Illimitable Man (IM)

I have died 1,000 deaths and by God if it is required, I shall die 1,000 more. There is no agony I cannot endure, no betrayal that can destroy, nor ugliness that can corrupt nor rob me of my light, and so with God as my witness, I swear to him I shall become the man I was always meant to be. If I am cast out of the heavens, as I fall into the fiery pits of hell with memories of paradise indelibly engraved upon my soul, I shall forever gaze upward at my rightful home, and by tooth and claw with every ounce of strength in my being, I shall painstakingly drag myself inch by inch to return to my rightful place, and know what I once tasted - I will find my way home. I will return to where I belong, and the way the journey back changes me will by its very training ensure my worthiness. And so I will pursue it with all that I am, relentlessly, ruthlessly, tirelessly, for nothing but death himself can stop me, and when he comes for me if my task is incomplete and I am thus yet unready, I shall wrestle him until he yields - I will bend even death to the fulfilment of my purpose, for I know precisely who I am and what I must do. I am incorruptible, impenetrable - immortal - and so I shall stay aligned with truth and beauty, because without them I am nothing, and to become nothing is irrevocable, for it is to die that one last time - to know the final death.

Make asymmetric bets with extreme upside. Gamble. Fail a lot. Apply what you’ve learned from past losses, codify experience into wisdom, and transmute pain into potency: then go again. Failure is the feedback mechanism for improvement, not a reason to give up on yourself. You are being refined.

If you love them, you won't make them play a game they can't win. You'll always rig it in their favour. Duh.

If someone fails to appreciate you, is there truly nothing there to appreciate, or does their failure reveal a limitation in their capacity to perceive you? What lies beyond the limits of their perception does not cease to exist, nor does their inability to recognise it make you any less worthy of admiration. Remember that.

if you are intelligent and high agency, there has never been a better time in human history to be alive than today.

Money spent on a child is never money wasted. You can always make more money. A child’s joy is magical.

If a child is intelligent, you should not underestimate them just because their cuteness is disarming. Their cunning and inferential capacity is greater than you think it is. Chess is probably the only sport where the presence of a child induces terror. It is incredibly amusing.

@O_E_O_O There is no shortage of beauty. Courage is the limiting variable. Nonetheless, I share your optimism.

@SovereignIM I have seen a reality of this discription and I have also witnessed soul- healing from such extreme personality eventually became emotionally open but not loose, graceful and tender... I am optimistic many of us can be. beautiful

She is first deprived of protected daughterhood, is forced into premature functional adulthood, and then becomes exceptionally capable at producing stability, growth and meaning for others, whilst remaining unable to receive those things without fear. Her parents do not primarily encounter her as a child with needs, but as a resource. The father’s treatment of her as a son is really the conscription of her into masculine-coded functions: endurance, competence, emotional containment, leadership, productivity and usefulness which forces her animus to develop early, because it has to. She learns that value comes from what she can carry, solve or survive, rather than simply being who she is. This produces the first major paradox: She becomes powerful precisely because she was not sufficiently nurtured or protected, but the power she developed to survive that deprivation later obstructs intimacy and thus rewarding deep emotional attachments, because loving and depending upon another person reactivates the vulnerable helplessness of childhood - the state she escaped by becoming hypercompetent, self-reliant and emotionally closed off.

@JoanQuillan17 Subscribe to my substack (link in bio), I've not posted in a few months, but exploring the structure of this is one of my prevailing intellectual agendas. It won't be the only topic I post, but yes, I will systematise, explore, analyse and explain the mechanisms of the archetype.

@SovereignIM I would love to hear more. I have a new goal of being a wildcard.

I am glad you feel more understood, because that means I am properly understanding the structure of the subject matter, and not unduly projecting or misgeneralising anything. "I agree with the whole not an excuse not to try thing." "I only hurt people, therefore I should be alone" is a common trap, yes. It makes you feel like you're doing something virtuous, when really it's just cowardice and self-hatred serving as confirmation bias for your original wound of believing yourself unlovable being fed by the masochistic tendency for self-erasure - "I don't matter" "they're better off without me" etc. "Just because it's more complicated doesn't mean that it's not possible." Precisely that. If you want what others cannot have, you must be willing to do what others cannot do.

@SovereignIM @agptopzy I , surprisingly didn't feel misunderstood. You restating made me feel more understood. I agree with the whole not an excuse not to try thing. Just because it's more complicated doesn't mean that it's not possible.

"And you have to do it with someone else in order to work." This will sound hilarious and obvious when stated explicitly, but is not intuitive at the time: you can't work on something attachment based alone, because there's no attachment present to trigger your nervous system. So if you "go it alone" you're not actually fixing the problem, you're just avoiding it and mistaking threat deactivation for a solution, when the real solution is stopping the nervous system from mischaracterising attachment intensity as threatening to begin with. "And you have to be able to verbalize that need in order to not damage the other person." I think this is more damage mitigation than prevention, because hurting whoever you're closely involved with is pretty much unavoidable. That being said, this is not a valid reason/excuse not to try - someone who truly loves you will be willing to suffer for you. Damage is on a spectrum, from mild to severe in intensity, and from acute to chronic in length. You just have to be responsible and make sure whoever you're involved with can handle more pain than most, because otherwise you will probably break/destabilise them into infinite rage or despair loops. Neither are good. You thus require a much stronger person than would be deemed even remotely "normal" or reasonable by conventional standards. "It's a balance of acceptance of who you are but a refusal of acceptance that it's all that you're meant to be." Precisely, yes. Recognising your present limitations without making those limitations a verdict on who you are and what you can be. You're accepting it so you can change it, which requires fighting it - it is acceptance as realisation, not as surrender. I know what you meant, but I am making the distinction explicit for the invariable lurkers who are psychoanalysing our conversation and may otherwise misinterpret what is expressly meant.

I think the hardest part about this is that you have to unlearn everything you already know, and act in a way that is the opposite of what you're conditioned to feel is "safe". It feels fake and performative at first. Like you're lying. And you have to do it with someone else in order to work. So you have to be able to pause, reintegrate, balance, and go back into it again. And you have to be able to verbalize that need in order to not damage the other person. It's a balance of acceptance of who you are but a refusal of acceptance that it's all that you're meant to be.

Roger Scruton, nails it with this one

@Chesck89 Reykjavik 2004 and yes there’s a short of that on chesstok and it’s really funny because whilst he’s frowning and thinking Carlsen gets bored and watches another game bahahaha

@SovereignIM This reminds me of the game Carlsen - Kasparov in Iceland, 2008 I believe. Magnus was just a kid a had Kasparov frowning over the chessboard lol.

Koreans received the biggest ever wealth boom from memory stocks and immediately shoved it into 3x leveraged positions and got wiped out

@GraysonJams You are talking about women who think they are great (who are plentiful) not women who are actually are (who are few). Great women don't have "elevated expectations" or "entitlement" in the way you are thinking of it. They just know when a man is rotten/will not grasp them.

@SovereignIM Women don't need all that much. What they want, on the other hand, is another story. Typically, "greater" women have elevated expectations without elevated benefits. This is why even great men avoid them.

The greater the woman, the fewer her options - not because she deserves less, but because she requires more. There are simply far fewer men who can truly meet her, and give her what she needs.

@Pat_Stedman “the attachment capacity and trustworthiness of a homeless drug addict” Haha. What a bar.

The "what a gentlemen you are" comment is a very bad sign and indicates prior mistakes, but to riff off of this more generally... I think too many guys in game are making excuses for this kind of stuff, as if there is a clear and consistent meta that avoids it from happening most of the time That used to be the case. But I've been "in the trenches" for nearly 20 years and I can tell you plainly that things have gone off the rails in the last few years Guys who play it right, check all the boxes, don't act needy are still dealing with rugpulls from most girls. It becomes hard for them to not act in bad faith themselves Ironically the guys who get burned the most are usually the ones who are holding back from sex, because cooked women consider any decision to not sleep with them immediately as weakness regardless of other disconfirming variables Anyway the point is that the intimacy issues and emotional damage among most singles has hit a critical point, in that many of the people you are dealing with have the attachment capacity and trustworthiness of a homeless drug addict Requires stronger boundaries and resilience than ever. Still got to operate in good faith to get anywhere, but need to be on offense with vetting not defense. Any complacency and you're gonna get burned

Assuming longevity tech through nanobots, genetic engineering and AI's effect on robotics and medicine doesn't improve human lifespan enough, yes. But if people start dying at 130 or even older due to greater cellular efficiency, organs that self-heal better, telomeres that partially regrow etc then this is perhaps not the case. We are on the cusp of an intelligence explosion, so it's really tough to say either way. It might be natural for future generations to have kids at 40, die at 150 and stay fertile until much later in life, in the same way it used to be normal for women to get married and then pregnant at 15-20, and die at 35-45 in antiquity (it wasn't common to know your grandparents in antiquity/Rome either).

@biggJ2314 Thank you.

@SovereignIM Absolutely beautiful, I really admire your impeccable style of writing and always reminding us that the world is our oyster. You’re my favorite account on X I must admit .

The main use case for being insane (in a high functioning way, as opposed to a crash out prone psychotic way) is immunity to demoralisation. Things are stacked against you in such a way, that becoming cynical, hopeless and perpetually demoralised is a rational response to the conditions you are subjected to, because logically evaluating trends will repeatedly show you how improbable desirable outcomes are for you, and how futile many of your efforts will be. This is why rationality, whilst useful as a tool in isolation, is a poor operational mode of being - followed to its ultimate conclusions, it can only ever lead you to cynicism and nihilism - it will rob you of both force of being and meaning, because it presents what is probable as what is inevitable. It says, there's a 90% chance the thing you hate will occur, and only a 10% chance the thing you love will occur. If you are rational, you say to yourself a 90% chance of failure... that isn't going to work then, and by accepting the 90% as if it were 100%, you lose your 10% chance. In accepting what is reasonable, you destroy what is desirable. Instead of saying "against all odds" - you have let the odds define things for you - which is the opposite of what you want to do, where you recognise the 10% chance as the only acceptable outcome, and obsess over it no matter how irrational it is, until your irrationality becomes its own force that shifts those probabilities more favourably. This is why no conqueror is truly rational. They may employ logic to understand the structure of things, yes, but they are not obedient to it as a governing system which dictates their general orientation and approach to things. They do not enthrone reason as the master of their soul, because to do so would be to sterilise what drives them. Rationality thus does not serve you here, but pure force of will, a love of beauty, and orienting your actions through the pursuit of the meaningful and transcendent does - and it is that which makes this form of insanity attractive - for it is coherent, generative and ultimately self-fulfilling. It doesn't have to pretend reality is something it's not, it simply doesn't accept the most immediate and obvious undesirable conclusions as inevitable and foregone. This insanity is the refusal to despair because it is the refusal to obey entropy - it is a type of stubbornness that rather than yield to the world, bends it through nothing but sheer force of will. It takes a very strong soul to be assertively optimistic, hopeful and positive in a culture full of people complaining, hating and doubting. Believing you can conquer whatever you put your mind is to not a rational response to a society that repeatedly punishes your best efforts, rigs things against you, prices you out, doubts you, and is always telling you why you can't. This is why you must become beautifully insane. Not in the "I am perpetually paranoid and imagine shit that isn't even real" sort of way, but in the "I'll take my chances on making the improbable beauty real" type of way. You will, as they say, shoot your fucking shot. Backwards. From the halfway line. And you will keep doing that and keep failing until eventually... it goes in.