ALPHA POWER
There’s a popular mantra: Let’s think positively! Think about good things! This sounds touching, of course. Almost like suggesting to treat a fracture with laughter. If you keep staring at the ceiling – the floor really does seem clean. But sooner or later you’ll stumble and get acquainted with that floor up close. With all its stains, sticky dust, and old rakes you never noticed before.
And here arises life’s first, fundamental task – taking inventory of the rakes. Yes, not self-actualization, not happiness, not harmony, but precisely counting what you’re bound to step on. The number of rakes, alas, is regulated by biology, upbringing, and social algorithms. You’ll have to step on them and smaking yourself in the face – the only question is at what pace, with what sound, and how many times in a row.
Sew this into your brain like contraband in a belly:
Keep stepping on the same rakes isn’t a mistake – it’s necessity. The world is much clearer when the pain is your own: someone else’s bump doesn’t ache. Nobody learns from others’ mistakes, unfortunately.
They say: A smart person tries not to repeat mistakes. The key word here is “tries.” And a wise person is one who occasionally succeeds. Wisdom isn’t a halo over your head, but knowledge you don’t need to keep in your head. Because it’s already built into your reactions. What “hot” means, nobody forgets. Wisdom is intelligence multiplied by burns.
A human is like broth. Not primordial soup where life accidentally emerged and then somehow everything just went on by itself. No. More like family broth, cooked from ancestors, traumas, 90s television, and random phrases from a third-grade teacher. If they dumped a pound of salt in there – you can’t extract it anymore. Inseparable. You can only dilute, add, compensate. Same with human psyche: everything hammered in during childhood doesn’t get deleted. But – importantly! – it gets supplemented. So they drilled into you: “Don’t argue with elders!” – well, don’t argue. Don’t argue with anyone at all. Let them err peacefully and solemnly. But make decisions yourself.
Because you have to live. And you have to make mistakes. They won’t pay for your unlearned lesson – you will.
And here an important shift happens: as soon as you allow yourself to decide independently, you start unsticking from others’ expectations. Which means – you remove masks. You can only learn not to judge others after you stop judging yourself for not fulfilling others’ roles. You shed the ridiculous clown costume, removed the makeup, remained yourself – and suddenly understood how luxurious it is: being yourself without strain.
And if someone nearby continues pretending to be someone else – you no longer judge, you suggest: “Just relax already! Take off the mask. Drop the role. Rest. Rest. Rest.” Freedom from role – that’s real freedom. Real – because it’s internal.
And then everything’s simple. If your motivation is “I want to do this” – you act from within. You’re in nature’s paradigm, on the instinct of action. But if your motivation is “I want to get this” – you’re already in the market paradigm. You don’t want to act – you want to consume.
You’re now speaking the language of consumerism. And that’s motivation with a minus sign. Nothing will come true.
Because you’re not doing – you’re waiting for delivery.
Some, especially brave ones, start fighting themselves. This is spectacular, of course. But absolutely meaningless. Because as soon as you’ve defeated yourself – it means you’ve also lost to yourself. Brilliant operation of self-destruction: one-zero in favor of internal conflict.
You are you. And if you’re at war with yourself, you’ll always lose. Even if you win.
Because what is a flaw? It’s when something is lacking. Missing. And we throw ourselves into fixing it with great pathos. We fight, eradicate, zero out – as if the flaw were a cockroach and we’re from a special squad for clearing out meaning. But how many grenades do you need to throw into a hole to destroy the hole itself?
Exactly. The more furiously we fight our flaws, the deeper we bury ourselves in them, and the stronger these flaws become.
Take laziness, for example. It’s not a vice or moral decay. It’s simply lack of motivation – or properly speaking, a separate instinct altogether. The instinct to conserve energy. The most ancient and one of the most reasonable.
In the wild, this instinct saved lives. No need to run for no reason – you run either after prey or from predators. Everything else is wasted calories, which, by the way, weren’t sold in plastic containers on sale back then. Laziness is an internal filter for meaningless actions. If the organism sees no point, it logically slows down: “Don’t waste energy. Sit. Wait. Live.”
And the more furiously you kick yourself – “come on, pull yourself together, you lazy beast” – the harder passive resistance kicks in. As if responding: “Who are you to command me without reason?”
Many familiar household inventions were born not from high love of progress, but from simple, deeply human need: do less, get more. Remote control, washing machine, electric kettle, vacuum cleaner, microwave, refrigerator, elevator, diapers – even the wheel – all created so humans would spend less effort on routine and not exhaust themselves where they could simply not strain.
The history of technical progress is partly a chronicle of strategic laziness. The circular saw was invented to avoid wasting energy on the back-and-forth motions of regular saws. Windshield wipers – so you wouldn’t have to wave your hand across the windshield in rain. Observation multiplied by unwillingness to do the same thing a hundred times in a row – that’s the engine of many discoveries.
Laziness, strangely enough, isn’t inaction but a trigger for rationalization. It launches that internal question: “Can this be done… differently, but better?” In this sense, laziness is the mother of engineering, the aunt of automation, and distant relative of UX design.
Inventions born from laziness become mass-market because they answer the main, universal instinct – conserve effort and time. This isn’t a vice. It’s adaptive strategy.
So resistance to meaningless violence against yourself isn’t weakness at all. It’s biological protection. You’re just possibly on the wrong side of this internal war.
“Be productive! Discipline is the mother of success!” screams internal propaganda, as if you’re an unfinished soldier on a personal front. But here’s the problem: the organism isn’t stupid. It perfectly understands you’re forcibly dragging it where it doesn’t want to go.
And it switches to sabotage mode – subtle, viscous, almost invisible. You seem to be doing things, but sluggishly. You sleep but don’t rest. You write but don’t burn.
Because biology doesn’t recognize force – especially from yourself. Self-discipline only works where meaning is engaged. Where you want not because you must, but because something clicked inside. Only then does neurochemistry say “okay, let’s go” and delivers dopamine. If not – braking begins disguised as fatigue, exhaustion, and procrastination.
Want to do something – first find why you need it, don’t kick yourself like a gloomy mule. Because you’re not kicking the mule – you’re kicking your own nervous system. And it holds grudges. But remember: freedom isn’t “do what you want.” Freedom is not being afraid to be yourself, even when it doesn’t fit, doesn’t align, isn’t approved, and frankly bothers others. Even when it’s inconvenient.
This isn’t just about thoughts, opinions, choices, actions, or views. It’s also about the body. About what it feels, what it lacks, what it fears. About touch, warmth, and softness we somehow decided to consider weakness. It’s not being afraid to be yourself… even in how you touch others.
And here begins the strangest paradox of the civilized world. Because in our culture, warmth is far more complex than it seems.
The biggest taboo in our society isn’t sex. Sex has long been legalized, monetized, and categorized. But physical tenderness is forbidden. Especially if it doesn’t lead to logical conclusion. An embrace pursuing no benefit. Stroking without subtext. Caress requiring nothing in return. For the modern human brain – this is mental malfunction.
Try approaching an adult – man or woman – and simply stroke their head. Without subtext, without jokes. The way mom might have in childhood, if you were lucky. Gently. Warmly. Tenderly. Result? Either stupor or tears. Because the body retains this knowledge, but life has a deficit.
Men, for example, fear tenderness to the point of hiccups. They’ll easily endure aggression, mockery, even harassment – that’s understandable, that’s the language of streets, army, daily life. But when someone strokes their arm and says “everything’s fine” – the system freezes. The brutal brain doesn’t understand this isn’t attack but care. And surrenders.
Those who joke ironically “if only someone would caress me” don’t understand how dangerous this is for them personally. Because if someone actually does caress them – that’s it, the roof gets blown off instantly. Pickup is cancelled, masks dropped, alpha becomes vulnerable boy. Deficit hit the heart – finita.
We’re all under-caressed, under-nurtured, under-touched, under-fucked. We’re social primates who’ve had grooming taken away and only roughness left.
Making a man impotent, for example, is easier than spoiling mayonnaise in heat. Five minutes of sex and ten minutes of poisonous laughter after – and that’s it, libido went on a bender. Cannot be reinstalled.
And generally, men and women even forgive differently. A woman – quickly, but never. That is, she simply stops voicing it. That’s all. Issue removed – from agenda, but not from memory. There it remains. In background. And a man? A man doesn’t forgive for a long time. Then – bang! – and forgot. Not because he’s kind. Simply because his memory for feelings is structured differently. Cleared cache – and moved on. Didn’t even remember being offended.
For a man, choice is refusal. He cuts off, leaves, and moves forward. The space of possibilities narrows, but direction appears. And with it – freedom. A woman knows how to choose but doesn’t know how to refuse. Emotional multitasking is built into firmware: holding contradictions is basic function, not anomaly.
We’re different – and this isn’t beautiful metaphor but neurobiological fact. Different brain structure, different hormonal layouts, unlike biological motivations, differing emotional reactions, and completely different concepts of justice, safety, love, and self-understanding. Difference – in everything. In the first book we examined these differences, in this one – we’ll go further. Because without this it’s impossible to understand what really happens between man and woman, who and why ignited the war of sexes, and why it so stubbornly smolders between us.
When a man loses direction – he stops being a guide. He becomes a porter, carrying others’ suitcases, others’ meanings, others’ tasks. Seems busy, seems useful – but moving wrong way to wrong place. Until he finds himself, he won’t keep any woman. Simply because he doesn’t know where he’s going. And no woman will follow someone who himself wanders on others’ path.
A man has a modest task: become God. Gain world understanding, comprehend laws of existence, inscribe this in his internal map and hold this map in his head with dignity. A core he needn’t be ashamed of. Not patriarchy – spine.
A woman has different mission – give form to life. Pregnancy, motherhood, sustaining, nurturing – all this isn’t role but internal program. Female energy is gravitational energy. It doesn’t go forward – it attracts. Her task is creating a field where life can develop. And where man can realize himself as guide, not porter.
And most important: everyone born has their own life path. Unique as neural activity fingerprint at moment of first breath. No one can occupy it. No need to fight for it. Just need to find it.
Which means stop being someone else and start being yourself.
