The Cure for Male Loneliness
Now if someone could get on the case for Male Pattern Baldness...and I hope it's not pickleball!!!! 😂
I would generally consider myself “on top of trends.” I know that there are two polar-opposite movies being released in theaters this weekend (the studios’ last-ditch attempt to take down Christian anti-child trafficking art for serious patriots, but they’ll never win…), and that there’s something going on about bananas, and that apparently people are in Italy alot. There are moments in which I falter, yes, but who among us? Last week, for example, a bunch of middle schoolers informed me that their slippers that looked like a bunch of golf balls glued together were actually a “trend,” and for that misstep I immediately went home and castigated myself thoroughly.
Things are not “cool” or “popular” anymore; they are “a trend.” The implied word in the middle there is usually “TikTok,” but I don’t want to send ByteDance any more ad revenue than they already pull in…and we receive a TON in click-through impressions and affiliate links here at Low Lift Ask! It’s insane! So if any menswear or heritage cookware brands want to get in touch, let me know—but NONE for ByteDance. None. I won’t even type the word TikTok here anymore. That’s my solemn promise.
Here’s another thing that’s “trending”: talking about how fucking lonely and sad dudes are these days. It’s so embarrassing…as someone who has never felt lonely not once even for one iota of a second not once because I have so many friends and friends who are girls and a girlfriend and many acquaintances that always hang out with me, it breaks my heartttt! It does!
In some sense, the entire project of Low Lift Ask has been the cure to male loneliness. Every week we gather here to share our little jokes. We do this for you, subscribers who identify as male. But as I’ve (hopefully) made abundantly clear, I really do not want to be friends with any of you. Please leave me alone and do not fucking speak back to me. That being said, I feel it is my duty to be a supportive Substack writer.
I’ve decided to lay out some tips and tricks for you all here. I love to share my wisdom with the world, because I’ve learned and already know so many useful things, about sex and other cool things as well, and I just hope our subscribers don’t go out there and buy pickleball paddles because they think they’re supposed to. You should do the following things first. I’ve helpfully broken them down by category:
“HEALTH AND BEAUTY”
. The “Anti-Wim Hof”
This is something I developed by myself—instead of cold 3-minute showers or whatever the fuck, you crank that shit up as hot as possible, see how long you can stand it (don’t use body wash or anything, the scalding heat will burn off any bacteria + skin/hair), and if you’re a pussy about it, get back in there the next day, champ. This will boost overall confidence and ability to withstand extreme temperature—something that we’ll need for our dire future!
. Midday Naps
Honestly, no one does anything during the hours of 1:30 - 3:30pm. You’re not missing out on much human connection. The average Kerala man wakes up every morning, eats at least a pound of carbs, thereby rendering him useless for most of the day, wipes himself out at lunch again with another heaping mound of white rice, and then takes an impressively deep nap before afternoon tea time. This is the ideal human routine. If you do this, as a man? You’ll be fucking in no time.
. Having a ton of sex
I recommend fucking to anyone who tells me they’re feeling lonely and spurned by the world, their inherent sociality levels whittled down to mere nubs by the advent of streaming technology and the digital escape. If you’re having a hard time making and maintaining friendships in our current desiccated husk of a communal landscape, I recommend having sex with various people.
. Mohawk
Get a mohawk. Robert de Niro had one in that one movie, but I recommend doing something much taller and sharper. I knew a guy in high school who claimed his sister Elmer-glued his hair every morning; he looked like the Shock Top mascot. It’s a conversation starter at the very least, and when you do finally let someone into the broken void that is your heart, you can let your hair down a bit.
. Do NOT get Covid
Duuuuuuuuuude…this one honestly is hard to do, I know. But sometimes when you have Covid, you have to cancel on plans, and that means one less opportunity to forge an unshakable bond with another Man. Stay the fuck home, don’t see anyone, and don’t get Covid!
“HOME OBJECTS”
. Carta D’Armenia — Santa Maria Novella Burning Papers
I know I’ve already talked about these before here. I don’t give a shit. I’ll write about them again, I don’t care. We’ve created, for ourselves, a society that devalues face-to-face human interaction in favor of the constant churn of digital communication, and so one way to combat that is to combine pyromania with being a frag head. Stock up on these prohibitively expensive burning papers and let it rock, brother. Light them everywhere. Just light up wherever you’re walking around, in your living room, at the office, at your Third Place (Starbucks!!!!). Some men just want to watch the world burn, dude, and some men? They also want that world to smell so fucking good…
. Personalized License Plate
There’s nothing cooler. I think of all the investments that one can make (travel, mortgage, college fund, health care), personalized license plate ranks near the top. I’ve never seen one I didn’t laugh at. And half the battle in making friends is making a dude laugh while he’s driving.
“BEING CHILL AND A GUY THAT FUCKING ROCKS”
. Just being normal
A lot of you could do with being a bit more normal. There’s no more room in the world for weird, interesting, quirky people; you’re either monetizing your mental illness on the internet or you’re a straight up neutral entity moving through social situations harmlessly until a quiet death. I would recommend sanding down any of your more bumpier edges, things that make you unique or useful to the world, in favor of just kind of chilling out and taking it easy once in a while. Keep it tight, you know? Just don’t do all that weird shit and that should help.
. Making sure to have at least 20+ texting conversations going at all times
Stop what you’re doing (reading this) and do this right now: go through every single contact in your phone and just text them, “Yooooooo what’s good homie” spelled and punctuated exactly like that. You will, at a minimum, receive a number of responses. Then, the game is as follows: do not engage with the physical world at all, and simply cycle through responding to each conversation one by one, so that you create an infinite loop of facile communication from which you can never extricate yourself, and it gives you the sense of being popular and connected and having a lot of social links, but in truth is just inane chatter that deters you from ever looking up from your phone. Get on this!!
. Develop the atomic bomb with your homies in Los Alamos, New Mexico at the US government’s behest
I’m just kidding, guys. I saw Oppenheimer last night, and so I wanted to include something like this for the fellas. A little joke like this goes a long way to maintaining Low Lift Ask’s predictable and exhausting sense of humor. So let me have this one. You actually should not develop weaponry that brings about mass death and destruction at an almost inconceivable scale! That’s how I should end this one, right?
. Semen retention
The weakest thing in the world you can do as a man is straight up cry; the second weakest is jacking off to porno. Stay away from porno. It drains the human male of his vital energy, thus weakening the entire species. Do not—I repeat, do NOT—surrender your semen under any circumstances.
“SPORTS TO FOLLOW”
. Basketball
Self-explanatory. It’s cool and full of interesting characters, has a vibrant secondary media apparatus via Twitter, and features athletic feats that look way cooler on filmed cameras than most other sports. And in following basketball, you can develop parasocial relationships with various podcast hosts—isn’t that what this is all about?
. Golf
An easy way to make friends would be to continually sign up for 1-person tee times at popular hours of the day, going, “Mind if I play with you guys?” to a concurrent group of two or three, and then laying on the charm. You have only one opportunity at a first impression, though, and this means the opening tee shot at the first hole is make or break. You absolutely cannot shank the opening drive—if you do so, you might as well just pack it in. You don’t deserve the refund anyway.
. Our nation’s politics…..
Become a wonk! I’m a “wonk!” Say the word wonk all the time. Junkie. “Politics junkie.” “Dataviz nerd.” Shit like that. Easy way to connect with the homies is to keep saying, “I don’t know, Chris Christie could make a surprise run for it…” at every hangout. “Wonk.”
That’s all I’ve got, really. The rest is on you. There’s so much that is intangible, ineffable, unteachable—I have so many perfect and undefinable qualities that are genuinely impossible to translate via the written word, and so this is all I can do. Stop being so lonely, is all I can say. Just stop it. It was easy for me because I’ve always had so many friends and friends who are girls and girlfriend and unspoken sexual tension with people at various public places (airport, train station, bookstore, etc.) and unblemished childhood and sex. It must be hard if you weren’t born with those things. So yeah, just stop. Don’t be lonely. Be happy.
Ritam’s Footnote
I love just not being lonely :)