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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4794 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here a few times.

Here's this travel writer's account of following in his footsteps and after Bourdain finally meets with her and validates her, she has a bit of an identity crisis when she realizes he's a sad loser.

Firstly, being a travel journalist is not as glamorous as it looks, having tossed her cookies after eating token cooked goat brain and local fruit

The fast life always slows down, but not how you’d expect. After enough time, you just get used to the pace, then it doesn’t seem so fast.

The next day, I spent the entire afternoon curled up at the base of the porcelain throne, praying for salvation from the unwashed melon. I was going to stop doing drugs, I told myself. Nothing was worth the panic of a comedown. Then again, I’d said that several times before.

I began to realize that going to different countries wasn’t a solution to a life. I had stopped being able to outrun my problems. Eventually, life on the road just becomes regular life. Whereas most people escape for adventure, when you’re a travel writer, you start craving an escape to stability. But people keep telling you that you have a dream job.

With my head over the toilet, I came up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.

But also, at some point she comes across an episode where Bourdain interviews Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk and his personal idol, and finds that an older and more mellow Iggy had come there from the gym, orders one drink, has the shrimp. Talks about how love and relationships are what sustain him now. It seems to crush Bourdain, who realizes the guy who invented live fast die young was just putting on an act, not leaving an instruction manual to be taken seriously.

Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.

I can't help but make the connection that the punk ethos and the travel-slutting ethos of taking the highs and the peaks and dodging the responsibilities and commitments, they might be a sign of enlightenment, or making the best of a cold uncaring world where nothing means anything, but probably it's an appealing outlet to the mentally ill and we should be skeptical of attempting to romanticize this kind of transience.

Quote our local @coffee_enjoyer back in 2024:

Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity. He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.

I am mostly unable to convince people in the progressive sphere that Bourdain's mental illness had anything to do with his lifestyle. Even Claude refuses to admit it. And adding the detail and sober account from this travel writer is met with the similar rejection. Mental illness just happens to people and living like a transient and dropping out of society and rejecting connection is just like, a totally valid way to live and says nothing about the mental state of the people living it, don'tchaknow? I just don't buy it, I guess.

I enjoyed travel slutting (and by this I mean extended tourism) and while I never identified with punk, for awhile I did the psychedelic Timothy Leary adjacent thing of trying to take drugs with numbers in their name and break out of default living, but ... it's kind of hard. And neither of these things are all that fulfilling at length. I'm not sure what's going through the heads of people who say they could just happily tour Europe or drop acid for forever. The fact that Bourdain is not a fringe figure but like a progressive hero meant to be celebrated and emulated is wild.

Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying your sweetheart and having 2.3 kids and buying the house with a white picket fence and your thrills are drinking a beer, smoking a brisket and giving your wife a creampie every Saturday, but after seeing friends die so young or losing their minds or never really being able to hold a marriage together, to say nothing of the grim meathook reality I've seen traveling the third world, that lame conformist life looks more like a precious gift and I feel sorry for people who get conned into rejecting it.

Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying....

Have you tried it? I can well believe it's the way to go on net, but it's not like nobody has ever felt overpowered by quiet desperation on that path either.

Also I'm skeptical about the one creampie every Saturday part.

The funny thing is it sounds pathetic in your teens but by middle age in a marriage you're doing well if you have sex once a week.

Imho, outside of a very rare few, the best way to get laid in your 40s is to have gotten married and grown old together in your 20s or 30s. In my 20s I had a fun string of girlfriends I had nonstop sex with. Including my future wife! But I can scarcely imagine that having kept up with aging, peers all settling down without me, career monopolizing more of my time, etc. Plus every time I creampie my 40 year old wife she still looks 25 to me. Beat that.

the best way to get laid in your 40s is to have gotten married

Sometimes, the sex will even be with one's wife!

career monopolizing more of my time, etc.

I've been wanting to downsize careers for a while now, but the loss aversion with regard to a smaller paycheck prevents me from doing so. When I was younger I thought (hoped?) that I as my net worth grew I'd be more down to fuck-around career-wise, but it has not happened.

When my wife and I were dating, we would have sex every single time we got together (which was about 3x per week). I was kind of excited when we got married, thinking that living together would mean we'd have sex perhaps even more, like 3-4x a week. Yeah no - I'm doing good if we have sex once per month. I'm not happy about it to be honest, but ultimately I do love her, and I also took a vow before God to stay by her side no matter what - there aren't take backs on that kind of thing. So I make do.

Also once kids enter the equation you'd kind of have to be a nonsensical psychopath to expect honeymoon period girlfriend frequency.

We bought a fairly small house for Americans when we first got together and the error of having our bedroom right next to the kid's bedrooms has not been more clear. Next house we are going to be floors apart.

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