Why Don’t You Quit Your Job And Write Full Time?

…says the woke girlfriend living off an inheritance…

Whenever I complained about my job she’d insist I quit and start writing full-time, like her.

“Sure, but what about food, water, rent, and all the rest of it?” I’d ask. “I’ll need money for those things…”

I enjoyed stating the obvious. It offered me the opportunity at a passive-aggressive sleight. It suggested she was too dumb to have considered the basics. And I wanted her to feel dumb as punishment for making such a naive suggestion.

But if I’d succeeded in making her feel dumb you’d never know it. In situations like these she’d offer her smug Mona Lisa smile and rest her hand on my shoulder before saying something like, “You’re reinforcing the idea of scarcity in your mind, and until you change that you’ll remain stuck in your current situation Mike…”

Sometimes she’d say more and sometimes she’d say less, but the gist of her theory was as follows: The universe responds to our thoughts and feelings, and my general unhappiness and lack of creative fulfillment was mostly my fault, due to a failure to nurture the proper mentality.

There was some abstract truth to that statement, but it all felt trite and empty in the face of reality. And the reality was this: she was living off an inheritance, and hadn’t had a job in over a decade.

She was so detached from the world and it’s basic challenges that she could utter that sort of drivel and not only revel in the sense of superiority it offered, but actually believe in its utility as well.

She had that luxury.

The message she was sending me was no, she wasn’t too dumb to have considered the basics, but in her wondrous wisdom she had somehow transcended the mundane realities us mortals are required to deal with on a daily basis and therefore was no longer forced to grapple with them.

“Oh I see,” I’d say. “So you’re saying that if I get a little more upbeat and hold a positive vision of the future, maybe my uncle will die and leave me $500,000 too?”

“The universe doesn’t respond to sarcasm, Mike,” she’d tell me. “Or irony.”

And she’d say that with no sarcasm or irony at all, which made it even more annoying.

I didn’t begrudge her her inheritance, or her lifestyle, but it annoyed me that she didn’t understand that those things disqualified her from offering such flaky advice.

She was trying to present herself as an example, and that’s what bugged me the most. I just couldn’t stomach the shameless sanctimony of it all.

All she’d ever really done was inherit a bunch of money from a rich uncle. And then later she’d manage to wrangle a nice little condo from an ex-husband who’d basically given it to her with the mutual understanding that she’d finally leave him alone if he did.

But it didn’t stop her from lecturing me on how “oppressed” she was, and how the “patriarchy” was largely responsible for this hypothetical oppression.

Remind her that nearly everything she possessed was given to her by a man and she’d accuse you of sexism…

Remind her that she wasn’t making any sense and she’d accuse you of “mansplaining”…

Remind her that she was playing disingenuous linguistic games and she’d suddenly feel “unsafe” due to your “attacks”… leaving you to feel like the guilt-ridden perpetrator of violent bullying…

There was just no way to present her with basic truths without her lapsing into victimhood, straw man accusations, and endless projections.

What that meant was that she could accuse you of anything without any sort of rhyme or reason, but defending yourself was either a) further proof of your guilt, or b) some sort of unprovoked attack on her.

It was hard for me to believe that someone seemingly so normal could be so insane. But she was so fiercely dogmatic about it all that it forced me to seriously consider her positions on occasion, no matter how bizarre or nonsensical…

“Vegan pizza with cricket and tofu pepperoni eh? Sounds…um…interesting!

“What’s that, you say? Men can get pregnant? Wow…I’ll have to look into that!”

“Police officers? Pah! Who needs em’? I think you’re on to something there!”

I’d furrow my brow and listen intently, trying to make sense of her utterances, but it was all in vain…

Over time I began to feel like an explorer, one that was desperately trying to decipher the grunts and gestures of a lost tribe of rainforest dwellers. “So explain to me again,” I’d tell her, “exactly how masturbating to someone requires their permission ahead of time. And explain it slowly this time…”

My great hope was that by making her articulate her positions out loud in a slow and deliberate way, she might just stop at some point and realize the absurdity of it all and allow reason and rationality to prevail. “You’re right!” I imagined her saying in my fantasies, which were often a mix of kinky sexual acts and logic she had repeatedly resisted. “Wow Mike, I can’t believe I said those things! Hey, lets go have some anal sex and eat a sausage and pepperoni pizza afterwards, waddya say?”

Every man is willing to sacrifice bits of his soul if it means sex with a beautiful woman; the question then becomes: exactly how much soul is he willing to sacrifice?

I hit my breaking point when she began calling me a rapist.

It didn’t matter that I’d never actually raped anybody. And though the reason she offered for calling me that was metaphorical, she refused to make that distinction.

I’d committed the cardinal sin of masturbating to people without their permission, you see. That was “rape”, according to her — “psychic invasion without consent”, is how she put it.

“What if I asked telepathically,” I asked, “and she consented psychically? Or what if I used a Ouija board. That seems reasonable to me…”

“Well, now you’re mansplaining,” she replied in between slurps of her pea and tofu soup. “And you’re being silly. Remember what I told you about the universe and sarcasm…”

A few moments passed…

“A rapist?” I asked, breaking the silence. “Really???”

“Really.”

She said it with a kind of sociopathic glee that deeply confused me then, but what I now clearly recognize as a symptom of the woke mind virus.

“Look,” I told her, “I need to explain a few things to you, and it’s gonna be uncomfortable. You mind?”

I made the mistake of framing it as a request.

She declined the request, and when I went on to say what I wanted to say anyway she quickly identified it as further proof of my rapist intent, because I’d “operated outside her will”.

I desperately wanted to dump her tofu and pea soup on her head, let the little bamboo bowl sit on her scalp like a yamaka, and turn her chair around and place her in the corner of the room like a toddler in need of a timeout. “You’re gonna sit there until you’re sane!” I imagined telling her. “For fuck’s sake, snap out of it already!”

But she wasn’t sane, and had no interest in sanity at the end of the day. Her whole identity was built around this alleged victimhood, and to operate outside of it would require some effort on her part, effort that she likely would have described as “oppressive”.

Nearly everything was “oppressive” according to her — including capitalism — which was, ironically, solely responsible for her inheritance and cozy lifestyle.

When you refuse to engage reality, over time, bad ideas grow in the mind like vines on a tree. And when they are reinforced by tribes of similarly minded lunatics, the echo chamber just perpetuates the lunacy.

She had loads of bad ideas and insane ideas, one of them being that it was her gumption and resourcefulness and her unique connection with the universe — and not her inheritance — that manifested the free time she now had to sit around and write about astrology all day.

Another was that I should just quit my job and begin writing and hope for the best. “No,” she’d say, “not hope…you have to believe you’ll get the best.”

Like most people who arrive on this platform, I indulged the faint hope that I could actually eke out a living with my writing if I was firmly dedicated. Funny that I’m taking the ex-girlfriend’s advice in a way, but it’s her tribe of ideological freaks — who have me shadow-banned every which way from Sunday — that won’t allow me to succeed here.

It appears the universe responds to irony after all…

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