How does he do it?
People sometimes say to me, “Wow, I’d love to spend all my time reading and absorbed in speculation on wisdom literature and in pursuit of the esoteric.” Well, they don’t put it so well beyond “I’d love to spend all my time…” How does he do it? Well, it’s not hard—you can do it too, very easily. Answer: live in relative poverty. Don’t have a car, don’t have holidays, don’t get a fancy phone every year, don’t do anything except buy two cappuccinos a day—don’t buy fancy books to put on a bookshelf but get them from the library or Internet Archive. See, perfectly easy—you too can have acres of time. “Wow, what a loser—he doesn’t even own a car. Why can’t you be normal?”. You can’t win with these people, so you shouldn’t even try.
They’re the same type who see some Chinese violin virtuoso and gormlessly ask, “How do I get to play like that?”. I mean you know really—start practicing twelve hours a day from the age of twelve, give it ten years and you’ll be good. It’s the same with people who pick E-Zee-learn Italian—learn it in your sleep, learn it while you jog—and think they will become fluent if they listen for ten minutes on the tube on the way to work. The dream…acquisition without sacrifice, gain without pain. All these gimmicks that have been sold for centuries—almost in exactly the same variations—with the promise that you can acquire what takes hours of work and sacrifice in your sleep (literally, just listen to the recording in your sleep and you will magically wake up fluent in Italiano).
The problem is that if you explain this to people—they know really—they snap back, “Doesn’t even own a car, gave up his car to learn the violin—why can’t you be normal, mate?”. In other words, they are greedy and lazy: I mean, yes, they think they’re hard-working pillars of the economy when they go to their pretend job that is only not automised due to certain quirks in an algorithm that balances out whether the machine is more economical than a man in this particular case—yet they get £35,000 p.a. so it’s important, right? Worse, the same people often have a pretend job as an art teacher at an FE College or some other state sinecure that probably, overall, detracts value from the economy and makes life worse for everyone, given the state’s perversity. Yet they are a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire and so they are an important person, very respectable. I mean, they just bought a new iPad—like a normal person.
Basically, people who say “I’d love to read philosophy books all day”, “I’d love to be an artist”, “I’d love to play the piano like Wang-Wang” are just airhead narcissists—often women, it’s always women who entertain a vague idea they’re an artist or a pianist but never do more than make it a hobby; and yet there are many men just the same. If you weren’t so greedy, selfish, and orientated towards the illusion that is “society”—or, more precisely, the illusion of social values that the masses subscribe to—then it’s easy; actually, many people are so fragile that without guidance as to “what is normal” (per what’s on the BBC News website) they feel bereft and terrified—they feel social censure above all, since along with being greedy, narcissistic, and selfish they are mostly terrible cowards as well; and not just physical cowards, moral cowards. They just shark up to people and think, “How can I say something to get him to do what I want? How can I fuck him over? (although few are that frank with themselves, they have some honeyed moral complexion about what they are about to do—they’re a righteous Christian, or he’s a weirdo so he deserves it).” “Got to play the game, got to play the game,” they natter to themselves as they plot against their fellow man.
There is a sub-group who move a little in the right direction, but then they crumple and think—I want to be an outsider dissident thinker, yet I also want public acclamation; I want to be a novel artist, yet I also want approval from all mainstream institutions without any pushback; I want be a hermit, but I want to be in society as I do it. This is all to do with narcissism, these people—as with the hobby women—are in love with “the idea of” being a poet, a dissident, a saint. You find lots of people with trust funds like this because they can effectively pay a mob to applaud like seals when they undertake their “courageous” enterprise. It’s all in their heads, these people are just bad actors—the problem is they think “I want to be…x” rather than “I’m going to be myself”. Above all, what people want is accomplishment without sacrifice. “Gosh, sounds like you gave up an awful lot to climb Mt. Katamanjarka.” Uh-huh.
I like to live as I live—otherwise I would stop. The thing that gives me most satisfaction in life is to look at a cappuccino in the morning and look at the steam that rises from it—there is nothing more beautiful, nothing more valuable. I do not need anything more—and, actually, you could take that away and I would still be satisfied. If you can train yourself to live like that, you can live as I do and be happy—you have to learn not to want, not to desire. All this business about, “I wish I could live like that but I can’t afford to,” comes from women and feminised men. What they really mean is, “My vanity wouldn’t tolerate it, my social status wouldn’t countenance it, people would disapprove—I must consume.” In other words, I am too greedy and selfish and afraid.