you chose desire and lost intimacy
performance feels safer than depth until it empties you
You ended up lonely because of obsession with being chosen.
As much as you’d like to externalize the cause of it to ineligible gay men and toxic environments, it didn’t happen by chance. It’s not your fault that the dating pool you’re in doesn’t have quality. But it is on you to still return there consistently, despite the emptiness you leave with.
You mimicked what you saw and thought was reasonable at the time. You saw other men get rewarded with love, so you believed that you’ll get your chance too and stayed the course. Makes sense.
You were entertained by performance. And now you’re performing even if you’re not enjoying it, just so you could still have a chance.
“Am I hot?”
“Do I have rizz?”
“I was being too much when I asked him to talk.”
“I’m too stuck up. I need more drinks to loosen up.”
“I don’t need a definition. I can be chill!”
“I can’t see you anymore if you’re not cool with us being open.”
“Can we collab for OnlyFans? The viewers will go nuts!”
If none of the above bothered you, then this letter is not for you. You can close this tab right now. But if at any point in your life it did, read on.
You adapted even if you hated it to stay selectable. Desire became safety because rejection was intolerable in an all-access world.
I know this because I lived this. And I didn’t stop until all I could feel was the cost of living so.
Like any cost, you don’t feel this all of a sudden. But your behaviors will make them grow exponentially. You start to monitor yourself all the time. You scroll on Grindr at 2 AM, re-read chats, click a 100 pics to get the “right angle.”
Every decision gets passed though one filter—presentation. Over time, this becomes second nature and you blend in with the performers. You even seek them out.
Anything else that involves cognitive work like introspection, conversational depth, or just sitting with your thoughts will feel either dangerous or disgusting.
None of this will feel like a loss. And you wouldn’t mind feeling this way. The attention masks everything else. You just need to be one of them. And when you are, you’re validated and rewarded.
You learn that the greater access to you, the more respect and recognition you command including your own. You have options and feel free, powerful, high-agentic. You find yourself constantly busy, always occupied with something or someone, and feel that you’re playing the game right to succeed in life.
The worst part is most don’t realize that this is not what they set out to be until a crisis occurs—physical or emotional—to see that they betrayed themselves. It doesn’t feel like a betrayal during, since you meant no harm on yourself. But you will feel it vividly after the damage.
the cost of optimizing for desire
Desire is a course. Mostly men learn it superficially.
The more men are taught that way, the more it gets passed on the same way. You major in shallowness.
We’re all shallow to some extent. And a reasonable amount of shallowness is healthy. You can’t keep digging into every little thing that is going on around you.
But to let being shallow train you into being hollow is what most gay men do to become their emotional worst.
what “having options” actually trains you to do
Everyone knows what it’s like to interview for jobs with no experience. You just want to get out of ground zero badly.
Easy helps with that. You move quickly, gain experience and get to live out all your options. The ease of shallowness shoots you up when you let it because any experience feels better than zero experience. Does it even matter what you’re gaining experience at? Or is perceived status the only thing that does?
Restricting yourself feels like restraint. Restricting others feels immoral and contradicts your “open” nature.
Even if you’re rescuing yourself through restriction, you’ll want to be rescued from the felt restraint. And you only look at what you’re being held back from—missed chances, friends, fun, adoration. FOMO cancels out any boundaries you once had. “No” becomes the biggest turn-off, and that’s all you see it as.
It’s not long before you vilify staying anywhere. You roll your eyes whenever anything gets unsexy. You don’t invest yourself. Because the last time you did, it was hell because of all the “constant talking about stupid, boring stuff.” Choosing becomes a game of numbers. And the only goal is having fun. If you do manage to get a good guy, you stay easy. But you hate messy. So you’re always ready to bolt.
why intensity replaces adulthood
Why is a random hookup exciting?
It’s new. And new always gets you going. As long as you’re “going,” you’re progressing according to yourself. You are a goal-striving animal and you need to stay in motion.
Repeating the same day is silent. And silence sucks. You invest a ton of time and get nothing in return. You feel stagnant. But staying in motion makes you feel incredible. The consistent, immediate feedback drives you.
Who do you become meanwhile?
You’re good as long as your character is presentable in another man’s eyes, even if it’s not in your own.
Chemistry starts to qualify character. And if the chemistry is off, so must be the character. When you feel something uneasy inside you, you strongly believe that something has to be wrong with who you’re with. You trust it and accept it just because you feel it instantly.
Passing contact becomes commitment. Being checked out becomes being seen as. Having attention becomes being held. These swaps are efficient at progressing you because they remove permanence.
How far will you let them take you?
the belief underneath it all
It’s funny how every one of our behaviors can be tracked down to a belief we accepted, either by repeating it to ourselves or by hearing it from someone else when we were kids.
“If I’m wanted, I can’t be abandoned.”
Most can’t admit this. Because it comes with its own bag of shame. I couldn’t for years either.
Viewing male desire as a primary pass for existence screws with your head. You’re always on guard to protect yourself. To do that, you strategize.
You never let yourself be known. You never do anything long enough because it threatens your belief—that you’d be nothing if you’re not wanted.
You reject yourself by being replaceable.
why this hurts more once you want depth
I learned this the hard way:
I have 2 choices.
Live in a fantasyland of eternal attention from hot men and only entertain the things that make me feel good for the rest of my life,
Or, accept life and love are gonna be messy, that rarely will there be incredibly good times but mostly it’ll be boredom—and still choose to stay real in reality.
I’ve lived the two lives above. I’ve been the guy who chased after intensity as my true calling. And I’m trying to be the guy who can stay where his feet are and not run at the first sign of struggle.
When you broadly look at choices, you almost always leave out the cost.
Living the first way made me lose creativity, hate reality, chase constantly and above all, hate myself when I had nothing going on. I couldn’t think anything anymore without feeling a knot in my chest. I trained myself to believe that existing without the high is deadly.
Living the second way has its cost too. I can’t just lay back as if I have nothing to do. I can’t enjoy scrolling anymore because I am constantly aware of how awful I feel after. I can’t pull up Grindr and let someone feel me up because I feel lonely. I can’t do small talk without getting annoyed. And so it goes.
If you choose to conveniently ignore the costs and never choose which costs you’re willing to pay, you’ll obey what intensity says it wants to buy.
the split
Some men can tolerate living most of their life in the extreme without falling out, breaking, isolating or going into crisis. Some can try but will never succeed. But both “selves” exist in you.
What most men never realize is, the selves are in fact systems—the more you identify with them, the harder it’s gonna be to give up control over them. You make yourself miserable when you use the modes for the wrong job. But the smart ones use this for themselves instead of against.
Know that you’re always operating a system. Never are your hands free.
Chaos-regulated system:
Regulating while running in this system is chaos. But chaos is what regulates your system. You never feel calm unless you’re going through what you consider to be a huge win or a dire loss. A regular day has to have either or both. If not, you flip. You feel the world closing in on you. Your system even forces anxiety attacks. You move toward magnitude and away from mundane. You seek out men and work that arouse them in you. Intense feelings can and will influence your choices. But after you ride out the high, you never stop long enough to see that you now can’t live without it, unless something changes. So you chase it in different directions.
Calm-regulated system:
This system doesn’t let you shy away from silence but makes it a part of its fuel. You can’t keep functioning unless there’s some quiet in the middle. Calm keeps you calm and chaos triggers chaos. When nothing is happening, you zoom out and just look. Be. Listen. Your body adapts to boredom easily but weakens with unnecessary intensity. You’re drawn to men who would rather stay in the quiet, talk the hard talks and look at you in the eye, than the ones who demand you be any wilder. You choose work that shows who you can grow into even if it’s not rewarding at first. You entertain healthy, passionate highs. When you do come after such a high, you’ll feel nourished back at baseline.
why intensity feels convincing
Most people think they choose intensity because it is tempting. But they don’t realize why it’s so irresistible.
What makes intensity attractive is its immediacy. No one likes to wait. And when you’re running on intensity, you never need to. When you do something, you immediately get to see and feel its effect. There is no doubt. There is no waiting. Everything looks clear. Where you could go wrong when you’ve been in pain for too long is mistaking what looks clear—relief—for what is.
“A man who will not take a chance on himself must bet on something. And the man who will not act with courage sometimes seeks the feeling of courage from a bottle.”
— Dr. Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics
Being wanted feels more real than being real because the former is immediate and certain, and the latter is unfamiliar and ambiguous. When you can’t want yourself, you will never stop wanting to be wanted by other men. You desperately need proof of existence that you couldn’t find in yourself. So, you hunt.
You think you’re choosing from options when all you’re doing is reacting to them instead of feeling your thinned self-esteem.
Motion quiets this unease. When you’re moving—it doesn’t matter if it’s away or toward something—you just stop listening to yourself. You pause feeling yourself because pausing the chase makes you introspect, doubt, face your lies. Continually walking gives you an excuse to never do any of that. And as a bonus, it makes the process feel like progress. So you believe that is your own agency at work.
the delayed cost
Some haven’t gotten used to this intensive norm. They can’t no matter how hard they try. They feel consistently incompatible because they’re already aware of the costs that the others fail to see.
It took me a very long time to get this because like I said, I lived both lives. When you feel good, or convince yourself deeply that you do, relief masks the rubble. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. You feel fine and you take it at face value.
You start to lose any sense of time, and not like you’re in a flow state. Days blur. You’re constantly busy but never there. If you do look back when you’re in the middle, you’ll remember nothing concrete except for your presence all over.
Commitment with no instant rewards becomes the most repulsive thing in the world. Long projects lose gravity. Relationships feel dead. Trying anymore feels useless since you know for a fact that this is as good as everything gets—which feels terrible. So you look for the opposite. You get so creative at seeking immediacy that exiting no-guarantee commitments doesn’t affect you in the slightest—except for one temporarily cheap cost. Your creativity.
This is the easiest to miss. You don’t feel this loss unless you really sit down to do something creative that you once loved like write, play your instrument, get curious about how your body works, or just come up with random ideas at random moments. When you try to get back into them but nothing comes to your head other than your wild nights and how insane it was back then, that’s when you’ll grieve.
the backlash
But after failing multiple times, you will actually manage to regulate yourself with calm instead of chaos after a long while. This is when most people bolt.
Calm starts to feel uncomfortable again out of nowhere. You start hating it for not working. People bolt now because they think it’s their hate at work but don’t see that it’s the chaos’. The chaos in you is going through a crisis. It’s jealous. And you’d even get to feel that jealousy when you stumble on those who meditate for an hour and come out refreshed. The bad news is this conflict with calm is here to stay.
the constraint
You’re changing the way your whole system works. You force it, you lose it.
Since you’ve now tasted both chaos and calm regulation, you’ll miscalculate to think that you’re equipped to use different regulations at different times. Thinking that you can is one thing. Trying to actually use both will confuse you and your system. You will slide back into chaos regulation just because it’s easier.
Either you can optimize for fantasies, attention and novelty. Or you can optimize for calm, acceptance and creativity. The last thing you and your system need is an unstable split regulation.
So why does this hurt? More when you want depth?
Wanting depth and consistent calm is not the problem.
The hurt you feel is the hurt of betrayal. From continually and consciously betraying your non-negotiable needs.
You keep betraying them for borrowed relief and the more you do it, the more the debt for betrayal gets accumulated. This piled up debt is felt as guilt. And it’s the guilt that hurts like hell.
the guilt you’re supposed to feel
You have a motive—to stay desirable.
Almost always men mistake the hurt they feel for loneliness, unhealed trauma, being “behind.” They never consider that ignoring their system when it’s crying out to them could be it.
Emotion is a symptom of function. And if the function is fucked, the emotion will be loud. Luckily, guilt is the easiest of emotions to crack.
The good thing about guilt is you can always know why you feel it, once you recognize it. But if you’ve been externalizing your own worth and respect your whole life while staying desirable, it is not unusual for guilt as a result of self-betrayal to go unnoticed, let alone be understood.
When you know what you are guilty of, guilt just feels a lot like pressure and less like hurt. But when does it hurt, ache? When does anything in your body ever hurt?
When you’re injured. You can’t know it’s guilt if you only keep looking at the scars, but never at the hand that left them. It hurts as it’s supposed to, so you do something about it—something more than just patching it up.
Your self-respect is trying to build a stronger sense of worth from underneath the wound and instead of letting it heal you, you cut more into the wound, unaware that you are—and effectively destroy any progress at finding the cause. Misalignment.
Any of your chaos-coping strategies like sex, novelty, attention will mute misalignment.
The second you realize that this muting is even happening and you’re the one who signed off on it, the coping loses a huge chunk of the control it has over you.
Misalignment is another functional symptom that leads to guilt. Unless you stop letting chaos override yourself, the misalignment will stay alive feeding on it and the resulting guilt will keep you congested.
Mechanism: override → misalignment → guilt
the place where it starts
That was heavy.
If you made it until here, it just shows that you don’t run anymore. I don’t want you to become someone different overnight. I’m just here to help you notice what you want. And that’s what I want you to do now.
I want you to notice one sentence.
This week, pay attention to the moment right before you override yourself to stay desirable, interesting, or chosen. There will be a sentence you tell yourself to make it feel reasonable.
“At least this will be worth it.”
“At least something will happen.”
“I’ll deal with the cost later.”
“This is better than feeling nothing.”
Don’t fix it. Don’t argue with it. Just write it down. That sentence is where the bargaining starts, and where it can end.
That’s all for this letter. I’ll see you next week.
—Karthik