"Self-Control, Scarlett Johansson, and Cigars:
The Keys To Happiness"
by John Wilder
"There’s a dirty little secret nobody in 2025 wants to hear while they’re doom-scrolling on their $1,600 iPhone in a $6 latte haze of mild caffeination in a room filled with hipsters: If everything is awesome all the time, nothing is awesome ever again.
I’ll share an example. There’s a particular Macanudo Maduro® that I love. But if I smoke it every single day, by week three it’s just a brown mouth-trash I’d light up without thinking, same as a Swisher Sweet™. That ribeye, mashed potatoes, corn and, oh, yeah, baby, gravy I used to save for my birthday? Eat it nightly and suddenly it’s just Tuesday protein.
That OnlyFans™ subscription I swore was “art”? Congratulations, I’ve turned Scarlett Johansson’s doppelgänger into wallpaper. (I’ve never been on OnlyFans©, but wanted an excuse to show a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s, um, assets.)
If I do this, my brain now reads “epic” as “baseline.” That is how luxury murders my joy. It’s inflation, but inflation of things that should be spiritually uplifting. If I flood the zone with dopamine, suddenly nothing matters anymore. I become that guy who needs a $400 bottle of wine to feel what normal people feel from a $12 Malbec on a Saturday night dinner with someone they love.
I figured this out slowly. I asked myself, “Why don’t you like that Macanudo™ as much anymore?” I mean, I’ve never treated myself like a Roman emperor with a Costco card: steak whenever, cigars whenever, and Johnny Walker Blue© whenever. But the cigar pointed me towards thinking about what sparking joy is really about.
Sunday only: the good cigar. Monday and Wednesday: a reliable but unremarkable daily drivers. Perfectly fine, but not the king.What a difference!
That Sunday Maduro® became a religious experience. I’d finish putting Monday’s post (yes, I write Monday’s post on Sunday night because I don’t have time travel), hit the hot tub, light the good cigar, and actually taste every note - cedar, cocoa, black pepper, the tears of my enemies, all of it. The other days? I enjoyed the lesser sticks more because I knew something glorious was coming. As the dead Raul Julia said, “There are two things worth living for. One is a good cigar. The other is a better one.”
It’s the same with food, but that’s a future Friday post lurking six months to a year out. I’ll just say, my Friday dinner tastes far better than yours. This is the stoic hack nobody markets because you can’t sell it in a pump bottle or an app or a subscription: deliberate deprivation creates anticipation, and anticipation is the multiplier of pleasure. I can’t recreate the first time I ever had an experience, but I can create enough anticipation to make that experience feel pretty damn good.
The problem is we are a society that is now based on hedonism. Hedonism is spiritual communism: from each according to his credit limit, to each according to his appetite. And like all communist systems, it ends with everyone equally miserable, standing in bread lines for experiences that used to be thrilling.
Look around. We are the richest society in human history and somehow producing the most miserable humans in human history. Suicide rates, antidepressant prescriptions, anxiety, porn addiction, 340% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ because vanilla life is so boring they need a new operating system to feel anything and get attention from people who are stuck with their noses in their phones.
This is all downstream of one fatal error: We removed the delay between desire and gratification.
• Want food? DoorDash in six minutes.
• Want sex? Swipe.
•Want entertainment? Infinite scroll.
• Feel bad that someone in Guatemala doesn’t have Hulu®? Invite them all the Squatamalans to come to the United States. Hell, the government will even pay.
• Want validation? Post a thirst trap, harvest likes, repeat until dead inside.
Congratulations, you’ve removed the space where soul is honed to a keen edge! You’ve eliminated the Monday through Saturday of life, the part where you suffer, anticipate, work, wait, and gone straight to an endless Sunday that, paradoxically, feels like nothing at all.
Real joy is not the peak. Real joy is the climb knowing the peak exists. That’s why lifting weights is the ultimate red-pill metaphor for life. Nobody loves the squat rack at 5:30 a.m. in January. But every man who has ever built a body he’s proud of loves having built it. The soreness, the sacrifice, the mornings you didn’t feel like it. That’s the lead up to the Sunday cigar. The physique is just the flavor that hits when you finally light it. Same with marriage, family, wealth, mastery of anything worth doing.
There is no substitute for the iron. You do not get strong without moving heavy things repeatedly while in mild to moderate discomfort.
• You do not get wealthy without years of saying no to stupid purchases.
• You do not get a great marriage without years of not banging the secretary.
• You do not raise great kids without years of being the bad guy who enforces bedtimes.
Every single thing worth having in this life is on the far side of self-control. Which brings us to the trad-right punchline nobody wants to say out loud: our current societal upheaval is not a bug. It is a feature. We spent seventy years removing all friction from life and now we’re reaping the whirlwind of a generation that has never been told no, never waited for anything, never suffered real consequences. The result is not utopia. The result is boys who can’t change a tire, girls who think chastity and modesty are personality disorders, and an entire culture addicted to rage and victimhood because pleasure no longer works on them.
The pendulum is swinging back, hard. It’s swinging back because young men are waking up in droves, hitting the gym, deleting porn, deleting social media, reading the ancients, building families, and discovering something wild: When you voluntarily embrace the Monday through Saturday of life, the discipline, the wait, the work: Sunday actually shows up. And when Sunday shows up after six days of earning it, my God, it is glorious. This scares the GloboLeft so much they even call is fascism.
So, keep your constant luxury. Keep your endless treats, your participation trophies, your “you deserve it” culture. I’ll keep my three cigars a week, my Thursday dinner, my Sunday Macanudo™, and the deep, soul-level satisfaction that comes from knowing I earned every single drag as I stare out into the infinite horizon of the sky.
Because the secret the stoics knew, that our ancestors knew, that every man who ever built something great knew is this: Heaven is only Heaven if you’ve walked through Hell to get there. And brother, I plan on enjoying the hell out of that walk. See you on the other side. I’ll save you a seat. And a good cigar."
No comments:
Post a Comment