I’ve unfollowed a handful of people on Twitter lately. Many of these guys I’ve followed for years. The two main reasons that I’ve stopped following them is part of the same thing really. Morality.

Older guys telling younger guys to “man up.” Older guys telling younger guys, “how it was back in the good old days.” When I say older guys, some of them are older than me, some are my age, and a couple are a few years younger than me. Don’t even get me started on the young guys who are preaching morality. All I can say to them is, “I appreciate what you are trying to do, I’ll give you credit for the effort, now sit down.” Not to sound condescending to these up and coming young men, but guys, the world hasn’t even begun to fuck with you yet. You have no idea. So sit down and close your mouths.

A lot of the guys that I’ve unfollowed are preaching their version of morality. Or what they learned in sunday school when they were kids. Nothing wrong with religion. If Jesus helps you be a better person, I’m all for it. If Jesus doesn’t do it for you, but Allah does, again, I’m all for it for you. But it isn’t for me.

When I say it isn’t for me, I mean all religions. I was raised under a certain religion from a tiny boy until about the age of 12 or so when I decided that that particular faith wasn’t for me. Through many years I’ve looked into a variety of religions and none of them fit me. I’ve gone down many rabbit holes of religion looking for answers only to find those rabbit holes either dead ended, or just kept spiralling around like a maze. I finally got to a place where I realized for me, that the religion rabbit hole doesn’t contain the answers that I have been looking for, and never did. Since that time, I’ve stopped looking for answers via religion.

One thing I’ve come to realize though is this, if you need religion to be moral, you’ve got problems. Big ones. If you need a book or scripture to tell you how to lead a moral life, if you can’t figure that out for yourself, you really have problems.

Morality is such a slippery thing in a lot of ways. When I grew up in the faith that I did, God and Jesus were perfect, we weren’t and aren’t. But man, you would be guilted and shamed for not doing everything in your power to be that perfection. Nothing you could do was good enough. You couldn’t pray enough. You couldn’t ask for forgiveness enough. And while God was a loving God, and was all-knowing and all-forgiving, somehow God just wouldn’t forgive you for that one little thing that you did that one time. God was all loving and a judgmental bastard at the same time. Now I realize that it wasn’t the religion itself per-se that was the problem, it was the “flock” or the “congregration.”

Still, religion is just not for me. You do you baby, and I’ll do me.

One of the things that I realized that helped me decide if I wanted to continue following these particular individuals on Twitter was the fact that they are preaching an outdated gospel. The times that they want to get back to are long dead and gone. Honestly I don’t think those time periods ever existed, I think what they are saying is mostly wishful thinking and delusional fantasy.

“Getting back to God” isn’t going to “save the west.” That ship has sailed. Religion has been compromised. The United States may have been founded under Christianity, but it won’t be saved by it. The only messiah that is going to save you is yourself. Stop looking to other’s to save you. They won’t. Stop wishing for “the good old days.” Those days are long gone or more likely never existed. We don’t live in a Normal Rockwell painting and we never have and we never will. Stop looking to the sky for your answers, they aren’t there. They are inside of you. You know what you need to do, so do it.

I’ve always been more interested in what IS than what OUGHT to be. I may not always like what I see, but I would rather deal with what is. Reality just is. It doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about me. It’s completely indifferent to you and me. It’s not benign nor is it malevolent. It’s like gravity. Gravity just is. It exists but is completely indifferent to us. You can rail against it when you fall down and tell it, “that’s not how it’s supposed to be!” But it won’t change anything. Gravity will do its thing to you again when you fall down. Might as well get used to that idea and maybe work on ways to not fall down so much.

I have my own moral code, just as I’m sure you have yours. I’m not going to tell you how to live, and I probably won’t judge you for the things that you do. I may not do things the way that you do, and that’s okay. Doing things my way doesn’t make me any less moral than you. At least in my book.

So yeah, I unfollowed a few dudes. I got tired of hearing guilt and shaming tactics that I heard almost 40 years ago. I got tired of hearing about “the good old days.” I got tired of hearing about things that amount to wishful thinking, platitudes, and living in a world that isn’t the world that I occupy. I got tired of hearing about how things ought to be instead of hearing about how things are.

Jack Donovan talked about being good at being a Man, and being a good Man. There is a difference between the two. Being a good Man is a moralistic perspective, while being good at being a Man, well, sometimes you do what you got to do to get things done, and sometimes those things can be immoral, or at least amoral.

In a perfect world, I think it would be best to be both, to be good at being a Man and a good Man. But when the shit hits the fan, being a good Man goes out the window and becomes irrelevant if and when the intruder is standing in front of you with a gun in his hand. You could be a good Man, but a dead Man. I know which one I would choose given that situation.

The issue of morality has always been a pressure point for me. That’s because everybody has their idea of what is moral, and they always stand on the side of being right when it comes to morality. What is right for you may not in fact be right for me. In fact, I would rather find something that “works” and gets me results than worry about being “right.”

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