Losing is winning

The strange thing about winning is that it tends to leave you profoundly dissatisfied, with a strange sense of emptiness. The Dwarf Fortress motto is “losing is fun” for a reason. Winning has the effect of robbing you of a challenge you used to be able to derive enjoyment from. It’s why someone like Elon Musk turned into a complete mental wreck.

In a sense, the punishment for cheating is that you win. And once you win, the game you liked is over. It works like this everywhere in life. The artist who made the song you like can’t enjoy it. We end our favorite stories with “and they lived happily ever after”, because after winning the prince’s heart and marrying him, life is just kind of over.

I play Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead and the game is fun because I never win. I’m very proud of myself when I manage to refuel a car, when I manage to kill some zombies, cook a meal or survive a night. I never get far enough to board up my windows, I never get far enough to set up my own base or gain followers. In people who play first person shooters, you notice the opposite of what you would expect. They enjoy getting shot (losing) and they dislike shooting the other player (winning).

Like everything else you experience, happiness serves a purpose. Your brain doesn’t offer it without a reason. But there are different forms of happiness. Listening to a sad song offers you a sense of happiness, even though you are simultaneously miserable. The brain will offer you happiness, in an attempt to get you back on your feet. The brain stops helping you once you win, because it doesn’t need to help you.

The weird thing is that the more women succeed, the less men are attracted to them, whereas the more they fail, the more men are attracted to them. Guys don’t like the woman with a PhD, they don’t like the woman with the six figure job. Guys like the goth chick who cuts herself, the stoner girl who can hardly get out of bed.

I would say that for women in relation to men it is the exact opposite, but that’s not really true. Women’s desire is infinitely more complex, at least in part because they control it. Men can’t make themselves attracted to a woman on a pragmatic basis, whereas a woman can at least to some degree just make herself attracted to a guy. You can see a woman married to an accountant and think “so that’s what women want”, not realizing that it’s not really what she wants, but that she convinced herself it’s what she wants.

It’s ultimately even weirder than I make it out to be, because of group level selection. Evolution has the task of preserving the genetic diversity of our species. This means it has the constant challenge of preventing any particular individual within the population from winning too much, at the cost of other individuals. That’s for example, why women enter menopause: You don’t want a small number of women having all the babies.

You also see this “punishing victory” mechanism at work in homosexuality. Women love gay men. Gay men look better, they are smarter, they have bigger penises, everything suggests they just carry better traits. So why are they gay? It’s a mechanism that seems at least in part intended to make sure they don’t monopolize women’s fertility.

When a guy looks happy and is overly good looking, like Luigi Mangione, we tend to assume he’s gay. This is also why I think a society that doesn’t force its gay men to marry women sets itself up for doom in the long run. The biggest myth has to be the idea that women are naturally bisexual but men’s orientation is somehow fixed at birth.

I urge you all, to read about the idle theory of evolution. Throughout history 99% of lifeforms have gone extinct. That’s what nature has to try to avoid. The biggest threat to a species tends to be overpopulation, because that causes it to exhaust its environment faster than it can regenerate itself.

Consider a population of wolves. If the population suddenly crashes by 50% due to a virus, it doesn’t really matter, because with fewer wolves, you will have more deer, thus making it easy for the population to recover. Now imagine the opposite: The population of wolves suddenly doubles. The wolves will eat more deer than the population of deer can grow. And with fewer deer left, fewer new deer will be born, as there are simply fewer deer left to become pregnant.

This is also why we have these end of the world fantasies, which humans have had ever since we have had civilization. We know the real threat we face is overpopulation. Overpopulation causes a species to exhaust its environment. This is a threat our species has faced for at least thousands of years, probably even before we developed agriculture, as the megafauna extinction suggests.

So what nature has been forced to engage in, is to reward losing and punish winning. When our population becomes too fit, when we become too smart, too good at hunting, too good at raising our babies into adulthood, we overpopulate our environment, cut down the trees, causing soil erosion and then eventually suffer local extinction, as happened on Easter Island and so many other places.

When it comes to Homo Sapiens Sapiens, the challenge nature faces is to stop us from becoming too fit. It is essentially the exact opposite of what you would expect in the Darwinian model, where nature encourages the proliferation of those genes that lead us to reproduce. In the short-term, we see the Darwinian model at work. But in the longer-term we have been subject to idleness theory: Populations that failed to develop mechanisms to suppress their own excessive reproduction went extinct.

What sort of mechanisms are these? Homosexuality, serial killing, eating disorders like anorexia nervosa that make you infertile, self-injury, warfare, human sacrifice like the Aztecs used to practice. We evolved to prevent our own overpopulation of the world.

You have to understand this principle, that a population’s main survival threat is its own overpopulation. This even applies to your own body, the biggest threat you face is that some of your own cells get better at making copies of themselves than they are supposed to be.

The reason nostalgia is such a typical human phenomenon, is because it is ultimately even more important for self-preservation than for us to reproduce. Rather than produce more copies of ourselves, the main task that is essential for our survival, is to preserve the kind of conditions that caused us to come into existence in the first place.

That’s why you see such huge enthusiasm among Europeans, for policies that seem as if they don’t make sense. Unlike Americans, Europeans are not interested in growing their economy. They design swamps, they encourage wolves to spread across the continent, they want to outlaw cars and force people to walk everywhere and more than anything else, they want to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere back to below 350 parts per million.

We see the same principle at work in Hinduism. I think the most useful concept to be found in Hinduism is the trimurti, the balance between creation, maintenance and annihilation, with creation being held in lowest regard. It’s entirely opposite of the modern Western perspective, where creation is held in highest regard. Hindus worship Vishnu, they worship Shiva, but they generally do not worship Brahma.

What Darwin observed about our world is true, but it is true in the same sense as you’re right when you remark that an arguing couple are angry at each other, without realizing that they’re able to be angry at each other because underneath they have a strong relationship based on love.

Darwinian selection is balanced by idleness theory, which is nature’s selection of self-destructive and self-handicapping behavior. In Hinduism, self-destruction is traditionally glorified. Widows jumped on funeral fires. And the Juggernaut, is named after the Indian Jagannath. India has these massive processions of these enormous temple cars.

The boys try to prove their bravery to each other, by standing in front of these cars for as long as possible. Oftentimes, they die as a result, they are crushed beneath the temple car. This has been going on for centuries.

Odoric of Pordenone noted in the 13th century, that Indians would just throw themselves in front of the temple cars, crushed to death by its huge wheels. The New York Times reported in 1864, on colonial authorities witnessing people intentionally throw themselves before the temple cars. This simple fact is often downplayed, people would rather pretend the deaths are accidents, but human sacrifice is just an element of the culture. For the elderly to starve themselves to death is also still held in high regard among the Jain.

The Western world inevitably develops these sort of mechanisms too, but they exist at the fringe of our culture. LGBTQI+ stuff, drug addiction and goth culture all now tend to overlap. We glorify drug-addiction in rappers and rock artists, we glorify all sorts of self-destructive sexual impulses.

When you want to stop a population from overwhelming its environment, you shouldn’t take out the specimens least able to reproduce themselves. No, you have to take out the most healthy ones. You have to make the herd weaker. That’s what we do. We encourage our healthiest specimens to destroy themselves and avoid reproducing.

You have to understand our entire culture, as an attempt at stopping ourselves from winning so much that it results in our annihilation.