Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
I like poker because it mirrors real life. In poker, if a player can convince others that they have something valuable, they get rewarded the same as someone who does. This is no different than getting a job offer, winning a political election, or getting a girl out on a first date.
The invention of social media has made it easier than ever to inflate value. People are never as virtuous as they are online. That’s the beauty of being online. You can have “Proverbs 31” in your bio and call somebody a racial slur. You can post a boomerang of yourself raising a glass to the birthday girl while feeling inadequate about how far behind you are in life.
As an example, here’s a list of common phrases people say online vs. what they actually mean:
We out here. “I’m home by myself.”
It costs nothing to be kind. “That’s still too high of a price.”
Chase dreams, not people. “I have succeeded in neither endeavors”
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. “Is what I wish other people believed.”
Live. Love. Laugh. “I have no purpose.”
In the book “The Dawn of Language,” a theory stated that the first practical use of language was to tell a lie. Maybe that’s why we love spending time with animals so much—because they are incapable of lying.
The Art of War states that “All war is deception.” Having played a lot of deception games, I don’t have a problem with people lying to me. I treat it as part of the game. In dating, people often lie to avoid the pain of rejection. While telling a lie has the potential to keep us from getting hurt, it also keeps us from experiencing love.
If you ask ChatGPT what love is, he’ll say that it’s a multifaceted emotion. Scientist and inventor Itzhak Bentov, in his exploration of the physics of consciousness in his book “Stalking the Wild Pendulum,” says that emotions are confined to the physical and astral levels of reality while love is “an energy or radiation that pervades the whole cosmos” and “possibly the basis of what we know as the phenomenon of gravitation.”
Gravity is more than what makes the apple fall from the tree. It’s what makes atoms fall in love with one another to form molecules and what makes stars fall in love with one another to create galaxies. We all have our own gravitational fields that bring things to us that match our frequency. The stronger someone’s gravitational field is, the more “pull” they have. In case you didn’t know, that’s a slang term referring to one’s success in dating.
A controversial Twitter user who goes by the username Rivelino went viral because of his theory called the “Green Line Test.” According to this theory, when there’s a photo of a couple, the partner who leans into the other is the submissive one. This is illustrated by drawing green lines over the people’s bodies to see who’s more slanted. Although this theory has been vehemently criticized as being sexist and misogynistic, it doesn’t end at romantic relationships. Rivelino extends his theory to groups of friends where the individual others lean into is said to have higher levels of esteem, power, and status.
The green line theory expresses how we signal value through body language. The scientific basis of the theory may be rooted in gravitational fields. When someone has a strong center of gravity, all things energy curve into them—money, animals, people etc. Gen Z refers to this as “aura points.”
So how do we increase our gravitational pull and gain more aura points? If we go back to the wisdom of Itzhak Bentov, we find that it is by increasing our capacity for love. No surprise there. Once again, all answers lead to love.
Love requires us to open our hearts and feel our feelings. Khalil Gibran, in his book “The Prophet,” says that to know the secrets of the universe, we must know our hearts, and in that knowledge, we become a fragment of God’s heart.
I’ve been going to this drawing club every week for the past couple of weeks, and I’ve learned to not draw what my eyes see but what my heart sees. Maybe that’s why we have a desire for art—because art mirrors the parts of ourselves that are normally unseen. The creator of the hit TV show Bojack Horseman published a series of short stories in a book titled “Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory.” That is the ultimate fantasy. Forget money. Forget success. That is the true meaning of life. It is the greatest gift we can offer ourselves: to see ourselves not with our eyes but with our hearts; to see ourselves the way God does.
