Hello Friend,

If this is your first visit to SoSuave, I would advise you to START HERE.

It will be the most efficient use of your time.

And you will learn everything you need to know to become a huge success with women.

Thank you for visiting and have a great day!

The Castle

Vulpine

Master Don Juan
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Prologue:

I had heard something out in the real world regarding a castle analogy that prompted me to want to come back and read again what I had left here.

I had a bit of trouble sifting through all the "your princess is in another castle" references that came up with the search, which is, coincidentally, exactly what I had overheard. Eventually, I found the thread, but it wasn't it's own separate thread, it was attached to another post I made. Oops.

So, for my future reference (and for current reference of members who have joined since I have been active), I wanted to afford the two philosophies their own separate space.
..............................

The Castle


Consider yourself living with your parent(s) as living in another person’s kingdom. All your life, you go about your day-to-day business, going to work, having some fun, meeting some people, and just getting by. Hanging out that Ye Olde Nightclub, shopping at the marketplace, attending some festivals and such... A pretty simple life, just getting by, like everyone else. Essentially, you are just a face in a crowd, doing what others seem to do, like an “extra” in the movie of life.

One day you happen to wonder: “How did this kingdom that I’m living in get established?” After researching the history, you find yourself somewhat envious of the king and think “What’s so special about that guy?” You might not make the connection or come to the right conclusion at that point, and perhaps you go back to the day-to-day life for a while.

As time passes, you see experience something in the kingdom that makes you happy and you start thinking again. “How can I experience this more? I bet the king gets to do this all the time! How did the king become ‘the king’?”

One day, you travel to another kingdom to pick up something at the market. After talking with some of the locals, you learn of that king and his kingdom’s history. There are things you like better about that kingdom and you decide to move. From kingdom to kingdom you move, you experience wars and losses, you take shelter in other people’s castles until finally one day someone does something so gracious that you feel ashamed and unworthy of such generosity.

“How do I deserve this, and, why do I need it in the first place? How did I get here, in this kingdom? In this castle? Is there some way that I could not depend on someone else and avoid feeling guilty?”

For a while, you might deal with some negativity and feelings of worthlessness. But then one afternoon you bump into someone at the market who explains that they live out in the countryside: not in anybody’s kingdom. You befriend this person and one day visit his humble little cottage. They tell you how they live, how they struggle, and how they came to build their cottage. “Wow, this person lives like a king!”

You come to realize that you yourself could potentially have a little kingdom of your own! You realize that you could build something lasting for yourself: you could design your own home, even build a CASTLE!!!

So, you stay in the countryside with the person and learn their lifestyle. You look around in the area, but you decide eventually that you just don’t like the terrain. You remember an area to the North that had some beautiful mountains and decide to scout that area out. There, you find someone living there in the countryside and ask about the lifestyle. “There’s a lot of bears and wolves” they explain. You were hoping to have some chickens and other livestock for meat, so you decide the area just won’t do. That person tells you about how they lived in the east and used to fish for a lot of their food. Since your path would be easy, and you fairly nearby, you go to see how that area to the east is.

Once in the east, you learn how to fish on the ocean and the lifestyle. You enjoy it for a while, but the people you live with aren’t very friendly and you become lonely. Miserable, you ask around about the south. “You won’t like it there, the people aren’t very open-minded.” Not taking another persons’ word, you go and see for yourself.

It’s pretty nice, and the people are friendly, albeit ignorant. But, it’s hot, and snakes and insects give you ye olde heeberie-jeeberies. By now, you’ve grown accustomed to relocating and decide to move out west to see what it’s about.

“Now HERE is where the festival is at!” You meet people, celebrate, and have a great time. After a few weeks of celebration, you sit one day with a hangover and realize that you don’t know what the celebration is about. “What’s with all the partying?” You ask around and the general consensus is that “it’s just how it is here”. Although fun, you realize that your body is tired and that the pace is too much. You haven’t slept enough, you are running out of gold, the cost of oats for your horse is really high, and the people are strange.

A messenger rides up to the Inn that you are staying with word that your mother is sick. Since your resources are about to run out, you decide it would be best to go back to the home kingdom to visit and regroup. A maiden you met in the west wants to travel with you, and you agree to her company.

Back at the home kingdom, the maiden can’t adjust to the new lifestyle and wants to instead celebrate all the time. She begins complaining and insulting you and you grow irritated by her, eventually asking her to leave the kingdom and return west.

With the loss, you become sad and again wonder about the king. “How is he so rich? How is he so powerful? I couldn’t be like him, he’s so GREAT! I’m jealous.”

So time passes, the day-to-day life occupies your mind, and you find little joys in the successes of your mundane existence. Maidens come and go, friends come and go, and family members die. But you get along, day by day, with no real purpose in mind: “Life is just living, I guess.”

Then, while hunting for stag in the king’s forest, you realize: “I really like it here, and I really enjoy hunting, I want to do it more!” You decide to see if there is any need for a royal hunter. For weeks you inquire amongst the town folk. From one reference to the next you inquire, until finally someone get you in touch with the king’s cook.

To your surprise, the king dislikes venison, so there is no need for a stag hunter. However, the king really enjoys fish, and he is also fond of mutton. But, you don’t know much about sheep, and you don’t know how to fish in the kingdom’s river, only in the ocean. It turns out that your efforts were for naught: “royal hunter” was a pipedream, a dead-end.

“What am I going to do now?”

Sitting in the courtyard, you look around at all the shopkeepers, stable hands, shepherds, knights, inn keepers and wonder if they like what they do. You wonder about their lives and ponder their struggles: “What did they do to get where they are? Was it easy?” The courtyard gets noisy and you just want to go away and think for a while, so you go out into the king’s forest with your bow to hunt in peace.

While in the woods, you realize that for all your travels you have nothing to show for them. All your efforts, all the struggles, and all the time you spent was wasted. All the maidens have left you for barons, lords, or princes: you are just a peasant.

Then everything becomes clear: you didn’t know what you wanted to be, you didn’t know what you wanted to do, you just didn’t know what the options were. All while, you had just been following other established paths, and you found yourself to be running around in a circle, you had been “chasing your tail”.

Instead of worrying about your wasted life, you began to see it as exploring your options and finding out what you might enjoy. You begin to see past failures as only learning experiences from which you learned that you either weren’t good at something, or you didn’t enjoy doing it. And, you began to look around.
...
......

This whole post doesn't seem to be going anywhere, does it?

If this seems to be a bunch of “blahblahblahblah” rambling, it’s MEANT to. “Blahblahblahblahblahget to the POINT!”

Exactly, what’s the point? What’s the point of life? What are we doing? Before you bother with even attempting to answer those questions, let me just ...get to the point.

I have been stuck in a life pattern, a loop, that I suspect (based on movies like Fight Club, The Matrix, and from shared experiences of peers) is not uncommon. Blahblahblahblah... just on and on with life: a life with no real meaning, no point.

MID-LIFE CRISIS!
death of someone close
EPIPHANY!

I finally recognized my life pattern of failure as:

get girlfriend > get job > get an apartment > crisis > get (angry, depressed, frustrated, shaken, etc.) > lose job > lose apartment > lose girlfriend > move > get girlfriend > get job > get an apartment...
On and on it went. I would build up “my life”, then there would be an influence, and my house of cards, my “sandcastle”, would come crumbling down as if the tide came in and washed it away. I felt like a little kid; as if my function in life was to play in the sandbox making sandcastles. And, it felt pretty futile.

(Continued next post)
 

Vulpine

Master Don Juan
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I finally recognized my pattern of failure, as I noted in “The Map and Compass”, and I wanted to break out of my cycle. I had been following other people’s trails in life, and I had been running around in circles. I had come to realize that I needed to forge my own trail.


In order to make positive changes, you have to need to know what’s broke and needs fixing. You can try to fix every aspect at once, but that would spread yourself too thin, in my opinion. And, it would likely slow down progress on the elements individually. Instead, I suggest taking one or two aspects of your life that you would like to change, and focus all your efforts on that. Once you are satisfied with that element, you can than focus on the next, and the next.

In my case, I am taking one aspect of my pattern and focusing on changing that...

> get girlfriend >


PSYCHE!

The “> get girlfriend >” aspect, as we should all know from our seduction studies, is completely bogus. I don’t need to fix that aspect, because I eliminated it: I no longer need to “> get girlfriend >”, so it’s not an aspect of failure.


No, actually, the element I’m focusing on is:

> get an apartment >
Instead of making sandcastles like a little kid, I’m making something more long-term, more lasting. I’m looking to make my life less prone to failure - more resistant to outside forces. So, for the sake of my own peace of mind, I am directing my energy towards that goal, because I feel that, for me, it would be the most rewarding. I have been stuck in “renter’s prison” my entire adult life. My things have been storage and my money has been flying out the window with nothing to show for it. Being a renter, having my things in storage, and making someone else rich with my rent checks has seriously affected my confidence and happiness: it has been eating at my soul. So, I’m going to FIX IT.

As you can see, I have done some serious “troubleshooting”. I’ve searched my soul, discovered what makes me the happiest, and have resigned myself to these goals.

Now, I don’t care if I have to literally ƒucking cut stone and stack that sh¡t up, I will have a “Castle”. This is the focus of my efforts, my goal. There will be nothing that prevents me from achieving this goal: nothing. I will put all my crap in storage, bathe twice a week, eat only meat and cheese, alienate women and friends with my situation, and sleep in my car for a year if that’s what it takes. Oh, and I’ll feel GREAT doing it because I know I am making progress towards my goal!


Is that it, Vulpine? The castle is a house metaphor?
No, of course not.

“The Castle” is you and your life.

You may have been thinking “I have to build a castle”, but, the truth is, you and your life ALREADY IS THE CASTLE. It’s popular perception to think of life in terms of “have not”. “I gotta get rich, I gotta get laid, I gotta get this and that.” Hey, make The Castle as big as you want. But, it would be improvements on an already existing one bedroom Castle. You already “have”, and chances are, your castle isn’t a cardboard efficiency castle underneath an overpass. Follow?


Hobbies, family, finances, obligations, vices, lovers...

All these aspects of your life, these facets, are examples of the stones in your castle. Your castle is only as strong as the weakest stone. That’s the one the “enemies” will find and exploit. So, when you relate it back to the cycle of failures in your (my) life, you can easily see how the aspects of failure equal crumbling stones in your castle wall. If you never give any attention to the crumbling stones, eventually the whole castle comes down.

All this maintenance seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

THE KINGDOM

It doesn't have to be. Preventative maintenance can save you a lot of fixing and extra work later on. I have come to embrace being "proactive" in my life versus "reactive".

See, your Castle is in your Kingdom. Things in your life don't necessarily need to be important functions, or shouldn't be in your life, they can reside in the countryside of your kingdom.

Friends that sort of suck, toxic family members, recreational drugs, nagging significant others... these things should be out in the kingdom. If people/things in your Castle begin to become saboteurs, load them into the trebuchet and launch them out into the countryside.

When you're single and looking, let down your drawbridge. Women will have to go around your "moat". Your moat is the protective device that are your qualifications.


I only have one more thing for you to consider:

Is your Castle a happy one?

If you think of The Castle as "happiness", again, where are the weak stones?
.......................

Afterword:
The Castle is just the metaphor I use. I could go on and on with the analogies and relating everything in life philosophically. But, "The Castle" serves me well to troubleshoot my life as it provides a means of "seeing the forest through the trees". It provides me with a place to start when I need to think things through or assess my life. It provides me with a "bigger picture" vantage point from which I can determine how, and to what extent, things affect me.

There have been many people struggling with their lives, knowing they need to change, but asking: "Where do I start?!?!!!" "The Castle" was my "starting point". I had to map things out for myself and keep them straight in my own head based on MY preferences. I needed a "life blueprint" that I could refer back to. That being said, I hope everyone can appreciate, and potentially adapt this Castle concept for their own.

Though, it doesn't necessarily have to be "The Castle". Your "The Castle" could be "The Chicken Coop" or "The Left Nostril of My Great Aunt Marie", I don't care. I'm simply offering you a "device", or a "tool" that you may be able to benefit from.
 

Vulpine

Master Don Juan
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Moderation: I meant to put this in general discussion. Would you please? I'd appreciate it.
 
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speed dawg

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Nice to see you back.

I'm going through my own mid-life crisis. Trying to find my point. I guess to take it one step at a time, I need to get my fat ass back in shape. Simple enough. I'm tired of my damn jeans choking my waist.
 

speed dawg

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Who the h*ll moved this to Don Juan Discussion?
 

Vulpine

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Rubirosa said:
I actually liked what he wrote....It was a new, refreshing angle to an old issue
Don't trip off "TicTac", Rubirosa. When I logged off back whenever, there was a pesky troll that kept coming back on as a new member every time the community found them and booted them. They probably got an e-mail the second I posted. Notice the quickness? Besides, would a 63 year old click "reply" just too type "ZZZZzzzz"? No, of course not. It's a some jaded woman stalker troll on a smartphone... If they aren't a troll, well, it's clear why they are here.

If you follow the "Map and Compass" link, this was originally attached to another article instead of being it's own thread. It's a repost from several years back. It's clear that I need to have a conversation with a couple dude's in my life (family, friends) that asked for advice with their situations (one's looking at divorce, the other, marriage and relocation). I came to bone up on some material so I can give them some tough love and hard-to-hear reality.

speed dawg said:
Who the h*ll moved this to Don Juan Discussion?
What's UP, SPEED DAWG!!!?? Good to see you, too, bru. Man, you gotta get a "up off your ass" job to shake that fat. I lost my winter fat right away when planting season came on this year. Big weight and big body movements: you'll ditch the lard in no time.

I asked to put this up over here (thanks for moving it, Moderation). "The Map and Compass" was originally in general discussion because it isn't specific to "Mature" men. Heck, I wish I had found some practical philosophy when I was still in High School.
 
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