My Black Flag
We live in an era of unprecedented pearl clutching.
It is possible to ignore the warnings, use a computer late at night, drink caffeine past 5PM, train way too hard for your own good, and still find reasons to laugh and enjoy an unquantified life.
The world is becoming a collective monolith of ideal purity. Moths to the flame of optimization.
We've heard ten thousand hours of the world's greatest optimizers and none of them live a life we want.
We roll our eyes at the evangelical preachers warning us about the impending flames of hell, but ringing the alarm bells about the dangers of blue light past sunset isn't much different. It is puritanical righteousness aimed at finding the right diet and exorcising the daemon holding us back from contentment. In our posts and in our podcasts — the kind of information we devour and vomit — we seek a secular Ten Commandments. Not so we can follow them, but so we can point the finger at those who don't.
In a world busy naming every vice, we've missed the one that owns us: the temptation to vilify unapproved behavior.
Despite the warnings of techno doom, I drink coffee upon waking. I take pictures of the sunsets and I skip the gratitude journaling. I doom scroll after, maybe even before the sun finished setting — because I can look at it later — I have a fucking picture. I fell asleep to a blaring TV, got less than six hours of sleep, and I woke up feeling just fine, because we are not meant to live life like it is described in a safety manual.
None of us are actually blind from masturbating. The old preachers punished the body. The new ones sanctify achieving climax with fewer strokes. Same pulpit, different Hail Mary. After centuries of preaching purity and burning wrong doers at the stake, the lesson is this: judgment is the only achievement available to people who risk nothing. We are not surrounded by villains. We are engulfed by cowards. We point fingers to confirm our fear. We look for answers to questions we are afraid to ask.
This is what exhausts me about the optimizers: they are seeking satisfaction. Their heaven is a settled mind — the right answer found, the search over, content at last. I am not content. I don't intend to be. Discontent is not my problem, it’s my engine.
H.L. Mencken wrote: "Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
Such a badass thing to say before you revolt against a tyrant — except he wasn't talking about that, and every wannabe gray man posting that quote next to his unsolicited political opinion looks like a sheep in sheep’s clothing.
Mencken — the same man who wrote "Puritanism as a Literary Force" — was chastising the literary industry. He looked out among his peers and saw nothing but pious mediocrity: writers writing to fall in line, politely questioning rather than violently destroying oppressive ideas. His main target was the moralizing critics. Fuck, why didn't I come up with that to describe our modern scourge of content creators? These types make the mediocre feel aspirational. They make purchasing consumables a striving step. They make the proselytizers feel correct.
He saw what I see in every wellness feed: someone who has failed to rise above the mean, organizing themself into a priesthood to preach the truth of adequacy. And once you see it, the temptation isn't to argue anymore. You realize the stupidity isn't a misunderstanding you can correct — it's a system defending itself against achievement. You've spent years engaging in good faith with people who only know how to use faith as a weapon — not as a way to take a leap. The temptation is to stop debating and burn the church.
My suboptimal cortisol curve will be my undoing — in 30 years. But 30 more years without doing the things that inspire a life is its own hell. No poet has ever been compelled by the beauty of an optimal bedtime or a sleep score. Life worth discussing happens between our control. The safety manual doesn't make life smaller. It makes it blind — there are things you can only know by paying for them.
Nowhere is this purity more absurd than in the laws and regulatory bodies of the fitness industry — which no one has written a poem about either. I've spent my career inside this machine. I've watched it certify the timid and audit the alive. They warn about the dangers of exploration, they recede to their patterns of “proven” fitness. These degenerate mid-folk will be the first to uninspire a generation from finding the beauty in doing things wrong. For a culture known for its rugged resilience, it sure has a glass back when you step outside their accepted dogma. They've spent careers proving themselves right about things that were never worth being right about. They've mistaken their squeamishness for standards, and their knowledge of the spine for having one.
I do not train to appease a standard, or to appeal to the authority of average. I don’t share my ideas as a passive-aggressive way to point my finger. I train to revolt against the mediocre parts of myself — and to exercise the one muscle that matters: the one that thinks for itself.
“Every normal man," he said. Normal does not mean average. It means built true — it comes from the carpenter's square. I see average men aiming for the mean. I see normal men feeling the pull — and if you feel it, that's your pulse.
This body is my black flag. I raise it in the name of discontent — to remind myself that the rules are only suggestions. Because none of us know what is worth doing until we do it. If you want the average experience, you take the average advice to become the average person: fat, poor, and statistically lonely. If it's perfectly safe, it's perfectly useless.
