Enjoying fiction, while blackpilled.

[Gremlincel]

Before I was truly blackpilled, fiction, in all it's forms, was one of my biggest enjoyments in life. Books, movies, games, shows, whatever. I was at my happiest when indulging in escapism. I suppose, I still am, but its effects have been severely dampened.

Now, whenever I am following a story, witnessing characters develop, the blackpill is at the forefront of my mind, constantly reminding me of how unrealistic it all is, how none of these things could happen in reality, how human nature is so much more predictable and dull outside of fiction. It really can ruin the experience at times, and makes suspension of disbelief, and immersion, terribly hard to achieve.
I also can't help but compare myself to fictional entities, always being reminded of how subhuman I am, how I cannot do any of these things that they do, while it is common for better people to do them, IRL. This was common before being blackpilled, but it has however far worsened it.
It seems anhedonia must seep into every facet of my life.

Has anyone else experienced this? Have you found anyway to lessen the amount it happens?

 

[Scorn]

yeh I can KINDA relate to that, now when I try to indulge in some fiction it somtimes just makes me sad of how unrealistic it is

 

[Gremlincel]

yeh I can KINDA relate to that, now when I try to indulge in some fiction it somtimes just makes me sad of how unrealistic it is

That's another point, it's not just hard to enjoy, it actively makes me sadder at times, knowing the world will never work like it does in bluepilled stories.

 

[Deleted member 2798]

I was incapacitated by anhedonia in the years leading up to 20, but I've since recovered my enthusiasm (Today Is the fuckin' Day!) for esthetics.

user@nausea had a thread in the early days of the forum about authors for incels. There are some good books out there that won't torment you with florid lies. Not all of these guys write fiction, but a good way to get back into books would be with:

Michel Houellebecq (first priority for incels)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Elias Canetti
Franz Kafka
Fritz Zorn
Thomas Ligotti
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Emil Cioran
Knut Hamsun
Fyodor Dostoevsky
James Ellroy

As for philosophy:
Friedrich Nietzsche
Arthur Schopenhauer
Peter Zapffe
Søren Kierkegaard
Otto Weininger
Oswald Spengler
Georges Sorel

If you need music recs, I implore you to ask. Even if you don't, I'll probably make suggestions.

 

[Gremlincel]

I was incapacitated by anhedonia in the years leading up to 20, but I've since recovered my enthusiasm (Today Is the fuckin' Day!) for esthetics.

user@nausea had a thread in the early days of the forum about authors for incels. There are some good books out there that won't torment you with florid lies. Not all of these guys write fiction, but a good way to get back into books would be with:

Michel Houellebecq (first priority for incels)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Elias Canetti
Franz Kafka
Fritz Zorn
Thomas Ligotti
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Emil Cioran
Knut Hamsun
Fyodor Dostoevsky
James Ellroy

As for philosophy:
Friedrich Nietzsche
Arthur Schopenhauer
Peter Zapffe
Søren Kierkegaard
Otto Weininger
Oswald Spengler
Georges Sorel

If you need music recs, I implore you to ask. Even if you don't, I'll probably make suggestions.

Hearing that you recovered from anhedonia, at least in relation to enjoying these things, is honestly quite heartening. Being unable to appreciate and enjoy art, or entertainment, is hell. Without the more abstract, intellectual side of things to experience, there is really no relief outside of physical, hedonistic pleasures, which can't hope to compare, or replace.
I hope with effort on my part I will be able to get back to finding happiness in these things, in time.

I appreciate the list, too, I'll absolutely write it down and research these authors, and read their work, I trust your authority on recommendations for this sort of thing. I use to love reading, back in the good days. Slipping into a lifestyle where I do nothing more strenuous, in terms of hobbies, than browse the internet, has been awful, so I look forward to getting back into books.

Sure, if you are offering, feel free to recommend some music you like, you have great taste in it from what I have seen so far.

 

[Deleted member 2798]

Hearing that you recovered from anhedonia, at least in relation to enjoying these things, is honestly quite heartening. Being unable to appreciate and enjoy art, or entertainment, is hell. Without the more abstract, intellectual side of things to experience, there is really no relief outside of physical, hedonistic pleasures, which can't hope to compare, or replace.
I hope with effort on my part I will be able to get back to finding happiness in these things, in time.

I appreciate the list, too, I'll absolutely write it down and research these authors, and read their work, I trust your authority on recommendations for this sort of thing. I use to love reading, back in the good days. Slipping into a lifestyle where I do nothing more strenuous, in terms of hobbies, than browse the internet, has been awful, so I look forward to getting back into books.

Sure, if you are offering, feel free to recommend some music you like, you have great taste in it from what I have seen so far.

I'm with you entirely. The worst periods of my life coincided exactly with those in which I was unable to derive enjoyment from art and culture.

To make a summary of my development, I was always heavily invested in these domains, particularly music as a high schooler. I saw in the independent rock scene of decades past the closest facsimilie of my being up to that point. A bunch of grimy losers making fucked up Dionysian music seemed to be the milieu in which I belonged exactly.

I grew sick with it upon reaching college, as I came to realize things would never get better; it seemed like everything I'd wanted up to that point was a ruse. At the very least, my Lodestars had been socially secure enough to be able to find 2-3 other like-minded people and get something done. I didn't even have that. What the fuck did anyone know about anger and sadness? These people, like everyone else, were charlatans.

It was in this period that I disengaged from understanding myself as a sort of phantom participant and acquired a growing consciousness of myself as a spectator - of everything. No one and nothing spoke for me.

I didn't really strain toward the rediscovery of my vitality - it was more a revelation, a leap of faith. One had to be willing not only to exist apart from everything, but also to make forays back among the monuments of culture to pilfer and abscond with what was useful. Of course, these are not equal and one must be aware of one's targets. The impetus for this was the discovery of Today Is the Day, a band that made me conscious that my suffering was true, communicable, and awesome in its scope. There was a way to wring something out of my trials, and I didn't have to accept the conditions of degenerate utilitarian hegemony to do it.

Music was the rope by which I climbed out.
As for recommendations of music with which to take the first step back into the stream of expression -

If you want the raw truth:



The kings.

I smell sex.



And I'm left still
Still longing
Still cold
So cold

If you just want to have a good time with some good music:

 

[PleaseKillMeLoseSkin]

When I was younger my old man would get pissed at me watching movies about fairies and dragons specifically it was "The NeverEnding Story" he would say shit like "That shit ain't real, you don't believe in that shit do you son?" so he could get me to go away so he could watch sports on t.v and I just hear his voice whenever I see stuff like Lord of the Rings so my imaginations been ruined for a long time.

 

[Grapefruit]

I usually stick to epic fantasy for my fiction. It is my escape and I love it. The genre probably helps me not get enraged at the content because of how innately separate from reality it already is.

 

[Brooding Genius]

Blackpilled Norman here:

Hi, I went through such a phase myself. It lasted for many years, maybe over a decade. I simply stopped reading all fiction altogether. It was like poison to me. Instead I read nonfiction books, magazines, newspapers, Internet, etc. In my case it was because I completely hated my life. The women situation? Let us just say I would have felt very much at home here and leave it at that. And as with many of you, that was one of the main things that made my life feel like a worthless non-existence.

I had been at my parents house like an idiot because I went broke, and it was either that or homeless. I had few friends during this period when before I had many. I have OCD, an anxiety disorder, and it was very, very bad during this time.

Thing was all fiction, poetry, short stories reminded me of how crap my life was, how shit it was, how stupid,worthless and lame I felt for having almost zero life. It was simply too painful to read it, and I even developed a fear or phobia, especially of novels.

Well, at some point my life started getting better and I was living on my own a ways away from my family. I was living as an adult again.

Without going into details, the things that had been driving me crazy about my miserable life got a lot better, and so did my life as a whole in many ways. My life bumped way up and I felt like I was living a normal human life as opposed to a worthless non-life of a failure. As my life, mind, and situation got more normal and I was able to feel better about it, I was able to start reading fiction, short stories and even poetry again.

Moral to the story in my case: When you feel like your life is complete shit of a worthless non-existence, it's hard to read novels, short stories or poetry. You can still read newspapers, magazines, and nonfiction books. As your life improves and you start living an actual fairly normal life of an actual human not a subhuman, you will be able to read novels, short stories, and poetry again.

I have no idea if your situation mirrors mine but if it does, you can't apppreciate fictional stuff because those people always have normal lives and you may feel you have a worthless shit of a nonexistence so you compare yourself to the fictional characters and you feel even worse.

I would say that if your life would ever improve in whatever ways you want it to improve in, then you will be able to read fiction again. And I would say that if you cleared this incel situation up somehow or other that would be one of the best ways you could improve your life. As your shit situation starts to get better, you will feel happier and more of a normal human and now you may be able to relate to fiction better.

It is almost as if the ability to read fiction - novels, short stories, and poems - is the sign of a healthy psyche.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Deleted member 5861]

Those obscure torture videos is good entertainment for blackpilled people.

 

[Indari]

yes, I used to read lots of young adult fiction but now I see how trash it all is

 

[Asianmanletcel]

I also can't help but compare myself to fictional entities, always being reminded of how subhuman I am

Yes especially when the protagonist is taller than me or a tallfag the blackpill is so strong I dropped whatever fiction was that I am reading

 

[Deleted member 2798]

Ah damn! I forgot to link one of my favorite blackpills, concise and unembellished. @Gremlincel, if you want a quick illustration of the truths that literature can reveal, read this:

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TwenSix.shtml

 

[Phosphene]

Blackpilled or no, it is inevitable that a consequent of any level of intellectual growth is a stricter set of criteria for what one can enjoy as high art. In the same manner in which many of us cannot sit down and watch childrens' cartoons, we cannot engage with instances of art that fail to convince us of their own validity. The literature you're encountering that is incapable of keeping your belief suspended is operating using suppressed premises that you do not believe have been proven, or are even plausible to be true, within the context of the story.

It seems as though you have already been recommended a good deal of content already, so I'll just leave my own small recommendation here: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, if you have not read it, is an interesting collection of three interconnected short stories revolving around themes such as isolation, surveillance, and the novel itself.

 

[Deleted member 2798]

The literature you're encountering that is incapable of keeping your belief suspended is operating using suppressed premises that you do not believe have been proven, or are even plausible to be true, within the context of the story.

A good point and, ultimately, a good sign. Your present state of misery may be an active process of evolution, from which you'll emerge with a better understanding of the works you used to love and with your sight more lucid.

The experience I described in the posts above was, in retrospect, a metamorphosis in which my earlier ideas and tastes were aufgehoben, discarded with the illusion of jaded permanence and retrieved in a brighter and more crystalline form. I think this is a fairly standard "liminal" stage for anyone who's genuinely inquisitive and sharp. I get the sense that you'll recover your animating passions as a person both new and old. I hope something in this thread can serve as the catalyst.

 

[Phosphene]

. . .It was in this period that I disengaged from understanding myself as a sort of phantom participant and acquired a growing consciousness of myself as a spectator - of everything. No one and nothing spoke for me

I find your development interesting, and I could not help but notice some similarities between our experiences:

To start, your transition from spectre to spectator aligns with my own life rather strongly. A number of months ago, I was ruminating over my own experience with isolation, posing questions that interrogated to what extent my isolation could be considered "legitimate," if even such a thing existed, and if the isolation with which I was primarily contemplating was social or cosmic in nature. During this episode, I couldn't help but feel a sense of joy at the prospect of being isolated--not out of a sense of misanthropy, but out of a sense of empowerment and liberation. And the rush of euphoria from the palpability of that liberation was embodied within your statement, "No one and nothing spoke for me." And I think whether or not the isolation was primarily social or cosmic is irrelevant in regards to this realization, because it would hold true in either scenario.

I didn't really strain toward the rediscovery of my vitality - it was more a revelation, a leap of faith. One had to be willing not only to exist apart from everything, but also to make forays back among the monuments of culture to pilfer and abscond with what was useful. Of course, these are not equal and one must be aware of one's targets. The impetus for this was the discovery of Today Is the Day, a band that made me conscious that my suffering was true, communicable, and awesome in its scope. There was a way to wring something out of my trials, and I didn't have to accept the conditions of degenerate utilitarian hegemony to do it. . .

The power of the realization that Today Is The Day brought you to, frankly, cannot be understated. This realization, which I expect has replicated itself across many more samples than just you and I, arrived to me in the past in the form of a person who facilitated the acquisition of the exact methods by which I would be able to derive the truths of the aforementioned realization through literature and music both. This type of instance reinforces the notion that I see everywhere that the ability to express ideas in vivid language undoubtedly makes them more palpable, if not more real (whether the language is made up of music or the sounds of the IPA)

Your statement regarding the ability to derive meaningful ideas from your trials reminds me of the book I just recommended in my first post. Within it, Auster makes a point about how, within the ideal mystery novel, every detail is important to solving the mystery. And even if one given detail isn't important at all in the end, the reader believes it had the potential to be so, which Auster argues amounts to just the same. And for this reason, I derive, the validity of one's own ideation as a process and as a response to the struggle of the everyday cannot be robbed from us.

 

[Gremlincel]

I'm with you entirely. The worst periods of my life coincided exactly with those in which I was unable to derive enjoyment from art and culture.

To make a summary of my development, I was always heavily invested in these domains, particularly music as a high schooler. I saw in the independent rock scene of decades past the closest facsimilie of my being up to that point. A bunch of grimy losers making fucked up Dionysian music seemed to be the milieu in which I belonged exactly.

I grew sick with it upon reaching college, as I came to realize things would never get better; it seemed like everything I'd wanted up to that point was a ruse. At the very least, my Lodestars had been socially secure enough to be able to find 2-3 other like-minded people and get something done. I didn't even have that. What the fuck did anyone know about anger and sadness? These people, like everyone else, were charlatans.

It was in this period that I disengaged from understanding myself as a sort of phantom participant and acquired a growing consciousness of myself as a spectator - of everything. No one and nothing spoke for me.

I didn't really strain toward the rediscovery of my vitality - it was more a revelation, a leap of faith. One had to be willing not only to exist apart from everything, but also to make forays back among the monuments of culture to pilfer and abscond with what was useful. Of course, these are not equal and one must be aware of one's targets. The impetus for this was the discovery of Today Is the Day, a band that made me conscious that my suffering was true, communicable, and awesome in its scope. There was a way to wring something out of my trials, and I didn't have to accept the conditions of degenerate utilitarian hegemony to do it.

Music was the rope by which I climbed out.
As for recommendations of music with which to take the first step back into the stream of expression -

If you want the raw truth:



The kings.

I smell sex.



And I'm left still
Still longing
Still cold
So cold

If you just want to have a good time with some good music:

Very interesting stuff, and well written as always, much appreciated.
I'll for sure look into your recommendations, thanks for sharing.

When I was younger my old man would get pissed at me watching movies about fairies and dragons specifically it was "The NeverEnding Story" he would say shit like "That shit ain't real, you don't believe in that shit do you son?" so he could get me to go away so he could watch sports on t.v and I just hear his voice whenever I see stuff like Lord of the Rings so my imaginations been ruined for a long time.

That fuckin sucks. I remember that movie, been ages since I saw it. There are certain things like that for me, too, that can be hard to look at because they remind me of bad memories, but I find once I overcome the initial discomfort, I can forget about them, for a while. Hopefully it's not so bad that, you can't bring yourself to consume that kind of media at all.

I usually stick to epic fantasy for my fiction. It is my escape and I love it. The genre probably helps me not get enraged at the content because of how innately separate from reality it already is.

Yeah, same deal for me, fantasy can be a lot easier to enjoy because, as you said, it is already separate from reality, so it isn't as painful to compare to it.

Blackpilled or no, it is inevitable that a consequent of any level of intellectual growth is a stricter set of criteria for what one can enjoy as high art. In the same manner in which many of us cannot sit down and watch childrens' cartoons, we cannot engage with instances of art that fail to convince us of their own validity. The literature you're encountering that is incapable of keeping your belief suspended is operating using suppressed premises that you do not believe have been proven, or are even plausible to be true, within the context of the story.
It seems as though you have already been recommended a good deal of content already, so I'll just leave my own small recommendation here: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, if you have not read it, is an interesting collection of three interconnected short stories revolving around themes such as isolation, surveillance, and the novel itself.

A good point and, ultimately, a good sign. Your present state of misery may be an active process of evolution, from which you'll emerge with a better understanding of the works you used to love and with your sight more lucid.

That is a very good point, you both made, I hadn't thought about it like that before, I will keep those concepts in mind, going forward.
I only fear that, I won't be able to evolve past this point, and will instead be stuck here forever, rather than learning and growing, accustomed to my new perspective, and moving on to enjoy things once more. I suppose one must, or they'll continue rotting and fading away until death.

 

[takERisks]

yes, I used to read lots of young adult fiction but now I see how trash it all is

 

[Phosphene]

That is a very good point, you both made, I hadn't thought about it like that before, I will keep those concepts in mind, going forward.
I only fear that, I won't be able to evolve past this point, and will instead be stuck here forever, rather than learning and growing, accustomed to my new perspective, and moving on to enjoy things once more. I suppose one must, or they'll continue rotting and fading away until death.

It's a rational fear, to be sure.
But I think your willingness to create threads such as this stands as a sign that you will be able to ultimately overcome this salient obstacle.

I wish you good fortune, and I hope that we can all continue to experience mutual growth.