Love and Lust

What Hacker News says

1. PaulHouleAug 2021
   I am reading ‘Love and Lust’ by Theodore Reik and I wish it had found me 35 years ago.

   Something happened between 1945 and the present that blew out our culture like the ozone layer.

   Ordinary approaches don’t work today. I for one read Eric Greene’s ‘art of seduction’ and then got all the references from the library and broke the clip on my gym bag hauling them back to my office. If you are going to get better results than most people you need a fully developed technology of love. It is not something PUAs are really into because it is deeper and takes longer but it is good for forming deep ‘friendships’ and improving how you relate to people.

   Most ordinary people will see all the references to life in other centuries and think it is obsolete and go back to tinder. They suck. They can’t be saved. You can be different.

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2. PaulHouleOct 2021
   I took lessons in acting based on this method

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meisner_technique

   and came to realize that there is a commonality between writing and acting. An actor might not need to think about the arc of a whole story but they need to think about how it is advanced in a single scene. Sometimes even in real-life situations I think about "blocking" and other concepts from the stage. (e.g. Look at drama and improvisational acting in general)

   Lately I read this book

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Seduction

   which has a lot of fiction and non-fiction references oriented around the technology of love ("Tale of Genji", "Les liaisons dangereuses", "Love and Lust") and works over the stories of very interesting people from various directions.

   I have been reading the references, reading the references of those references, and going off in other adventures in reading including recent feminist scholarship such as

   https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

   I think that love is the most popular topic for storytelling and this project has vastly improved my ability to confabulate on the subject.

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3. PaulHouleAug 2021
   I was reading Theodore reik’s book about ‘love and lust’ and it made it clear to me what I knew all along, which is that work and love are not foes but instead closely related.

   We went through some cultural event horizon some time between 1945 and 2000 where it was more clear people were motivated like that. Today if you tell people you were motivated to do a creative project because you wanted affection people are baffled; ‘normal’ people today play the influencer game so they can get free swag, then they get on tinder.

   But if you look at fiction as a window of the human soul or real life stories from not long ago the 21st century schizoid man seems sad.

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