The Purpose Series (Part 1 of 3) - Purpose, Anxiety, Fear, the Unknown, and the Purposeless Epidemic in Modern Society
Woujo | December 6, 2019 | by Woujo
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INTRODUCTION

This article is the first part of a 3-part series. Part 1 will discuss
why a man’s purposes are the most important things in his life and
why they also bring him the most pleasure. Part 1 also discusses how a
man’s confidence pushes him towards his purposes and anxiety pushes
him away from his purposes. Part 2 will discuss how a woman’s
attraction to a man is centered on his purposes, which in turn create
his emotional experience and his reality. Part 3 will discuss how a
man can manage his ego to maximize the pleasure he receives from
pursuing his purposes and minimize his anxiety. 

PURPOSE AND EMOTION

The most important thing in a man’s life are the purposes he chooses
to pursue, and the key to a successful and happy life is choosing your
purposes with your rational mind rather than your emotions. If you do
not consciously and rationally articulate your purposes to yourself,
your subconscious emotions will determine your purposes, and emotion
without rational guidance usually leads to ruin. Worse yet, if you do
not consciously and rationally determine your purposes yourself,
others will determine them for you, often by manipulating your
emotions.   

All human emotions and activity can be conceptualized in terms of
purposes. Everything you do is directed to some purpose, whether you
realize it or not. If you are watching TV, eating Cheetos, and
scratching your balls, your purposes are watching TV, eating Cheetos,
and scratching your balls. The question is not whether you have
purposes, but what your purposes are.

Discussions of “purpose” often become abstract and meaningless, so
I seek here to link purpose to fundamental biological emotions. Human
evolved to feel “pleasure” and positive emotion to motivate us to
seek things that help in our survival and reproduction and “pain”
and negative emotions to avoid purposes that will lead to us harm.
Positive emotions include the desire for food, sex, and affection,
while negative emotions include grief, shame, guilt, depression and
anxiety. Positive emotions usually fill us with energy and enthusiasm
to motivate us to move, while negative emotions cripple us to prevent
us from moving. But every emotion serves some purpose, and the key to
a healthy and happy life is not to repress or kill your emotions, but
to put each emotion in its proper place so that they work in harmony
for your overall good.  

Our rational mind is a much weaker than our emotions, and is often
overwhelmed, hijacked, and tricked by emotion. The only thing that can
defeat an emotion is a stronger emotion, so the primary responsibility
of your rational mind is not to conquer your emotions, but to order
your emotions properly so that your “higher” emotions predominate
over your lower ones.

POSITIVE EMOTION

The biological systems underlying positive emotion can be summarized
using a familiar quote: “life is a journey, not a destination.”

The primary brain chemical that regulates positive emotion is a
neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine is released every time we
do something pleasurable: when you eat a tasty meal, snort a line of
cocaine, or have sex. You also feel dopamine when you experience
“higher” pleasures like acceptance by the tribe, love, affection,
and the joy of accomplishing a goal or helping somebody. But
strangely, most dopamine is released “on the way” to achieving the
pleasurable goal, rather than after we attain the goal itself.

Most people think of pleasure as a destination. You see (or
conceptualize) a pleasurable goal, you take steps to achieve that
goal, and you feel pleasure AFTER you achieve the goal. I call the
pleasure you feel after you achieve some pleasurable goal
“destination pleasure.”

But the journey to the pleasurable thing is stronger than arriving at
the destination. When you see (or conceptualize) a pleasurable goal
and take steps to achieve that pleasurable goal, you feel pleasure on
the journey to the pleasurable goal. I call this feeling “journey
pleasure.” As Artie Lange said, “the best part of doing cocaine is
going to your dealer to get it.” The excitement and enthusiasm you
feel on the way to something your subconscious thinks will be
pleasurable is much stronger and longer-lasting than the destination
pleasure you feel when you actually consumer that thing. This is why I
consider journey pleasure to be a superior and “higher” pleasure.

The superiority of journey pleasure makes perfect sense from an
evolutionary perspective. Humans need to go get food, find shelter,
and have sex, but evolution doesn’t care if we feel pleasure after
we achieve those things. Evolution is more concerned with getting us
to those things in the first place, which is why we are wired to feel
most of our pleasure as we move towards the goal rather than after we
get it. We did not evolve to rest on our laurels and celebrate after
getting something we want. Instead, we evolved to immediately want to
go get the next thing.

We have all experienced this on some level. We have all won some
championship, completed some final exam, scored with some hot girl, or
achieved some other goal, only to find ourselves underwhelmed and
feeling empty after we achieve the thing we thought we wanted. As
George Bernard Shaw famously said, “there are two tragedies in life.
One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.” This
is because journey pleasure is much stronger than destination
pleasure, and once the journey is over the destination pleasure feels
relatively weak and empty.

But make no mistake: journey pleasure only exists when the journey
leads to destination pleasure. If there is no pot of gold at the end
of the journey, our subconscious mind will not generate the dopamine
necessary to motivate us. Our brain is a pleasure-seeking machine, and
if there is no pleasure involved we simply will not pursue something,
no matter how noble or important the goal. We are animals, not angels.
It is just a happy coincidence that pursuing noble and important goals
sometimes brings us pleasure. The brain’s motivation system is
somewhat paradoxical: even though we are motivated by destination
pleasure, we feel most of our pleasure on the way to that destination
pleasure, so we often don’t even care about the destination pleasure
once we get to it. Billionaires work 80-hour weeks to make a fortune,
only to give the fortune away after they have receive it. They don’t
care about the money (they have more than they could ever use) –
they love the game. Nevertheless, if there is no fortune or other
attractive prize at the end of the journey, billionaires would not be
motivated to work 80-hour weeks in the first place.

Human beings will only do something if we feel like there will be some
payoff in the end or if we are afraid of some worse outcome. A child
will only do his homework if he fears punishment or if he genuinely
believes he will receive some worthwhile reward for doing it, either
in the short term or in the long term. Similarly, as you move through
life, you will only be motivated to work hard if you believe your work
will lead to something. That “something” can be money, developing
your skills, creating something new and valuable, or helping people.
Ideally, your work will pay off in all of those ways.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that
successful people see their life as leading towards some higher
purpose, even when things are going badly. Even when they do something
that sucks, they are building towards something higher: they are
building their resume, developing skills, saving money, learning
lessons, meeting people, etc… Unsuccessful people feel like no
matter what they do, they will never get to the promised land, which
is why they are not motivated to work hard today. Successful people
run towards a goal; unsuccessful people run on a treadmill.

JOURNEY PLEASURE AND EMOTIONAL STABILITY

Journey pleasure is superior to destination pleasure because it is
stronger, lasts over a longer period of time, and does not require
external “things” to be satisfied. Destination pleasure only lasts
for the brief moment while you consume the pleasurable thing: you feel
destination pleasure while you eat the cake, have sex, or hug your
friend, but the pleasure disappears a short time after and you need
some external thing to give you pleasure again. Journey pleasure, on
the other hand, lasts for as long as you are working towards your
goal, so you can feel it anytime and anywhere because it is primarily
mental. If you are building your business, you can feel journey
pleasure as you work, as you eat lunch, and even as you have a few
beers with your friends to wind down, because all of those activities
are taking you towards your goal. 

Journey pleasure is required for emotional stability and rationality.
Humans are pleasure-seeking creatures, and we cannot think rationality
if we are chasing one brief pleasure after another. But journey
pleasure satiates our desire for pleasure, and once we have a
consistent source of journey pleasure we can make rational, long-term
plans. Even people that enjoy journey pleasure need to feed their
lower desires occasionally, but because their higher pleasures are
satiated all of their thoughts and emotions are not directed towards
satisfying their lower pleasures.

PURPOSE ROUTINES

Your brain constantly creates maps of the world based on your purposes
to determine where pleasure and threat exist, as they are defined by
your purposes. Your brain creates a spatial map of your immediate
surroundings, coloring what you believe to be indicators of pleasure
and threat with emotion so you are drawn or repelled by those
indicators. Your brain also creates a more abstract map of your life,
marking pleasures and threats that may occur in the future as you
pursue your purposes. To see this spatial map right now, just look
around – what you see is not necessarily reality but a map of the
world that your brain created, with sources of pleasure and threat (as
you understand them) emphasized by your brain to draw your attention.
Similarly, you can “feel” the abstract map by thinking about your
future: if you think about the upcoming week you will feel good about
the pleasurable things you think will happen and anxiety about the
shitty things you think will happen. Interestingly, your spatial map
and your more abstract map are both created by the same part of your
brain – the hippocampus.

To navigate these maps, your brain creates what I call “purpose
routines.” A purpose routine is a set of procedures and rules
designed to lead you to a certain goal, like a computer program. You
can learn purpose routines with your conscious mind, but after you do
it a few times it becomes subconscious and executable with little to
no conscious thought. A simple purpose routine is walking downstairs
to get something from the fridge, tying your shoe, or brushing your
teeth. Purpose routines can also be more complicated – drafting a
routine letter to a client, repairing an HVAC unit, or driving to
work. Experienced doctors can even perform delicate surgery almost on
autopilot because they have done it so many times. Sometimes your
conscious mind even forgets the instructions to a purpose routine, but
your subconscious mind can still do it.

We need subconscious purpose routines to function because we cannot
consciously think about every single little thing we are doing. Our
conscious mind can only process around 5 to 7 pieces of information at
one time, but our subconscious mind can process much more. Most of our
actions at any time are purpose routines running on autopilot. If we
learn to do something in the wrong way, our brain might lock that
defective purpose routine away in our subconscious, making it
difficult for our conscious mind to reprogram it. The subconscious
nature of purpose routines helps explain why sometimes very talented
people are terrible teachers – their skills are locked away as
purpose routines, so they cannot explain to another person what
exactly they are doing. Purpose routines also explain why quack
pick-up artist instructors often fail to communicate their abilities
to their students – much of what we consider to be charm, charisma,
and “alpha” behavior is an automatic expression of our purpose
routines, and it is very difficult to consciously articulate what
exactly those behaviors are.  

Your brain learns to associate purpose routines with pleasure so, for
example, if you have enjoyed snorting cocaine a few times, your brain
will learn to associate the steps of snorting a line of cocaine with
pleasure. Even seeing a line of cocaine or going somewhere you snorted
cocaine may cause your brain to release dopamine, because it is
anticipating the destination pleasure at the end of the journey it
thinks it is on. Purpose routines help explain why addiction is so
difficult to overcome – your brain is a pleasure-seeking missile, so
whenever it feels bad, bored, or eager to do something (essentially, a
lack of pleasure), it will automatically start running purpose
routines it knows will lead to its drug of choice without your
conscious mind even realizing. This is why addicts often need to
consciously and carefully monitor their behavior.

Because your brain relies on your purpose routines to obtain pleasure,
it is all the more important to consciously determine your purposes.
Most peoples’ subconscious minds’ are littered with garbage
purpose routines they automatically run to whenever they want
pleasure: video games, drugs, alcohol, wasting time on the internet,
etc… Whether we realize it or not, our brain is constantly seeking
pleasure, and if we are not directing what pleasure it seeks, it will
probably seek the lowest, cheapest pleasures that will ultimately lead
us to ruin.

ANXIETY

The key to happiness, therefore, seems simple: pick a few good,
positive, emotionally attractive purposes, pursue those purposes,
collect journey pleasure along the way, and live happily ever after.
Why then, are so many people miserable?

The main obstacle to journey pleasure is anxiety, which is a
subconscious mechanism designed by evolution to help you pick which
purpose to pursue. Animals and humans feel anxiety when 1) the
subconscious brain believes there is a threat or anomaly on the way to
the purpose it is seeking and/or 2) the subconscious brain is faced
with multiple purposes that seem equally appealing. When faced with
either of these situations, the anxiety circuit 1) floods you with
negative emotion to make you freeze and stop progressing along the
path you were on and 2) switches your mind into “information
gathering” mode so that you can figure out which purpose to pursue.
The more important the goal and the bigger the threat, anomaly, or
conflict between goals, the stronger the anxiety. To our brains, a
threat or an anomaly is anything that makes us feel like we are on the
wrong path, either because it will cause us to not achieve the goal,
or worse.

Anxiety is the opposite of journey pleasure. We feel journey pleasure
only when we see a clear path to the goal, but we feel anxiety when we
see obstacles and threats on the way to the goal. Our anxiety
decreases when we feel journey pleasure, and our journey pleasure
decreases when we feel anxiety. Both emotions are necessary: we need
journey pleasure to motivate ourselves to pursue the things we need,
but we also need anxiety so that we don’t run into dangerous
situations. When our journey pleasure outweighs our anxiety, we go for
the goal, but when our anxiety is stronger, we stay frozen. Journey
pleasure is the cure to anxiety, but to feel journey pleasure we must
feel like we can overcome the threats and obstacles on the way to our
purposes.

Anxiety is generally stronger than journey pleasure, and with good
reason. If a mouse sees a piece of cheese guarded by a cat, it should
not pursue the cheese because the reward for getting the cheese is a
little pleasure, but the consequence of getting caught by the cat is
death. Therefore, when weighing the journey pleasure and anxiety of a
particular course of action, our brain puts much more weight on
anxiety. This means that humans are extremely risk-averse and our
default answer to any new adventure is “no.”

Scientifically speaking, anxiety is different from fear. Fear is the
“fight or flight” feeling we get when we are actually in the
presence of the threat, whereas anxiety is the feeling of paralysis we
get when we think there MIGHT be a threat. A mouse who will not walk
into a cage because it smells cat odor feels anxiety, whereas a mouse
that actually sees a cat and starts running from it feels fear.
Anxiety becomes fear if we feel like the threat has actually arrived,
and people with very bad anxiety often have panic attacks, which is a
fear response. When most people say “fear” they really mean
anxiety, but it is important to understand this distinction, because
fear is often an important motivator, whereas anxiety is often a
hinderance, as I will explain later.

Finally, many kinds of anxiety exist: social anxiety which views high
status members of the tribe as a threat; separation anxiety, which
views distance from the tribe as a threat; obsessive/compulsive
disorder, which views a lack of order and hygiene as a threat, etc…
To simplify this article, I simply use the word “anxiety” to refer
to all of these emotions.

ANXIETY AND PURPOSE ROUTINES

Just as our subconscious mind tags certain purpose routines as
“pleasurable” so we pursue them, it also tags others as
“threat” or “obstacle” so we avoid them. For example, if you
put your hand on a hot stove and burn it, your brain will
subconsciously associate “putting your hand on a hot stove” with
“threat” and strike you with anxiety if you start to do it again.
Even if you consciously decide to put your hand on a hot stove because
somebody offered you a million dollars to do it, your subconscious
mind will flood you with negative emotion and freeze your muscles so
you do not do it. Moving your hand to the stove will feel like
swimming through molasses because your underlying biological systems
will be doing everything they can to stop you.

Our brain uses anxiety for memory and map building because we need to
know where not to go, both spatially in our immediate surroundings and
more abstractly in our life. This is partly why drugs that reduce
anxiety, like marijuana, alcohol, and Xanax also impair your memory.
Anxiety is literally responsible for building the world we experience,
but as we will see, anxiety can create a distorted view of the world.

The brain’s process of painting certain purpose routines as threat
is useful because it helps us automatically avoid dangerous situations
without even consciously thinking about them. We do this every single
day with thousands of potential threats. But anxiety tries to do a
thorough job of documenting all of our threats so it often registers
false positives. These false positives occur when 1) your brain
subconsciously thinks something is a threat or obstacle when it is
really not, 2) your brain subconsciously thinks something is a threat
or obstacle when in reality you have the ability to overcome it, or 3)
your brain associates a purpose routine with a threat or obstacle that
will not be there in the future. Sometimes your brain does all of this
at once.  

For example, imagine you go bowling for the first time and get stabbed
at the bowling alley. In that case, your brain may associate
“bowling” or “going to the bowling alley” with “threat”
and make you feel anxiety the next time you consider going bowling, no
matter where the bowling alley is or who is there. But getting stabbed
is not a regular or inherent part of bowling, so the brain’s
association of “bowling alley” with “threat” is wrong and
counterproductive.

Now imagine how many false positives your brain has created since your
childhood and how many possible paths your brain has subconsciously
marked as forbidden without your consent or realization. Most
peoples’ subconscious minds are full of paths that have been wrongly
labeled as negative, and these paths accumulate to form complex
emotional and belief systems that cripple us. This mechanism often
operates subconsciously without us even knowing what is happening: we
just “feel bad” when we leave our comfort zone, and we don’t
know why. Anxiety may manifest itself in many different ways:
paralysis, endless rumination that goes nowhere, listlessness, a
desire to procrastinate, hesitancy, timidity, laziness, a tendency to
become distracted, a “weird” feeling you cannot explain, a feeling
of pending doom, “rational” arguments as to why you should do
something else, etc… Anxiety will use any trick it can find to make
you stop pursuing the goal, including “rational” reasons that you
cannot stop thinking about. Sometimes those reasons are laughably
stupid, and sometimes they are solid and should be taken into account.
It is your job to figure out which is which.

Anxiety does not just try to make us pick a different path than the
one we are considering, it often causes us to not consider certain
purposes at all. Most people never even consider following their
dreams because their brain kills those thoughts before they even make
it to their conscious mind. Most people live in a world of invisible
walls they create for themselves. Most people never leave their narrow
“comfort zone” because their brain subconsciously convinces them
they will fail. I strongly suspect this is also partly why people get
“stuck in their ways” and more closed minded as they get older:
there has simply been more time for negativity to accumulate in their
mind.

Modern society exacerbates this problem. The anxiety circuit is a
primitive circuit designed to react to simple threats in the jungle,
not abstract, complex “threats” like an emotionally unstable
girlfriend, a shitty job market, or other complex changes and
challenges that we face in the modern world. The media and
entertainment industry are also constantly trying to scare us into
thinking that everything is a threat. Most people know the media and
entertainment industry lie and fearmonger, but if this programming
only works 10% of the time on us, that is still a ton of irrational
anxieties that are now part of our subconscious programming.

To make matters worse, anxiety often hijacks our “rational” mind
and creates false beliefs to match our garbage emotions. The world is
infinitely complicated, which means that you can confabulate
“facts” to support almost any decision you make or belief you
hold, and this is exactly what your mind does when it really wants to
pursue a certain purpose (or not pursue a purpose).

For example, imagine somebody grows up in an environment where their
friends, family, and society constantly tell them that it is very hard
or impossible for the “little guy” to get ahead. That person’s
brain will subconsciously associate the purpose routine of “working
hard to make money” with “insurmountable obstacles and threats.”
If you asked them if it was possible for the “little guy” to get
ahead, they would “rationally” explain to why it was not. This
person may even use true facts to make their argument, but they would
only do so by ignoring all the other facts that contradicted their
argument.

Of course, this person will never become rich because every time they
do anything to make progress along that path, their subconscious mind
will cause them to feel anxiety and do something else instead. Even
his conscious mind will often sabotage him, because it has been
subconsciously programmed by his emotions to form a series of false
beliefs about the world. In this way, his emotions, actions, and
beliefs will form a vicious cycle that will make it impossible for him
to become rich. 

The solution to anxiety and negative purpose routines is not always to
ignore them and plow ahead. Anxiety serves an evolutionary purpose,
and your subconscious mind can store and quickly access much more
information about threats than your conscious mind can. Sometimes you
get a “bad feeling” because something really is a threat, even
though your conscious mind cannot articulate exactly why. Just because
anxiety sometimes produces false positives does not mean that all
anxiety is a false positive. Ignoring anxiety will deprive you of an
extremely rich source of information and potentially expose you to
danger.

Instead of just ignoring your anxiety, you should rationally analyze
it and determine whether the “threat” you feel is real or not. If
I get a bad feeling about something, I try to articulate to myself in
words what is causing that bad feeling. For example, if I feel anxiety
about a business deal I try to figure out if there is a real threat,
or if I am just afraid of the unknown. Unfortunately, for people with
lots of purpose routines that have been polluted negatively, it will
take a long time to “clean” your purpose routines that have been
wrongly polluted.

Anxiety is not the only negative emotion that colors our thoughts:
guilt, shame, depression, jealousy, also hijack our purpose routines
and beliefs. These other negative emotions mix with anxiety to create
a terrible mixture of false beliefs, falsely tainted purpose routines,
and constant negative thoughts and emotions. Cleaning this mess is
extremely difficult because our false beliefs and purpose routines
layer on top of each other over the course of years, so to “fix”
ourselves we must unwind each layer with our conscious mind, reprogram
our mind to see it as positive, and then move to the next layer. This
process can be very difficult and time-consuming, which is part of the
reason you should not bother with damaged women.

THE UNKNOWN

As our brain builds maps of the world and purpose routines to navigate
those maps, it must deal with the fact that much of the world is
simply unknown to us. The unknown contains the two main things which
cause anxiety: 1) potentially infinite threats and 2) infinite
potential paths. Our brain needs to know which path to take, so it
runs the regular anxiety program when faced with the unknown: we
freeze and slowly try to gather information so we can figure out which
path to follow.

The Bible says that the human desire for knowledge of the universe is
a result of anxiety. When Eve was faced with threat for the first time
(the snake), she felt anxiety and ate of the tree of knowledge of good
and bad (evil is a mistranslation) so she could “become like God.”
Eve probably desired to become God because she faced threat for the
first time, felt unsafe, and wanted to defeat that threat. She then
brought her anxiety to Adam and convinced him to eat the forbidden
fruit as well. This was history’s first shit test, which Adam
failed. Gaining knowledge of good and bad did not make Adam and Eve
gods: instead, they became even more fearful.

Aristotle said that the highest and most noble pleasure for man is the
desire for knowledge. But the Bible says that knowledge of good and
bad (pleasure and threats) is useless if you do not have the courage
to actually confront and defeat those threats. Without that courage,
gathering more information will cause you to only become more anxious
because now you know about more threats. When Adam and Eve gained
knowledge of good and bad, they became afraid of everything. And
interestingly, the first “threat” that Adam and Eve recognized was
their own sexuality.

I think the Bible is correct. It is true that one of our strongest
emotions is the desire for knowledge, but that desire is caused by
anxiety. We gather information so we can keep ourselves safe from
threat and figure out what to do, but information gathering often just
makes us more anxious. Anxiety-induced information gathering is a
useful tool for animals exploring a physical environment, but it is
less useful for humans trying to navigate the abstract map of their
life. If we freeze and try to “gather information” to determine
what to do next in our life, we may stay frozen forever because the
information we need may never come, and even if it does come, we may
not have the courage to actually face the threats on our path.
Sometimes in life you need to just go for it and leap into the
unknown, and sometimes you need to do so without having adequate
information. Many people stricken with anxiety endlessly ruminate and
never come to a conclusion because they do not have the information to
decide what to do next or because they know the right path but ignore
it because they see the threats on the way.

At the same time, the unknown can contain potentially infinite
pleasure, so we have a deep and powerful fascination with the unknown
and the transcendent.  No animal can survive without venturing into
the unknown, so we evolved to want to explore the unknown and figure
out what is going on in there. We always want to go beyond what we
know, make the unknown “known,” and then go further into the
unknown. In fact, the journey pleasure we get from venturing into the
unknown is the strongest type of journey pleasure possible, because
all the pleasure in the “known” world is finite, but the pleasure
in the unknown is potentially infinite.

The strongest pleasure a human being can feel is the thrill of
venturing into the unknown to create a future transcendent reality.
Humans evolved to create things to guarantee ourselves and others
pleasure in the future. But once our creations give us an easy path to
pleasure, instead of enjoying it, we wish to venture into the unknown
again. Humans inherently desire transcendence – the burning desire
to go “beyond” whatever we have. This emotion is impetus for the
human race’s insatiable desire to explore, innovate, and conquer,
but as we will see, this desire is also the death knell for many
friendships and romantic relationships.

We must venture into the unknown consciously and voluntarily, so we
can create a path through it that reaches the pleasure but keeps us
safe. Too much unknown overwhelms and cripples us because we cannot
carve paths through it quickly enough to get to our goals. Too much
order, we get bored. Humans literally evolved to feel best when
exactly on the border of “chaos and order” as Jordan Peterson
describes it. Similarly, “flow” occurs when we do something that
lies just outside of our ability.

This desire to make order out of chaos is one of the strongest
feelings that human beings can have. Humans love to find patterns in
randomness, which is why we love music. When we hear a pattern in a
song two times, we get a quick jolt of dopamine if we hear it a third
time. However, it is also this desire to find patterns that causes
people to become addicted to gambling or make stupid investments in
the stock market. When the blackjack table or the stock market changes
in a way we feel is a pattern, we feel like that pattern will
continue, which causes us to bet on it. But casinos and the stock
market are not designed to follow a pattern, so betting on the pattern
will cause you to lose money. In fact, I strongly suspect that casinos
and the stock market are purposely designed to act randomly or in the
opposite of the expected pattern, so that sophisticated investors and
casino owners can bilk poor saps that feel like they have found a
pattern. 

Although humans’ strongest desire is to venture into the unknown,
most people cannot do so because they are crippled by anxiety. As we
will learn later, anxiety is alleviated by the alpha male.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE UNKNOWN

Although anxiety is always difficult to contend with, anxiety caused
by the unknown is particularly crippling because your rational mind
cannot help you. Your rational mind is an information processing
machine, and can evaluate known threats or obstacles with information
it previously gathered. But with no information our rational mind
cannot help, which is why our emotions often take over when faced with
the unknown. We also have no purpose routines that we can rely on for
pleasure when faced with the unknown, so we are at the mercy of our
negative emotions.

Most people that have chronic anxiety are generally anxious of the
unknown, not specific, identifiable threats. People with anxiety
disorders often have too much unknown coming at them from all sides
and cannot create paths through it fast enough. Their boss is an
unpredictable asshole, their girlfriend is unstable, their friends are
shitty, their own behavior creates more problems for them that it
solves, and worst of all, they are simply unprepared for all the
problems the world throws at them. The more unknown they face, the
more they are crippled with paralysis, so the less progress they make,
so the more unknown they are faced with. It becomes a vicious cycle.

No situation is ever completely unknown. Most situations we contend
with are a mix of known and unknown elements, so our anxiety of the
unknown can latch onto real “facts” to justify our paralysis.
Anxiety never says “don’t move forward because you fear the
unknown and you’re a pussy.” Instead, it says “you should not
move forward because of reasons X, Y, and  Z,” and those reasons
will sound perfectly rational and logical.

FEAR

It is important to know the difference between fear and anxiety
because fear, if harnessed correctly, can be an extremely powerful
motivator.

Our subconscious mind will try to seek the clearest and easiest paths
to pleasure, which often lead to things like drugs, pornography, and
video games. Almost all higher purposes have at least some threat
associated with them, and a purpose tinged with even a little threat
may cause our subconscious mind to push us to take an easier path.
Negative emotions like anxiety are generally stronger than positive
emotions like journey pleasure, so we will give up on a positive
reward like journey pleasure if there is even a little anxiety
associated with it. This is why most people primarily chase lower
pleasures rather than higher ones.

One way to force yourself to take the right path is to use fear. Fear
is one of our strongest emotions, if not THE strongest emotion. Fear
is even stronger than anxiety because fear indicates there is a
currently present threat that will kill or destroy you if you do not
immediately fight or run, whereas you feel anxiety when there is a
potential, but yet unrealized threat. We will gladly run down a path
littered with potential threats if there is an actual threat chasing
us down that path. In ancient times the Roman army would punish
disobedient, lazy, and timid soldiers so harshly that it was famously
said that Roman troops were more afraid of their commanders than the
opposing armies, which is why the Roman army was so courageous and
successful on the battlefield.

Our motivation is lowest when we see a threat blocking our way to the
goal. It is highest when we see a clear path to the goal, and our fear
is behind us, pushing us towards the goal. Therefore, if you are
feeling unmotivated, or feeling motivated to do the wrong thing, you
should create fear for yourself, either by focusing your thoughts and
emotions on the consequences of not doing the right thing or by
creating an abstract fear for yourself, like the fear of God. Without
fear, you are prone to chase lower, easier pleasures rather than
higher, more difficult pleasures.

Humans place disproportionate weight on pleasures and pains that will
occur in the short term, and we wrongly discount pleasures and pains
that may occur in the long term. If I have strong pleasure available
to me now, but the pain associated with consuming that easy pleasure
will not occur until much later, my emotions will incline me towards
the easy pleasure now. This is all the more prevalent when the later
pain is abstract and difficult to conceptualize. For example, if
ignore my training to chase easy pleasure now, I will not see the pain
of that decision until I lose the championship game, which may not
occur until many months from now. To motivate myself to train hard, I
bring that future pain to the present.

I am not saying that one should constantly feel the emotion of fear.
The flight or fight response that fear produces is incredibly damaging
and stressful on your body, and evolved to only be invoked in
emergencies and for a brief period of time. If you have ever been
genuinely afraid, like in a fight or a car accident, you know you
cannot sustain that emotion for a long period of time. The fear that
motivates is a rational understanding the short and long-term
consequences of not pursuing the correct purpose, not an emotional
response. For example, my industry is very competitive, and I know
that if I do not work hard some upstart will take the top spot from
me, just as I took the top spot in the past from the previous winners
that became complacent. This is the same “fear” that causes me to
not text and drive at the same time.

Arrogance and laziness are the result of too much unhealthy anxiety
and not enough healthy fear. Arrogance comes from enjoying the
pleasure that high status brings, and laziness comes from fear of the
unknown. Arrogant lazy people enjoy feeling high status but fear the
unknown, so they lie to themselves and others that their current
purpose routines are good enough. But the world is constantly changing
and the unknown is constantly encroaching, so you will eventually be
defeated if you do not venture into it. A humble person doesn’t
enjoy the pleasure of high status – he reaches for a higher pleasure
– the pleasure of venturing forth into the unknown, knowing he will
have to change his purpose routines to defeat whatever may lay
therein.

Fear should not be your greatest motivator. Your strongest motivator
should be the journey pleasure that comes from pursuing a grand
purpose. But everybody is prone to becoming lazy and arrogant at some
point, especially after we have accomplished something, so it is
beneficial to have the ability to scare yourself to get back on track
when necessary. Threat constantly surrounds us, and anxiety makes us
reluctant to face that threat, so we sometimes need a stronger fear to
force us to fight that threat. 

Most people in the modern world are motivated by fear, not by any
grand purpose. They may enjoy some aspects of their jobs, but the main
thing pushing them to wake up and go to work in the morning is the
fear of losing their job, becoming homeless, and being rejected by
their tribe, whatever that is. Journey pleasure is a rare and delicate
flower that is hard to cultivate, whereas fear is a more solid and
consistent motivator, which is why “self-motivated” people are so
rare. In earlier times, people feared their father, their priest,
their teachers, their society, their king, and their God, and this
fear propelled them to pursue higher purposes. Nowadays, people
primarily fear dying and being homeless, and whatever their tribe
tells them to fear (in LA, people fear being ugly, in SJW circles,
people fear being called racist, etc…), so they are content with
living a mediocre existence. The modern world makes a devil’s
bargain with us: if we become a conformist slave, we will have nothing
to fear. But by giving us nothing to fear, the modern world ensures we
stay a conformist slave. This comfortable slave, who had no higher
purpose, is Nietzsche’s “last man.”

THE ALPHA MALE

The story I have told thus far sounds very grim. From this picture of
human psychology, humans are timid little animals that only want
pleasure, but are paralyzed by anxiety whenever we see a threat, so we
stay in our safe little purpose routines that are absolutely
guaranteed will bring us pleasure. The only time we can be motivated
to stray out of our comfort zone is by fear. If I have been correct so
far, it is not clear why all humans are not curled up in the fetal
position crying right now.

The answer is the alpha male.

The alpha male supplies the tribe the courage to venture into the
unknown and create new purpose routines. Throughout history, societies
have worshipped their ancestors and mythological “heroes of old,”
because those men “ventured into the unknown,” either physically
or psychologically, and brought back new purpose routines that the
tribe could use to get what they want. People are naturally scared of
the unknown, but once the alpha male carves a path for us, we can
follow that path with confidence that we can succeed, because we have
seen others successfully follow it. Very few people, however, have the
courage to initially jump into the unknown, which is why humans have
traditionally held alphas, innovators, and explorers in very high
esteem.

THE DYNAMICS OF THE TRIBE

Why must the alpha male venture into the unknown? Why can’t
“regular” people do so?

Evolution, in its infinite wisdom, determined that a tribe was more
likely to survive if it confronted challenges together as a unit, with
the strongest member of the tribe at the head of the expedition. If
every member of the tribe pursued their purposes individually with no
regard to what the others were doing, there would be endless conflict
and everybody would end up losing. A united tribe is much stronger
than individual apes, and a united tribe can also better distribute
resources to the most valuable and productive members of the tribe.

To ensure that the betas obey and follow the alpha male, evolution
uses a carrot and a stick: the carrot is the fact that the betas can
feel journey pleasure vicariously through the alpha male as he
explores the unknown. The stick is that the betas feel intense anxiety
whenever they consider doing anything that might offend the alpha
male. The betas also feel depression after the alpha male kicks their
ass and rejects them from the tribe.

The downside to this arrangement is that betas are constrained by
anxiety from three sources: 1) known threats, 2) the unknown, and 3)
the alpha male. I say “constrained” because the beta will not
actually feel any anxiety if he obeys the alpha male, but he becomes
awash in anxiety if he disobeys. If the beta obeys, a good alpha male
will shield the beta from threats and the unknown. The beta will also
never have to choose between equally appealing purposes because the
alpha male will always determine his purposes for him. In exchange for
this protection and guidance, the beta must become timid, conformist,
and operate within a narrow set of purpose routines that have been
created and approved by the alpha male. That alpha male need not be a
human man: it can be anything that “feels” like an alpha to the
beta’s subconscious mind: their father, their boyfriend, the media,
God, or society itself.

If the “alpha male” acts arbitrarily and abusively, the betas
underneath him will feel all three of these anxieties and become
especially anxious, weak, and depressed. An abused beta cannot build
positive purpose routines for himself because the alpha is always a
threat, thwarting whatever he does and never rewarding him for good
behavior. The beta will constantly try to figure out what he needs to
do to please the alpha male and contribute to the tribe, but he will
never figure it out because the alpha acts arbitrarily. Depression is
a form of learned helplessness: just as you can create a purpose
routine in a rat that pressing a button will lead to food, you can
induce depression in a rat by shocking it at random intervals
regardless of whether it presses the button. Once you cannot see the
causal link between your actions and the accomplishment of your goals,
depression is sure to follow. And worst of all, because the abused
beta never feels journey pleasure, he becomes addicted to destination
pleasure, and he fears beginning any long-term project because he does
not believe there will be any payoff.

Because nothing he does seems to work at pulling him up from the
bottom of the dominance hierarchy, the abused beta feels depressed and
worthless because he does not feel like he is contributing to the
tribe. He also becomes hyper-sensitive because he feels unable to
defeat any challenges, so every challenge, real or imagined, appears
to him like it could be the end. He may also spiral into “I’m a
victim” thinking or conspiracy theories because he feels constantly
oppressed and unable to do anything about it. Depression is a pain
response, so if you feel no journey pleasure or the pleasure of having
high status, you will be in constant agony. Freud also believed that
humans a “death instinct” – if our desire to conquer and create
the world could not be expressed outwardly (either through ourselves
or vicariously through the alpha male), it would be redirected
inwardly, and cause us to want to kill or destroy ourselves.

On the other hand, people who grow up around good alphas become
confident. The good alpha creates purpose routines betas can use to
successfully accomplish goals, and the alpha awards them a higher
status in the tribe for their successes. They are also more
emotionally stable because they feel journey pleasure, whereas damaged
betas are like anxious squirrels that jump at pleasure at every chance
they get, because they do not know when it could come next. But even
well-adjusted betas have an inherent fear of the alpha and the
unknown, which limits their possibilities.

I contrast damaged betas and well-adjusted betas because there are so
many damaged betas in modern society. Many families are abusive, but
even people who come from good families are abused and made to feel
inferior by other “alphas” in society: teachers, bullies, the
media, society, God, etc… In fact, every major source of authority
in the world has completely failed its followers in at least one huge
way in the past 50 years. The media happily encourages the “evil
alpha” narrative because a depressed, helpless population is easier
to control than a confident one. Similarly, many women are completely
damaged because they have been abused in some way, either sexually or
mentally, by the men in her life. These women are often incapable of
having a healthy relationship or following an alpha male on a long
journey, because every man she has ever met has proven himself
unreliable or not worth following. The “follow a man” purpose
routine in her mind has been tainted with “not worth it” or “too
much pain for the expected benefit.” 

Social anxiety is often caused by growing up around arbitrary and
abusive alphas. People with social anxiety are trained to
subconsciously see themselves as beta in every social situation, and
see higher status individuals as a potential threat and source of
“unknown.” Their subconscious mind associates social situations
with “threat” and just being in a situation with strangers (who
they automatically subconsciously view as being higher status than
them) will flood them with negative emotion. People with social
anxiety subconsciously think they need to “please” the other
people in the interaction or else they will be punished, but they have
no idea how to do so (especially if the others are strangers), so they
feel anxiety.

MASCULINITY AND TESTOSTERONE

What enables the alpha male to venture into the unknown and defeat
threats when others cannot? Clearly, the alpha male is physically
stronger and has more resources than betas, but the alpha male must
have an emotional advantage as well so that he can overcome the
anxiety that cripples others. This emotional advantage is caused by
what I call “masculine energy” or testosterone.

Testosterone is a hormone that is linked to aggression and
competitiveness. Womens’ bodies make testosterone, but mens’
bodies make about 10 times as much. Most physical features in men
associated with masculinity, such as beards, big muscles, and male
sexual organs are caused by testosterone. Just as journey pleasure is
the opposite of anxiety, testosterone is the opposite of cortisol. The
more testosterone in your body, the less cortisol, and vice-versa.

Testosterone is what causes men to confront, challenge, and try to
conquer other men and nature itself. It is a wild, reckless hormone
that is linked to taking unsafe risks and criminal behavior. Most
prisoners are men because men have higher testosterone. Testosterone
is also why boys are falling behind in school and society in general:
because boys are more likely to confront authority figures they view
as a “threat” and follow their own path, they will be punished by
a society and a system that does not take into account their
proclivities. If testosterone is not tutored and channeled into
productive uses, it can be very dangerous, both for the individual and
society. A man’s testosterone decreases as he ages, which is why
younger men are more reckless and violent.

Evolution understood the danger of testosterone to the unity of the
tribe, which is why betas have lower testosterone. Studies on human
males have shown that before a competitive contest, both men show
higher cortisol levels, presumably because they foresee a threat.
Immediately after the contest, however, the loser shows lower
testosterone, but the winner’s testosterone does not change. Lower
testosterone has been correlated with depression and even suicide.
Therefore, by decreasing testosterone, increasing anxiety, and
increasing depression, evolution ensures that betas stay in their
place and do not continue to cause problems for the alpha.

Despite the dangers of testosterone, somebody needs the courage to
defend the tribe from enemies leap into the unknown and find new
enemies to slay. Testosterone is what propels men into the unknown
when there is no clearly visible path to pleasure and only potential
threat. Testosterone is necessary because our rational mind and our
anxiety circuits fail in the face of the unknown, so we need to dive
into the unknown with wild abandon.

Of course, when taking any risk or jumping into any situation you must
use your rational mind as much as possible, but your rational mind can
only work with information. When you cannot get the required
information, you sometimes just need to fucking go for it. Throughout
history, men have done incredibly brave and daring things, often
ending in death, but these men built the world we have now. If
Christopher Columbus didn’t have the balls to try to cross the
Atlantic Ocean, the United States of America would not exist. Men who
built and tested the early airplanes knew they might die, but it is
because of those men that you can fly anywhere in the world within
hours today.

It is amusing to say “pussy runs the world” but the truth is that
testosterone runs the world. Without testosterone, everybody would be
afraid to leave their house. Pussy is cheap and essentially valueless
because it is destination pleasure and every woman has one, but a man
that can properly direct his testosterone is an extremely rare and
valuable commodity. Alpha males provide the most valuable thing in the
world: the courage to venture into the unknown and pursue a grand
purpose without anxiety.

CONFIDENCE AND CERTAINTY

The word confidence derives from the Latin con + fidens, which means
“with faith.” Confidence essentially means the faith that you will
succeed at whatever you are trying to do. We are all confident with
respect to purpose routines we know will work because we know there
are no insurmountable threats on the way. For example, we are all
confident when we brush our teeth, tie our shoes, or play a video game
we have beat a hundred times. But our confidence fails when we face
the unknown or with a threat that we are not sure we can defeat. We
can try to “believe” with our rational mind that we can defeat any
threat that we face, but as we have discussed, our anxiety is stronger
than our rational mind and often overwhelms it. Confidence therefore,
must be an emotion as well as a rational belief.

What is this emotion? Testosterone. Confidence is testosterone.
Confidence is the blind faith and irrational emotion that we can jump
into the unknown and defeat whatever threats may lay therein.
Confidence is what sets the alpha male apart from the betas, and it is
the thing that woman seek in men.

Just as anxiety can be extremely harmful if not guided by our rational
mind, confidence untutored by rationality can also be dangerous.
Having testosterone is like having a gun in your back pocket. Some men
lose their gun, some men forget they have a gun, some men are afraid
to ever use their gun, and some men fire their gun at the wrong people
and things and get fucked up because of it. But the man who can
control his gun and fire it at the right things is deadly. 

Your rational mind can use your confidence/testosterone when you are
faced with anxiety and need a boost, but it must be strictly
controlled. Of course, I just said that there will be situations where
your rational mind will simply not have the information to make the
right decision, but you must use your rational mind to process every
single last bit of information you can gather, so the scope of your
risk is as narrow as possible. A lot of “alpha” guys take insanely
stupid risks that even a little bit of rational thought would have
prevented. And just having testosterone will not make you attractive
to women – lots of men have testosterone – it is the ability to
control and use your testosterone skillfully that women are attracted
to. Later in this article I will discuss how to use your rational mind
to control your testosterone and anxiety.  

Just as betas rely on the alpha male for their purpose routines, they
also rely on betas for their confidence. Betas are crippled by the
unknown and the possibility of threats, so the alpha must reassure
them that the purpose routines that the alpha has created will be safe
for the betas to traverse. If the “alpha” is weak, then the betas
will be weak because they will have no confidence. Many betas are
“confident” so long as they are on a purpose routine the alpha
created for them, but they melt when faced with a completely new and
unknown situation that their training has not prepared them for. There
are many beta males and women that are very successful lawyers,
intellectuals, and even CEOs. But the they lack the faith to leap into
the unknown. There are many competent managers and executives that
could easily quit their jobs and start their own companies and make
tons more money, but they don’t solely because of anxiety. Many
people are also great at their job but break down and become a
sniveling mess when they are faced with anything genuinely unexpected
or outside of their instructions.

I explained earlier that anxiety helps us decide between conflicting
goals that both look appealing. Confidence, therefore, requires
certainty of purpose: we need to know that we are doing the
“right” thing and that there is no alternative path that is better
for us to pursue. A non-confident man looks and acts timid, hesitant,
noncommittal, and awkward because subconsciously he feels like he may
be pursuing the wrong purpose, and there may be a better purpose he
should be pursuing.

A confident man is completely congruent and focused, with no inner
contradictions or disputes between his emotions. Because he knows he
is on the path to the right purpose, his thoughts, emotions, and
actions are all focused on that purpose, and is not worried,
consciously or subconsciously, that he might be doing the wrong thing.
Imagine I told you that there was a suitcase in the next room with a
million dollars in it, there are no obstacles between you and the
suitcase, and all you needed to do was grab it and it would be yours.
Imagine also for the sake of this hypothetical that I was telling the
truth and you genuinely believed me. With this knowledge, you would
immediately leap to your feet and go grab the suitcase. You would not
feel any anxiety, worry, or timidity. You would not think about it,
ask anybody, care what anybody thought, or hesitate. You would leap to
the other room with boundless enthusiasm and focus, with all of your
thoughts and emotions focused on getting the money. You would be
confident and certain because you know you are doing the right thing,
there are no obstacles on the way, and there is no better thing you
can be doing.

That feeling is confidence, and the goal is to translate that
confidence to other parts of your life.

HOW TO DETERMINE YOUR PURPOSES

You must conceptualize your desires, purposes, and emotions as a
pyramid, with “lower” purposes supporting higher ones. At the
bottom of the pyramid are your lowest purposes: eating, shitting,
having sex, staying warm, etc… Those purposes must be satiated so
you can pursue your higher purposes: lifting, having a successful
career, maintaining good relationships, etc… At the top of the
pyramid your highest purpose, the purpose which all lower purposes
support, is your desire to venture into the unknown, defeat the
threats that lay therein, and create a transcendent future reality
that is infinitely better than your current reality. I called this
highest purpose the “Ultimate Transcendent Purpose.”

The Ultimate Transcendent Purpose is a transcendent ideal and by
definition never achievable because no matter what you achieve, there
is more to do. The Ultimate Transcendent Purpose contains within it
anything else a human being could ever want or need. It is
simultaneously the ultimate adventure and the ultimate destination.
Because it is transcendent, it cannot be imagined by any current human
mind.  

Why should our top purpose be a transcendent, impossible, abstract
ideal? Why should we not place as our highest purpose a concrete
thing, like our career, our family, self-improvement, etc…?

First, there is nothing wrong with pursuing mundane purposes. In fact,
it is necessary. But your ultimate, highest purpose which your mundane
purposes support must be transcendent and lay beyond the unknown.
Humans simply did not evolve to get excited by mundane purposes. For
many of you, pursuing the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose may not even
change your day to day activity – the only difference will be that
your psychological outlook on your life will change. You will still
need to go to work, pay your bills, eat well, go to the gym, and have
relationships – but none of these goals become a tool to ascend to
something higher, not a false idol to worship. The Ultimate
Transcendent Purpose is superior to a mundane purpose for the
following reasons:

First, because the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose is the most valuable
and pleasurable destination and because it requires venturing into the
unkonwn, you will feel the strongest possible journey pleasure during
its pursuit. And because the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose is not
achievable, this journey pleasure will never end.

Second, if you pursue the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose you will
always feel confident and certain of your purpose because you know you
are pursuing the best possible purpose. You will never feel that
nagging anxiety that you should perhaps be doing something else. You
may run into obstacles or make mistakes in choosing your lower
purposes, but because your highest purpose is the correct one, you
will be able to quickly change your lower purposes without feeling
like you have failed in your life’s mission and falling into a pit
of depression and anxiety.

If your highest pursue is mundane and concrete two things may happen
that will end your journey pleasure: 1) you will achieve your goal, or
2) your goal may become impossible to achieve. Both of these events
will leave you anxious, depressed, lost, and at the mercy of your
lower emotions, because your journey pleasure is no longer there to
stabilize you and provide you a path to pleasure. You need constant
journey pleasure in your life, and you cannot make your journey
pleasure contingent on achieving this or that specific goal.

If you make your highest purpose anything lower than the Ultimate
Transcendent Purpose, you will miss out on the delicate balance of
purposes that makes human life worth living. If you make your career
your ultimate purpose, you may ignore your children, if you make
making your children happy your highest purpose, you may end up
enabling their bad behavior, if you make your relationship your
highest purpose, you may end up ignoring yourself, etc… Furthermore,
you are making yourself a slave to a particular thing that can
disappear at any time. Of course, there is nothing wrong with pursuing
a career, a relationship, or children, but if you make that thing your
highest purpose you make it impossible to switch gears if you are in
the wrong career, the wrong relationship, or your children are bad.

I know a guy who dreamt of winning the World Series since he was 8
years old. He eventually become a Major League Baseball player and won
the World Series in the 90s. It’s obviously an amazing achievement,
but his life fell apart after he won the World Series because he had
nothing else to motivate him. After he retired from baseball, he
became an alcoholic and spent his time hanging out at nightclubs
trying to fuck women based on his semi-celebrity status. He jumped
from shitty job to shitty job, all the while being miserable because
he had no purpose in his life anymore. 

By fixating on the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose, you can easily
switch lower purposes without falling into existential despair. The
biggest failures in life are people that get overly emotionally
invested in an unhealthy relationship, the wrong career, the wrong
ideas, the wrong hobbies, the wrong friends, or the wrong mental
states. Because they rely on those purposes for their pleasure, they
cannot let them go when it would be rationally wise to do so. In my
life, I have observed that the most successful people are the ones who
can quickly and flexibly change course when situations change.

You will be able to ignore distractions from your lower purposes
because your higher purpose will be so much more pleasurable.
Furthermore, because everything we do is somehow contributing to the
Ultimate Transcendent Purpose, we can at least hypothetically feel
this journey pleasure at every moment of the day. All of our actions
will take a more meaningful significance because not only will they
contribute to a higher purpose, they will contribute to the highest
purpose.

Pursuing the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose also lowers your anxiety
because there are infinite paths to the top. If one path is closed off
to you (for example, you get injured and cannot play professional
sports), you can switch paths. But if the ultimate purpose in your
life was to play professional sports, and you get injured, you have no
choice but to fall into a pit of depression and anxiety until you find
a new purpose to motivate you.

CONTROLLING YOUR EMOTIONS

A person who feels journey pleasure will find it easier to control
their emotions and think rationally because they will have less
anxiety and because they will not be tempted by destination pleasure
as much. Journey pleasure is stronger than destination pleasure, lasts
over a longer period of time, and does not require external
“things” so feeling journey pleasure will free you from the
tyranny of destination pleasure. Destination pleasure only lasts for
the brief moment while you consume the pleasurable thing and then
disappears when the pleasurable thing disappears. You feel destination
pleasure while you eat the cake, have sex, or hug you friend, but that
pleasure is temporary and requires the pleasurable object. Journey
pleasure, on the other hand, is primarily mental lasts for as long as
you are working towards your goal, so you can feel it anytime and
anywhere. If you are building your business, you can feel journey
pleasure as you work, as you eat lunch, and even as you have a few
beers with your friends to wind down, because all of those activities
are taking you towards your goal. 

Journey pleasure is required for emotional stability and rationality.
Humans are pleasure-seeking creatures, and we cannot think rationality
if we are chasing one brief pleasure after another. But feeling
journey pleasure satiates our desire for pleasure, and once we have a
consistent source of journey pleasure we can make rational, long-term
plans. Even people that enjoy journey pleasure need to feed their
lower desires occasionally, but because their higher pleasures are
satiated all of their thoughts and emotions are not directed towards
satisfying their lower pleasure.

To control your emotions, your lower desires must be satiated, and to
feel satiated you must put each desire in its correct place in your
hierarchy of emotions. Your desires never “turn off” so you cannot
satiate them by feeding them. In fact, feeding them often makes them
hungrier. Our desires evolved to be constant and insatiable to make up
for anticipated scarcity. If a caveman came upon an opportunity to eat
or have sex, he would eat and fuck as much he could because it did not
know when the next opportunity would come. We can, however, reduce
this feeling of scarcity by putting our desires into a schedule and
routine. If you offer me food or pussy right now, but I know for a
fact that I am getting some food or pussy later, it will be easy for
me to resist. Otherwise, it will be hard.

Pursuing the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose will cause you to feel
satiated because it includes within it all of your desires. If you
make a lesser purpose your primary purpose, your other desires will
revolt and demand attention. Imagine a businessman who has made his
career his highest purpose and the night before an important meeting,
a beautiful woman who is normally out of league begs him to go out and
drink with her. The businessman’s conscious mind will say “I
cannot go out, I must go to the meeting,” but his subconscious mind
will say “I strongly desire this woman, and I may not be able to get
her by pursuing my primary purpose, so I should probably take this
opportunity because I may not get another one.” A man pursuing the
Ultimate Transcendent Purpose, however, would turn the woman down
because he would faith that by pursuing his highest purpose, he would
satiate his lower purposes as well. In other words, by incorporating
his lower purposes into his higher purpose, he can control his lower
purposes. He can also feel certain of his higher purposes.

Hypothetically, the alpha male is the most “rational” member of
the tribe because he feels the most journey pleasure and the least
negative emotion. The oversimplified saying that “men are rational
and women are emotional” is wrong because there are plenty of beta
males that are extremely emotional. A woman who has been taught a
series of reliable purpose routines by a powerful alpha male can
oftentimes act more rationally than a beta male that has few useful
purpose routines and is riddled with anxiety and depression. Generally
speaking, it is “easier” for men to be “rational” because they
can generate journey pleasure easier, but many men, especially in the
modern world, waste this natural advantage. You need more than an XY
chromosome to act think and act rationally – you need purpose
routines that will bring you journey pleasure to stabilize your lower
emotions.  

VENTURING INTO THE UNKNOWN

The most important aspect of pursuing any purpose is venturing into
the unknown. Human beings simply did not evolve to pursue mundane
purposes or stay within a predefined comfort zone. The middle class
dream of “a house, a wife, and 2.5 kids” as the pinnacle of
happiness is a lie that has left many people with regret, longing,
existential anxiety, and mid-life crises.

Earlier, I said that you should conceptualize your purposes as a
pyramid, with your lower purposes supporting your higher purposes, and
the highest purpose of all being the Ultimate Transcendent Purpose.
But you should also conceptualize each purpose as a combination of
feeding some desire and venturing into the unknown. For example, if
you lift weights, you should not just do the same workouts for the
rest of your life. You should constantly learning new techniques, new
workouts, and completely new approaches. You should also experiment
with untested techniques and perhaps discover something nobody had
ever known before. Similarly, if you cook, even if it is just a hobby,
you should be constantly learning new recipes and new cooking
techniques. Therefore, it is more accurate to conceptualize your
pyramid of purposes as a pyramid of pyramids, with each smaller
pyramid pointing towards the unknown in some way.

Of course, you cannot spend hours “venturing into the unknown”
with respect to every single thing you do. You have limited time and
energy, and there are certain fields and tasks that you are more
well-suited to innovate in than others. But you must constantly remain
open-minded and seek novelty wherever possible. Furthermore, before
you can “venture into the unknown” you must master the known
territory. If you showed up to jiu-jitsu class the first day and
started making up moves you would get your ass kicked. There is a
reason the alpha ventures into the unknown and not the beta. But it is
this very possibility of venturing into the unknown that should
motivate you to master whatever field you are in. If the reward for
mastering a field is that you just know stuff a bunch of other people
already knew, you will not want to do it.

AN EPIDEMIC OF PURPOSELESSNESS

Men and women in modern, industrialized countries are currently
suffering from an epidemic of purposelessness, which in turn leads to
depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, mental illness, bizarre
behaviors and interests, political extremism, and addictions to cheap
pleasures. I believe this epidemic of purposelessness is caused by
several factors.

First, people in the modern world are paralyzed by existential anxiety
because we have so many different opportunities open to us and no
clear guidance as to which to pick. As I explained earlier anxiety
occurs when our brain is trying to choose between equally appealing
goals. Because the modern world offers so much opportunity, but no
guidance as to what a person should actually do, many people are stuck
in “freeze and gather information” mode and spend all day on the
internet mentally masturbating. In earlier times, people’s purposes
were narrowly defined by society or thrust upon them by their
caste/family/situation. Most people’s primary purpose was simply
surviving. But in the modern world, we have complete freedom and
infinite information, and no way of sifting through that information
to determine what we should actually do. I think one reason mental
illness most often manifests itself in a person’s mid-20s is because
it is the first time in most people’s lives that they have no clear
path to follow and nobody forcing them to do anything.

Even when people do select a purpose, they do so with hesitation and
timidity because they are afraid that there might be a better purpose
they could be pursuing. The pernicious lie of “do what makes you
happy” causes people to flit from job to job, hobby to hobby,
relationship to relationship, and even identity to identity, often
abandoning any pursuit once they run into even the slightest amount of
adversity. The media and entertainment industry worsen this problem by
presenting to people an infinite array of lifestyles, ideologies, and
alternative ways of thinking, causing people to constantly feel unsure
of their purposes, beliefs, and even their own thoughts and feelings.
As de Tocqueville observed, as freedom increases in liberal societies,
people actually become more conformist because they have no idea what
they should do or be, so they are easily manipulated into following
the crowd.

Second, the great purposes that motivated people in the past are
disappearing. Whatever faults religion and ideology have, they have
the salutary effect of giving people purpose and certainty by closing
off all avenues of doubt. But today most people have become
disillusioned with religious, political, and nationalist movements,
presumably because they have learned that those movements were, or
have become, corrupt. People nevertheless have an innate desire for a
grand purpose and a grand challenge, which is why they sometimes join
extremist movements that claim society is about to imminently collapse
(either because of immigrants, climate change, technology,
conspiracies, etc…). This is why otherwise comfortable,
well-educated, and middle-class people to join ISIS or become members
of the alt right or the far left. Nevertheless, however, intelligent
people don’t generally fall into that trap.

ARBITRARY ALPHAS AND MODERN SOCIETY

Earlier I discussed how an alpha male that acts arbitrarily and
unfairly can destroy the betas underneath him by riddling them with
anxiety and depression. Part of the reason more and more people are
becoming beta and awash with depression, anxiety, and hopelessness is
because the “alphas” in our society have acted, and continue to
act, arbitrarily or cruelly.

The modern entertainment-media-academic (EMA) complex has caused
people to lose faith in all of the older “alphas” that they
historically obeyed and relied on - the father, the mother, the
church, and traditional culture. The EMA complex accomplished this
feat by conducting a brilliant and relentless propaganda campaign that
argued that these traditional alphas were corrupt and evil. Of course,
it is true that traditional culture and religion were sometimes
corrupt and evil, but the EMA complex replaced these alphas with
something much worse - itself. In today’s modern society, the EMA
complex performs all the functions of the “alpha male” in that it
determines the purposes for the betas, rewards them for pursuing those
purposes, and punishes them for deviating for those purposes. The
state, corporations, and the financial system are simply
instrumentalities the EMA complex uses to accomplish its purposes.

But the EMA complex is not a good alpha – it acts arbitrarily and
cruelly so that the betas stay depressed, anxious, confused, and
helpless. Instead of teaching betas good purpose routines, the EMA
complex instead teaches that destination pleasure is the pinnacle of a
happy life. Many men in modern society think the point of life is to
have a nice house, a nice car, and a hot wife (or fucking tons of
bitches, bro). On the flipside, others completely opt out of a
meaningful career to “follow their happiness,” which often means
drugs, silly political activism, and shitty jobs. These hippies spend
all day preaching “love,” “peace,” and “becoming one with
nature,” but because they are not actually accomplishing anything
with their lives, they are often just as addicted to destination
pleasure as the professional guy whose only joy is buying expensive
shit and eating at fancy restaurants.

Furthermore, both the right and left wings of the EMA complex subtly
and implicitly sell a victim narrative and strongly imply that people
will never be able to achieve any impressive purpose. The implicit
message is “There is an evil cabal of nationalists/Jews/white
supremacists/left wingers/right
wingers/globalists/communists/capitalists that run the world, and you
can do nothing about it because you are weak/oppressed/hated/unfairly
treated, so just buy this stuff, get drunk, and vote for this
candidate.” Mind you, they do not come out and openly say anything
this obviously bleak – the EMA complex often sounds very hopeful in
its explicit statements – but their goal is to subconsciously
instill a feeling of hopelessness, and it often works.

As more and more individuals in society have learned to see themselves
as beta, and act accordingly, a smaller and smaller group of alpha
males has taken most of the power and money in society, oftentimes
working in conjunction with the EMA complex to maintain and expand
their power. Small businesses are being replaced with giant
corporations that are controlled by these mega-alphas. Most men are
simply not prepared to compete with these mega-alphas because our
education system sucks, the EMA complex feeds men lies, and men simply
never learn the discipline they need to compete at the highest levels.
Because betas feel unable to pursue worthwhile goals, they focus on
cheap pleasures and stupid goals.

Most people feel no journey pleasure at their jobs because their jobs
are designed to be routine, simplistic, and provide no outlet for
creativity or decision-making (those things are reserved for the alpha
males). Furthermore, most people work for middle managers who act as
arbitrary alphas (and are often just as afraid, unprepared, and
miserable as they are), so people are in a constant state of anxiety
that they will get fired, making it impossible for them for them feel
journey pleasure. Because most peoples’ primary concern is keeping
their head above water, their primary motivation is fear of the alpha
male rather than the joy of actually accomplishing anything. Most
people have no great ambition for their career or life, they just want
to have a job and “get by,” without going broke and becoming
homeless. The “alphas” in every industry enjoy all the journey
pleasure, while everybody else is simply trying to not get destroyed
by the alphas. It just takes one intelligent, hard working,
disciplined, badass motherfucker in an industry to make everybody
else’s life in that industry a living hell. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk,
or Jeff Bezos, were each individually responsible for making thousands
of their employees’ lives miserable (those guys were famous for
being assholes), and those employees are the lucky ones who can say
they worked at Apple or Amazon!

PRACTICAL ADVICE

So what should one do? While your ultimate goal, the Ultimate
Transcendent Purpose, should constantly lurk in the background, you
need a practical plan of action for today, tomorrow, and next year.

The first thing you need to do is start creating sources of journey
pleasure for yourself. You can start with small, short-term tasks that
you can easily achieve to obtain “wins.” When I was at my lowest,
I started with a small goal: to brush my teeth every day. That small
“win” gave me the small dopamine boost that motivated me to tackle
bigger and bigger challenges. To get these consistent “wins” you
need a predictable, structured routine with opportunities for these
repeated wins.

Instead of seeing your job as a miserable chore, you should begin to
view your job, and everything else you do, as just a stepping stone in
your journey to something greater. Your work today may suck, but you
are learning skills, saving some money, making connections, and
figuring out your next move. If you have a shitty boss, figure out
what makes them tick (it is usually narcissism and a desire to pass
off their work to somebody else), and then suck up to them so that
they like you.

If you absolutely cannot feel journey pleasure or “venture into the
unknown” at your job, you should engage in activities outside of
work that bring you those things. Teach yourself a valuable skill that
can help you with your career, begin a long-term fitness program,
and/or begin some creative endeavor where you can work at your own
pace without some alpha looking over your shoulder and striking you
with anxiety. If you can do all three of these things, all the better.
My job often requires me to undertake long-term projects that do not
pay off for months or even years, so writing the Woujo blog gives me
small “wins” that keep me gassed up with journey pleasure. 

ELIMINATING ANXIETY

The key to eliminating anxiety is planning.

To reduce your anxiety, you must reduce the threats in your life,
eliminate conflicts between your goals, reduce the amount of
uncertainty and “unknown” in your life, and attack the remaining
unknown voluntarily, rationally, consciously, and with a plan. To deal
with the unknown, you must gather information, calculate a series of
paths based on that information, and then “test” those paths to
see if they are “correct.” Although this process of venturing into
the unknown is the highest thing a man can do, you will become
overwhelmed with anxiety if you are bombarded with too much unknown in
your life. Your conscious mind has limited bandwidth, so it can only
transform a certain amount of “chaos” into “order” at one
particular time.

For example, if things are going well in your life but you get fired
from your job, you will feel a little anxiety but you will probably be
able to formulate a plan to get a new job and successfully carry out
that plan relatively quickly. But if you simultaneously get dumped by
your girlfriend, get fired from your job, and feel a bunch of other
uncertainty in your life, you may become paralyzed by anxiety and
unable to do anything.

Planning helps eliminate anxiety because your brain only feels anxiety
when you actually start moving towards your goal. But if you take some
time to calculate a plan to get to your goal before you start moving,
your mind can think clearly and unclouded by anxiety. In this clear,
rational state of mind you can rationally analyze potential threats in
advance instead of suddenly finding yourself faced with those threats
in the middle of your journey. By planning you can also calculate
routes that will avoid known threats, and plan your journey with the
anticipated threats in mind, so you will feel less anxiety when you
actually start to traverse this path. Of course, there is always a
possibility that random threats will pop up out of nowhere and
surprise you, but the more certain you can feel about your paths, the
less anxiety you will feel, and individual threats will not be as
crippling.

This planning cycle sounds so simple and obvious as to not be worth
discussing, but it is actually very difficult to implement. You must
reduce uncertainty in your life as much as possible, so that you can
use the precious, limited power of your conscious mind to tackle
challenges that actually matter. You should create long-term plans for
your life and short-term plans to support those long-term plans. On a
micro level, you need to create a predictable routine for your daily
life. You also need to eliminate unnecessary sources of uncertainty
and negativity in your life, like shitty friends, bad habits, a dirty
house, addictions, and internet worm-holes, because your brain views
these sources of negativity and uncertainty as threats, and if you are
not voluntarily and consciously confronting these threats, they will
induce anxiety in you.

Because most people are playing whack-a-mole with problems and threats
in their life, they rarely get the opportunity to sit and rationally
think about what they are doing. Ideally, you will set some time aside
to rationally analyze every single thing you do. What are you eating
every day? What small changes could you make that would make you
healthier? How are you wasting your time on the internet? Why are you
working at your job? What better opportunities may exist for you?

We also feel anxiety when we are unsure that we are on the right path.
This is one situation where anxiety can help you – if something is
giving you a nagging feeling of anxiety, you should reflect on it
because your anxiety may be correct. Anxiety can cripple you, but it
is also can be very helpful, because your subconscious mind can
process tons of information that your conscious mind may have
forgotten. Sometimes you will feel a powerful compulsion pulling you
to do something, but anxiety will be that small voice in the back of
your head telling you to do something else. Sometimes you need to
listen to your anxiety, but as I have made clear, you must analyze
your anxiety rationally. When people ask me what they should do with
their life, I tell them to listen to their anxiety because it may be
telling them something. They may be at a job that is not adequately
utilizing their talents, or a place with a threat that may one day
destroy them, or they may be trying to pursue two incompatible goals
at the same time.

The best thing most people can do to reduce anxiety is to eliminate
conflicts between their goals. Because of the infinite possibilities
and desirable things in the modern world, many people are pulled in a
thousand different directions and find themselves pursuing purposes
that conflict with each other, creating anxiety. Your purposes should
support and help each other, not fight each other. Again, harmonizing
your goals is much easier said than done, because you may need to
sacrifice things you really enjoy doing or value. You may also need to
stop following your “dream,” at least for now, for the greater
good of your life.

The biggest conflicts are caused by our addictions and other desires
that we cannot control. Most people “know” the right path for
them, but they cannot resist partying on weekends, eating shitty food,
getting into bad relationships, etc… Controlling your vices is a
difficult task that deserves its own article, but I will focus here on
your hierarchy of purposes. The only thing that can defeat an emotion
is a stronger emotion, so the only way you can control your vices is
you have a stronger pleasure available to you. This stronger pleasure
is journey pleasure.

To feel journey pleasure and to eliminate anxiety you must feel like
you can defeat the threats that lie in your path. Acting and feeling
like an alpha male helps to a degree, but all humans are subject to
the viscitudes of the universe and powers that are stronger than us,
so to genuinely feel like you can overcome any challenge, defeat any
threat, and succeed when venturing into the unknown you must have the
correct beliefs about the universe. These beliefs must also be
instantiated in your emotions somehow. You can do this with faith,
prayer, psychedelic drugs, or philosophical investigation. You can
also look up to great people who came before you for inspiration, but
beware: if you are going somewhere that nobody has gone before, there
may be nobody to look up to.

Maintaining the correct beliefs about your ability to conquer the
universe is much easier said than done because your subconscious mind
is designed to think negatively to protect you from threats. You can
read all the inspirational and motivational books in the world, but
meanwhile your mind will subconsciously be tagging various purpose
routines as negative. The negative aspect of our subconscious mind
also secretly influences our conscious mind, planting negative beliefs
in our minds that appear “rational” to us. Many of you have years
of negative beliefs that have accumulated in your mind, and to feel
motivated again you must bring each of these beliefs to light and
“clean” them in the light of positive emotions and beliefs. 

I do not have the space here to describe every belief you need to
replace, but here are two important ones: First, you must believe that
the world is governed by rational rules, that you can understand these
rational rules, and you can use these rational rules to get what you
want. Your subconscious mind will constantly try to make you feel like
some things are just impossible, and that feeling will often appear to
be supported by the facts. But success in every field basically
requires consciously taking certain steps, and to learn what those
steps are, you must rationally analyze the universe and learn what the
relevant rules regarding those steps are. Second, you must not feel
oppressed by any alpha male. Most peoples’ depression and anxiety
stems from a fear of the tribe’s alpha male, and those feelings
persist even when there is no actual alpha male. Even if you are being
oppressed by your boss, your father, or the President of the United
States, you cannot let yourself FEEL like a beta. You should remain
humble, and you should sometimes act like a beta when it is necessary
(for example, at work), but you should realize that the primary thing
that cripples most people is the fear of the alpha male, even if they
do not realize it.

CONCLUSION

By putting journey pleasure at the top of our hierarchy of purposes, I
do not mean to say that life is merely an animalistic search for
pleasure. Life will offer suffering and long stretches where a person
will not feel any journey pleasure, and those periods have advantages
as well: they build character, they provide good things for other
people, and they prevent worse harms from happening. But in the final
analysis, a person must have some motivation to keep them going, and
that motivation must ultimately point to something desirable. Some
people would call journey pleasure “hope” or “meaning” rather
than “pleasure” because people normally associate the word
“pleasure” with lower pleasures like eating or sex. I prefer to
use the word pleasure to emphasize the fact this feeling is tired with
our biological motivational systems. 
 
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Archived from https://theredarchive.com/blog/Woujo/the-purpose-series-part-1-of-3-purpose-anxiety.18986