The Human Body is a Disposable Tool with a Shelf Life
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about what it means to be middle-aged and how it affects our perception of our bodies and how we treat them. We also talk about why it s important to protect your body and why you should not care what your body looks like.
Transcript
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if you didn't achieve, like I did achieve many of the things I was sort of programmed to achieve
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at different parts of my life, right? But like, suppose you didn't get to sleep around a lot when
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you were younger. If you then try to do that when you are middle-aged or an old person-
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You will not get the validation or the happiness or the satisfaction you would have gotten. It is
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really important to understand declaring bankruptcy on stages of your life and moving
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to the next stage of your life. I like that. Declaring bankruptcy on certain life stages.
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It just wasn't going to happen. Right. And then you can find new ways to optimize. There are new ways
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to optimize and still live a life of value. If you realize that you're middle-aged or you're old and
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you never had kids and you never had a family, there are new ways you can fill the role of an
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older mentor in your community and stuff like that. Would you like to know more? Oh God. Yeah. When
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everyone was like, you can see every single pore that I have. Everything's horrible. When I realized
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what we can do to fix my eyes is I just need to buy those like Naruto contact lenses or just like
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cinematic contact lenses. Like just the total black, you know, they're just completely black.
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So for anybody wondering what she was talking about there, my wife is wearing sunglasses right now
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because what's that thing that happened? You had like a bud vessel burst in your eye.
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Mm-hmm. So I look gnarly and disgusting. I mean, more gnarly and disgusting than normal.
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I think you look beautiful, but this brings us to our topic today. My wife has been recently,
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you know, I was talking to her and she's like, I really do not like that. I feel like I'm beginning
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to look middle-aged. You know, I'm disgusting with my body. Yeah. And I was, it really sort of shocked
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me that this is still something that would be so concerning to her. The analogy I posted to Facebook
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that got a bunch of angry comments as people can guess. And I think that they're really indicative of
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where we are as a society. So what I said is my wife has been getting worried about beginning to look
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middle-aged. A woman pregnant with her fourth kid complaining about how her body looks to a devoted
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husband is like a fisherman with a pile of fish on the dock complaining about not having any worms.
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And of course people were like, and you know, some of my trans friends were like, oh my gosh,
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you know, it really does matter that you're okay with your body. And here I am like, no,
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no, it doesn't matter that you're okay with your body. Fuck your body. Your body is a tool
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that is meant to be used. And if you use it well, this is a really interesting thing. And I think
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it's an analogy I will use for my daughters for their bodies. Right? The terrible young women in
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our society. It's like we as parents are giving them this really nice fish we caught like a tuna or
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something like that. We're like, go to the market and get the best price you can for this fish.
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And, you know, some women just come back with cum all over their tuna and then nobody wants to buy it.
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You know, nobody, nobody wants a tuna that, that people have had an orgy on, but that's not the only
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way you can. I feel like the metaphor is falling apart. If that's what people are.
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The core way or the only way you can fuck up this little routine. Okay. Okay. Go to the market
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and a lot of girls are coming back to their parents with a rotting tuna and saying, nobody wanted to
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give me a price that I thought it was worth, but look, I still got my tuna. The problem is,
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is that the tuna rots. If you don't sell it, it's increasing in value with every second you haven't
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sold it. And this is the tragedy. Like men go out there and they're all like, men have it so hard
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in our society. And I'm not going to lie about all the unfairnesses of being a man, but you're not
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dealing with this same ticking clock that women are dealing with. Yeah. And it's not, it's not just
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appearance. It's, it's biology too. Like if one does want to have children. So even if one is totally
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like, yeah, appearance should be nothing. There's still this other functional limiting factor, which sucks.
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Yeah. Yeah. And it creates this, this environment where we tell girls protect the tuna, protect the
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tuna, protect the tuna to the point where they forget the point was that the tuna was supposed
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to set them up for the next stage of life. They sell the tuna, then they open the fish store or
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whatever it is they're doing next. Right. The tuna wasn't the point. They're just supposed to protect
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the tuna on the way to the market. Sorry. You hate this analogy so much. Yeah. Because everyone's
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goals to become a fishmonger. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I hear you though. Yeah. And a rotting fish is
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definitely a strong analogy when it comes to. Yeah. I thought it had a certain, well, and I also like
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the worm analogy, like being bemoaning that you don't have the worm when you have the greater prize
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that the worm was meant to catch. And so a lot of people are like, well, my white life, like my life
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as a woman is not about having kids. Right. I'll come to me with this. I'll say, so therefore,
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well, therefore what you're going to get old no matter what you do. Right. And you do have certain
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advantages within many environments, whether it's your workplace or whether it's your, you know,
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any, any, anything, even, even just like generically socially often, if you're an attractive woman,
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now there are downsides to it. It actually can hurt you in female environments and women will do
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things to hurt attractive women more. This is like been shown in a bunch of studies, but generally
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you have an arbitrage opportunity. So then as you age, regardless of whether or not you've sort of
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dedicated your life to the intergenerational game of building a family or anything else,
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you can ask yourself, did I make use of this asset while it was available to me?
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And if you did, then great. Okay. You, you did something that I think was pointless,
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but at least you did it well, you know, at least you actually utilize the asset while you had access
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to it. But what is completely feckless is not utilizing the asset at all in spending your entire
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life in veneration of a decaying asset. And how does this happen in a secular society? Why in our
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secular world do we end up venerating these decaying assets? Okay. Okay. Okay. So let's,
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let's move to this fishmonger world, right? Okay. This is, this is a world then where on every social
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media platform, it is just people holding their freshly caught, shining, glittering, untouched tuna
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fish. And that's what people are rewarded for. And there are no, there's no glorification of being
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a fishmonger. There's no glorification of, of all of that part of life. And so people will do
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everything they can to try to look like they've just caught a fresh tuna. And some people will
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take their tuna and rather than sell it, they will have it turned into taxidermy and they'll walk around
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with their taxidermy tuna and hope that people don't realize that it's not there. And I can't blame
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them. Right. Because you know, that that's, that's what society rewards. And some people will look at
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the taxidermy tuna and be like, wow, look at them, you know, like they'll have their, you know,
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they'll post their taxidermy tuna on social media and people will be like, I don't know. They seem,
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it's, I don't know. It doesn't look quite right, you know, and, but, you know, but they still try,
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you know, and they still get attention. I love this taxidermy tuna. Cause now I'm imagining
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these horrified taxidermy tunas was like the fake eyes and everything. Well, it's, it's not. And that's,
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that's what it looks like when you try to look like a 22 year old woman and you're 55 or you're
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38 or whatever, if you're, you're 32 really. But, but then, you know, you're on the other side of
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this, which is where I'm sitting. I'm sitting at the fish monger desk. All right. I don't have any
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tuna and I'm looking out and I'm watching, you know, all these people walk by with their giant tuna
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glittering in the sun. And I'm like, well, yeah, don't have, don't have any tuna. I don't.
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Well, so this is the world. And I, I, I like how you've gone deeper. Was this crazy analogy?
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Cause I want to go deeper too. You're freaking out. So I'm going to just make you.
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So we live in fishmonger world, right? When you go on an online environment, when you go
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in, in, in secular media, you are in the fishmonger world. It's not just the people who
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are trying to sell tuna that are showing it off. It's the people who just bought tuna that are showing
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it off. It's, Oh, look at this fresh tuna. I just bought with my life savings.
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Mm-hmm. Flapping around the tuna, taking pictures of the tuna. And then they begin to forget the
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purpose of the tuna marketplace. Yeah. Which is to freaking have a meal.
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Was to buy and sell the tuna. Right. Yeah. Well, and to eat tuna, presumably, you know,
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it's a consumable item. And keep in mind, we're not saying buying and selling women's bodies. Yeah.
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It was to eventually eat the tuna. Right. Yeah. Um, uh, uh, what we, what we, what we are saying is
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in the same way that you can have a marketplace, like a marketplace for employees. Like there are
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human marketplaces all the time in our society. There's nothing vulgar about a, a human marketplace.
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What's interesting about the marriage marketplace is that you are trying to sell yourself a tuna for
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an equivalent, let's say something else puppy or something, right? You are trying to trade it
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for a specific other thing, which is a male of equivalent value to you.
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Well, and, and more importantly, what you're trying to explain too, is that like the human
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body is meant to be used. You know, the human body is, is meant for, you know, doing different
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things at different phases of life. And we are sometimes more strong and sometimes more wise and
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sometimes, you know, various things in, in, in trying to do the same thing with that body all the
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time, but basically using your body is a good thing. You know, if you are aging because you are
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having kids and raising them and whatnot, that's not something to be ashamed of. That's means you're
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actually using your body for what it's meant for. Right. Yes. And I would say that we live in this,
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like the world around us, once you are successful in the fishmonger game, once you have sold your
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fish and then gone home with the person you sold it to to eat it together, right? Like this is a weird
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world where someone buys your tuna and then you're like the analogy for the rest of your life.
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Then you start a fish shop together. You're then no longer flogging fish. You no longer have the
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motivation to be showing how great your fish is. You no longer have the motivation to be showing
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how great a fish you just bought is. So you are no longer signaling into the world. So then if you
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look out your window, everyone is still shouting about fish, right? Because they're all desperately
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trying to sell theirs and it can create a world. And this is the core problem that we're dealing
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with where how shiny a fish you just bought or how shiny a fish you just have, you have is a status
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symbol, right? And you begin to think, oh, this is how status is judged in society. Because when I go
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and I buy a movie, right? Or when I look at ads, I'm going to see big shiny fish. And the reason why
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these fish are big and shiny on ads and in movies and everything like that is me as a guy, you know,
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this is seen throughout surveys on guys. Most guys prefer a woman who's 23. Like if you look,
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it's really funny. Women generally prefer a guy who's like a couple of years older than them and
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then about their age and a little bit younger than them if they get older. Men, if you look,
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it's like always 23. No matter how old they are, 23 is the age that they want.
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Well, it's simple, but what it means is that's because that's where for a guy,
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you're going to have the largest biological window to have as many kids as possible.
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Like if you died in my biology and I was like master of a tribe or something like that,
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and I could choose any woman I wanted to, to be my next wife, I would be evolutionarily rewarded
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for choosing a woman near the beginning of her reproductive window instead of a woman around
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my age, right? So my body is programmed to spend a little extra time staring at those and stuff like
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that. And so when people in the secular world, whether it's in movies or in ads or anything like
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that, utilize these, they can very easily draw people's eyes much more than they can with women
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that have moved on to this next stage of their life that have kids that are being a good wife,
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et cetera. And the reason I keep saying secular world, people might be like, what do you mean
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secular world versus religious world? Because some religions succumb to this after a while, but
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only the new, like really soft iterations, the historic religions, which are usually like a
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religious and cultural tradition, typically have prohibitions against this and typically venerate
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women for entering the motherhood phases of their life. Why do they do this and the secular world
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doesn't? It's because the secular world doesn't have any intergenerational reward mechanism,
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rewarding and punishing iterations of it. I mean, it does now. They have very low fertility rates and
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it's going to disappear soon. But I mean, like in a historic context, whereas most religious
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cultural, the ones overly venerated youth that didn't venerate mothers, women wouldn't want to
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become mothers at the same rates as other cultural traditions around them. And therefore they were out
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competed and eventually stamped out. So it's not like a moral reason why the religious cultural
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traditions venerate mothers and venerate this, this transition, but they do do it and it is useful.
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And it's something that I really worry about where you even, I mean, you are a sane woman and I,
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I think a totally logical woman. Well, and I'm also, I, one thing that's important to know too,
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is I was never someone whose attribute was beauty. Right. So like, I never, I think this is uniquely
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hard for people who grew up being the beautiful one and who grew up having that as a currency and
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then they lose it. So like, this is not even something that I'm experiencing is severely because
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I never felt like I was the pretty one and I never was the pretty one. Oh, you, you always wanted to be
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old too. I always wanted to be old. I always like my real age is 63 and that's when I will ultimately
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feel comfortable with myself or maybe 62, but yeah. So like, I think it's even harder, but even
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me. So even though I don't care about this shit, even though I really look forward to being older
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and looking older, and even though I never was celebrated for looks or youth or beauty in the
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first place, I still regret all the little signs of aging that I see. And that's really crazy to me.
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So I wonder how much of this do you think is a biological thing? Like you just want to hide this so
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you can, I don't know. Oh yeah. So it's like some kind of instinct is kicking in because my body
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is saying, whoa, lady, if you don't look youthful, your tribe is way more likely to kick you out if
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times get lean. Right? Yeah. So how much do you think is that versus how much do you think is sort
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of social conditioning and brainwashing? That's a good, I mean, I, I, gosh, it just never occurred
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to me before you brought it up that this might be a separate evolutionary thing, but final, final
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option. How much do you think is some genuine doubt that I will continue to find you attractive
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and desirable? Like, like real logical doubt. Oh, I think it's, I never thought about the
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evolutionary aspect of it, but I'm assuming that that has to be something at play here. Because if
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I genuinely look forward to looking older, right? Like that's the look that I like. And I never felt
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beautiful, like beautiful and youthful in the first place, then it has to be something more
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than that. So like, it's so tempting to just blame society to be like, well, despite all this,
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everything I see on Instagram is beautiful people and blah, blah, blah. But in the end,
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maybe you're right. And so maybe there's like 80%, I would say 80%, um, evolutionary and then 20%
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social and then 0% concern about you. Because if we have, you know, three, almost four kids together,
00:16:04.640
like we're pretty committed, we're pretty happy with each other. And also we have a relationship in
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which, frankly, if you found me unattractive and gross, like you would be super welcome to look for
00:16:16.160
fun elsewhere. Right. Like, so in the end, like we have solutions for this that don't even threaten
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the relationship. So that's not a threat to me though. It is, you know, disappointing,
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but it's not something that drives my action. So this is interesting with it being partially a
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biological instinct. That means we'll have to work extra hard to create an environment that helps
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our daughters fight this in themselves. This shame of aging only become an issue when people are older.
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But they'll need to, I mean, I don't want my daughters to be racked with mental guilt. Like I
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think that some religious cultures do a good job of venerating mothers so much that it overrides
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the biological sort of shame of aging. Right. Because if, if one is constantly reassured that
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like, this is a good thing, this is a good thing, this is a good thing, then you think that there's
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less risk. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I really have to treat my wife well, I suppose, which is one of
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these reasons why these fertility strategies that some, you know, pronatalists pursue, which I think
00:17:25.820
do not venerate the women who are having their children are going to be unsuccessful. There is
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one iteration of them, which can be successful, which is the men who just use a surrogate and then
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raise the kid entirely. And I know some men who do this and whatever, right? Like that can work.
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But then there's others where they'll have a number of serial partners and that can, I think,
00:17:49.520
cause daughters to be less interested and then sons to do something that pushes their daughters out of
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the cultural group, which isn't a great thing. Yeah. I mean, that kind of culture basically says,
00:18:00.880
like, I am not going to, to women, it says, I'm not going to be invested in as a long-term asset.
00:18:07.680
I'm going to be dropped as soon as I age. So either I'm not allowed to look like I'm aging or
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I shouldn't bother investing in men at all. And what we were just looking at some other
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unrelated to this data that really demonstrated even more so the extent to which women are really
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the bottlenecks on how many kids a family has, that it's, it's more like the upbringing and exposure
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that young women get throughout their lives that influences how many kids they have. Whereas like men,
00:18:35.540
their experiences, it doesn't really matter. I think it really comes down to who they marry.
00:18:39.940
It's so weird. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I've even seen this. Well, I think the vanity of women is
00:18:45.920
especially important. I know a number of families where the man went into the relationship planning
00:18:49.640
to have like five kids. The woman got to like kid number three and said, I'm stopping now. And
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that's the most horrifying thing I can imagine.
00:18:56.200
Well, and what you're, yeah. Also like these are marriages where the women came in saying,
00:19:00.400
yeah, I also want five kids. Yeah. And they're like, it's hard.
00:19:04.080
Yeah. So this is not one in which the women hadn't signed up for that to begin with, which
00:19:08.780
also happens, right? There are many marriages where like, there's, there are mismatched expectations.
00:19:13.420
And because couples didn't communicate, that's a problem. But these are ones in which literally
00:19:17.160
people entered the marriage of like, I'm going to have seven, I'm going to have five.
00:19:20.300
Yeah. No, but like, you shouldn't be shaming somebody for focusing on their body and feeling
00:19:26.440
comfortable with their body. Right. And feeling happy with their body. And this just really got
00:19:31.700
to me because we absolutely should be shaming that. I mean, secular society doesn't shame that
00:19:37.020
because the, the urban monoculture, right. It tells people do whatever you want, whenever you want
00:19:42.740
and be affirmed for whoever you want to be. And that's how it attracts people. So of course,
00:19:46.120
within its set of cultural values, it's not going to tell people that they should ever really feel
00:19:50.760
bad about any decision they make about themselves or about any, you know, way they want to perceive
00:19:55.960
themselves. However, it's doing really bad fertility rate rise. And it's doing really bad. If you look
00:20:01.500
at rates of mental health issues, like horrible mental health issues that do not exist in the
00:20:07.040
more conservative cultures, you know, there's the famous statistic of what would, what is it?
00:20:10.900
Progressive white women under the age of 30, like over half of them have a serious mental health issue.
00:20:15.140
Yeah. This is not great. Like this is not a culture that is functioning. And what I would ask is,
00:20:19.740
is I do not think there is a logical basis for your body, not being something that you were meant to spend.
00:20:25.960
By that, what I mean is God gifted you your body to play a part in this intergenerational cycle,
00:20:32.580
right? Like be fruitful and multiply, right? Like that was a commandment. If you're taking this from
00:20:37.400
a religious perspective and very few religions due to cultural evolution are going to say that that is
00:20:42.620
not the purpose of, of one's body, but then evolution, suppose you're being totally secular about
00:20:48.600
this. Well, evolution also wants you to have the maximum number of surviving offspring. And it gave
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you all of the signals to show your youth to signal to potential partners with the goal of having kids
00:21:03.940
eating the fish, right? It's not about just showing people the fish, but this is so interesting when I
00:21:09.580
think about the fish analogy in this context, because it reminds me of the way we now relate to food as a
00:21:17.780
society where there's so many stores, you know, especially in cultures that are deeper in the
00:21:22.640
social media abyss that are around like Japan or Korea or stuff like that, where you can go
00:21:26.140
and like the restaurants are really optimized around being able to take pictures and post them to social
00:21:31.560
media. Right. Well, even in the United States, totally in the United States. There's some restaurants
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that do this more than the food itself, right? More than the experience of eating. And this is because
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our society has become warped like this. You know, a lot of young people, they will spend more time
00:21:50.380
bragging or trying to put into the world, you know, how great they are at sex or whatever,
00:21:56.260
than actually being good and getting partners and everything like that. Right. We see this perversion
00:22:02.800
throughout a society in which our value is to some extent signaled to others and thus impart to
00:22:10.340
ourselves through what we can communicate within environments in which there is no validation
00:22:17.700
happening. By that, what I mean is historically, it was harder to do this. You know, you could like
00:22:22.240
say, oh, look at this lovely snack I'm having, but other people could go to the same restaurant and be
00:22:28.000
like, that place is gross. Right. But in an online environment, it's much harder to do that. And so
00:22:34.640
people begin to genuinely believe the signal itself is what is worth living their life for.
00:22:42.160
So that's one area of corruption. But then the other area of corruption comes from being too deep
00:22:46.540
within the urban monoculture and actually believing what it tells you, that if you live a life doing
00:22:52.180
whatever makes you happy and being validated for whoever you desire to be and however you desire
00:22:59.140
to perceive yourself, that if you do that, you will achieve mental health and happiness. Even I think
00:23:05.300
if you take like an objective secular perspective and you're just looking at the psychological research,
00:23:10.240
you would immediately be like, oh, this is like a perfect way to like psychologically fuck someone
00:23:15.900
up, telling them just chase whatever makes you happy in the moment all the time and be affirmed for
00:23:23.840
however you want to see yourself. Well, but aren't you also saying that you would encourage cultures
00:23:29.840
that make people feel affirmed for not looking like they're 23 years old when they're no longer 23 years
00:23:36.360
old? Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's okay to feel good about how you look. And I mean, part of me, when I look
00:23:43.560
at comments like that, I think, well, yeah, but it's going to be a lot easier to feel good about how you look
00:23:50.320
when you're not trying to pull something off that you can't pull off. One thing I wanted to ask you
00:23:54.280
though, is do you feel any like qualms or concerns about aging? I mean, you look better every day.
00:24:02.380
I will be clear about that. It's deeply unfair. However, you are getting more gray hairs, you know,
00:24:07.480
there, there, there are signs of aging. This is a really interesting thing because it's how I relate
00:24:11.480
to nostalgia. I'll often think about things I used to do, you know, back in the day when I used to sleep
00:24:15.800
around a lot, or, you know, the little games I played back then, I don't think about sleeping
00:24:19.820
with women. Like when I look back and I am nostalgic about things I did in the past, it is not the sex
00:24:24.980
I'm nostalgic about. It's the courting process. But that was also really hard and stressful.
00:24:29.900
So what's going on there? It was hard and stressful in a fun way. You would go on a date and you wouldn't
00:24:33.880
know how things were going. And there was, and I reflect on this, like when I'm watching anime,
00:24:38.800
where like young love is courting and everything like that. But I look at this through the lens and was
00:24:44.940
a complete comfort was the fact that that was part of a previous stage of my life.
00:24:50.720
Oh, so just that it's over. Like the fact that it's over is what makes you feel nostalgic.
00:24:55.620
Yeah. To put it another way, it would be silly to be nostalgic about, you know, trying to pierce
00:25:02.540
the egg when I was a sperm, right? Or the egg being pierced when I was an egg, right? Like I was
00:25:08.940
basically a completely different type of biological entity back then. My entire optimization function,
00:25:14.920
the way my, the things that made me happy were different. The stage of my life was different.
00:25:18.060
Everything was different. And I can take solace in the things I did get to experience during those
00:25:24.120
stages of life and the things I didn't get to experience. There were types of rebellion that
00:25:28.980
I decided not to indulge in because I thought they were too risky to my long-term goals. And I can see
00:25:34.160
people in movie engage in those types of rebellion, whether it's tattoos or drugs or whatever. And I mean,
00:25:40.760
I did do, I guess, a lot of drugs, but not specific drugs that were addictive. So I never really
00:25:46.720
indulged in that sort of stuff and in that culture in a way where I can go back to that. Like as an
00:25:52.660
adult, if I went and tried that stuff, it just wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be that experience
00:25:57.660
of genuinely doing this in an experimental time of my life. And I think that nostalgia for previous
00:26:05.960
life states can be a positive emotion when you understand that those are things that you'll
00:26:12.760
never get to experience again. And it can be a negative emotion when you try to recreate them.
00:26:18.300
Well, I think it's also a problem when you actually really did enjoy that thing and you
00:26:22.120
couldn't do it anymore. Like let's say that you really enjoyed something really, really super
00:26:26.020
athletic and then you aged and you couldn't do it anymore because literally your body couldn't take
00:26:30.740
that kind of wear and tear. Although here's the thing is I don't feel that, that, that, that kind
00:26:37.520
of nostalgia, regret, whatever is not what I feel as I age. Because first off, like if I actually were
00:26:44.000
super crazy attractive and if people gave me a lot of attention for that, I would feel one,
00:26:48.760
deeply uncomfortable because I don't want the attention. And two, like I would also very much
00:26:54.020
not respect the people who were attracted to me because if someone just likes me because I'm pretty,
00:27:01.160
that's gross. Like I just, I would find that pretty aversive and it would make me very deeply
00:27:07.960
uncomfortable. Like I was just listening to someone talking about host clubs in Japan where you have
00:27:11.600
either a male or female, like professional essentially fawning over you and being like,
00:27:16.200
oh, you're so pretty. Oh, you're so smart. And I was thinking, oh my God, I would like pay money
00:27:19.220
to not do that. So it's also not that I regret not being able to have that experience. So there
00:27:24.360
is really something different going on with women. And what do you want to be affirmed for?
00:27:30.200
For achieving things, for, for getting stuff done. Like remember when, when, when I, when I first
00:27:33.760
sort of taught you how to compliment me in a way that would make me really happy, it was never to
00:27:38.720
say something like, oh, you're pretty or you're so smart. So never to be like, oh, you are so attribute,
00:27:43.140
but rather, oh, X thing that you did was so clever, or I see you worked really hard on that.
00:27:48.980
And it's amazing how this is paying off, that kind of thing. So like compliment actions and
00:27:53.160
moments rather than apparent fundamental attributes. But I do think that if we were to
00:27:58.900
get to the bottom of like, what's solving societal problems with women not being comfortable with
00:28:05.200
aging, I don't even think it's about like raining praise on them for being beautiful and wonderful
00:28:12.300
in whatever life stage they are, like affirming them in their current body position, because I don't
00:28:20.520
Well, okay. So here's what I think it is. You were talking about how, well, you've got to affirm
00:28:25.920
women for different life stages and optimizing them. When I was younger, there were multiple
00:28:30.500
optimizations. I looked for in a woman, whether it's like the perfect goth woman or nerd woman,
00:28:34.960
or like artsy chic, like there are different ways that women can optimize even within that useful state
00:28:39.860
to look breathable. I guess you could say, what's the word these days? That must have been breathable,
00:28:44.820
right? Like what I was interested in. And I think that there are optimization functions that are valid
00:28:50.380
within our society as a person ages. I think that's what we're seeing with cottagecore, right? Like
00:28:55.640
cottagecore is thirst trap, but not thirsting over a woman's body, but over the environment she has
00:29:02.900
created around her. So cottagecore is thirst trap, Martha Stewart. It is an environment where a woman
00:29:13.400
is cultivated, you know, of a house and everything like that, or a family. And then I'd also say
00:29:19.500
there's like prepcore, right? Which might be closer to, but we're like a cross between cottagecore and
00:29:24.580
prepcore, right? Where you have these like Christmas photos and stuff like that, where when you share
00:29:28.900
these, I mean, if people go to your Instagram account, what's the handles? Simone H. Collins?
00:29:35.100
Yeah. I haven't posted there recently. I need to. Well, I mean, it's basically a thirst trap account,
00:29:39.280
but it's a thirst trap account for loving your husband and having kids. What were you saying,
00:29:45.040
Simone? For wholesomeness, right? Yeah. And, and it's not going to get as many likes because you know,
00:29:50.820
you're not appealing to the same audience, but I do think that you are signaling an ideal that you
00:29:57.140
have achieved at this stage of your life, that one day you are going to have to let go as well.
00:30:03.340
You know, one day it will be grandmothercore. And I'm sure people will come up with like grannycore
00:30:08.820
and stuff like that in the future. One really funny thing is I was, I've been watching Adventure
00:30:13.040
Time with my kids and there's this one character on it. I mean, I've seen it before, but I never
00:30:17.040
can text her like this, Tree Trunks, who's like this old sweet lady, but who's also like always
00:30:23.020
talking about her former, like basically sexual escapades and stuff like that.
00:30:27.700
My adventurous instincts tell me to seduce that tentacle critter with my womanly charms and elephant
00:30:34.740
prowess. What are you doing here, Tree Trunks? I'm helping you by tempting this guy with my body.
00:30:41.860
It's not a guy, Tree Trunks. It's a snake-armed ruby brain beast. Even brain beasts get lonely,
00:30:48.000
thing. Jake, you were supposed to watch her. She got past me, man. I tried to stop her, but she
00:30:54.800
overpowered me. I did it. I helped. I'm the sexiest adventurer in the world. Mr. Fine Duty.
00:31:02.860
Yes, Captain Tree Trunks. Mr. Fine Duty, pick up that mop, you bug.
00:31:12.380
Captain Tree Trunks, we're approaching a ship off the port bow. Good.
00:31:21.780
Uh, I'm Wyatt, your new secretary. These flowers are from Robot Body Mo.
00:31:34.120
I'm sorry I didn't trust you. I just know you've had a lot of adventures in the past,
00:31:39.980
It's true. I sometimes miss those wild times, but back then I couldn't even tell the difference
00:31:48.080
between a good adventure and a bad one. I was just a leaf in the wind, blown about by my whims,
00:32:00.240
Yeah. And that's associated with old age, and I suspect our kids will grow up associating that
00:32:06.760
with old age, because so much of the future generations, I think, are going to move away
00:32:10.660
from that lifestyle, and only will this, like, broken older generation be these 80-year-olds
00:32:16.320
talking about all the sex they used to have, whereas Gen Z today, I think, is just looking
00:32:20.620
for a wholesome relationship, a lot of them. At least the ones that I see that look like they're
00:32:24.360
going to have kids. A final thing I'd note when I'm talking about life stages and, like,
00:32:28.920
just being able to recognize and appreciate that I cannot relive those things, and I just need to
00:32:34.200
be happy for the game I was playing when I was playing it. I'd almost argue it's like a post-game
00:32:38.520
where, like, the game is switching the score that is judging you on.
00:32:42.080
Is that if you didn't achieve, like, I did achieve many of the things I was sort of
00:32:47.220
programmed to achieve at different parts of my life, right? But, like, suppose you didn't get to
00:32:51.500
sleep around a lot when you were younger. If you then try to do that when you are middle-aged
00:32:56.580
or an old person... Which a lot of people try to do.
00:32:59.800
You will not get the validation or the happiness or the satisfaction you would have gotten. It is
00:33:04.380
really important to understand declaring bankruptcy on stages of your life and moving to the next stage
00:33:10.940
of your life. I like that. Declaring bankruptcy on certain life stages. It just wasn't going to
00:33:16.920
happen. Right. And then you can find new ways to optimize. There are new ways to optimize and still
00:33:22.880
live a life of value. If you realize that you're middle-aged or you're old and you never had kids
00:33:27.480
and you never had a family, there are new ways you can fulfill the role of an older mentor in your
00:33:32.160
community and stuff like that. Now, it's important that you understand, and this is especially important
00:33:36.640
with the older mentor role, is that your goal is to actually be useful within your community and not
00:33:42.800
masturbate the feeling of being an older mentor. Which some people... I remember when I was young,
00:33:47.180
I'd get these people who would try to forcefully mentor me. But by that, what I mean is give me
00:33:52.260
advice that clearly had... They hadn't thought about whether that advice was still useful in the world
00:33:57.180
or how to deliver it to a young person or how to help the young person in their goals. Just
00:34:02.920
sort of masturbating this self-image as an older mentor. So it's important within any of these life
00:34:08.260
stages. It's the same with being a parent. You could do the wholesome preppy prep core, right?
00:34:12.800
Where you are using your children to feel like you are the perfect parent. And so you are focused on
00:34:21.080
how they appear in pictures, how they appear in et cetera, right? Like how you're thought of by your
00:34:24.900
community. Rather than remembering that this is just as hollow as walking around with that rotting fish
00:34:30.800
or taxidermying that fish. The point of the fish is to be eaten. The point of being a parent is to give
00:34:36.540
your kids a good childhood and raise them to be emotionally healthy and efficacious adults.
00:34:42.340
It is not to look like a good parent. The purpose of being a mentor is not to think of yourself as a
00:34:48.720
mentor or by seeing by your community as a mentor. It's to help young people, right? Always remember
00:34:54.520
that there is the taxidermy iteration of life and there is the actual iteration of life. The actual
00:35:00.640
being an efficacious member of your community. And your biology will reward you for the true version
00:35:06.400
and it will punish you for the incorrect version. What I mean is you may be venerated by your
00:35:11.600
community. You may be liked by a lot of people on TikTok or whatever, but the happiness you gain
00:35:17.600
from that will always be hollow and evanescent and eat at your soul. You know, a soul burns on a
00:35:26.000
bonfire of vanity. And that is true. I think another thing too, in terms of like giving,
00:35:33.220
encouraging our family, kids, daughters, especially to have healthy views about this
00:35:37.620
is I think the way that we'll say like tropes of warriors in the past talked about battle scars is
00:35:46.200
probably a really good way to look at things. Like you don't see warriors in a lot of like,
00:35:52.080
and again, these are all just character tropes. This isn't like a sample of real people that I
00:35:56.540
know about, but you don't see them complaining about like, oh, you know, like my face is all
00:36:02.040
scarred or like my like pinky finger is gone. You know, it's like, oh, I lost this on this thing.
00:36:07.920
You know, like it shows signs of achievement. And maybe if we instead encourage or contextualize,
00:36:14.140
I shouldn't say encourage, if we actually contextualize signs of aging as signs of a life lived
00:36:20.280
properly and well, then also values well aligned, like not investing money in plastic surgery when
00:36:26.840
you could invest in your children's education or something like that, that, that, that being seen
00:36:31.180
as something to be proud of the same way that a warrior shows off his battle scars.
00:36:35.060
Yeah. Well, and I can't imagine, I mean, imagine being the type of person who invests in plastic
00:36:40.160
surgery rather than your children's education. A lot of people do. When you consider how much
00:36:46.700
these procedures cost, there are many, many, many, many parents who are, you know, implicitly
00:36:56.440
because they're not putting that money towards something else, investing in their looks over
00:37:02.100
that. And often it doesn't look good in the end. Often it gets botched in the end and they have to
00:37:06.800
take fillers and get dissolved, get them dissolved to get rid of them. Taxidermy looks like taxidermy,
00:37:12.020
right? You, you, you don't have your actual dog, you know, your, your, that reminds me of that
00:37:17.480
dumb and dumber scene. You sold my dead bird to a blind kid? Lloyd, that, that, you, what are you?
00:37:25.520
Petey didn't even have a head. Harry, I took care of it.
00:37:33.760
Pretty bird. Yeah. Can you say pretty bird? Pretty bird. Yes. Pretty bird.
00:37:47.480
Tomorrow on A Current Affair, inside the home of the Menendez Brothers' attorney.
00:37:52.240
And next, we'll be back in a minute with the heartbreaking story of the blind Rhode Island
00:38:05.560
That is the weird thing about plastic surgery is like,
00:38:07.560
there are some plastic surgery looks that I now associate with age because I only like old people
00:38:13.880
use it and only old people have that kind of facial structure, like the puffy cheeks, the puffy
00:38:19.380
lips. Like I associate it with a sign of, of, of middle age or being elderly, which is super interesting.
00:38:28.400
What I love is when we get plastic surgery that makes you look better at being your age. Like when
00:38:32.580
you're 60, if you don't look like the perfect granny, you're like, no, no, no, no. I want, I don't want to
00:38:37.300
look younger. I want to look like a cooler. Yeah. Like I will, I will probably bleach my hair to make it all
00:38:43.280
white instead of just having gray hair. Perfect example of the correct way to alter your appearance
00:38:49.440
to lean into it. Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait for my white hair. My family has this great genetic trait
00:38:57.720
where we get pure white hair at a pretty young age. I'm so jealous. You've seen it. And our hair
00:39:03.580
doesn't like, we don't decrease the amount of hair we have. I'll just have. Yeah. It stays thick and
00:39:07.300
full and it just gets gorgeous and white. And I hate you. I hate you so much. It's not fair.
00:39:12.780
Hey, I'm looking forward to you being a granny because I know you're going to be the
00:39:16.720
sassiest mo fucking granny ever. And I love it. I am going to love it. Maybe it's this awkward
00:39:22.420
transition. I love who you are today. I love who you were when I met you. And I love who you're
00:39:25.920
going to be when you're an 80 year old woman. And don't you forget that. I'm never going to say
00:39:30.460
like, oh, Simone, I'm so worried about these changes that are happening to your body because
00:39:35.080
of fourth kid that you're producing extra blood and you got this blood vessel popping. You're like,
00:39:40.700
no, I was just listening about some Korean divorce in which the husband would get
00:39:45.000
sex workers who looked like the younger version of the wife. And oh man, like that hurts. You know,
00:39:51.260
like, I don't even know if that hurts. That's kind of sweet. I don't know. I don't know. It's
00:39:55.700
he didn't leave the wife and he still liked the idea of banging a younger version of her.
00:40:01.760
He probably, this is the thing that you're forgetting. He probably was imagining the people
00:40:07.120
he was banging other than his wife were his wife. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess that's sweeter than
00:40:12.160
going for a completely different look. But still, I, I understand. Also, you got to keep
00:40:17.400
in mind that aging happens differently for different ethnicities was white people. It's
00:40:22.360
more of a gradual change as they get older. Whereas with Asian people, they often undergo
00:40:28.840
especially Asian women sort of sudden transformations between life stages, which I think is a blessing
00:40:35.340
because you know what life stage you're at. Are you at Asian granny stage or are you at Asian
00:40:40.140
Vixen stage? Yeah. And like Vixen stage somehow lasts forever and then suddenly. Oh, it lasts forever
00:40:53.740
and then immediately you transform into like a short granny. Yeah. I don't, I really wonder what's
00:40:57.900
going on with that phenomenon of like, you really don't see this other transition. You don't see
00:41:03.140
middle age. It's, I don't understand it. I don't understand it. I don't know. I'm fine with it,
00:41:09.380
but, but, but, but it, I mean, except it might make it easier for them to accept when they're
00:41:14.580
granny. Yeah. To just be like, oh yeah. Cause yeah, I think it's that, it's that, that weird
00:41:19.540
interstitial period where you don't really, you can't pull off any look. You can't pull off old
00:41:26.000
and you can't pull off young. So what are you anymore? Well, I think a core thing that you can
00:41:30.140
do is look forward to who you're going to be next. Look forward to being the old lady, which you do,
00:41:35.760
but you just never look forward to being the mom. And because of that, you're sort of struggling
00:41:41.940
with the stage transition because you didn't know it was one of the stages to look forward to.
00:41:46.960
Well, I only ever knew my mom in her middle age. Like she died before she could get old and I never
00:41:54.180
knew her when she was super young. So I only ever knew her hating her body cause she hated her middle
00:41:59.560
age body just like I do. And yeah. So maybe I just like, see this as like some permanent purgatory,
00:42:07.140
but it will end. It will end. And then I'll, and then I'll get old and wrinkly and I'll be so happy.
00:42:12.460
It'll be great. I love you so much. I love you too, Malcolm.