An excerpt from Chapter 10

Metamorphosis - the recurring theme of change

Attention internet men:

If any of you people reading this also see me on YouTube or Twitter (X), or you’re up to date on this pile of Substack articles, you probably heard me mention once or twice that I’m slowly getting around to pissing out a generic manosphere book. Mostly just as practice. I have some ideas for real books - a couple of fiction books actually - but I want to learn the dirty ins and outs of how to turn scribbles from my keyboard into something on people’s Kindle apps before I try my hand at a real book.

It’s slow going. My boss thinks I should do my real job so my family can eat, and my wife thinks I should spend time with the family before the kids grow up. And they’re probably right.

I’m something like 150 pages into this thing, and every time I go back and reread what I’ve written, I think I’m a long-winded blowhard pontificating about boring topics whose writing style is terrible to parse. But this is just my practice book anyway. They say the average self-published niche book sells fewer than 12 copies. I’m aiming even lower.

So anyway, I’m currently in the middle of Chapter 10, which talks about the theme of change. How broad and sweeping the changes wrought by the internet have been, the theme of change through the self-improvement aspects of nearly every movement of the manosphere, and a fun dive into Metamorphosis, by Kafka, because it’s one of my favorite classics anybody who’s ever had a job and a family can probably relate to. So I pulled a chunk out of the middle of the chapter that seems to read okay. Have fun.

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For many men, improving their social skills is far more difficult than improving their physical appearance. Going to the gym and moving objects around on one’s own is a fairly low-risk undertaking. The only investment in play is the financial cost of a gym membership, and the only social risk is the unlikely chance someone else at the gym may see a man exercising and think negative thoughts about that man, which rarely happens, and the majority of the time it does, the observer doesn’t say or do anything to the man anyway so the man never knows.

However, practicing social skills, as its name implies, requires being social, which is risky and potentially embarrassing. Humans are, to an extent, unpredictable. When you speak with another human, you don’t know what the other human is going to say or do. You are going to have to react to the other person, quickly and spontaneously, in an attempt to demonstrate appropriate and socially accepted behavior that will be regarded positively, with no time to prepare or plan.

This severely limits your options to hide who you really are and what you are really like. So if who you really are and what you are really like is creepy, weird, and socially awkward, that is going to be very quickly discovered. You will then be trapped in the remaining portion of a social interaction with another person who knows this about you, and forced to endure their reaction to this discovery until one of you is able to end the encounter.

This vulnerability and judgment from another human is far more difficult for most humans to bear than walking around the interior of a gym while being out of shape, occasionally failing to lift a heavy object. This is because the other human with whom we may be interacting is highly likely to react in a way that communicates their negative judgments of us, even if these judgments are subtly hinted at and not overtly said, leading to feelings of shame and embarrassment from this social rejection. That possibility and the unpleasantness of those feelings makes interacting with a living human much scarier than interacting with an inanimate barbell, even when a conversation with that human lasts a mere two minutes, while developing the strength to lift that barbell may take months.

When the other person with whom a man interacts is female, the stakes are even higher. It is possible that this female human may go on a date with him, have sex with him, enter into a relationship with him, even become his future spouse, or at the very least maybe she has some cute single friends she can introduce to this man. If this man allows his social awkwardness to be discovered, the usual shame and embarrassment he feels when this woman judges him will also be accompanied by a sense of loss. Now, he will never know if he would have been able to date her, have sex with her, marry her, or meet her cute single friends.

Preemptively fearing this sense of loss leads many men to behave in off-putting and unattractive ways in the presence of women. I suppose I could have typed that previous sentence using considerably fewer words: guys get nervous. This is especially the case for men with poor social skills, who often have a long-standing track record of having a difficult time making friends, impressing women, impressing educators, impressing employers, impressing clients, or even getting along with their families. A lifetime of shame, loss, and rejection can cause a man’s subconscious to create an association between these feelings and social interactions – especially social interactions with women.

It is not uncommon for men with below-average social skills to begin avoiding situations where those feelings are likely to occur and retreat into video games, overconsumption of food, alcohol, drugs, consumption of television and other media, obsessive hobbies most outsiders would term “seriously geeky”, and especially internet use. This behavior, unsurprisingly, allows a man’s social skills to continue to atrophy and become even less palatable to others.

The internet is an amazing haven for socially awkward humans. Unlike reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a regular video game, the internet is full of real people with whom we can interact. However, we are able to communicate with as many or as few of these people as we would like, using a variety of different media. For example, nobody with whom you interact is able to see your facial expression or body language, or your overall physical appearance, unless you specifically allow this by activating a camera. Nobody can hear your vocal inflections unless you specifically use a microphone. At your option, you may communicate using only text, which is by far the most common method of communication and type of content throughout the internet.

Additionally, the internet allows humans to interact with others asynchronously. While the option exists to “stream” content that is “live”, this is purely optional and represents only a small portion of internet content. Whether we are communicating using videos, images, audio, text, or any combination of these, we have the option to prepare this content on our own, recording as many versions of it as many times as we would like, and even edit the content after creating it, before finally making it accessible to the internet. So any information we present that others are able to access can be as curated and polished and edited as we would like. Plus, if the content we are submitting is a communication that is responsive to another person or another piece of content, use of asynchronous communication allows us to consider and prepare what we believe is the best possible responsive content without being required to communicate quickly and spontaneously.

In short, the internet allows its users to hide an unattractive appearance and poor social skills, while still enabling us to interact with other humans. It’s not exactly a healthy substitute for normal social interactions with humans in the real world. Exchanging text in a forum filled with thousands of other humans, none of whom know anything real about you, and all of whom are hiding just as much about their real lives from you as you are from them, often asynchronously and sometimes even anonymously, doesn’t seem to affect our brains in the same manner as a genuine human connection. However, for unattractive humans, whether due to poor appearance or poor social skills, the shallow mockery of actual human connection that is available using the internet sometimes feels preferable to continuing the cycle of shame and painful psychological impacts of social rejection in the real world.

Of course, becoming a bit of a social recluse, hiding things about oneself from other humans, communicating primarily through text in an asynchronous manner with other humans who are usually also hiding things about themselves, and often communicating about peculiar niche topics of interest, is not a fruitful path to developing better social skills and improving ourselves. In fact, as you can probably imagine, this isolation and bizarre manner of communication, to the reduction or exclusion of real-world human connection, is quite an effective path for becoming even weirder and less likeable in the real world.

Future scientists are probably going to look back at the invention of the internet, and the smartphone soon after that, as major turning points in the social development of the entire species. Our ancestors used to pick bugs out of each other’s hair and sleep in piles. And now it’s possible to go for days, weeks, or even months never seeing another human or hearing another human’s voice, and still have a life some would consider successful.

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