My new book, The Romantic Ideal: The Highest Standard of Romance for a Man will release in just two weeks on November 19th (International Men’s Day). It’s available as a 99-cent ebook preorder right now, but the price will go up after launch. Paperback, hardcover, and audiobook narration will also be available starting on the 19th.

If the loss of the authentic self can be seen as a form of spiritual death, then those who remain true to themselves indefinitely are the only immortals. They are fated to outlive everyone around them, everyone they grow close to and bond with for any length of time, because they stay the same while everyone else changes and degrades, killing themselves, in a sense, far too early. The trope of the lone immortal in a world of fragile mortals perfectly captures the resulting psychological state: a continuity of consciousness across thousands of years or generations where everyone else keeps dying after only several decades. It becomes impossible to meaningfully bond with, trust, or invest in anyone because you know they will soon be gone. Only you will remain. This is how it feels to live forever in a world populated by psychological mayflys.

It’s about the grammar of the question. It’s always presented in the past simple tense. What “did” you study? It indicates that studying (and basically the entirety of education itself) was an event that began and ended in the past. The lack of specifying the intended time period implies that I should already know exactly when the studying in question is supposed to have happened: at college when I was a young man. Probably in my early twenties. Obviously, that’s when education occurs in someone’s life. And then it stops. So, when someone asks me what I “studied,” they almost certainly mean the singular subject that dominated my formal schooling for a defined period in my life.

The first two Terminator movies serve as an effective meditation on the interplay between masculinity and feminity. People forget that the first Terminator movie, in particular, is a love story between a human soldier from the future and the woman that he's sent back in time to protect from the titular robot assassin. His character evolves as a result of bonding with the woman he first just sees as the target of his mission.

I recently added two new pieces of wall art to my growing collection inspired by mythologically significant figures from movies and television. The subject of both new pieces is Peter Capaldi’s passionate and curmudgeonly portrayal of the 12th incarnation of The Doctor from Doctor Who. His is the only version of the 14 who have so far played the character that I felt captured what a 2,000-year-old alien, who had seen, experienced, and endured more than any of us can imagine, might actually be like. And though there are many episodes and moments from his three-season run on the show that I could have chosen as worthy of immortalizing, I chose these two as polar opposites, the yin and yang of what he is capable of experiencing. It is a similar dichotomy that I relate to in my most extreme experiences of life.

How could masses of people support such actions (sometimes for centuries or millennia) that seem so obviously wrong from our modern, enlightened perspective? What do you suppose prevented the people who thought those ways from seeing what was wrong with them at the time? And what do you suppose the social reaction to those few who saw what was wrong with them and spoke out must have been?

I have long taken the prospect of killing myself quite seriously. At times, the thought pops up every few days, at the very least. As ghastly as that sounds, a lot of people would benefit in a spiritual or philosophical manner by allowing themselves to undergo a similar kind of recurring ideation about the worth of their own lives and the merit of willfully continuing them. Withstanding the discomfort of such rumination, a certain type of mind might think more clearly about what it finds meaningful and the direction it will take with the time it has left to find and maintain that meaning.

The Last Temptation of Christ is notorious and noteworthy for depicting a profoundly flawed, human, and at times, broken version of a figure we are accustomed to seeing portrayed as unwavering and perfect. This Jesus is not an embodied paragon from immaculate conception to death. He is blasphemous and insulting to the traditional conception of the Christian messiah, or so it seems at first. His real role is to speak to the human hero seeking to be worthy of Godhood in all of us. 

Healthy relationships of all kinds are based on mutual respect. This means balance and reciprocity in all things. We are happy to do for others that which we believe they would be happy to do for us too. When they do not do what we have done for them (or would do), we naturally feel as though they have cheated us. We feel we must reassess the nature of our relationship with someone we thought we knew because their behavior is incongruent with the narrative they have put forth about who they are and the social contract we have formed together. You can only be as good to other people as they are to you before being good to them is no longer a good idea.

A Man Called Otto is not the simple and endearing love story that Tom Hanks’ (i.e., “America’s dad”) performance as a lovable grump makes it appear to be. It unapologetically explores the masculine desire to exit an unfulfilling life. Here, suicidal tendencies are presented casually and unassumingly because they are framed through the story of a curmudgeonly widower missing his lost love. We cannot help but like Otto and understand the motivation behind his unsightly attempts at self-termination, no matter how ghastly his situation is.

Too often, I read such a book written by a so-called "expert,” only to get to the end and realize that I probably could have written virtually the same book with the information I had when I started reading it. There will almost always be a chapter, a section, or a mantra repeated throughout the text that could be summarized as “Just start doing the thing.” In other words, the author is expertly advising you to just copy how other people doing the thing do the thing. Then, you too will be doing the thing.

Why should art exist simply to please the senses? Art can be meaningful. Art can be a sensory reminder of something personally important and worth frequently being reminded of. We surround ourselves with triggers of how we want to think and feel. That is the purpose of art: to recreate a specific aspect of reality in a controlled environment.

I have never seen a movie that so effectively demonstrates how the way we view a story affects our interpretation of the literal events we witness and the invisible overlay of character motivations and justifications we add to those events. It takes the concept of an unreliable narrator to a disturbing meta-level because it forces us to realize that we, too, are silently contributing to the story as narrators merely by viewing and interpreting it in real-time.

Every now and then, I find that I need to reference a phenomenon or experience for which I lack an adequate label in English. In these moments, I search for a term that will capture the meaning I intend and make the concept easier to repeatedly refer to. Since I have introduced these and other terms into my personal lexicon, I find myself cognizing them more readily and using them as labels to conceptualize the world around me. I’ve already used a few of them in print, too. I will probably update this list as I invent more terms. Feel free to start using them in whatever ways you see fit. With enough use, maybe I’ll even see them show up in a dictionary someday. The purpose of a dictionary, after all, is to record common use of language.

It’s amazing that we are still at a point in history where most people don't seem to agree that there is an absolute objective nature to how the field of economics works. But that’s the evolution that every field of study must go through on its historical journey toward mass understanding and acceptance. Every area of science and philosophy undergoes a progression where, for the longest time, everyone fights amongst themselves about how it works. In the early days of physics (presently our most developed science), we didn't even know the answer to such basic questions as if the sun revolved around the Earth or the Earth around the sun. We didn’t know if the heavenly bodies were perfect spheres upon the firmament of the night sky. We didn’t even know if heavy objects fell faster than light ones.

The first thing to understand is that there isn't a universal approach that works for every man with every woman in every situation. No one could write a worthwhile manual that says, "Touch a woman here, here, and here to give her the best sex of her life. Compliment her in exactly this way. Wear exactly this and do these four things to impress her.” As in all domains, there are only principles that generally describe how things work.

The sexual impulse sits at the foundation of our animalistic selves. Therefore, its repression is incredibly harmful to people and society. Under healthy conditions of self-exploration and -expression, every individual would be free to determine for themselves what part this biological drive and everything that comes from it will play in their life.

Understanding this, it becomes a lot easier to increase the rate at which you are right about the things you think and to have the confidence that you are right even when most others disagree with you. You develop a standard for checking the thoughts that enter your head for internal consistency. You don’t open your mouth until you’ve gone through a fairly lengthy process of ensuring that they fit together on the map in your head.

The first set of rules (what we might call the “real rules”) is what’s physically possible. These rules do not need to be enforced by anyone because it is not possible to break them. The second set of rules (what we might call the “fake rules”) is what’s socially permissible. These rules have to be enforced with the threat of punishment for breaking them because – spoiler alert – it is possible to break them.

Anything that goes unexamined too long in any mind is potentially monstrous. So long as it is painful for us to think differently about what we prefer to believe, we are monsters in waiting. Passion and the demand for truth in all things must supersede the comfort of illusion, however innocuous that illusion might seem on the surface. Illusion forces all analysis to awkwardly work its way around it, to contort and disfigure itself to fit a sacred “truth” that will never budge in the face of superior evidence or reason. The ego and identity are too built up in it, so to remove or alter any part of it feels, quite literally, like one is being tortured or dying.