Speaking for myself only, I can confirm that you did not convince me of anything. But you showed me, and I just needed to take what you showed and run back to the back office in my head and compare my records to yours, and voila, a lot of the crap that I thought was just paradoxical and disturbing, made more sense now. I’m 32 now, so I haven’t got a shitload of experience yet, or maybe never will, but I have had two major crises in my life, which set me on a path to more understanding.

The first crisis was a slow-boiling affair, which is still kind of blubbering under the surface, but most of it I believe I have digested and dealt with. It was the slow realization that the liberal crap and feel-good history and ethics they instilled in me from Kindergarden through highschool messed up my sense of the real. Reading about stuff like what the Belgian merc witnessed kind of falls into that. For some time after highschool I thought, “Where the hell have those years gone, when everything was good and innocent, when I believed in a better world out there? Where is the freaking brotherhood of mankind that the adults promised?” Now I know that this was the blue pill world in which I lived and in which I experienced more and more glitches as they struggled to keep it all together. Now I know, that they can’t keep it together, because like in the machine-world of the Matrix, there are flaws built-in (talk about unlimited growth). I like the term “the desert of the real”.

The second crisis was my first ‘serious’ dealings with a wimminz. It didn’t last too long, just about 2 years or so, where I felt like absolute shit. Lol, the dealings only lasted a couple of weeks, but the emotional fall-out hovered over my head for quite a while (talk about genuine feelings and expecting them from a wimminz, although in retrospect I have to say I probably deluded myself about my own feelings as well, I just hadn’t realized that part about myself. All I felt afterwards was the bitterness of being let-down). After that, I never let any wimminz disturb my peace of mind anymore, but it took quite a while longer to actually process and understand what I experienced and eventually get rid of old illusions about relationships and human nature.

One of the consequences of the fact that it’s a slow process and you never reach a point where you know as much as you should is that I am now married with a kid. I have no idea where all of this is going in the future, but I know what can happen and I know a little bit about why it can happen. The most valuable opinion I read on your site was that I have to be able to walk a away without a second thought, if I notice, that I am being slowly sucked dry and destroyed. The fallacy of confusing sunk costs with investment is something that I have taken to heart. I have drawn lines in my mind. If these lines are crossed, I will incur a consequence to myself or to others I have relationships with, and I will not shy away from the seeming “losses” that I make. I guess they are personal standards, as you have described. Years earlier my efforts would aim at saving something, but now my efforts always aim first and foremost at saving my sanity and personal integrity. Everything else comes second.