If you’re single, you will “die alone.” You’ve probably heard that message, either directly or through the media. Maybe you’ve conjured up the image yourself: dying alone in a sterile hospital room, lonely and unloved, or dying alone in your apartment, days passing before anyone discovers your body. Oh, the shame, the post-mortem shame. Years ago, I was on an online forum. I said that I wasn’t interested in getting married or having kids. Knowing…
A romantic partner will complete your life — so we are told in a hundred ways, implicit and explicit. Even if we recognize the foolishness of this belief, it can still pester us, because the conditioning is so pervasive and persistent. So, let’s spend a few minutes deprogramming. First, where does this belief come from? Well, as usual, from nature and nurture. First the nature, then the nuture… Nature We are the products of a…
If you’ve been living the bachelor life for as long as I have, it’s easy to take the freedom for granted. I thought it might help to remind us all of those freedoms. Doing so might enable us to better appreciate those freedoms and maybe even utilize them better. I’ll divide the discussion into “freedoms from” and “freedoms to.” Freedoms From Bachelors enjoy freedom from a long list of constraints, stresses, and problems that weigh…
In this piece, I will cover three additional principles for building self-esteem. If you missed earlier segments in this series, check the menu under “foundations.” The three remaining principles are: Find Meaning Understand Uproot the Negative 1. Find Meaning Bachelors have to find their own meaning, because the sources of meaning that traditional men use are not available to us (e.g., marriage, children, work to support that). We must find meaning off the beaten path. …
We don’t get self-esteem by blowing ourselves kisses in the mirror. I tried; it doesn’t work. Building self-esteem (or “self-respect,” if you prefer) requires work, and it requires a certain kind of work, specific practices. I will describe two of those practices in this piece and three in the next. These practices emerge not from my posterior but from decades of reading and experience, personal and professional. I will focus on the part we…
Now I’d like to turn to the topic of building self-esteem. After all, if self-esteem is such an essential ingredient of a contented bachelor life, we’d better know something about how to get it.
The bachelor life isn’t for everyone. In some ways, it’s a hard road. It comes at a price. That is what this article is about: the costs of traveling this toll road, and how self-esteem can help defray those costs. More broadly, I want to lay out the case that self-esteem is essential for bachelor contentment. Before we get to the bachelors, though, let’s appreciate the importance of self-esteem in general, for everyone. Self-esteem (or…
If you want to get somewhere, you need to deal with the obstacles on the path. Bachelor-shaming is one of the obstacles. It can undermine your ability to live happy and contented bachelor life. It’s worth taking some time to uproot. Shaming attacks rarely come directly, in person. Although occasionally you’ll get some grief from a dipshit online, most of it comes from the surrounding culture – media, Hollywood, etc. It’s a virus in the…
If you are trying to live a happy, contented life as a bachelor, you have an enemy, and the enemy is inside. Actually, there are about a dozen of them. I’m talking about a set of destructive, interlocking negative beliefs about the alleged perils of bachelorhood. These beliefs can ruin your chances of having a good, satisfying bachelor life. They can leave you stuck, feeling sad, remorseful, envious, shamed, or uncertain. Here are some examples. …
Psychological independence is a cornerstone of a good single life, but we don’t hear much about it. Oh, we get memes, one-liners, and slogans – be yourself, chart your own course, go your own way, maintain frame, be your own mental point of origin, etc. But that’s about as far as it goes. There is very little in-depth discussion of independence – what it is, where it comes from, how to develop it. That is…