canonization this side of the millennium. He who has no desire to sleep with a hot, nubile model may cast the first stone. I’ll wait.
That said, please substantiate "fucking her around."
I started in good faith. I told her I was moving. I rebuffed her efforts to convince me to marry her. I put marriage on the table if she came with me, because I was correct in hoping it would help her connect the dots. She declined. Instead, she wants me to stay here, uproot my life, and marry her, while she continues to sleep with other men. Do I look like a chump? Do I look like a chimp? Do I look like, as @Sloot would eloquently/crudely put it, a simp?
She treats my time with the entitlement usually reserved for minor royalty. She told me she'd let her ex get her drunk in his nightclub and then let him take her back home to fuck her senseless, a few weeks before I was due to leave. She hassled me with a pregnancy scare - I am not a gynecologist. She once called me away from a family dinner, weeping, begging to see me: only to reveal she actually just wanted a ride to her toxic ex's house because she missed him. She is lucky I didn't throw a drink in her face.
Do you know what the male equivalent of that behavior is? Removing panties under false pretenses. I have never done that. I have left beautiful women behind because I had the simple honesty not to lie to them. That is a low bar, I admit, but look at the other clowns in this circus. One is a cheater, the other is a coward, one more paranoid (justified with knowledge he doesn't have), and the lady in the center is an arsonist complaining about the heat.
So what if I stick around for the attention, the drama, and the chance to get laid again? Her home is already a burning heap of garbage; I didn't light the match. She is cheating on two men and trying to solicit fraud from a third. At this point, my aversion to homewrecking is overpowered by the realization that there is no home left to wreck. A good soul would have saved numbers and organized a group call with Rich and Poor alike.
Fucking her around just so you can feel superior and post about it on here is not cool, man.
I chose unkindness because politeness failed. I chose to narrate it because it is absurd.
I have offered nothing but the truth, for once delivered with the bedside manner of a crash cart. I refused the fraud. I refused the gaslighting. I told her to settle for the least bad option. Truth is an absolute defense for libel, and it should be for being a "cad," too.
You're louche, you're rakish... you want to look cool while you're doing it.
Guilty. Of looking cool. The sunglasses are there because the glare from her bad decisions is blinding.
Much of the tone is a bit. If you missed that I was performing the role as a shield against the sheer depressing reality of it, that's on you. If I didn't write it this way, I'd just be another sad guy wondering why the world is broken. Better to play Hunter S. Thompson than Werther.
But you read this story, where a woman offers sex in exchange for malpractice to cover up her infidelity and wishes to euthanize the dogs of a man she's cheating for her convenience, and think I'm the villain? Really? Not a word for the arsonist, just the guy taking notes? I'm not afraid to tell her anything you wish to convey. I don't care. She reached out to me again, today, so evidently she thinks I'm less of a cad than you do, not that I would trust her judgment further than I can throw her. She's using me, and I decide to use her in the sense that people used to pay money to gawk at the inmates of an asylum.
My soul floats as light as a feather. I trade off interesting vs. regret, and right now, the ROI is looking just fine.
I kickstarted my year by re-reading Reverend Insanity. I won't bore anyone with a recap, all I'll say is that it took me 4 months to finish not because I was slow, but because the novel is both great and very, very long. About 5x the entire HP series.
But I digress. Reverend Insanity is peak fiction. Go read it.
Outside of that singular, four-month nostalgia trip, this was a bad year for books. It felt like walking through a library where all the ink had run, leaving behind only the faint smell of pretension and pulp.
The Golden Oecumene Trilogy (John C. Wright) I am sitting on a full review of this, much like a hen sits on an egg that refuses to hatch. The barrier is purely technological. I write in markdown, and Substack demands a rich text editor, and the activation energy required to convert the formatting is currently higher than the energy required to simply stare at the wall and sigh.
The story concerns Phaethon, a man in a post-human utopia who decides he would rather own a spaceship than be happy. It is solid hard sci-fi. Wright builds a world of remote-controlled bodies and dream-logic Internet architectures that feels surprisingly robust. It is the sort of future the effective accelerationists dream about, assuming they stop tweeting long enough to actually build anything.
The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson) I have already written about this. The premise is a banger: The Black Death kills 99% of Europe instead of 30%, leaving the world to be carved up by China and the Islamic Dar al-Islam. We follow a group of souls reincarnating through the centuries, trying to build a history that doesn't end in trench warfare.
It is a good book that fails to be great because Robinson treats Buddhism less like a religion and more like a narrative device he bought at a discount store. The theology is contrived. The characters feel less like reincarnated souls and more like KSR wearing different hats, lecturing the reader on the inevitability of scientific progress. It is Whig history with a side of curry.
Perdido Street Station (China Miéville) I tried. I really did. I read half of this brick before throwing it across the room, or I would have, had it not been on my phone, and had I not been worried about scratching the screen.
Miéville is a talented writer who has fallen in love with his own adjectives and the way his tongue tickles his taint. The setting is New Crobuzon, a city that is essentially London if London were made entirely of grime, cactus-people, and Marxian alienation. So basically just London, albeit with denizens who are more literal in their prickliness. The plot allegedly involves Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin trying to restore flight to a bird-man, which eventually unleashes psychic moths that eat minds. Oh, and he also fucks a cockroach woman. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that the cockroach bit is above the neck.
But getting to the moths is an ordeal. You have to wade through three hundred pages of atmospheric sludge. It is navel-gazey. It is the literary equivalent of a goth teenager showing you their collection of preserved insects for six hours. The pacing is nonexistent. Miéville seems to believe that if he describes the dirt on a windowpane with enough polysyllabic words, it constitutes a plot point. It does not. 6/10.
The Simoqin Prophecy (Samit Basu) This was a re-read of a teenage favorite, and unlike most things from my teenage years, it holds up.
It is Indian fantasy, a genre that is tragically underrepresented. Basu takes the standard "Farmboy Saves the World" trope and beats it to death with a cricket bat. The hero, Prince Asvin, is sent on a quest, the only sincere man in town, surrounded by people who know they are in a book or at least have a refreshing tendency to say fuck you to the plot and do sensible things. It is meta without being annoying, which is a rare feat. Tracking down the epub for the third novel required me to scour corners of the internet that haven't been visited since 2008, but it was worth it. Western readers might miss the puns, but good satire transcends cultural boundaries.
The Outside (Ada Hoffmann) There is a specific genre of modern sci-fi that I call "HR-punk." The Outside is the apotheosis of this genre.
The protagonist is an autistic scientist who accidentally invents a heresy that attracts eldritch gods. She is autistic. She is also a lesbian. The author is autistic. The author is possibly a lesbian. Did you get that? The book will remind you. It confronts the cosmic horror of AI gods who eat human souls, but the real horror is the prose.
It feels less like a story and more like a diversity statement written by a committee of Lovecraftian entities trying to avoid a lawsuit. It is absolute dross. The identity politics are not the subtext; they are the text, the cover, and the barcode. It is a book that demands you clap for it, not because it is good, but because it is brave. It is not brave. It is boring.
Theft of Fire (Devon Eriksen) This is more like it. A decent sci-fi page-turner. It’s about a roughneck space trucker and a genetically modified heiress trying to steal a superweapon. It’s The Expanse meets Firefly, but written by someone who really, really likes engineering schematics.
I am a Richard Morgan fan. I like Hard Men Busting Heads (In Space!). Eriksen delivers this. The physics are hard, and so am I : radiators, delta-v, the silence of the void. Unfortunately, the book suffers from the "ChatGPT Problem." It makes predictions about AI that became obsolete roughly three weeks before publication. I look forward to a sequel.
The "Mid" Pile: Footfall, Live Free or Die, Through Struggle, The Stars I group these together because they all suffer from the same pathology: The inability to write a human being who sounds like they have ever spoken to another human being.
- Footfall (Larry Niven): Aliens who look like baby elephants invade Earth. They are called the Fithp. The military sci-fi is competent, but the characters are cardboard cutouts that Niven seemingly forgot to paint. I liked Ringworld in my youth. I wanted to love this. I did not.
- Through Struggle, The Stars: Standard mil-SF. The author hands the characters the Idiot Ball whenever the plot requires tension. It is frustrating. It is like watching a horror movie where the teenagers decide to split up to search the haunted asylum, except here they are commanding starships.
- Live Free or Die (John Ringo): This is part of the "Troy Rising" series. It is extremely "Humanity Fuck Yeah." Aliens build a gate in the solar system, and humanity fights back. How? Maple syrup. I am not joking. The protagonist leverages the galactic demand for maple syrup to fund an orbital defense platform. It is a libertarian fever dream where the free market literally saves the species. It is soft sci-fi for people who think Ayn Rand was a documentary filmmaker.
Space Pirates of Andromeda (John C. Wright) Wright again. This is an odd duck. It feels like Wright watched Star Wars, got annoyed at the physics, and decided to rewrite A New Hope with accurate orbital mechanics.
We have a princess, a gallant Space Cop, and an evil empire with a Death Star. But in addition to the Force, we have very rigorous adherence to the laws of thermodynamics. The dialogue is baroque. The characters are larger than life in a way that feels operatic. It is a 7/10 novel that I finished on a long flight, sandwiched between a crying baby and a man who smelled like old cheese. It passed the time. I will not read the sequels. I have mountains to climb, and by mountains, I mean another four million words of Chinese cultivation novels.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Was he working in the North Sea? Half of Scotland seems to be involved in Oil and Gas, but my impression is that the overwhelming majority are locals/white.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
It strongly depends on what actually caused me to end up in such dire straits. Was it insufficient care taken when anonymizing patient details land me in front of a patient tribunal and strip me off my license? Did the UK succumb to the rage virus? Did the NHS finally crumble?
Usually, my backstop is coming back to India. Working with my dad and taking the reins. Looking for a job elsewhere. If I'm done with training by then, I could probably make a decent life for myself as a shrink, if not, well I suppose it's hitting the books and preparing for some other exam. I'm pretty good at that, even if it's hardly my preferred way of passing the time.
If I ever have delusions about wanting to get into a relationship, I'll just talk to self_made_human to kill that urge in a jiffy.
This is "Pagliacci becoming a doctor for clowns" territory. I can't cure my own urge to get into a relationship! I'm doing that right now, by which I mean getting into one and not the curing. (it's not with the model).
By all means, do enter into relationships. We live in a fallen world, in an age of declining TFRs. Everyone needs to do their part. Find love, expose your heart to being flying kicked and then curbstomped. It's a learning experience. Most women are actually nice, I just have very little to say about them that isn't better articulated by some romance blogger with a bazillion followers on Substack.
You're making me blush. No one more hopelessly romantic than a lapsed cynic.
Writing a book is hard work, though I might have enough material for "crazy women and how to love them (don't)". But I think of how much people make writing sappy bullshit on Substack and wonder if I should pivot away from writing about Chinese web fiction and niche hard scifi novels. Of course, ¿por que no los dos?
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