Sometime around September of this last year I realized that I had well and truly run out of Fucks to give. The first and primary consequence of this realization was that I stopped worrying about what my boss thought of me, or the consequences of not being a shit-sucking weasel every day.
Not that I stopped being generally professional. I showed up at work on time, early really, did my job with full conscientiousness, and was generally a model employee... and I felt better about myself and less stressed because I no longer gave a fuck if the boss liked me.
Contrary to what I've heard about Confidence and Boldness, this did nothing to improve my work life. I was fired a few weeks later for a possibly unrelated incident involving the fruits of feminism... saying one of the many, many forbidden words of the modern workplace. Literally. I said one word that got me fired, and that word was "Porn".
I, however, gave no fucks, because the job sucked and I quickly moved into a new job that paid the same money but gave me more hours and had no real annoying office politics. I still gave no fucks, I was, after all, completely out. Sadly, that job didn't last because I confused two different managers with the same name and the one that was in charge of me decided I had to go.
Again, no fucks were given.
This is neither here nor there. In twenty years of keeping my opinions to myself and being a good, model, loyal employee, I had somehow sold away a very important and real part of my self identity, my soul. I had given away my fierce and burning urge to be myself. I am not easily a slave, but habit is a dangerous thing.
In the wake of that... call it a debacle... I decided that I had, at last, run out of patience for the tread mill, for the sacrificing of my own sense of self worth, my own pride in myself for the gratification of increasingly idiotic, but lucky or connected, bosses, for liars and knaves and power drunk sociopaths... I was done.
Because I no longer had the fucks to give. I had reached the point where the erosion of my pride had meant there was no social condemnation powerful enough to shame me into wanting or needing work to value myself. I had reached a sort of equilibrium, too much pride to go on, not enough to be forced back into it.
I have a very good memory for the defining moments of my life, the things that shaped me into who I am. Thus I can tell you, objectively, that the promise of the man I was at age 6 was not the man I grew to be at age 18, and despite a general lack of effort since then, I've slowly but surely been finding my way back to that long lost promise.
I went from being an aggressive, determined and confident child to a sort of doormat, relentlessly 'civilized' to the point where I actually slouched consciously to avoid towering rudely over others, where I never stood up for myself, or others, because I had been taught, ruthlessly, that if anyone did anything worth getting into trouble over it, I would catch the worst of it even if, or because, I was in the right.
This is neither here nor there except as a framework for what I say next. While I occasionally wished I was a different man, a better man, I wasn't terribly unhappy, and even in my halcyon youth I was rather hermit like in nature, solitary... so I can't blame the errors of my parentage for the one thing that pained me most.
However, not giving a fuck has led me to an interesting experiment. The manosphere, the pick up artists, generally talk about alpha behaviors, even faking it until you make it and other such things. Its always sounded rather interesting, but ultimately academic and somewhat... difficult to verify.
Until now.
Note that I'm not terribly concerned at the moment with seduction and picking up chicks. My luck there has managed to be tolerable for my circumstances despite my rather deliberate nebbishness, the false neurotic camouflage I have so long adopted to avoid giving offense.
Shedding that requires conscious thought. Forcing myself to stand upright requires thought and effort. Not tucking my too-long legs under my chair only requires vigilance, as I have always sat 'alpha posture', legs out and spread, when I was given space... but I find I still unconsciously minimize myself in even a modest crowd.
After a week or so I have to say I don't feel any more Alpha, or however you want to phrase it. No more confident, no more self assured. I still have that empty well where my Fucks used to reside.
On the other hand, I do notice that I care less about those many minor offenses, real or potential that used to nag at me. A rather minor case in point: Today I wore sunglasses inside.
There is no law, and damn few rules about sunglasses indoors, but it is something that is simply not done.
No one said a word to me, which is not unusual in and of itself and I didn't feel particularly rebellious doing it. Its sunglasses, man... its not like I was swinging my dick out and about or anything.
However, having made the conscious decision, with full malice aforethought, to challenge this unspoken rule of etiquette, I realized that I literally had no worries, not even the pale ghosts of the worries I still had after I ran out of Fucks, that used to plague me about every minor action or inaction. So what if someone thought I was rude, or that I was doing something wrong? So what if it wasn't the one thing I had deliberately chosen to do but some other niggling point of etiquette that I just didn't 'get'?
As it was deliberate, as I expected some condemnation, spoken or not, nothing else that might have worried me really applied.
In a sense, my sunglasses had set me free, if only temporarily and from the most minor, if constant, of stresses in my life.
In a sense, I was doing something I had never really done in the last twenty years or so: I was being absolutely true to myself rather than forcing myself to conform, and poorly, to someone else's standards.
Freedom as a pair of sunglasses.
Who knew?
While it is still early in my empirical test of the 'fake it till you make it' school of manospherian alphadom, I can say that I've had an early positive result. I'm reluctant to read too much into it, after all I am deeply in the grip of a sort of apathy that seems to approach the levels of a psychotic break. It might not be the sunglasses, the rule breaking, per se but the fact that they merely demonstrated that not actually having a fuck to give means not being stressed by the little shit.
But if, in a few weeks, I feel I've made progress on maintaining my "alpha physical frame", and I haven't found a compelling reason to stop, I will progress my crude experiment to the next level. I have been cataloging the moments of my adult life that I have been more happy with myself in one way or another and will work hard on recreating those times as an organized whole. Some I will start immediately, as they require investments of time to pay off, others will require more... thought.
For now, the glasses are tentatively chalked up to a positive result of... shall we call it the 'do what thou wilt' principle? I think we shall.
I note that simply being lazy is not the same as doing as thou wilt. Breaking the social norms of public comportment as a deliberate act is not the same as going grocery shopping in your pyjamas, as seems to be the current fashion. That is a passive display of generalized apathy and contra to both my intention and my nature. It is a fault to be overcome for its own sake, not a statement of 'being true to oneself'.
But this post has hit the rambling stages, so I bid you adieu.
And I'm still all out of Fucks.
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