Five years of blackpill: the 500k Neocities views special

In the summer of 2015, something new happened: I fantasised about killing myself over long stretches of time. I have always been apathetic regarding my death, but my thoughts never went further than apathy. As this continued for weeks, I decided this wasn’t healthy and that I needed help to overcome it and to avoid doing something stupid. This is how I began therapy and how I swallowed the black pill.

I

I was the smart kid in class. I have multiple awards from mathematical competitions, and I used to excel at everything I tried seriously at, except for sports; I had undiagnosed amblyopia until it was too late, so I have lost most of my vision in my left eye and I have next to no depth perception: reality looks to me the way playing video games looks to you. As you can imagine this doesn’t help when most of your gym class is focused on throwing and catching balls. Upon entering university, I was the 16th best student there in terms of grade. As in, against the entire country.

It is not particularly fun being a good student. Most of your performance is determined by doing extremely boring, useless, easily-automated, but mentally taxing work and memorisation. You have to do well to get into a good uni. You have to get into a good uni to get a good degree. You have to get a good degree to get a good job. You have to get a good job to get a good life. You have to get a good life to not kill yourself.

I liked computers, so I got into the premier electrical engineering and computers uni of my country and I had a bright future ahead of me. Everyone was certain I would do something big. I was one of the many boys out of bumfuck, nowhere who would make a statement. Naturally, five years later, I was certain I would be better off not being born.

II

I remember, when I was younger, I used to have grandiose dreams about my future, and be really hyped. Today, I mostly want to be happy. I don’t dream of anything bigger.

My first realisation was that the grind never ends. Having good grades came easier to me, yes, because I have been privileged with a good education, good genes, and a mother who did not do drugs (nicotine, alcohol) while bearing me. But I still had to grind for them, and it was a grind I did not want to do. I grinded for software, because we didn’t have software class and I liked software. I grinded for Linux, because I loved Linux and there was no one in my village who could teach me save for forum posts on the internet. I grinded for learning how to draw. I grinded for learning how to write—in English, that is. Then I had to grind calculus and physics and ancient Greek and a billion other things. And of course play some games and watch some anime, because life has to have some fun as well.

The classes I had to take at uni weren’t any less repetitive or useless than the high school classes. If anything, with the material being more difficult and the teachers sucking more, I had trouble keeping up. It was getting increasingly harder justifying grinding for increasingly harder calculus and physics, then returning home and grinding software because I just wanted to write software. And I was going to have to do this for 5, 6, 7 more years, just grind grind grind. And when I got a job, because I would have to compete with all the retards in my country, I’d have to grind some more. I didn’t even have my friends or my family with me for emotional support, although little did I know they were having neurotic breakdowns of their own and they wouldn’t have helped much.

How much grinding for things you have zero passion for amidst grinding for things you have some passion about can you stomach? Well, after the first exam results hit, I decided I could not stomach it any more, so I didn’t. I mostly sat in my room and hated life.

III

Slowly, I lost everything. My family were becoming more borderline by the day. I did not talk to my friends. The people I did talk to were tumbrites of the worst degree and only cared for social justice brownie points and taking antidepressants. The hobbies I used to enjoy were gradually replaced by anxiety and self-loathing. The industry I wanted to be part of was filled by the grindy, corporate, billionaire-dominated social justice cancer that was making me miserable.

My personality unravelled. I did not need family to live; I did not need friends to live; I did not need Google Inc. to live; I did not need interests to live (?). I did not need to live. I got increasingly anxious about the future. I was certain I was doomed to be homeless and miserable. I could not think 10 years into the future. Then 1 year. Then 1 day. Just entertaining the fact gave me incredible anxiety. And when the anxiety became so overwhelming and it was the only thing I felt, I started wondering if I’m better off dead.

I came out to my mum that I thought I needed help and I got some help. It wasn’t life-changing or deeply enlightening, but it helped me feel less anxious and neurotic and know how to manage those aspects of myself better. The therapy merely enabled the lessons that followed.

IV

I am a human being with feelings and those feelings matter, not just the feelings of those around me. Back then I didn’t have Re:Zero Season 2 to help me through that. I had to come to the realisation on my own and with the help of Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex. I can’t say for sure why I chose not to die, and why life is worth living, but if there is a single person who influenced me above others, it is Scott Alexander.

If you have a penis, it is not easy internalising your self-worth, because all of human culture revolves around objectifying men, reducing them to meat shields, baby-makers, and capital. To even begin building up self-worth, you must accept that, so that you can fight against it. This is the black pill: that, as a man, because you are a man, you are viewed as uniquely expendable. That in the eyes of society, your feelings don’t matter. Your value begins and ends with what you can offer, and when this utility ends, you might as well end.

Nobody likes taking the black pill. But either you swallow it in a controlled environment, with a therapist in close proximity, or life shoves a fistful of them up your arse and you better hope you don’t do anything stupid.

My therapist did not know what I was going through nor how I would use the things I learned from him in the service of the black pill. But he did not have to. I was in therapy to be less anxious and neurotic, and I was succeeding. He had a vision for me in line with what my teachers, my family, my culture wanted, and I knew that, and I chose to reject that because it did not interest me.

Taking the black pill is a reductive exercise: how many false notions can you strip from your self worth and still survive? You must reject your need for validation from society: society views men as tools, so they will never validate you. They only recognise your usefulness as a tool. You must reject your need for money: more material things won’t bring you happiness. Rich people aren’t less neurotic than poor people; if anything, they are more neurotic. But most difficult of it all is that you must reject your need for women.

V

All of my life, I felt that there was something missing in me, an existential hole that only very few things could fill. A great achievement. A great enlightenment. The love of the woman you chose to share your life with. The birth of your child.

My very first trial as a man was accepting that I wanted from a woman what no woman could provide. From the get go, it is ridiculous to expect a person to save your soul like a waifu would. The very idea of seeking validation from her is seated on the assumption that the only unit of value for a man is having a woman and how desired he is by women. And thankfully I had a great teacher in Barbarossa of YouTube to help me frame my feelings and deconstruct them. What I was going through was the male-mother need.

If society objectifies men, romance objectifies them tenfold. What I felt towards women was a type of religious adoration, a pair bonding on an almost spiritual level, and I expected something of the sort in return. This is also reinforced by society and especially all the anime I enjoy. But like the Lord of the Rings gives us an idealised war, where standing on top of a hill heroically doesn’t get you killed, so does our entire conversation around dating.

You are not wanted for who you are. You are wanted for your face. Your height. Your wallet. She will love you while your looks last; she cares not for your feelings. She will tolerate you while you pay her bills, but she will sleep around with others and your children may not be actually yours. She will propose an open relationship. She will divorce you. The moment you put a ring around her finger, she will grow to hate you. The sexual encounters that please you will disgust her, and soon you will masturbate more as a married man than you did while single.

You are not a person to her. You are an object. She will never love you. You will never be loved.

VI

Since then, life has taken more things from me. My family has grown more dysfunctional and they are beyond salvation. My friends have moved away and we rarely talk, especially due to corona. I had to come to terms with possibly becoming deaf, and whether I could go on living without hearing music again. Even writing software is just a job for me now, not a passion.

Every year of my life, I have one less thing tying me to this world. I am just a guy who wants to watch anime and write lolicon. That is the reason I live. Sooner all later, all blackpillers become like that: the guy who just wants to fish. The guy who just wants to hike. The guy who just wants to do maths. No wonder why so many blackpillers are anarchists and existentialists and individualists. When you shed everything but your soul, what else remains?

Everyone I know could drop dead tomorrow and I could go on living.

Everyone I know could hate me tomorrow and I could go on living.

There is nothing I care about except what I like.

I have no hopes for the world remaining. I don’t have any dreams. I don’t seek a romantic partner nor do I agonise over not having one. My biggest worry is that I need to lose some weight because that way I’ll get to live longer. Hell, I don’t even need pleasure anymore. I don’t aim to be happy. I want to be stress-free. I want to be serene.

You may think this is pathetic, or misogynic, or depressing. But in 2020, society asked you one simple thing: please stop binge drinking with turbosluts for three weeks, and you got so depressed over the sheer agony of it that you slit your wrists and livestreamed it on OnlyFans. In the end, I guess the person with the better adaptation survives.

My name is Vas, and this is the person I have become. What person will you be?