This is part 1 of a short series on self-betrayal, which here focuses on its description. Part 2 deals with its origins.
Self-betrayal is so widespread in our world that no one talks about it, the same way that talking about the outrageous inequality we live under makes people around us roll their eyes, sigh, and say that "yes, we all know about this, so now can we go back to the serious subjects?", or that everyone is constantly in denial of their own mortality, to the point where they do not realize the extent to which they are in denial about it.
The man who betrays himself 1 cannot truly love anyone, which is why wage slaves can be nice, very nice in fact since niceness is the unofficial religion of our times, but never loving. Those who live a life of compromise will only be nice as long as they have what they need: financial stability in order to keep a roof on their head, some access to modern technologies which have become necessary to live (phone, computer, maybe a car), people around them to not feel too lonely, etc.
If any of those things ever gets snatched away however, you can bet that the "nice" person will swing between states of anger, which our world tries to repress but which still show up here and there, and depression, self-pity, completely giving up and despairing at their situation. At no point do those people ever meaningfully change however, their concern is and will remain themselves.
They might complain about their situation, complain a lot in fact since it is the easiest way for most people to relate with one another, but at no point will they ever do anything serious to live a full life. They have got many plans, many ifs and perhaps, many complaints, but no action whatsoever. The man who betrays himself is first and foremost a cuck, someone who is afraid of action and direct experience, and prefers to let society, or less abstractly a boss, a screen or a self-help book, tell him what to do, what to think, and what even to desire. 2
You can never run away from yourself, which is why a life of compromise manifests in all sorts of ways, most notably:
§1. Terrible sleep, because the life you haven't lived comes back to haunt you at night. People notice their inability to sleep and come up with all sorts of complicated reasons as to why their sleep is bad, because the ego loves complication (and distraction) as a way to not look at itself, but ultimately your life is a reflection of who you are. Of course, some of the common explanations are valid to some extent, such as a constant exposure to screens, or a lack of physical exercise, or too much mental activity and stress without any corresponding form of relaxation, will all lead someone to sleep poorly. These are all partially correct, but they miss the deeper and simpler reason that only someone who is not aligned with something important would spend so much time in front of a screen to begin with, or be constantly stressed out and obsessively thinking. Ultimately, someone who cannot sleep is someone who hasn't lived well.
§2. A tendency (and desire) to overwhelm yourself with pleasure and self-gratification when at home, where you have all the freedom in the world, a nice contrast from the restrictive prison known as work. As Darren Allen would say 3, we go from an Orwellian workplace to a Huxleyan home, and think of the latter as freedom, when both are similar in their denial of a conscious life. The loop of up and down is what keeps us in place ('kinertia' as Darren Allen would again say) because we always have a new 'up' to satisfy us, which is why all the people who betray themselves and live like zombies constantly have a new thing to look forward to, something which our world is of course very much complicit in creating.
§3. Terrible sex life. Stiff laughter. Rigid posture. Expressionless face. They don't really enjoy being in their body, often walking like they are dragging around an anchor, rather than being infused with vitality and an excitement for life. The body does not lie, which is why an inexpressive body is a reflection of a repressed life, one which is held together by tension and self-coercion.
Our society has no use whatsoever for embodiment and vitality, which is why people who betray themselves to fit inside it look so lifeless, zombies walking between their car and the office. But because the ego cannot be allowed to look at the root of its problems, for it is the cause, they adopt explanations which allow them to never look at the obvious truth right in front of them, and blame things like mental "illnesses", or the economy, or the government, or this or that evil politician, for their inability to enjoy life. (More in point 8.)
§4. Nothing is really vivid, or fascinating, or memorable, or beautiful, or funny, everything is just kind of "fine". How was work? It was fine. How was the food? It was fine. How was sex? It was fine. How was the weather? Actually the weather was shit because people love to complain about it, since it is one of the few things which doesn't involve human agency. (I guess that climate change has somehow found a way to even blame the weather on people)
Most people go through life as if they were a corpse jolted around by shocks to their nervous system, which makes their body "laugh" or "enjoy" something, but really, behind their eyes, there is nothing, just a porn stare which craves or hates things, but never appreciates anything for what it is. No one stops to look at the sky because it's boring, no one listens to the birds, no one really sits down and tastes the food, too busy scrolling on their phone, experience passes by them because they aren't interested in anything. Except the stuff which is useful for them, which is why self-help is one of the things which people still read, because they get something useful for it. 4
§5. Speaking of experiences passing them by, people who betray themselves have an intense time anxiety. Because they are not really living, they are terrified of their own death, since they cannot rest at peace knowing they lived a full life. This means that death, and anything which evokes fear, uncertainty, loss, must be kept at bay, not consciously, because consciousness is precisely the enemy, but subconsciously, sweeping everything under the rug and forgetting you have done so.
So they fill their time with inert activity, time fillers, which they can do while remaining unconscious, which is why video games are so popular in our times, but all of this amounts to nothing, which is what prompts them to look back at their time and feel like they've wasted most of it, because indeed they have. Instead of taking responsibility and doing something about it however, they simmer in their anxiety and blame life itself for it. "Time passes faster when you are older! How cruel! Existence is so terrible!"
It never occurs to them that time passes faster when you are unconscious, which is why sitting in stillness and silence makes time go by slower, why artists so often talk about love as if it was eternal, because love has a way of melting our sense of time, and why young children (before they are plugged into screens at least) do not feel like time goes by quickly, because everything is so novel and strange to them that they can only deal with life by being conscious, they haven't learned how to live on autopilot yet, thank God.
§6. On that subject, people who are genuinely themselves, such as young children before they go to school, those who simply enjoy life and being around people, and those who have done the work to let go of the false self bolstered by society, have a way to trigger those who have betrayed themselves. Like a prisoner envious of those with more freedom than them, except that in this case the prisoner is responsible for their condition, but is in denial about it, which is why inauthentic people are angry in ways that they cannot explain.
They see someone taking a stroll through a park, enjoying the sunlight and walking without any worry in the world, and somehow feel like this is unfair. This person is not allowed to be like this, everyone is supposed to be miserable, and anxious, and cripplingly self-conscious, otherwise what does that say about me? It's simply impossible that I have been torturing myself for nothing whatsoever, I am normal, which means that there is something wrong about them.
Such is the game of rationalization of the man who has betrayed himself. He convinces himself that people who are joyful in life must be stupid, because he thinks that his suffering must have some noble cause behind it, because he's not willing to examine that his self-betrayal is due to a lack of courage, and has nothing to do with intelligence whatsoever.
§7. As such, there is an association between value and suffering, the rationalization of the pointless sacrifice of the living dead. They cannot admit to themselves that their self-betrayal is done out of fear, so they convince themselves that living a life they hate is somehow good, that there is a dichotomy between joy and virtue, because there is nothing worse for the ego than pointless suffering, since that would bring into light just how confused it really is.
The realization that the ego has caused itself more suffering than necessary is one of profound inner pain, and moving through it requires an ability to handle grief, which our deathless world is terrible at. This is one of the major reason why people cling onto their suffering for so long, because it is their identity. If they had to admit that the way they live was deficient, they would have to let go of their current strategies and beliefs, and take responsibility for changing themselves, which are far worse for the ego than resolving its cognitive dissonance through adopting bullshit.
§8. This is why people who betray themselves are so stupid when it comes to matters of importance. They might be brilliant within their narrow area of specialization, but when it comes to their integrity, maturity, courage and their ability to love, we find that there is very little there, because their life is shaped by convenient beliefs, not by the truth.
As a result, they spend a lot of time complaining about everything under the sun, gossiping about other people, feeding their mind with more bullshit, worrying about things they can't control, because all of these are ways for the ego to not examine itself deeply. The fundamental problem with bullshit is that it doesn't survive under the light of scrutiny, which is why it needs an extra layer of distraction to maintain itself. Thus is the life of most people, bullshit at the foundation, distraction at the top, constantly scattering their attention so that they never have to look at and change themselves.
§9. Distraction doesn't just happen individually, but more importantly collectively. To an important degree this is what society is: a massive conspiracy 5 aimed at keeping ourselves unconscious. Perhaps you've had this experience when surrounded by a lot of people, that you are not really yourself in most social environments, that you are just a bundle of canned responses and scripted behaviors. This is how the unconscious self is magnified by the unconscious system it is embedded in.
As a result, people who have betrayed themselves surround themselves with others just like them, full of excuses for their mediocrity, empty inner lives, stiff, loveless, and unwilling to change in any serious manner. Many people talk about how social groups are like crabs in a bucket, pulling down everyone who stands out, but few are willing to admit that they themselves have walked in the bucket in the first place, that they enjoy being slightly less mediocre than the people around them.
§10. Finally, when those people have deferred their life for so long, have given up on basically all of their dreams in favor of a quiet life of misery, there comes a time where their own mortality is no longer an abstract concept in the future but an unavoidable reality, and that is when they fall in a midlife crisis, 6 a second wind for their conscience, which has been smothered by long years of schooling and office work.
People who betray themselves become more miserable as they age, because it is more and more difficult to maintain a life that you hate, which is why they are met with a seemingly endless network of problems: health, relationships, anxiety, tiredness, worry, money, and boredom, just to name the main ones, and once again they project this on life itself rather than the specific way in which they have lived, or rather, the way that most people live, which is unconsciously.
It is not necessary for life to jolt us out of our trance to live more consciously however, but in practice, most people are not proactive about their life, they defer, come up with excuses, avoid, rationalize, but rarely do they actually change. This is why facing the small fears in our day to day life is so important, because the series of small decisions we make, and situations we face, end up defining who we are. Someone who avoids situtions which involve any form of conflict, or pain, or loss whatsoever will then avoid the important decisions which inevitably involve those losses and uncertainties, and thus keep defining themselves as a coward, someone who chooses the path of least resistance in favor of their integrity.
Self-betrayal is actually quite binary: do you honor your conscious self, and rearrange the entirety of your life according to what it demands from you, or do you simply settle down into what is comfortable and convenient? If you don't choose the former, a paradoxical choice because it's the choice of no-choice, then you will by default get the latter, since our world needs and encourages people who put the priorities of the system above their own. Framing this as a binary sounds extreme, until you come across people you have known in the past and who have completely drifted into mediocrity, have had the flame of consciousness snuffed out of them. What is subtle in the time frame of days becomes obvious in the time frame of decades. There is no Godot to wait for, life happens right here and right now.
1 I use the term "self-betrayal", but the self in question is not the same as what Darren Allen would use in his book "Self and Unself", I mean it more like "betraying your conscience", doing the things you know are not true to your highest self, but that would be a mouthful to say and write, so I am going to use language as it usually comes, and simply call it "self-betrayal".
2 See also: Sadly Porn by the Last Psychiatrist.
3 See Four Kinds of Dystopia for instance
4 Not that there is anything wrong with usefulness of course, but when all that you have is usefulness, then you don't really have a life do you? If all you do is "improve" your life, improve your circumstances, then what are you actually enjoying for its own sake? What are you progressing towards?
5 To 'conspire' means to work together in secret
6 Also known as a "mid life" crisis, the realization that your life is mid.
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Authenticity Selfbetrayal Consciouslife Zombieworld Obvioustruth Time Midlifecrisis
2026-02-06