What is my goal? Is my goal possible? Is it reasonable?

Listen to my story. This... may be our last chance

Attention imaginary internet men and women, bots, and my 3 real followers:

I’ll start with a little bit about myself, mostly because even though I’m super-boring, like most humans, I enjoy talking about myself.

“Archwinger” is the name of the third boss in a late-1980s Nintendo game called “Legacy of the Wizard”. This was the American version “Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family” in Japan. It was a very old-school “Metroid-vania” style game that wasn’t very difficult gameplay-wise, but had a huge map so figuring out where to go and what to do and actually winning was impossible for most kids my age. I beat it anyway because I was a very cool kid who was very good at video games, which I played for long hours on account of having buck teeth, picking my nose, being socially really weird, and having next-to-no friends.

Archwinger is best known in the real world for his writing on “The Red Pill”, a community of internet misogynists discussing strategies to get laid and talking shit about women that had its heyday in the early 2010s. This community was based on Reddit, an absolute dumpster-fire of a social media platform. The Nintendo game above isn’t the least bit important, other than to illustrate that selecting anonymous internet account names you’ll remember the next time you log in that aren’t already taken can be hard. Anyway, I pissed “Red Pill” ideas out of my keyboard and on to Reddit for something like 4 years, from 2013-2017. If you search for Archwinger on Google, you get more search hits about me than about Nintendo games.

I don’t know if this is normal or just a personal weirdness of mine, but I get these ideas tickling around in my head, and until I get them out, they’re in the way. I can’t write a better idea, and I even have trouble doing my regular job, until I get them out. Some of the ideas I’ve pissed on to the internet are really awesome and popular, and are still quoted even today. And while none of them are absolute dogshit, some are definitely less easy to read and less insightful, but I had to get them out. (If you’re reading this right now and are wildly entertained, that’s excellent! If not, sorry!)

I’m 45 years old. Married (for the second time). Two kids. A 13-year-old girl (with my first wife) and a 2-year-old (with my second), turning 14 and 3 in May. Both kids are smarter and more talented than I am, which makes me happy. My wife’s pregnant, due in September. It’s a boy. My real job is being a patent attorney at a small law firm in Texas, which is intellectually challenging and interesting, but really long hours, and pays me just barely enough to not run out of money but also not ever be rich.

During the time when Archwinger entertained angry men on Reddit, I was married to my first wife, who was a sex-less super-bitch that was really mean to me. I certainly wasn’t the ideal husband, but I treated her well, loved her a whole lot, made decent money, did the lion’s share of the cooking and laundry too, even my fair share of the childcare. I even worked out every day and kept in shape. I was a bit of an unattractive spineless dweeb while doing all of this, but most people from the outside looking in would have said she married one of the good ones. She turned out to be a lesbian. Like, for real. She’s married to a woman now. Our daughter was a bridesmaid in my second wedding. My second wife and I attended my first wife’s lesbian wedding ceremony. Our 2-year-old really likes my first wife and lights up every time she comes to the house to drop off his big sister and/or her things.

Why is my life on this married-man-with-kids-in-suburbia path? I think I’m a caretaker at heart. Some men are adventurers, some are fighters, some are lovers. I have a natural tendency, a calling maybe, to round out whatever group I’m in and support its members. If you’re one of those super-nerdy Dungeons and Dragons guys: Think of me like your cleric, or maybe your bard. Bard fits better. Good with words, helping others do what they do even better using my unique support abilities, and here for the fun even though I’m not in the frontline trenches. That’s who I am with my family. That’s who I am when I try to help some average dude become very slightly above average. That’s who I am when I reply or quote-tweet or repost or recommend some manosphere dude who’s actually in the frontline trenches of the disgusting swamp we call the internet. That’s even who I am when I say extreme, inflammatory stuff on the internet to anger strangers and incite them into saying and doing stupid stuff and engaging with me and others.

I don’t usually type a lot about myself, but when I type an idea and people are like “This is wrong! Where is this dude even coming from with this crap?!”, the context above may be useful.

Very frequently when I’m trolling about the internet nowadays (usually on X - formerly Twitter), somebody I am interacting with will declare that due to my unpopular and disliked viewpoints about men, women, relationship dynamics, or even just politics and the universe in general, I am clearly a loser who will die alone. I explain that I am actually married with children, vaguely upper-middle-class, and we’re all mostly-happy and doing well — thriving even. I mean, we could use a few million dollars and a lot more free time to get stuff done, but we’re doing pretty okay. And I am declared a liar who is definitely not actually married with children, or at least we are definitely not happy - especially my poor wife.

I’ve never seen much point lying on the internet, beyond the usual branding where we act a little more boisterous than we would in the real world. If I wanted to make up a lie about myself and construct a fantasy life, I’d be living abroad as a studly player, not pretending to be a boring married guy barely affording the mortgage on our 5-bedroom in suburbia.

My pipe-dream goal is after my daughter’s in college, to ex-pat and take the rest of the family to live in Latin America. Unless our parents leave us a lot of money or crypto actually takes off big-time, we’re never going to be super-rich. But going somewhere with a lower cost of living and a slower pace of life is a nice way to attack the problem from the other end. I do Spanish audio courses in the car. I don’t know if this living-abroad-pipe-dream will actually happen, but it sounds like fun.

So let’s get to the point:

The ten paragraphs above are a bit over-budget and I probably should have been more concise, but every man has the above. Even if he doesn’t know it and has never written it, he has one. Essentially, a “two-minute commercial” version of himself where if somebody says “tell me about yourself”, a man can respond with a brief status of his history, his current life, and his goals, but not in a boring way like he’s reading his resume to them. More like telling a story. Because when it comes to humans and the way we communicate, the SI unit of information is not the factoid. It’s the story. Humans have communicated using stories pretty much since humanity invented communication.

I’m not saying anybody needs to do a homework assignment and come up with something like this. I’m saying all of you already have it because you’ve been writing it your entire life. If you have trouble communicating it, it’s not because you don’t have a good story. It’s because your skillset doesn’t include storytelling. You’re probably not the bard of your group. More like the wizard or something.

Every man has some kind of goal or mission. Even the men who don’t have one unconsciously have one. If you never took the time to think about what you want out of this universe, society has probably indoctrinated you to unconsciously assume you’re just supposed to live the same average life everyone else does, and that’s your unconscious goal. Meaning you’re supposed to finish school, get a job, get your own place, get married, and have kids. Which is a fine goal to have, especially if you’ve never felt a strong pull toward any other goal.

But homework-wise, it’s actually probably worth some time to sit somewhere and think about this. Maybe mediate in your dark closet, sit with your journal if you’re into that kind of thing, or a notepad or at your computer if you’re the sort who likes to jot notes, float in a pool, ponder this between sets at the gym. Whatever. But it’s good to take a few minutes and listen to that inner voice and see what’s actually pulling you. You can always change your mind and pick a new direction later, but if you have no direction at all, you’ll just be flopping around aimlessly, doing random stuff. Once you have at least some vague idea of a direction you think you’d like to try out, a lot of things going on in your life seem to fall into place as something that fits or doesn’t fit that direction, which really helps you prioritize what to do or not do and make some vague plans.

At that point, things like The Red Pill and the internet manosphere as a whole (even the entire internet as a whole) become a lot easier to parse, because you have a better idea what fits and what doesn’t fit into your life. You also realize that The Red Pill, the manosphere, and all of its members are not telling you what to do. They’re telling you what they did, and what they’ve observed. What they did isn’t that important, except it gives you some context about what they’ve observed. And what they’ve observed is not important on its own. It’s important to you more as an illustration of what is possible, or realistic, given their context.

That’s a lot of academic language that says nothing, so I’ll go with a working example instead:

Most men want to end up married and have children. If that’s not you, that’s fine. But most men do. There are a lot reasons most men want this. Companionship. Genetic legacy (don’t get me started about the concept of “legacy” when you’re a plumber or insurance salesman who thinks he’s carrying an important legacy forward). Sexual access. Logistics (having a team/workmates to get things done more cheaply and efficiently to free up resources for other things). Personal experience.

Personal experience is the really big one, actually. Everything else might be a subset of personal experience.

Most men don’t just want to be married, as an abstract concept. That’s why not just any woman will do, and they search far and wide to find a woman with characteristics they think they want in a wife. That’s even part of the reason the internet manosphere worries so much about divorce. It’s not marriage itself that is the goal — it’s having a certain type of marriage. One that mimics their personal experience (or is the opposite of their personal experience).

If we grew up with married parents who had a relationship that appeared content, we’ve been conditioned by growing up with that model for relationships to want a similar type of relationship in our own lives. If we grew up with unmarried parents or parents with a very bad relationship, this may lead us to spurn the idea of marriage, or to even more desperately seek out marriage but to try to be as different from the way our parents did things as possible.

Similarly, most men don’t just want to have kids, as an abstract concept. Elon Musk is neat and has electric vehicles and cool rockets and may be president of Mars one day. But just siring babies and passing on our genes, but not actually having the family experience, isn’t the goal of most men. Most men want to have the family experience they grew up with, or want to have the family experience they didn’t get and missed out on growing up.

Either way, those personal experiences shape what we want.

Once we have some idea of what we think we want, internet communities like The Red Pill can be parsed a lot more easily to pick out the information we think is useful for our purposes. For example, rather than interpreting an online community as telling you to get married and have kids, or to avoid marriage and kids, you can peel back a layer of language and look a little deeper: What is the context, and what was the observation?

Those observations can help with some deeper questions: “Is what I think I want possible? Is what I think I want reasonable? If so, what context surrounding my life do I need to change?”

For example, is it possible, today in 2025, to have a marriage similar to your parents’ marriage, and to raise children similar to how you were raised? Probably not identically so, but maybe you can figure out a way to have something similar.

Or maybe times have changed so much that trying to mimic what your parents did (or desperately trying to do the opposite if what your parents did didn’t work out so well) is completely unreasonable, and you have to compromise on this goal or change a whole heck of a lot more things than what most people would consider reasonable.

Maybe you figure it out, maybe you don’t. Maybe you change the context surrounding your life, or maybe you change goals a bit — or entirely. But all of this becomes part of your story. And even if you’re not so great at getting that story out, that story is the context of your life that shapes what you want and what’s possible.

Act accordingly, and good luck out there.