How old are you?
I thought you were around my age. I'm 33 and I don't feel old.
I was kind of depressed last night about lack of dating luck for the past 8 months and I found this book at work written by a Catholic priest and his ideas on some of this stuff made me question my desire for pleasure and attention from others.
Like he said that four false idols we worship in this culture are money, pleasure, beauty, and power.
Pursuing any of these four things will not lead to true happiness or joy in life and cause you to end up being spiritually bankrupt.
I think beauty is one of the worst ones because we hold up people simply for being artificially beautiful or living up to a beauty standard which is generally Aryan looks. Even when a hot person in pop culture is non-white it's only the ones who are really caucausian looking with big eyes or women like Beyonce who are so light they may as well not even be black.
But it's also a problem when all a person cares about is improving their physical appearance, working out just to be fit isn't going to give you a model body, bodybuilding and weightlifting are mainly done to feed the ego and vanity and to get attention, you might look better, but internally you will be lacking.
The pursuit of pleasure is another thing, people don't want to work hard or suffer to get anything in life, they just want to enjoy every day and they feel entitled to that joy. But you can't have true happiness without great suffering.
The priest said that self-sacrifice and devoting your life to serving others is the key to true happiness and to a worthwhile life.
So instead of being like how am I gonna get a girl to like me today, or how am I going to get laid or make more money, if you wake up every day being like "How can I help make someone's life better today?" you will lead a much more fulfilled life.
A perfect example of this is, have you ever talked to a guy who is a "pick up artist" or who gets tons of girls? They usually aren't even that happy. My friend Ed has gone through periods where he picks up several women a week but half the time he talks about suicide and can't seem to make it through a day without cocaine or a pint of whiskey.
Any man who sees women in terms of numbers like "She's a ten, or she's a 6," comes across as pathetically immature to me.
I have more respect for you from reading your posts on here than any guy like that.