Nerds With Porn Machines, Or How We Got Here

Years ago, I blocked "Aella" on Twitter because I was tired of reading her nonsense. To my dismay, I discovered that I also had to block the term "Aella" in order to avoid being exposed to her nonsense by other people on my Twitter feed discussing it... often favorably.

That the things Aella says and does are complete and utter nonsense is perfectly obvious to anyone older than the Millennial generation. It's a banality, not even worthy of an explanation. But people Millennial-aged and younger have lost the tools to discern why her particular brand of "Why shouldn't I completely debase myself to a leering audience?" is objectionable. 

How did we get here? Buckle up, I'm about to explain.

Part One: What Life Used To Be Like

First, we have to travel back in time to the year... oh, say, 1982. Nerds existed in 1982, but nobody wanted to be one. Not even nerds. Maybe especially not nerds. There was no such thing as a "self-described nerd." The term itself, by 1982 standards, would translate roughly to "self-described sick fuck that nobody likes" in today's parlance. Nerds were bullied, and that was sad, but the fact that they were bullied doesn't mean that they were harmless or doing the right thing. They were bullied precisely because they were doing the wrong thing.

See, in 1982, if you wanted to have fun, you had only a few options. We can group all of those options into two basic categories: 1) Going out of the house and socially interacting with other people, or 2) Staying home and not interacting with anyone. Good, popular, well-adjusted people mainly chose option 1. They enjoyed sports, social clubs, shopping at the mall... but even if they were introverts, they'd still have a little group of friends to do quilting with, or to tinker with cars, or to have a drink with their buddies at the bar, or to hang out in a church group, or etc., etc. Having fun just was getting out and doing stuff, usually with other people, but at least in the vicinity of other people.

Except for nerds. Nerds preferred staying home and playing Atari or reading books or otherwise being alone. 

Being able to relate to other people is mainly a function of going out and being with other people, forming a social identity, forming social bonds. It's not about being an extrovert, it's about joining the human race in something, anything. When you self-isolate, as the nerds of 1982 self-isolated, you gradually lose your ability to relate to other people. Eventually, other people can smell your inability to relate like a stench. You become a pariah. No one wants to be around you. Consequently, people hated nerds.

Now, back in 1982, nerds had a path to normalcy. They might still be interested in Ataris and fantasy novels, but if they could find a group of other nerds to actually interact with, to actually join with in the real world, maybe play some D&D, then they could form social attachments and their minds would rehabilitate. They might never be popular "jocks," but they'd be normal. 

Perhaps even more importantly, nerds could acquire romantic partners, girlfriends and boyfriends. They could kiss each other. They could, dare I say it, have sex with each other. This is important because love, romance, and sex are all absolutely crucial for good social development (to a point - stay with me here). It's impossible to be a self-isolating weirdo when you're emotionally invested in the wellbeing and care of another human being. Friendship and romantic partnership extract us from the bottomless pit of our own private thoughts and thrust us into the real-world adventures of another person's mind, body, and emotional care. 

Nerds who acquired healthy romances didn't often remain nerds for very long. You can spot this in old 80s movie tropes: the nerdy guy with glasses has sex with a female vixen character off-screen and suddenly becomes a "real man" again. Or, the nerdy girl has her glasses removed by a good-looking guy who also lets her hair down and gives her a big kiss, revealing that she was a stunningly beautiful woman all along. These tropes existed in movies because they reflected a real social phenomenon. Romance rehabilitated nerds almost completely. Sex and love are powerful forces that melt even the staunchest defenses of a self-isolating weirdo. 

Nonetheless, some nerds never got to experience true romance. Well, humans are sexual creatures, and all that pent-up energy had to go somewhere. In the worst cases then, as now, socially repressed nerds became sexual creeps and perpetrators of real harm. You can see this in some developing countries in which hoards of men who have never been able to experience romance harass, grope, and "Eve-tease" women endlessly. Many of those cases further develop into shocking crimes of rape, acid attacks, honor killings, and so on. 

But of course not all sexually repressed nerds become criminals. Most of them just become gooners, in other words, porn-obsessed perverts. In the 1980s, in order for such people to satisfy their urges, they needed to go to pornography stores. I think Zoomers and Gen Alphas would be quite surprised to know that there used to be physical retail stores, usually on the outskirts of town or on the wrong side of the tracks, that sold pornographic VHS videos, magazines, dildos, and who knows what else. They were one-stop shops for sexual deviants, people who had an under-developed sense of romantic human bonding and an unsatisfied sexual appetite.

I want you to pause and think about this for a moment, because it's important: When a person never develops a healthy sense of romantic attachment to a sexual partner, then sex becomes the mere satisfaction of an urge, rather than a form of loving communication between two equals. It becomes a process rather than a relationship. This is why pornography depicts sex as some kind of anatomical display, with close-ups of genitals and fluids, rather than words and facial expressions and loving care. People don't use pornography to experience a great love story, after all, they use it merely to get off, after which point, they discard the pornography and go about their day.

Pornography and the kinks and fetishes it encourages is not a healthy expression of human sexuality. It's merely the depiction of a sex act. The lone goal is orgasm. There is nothing else to it. By contrast, healthy sexuality involves loving communication between two people who are interested in more about each other than an orgasmic endpoint. It involves the mutual respect and care of another human being. Healthy sexuality doesn't just look different than pornography, it's different in almost every way.

And this was all perfectly obvious to people in the world of 1982. Maladjusted perverts were frowned upon more or less the same way we look at "incels" today. There was no justifying their porn obsession with high-minded explanations about "kink-shaming." Everyone knew that the kinds of guys (usually guys) who skulked off to the adult video store to get their rocks off were to be avoided at all costs. Everyone knew they weren't healthy.  

This was the world circa 1982 and before.

Part Two: The Social Impact Of Pornography And New Computer Technology

Then, computer technology exploded. It gained a lot of ground in the 80s, but it was the 1990s when it really took off, thanks to the proliferation of internet technology. Whole libraries have been written about this topic, so I won't waste too much space here. What's germane to my purposes is the fact that internet technology had a few crucial attributes that changed the social landscape.

First, it made computers a commonplace thing. It was no longer basement-dwellers who were interested in computers. Pretty much everyone needed to get interested in computers in order to produce a good job resume, or to do good schoolwork. It revolutionized the workplace to the point that now even auto mechanics these days are a specialized sort of IT worker. We all use computers now. To some extent, we all love them. So "being a techie" was no longer something that socially isolated people were; we are all techies now.

Second, it created a platform in which socially isolated weirdos could discuss their weirdness with equally weird people in a way that felt "social." It's not social. Posting your thoughts on the internet and having them judged by strangers is not even remotely "social." It's voyeuristic, but because voyeurism requires the participation of an observer, it can be mistaken for "social interaction," especially by people who lack real social experience and emotional maturity. So, pockets of nerds began to clump together like bits of mud.

Third, and probably most dramatically and tragically, the proliferation of internet technology put a PORN MACHINE in the living room of every home in America. Dell came up with a way of marketing home computer sales to the middle class ("Dude, yer gettin' a Dell!"), and so among the more affluent segments of the middle class (or within those households in which there still existed a pre-90s nerdy streak) there was soon a porn machine in the bedroom of a large number of teenagers. To make matters worse, Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and essentially put a porn machine in the pocket of every adult and almost every teenager in America. 

Of these three developments, we can call the first either neutral or good. High productivity is certainly a good thing, as are economic development and increased salaries and wages. Just remember that this was the result of using computers to solve old problems in new ways. In other words, it wasn't merely an increased interest in tech that caused these developments, it was that we had better tools to solve problems. But the other two developments were absolute disasters. 

The rise of "online communities" gave nerds the false impression that they weren't really socially isolated, leading to believe that they were just a different kind of normal. This reduced their incentive to go outside, get into the real world, and interact with real human beings. Thus, it significantly reduced nerds' collective ability to rehabilitate themselves through true social interaction.

Here it bears repeating that interacting with an online community is not a kind of social interaction. Again, it might feel like it, because other people are tangentially involved, but what people are actually doing online is putting their own mind up on a web page and then choosing to either focus on a few approving comments or lashing out at a few disapproving comments. This is nothing like interacting in the real world. In the real world, your friends will support you when you say or do something that warrants support, but if you say something wrong, crazy, or bad, your friends will set you straight. They do this not because they are jerks who hate you, but because they love you and have an obligation to prevent you from falling into some kind of mental trap.

With the rise of internet communities came the rise of "flame wars" and "trolling." Again, this is something that can only happen through online, pretend social interaction. If you walked into a public space and attempted to have a "flame war" with someone you disagreed with, you'd probably end up in a fistfight, which comes with real-world consequences such as black eyes and jail time. Online, however, the socially underdeveloped denizens of the early internet would rally around anyone in a flame war who happened to agree with them about some political issue or something. So what was clearly antisocial behavior became a reason for online communities to grow stronger. Think about that that, stronger through antisocial behavior. That's problematic.

When we add porn machines into the mix, we begin to gain a real sense of what has happened to society since about 1995. Remember, pornography in 1982 was relegated to the outskirts of town and the dregs of the community. It was another type of antisocial behavior, categorized mainly by social underdevelopment and unhealthy expressions of sexuality. By placing pornography into the homes of every American and making it mainstream, we created a situation in which socially stunted nerds would go online to express their sexuality in unhealthy ways. Instead of finding a romantic partner with whom to explore love, romance, and sex all together as one expression of a single pair bond, nerds would go online and search for exactly which kind of kink or fetish they most "identified with."

In short, sexuality quickly devolved from being a biologically and emotionally driven tool to propagate the species into being something like "the collection of images and paraphernalia that are most likely to trigger an orgasm in me while I am alone at home, outside the context of a romantic bond." 

Nowadays, young people scour the internet for which depraved thing is theirs, which fetish they are going to call their own. They're looking for kinks the way people in 1982 used to look for partnership. But there is all the difference in the world between looking for someone to have sex with and looking for which activities to orgasm to.

Rationalism: The Final Nail In The Coffin

Turning the youth of society into socially underdeveloped, self-isolating gooners is bad enough, but it's all just abstract internet stuff until it becomes a modus operandi, until it inflates itself to the point of being a philosophy. Sadly, that is just what happened when "Rationalism" appeared.

Rationalism began as a hobby for particularly bookish nerds. At its core, it's just a bunch of nerds in an online community trying to explain things they don't really know anything about. This kind of thing is completely harmless when it's relegated to little parties where everyone knows they're just having a little fun. If it happened at a dinner party among friends, it would even be a good thing. 

But Rationalism would be Rationalism if it happened in real life among friends at a dinner party. No, Rationalism is precisely what it is because it's an online community of people writing tomes and tomes of complete and utter nonsense in absence of direct connection to the experts who do happen to know about whatever topic the Rationalists have taken aim at today. 

I've written plenty about Rationalism on this blog, and I don't want to repeat myself. Today, it will suffice to say that Rationalism encourages socially isolated nerds to come up with their own ersatz theories about why the world is the way it is, and when socially isolated nerds do this, they tend to engage in an enormous degree of confirmation bias. If I'm all on my own, coming up with any explanation for any phenomenon I happen to be thinking about in absence of real-world expertise and peer review, then I'm going to end up fixating on anything that upholds my existing world view and underestimating the importance of anything that contradicts me. It's human nature.

But it's an aspect of human nature that is severely restricted by real-world interaction. When you cook up some bizarre theory about why hallucinogenic drug use is good, actually, or why bacon will not really clog your arteries (these are real examples from the real Rationalist community, by the way), and you articulate that theory to a real person, face-to-face, that person is going to rightly tell you that you're insane. But if you do this in an "online community" and then channel all of your bookish energy into defending your position, you trick yourself into believing that there is a legitimate debate to be had about any of these things. There isn't, but you're now convinced that there is.

More to the point, the effect of "Rationalism" and Rationalism-like behaviors on social trends has been to smear a thin coat of legitimization on behaviors that, prior to 1995, were clearly and obviously antisocial and aberrant. 

It was precisely these people who rewarded Aella for her complete and utter nonsense. "What's wrong with polyamory?" quickly yields to "Why shouldn't some women become prostitutes?" The fact that Aella had been sexually abused as a child was consciously ignored by the Rationalists as irrelevant. "Plenty of people become consensual polyamorists without suffering sexual abuse!" Really, who? But anyway, the whole purpose of their argument was to willfully engage in confirmation bias in order to avoid thinking about the most obvious thing in the world: Aella wasn't a healthy person, she wasn't doing healthy things, and polyamorist prostitution and "analysis of" (undue consideration of) pedophilia are horrible examples of how people should live their lives. Add a hefty dose of drug use to that, and you've got yourself a perfect demonstration of antisocial behavior from a group of people who are basically socially maladjusted gooners.

In 1982, they would have been ostracized into silence, but in today's world of social isolation and sexual fetishism... well, here we are.

Conclusion

Every now and then, vestiges of the old way still rear their heads. That happens when Aella says something weird about pedophilia or about going on a 200-hour LSD binge that "cured" her of the damage she suffered in childhood. Isn't it wild how the pathologies of her condition magically made her condition disappear? She must be normal, after all! Or, it's confirmation bias again...

But anyway, to normal people, these things are just obviously bad and wrong. There's no question about it. There's no debate. There is no Rationalist community suggesting that maybe, just maybe Aella has the right idea about life after all. There is no survey pool of perverts answering poorly controlled surveys and demonstrating that "See, we're normal after all - 65% of us do these crazy things." To normal people, this whole thing is bizarre. And it is. 

But these are merely vestiges of the old way. For the most part, Gen Y, Gen Z, and younger are all encouraged and incentivized to scour the internet for their own unique brand of bad behavior and throw themselves into it like a labrador retriever throws itself into a mud puddle on a hot day. It's been 30 years since 1995, and social mores have been significantly eroded. Today, thankfully, Aella's behavior is still seen as strange and unusual, but over time, if things keep going this way, it will look increasingly less strange. More and more kids will get into polyamory, drug use, "sex work," and all the rest of it. Anyone who has any kind of rational (lower-case R) objection to any of this behavior will be accused of being "judgemental" and of "kink-shaming," and there will be no one left to raise any objections to this except the most extreme social conservatives who refuse to change with the times.

And that will be bad.

Don't Make Your Hard Days Too Hard

A common refrain in the running and cycling communities these days is, "Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy." Is that good advice? It depends.

It's good advice if you're prone to making the mistake a lot of (especially young) athletes make: keeping too high a pace on your easy days. If, for example, you're supposed to do an easy run on Wednesday between speed and tempo days on Tuesday and Thursday, then that easy run should be kept at a low and very comfortable pace to avoid over-working your muscles. The two risks here are 1) injury from over-training, and 2) tiring your muscles out so much that you can't capitalize on the benefits of your harder training days. 

Point 2) is especially important, because getting faster or better at running or cycling depends on your ability to push really hard during your most difficult training sessions. You're less likely to improve your top speed if you're only ever giving it 75% of your effort. When training, you have to go into the red sometimes. What happens with some athletes is that they don't give themselves ample recovery on their easy days, so their muscles are still tired on Thursday from what they did on Tuesday, and thus they can't push themselves as hard on Thursday as they need to in order to improve.

That's the idea. Unfortunately these days, the "keep your hard days hard" crowd has taken that even further in saying that we should do our hard workouts and our strength training all on our hard days, and do only easy runs and yoga on our easy days. 

The problem with this new point of view is that the human body only has so much energy and ATP and all the rest of it; trying to pack seven different workouts into a single day is still going to subject your body to the same problem described in my Point 2) above. If you blast all your muscles with a hard weight training workout, you won't have as much energy to push hard during your sprint workout or tempo intervals. Also, vice-versa: it's hard to get much hypertrophy going on in your strength workout if you've already tapped your muscles with a hard workout on the bicycle. 

The solution is simple and obvious: weight train on easy days. The reason this works is because your easy run or ride will not really tax your muscles much, so you can afford to push during your strength training, knowing that it won't compromise the integrity of your run (and vice-versa). Moreover, working your core and/or your upper body on today's off day will still give your muscles ample recovery time for tomorrow's speed workout. You'll have about 24 hours to replenish your muscular glycogen, and your core and upper body are primarily playing supporting roles in your running and cycling training.

Naturally, this all assumes that you're training all things on an ongoing basis. As a middle-aged man, that works for me. I'm not training to win anything. If you're training to win something, though, then you're likely better off following a more traditional training cycle, in which you spend some time building muscle mass, then build your endurance base, then do some targeted speed work in support of your goal event, and then go through a period of rest and cross-training. But this is a full year-long training cycle, and if you're the kind of person who needs to do that, you probably already know and didn't need to read it on my blog. 😉

To Live Forever

I watched an interesting movie called "The Devil's Climb." In it, two professional rock climbers scale five impassable summits in twelve hours after completing a 2,000-mile bike ride to base camp. Are these guys badasses, or what. 

One of the climbers happened to be 45 years old. Guess who is also 45 years old. 

It goes without saying that I am nowhere near the athlete that these two guys are. That said, I have never really stopped pushing myself. I've lost a lot of running speed since my early twenties, but I've never stopped pushing. Every week, I get two tempo workouts in, or a tempo workout and a speed workout, in addition to a full week of endurance runs and a long run or a long bike ride. This is serious training for most people.

In fact, when I talk about training with most people my age, the way they speak about it is in terms of what they used to do. Back then, they would train hard. Now, they don't. The reasons are varied, but always unsatisfying. They don't have time. They just stopped doing it for a while and need to get back into it. And this is the minority of people who once trained like I do. The overwhelming majority of people my age never trained like this. At best, some of them want to lose weight and are thinking about going to the gym or getting out for a daily walk. 

I exist in what feels like a completely different world. Not only do I still run hard, and bike hard, daily, but I also do strength training, box jumps, hiking, take my kids on excursions that will build memories for them. There will come a day when I have to stop doing things like this, but I don't ever want that day to come. I love to move my body. I love experiencing the health that I have. I love being able to take my shirt off at the beach and not feel self-conscious. I love knowing that I will wake up tomorrow without a hangover, and without the aches and pains that plague so many of my peers. They laugh at how much time I spend exercising. They have always laughed at how much time I spend exercising. But look what it gets me.

In addition to looking and feeling good, I've seen some amazing places in nature, places that one can only ever see from the seat of a bicycle or from the vantage point of a pair of running shoes. I can't even really describe these sites; mountain peaks, hidden waterfalls, corners of the desert, hieroglyphics, ancient ruins, fossils, mountain springs, so many plants and animals. These are all things most people never get to see. I'm so fortunate to have seen them, and so happy that I had the good health and drive to be able to see them.

At 45 years old, people still refere to me as "young man." I show my I.D. card when buying alcohol, and the cashiers look at me with incredulity. They can't believe I'm as old as I am. Sometimes I can't believe it, either.

I'm realistic. Within a very short period of time, the grey will overtake my head of hair, the wrinkles will get so deep as to be impossible to ignore, my speed will evaporate, and I will become just one more uncool old man in spandex, a laughing stock for the younger generations who see an old fool experiencing a midlife crisis. 

I don't know what I'll feel on that day, but the closer it gets, the more I start to believe that I will feel the same happiness, satisfaction, and sense of fulfillment that I feel today. Good health and physical fitness is such a wonderful blessing. It's worth tenfold the effort you put into it. Beauty fades and coolness, if you ever get to experience it, is fleeting. But the strength of your own two feet driving you forward, or your own two hands driving you upward to the summit of a mountain is something that can never be taken away from you.

Go running, folks. Get a bike. Go to a climbing gym. Do your pull-ups and push-ups. Wake up early and eat your vegetables. It's worth it, I promise.

Blogging Is A Good Habit

Because I have comments enabled on my blog, and because no one actually communicates with each other as real people anymore, I occasionally receive emails notifying me that a spam bot has left a comment on my blog. I don't bother to delete these comments because, who knows, perhaps they somehow drive traffic to me on their way to driving traffic to whatever it is they're selling. (I have no idea what they're selling, because I don't click the links in their comments.)

Against my better judgement, I do still read all the comments I get here, so feel free to post one any time you're moved to communicate to a real person. I'm here, I'm paying attention. It seems crazy, I know, but it's true. 

I take that back. It doesn't seem crazy, it seems antiquated. Remember back at the Turn of the Century, when people wrote blog posts and others commented? Remember when communication was still relatively fun, still something people looked for opportunities to do? Remember when social media wasn't always some combination of broken and infuriating? Or do things just seem better in hindsight.

Anyway, when I receive these spam-bot comments, I sometimes click through to the old blog post upon which they appear and re-read what I wrote. It's a trip down memory lane. Sometimes I've written about something that was going on in my life; sometimes it's just a thought I had; sometimes it's a diatribe. In short, it's a collection of thoughts I really had on real days of my life that I really decided to write about. Reading it back again is actually quite nice. I seldom read a post and think to myself, "Oh God, I was such an asshole/idiot/whatever." It's encouraging to know that the things I spent some time thinking about in the past produced good thoughts that I generally still agree with. 

I'd say I've never kept a journal, but I suppose this is it. I've finally discovered what generations of my forefathers had known: journalling is a worthwhile activity. Indeed, blogging is a good habit. 

Over the years, I've fallen out of practice. Immersed in a daily commitment to blogging can be a little stressful, especially as it was in the early days, when people actually read my blog and responded. I felt a responsibility to write to my audience and provide them with something worth reading. But stress wasn't the only reason I stopped blogging. Like many other former bloggers, I sometimes had the sense that there wasn't any point, that I had "said it all before" and didn't want to repeat myself. And of course, all the other bloggers who actually made money doing this moved on to Medium and then to Substack and now, I can't believe it, people pay a monthly subscription to read stuff like this. And then they use AI graphics and post their stuff on X and it's this whole marketing thing for them. 

When I go back and read someone else's blog, I seldom feel as good about their old blog posts as I feel about mine. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with their posts. I think it speaks to their motivation and authenticity, though. David Henderson's blog never gets old. He writes authentically. But Slate Star Codex guy's posts are stale within a week of having been written. Clearly these two example bloggers are writing different kinds of posts for different reasons.

And then there's me, writing for a third reason, which is mostly that I just like it. There are other potential benefits, such as having a record of my personality for posterity, assuming this blog doesn't end up getting deleted at some point. Writing advice to my kids for when they need to read it and I'm not there to say it to them. I've written about all that before.

Well, anyway, I hope I re-develop the blogging habit. It's good. It's productive for me. I think I'll try to keep it going. 

In closing, I'd like to set down a list of things that have happened to me that readers of this blog may not have been aware of, given that I've been quite out of touch for a while. Here it is:

• My band released an album. Listen to it here and elsewhere.
• I converted to Orthodox Christianity. Long story. Maybe I'll write about it some time.
• I started learning Greek - not really related to the Orthodox thing, but kind of.
• I'm still running and riding bikes like a fiend, so that's not really an update.
• For some reason, I can't think of anything else right now. I'll blog about things as I go.

Anyway, here's hoping I can reestablish this great habit.