There’s a particular type of man
He’s a hero without a cause except for his own idea of heroism, and his list of valorous deeds is short. This is okay because heroism is a defiant shimmering mantle that gleans in the light, above the well-polished armor of contempt, not walking naked into the polar night blizzard.
He may be divorced. He may never have had a girlfriend. He may have had a string of them. He may be in an unhappy marriage. It is almost impossibly unlikely he is in a happy marriage. He wants to have children because he wants to grow larger so he can then be happy.
He is attracted to the images of billionaires as totems. He thinks these images are expressions of an ideal path of metamorphosis, in reality, they are escape plans from his own life. He wants to burn up. To become an image rather than a person- he’s far from alone in that.
He thinks he’s going somewhere. He thinks he’s going to guess the next big cryptocurrency before it becomes big or some other offering of technology. He thinks the world is throbbing with potency that must break its blockage, the earth is about to burst in a gushing pillar, and he will be carried to heaven riding that geyser. He will get there because he doesn’t belong here. He heard that chaos was a ladder, but never asked himself for whom? All of his plans are curiously threadbare and indolent. This is because the plans are not the point, again: he will and must get there because he doesn’t belong here.
He feels strangled. He feels like his potency is being restrained by something. He calls it ‘wokeness’ but even on his own conception, it is something so much larger than wokeness. To take an example from current affairs, he has taken to calling those worried that AI will consume the world “woke” even though there is little overlap. The problem isn’t that the world is wounded, it’s the immunological response and the recognition of illness- if it just felt like the postwar boom again it would be the postwar boom again. To break the sense of the sickbed, decisive action is needed- but which sort doesn’t especially matter, indeed if the action is capricious- a deadly serious whim-, that might, on his conception work. Wokeness for him is anything that restrains the dread potency. Now, I grant that the dread potency he can feel isn’t wholly unreal but it isn’t his.
He wants so badly to make the hard choices. He thinks this makes him courageous, but he doesn’t understand that if you want to make the hard choices, they aren’t hard. His hard choices, the real ones, lie always at the periphery of his mind’s eye. He imagines his calloused heart became that way by suffering the whole world, and will sit in wise judgment at the right hand of virtue, which, after all, means manliness in the original Latin, shifting through all the nonsense and excuses -except his own- and casting them aside.
[and he does so love his Latin and his etymology and any phrases or linguistic tidbits that seem to him rather like cheat codes.]
He’s too old to be living like this. He is not a young man anymore, and he doesn’t know how to relate to that. There’s no final point to be made here- if there is a singular revelation into the nature of things at the heart of him, I can’t see it. This is who he is, and who he will remain unless he becomes something else entirely.
Your description reminded me a lot of notes from underground. While the narrator was frustrated about the rise of nihilism at the time, the spirit feels the same. Clever but mediocre man blaming the world for his inability to live up to his own heroic grand image. I thought maybe it was directly inspired by that book.
Underground man?