I am Relaunching My Website! A Journey of Ideas and Community Building
Hello and good morning or evening, depending on when this post finds you! I close out another week with many new thoughts and ideas swirling around in my head. This past week, I finally decided to relaunch my website purposepursued.me and have begun the process of uploading all of my writings there. A few reasons for this are I realized that there is much more flexibility in a website to build, sort, and organize it as I wish than it is on this substack page. In addition to this I have multiple writing projects which I want to better be able to organize. I also want to begin creating a library of book reviews and a place where I can organize the thoughts and ideas that I glean from all the podcasts and audiobooks that I listen to. I’ve realized that I even get lost and forget where I first heard an idea from a book or podcast, so my hope is that through this website, I can better create a library that will allow me to organize the various subjects that I read. I am also working on a spiritual successor to “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S Lewis, which I am very excited to introduce and begin to share once they are ready. There is also a much larger writing project that I am working on, and I am trying to figure out a way that I can share this project in a controlled manner and allow for feedback on it as I release details on it. Stay tuned for more details!
Secondarily, I am also working with a friend on creating something of a community events hub for Lubbock, a place where local public events can be posted and shared to allow people to build an organic community and allow for us to begin to create a social culture where Friday nights can have an alternative to going to the bar. I also would love to help build something that takes the individualistic silos of churches and the events they host and brings them together so that when someone moves back to Lubbock or is seeking to find a community of like-minded people, they have a place to begin their search. As I’ve spent a ton of time reading books and listening to podcasts, there seems to be a hunger for something that seems to have been lost in our social media frenzied culture. I’ve also learned that post-college ages, finding friends and meeting new people can be tough if your job isn’t a social one. Now, maybe I’m just looking in the mirror too hard and am only seeing my own frustrations with our current culture, but I want to help create something that can break down those silos of isolation. Many cultural critics have called Millennials and GenZ some of the loneliest in reported history, and much of this comes from the fact that our jobs have changed to allow for remote work, as well as our increasing isolation because of social media. We, as human beings, are creatures meant for community, and our culture does a poor job of fostering solutions for this need. This solution I am brewing is something that is still very much in its early stages, as it will take a commitment and an investment of time from multiple people to give it any chance of success. Once this idea is further developed, I’ll share more details.
I find I often keep many of these ideas close to the chest. In this way, if they fail, I avoid feeling a sense of failure, but not sharing these ideas allows a greater excuse to not do anything with them as there is minimal investment. By sharing these ideas publically, there is a greater risk in my mind and a heightened sense of failure if nothing comes of these publically proclaimed ideas. This is, in my view, a good thing, creating healthy pressure to follow through on an idea. At least trying it is better than not trying at all and never knowing if it could have worked. No good or great thing ever came into existence without some risk, and in truth, the risk of failure in these small ideas is truly so insignificant that not doing them is, to a degree, cowardice. So here I am sharing my ideas and hoping to try them at the least.
Reading & Learning This Week
As anyone who has read any of my work will know, I spend a lot of time on subjects that I am technically not supposed to talk about, according to public sentiment. Well, today will be no different. Today, I will be writing about the book I read this week called “Women Who Win at Love” by Suzanne Venker (PS this book is free with an audible subscription). There is a second book written by Suzanne called “The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men and Marriage” that I have started, and I definitely feel like a fly on the wall eavesdropping on a conversation “for the girls.” Unfortunately for me, I can’t help but be curious as to what the advice looks like on the other side of the aisle and so I listen and learn. I became aware of Suzanne and these books while I was listening to “The Lila Rose Podcast,” where they discussed many of the cultural problems we are facing today.
Both the conversation and the book contain ideas that, to many modern minds, will likely be highly offensive or considered politically incorrect. Our mainstream culture and media seek to promote androgyny and the sameness of the sexes rather than promote and honor the differences. Listening to this conversation, it was very interesting to hear the perspective of someone who has experienced the lifestyle that our culture promotes. For anyone who wants a quick introduction to Suzanne's ideas, I would highly recommend checking out this podcast episode.
In the book, Suzanne argues for a return to traditional gender roles as well as promoting that women seek jobs that will allow them to focus on their children. She offers practical advice to women who are struggling in modern dating culture while also returning to women a power that they largely abandoned within the world of the sexual revolution and its ideas - ideas that have infected the modern mind in a way that few have taken stock of. Suzanne argues that women reclaim their power as the sexual gatekeepers, meaning that women begin to again raise the bar of expectation for men to have sexual access.
I have written before on this subject, and my belief is not that we expect too much of men today but that we don’t expect enough. Now, this can become very dicey very quickly, as this does not mean that women should expect men to make six figures, have a six-pack, and be six-foot tall, as is often seen in common online dating conversations. But instead, women should expect men to court them and respect them. The way I’ve heard it said is, “Men will meet the bar, women set for them.” Good men love to work hard, and good men will work for the things they desire. Men will thrive when they are put into healthy, challenging environments where they are forced to become better. These issues are multifaceted and have many different variables that have led us to where we are today. There is a great deal of responsibility that lies at the feet of men, but then there is also a forgotten power and responsibility of women, a power and responsibility that Suzanne describes well in this book. A quote that I think is worth pondering is this, “If you want to know the health of society, look at the quality of its women.”
This is a complex subject and one that often ends up in a lot of finger pointing by both men and women. Both blame the other for the predicament they find themselves in. This is not a new problem; we have been dealing with it since the moment of the fall when Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the snake, and so the blame game began. We have not changed since this moment, and we still do very much the same thing today. Each sex must look in the mirror and recognize that we each have a unique role to play, and each of us is responsible for some portion of the problem that exists today. I have read many books recently that seek to promote and lead men in the taking on of their responsibilities in these problems. It is far less culturally popular to also say that women, too, have and are contributing to these problems. We are left with the question of whether can we honestly look in the mirror and ask how we are contributing to these problems as individuals and as a group. In my view, it is only when we can do this that we begin to move the needle in a positive direction.
