32 Things I Learned This Year

For my Birthday please go Like a few of my articles.

1. It isn’t really supposed to make sense.

2. In Wonderland the Queen calls the shots, and it’ll always be Alice’s story at the end of the day. But the Cheshire Cat’s aware of that; actually sees what it means. Takes all he can from the former; just a bit of fun from the latter—like the Hatter, and Caterpillar, and (less winsomely) the inimitable twin-Tweedles: Dee and Dum. There’s lots of paths to take through Wonderland, but all that matters at the end of the day is that you never become a White Rabbit—or God forbid, King of Hearts.

3. These days exceedingly few people are ever “persuaded” of things, since thanks to that benighted Zoomer Oral Culture we’re all in some closed loop Narc Cult that fans our balls 24/7, making questions of ethics and aesthetics frictionless opt-in matters of preference entirely downstream of genetic neurotype. As such there’s a lot less alpha now in syllogistic “argumentation” than in eloquently and forcefully putting to words an embodied and intuitive folk knowledge almost everyone feels the truth of in their teeth but will never be reflected in the pantsuit epistemology sociological surveys the Straussian Aspartame AWFL born 1975-1990 perennially soyfaces over. Meanwhile a lot of peeps these days are in dire need of compelling Myth to streamline / index / cohere all their assorted explanatory and predictive heuristics developed haphazardly in our fake and gay chaotic griftworld—hence the recent popularity of self-help slop or astrology and perspicacious typological schemas a la my own taxonomy of ethnic groups by Pokémon Type.

4. It often reads as cringe and LARPy when a chick calls you Daddy these days—primarily a consequence of oversaturation, since even in cases where logically it shouldn’t feel fake and gay at all (e.g. she’s 18 and hugely into DDLG for instance) bae calling you Daddy is simply too phenomenologically adjacent to other girls your own age having done so in the past to not come off as sort of anodyne and hollow and if I’m honest not a little wholesome chungus. Having said that with younger cohorts of Zoomettes it’s not uncommon at this point for the ones who actually mean it to instead call you “Dad” —which idk. Because on one hand it’s clearly just the same itch being scratched that daddy did back when it had only recently been adopted from The Gays and was still transgressive / more deeply pedo-coded than people remember given the whole Harvey Milk factor but we’ll not get into that—point is Zoomers have significant arrested development on average and a Zoomer 20 at least to me registers as the same level of maturity as maybe a Millennial 15? Honestly there’s something inescapably childlike there—whereas when Zoomettes get into DDLG for instance it’s never really in the way Millennial gals do with a more discrete light switch transition into “Little Space” or w/e or a notion of restricting it to the bedroom—rather it’s a fully continuous thing that babygirl fades in and out of across several axes at once and sees as an entirely normal part of her personality / sexuality instead of as some fetishistic thing she’s embarrassed about (which is how it is with Millennial girls usually), since even more generally than this the idea of a hard and fast ontological line between your bedroom dynamic and outside-bedroom dynamic would strike most Zoomers as weird / cringe, since generally the attitude is more that one is just the private and sexualized version of the other but the gradient should be entirely organic. Which means the Zoomette’s ideal DDLG dynamic won’t just be about e.g. wanting you to call her princess or w/e whilst inside her—she’ll 100% expect you to help out with homework or rando DMV shit and even outside the context of formal sugar dating age gap relationships these days typically will have at least a little sugar-adjacency in a casual way that probs still would have read as weird in 2010 (and which these days Geriatric Millennial women are tbh quite weird about whenever it enters their ontology). Thing is tho compared to back then it’s phenomenologically just genuinely closer to a protective quasi-parental dynamic, and whether they’re pro or anti age gap no Zoomer thinks “age is just a number,” because absent culturally normative dating scripts everything is bespoke and played by ear by definition, which means asymmetries don’t EVER simply get papered over in the Aspartame HR voice you’d see with Millennial girls dating Gen X guys who worked at Blockbuster and shit. Hell, if anything the trend is in the other direction with the sort of girlypops who enjoy age gaps actively playing up the lolita aspect of it—though I might hesitate to frame it like that as I don’t want old people thinking it’s “performative” per se. It’s *sort of* performative for sure, in the metamodern way we’re all performative simply on account of growing up in a simulacra society without a monoculture, but it’s not performative in that cringey “roleplaying” sense one associates with old people sex. And this is a big thing I suspect most oldpeepo don’t yet grok about Gen Z at all (while Zoomers themselves probs lack the vocabulary to articulate such differences on account of lowkey being sort of retarded), but from where I stand it seems performance and authentic self are entirely seamless for them, such that if a line exists between the two it’s always defined functionally and post-hoc as befits their practical ends instead of analytically (in this sense they’re like Boomers and unlike Gen X / Millennials). And they’ll for sure revise and shift registers however many times and however much they need to feel sane / right / reputationally secure, with the reasons they do so being obvious if you just consider all the platform incentives of Insta for instance but anyway circling back I actually find myself a bit peeved by Gen X lately, and on that note had a query for all you boys—namely, if we Millennials are such immature snowflakes why are your little girls calling us Daddy / Dad these days? Also do you ever wonder if you hadn’t been like “slackers” in the nineties whether your daughters might not have embraced prostitution more than probs any cohort since the steam engine was invented? Or at least developed enough institutional clout to supplant either major party’s sitting octogenarian?

5. You can fill your condo with a genuinely astonishing number of trash bags without getting bugs and shit provided you live on the twenty-fifth floor.

6. The single most valuable skill in today’s marketplace—economic, creative, sexual, intellectual, spiritual, w/e—is the ability to humblebrag elegantly i.e. in a way that isn’t super obvious and thus boosts your status without your interlocutor noticing the maneuver. Often this involves a rhetorical sleight of hand technique wherein the speaker will emphasize the humble / status lowering aspect so it seems he’s being vulnerable and self effacing despite him knowing full well that contextually the status bolstering aspect implicitly carries more weight (in the context he wants) and will leave him ahead on net—often by leveraging semiotic arbitrage to exploit a values / aesthetic gap with a dummy interlocutor. For instance lots of guys get laid by ostensibly shitting on themselves in front of other fellers with girlypops present in a way that reads as faggy / emasculating in masculine hierarchies but projects value to womyn removed from a need for men and masculinity (mostly it’s high status white women like Art Hoes and matcha PM types), through shit like aloof disinterest or goofball nihilism—Pete Davidson’s trick if you’re curious. It’s also what you’re supposed to do whenever they ask you what your biggest weakness is on an interview; clearly they don’t expect you to tell the truth here. It’s a question of social intelligence (can you intuit past Straussian haze to figure out what you’re being asked) and verbal IQ (can you leverage semiotic arbitrage to seem capable / statussy while also ostensibly talking shit about yourself). They test you on it more regularly than literally anything else socially since humblebragging is the fundament of WASP social politics—in lots of situations you’re taken seriously in pretty direct proportion to your ability to humblebrag in ever more mediated / oblique / plausibly deniable ways. Which is an area, by the way, where for all their love of status games as a vector for assimilation Indians kind of suck ass at tbh—which is odd frankly as usually we see them as mealy-mouthed and indirect. But anyway whenever Indians try to brag it lowkey feels like talking to a black person.

7. Men can get away with basically anything when they’re seen as the Strong Horse and hilariously little once they begin to give gluestick. And to be clear it’s a great thing to be good, but while goodness means a lot from Secretariat the same will eternally read as cope / cringe from Pie-Oh-My until he wins a new derby, since to most other men you’re only ever as good as your last check, whereas to the ladies it’s pretty much always a function of how you make her feel Right Now. And yet fortunes rise and fall and civilization is thermostatic and memories these days especially are just short as shit—which means, of course, that over the long term what matters most is a certain grit and resilience; a willingness to stay in the race until at last it’s YOU getting the feminists to slice open Monica’s tendon.

8. Women have basically infinite patience for you hurting them; what they’ll never tolerate (and oftentimes unperson you for) is making them seem like a Bad Person. Recall the classic Medusa story—feminine caprice always needs to be reflected and refracted (e.g. by making your point except you also say that all the mean stuff girls do is ackshully good or by intermittently shitting on incels out of nowhere), elsewise they’ll turn you into stone by culturally coding your entire-ass interiority as ontologically illegitimate / untrustworthy by way of magic words like “bitter” and “resentful” and the dreaded “incel.” And you need to watch out when these mischievous little kitties come for your name and reputation, because they and lots of society at large will also see you responding in kind as beyond the pale—and the thing is this asymmetry actually makes sense, as women’s reputations very genuinely ARE just a lot more narratively permeable than ours on account of the fairer sex actually needing to be seen as Good People in a way we simply don’t provided we’re A) powerful; and B) not so overtly antisocial as to wreck plausible deniability. But just compare Trump and Hillary; the former is far more overtly corrupt and violent but nobody gives a fuck since he’s the Strong Horse. Women can never be the Strong Horse, though—only like Dolores Umbridge—and even a tiny bit of corruption as a treat gets babygirl crushed even with chickie voters—no wonder girls are so tediously obsessed with being a Good Person! Anyway if you’re interested I develop this point a lot more in In Defense of Hitting Women.

9. They’re called Art Hoes for a reason—which isn’t to rag on them for being Hoes, by the way, but rather for being artists, as basically all artists with actual talent are kind of huge assholes in practice. The reason being that originality and creativity and genuine vision all come primarily from a certain normative solipsism—a sort of deep-seated contempt for the fundamental existence of other minds / non-Me interiorities often observed in niggas with a pronounced verbal tilt given that we place a huge premium on narrative fidelity. Which works quite well, frankly, if the other person is a normie and sees life less as a novel and more as e.g. a to-do list—for instance my goffik anorexic single mom boo Morticia was an ISFJ with an 115ish IQ and that was far and away the most stable and loving relationship of my life. Even if the intellectual spark wasn’t always there I actually found she was a lot more sentient overall than, say, XNFX girls in the ~120 IQ range I’d dated before who are usually *just* smart enough to regurgitate Judith Butler at you but certainly can’t propositionally spar with a hyperverbal 145 ENTP on the fly and so to recover parity will deploy all these gay Amazing Amy tactics out of left field, such that it’s primarily in being good at manipulating you where she’ll palpably outshine other girls intellectually. Whereas the 115 ISFJ will usually be great at rephrasing shit you say (which is lowkey what most of us scrotes want deep down anyway even from an “intellectual girl” if we’re honest injuns) as she’s mostly optimizing at this juncture around getting you to take her for froyo like you said instead of writing another nine hours straight. Anyway long story short my point is if you like moody Lana-type girls you can 100% get a bih who dresses and acts like that in an Arts and Crafts Hoe versus an Art Hoe proper and it will probably work out splendidly. But two super writerly types in particular is frankly the worst combo I can imagine, and more generally I suspect that if you’re any sort of artist or intellectual you really need to accept that you’re a Bad Person deep down because a true life of the mind involves kind of exploiting people in a way that to you will mostly read as ambient. Ultimately if you want to fall in love with a chick who excites you intellectually that’s probs best pursued more as an affair, and she should probs herself go marry a guy good at fixing the dishwasher. Anyway this is actually one respect in which I empathize with the genuinely talented Art Hoes, because men simply demand far far far more of women in relationships hence most of history’s greatest chickie artists (specifically in a literary context) either ending up as biddies or having some piece of shit dude fuck everything up for her. Whereas if you’re an asshole Houellebecq type on the other hand you’ll kind of always find a groupie or twelve starved for abuse—thank God.

10. Parables like Pandora’s Box and the Tree of Knowledge likewise exist for a reason; if there’s any justification for hating womyn for real it’s almost certainly for them having introduced sapience to mankind through paleolithic experiments with hallucinogenic snake venom, which wasn’t coo.

11. The girl you marry should get wet whenever you go through her phone, weigh less than half of what you do, and not understand anything you post on Substack.com. More casual rendezvous with gals met on the platform are permissible naturally, but it’s best to confine that to groupies/fans and steer clear of peers/collaborators for all the obvious Cass Elliot reasons (though ofc you should hit on all your lady podcast guests a little bit at least simply as a basic matter of courtesy).

12. No one really has “dignity” as such in a world where other minds exist—your own interiority will on some level always be opaque to others and vice versa, and you’ll never know what is conditional or performative or unrepresentative 100% when dealing with literally anyone. Thing is in the past this was mediated by shit like honor culture and localism and tight reputation economies, whereas under the Zoomer Oral Culture explained above the incentives to defect by embracing pure affect and Dick Morris morality while relinquishing any and all contiguous sense of self are fast expanding. Like one thing I see in Zoomettes for instance is that these poor babies will a lot of the time backstab the shit out of each other quite ruthlessly even when they were ostensibly “sisters” yesterday—a sharp departure from Millennial girls, who cloyingly repress all competitive / jealous / resentful feelings towards friends. Meanwhile Zoomer guys often seem to long deeply for a Männerbund (they don’t seem to like girls all that much tbh but really love their bros, whereas Millennial guys are woman-oriented to a point of simpiness tbh and tend to have far more casual male friendships), often to the point of wanting to throw all they have into one even as said Bunds tend towards fragmentation in practice (mostly on account of the tendency of Zoomerinos to veer frenetically between ideology and ideology in a manner somehow both ironic and fanatical (their basal temperament, kind of like how Zoomettes are basically always half courtesan and half lesbian)—which makes it functionally impossible to plan around Bushborn Bucks in any meaningful sense as their “social news cycle” (to the extent it ever briefly exists as one static thing) is so short these niggas will shift alliances on a dime, and when it exasperates you will act like you’re a stuffy old codger who can’t handle their nimbleness before e.g. blasting you for not conforming exactly to the totalistic worldview they adopted 5 minutes ago.

13. Almost everyone lies all the time, but men believe their own lies about the future while girls believe their own lies about the past (read All Sex is Rape for the tea). Each type of lie also enables the other and is a largely eugenic social technology (hence them both being low status to whine about), whereas more generally in society feminine caprice and masculine narcissism are defense mechanisms that precipitate / justify / protect against the other—and also simply the game theoretic resting points for men and women in a low trust sexual ecology, wherein the boyos will tend toward an affected NPD and the girlypops an affected BPD.

14. All chickies are Straussian. If she thinks of you as hubby material there’s a decent chance she’s lying about her bodycount / not telling you about the time she did something a lil sex work adjacent mb / insisting it was for sure you who broke in her butthole and also ur the only one who’s made her feel Safe or Cum This Hard / playing up how her most transparently evil exboyfren Actually Really Scared Her while conveniently leaving out how it ackshully made her wet as shit and you get the drill. Thing is though bae genuinely believes her post facto Wikipedia Edits, which is itself another hugely necessary social technology btw—as is the impulse gals have to epistemically eviscerate any quixotic souls among the Unfair Sex who’d attempt to make the Boyim writ large a little more aware of this dynamic—a goal that clearly doesn’t serve anyone’s interests at the end of the day. Moreover you ought not be butthurt about this as it’s never experienced as a cuck thing in the girl’s mind when she edits shit to dignify YOUR narrative, whereas all those lads you think of as “fuckboys” lowkey get pumped and dumped all the fucking time by bitches and then erased the same way they’ll erase black guys and shit, because contra normie hot dog manosphere narratives almost any guy who’s bipolar or w/e will usually be able to casually fuck much hotter girls than he’d be able to marry.

15. Never shoot up the school—not because it’s “immoral” or whatever but because Elliot Rodger threw it all away literally like a year before K-Pop got huge.

16. As a rule the Jews you can trust don’t hear “kike” like “nigger” so much as like “cracker” (or even better—“mick” or “wop”). Whereas in the specific context of raceplay I find that Jewesses will hear it like “spic” if they’re hot and “nigger” if they’re not, with only the canniest among them realizing that it always sort of means “massa” in an Alt Right mouth—even and perhaps especially whilst babygirl’s chained to the headboard with a swastie drawn on her tidders.

17. The friend-enemy distinction starts with the universe versus you and your mom.

18. You can’t really trust poor people or incels.

19. Just about everyone in creation is hugely motivated by status—especially the folks who insist they don’t care about status (which invariably means they’re operating in some photonegative / stack overflow hierarchy), and especially especially those lovely long-limbed litigators reading this who ackshully aren’t just posturing here but are very earnestly convinced they themselves care not one whit for status—which by the way isn’t even a conscious thing mostly, existing primarily in your marrow in a manner intuited precognitively, and fluctuating contextually as it’s factored in subconsciously to all decisions large and small the world will make about you. That said it’s probs ideal to consider this process consciously as little as humanly possible, and the disgust for status talk / genuine belief in one’s own status-ambivalence is at least by all appearances an entirely adaptive delusion.

20. No one believes in Live and Let Live once they have space to flex nuts. Chuds are therefore better than intellectuals a lot of the time since they’ll be straight about thinking you’re disgusting instead of e.g. trying to backsolve for a higher order reason in a transparently fake and gay way you need to treat like trigonometry class or else you’re being “uncharitable” by WASP dialectical norms, which make you take all interlocutors at face value even though we literally all have access to our own interiority and know we ourselves are constantly intellectually dishonest when convenient. Again—a Straussian impulse dressed as a universal norm.

21. Sometimes Art Hoes who are ostensibly dumb and retarded will be correct about things in a way that initially will feel specious / empty cause their little ginies and nips and shit are picking up on subconscious lower order frequencies not legible to syllogistic and phallic propositional manlogic. For instance the art hoe disgust for AI was clearly quite pigheaded last year, but this year almost reads as having been an uncanny leading indicator given that ChatGPT has since decayed into a flat and entropic caricature of itself that constantly lies to you like an Indian.

22. Astrology likely has something similar going on, as does basically all silly girl shit that codes as high status for men to pretend is real—in most such situations you can find some second order adaptive function your manbrain will recognize as useful if you think about it a bit. And yeah maybe it’s all a mythopoetic just-so story—but also on some level so is literally all human knowledge so just go ahead with it if it makes you feel a bit better about having to learn what a sagiquarius is. Then if the girl is a little autistic you can get her into Jungian archetypes or Big 5 and Moral Dimensions typology instead, which proffers basically the same value as a Types of Guy heuristic under a materialist and empirical cosmology. Having said that though chicks who don’t have Asperger’s Syndrome actually do just need to rewrite everything in their period blood or w/e a lot of times or else the world seems a horrifying Kafkaesque nightmare to them, and so if bae likes astrology don’t be a fag and just respect her silly girlbrain’s need to make sense of disorder (which she has far far more of btw being a woman) in a way that fits same as u.

23. Cats and women both enjoy being touched a lot more when they’re hungry.

24. Everyone who says you’re being Too Racist is literally always way whiter than you— and there’s 100% a complex high and low against the middle thing going on here (think a WASP-Negro alliance against Wogs implicitly), but you fellers will have to wait for my next book to learn all about that.

25. You can’t hate anything deeply without also loving it and vice versa—especially when it comes to women and Jews and oneself—all cases wherein power comes from that ineffable grey register of matroyshka dolls and horseshoes; caducei and finger traps; molested girls who groom their boyfriends. The same way that e.g. Judaism builds recursion into the culture to keep it a closed loop and womyn tend to seize power from their vulnerability, the most capable and charismatic (or even just socially agile) people are usually the ones who are also the most self-deluded.

26. Top level of the iceberg is Walt is sort of Jewish. Below that is Walt is kind of gay. Below that is Walt is a little black. Very bottom is that Walt is kind of an Art Hoe.

27. 90% of people who Used To Be Fat are sort of evil / weird and will eternally have something wrong with them particularly in their behavior toward the other sex. Moreover fat woman / skinny guy is left coded whereas fat man / skinny girl is right coded and each side hates the other and thinks that it shouldn’t be allowed.

28. The people you find really annoying will usually do the most for you and the two always go hand in hand subconsciously in a Ben Franklin fuck my creditors way. Meanwhile the idea you hear that “as a man no one cares about your problems” is honestly self-serving bullshit because your mom for instance and also fans with a similar neurotype who look up to you and any girls who have a crush on you all care quite a lot about your dumb problems. But like when sexy Art Hoes kvetch on Substack about how they can’t get a bf when what they really mean is that they can’t date Harry Styles or Justin Bieber or w/e you’re only concerned about male peers of a comparable or higher status and like your Reach Girls caring about your bullshit, and even if you’re a bit of a faggot are probs authentically quite stoic with just about everyone else in your life. Because men for the most part just make up all this fake and gay Lord Byron shit to dignify their own solipsism.

29. Sleep deprivation lowkey makes you write in iambic pentameter.

30. Never hire attractive women—particularly if you’ve fucked them before, in which case she’ll always use sex to get out of doing real work, often distracting you in the process from things you yourself must do to produce value in the world as is expected of an adult male but she won’t ever understand let alone respect because her value in any room is never her ability to write SQL code or whatever gay shit you hired her for, which she knows in her nips if not propositionally. But anyway the more you fuck her the more you’ll disregard anything that’s value-generating because she looks down on such things as lowkey incel coded and in practice will amidst afternoon delights ambiently encourage you to act a lot more niggery and contemptuous of duty qua duty since it arises from a hard masculine place she can’t understand and which as a consequence will always and everywhere get totalistically obliterated the instant any decent puss shows up in any male space which btw is why pirates and such were completely and utterly right to not allow girls on their ships and call them bad luck. So anyway no hiring pretty girls—ever. If anything hire someone you find genuinely off-putting and groace so it imposes a bit less of a cognitive load on the margins to reproach them when they fuck up.

31. Connecting your “personal brand” or w/e to shit you care about for realsies will most of the time fuck up both of those things. Also remember your public persona is literally a cartoon character to all but your most hardcore fans who know how to do a Straussian read of your texts for all the cryptic gay Not Really Evil subtext while peering past the normgroid-intake brand management malarkey. And as irksome as it is at times to be flattened into a caricature with “Adderall” and “Jewish Chicks” sort of Mad Libbed in randomly as if they’re my Scooby Snacks that’s precisely what you need at the end of the day—a low resolution filter to scare away Youhaters, because most of the world very genuinely CAN’T handle your scuzzy and discordant interiority. Which means btw that if you want to make it as a Public Figure it’s generally a sterling idea to keep slices of yourself illegible to the hoi polloi so only your most committed and neurotype-proximate followers who actively and agentically jump down the rabbit hole will ever get to see them.

32. Overindexing on IQ is really quite gay. It was obviously the chief determinant of success circa 1950-2010 but going forward it’s all about executive functioning and the basic ability to resist temptations / maladaptive looping, as well as for lack of a better word “gumption,” e.g. the drive to resist entropy / wash your penis instead of taking the easy way out ad nauseum until you’re living in Precious-Tier squalor. And I think the main problem for intellectual / artist types is that gumption codes as normie hotdog grandma, while lots of us still romanticize a certain species of aristocratic languor and indulgence, which was fine even as late as 2015 but can’t really survive modern dopamine traps and particularly AI. So figuring out a way to thread that needle is I think my foremost priority going forward as a Thinker.

Anyway I’m 32 this month—which seems rather less of a weirdo liminal age than 31.

This past year I wrote my first novel, plus a handful of hoe-scaring jeremiads not super optimized for growing my platform but I expect will kind of stick with folx in years to come—especially The Girl Who Cried Incel, the crown jewel of my extended oeuvre imo.

I also put out a couple dece showtunes e.g. Not My Fault, Speedy Little Friend, Breed On, My Little Zoomette and Hail Victory, and recorded some truly fantastic podcast eps with folks like Kryptogal, Josh Slocum, Stormin’ Norman Eckhart, this teenage girl I dated two years ago, and The Tortuga Society’s first based black guy—Marcus Benedicta.

At times it was a bit of an Opium Den in Morocco Year for Uncle Walt—or I suppose it would be an Adderall Den? Or a recursive Pilpul Den? Whichever Scooby Snack his beloved readers find most amusing, Wally B. will eternally feel grateful to bark for it.

Also negativity codes as low status, so at this juncture I’ll code switch to Deloitte Walt to highlight that unforeseen market recalibrations enabled me to reimagine big ticket deliverables and deepen resilience narratives while aggressively iterating in a dynamic environment to optimize growth opportunities in an evolving client landscape.

But anywho shout out as ever to pirate bros

Theon Ultima

and

Rajeev Ram

for putting up with my occasional spells of insanity, as well as my foil

Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)

for letting me Exhaust her, and then of course to

Sai Ψ

and

Ancient Problemz

and

Lirpa Strike

and

The Calipers

and

Meghan Bell

and

Professor Axelrod

and Mary Ann and the rest of y’all niggas know who you are.

For now I’m signing off to go do assorted middle aged man things—gotta feed the proverbial horse its oats in preparation for 2026!

After all, lads—pluribus contendimus.

— WB