Sometimes our best insights are gleaned when we step back from a state of hard focus. I haven’t written at ROK in the last few weeks due to a combination of writing burnout, work responsibilities, and wanting to concentrate on other ventures. I adopted a regimen of bare-bones involvement, keeping up with ROK and a few select blogs over that time. Once you step away from the daily inundation of information, electronic or otherwise, here are a few things you may tend to notice even more readily than when you are plugged into the network:
1. People tend to take everything at face value
Though our detractors would paint ROK and this movement in general as a monolithic echo chamber, my hiatus took me away from the often heated and intense debate of ideas that exists on ROK, on RVF, and on many similar blogs. In many cases an idea will be roundly explored from a number of positions and summarily discarded if it doesn’t pass the smell test. After many discussions with people who blindly accept the normal life path, the most striking thing is that you ask them “why” and they don’t seem to have an answer. Of course we knew this already, but it took unplugging a bit from the manosphere to demonstrate the huge percentage of people who are still unwilling to question orthodoxy. It seems that, indeed, man’s natural state is slavery, and freedom is paradoxically a constant struggle to maintain.
2. The vast majority of people are inherently self-sabotaging
In the occasionally navel-gazing practice of reading and thinking about your own self-improvement, you often neglect to observe what actions others are taking. Pitiful examples are everywhere: men are poorly dressed on the subway and at the bar. Girls self-handicap with piercings, tattoos, and poor clothing that detracts from their natural gifts and makes people take them less seriously. If you want to reaffirm your commitment to yourself, spend a few weeks observing automatons shuffling to jobs that make them deeply unhappy simply because they are afraid of uncertainty. Watching others corkscrew further into misery was a much-needed reminder of the dangers of complacency.
3. Feminism just doesn’t affect my day-to-day life very much
I’ve read so many well-written articles here and elsewhere about the ills of feminism in our society that I, admittedly, probably pay it more mind than necessary. Despite living in one of North America’s strongest bastions of liberal feminism, stepping back from writing allowed me to better enjoy a reality that they have trouble penetrating. By creating a life of masculine hobbies like martial arts, weightlifting, and reading, along with not reading the news and limiting my interactions with women who self-identify as feminists, I’ve severely cut down on the day-to-day impact of feminism on my life. Once in a while I’ll approach a girl who can’t wait to talk about “social justice” and “rape culture,” but in those cases I simply don’t call her back. The ethos still pervades society and presages longer-term insidious changes, but I’m thankful that it’s difficult to see them in my everyday life.
After a few weeks of casually observing the world without the Red Pill commentary in the background, I’m ready to jump back in. As with anything, I encourage all readers to take a brief hiatus to aid in connecting the concepts you’ve read about to the world around you. You may be surprised with what you observe.
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