Boring Ourselves to Death
A brief foray into the weird world of optimisation...
The last time I joined a cult led to thorough disappointment. After overhearing the excitable chatter between cult members—on the Tube, between bar stools, within WhatsApp groups—my interest swelled. Evidently, the first rule of this particular cult was to never stop talking about the cult.
Of course, devotees don’t call it a cult. They prefer community. A community of like-minded individuals coming together as one to share the burdens of existence. Or perhaps to whack a golf ball over acres of manicured grass, only to whack it again. To each, his own. But the word community derives from commune. I have seen those steamy 1970s films. I thought I knew unfailingly what community members do when they commune.
Cults follow a tried and trusted rubric. For starters, a cult needs a leader. Secondly, cults need an all-encompassing vision through which they neatly explain all of existence and man’s redemption from its grubbier aspects, in a tidy little paragraph. Thirdly, a cult needs members. A cult without members is just a lunatic masturbating on the Piccadilly Line.
To attract members, a cult needs an overarching philosophy, a promise of truth, enlightenment and ultimate redemption from man’s earthly woes. A cult also needs your money, not to mention your lobotomised devotion to its cause.
A cult encourages feet through its temple doors and bums onto its foldable chairs by promising its flock something devotees cannot get by joining a book club or a local pub darts team. Nothing else will do. To siphon those £20 notes from your wallet and the equity from your mortgage, cults must dangle a carrot unobtainable elsewhere. Call it a unique sales proposition.
And what is that USP? Eternal truth? Perhaps. Enlightenment? Maybe. Free coffee? Sure. Comradeship, camaraderie, community? There’s an alliterative slogan. Yes, yes, yes!
But that which a cult offers its flock is implicit. It’s unwritten in the small print. Sure, you show up for the free garibaldi and the chinwag, but you keep coming through the doors for one thing only.
It’s a thing one cannot get anywhere else—at least not without a heap of unpaid labour, and needless psychological, social, and financial risk. That’s right. Cults promise, at least to its more virile members, access to the common stock. By common stock, I don’t mean ladles of mung bean soup languishing in a grubby Yeti box. Nor the passing around of bum-sucked joints. In Plain English, men join cults in order to shag the wives and girlfriends of their fellow cult members. Every active cult on this earth operates on this implicit assumption. It’s like swinging but with compulsory choral music, undiagnosed personality disorders, and complimentary coq au vin.
The cult leader knows what the advertising executive knows. He knows what the Ferrari salesman knows and what everyone in between pretends not to know: men are simple creatures governed by appendage rather than brain. Men buy well-cut suits and plush cars because men know that women appreciate well-cut suits and plush cars. If a man could seduce a woman in a pop-up tent, the mortgage industry would dissolve overnight.
Excuse my reduction of half the population. Perhaps I am speaking only for myself. So, you can imagine my despair when I signed up to a very modern cult last week.
Why would I do such a thing? The dating game is currently funereal. Ask anyone. Tinder is drier than a dessicated cynic. I prefer the ways of old. Meeting a potential lover in a pub is no longer passé. But the dating game is a numbers game. Now where would I find a platoon of potential suitors all gathered in one room? Speed-dating? Pah! I’m not that desperate.
I scoured the online forums and settled on a meeting of ambitious, open-minded, and hopefully sinewy types all aligned in a common goal. But I should have known better.
As I navigated the bleachy corridors of the temple—a corporate meeting room in a mid-range Soho hotel, the doom song of my prospective new harem bounced off the walls:
‘Believe it! Achieve it! Believe it! Achieve it!’
Okay, I thought. At least they have goals. Following the metronomic beat, I peered through the windowpane. The horror! Seated in a semi-circle were 12 members all decked nose-to-tail in breathable athleisure garments, popular with bores who shoehorn into conversation their ‘elite sleep score.’ On each sinewy wrist hung a screen at which members pecked incessantly.
Before I could come to my senses, a twenty-something man with a Ted Bundy grin invited me to join the circle.
I Sharpied my name, a Jim Dixon of Lucky Jim fame, on the sticker and slapped it on my chest. Kingsley Amis, ardent novelist and prize-winning shagger, would hold steady, I assured myself. It’s either the radioactive wastelands of Tinder or this. Believe it. Achieve it.
The members were debating a recent brouhaha in which one of their high priests found himself embroiled. Stephen Bartlett, host of some podcast about insufferable twonks who optimise their every dreary moment, revealed that three glasses of wine ruined three days of his life. I sniggered over the fate of this faintly ludicrous person and his inglorious public seppuku.
Perhaps I gave the game away when I took a long draw of Gordon’s gin from the flask nestled in my jacket pocket.
“You know that’ll disrupt your dopamine system?” cried a minion to my left. “Think of the ruination of your sleep score, Jim! Your sleep score!” Before I could muster a reply, the platoon of perfectly dull, sentient spreadsheets surrounded me.
“With respect, Jim, perhaps your presence here is suboptimal.”
Scanning the semi-circle of earnest faces, I realised my assailant had a point. Of the twelve, not one was even discernibly female. All men, each united in a Sisyphean hellscape of dopamine detoxes and magnesium cocktails.
“All right,” I said. “I’m going. I’ll leave.”
As I scarpered down the corridor, the chanting and wailing and the speaking in tongues crashed around my ears.
In a nearby pub, whilst nursing a coffin-varnish gin and tonic, I settled for the inefficient method of carnal acquisition and signed up to Tinder.
“What’s your favourite book?” said a promising match.
“Lucky Jim,” I replied.
“Never heard of it,” she said.
Thank God, I thought.
“Fancy a drink?” I ventured.
“Not the worst idea, ever,” she said.
Funny. Yes, what I enjoy most is making conversation with whomever I am around, and I think that's an art :)
I feel for modern singles. I met my hubs at work. Would that even be tolerated now?
I heard about Bartletts wine problem 😂 what a pretentious precious lightweight he is. My god man, if 3 glasses of wine Sent you over the edge for 3 days there's something missing from your life - joy.