
Right now, we dwell in the infancy of what AI could become, with the vision of the AI film being not too far off from a plausible result. Population is declining everywhere except India and Africa, and thanks to plastic contamination, MRNA "vaccines", and the inevitable end of plentiful petroleum-fuel fertilized food, we are looking at a hollowing out of crowds that makes the current situation in South Korea look tame. This is nothing to panic about -- panic never helped anyway -- it is just one of those things we have to deal with.

The role of the etheric plane
Isn't it ironic that the world has more people on it than ever before and more ways for strangers to meet than ever before, yet it is nearly impossible for the average young person to land and maintain a lasting spousal relationship? Many attempts will be made to explain the current set of problems and most will fail, and the reason they will generate more heat than light is ignorance of a condition of being called the etheric plane.
As I have mentioned time and time again in these essays, etheric starvation is the commonest condition of our era. What the hell is etheric starvation, you ask, and what does it have to do with AI and the price of tea in China? Well, in order to understand etheric starvation, we need to allow for thoughts about what occultism has to say about the etheric plane. Atheists, so-called rationalists, and fundie Christians are advised to scroll away. The following is talk for the open-minded that requires conceptualizing beyond artificial Meatworld limits. Please go back to your comforting circle jerks, empty universes, and ignosophy. The grown ups are talking; you would refuse to understand. Besides, I hear Sam Harris is looking for new subs.
All things are energy and physical matter is the densest form of energy. Traditional occultists (and ex-atheists) like myself attempt to understand these hierarchies by labeling them as planes. We also acknowledge a causal relationship between planes and though they are separate and discreet, matter in the material plane (Meatworld) is an obtuse, clumsy expression of more subtle planes, all of which originate from the subtlest plane of all, the spiritual plane. The planes are not faraway places you go if you are "good" or "bad". The planes are not the Christian vision of heaven and hell. For everything in the material plane exists at once, right along with the astral, mental, and spiritual planes. Our feeble human brains can only perceive the material plane and some of the etheric. When it comes to the astral, our perception is a hot mess. Very few have mastered anything as subtle as a mental plane concept. As for the spiritual? Ay yi yi.
Let me explain it another way: I suck at dancing. I have the Meatworld requirements to be a dancer: a strong body, fairly graceful limbs, good physical health. On the etheric or energy plane, it goes askew. I am unable to sense when dancers around me are going left: I go right. My movements on this plane of energy are clumsy and vague. On the astral plane, I can envision someone else dancing but despite being able to remember entire half-hour long piano sonatas after two weeks of work, I cannot remember the directions I have been given in order to execute a full dance routine. On the mental plane, my grasp of dancing is nearly non-existent. Achieving any kind of dance expertise would take years and possibly multiple lifetimes of study and practice.
Dancing is not all that different between the sheets, and I suppose I'm terrible at that too, but my husband seems happy enough with it so there's that. Dancing across a stage or horizontally (or bent over, or in a swimming pool, you do you, Boo) are mostly-etheric phenomena. That is to say sexual intercourse is satisfying primarily because of what it makes happen on the plane of energy and electricity between physical Meatworld and the imagination.
Etheric starvation can be understood as a failure and lack of feng shui. Ugly rooms, insufficient light, bad airflow, exposure to the flying arrows of cars whizzing down roads, and more contribute to etheric poison that causes everything from bad moods to outright misfortune to all who live in the desensitized environment. Add EMFs, devitalized food, and indoorsy lifestyles and everyone in the world (present company included) is starving on the etheric. People get fat as an attempt to remedy their etheric starvation; this is why Americans and British people are so fat and Chinese and Indians are getting fatter.
The Trad Wife presents the ultimate remedy for etheric starvation or at least the illusion of that remedy. In the most direct way, the Trad Wife marries young while she is still extremely physically attractive. In between popping out kids (female fertility and etheric potency are directly linked) she takes care of her man as a homemaker and in bed. Unlike certain Christian wives of old, she does not have crippling shame about the natural, healthy process that makes babies.
Sex is primarily an etheric phenomenon where etheric bodies polarize and refill each other. Our etheric bodies are typically the opposite gender of our physical bodies. Our astral bodies represent yet another flip: the classic male pattern is to have a female etheric body and a male astral body. The classic female pattern is to have a male etheric body and a female astral body.
The elaborate rituals of etheric labor in the form of housework that Trad Wives do (or seem to do, as at least half of Trad Wife influencer reels are pure playacting for the camera) replenish their husband's and kid's etheric energy. A woman's energy in Meatworld is yin: her body is built to receive, it is smaller than a male body, and it needs more physical protection. A man's energy in Meatworld is yang: his body is built to kick ass and inseminate. Women have yin energy on the physical plane and yang energy on the etheric plane. Men have yang energy on the physical plane and yin energy on the etheric plane. When a woman orgasms, she pushes a concentrated wave of her own yang etheric energy just as men push out sperm and semen when they orgasm. When men masturbate, they lay themselves bare on the etheric, and if there is no female orgasm in return, they end up raw and compromised on the etheric energy layer. Because of this pattern of absorption, men end up with what traditional occultists call larvae. In John Michael Greer's book Monsters, he describes larvae as "etheric parasites who normally feed on cast-off etheric shells but sometimes fasten onto the damaged etheric bodies of the living". Larvae are not visible to anyone in Meatworld except clairvoyants. More often they are felt. Larvae proliferate in funeral homes and nursing homes. Hospitals, despite being materially sanitized, are absolutely teeming with them. When a man comes without the woman coming in return, the door is opened to etheric larval parasites who rush in to fill the void. Spiritual ignorance being what it is these days, he will have no idea what happened. All he will know is that he feels a low level of anger which is likely papering over subconscious dread and fear. Since his etheric body is likely already compromised, his etheric starvation will worsen.
Because biological women are usually etheric males, women don't have the same set of problems and disadvantages on the etheric plane. As a kind of tradeoff, women are more physically vulnerable than men. In Meatworld, women catch more STDs because of the nature of our equipment down there. Women are also more often subjugated for their sexual or etheric contributions, and this is why most housecleaners and sex slaves are female. Fertile women also have the additional condition of being able to get pregnant, for better or for worse.
AI girlfriend to the rescue?
Enter AI. Human beings are feisty, willful, and disobedient. AI girlfriends at the moment are mostly confined to an agreeable set of images on a screen. Lonely men and women seek out these creations as a refuge on the astral plane, and they certainly fulfill that role on the astral plane where images live. Perhaps problems arise when a man of few words has no choice but to engage in a talkathon with his AI girlfriend in order to achieve interactions; I don't know what people are willing to put up with. Unlike a real woman, an AI girlfriend will always be dependent upon the original logos of the programmers who brought her to life. Without them, she won't have the remotest ability to sense what a guy needs, let alone cook it.
Let's face it -- the path to a man's heart is through his stomach. If women as a whole in the industrialized world still largely felt it was their duty to handcraft daily meals for their husbands and families, the divorce rate would look a great deal more like India's, which is higher than it used to be but still dramatically lower than the US. Cooking is alchemy. It is not significantly different from the processes of old used to ostensibly find the philosopher's stone. Home cooking replenishes the etheric body. Women live longer than men partially because they have an etheric male to prepare their food: themselves. Etheric males, i.e. women, can powerfully seed their homes with etheric energy and vitality. Men don't usually have this natural advantage, which is why I will never understand the popularity of male celebrity chefs: men usually lack the etheric sensitivity that women are gifted/cursed with, and that is what makes men generally better at dirty jobs and worse at cooking and aesthetic matters than women.
Oh, the places my mind goes...
Even if we get to the point where AI robots service our every need, it is only the rich who will be able to afford the small army of robot help it takes to run an upper class household. Robot help is already a double-edged sword. Robots have the problem of autistic literalism -- for instance Roombas that mistake dog crap for regular mess and proceed to smear it in a fine layer across the kitchen floor. In one 2015 Google Photo gaffe, an AI system labeled references to black people as gorillas. The problem proved so pervasive that Google Photos brainiacs removed the word "gorilla" in its entirety from the Google Images algorithm for a time.
Future AI girlfriend tech will combine the Real Doll with working eyes, heating pad boobs and vulvae, and flushable, self-wetting orifices if it has not happened already. Though Ray Kurzweil's longed-for Singularity may achieve an AI girlfriend who can manage an upper middle class cocktail party without racial epithets, my guess is that there will always be an air of the uncanny about her, no matter how convincingly human she is made.
Lonely robots for lonely men
As it stands, AI remains in an exceedingly primitive state where the best it can do is deep fake videos and spying on plebes in hopes of forcing social credit scores. If AI + robots gets to the point where it can scramble an egg without adding dirty dishwater or worse, a machine still lacks the etheric male body that gives the real woman her power. The guy who mates with the AI avatar or the working Real Doll is still a coomer. As I have mentioned in a past essay, the most common pattern among men is to desire a harem whereas women want The One. This happens because of their etheric bodies: men want a colony of etheric fountains, not a collection of parasitic larvae. Women want the Perfect Guy to lavish their etheric wealth upon, not some group of betas who siphon off vitality.
Girl fight!
Another key fact overlooked by the AI girlfriend as solution is that many humans thrive on drama. Half the fun of any given sultan and his harem was to pit courtesans and eunuchs against each other in competition for his attention and affection. Pimps are the debased modern equivalent of the sultans of old. A pimp's energy comes not only from grandstanding and lousy hip hop "music" but also the energy he makes by pitting his whores against each other. Robots can be programmed to fight, but the angst will not come from the true place of agony the narcissist drama king wants unless those robots develop Will.
The current state of men puts them between a rock and a hard place. They are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A large number of single women believe they want security via a high-earning man, but if I had a dollar for every depressed, unhappy rich couple I have heard of, I would be a billionaire. If I had to put my finger on the one thing that is making would-be lovers and spouses miserable, it would be transactionalism. Transactionalism is a term I have coined for the belief that the nice or mean things we do to/for each other can be quantified in material sums. Women attempt to enforce transactionalism by essentially putting prices on their own heads and bodies. The extreme example is the influencer who ends up as a Dubai porta-potty because she thinks it is worth degradation and humiliation to own a collection of designer handbags. There is also the 26 year old virgin transactionalist who waited for marriage and two years later finds the childbearing ship sailed when she was 21 and with a poor guy for whom she would not put out. Men transactionalize their relationships with women all the time, so don't think they are getting off easy. The quantization of female attributes is at an all-time peak, and though women mainly amplify their own dysmorphia, there is no shortage of men rating women solely based on their looks and sexual histories.
One of the most egregious examples of transactionalist scorekeeping is when women attempt to get their husbands to do household and fix-it tasks by making some kind of poster or dry erase board and checking off bullet points for every task he completes. Often these bullet points are incentivized with rewards. This boneheaded practice is endorsed by plenty of marriage counselors, influencers, and self-help gurus and it can and will end your marriage if you let it. Imagine coming home to a messy house after a long day of being down-dressed by your bureaucrat taskmaster of a boss only to face a chart of inadequacy from your bureaucrat taskmaster of a wife. No thanks -- being married to a robot is easier and better, right?
No. A robot is just another convenience in a convenience-addicted culture. Microwaves do not provide better food for us. Don't even get me started about my hypotheses about why microwaves poison food. Suffice to say it's faster, not better. CGI-laden movies are not inherently better than analog ones, only different with less emphasis on plot and perhaps less creativity in props and stunts. Replacing a real limb with a prosthetic one can be great, but not if you have to cut off the real limb to gain the benefit. Using AI for sex, household chores, or defusing bombs is a fine thing. Thinking AI can replace human companionship or somehow heal what has gone terribly wrong is problematic at best and fatuous at worst. Do machines have the ability to make our lives better? Sitting in my air-conditioned room typing on a home computer on a 90 degree day, my answer is "sometimes".
no subject
Date: 2024-06-18 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-18 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-18 02:00 pm (UTC)We fake sugar with aspartame.
We fake health with medication.
We fake fruit juice with flavor crystals.
We fake happiness with drugs.
We fake immunities with vaccines.
We fake cooking with microwaves.
We fake understanding with education.
We fake experiences with movies.
In fact, we've faked so much we now even fake our own fakes - for while we can fake love with prostitution, we can also fake prostitution with pornography.
We have faked so much that there's nothing left to fake but ourselves: bring on the AI robots!
Squire Trelane welcomes you to Gothos, traveller.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-18 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-19 02:39 am (UTC)I'm the guy who received the optimistic relationship readings a while back.
Spent the last couple of weeks with my folks and I'm left wondering to what extent your essay applies to my family. Any recommendations for further reading?
no subject
Date: 2024-06-19 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-20 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-20 04:07 pm (UTC)but to the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet.
From Proverbs.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-24 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-24 09:38 am (UTC)Ever since starting to read your essays I’ve begun thanking my household objects I use and my food, and it’s true, I do feel more nourished. In fact I’ve noticed that if I don’t thank and bless my food, I don’t digest it as well.
It’s been interesting seeing the tradwife phenomenon pop up. It’s demonised to hell and back in the popular media, of course, but that just stinks of projected resentment and jealousy. And whilst I agree with you that a certain proportion looks staged, I think this movement in many ways is genuine and will only grow in popularity. People people are really over the ‘modern’ ‘progressive’ double-income lifestyle which leaves people and families haggard and as usual with modern ‘progress’ seems to leave us further behind.
I’m of the ‘dating’ age, so it will be interesting to see what happens with my age group going forward. Of course I tend to attract more traditional men so I may not be an objective guide to the cultural zeitgeist.
Please do continue on your hypotheses about why microwaves poison food!! I’d love to hear it!
Thanks for sharing your wonderful essay 🤗
— Ekaterina
no subject
Date: 2024-06-24 04:18 pm (UTC)100% agreed on people being jealous of tradwives. I'm beyond the age of being triggered by it though I can see why so-called feminists go into attack mode. A return to those values undermines their livelihoods and everything they stand for because it attacks them at the level of the astral pyramid. For half a century, media has insisted a woman is at her most autonomous, beautiful, and powerful if she stands alone without a man to care for her or protect her. Entire industries depend upon women having this image in the forefront of their minds. Now it is becoming evident that the image is a sham for many. We are not all Amelia Earhart.
I will consider putting the microwave thing into a future essay in more detail.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-24 05:08 pm (UTC)With the more, shall we say, "regular" kind of masturbation, a man is more aware of what he is actually doing, and the shame (aided by his religious background, if he has one) may limit it. The simulation of a real woman might not do that to the same degree, so it could make his etheric starvation worse.
It is perhaps likely that this is a temporary problem, as our society may not have the energy for such frivolities in the near future. But we shall see.
Christopher Kinyon
no subject
Date: 2024-06-25 02:16 am (UTC)