There have been a few posts recently about the Gray Man approach to MGTOW. Which raises an interesting question.

There's a scene in the film Moneyball where a player, Scott Hatteberg, hits a game-winning home run that gives the Oakland A's twenty wins in a row, tying the American League record. An entire stadium full of people goes berserk, cheering, while one person, Peter Brand, who's played by Jonah Hill, is actually responsible for the whole thing. He's the young, nebbishy-looking kid hired by Billy Beane to implement a new strategy. He thought of it, he did the math, and besides about five people, nobody knows, or cares, who he is. He's based on a real person, a guy named Paul DePodesta. He’s in the middle of a cheering crowd, unknown.

I'm in my fifties. Thanks to my divorce, and the actions of my ex-wife, I haven't seen any of my daughters for over a year. There's no hostility or problem -- she just moved them across the country, and because I thought it was best for them, I let them go. They don't really know who I am, and unless something really surprising happens, they never will.

My father is dead. My mother is ninety. I'm not close to any of my siblings and half-siblings. The quarantine has been in place since March, and I work alone. Women have turned out to be easy to enjoy without having to commit -- I'm getting laid more than I ever have in my life, without any real commitment, but they obviously don't hold any answers, either.

The bottom line here is that I've become the Gray Man, and although I kind of like it, it's also occasioned some fairly tough questions about who I am and what matters to me -- since it's unlikely anyone else will know or care.

Is this better than spending my life on the Plantation? Yes. I would rather fucking die than have my soul gradually destroyed by that life. Because I don't have any distractions, and because I like what I do, I'm turning into this kind of machine. I work, I spend a couple of days/nights a week fucking the woman I'm dating, I work out, and that's kind of it. It's a very quiet life. I read a lot.

I have a digital photo frame on my desk that scrolls through a couple thousand images that I've grabbed over the years. One of them is of an American paratrooper about to be dropped into Europe in World War II. I remember reading that the casualty rate among these guys was something like three times what it was for any other infantry unit. In the picture I have, one of these guys is looking at the camera. He's kind of Jewish-looking, and has shaved his head into a Mohawk, and put war paint on his face immediately before being dropped into Europe. He's completely become a creature of his profession. He's been transformed into this pure violence machine, from someone who was probably a different person, and a lot more sensitive and kind, as a civilian.

Is that where all this leads to? When you have complete freedom to shape your own life, does it take the shape of your profession? Do you become this product of your environment? Without the Plantation, without family and social expectations to make you into something, you can decide or discern what you really are, and become it. Is that where MGTOW takes you?