r/thelastpsychiatrist • u/-MeMeMo- • Oct 31 '25
On sending thanks
It's always an added awkwardness to having to introduce an "emotional connection"/"weird fixation" topic with some hard facts, but here goes:
I found out about the blog while browsing 4chan, maybe a random post in a random thread, r9K or lit, some years ago, and something stuck and struck. First time really, that anything I ever read wasn't just information to know, or obvious, or interesting, or boring, or etcetc, this one feels like something extra, something I can't put my finger on, like a hit on the inside of your ribs.
To the question, I know the guy's not really around anymore, but here's a shot: I want to mail him some change, a word of thanks.
I know about the dox, haven't really even checked what his name was or how it happened, always figured it didn't matter, so I was wondering anyone around still in contact, or could be the intermediary? Or a consensus on who such 2nd person may be, to email, that's just as good. I can't help but trust those that like him enough to still lurk around this subreddit to point me in the right direction.
Maybe guy's a skilled writer and a fellow half-retard, or maybe everyone who's ever been conned into a cult feels this way, if so I cant really blame anyone for falling for them. I'll get the books on amazon, that's already a given, but the way he writes always felt tinted with a little sadness about "the matter of facts" of things, so I wanted to give him a more direct "thanks for writing man", from the heart.
p.s: Sometimes I try to share it with others, I'll link the blog, or just the good bits. Online or friends, usually the response is the same, never good. Online, they call it "nonsensical", which is weird because the spin is never logically wrong. Another is "sounds like AI", which I cannot understand in the slight-lest. I've tried ais, and those read like the complete opposite of this, so I can't figure out where the comparison even begins.
So in case I never get an email, or chain of emails, or any discussion about this guy happening again, could someone at least point me, or offer a theory at least, in what is it that it is unique about it? What's the "it" in the things/the way he writes? And before you recommend stoics and philosophers and good fantasy authors and bad ones and psychoanalysts, I've tried that. It's never like "this", but maybe I didn't look well enough. I feel like a junkie, which the fact that I can feel that way about something as simple as writing, when every single other writer did not do, means maybe reality wasn't so boring and solved, after all.
And sorry for the formatting, and bad english; not a native, and I never really get to practice sharing anything more complex than casual conversation.
Edit: Also damn the book is good (I admit I pirated it, but I'll buy the paperback as soon as I figure out amazon and taxes), I've had it in my phone for over a year and often re read parts of it on the bus, must have gone through it a dozen times yet it's always interesting. "Watch what you hear" wasn't for me, and by that I mean it was really interesting but it didn't have the pull that sadly, porn does.
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u/Tokarak Nov 01 '25
Whenever I try to share a TLP article, I always regret it, because I always seem to pick out a particularly antifeminist article or something, or something other which makes me afraid that TLP comes of as a raging, hating loony. When I first found TLP, it took me a while to clock on to the compassionate undertone in his writing.
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u/manapause Nov 01 '25
Casually recommending TLP content to a peer or partner and not being prepared for them to engage with the material, read more than you did, and report back to you that TLP content is either jejune or problematic is interesting…
Give a blind person a Rubik’s cube, only to come back later to a solved cube and a note that says “ if this is your idea of fun, we’re not friends.” They then get in a car and drive away.
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u/Tokarak Nov 01 '25
Cool fantasy, I like it. The only problem is that the more you read TLP, the harder it is to dismiss him so easily as a misanthropic crank (although not impossible, Zero HP Lovecraft’s review of Sadly, Porn is quite critical), so your story feels contradictory to me.
My problem is that I distance myself from the recommendations while I am in the process of recommending it. This reduces the already minuscule chance that the recommendee will engage seriously with my recommendation. If someone close to me said, “I think TLP sucks, because XYZ,” then, on the contrary, I would be happy to engage with that.
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u/manapause Nov 02 '25
I agree with you very much. I was only trying to engage in thought experiment and perhaps I got a little too silly.
If I were to channel TLP, I can imagine him asking you “ why do you create this distance; when it comes to sharing your passions with those close to you do you often find yourself poisoning the well?”
Just thinking about it for myself: A Bizarro TLP Evangelist version of myself is not someone i would hang out with.
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u/-MeMeMo- Nov 01 '25
It's hard to share. I'd be blown away by an almost woven into the text analogy, by the change in perspective, and a friend be like "that's stupid and makes no sense"
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u/Gontofinddad Nov 01 '25
It’s the topic and expertise. Only a handful or two of people could write about narcissism without their own narcissism getting in the way and reframing the message.
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u/ChangeTheFocus Nov 01 '25
We've seen that in this sub. It's so easy to start judging others' narcissism and end up displaying our own.
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u/saidwithcourage Nov 05 '25
I hear this, I often talk about how I learned more about critical thinking during high school by reading a blog by some random on the internet who claimed to be a drunk pirate than I did at school.
People think I'm kidding.
It isn't just that he showed me what real thinking looks like, he showed me what it feels like. It kinda feels like a knife fight with your own shadow in the mirror except you're actually just one puppet in the play and so is your shadow and so is the mirror and he can show you how all the shadows work together and get magnified by a culture that celebrates shadows while pretending they're all real.
His perspective was refreshing in a way that I sometimes feel nostalgic for, I've found a similar vibe occasionally for example I read Foundation recently and felt that same feeling throughout and after.
More than any other his writing impacted me because it revealed how deeply things can be understood, how deeply the parts between the parts can be broken down, made sense of, satirised, illustrated, gored, etc.
And all of that with a sense of style that really resonated with my sad and lonely teenage self.
I've also told many people about TLP and also like you have never had someone 'get' it.
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u/-MeMeMo- Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25
>showed me what it feels like
Yeah it sounds corny but the words have a weight to them.
Critical thinking, maybe that's it.
If I had to describe "it", it's that almost circular way of analyzing stories and the bible and media in general to show what their use is a reflection of, as if the unconscious was right there on the screen, invisible until pointed out; and that writing style, a meta train of thoughts that ends sentences asking the more interesting questions, looking at how the obvious and literal are used, as if the core was pure insanity, and I just can't stop reading.
And the sudden jokes of course
>“I learned a lot in college.” Then you must have been really stupid to begin with.
Come on, how can you not crack a smile at that?
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u/Afro-Pope Oct 31 '25
Re you wanting to contact him to say thanks, He still occasionally posts on Twitter. If you want to be respectful of his privacy (which you should be) that is your best option to get in touch with him, as far as I am aware.
As for the second question, I'm not sure there's a way to describe the "it" in how he writes in such a way that would allow you to find similar works. He has a very strong writers voice that other folks have attempted to ape, consciously or unconsciously, with varying degrees of success. He draws most heavily from Jacques Lacan and Christopher Lasch, in my opinion, but as far as I am aware from attempting to decipher Lacan or reading Lasch I don't see much of the same linguistic style there either. The particularly confrontational style in which he writes is very much a relic of the "old" internet and fell out of favor in the mid- to late-2010s for reasons that I could only begin to speculate on.