Catastrophic Illness

The Four Horsemen of Autonomy's Apocalypse.  
Part 2 of 4

You are going to get sick and die, and there's nothing you can do about it.  The only power you have is the power to, maybe, prolong the inevitable.  As a MGTOW, your physical and mental health should be your absolute first priority - no exceptions.  You cannot live autonomously if your health prevents you from living autonomously.  As a MGTOW, you have a greater than average ability to take care of yourself, to control what you do and do not put into your body.  You have a greater than average ability to avoid toxic people, situations and interactions.


If you have addictions, overcome them.  You cannot be autonomous if you are enslaved by substances or behaviors anymore than you can be autonomous if you are enslaved by people. This should be your first priority and you will have not wasted your energy if you have spent decades overcoming your addictions and accomplished nothing else. Dependency is your worst adversary - overcome this and nothing will be too difficult for you.  Your decision to go your own way means that you are breaking your addiction to women and to the role society would chain you.  Why would you settle for yet another prison?  Don't consume poison.  Believe me, you have already had more than your fair share.

As a child, you ate what you were given to eat - and there is a very good chance that much of it was fried, processed, corn syrup soaked shit.  If you were born in the 60s or 70s, there is a very good chance that you breathed second hand cigarete smoke on a daily basis - well into the 80s and 90s.  If you live in an urban area, the air you breath, the water you drink - contains the carcinogenic bi-products of industrial waste and air pollution.  If you live in a rural/agricultural area, you are exposed to cancer causing herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and petroleum based/carcinogenic fertilizers to a greater or lesser extent throughout the year, in your water and air.  You can't and you won't escape it. But as an adult, who is autonomous, you can, and should, educate yourself about the shit you put into your body and act accordingly.  Obviously the safest food you can eat is the food that you yourself grow.

Get in shape and stay in shape.  This is your second priority after defeating your addictions.  You will have not wasted your energy if you have spent decades getting into shape and maintaining a healthy weight.  This, like addiction, may very well be a lifelong struggle.  It's a worthwhile struggle.  if you sit at a desk all day, learn to stand.  Sitting on your ass will kill you - it will sap your life away.  Purchase or make a standing desk.  At 30, I built my own standing work station in three hours using parts from a broken computer desk.  Before that I was suffering from a debilitating slipped cervical disc - the pain was so bad, I actually considered suicide. I felt like I was ninety-years-old.  It literally took me months to get my spine back into working order with the help of exercise (yoga and tai chi), a couple of spine adjustments and an inversion table - I will spend the rest of my life working to avoid that kind of chronic pain.  All from sitting 8 - 10 hours per day. Never again. It actually effected every aspect of my health, even my digestion.  I have no doubt that if I hadn't made the changes, I would have been dead by now.

Practice moderation in all things - including work.  Get enough sleep, but not too much. Exercise, but not recklessly.  Listen to your entire body.  Learn to experience self denial as pleasure - especially if you have a weakness for over indulgence, but always - in moderation.  Balance is health.  I know that sounds "new agey", but there is no shortage of science or precedent to back it up.

Seek to manage your stress.  The fact that you are a MGTOW, means that you have already eliminated a huge source of stress.  Relationships with women had been the greatest and most harmful source of stress in my life until the day I lay that ridiculous burden down.  The burden was tremendous and grossly inflated, and I literally felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off of me the day I shed that burden.  I was angry for a long time by the sheer absurdity of carrying that terrible weight.  It was as if someone suddenly walked up to me and said, "you know those sand bags that you've had strapped to your shoulders since you were child - well, you do realize that you don't have to carry that shit, right?"  It was infuriating, embarrassing and euphoric simultaneously.  Overtime, and in short order, it became just euphoric.  I think too many MGTOWs waste their time seeking an explanation for their former burden, and to a lesser extent continue to carry it by obsessing over the "why".  For me, the anger and embarrassment, it fades leaving ever increasing room for celebration and euphoria.  The awakening is a gift. It causes me to pity the "simps", the "blue pillers", but I feel more pity for my fellow MGTOW, who are awake, but still too angry about the grand deception to truly celebrate and enjoy their autonomy for the gift it truly is.  Yes 2, 3, 4 or (god forbid) more decades is a horrible amount of time to be living a lie - but to me, it would seem to be all the more reason to get to the business of living as a happy and autonomous man as quickly as possible.

Get your check-ups, your screenings, but don't yield your own capacity for critical thought to doctors.  Doctors are not gods.  Modern health care is not infallible.  Right now, we live in the pharmacentric drugs-are-king era of medicine.  Most people with chronic illnesses are over medicated due to an over reliance and preferance given to specialists, who frequently and systematically cannot see the forest for the trees, and do a terrible job of collaborating with the myriad other specialists with coordinating treatment.  I have observed this first hand with my own parents.  Real damage occurs when the "do no harm" all too frequently gets set aside for "this is the industry standard drug that gets prescribed for this problem" in isolation of the myriad of other problems and affected systems as a result.  People get specialized and drugged to death every day, and in 100 years we'll be shaking our heads at the pharmacentric era of medicine with the same disdain we currently reserve for lobotomists and blood letters, I promise you.  With that in mind I say avail yourself of modern medicine, but educate yourself and advocate for yourself. If you wake up one day and find yourself wondering if you should really be taking all these fucking prescribed pills, you probably are over medicated, and you need to advocate for yourself.  Your doctors are every bit as vulnerable to blind, unquestioning indoctrination and arrogance as they ever have been, and in countries like the United States, where "health" is an "industry", you can damn well bet that "do no harm" will lose out everytime to the capitalistic mantra "more is better".

All of this has a two-fold purpose.  The first is to improve your quality of life.  The second is to prolong that quality for as long as possible - because you will diminish.  You will decline.  You will get sick and die, and there's nothing you can do about it.  You will probably end your life under the care of strange and careless women and men.  This is true, regardless of whether or not you have lived under the blue pill illusion, or the red pill awareness. I don't believe that marriage, family, or "legacy" will provide any more comfort in your final days (see my "Aren't You Affraid of Dying Alone") entry. If you're still not convinced, I strongly recommend you spend a few months volunteering at your local "assisted living (dying) center", or get to know a hospice worker well enough to learn what he/she really thinks about the business of death and dying.  Perhaps it was once comforting, when the old died in familiar surroundings, in their own beds, in the homes of their adult children and grandchildren, who looked after them in their waning years, but that relationship was systematically eradicated long ago.  Now most of us will die alone, in the company of strangers.  I say, live autonomously for as long as possible and enjoy every second of it - then check out on your own terms, and fight like hell for the right to do it.

In summary, you should mitigate your risk of illness with a healthy lifestyle, and you should prepare financially for health problems.  In the United States, that means health insurance or "obamacare" if you can avail yourself of it.  They are both rackets, and they are both designed primarily to benefit and subsidize the health insurance/care industry, but HSAs are a pipe dream, unless you are fabulously wealthy.  You are at the health insurance/care industry's mercy regardless, and there is no fighting the system, unless (and I'm deadly serious) you are prepared to just go off in the woods and recycle yourself back into nature.  In either case, I strongly advise you to develop some tolerance for pain and physical discomfort and to avoid using or accepting opiates as much as possible.  Save those for the end of your life, when they will do you the most good.