In the course of sharing a life with someone, you will see them in moments when they have not prepared their appearance: no makeup or fancy dress to craft the specific image designed to attract you. You will see them at their worst, just as they will see the same from you. If you are only attracted to them at a manufactured best, you’re not really attracted to them at all. When you cannot help but still be drawn to them in physical form, even when it is not obvious that you should be, and even when no other men notice the beauty you do, you will know you have found miraculous physical chemistry.

People who have never had enough money and people who have always had more money than they know what to do with have something in common: They seek to spend more than they need to as a form of self-indulgent recreation. That’s what attracts shallow women. Not the skill that it took to produce wealth or the responsible mindset of spending and investing it wisely. Shallow women want a man willing to waste hundreds or thousands of dollars buying them drinks at a bar or showering them with shiny trinkets in an effort to win their attention. The willingness to waste is valuable to them. It makes them feel like a prize to be won.

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.

Ladies, do you see a man become a better, more fully expressed version of himself around you, as a direct consequence of your influence? Do you see that he cannot pull his heart away from you because you bring peace to his life and activate his potential? Do you make all the beauty in the universe come alive for him, such that your influence lingers on him like a scent even when you are gone? Are you like the sun to him, the source of light and warmth that all life on Earth reveres?

Real romance is indulging in the primordial drive toward romantic love, which exists within all of us to some degree. Love is shared identification with another. It comes in many familiar forms. Parents love their children to the point that their survival instincts extend to protect them, above even themselves. Friends and comrades bond over mutual support, pastimes, and ideological values. But romantics seek to merge both ego and physical being with the one they love. It is like a natural chemical reaction that automatically occurs when they are near whomever they are romantically compatible with.

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.

Herein lies a particularly insidious and necessary warning for romantic men because they are so drawn to the beauty and vulnerabilities of feminine creatures. We underestimate a woman’s ability to destroy us with the power we give her. We trust that she will naturally only do beautiful things with it because we perceive her as a purely beautiful creature. It is imperative that we retain the ability to spot toxicity brewing within her and the perversion of her beautiful feminine nature.

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.

Intrigue, like beauty, is not a bad quality in and of itself. There’s a reason both are so attractive to different sexes. They play essential roles in our lives and are products of the natural biological division of labor between the sexes. In an ideal social environment, women would be celebrated for being beautiful, just as men would celebrated for being interesting. The essential difference between that hypothetical world and ours is the element of social manipulation. Women who cultivate beauty for the sake of manipulating men are perpetuating harm on them in the long run, just as are men who cultivate intrigue for the purpose of manipulating women.

Imagine a whole world of night, darkness, and cold. Out there, in the distance, you sense the coming rays of warmth and light as the shine of an impossible sun rises to meet you for the first time in so long that you can barely remember it. In those moments, it becomes your conscious and exclusive goal to pursue that warmth and light, as the comfort it brings you is incomparable to even the best that the darkness before could ever offer you.

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.