Tuesday 12 July 2022

The Epitome of Advice Nobody Wants to Hear: Writing to "Decline".

This was left as a comment for the perpetually depressed youtuber known as "Decline" (on this video).

You can't have a relationship if you don't relate.  Women will talk to you (and keep on talking to you, for years) because (1) they find you interesting to talk to, (2) they care about you, and (3) they know you care about them: this is true for people at all levels of physical attractiveness (the beautiful and the ugly alike).  You can slightly improve your life through exercise and diet and exercise, but you don't (yet) realize how slight and how shallow that (possible) improvement is.  You can radically and profoundly improve your life through achieving higher levels of intellectual sophistication (generally visible to others as cultural sophistication, or some other specific kind of sophistication, resulting from the particular field in which you apply your intelligence).  Eat a vegan diet and do 200 push-ups per day, sure, it'll slightly improve your life and relationships, but actually being a good person both mentally and morally makes your life better every day with or without a partner (with one partner or with multiple partners, etc.).  On some level you know this is well intentioned advice; on some level you know that it isn't really possible for it to be wrong.

It is a rare thing to say, "it is impossible for me to be wrong in offering you this advice", but we've finally hit that point, ladies and gentlemen: I'm offering my opinion on something so ineluctably obvious that we've passed the threshold of the irrefutable, and have entered into the realm of the indisputable.

And yes, for the record: the repetition of the verb "exercise" was originally an error… but I found it charming, and decided to keep it in.  ;-)