The Two Doors

I was nineteen the first time a woman wanted me, and I ran.

Not in any way you could have seen. We were in her apartment, ostensibly to study, the textbooks open on the low table the way textbooks stay open in rooms where no studying is going to happen. I knew. Some animal part of me knew before I could have told you how: the angle of her body, the length of the pauses, the particular quality of a silence waiting to be ended. There was a moment. The kind of moment the whole of adolescence is supposedly a rehearsal for. She was there, and she was willing, and the door of the thing had swung open on its own, asking nothing of me at all.

And the floor dropped out of me.

Because no one had ever taught me what to do with being met. My father had not sat me down. The culture, for all its noise about sex, had handed me nothing usable, only the taboo, the snickering, the sense that this was a test every man was supposed to pass alone and in silence, with no instructions and no one to ask. So in the one moment intimacy was offered to me, freely, requiring nothing, I did the thing the unprepared do. I pulled back. I made it small. I went home.

And then I did the gesture that would define the next ten years of my life. I opened a laptop, and I typed, into a search bar, the words: how to seduce women.

Read that back. A girl had just offered me the actual thing, no technique required, and within hours I was at a desk in the dark looking for a method. The boy who cannot receive what is given to him goes looking for a system to get it instead.

The search took me where it took every lost boy of that era: into the forums.

What I did not understand at the time, what almost none of us understood, was that the men selling us our salvation were not seducers. They were marketers. The pickup industry and the internet-marketing industry were the same cohort, the same playbook, the same downloadable PDF, only with the target narrowed from anyone with a credit card to the specific, bottomless ache of a male who cannot get a date. There was a famous one, Double Your Dating, fifty dollars, which I did not pay; I pirated it, broke college kid that I was, and I have wondered since whether the author ever did a single thing in it himself or understood, better than I did, what a desperate man will buy.

After the PDF came the books. The Game. The mansion full of pickup artists with stage names and "methods." Down through the generations the movement mutated: the mystery and the routines hardening into the red pill, the red pill hardening into the rage-merchants who sell young men their resentment back to them at a markup. It was, I will admit, fun. It knew exactly how the male mind works, which is the same reason it was dangerous.

But here is the part that complicates the easy story. I had not come to it only for women. I had come to it from the self-help shelf, standing in a bookstore between the Eastern philosophy and the productivity titles, and pickup had been filed, in my mind, under self-improvement, its strangest and most honest subgenre. Because how do you become attractive to the person you want? You become someone worth wanting. The work points inward whether you mean it to or not.

So I did the boot camps. The brutal ones. The instructor would take you out and make you approach strangers: in the bars at first, shouting over the music, and later, the part I came to prefer, in daylight, on the street, in the bookstore, walking up to a woman in the cereal aisle to tell her, plainly, that she was beautiful. Not to get anything. As repetition. As a way to grind the ego down past the place where it could flinch.

The rejection was never the hard part. Most people, it turns out, are kind to a stranger offering a sincere compliment. The hard part was internal. It was the three seconds before you move, when the whole of your mind rises up to talk you out of being seen. I had gone looking for a way to get women and stumbled, without meaning to, into a discipline for dismantling the self. It was the most contemplative thing I had ever done, and it was wearing the worst possible costume.

Then the apps came, and the street I had bled to learn went obsolete.

You did not have to walk up to anyone anymore. You had a portal, a rectangle of glass offering, in theory, every available face within whatever radius you cared to name, and you could name anywhere, because location is a setting now. I swiped through its eras, one app after another. And what I felt, after a while, was less desire than a low nausea: the sense of standing at the lip of something with no bottom, that did not, in any way I could measure, want me to find it.

Here is the cruelty engineered into the portal. You see the faces. You never see your competition. You cannot feel the ten thousand other men reaching for the same face from the same dark rooms, and so you cannot understand why the arithmetic keeps refusing you, why a tenth of the men seem to gather most of the yes, and everyone else is left starving in front of a banquet. Both sides starve. The men who cannot get chosen, the women holding out for the few who will never settle. A whole generation at the feast, and no one is fed.

And once you see it as a machine, you cannot stop seeing the rest. The screen that taught a generation of men's bodies to answer to glass instead of skin, until the skin itself stopped answering. The surgeries, where men break their own shins now to be reset an inch taller, doing to themselves what women were always told to do. The old yogis warned that a man spends something like a pint of blood with every release; whether or not the biology is literal, the lethargy never lied. It is all one apparatus, and the apparatus runs on you: your attention, your restlessness, the stored and unspent charge of a young animal with nowhere to put it. The machine converts that charge into revenue and gives you, in exchange, the feeling of almost.

A friend once described the early years of an online game to me, World of Warcraft, back when it was new. He met a lawyer in there who gave him real advice about his real life. The thing was small then, and being small, it was intimate; strangers became something like kin. And then it crossed a threshold of scale that no founder can hold, and it went feral, and not even the people who built it could steer it back. Every village becomes a city becomes a crowd. Every intimacy technology I ever touched ran the same curve: alive at the start, when it was small, and dead past the point where it got large enough to matter.

The machine was not broken. It was working perfectly. It was never built to deliver me to anyone. It was built to keep me reaching.

I would like to tell you I left it in triumph — that I cracked the code, beat the game, walked away a winner. That is not what happened.

I did not get better at the game. I lost interest in the prey.

The shift was so quiet I cannot date it. Somewhere in those years the question I was asking changed beneath me, and one day I noticed I had spent a decade learning how to make a woman want me and not one single hour asking who the I was that thought it needed her. The hunger had never been for a body. The body was just the nearest thing the hunger could point at. And when I finally turned and followed the hunger back to its source, it did not lead to a woman. It led inward, to the one doing the wanting.

I found, to my surprise, that I was fine. Not resigned — fine. It is entirely possible to be alone and not be lonely; we have simply been trained not to believe it, because the whole arrangement depends on our not believing it. Marry, couple, produce the next cohort to hold up the last: there is an old machinery in that too, and a man is allowed to notice it and still wish the people inside it well.

What I started to see instead was that we are, all of us, sense addicts. The eye pulled helplessly toward the beautiful face. The tongue toward the sweet. The hand toward its own warmth. The senses are antennae that keep us permanently turned outward, ringing, reaching, certain the next signal is the one that finally satisfies. Yogananda had a phrase for the practice of withdrawing them — hanging up the sense telephone, taking the line that runs out to the world and, for a while each day, setting it gently down. Behind the ringing, he said, is the one who was always home.

This is the war the Bhagavad Gita is actually about, if you read it the way the yogis do — not a battle between armies on a plain but the battle inside a single body, between the energies that drag a man down into the senses and the ones that lift him toward the light behind them. Every swipe is a soldier on one side. Every still morning is a soldier on the other. The war of the sexes that I had studied like a science was only ever the outer shadow of this older, quieter, interior one.

So I stopped chasing. Not as a discipline I imposed, but as a thing that simply happened once I saw the board clearly. These days, when it comes, it comes; when it does not, that is also the answer. I let God take charge more than Tinder. And the strange part, the one no method ever delivered, is that life got interesting again, full of the small unscheduled surprises of a road you stop trying to control.

But I have learned to distrust my own conversions, and you should too.

Because look at the two retreats side by side. At nineteen, a woman wanted me and I turned away, out of fear, and called it not being ready. At thirty-something, the whole arena lay open and I turned away again, and called it God. From the outside, those two men are indistinguishable. Both close the door. Both leave the woman standing there. And the most honest question I can ask, the one I put to myself in the dark where the lying is easiest, is whether my surrender is the real thing or the most sophisticated retreat I have ever built. Fear, this time, in saffron robes.

The easiest person in the world to deceive is yourself. You can lie to everyone else and get away with it; you can spin a thing a hundred ways and half-believe each one. But there is a deeper place that always knows, and the whole work of a life is staying honest with it.

Consider the sentence I had been telling myself: the grass is never as green as it looks; you are just not seeing the manure underneath that keeps it green. It is a wise sentence. It is also, word for word, the sentence Aesop's fox tells himself about the grapes he cannot reach. The sage who has genuinely let go and the fox who merely failed say precisely the same thing. Renunciation and sour grapes wear the same face.

So how do you tell them apart? There is exactly one instrument that reads that deep, and it is envy. Watch yourself when the couple walks past: the happy ones, the ones who have the thing you have decided you no longer want. If something in you leans toward their life with the old ache of I am missing that, then the letting-go was a costume, and the body just told on you. If nothing leans, if the quiet stays quiet, it was real. You cannot fake the absence of envy. The lie always leaks out as longing for someone else's life.

Which brings me to a shrine in the mountains, and the cleanest answer I have ever been handed.

Nikko sits up in the cedars north of Tokyo, the great gilded shrine where the first Tokugawa shōgun is buried, founder of the dynasty that sealed Japan shut for two hundred years, lately famous again to people who have never climbed its steps, because of a television show. I went for the day, alone, the way I travel now. Inside the main precinct I noticed a cute girl, maybe in her mid-twenties, and the old machinery fired right on time: there she is, mark where she goes. But I did not move on her. The three-second urgency had long since worn down into something patient. I let the day arrange itself.

It did. At a vending machine I turned and she was there, reading the slip of an omikuji, the paper fortune you draw at a shrine and knot to a rack if the luck runs bad. I asked her what it said. We started walking, and we did not stop for the whole length of the grounds.

She was not Japanese but Filipina, as it turned out, teaching English in a rural town and now packing up a life to move home to Manila. Her parents were there too, waiting outside the paid gate; the fee was not worth it to them, so she had come through alone. We traded Instagram handles at the end, the way people do, and afterward I kept messaging her. A few days later, when I learned we were both near Kamakura (an hour, it turned out, from crossing paths a second time), I proposed we make a proper day of it.

That was when she told me she had a boyfriend at home.

I want to be exact about what happened in me when she said it. Nothing fell. I had been fairly sure she was warm on me, and maybe she had only been warm, and either way the thing I braced for — the drop, the deflation, the sour reflex of the passed-over man — did not come. I checked for it. It genuinely was not there. The polygraph I had been carrying for years read clean, in the exact situation that a decade earlier would have wrecked me for a week.

And then she did the thing I keep turning over. She did not give me herself. She gave me a recommendation: a town a couple of hours out by train, Chichibu, somewhere she had loved. So I went. Alone, on her word, up the line, and I walked the town, and I still carry that day in me as one of the good ones.

I only learned afterward what Chichibu is. It is the seat of a pilgrimage: thirty-four temples to Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy, one of the old sacred walking circuits of Japan, the kind of route people have traced on foot for centuries to find a thing they cannot name. She had mentioned the temples; I don't think either of us knew what we were standing inside of. A woman I would never so much as date had pointed me, without meaning to, straight at a pilgrimage. And I had walked it.

She did not give me herself. She gave me a road.

Set the two doors beside each other. At nineteen, a woman opened a door and I fled it into a search bar. At a shrine in the cedars, a woman closed one, and I walked away light, toward a temple road I did not know was holy. The same man. Turned the whole way around.

I meant to write something much colder than this.

I meant to write about the war, the oldest one, men and women, and how loud it has gotten. About a civilization quietly wiring itself for solitude: children in the same room speaking to each other through their phones because the eyes have become too much; the first machine companions arriving to murmur back exactly what a lonely person wants to hear; the cradles emptying across every developed country at once, as though the species had taken a vote it does not remember casting. It is easy to stand above all of that and narrate the collapse. I did, for years. It is a way of feeling large while doing nothing.

But the diagnosis from above has a flaw the old teachers caught a long time ago. You cannot fix it from there. You were never going to mend the loneliness of a civilization with a policy, or a movement, or a one-way ticket to somewhere the women still smile at strangers. People burn whole lives trying to change a nation. They have never once met the representative of their own district. They could do more good on their own street than they will ever do at the scale they are shouting into.

How can you set the world in order when you cannot set yourself in order? The Confucians built a staircase out of that question: cultivate the self, and the family orders itself; order the family, and then the state; order the state, and then peace under heaven. Every step rests on the one beneath it, and the bottom step, the one bearing all the weight, is you.

Which means the war in the world and the war in me were never two things. They are one war at two scales. The thing tearing through the species, the reaching that never arrives, the senses ringing out into a void, is the same thing that ran through me at that desk at nineteen, and the only stretch of the whole battlefield where I have any command at all is the one square meter of ground I am standing on. I do not get to win the outer war. I get to tend the inner one, and let the ordering, if it ever comes, ripple outward from there at its own pace, most of it long after I am gone.

This is the part that will not resolve cleanly, and I have stopped trying to make it. The world goes on falling while you tend your one square meter. That is not a triumph. It is closer to a vow: to be in the world and not of it, to walk through the machine without being run by it, to keep the one war a man can win and leave the rest to a larger hand than his.

Come back to the desk in the dark.

The boy is nineteen. The search bar is glowing. He has just turned from a woman who wanted him, because no one ever taught him how to be wanted, and he is about to type the words that will route the next ten years of his life through every method and forum and machine ever built to harvest exactly his kind of ache. I cannot reach him. You cannot reach him. The words are already half-typed.

But there is another man on a train somewhere north of Tokyo, alone, on the word of a woman he will never date, riding two hours toward a town full of temples he does not yet know are sacred. He is not reaching for anything. He is only going where the road said to go.

They are the same man. The whole distance between them is the only distance that was ever mine to walk.

From the Road

I wrote this flat on my back with a stomach bug, just home from the trip these scenes are stolen from, too wrung out to dress any of it up. It is the most personal thing I have sent you, and I nearly didn't. If it found you, if you are out somewhere on this same question, in the machine or lately out of it, trying to tell your surrender from your fear, send it to the one person you know who would understand, and then go tend your square meter.

— The Pilgrim Age