Tell Me You Hated Fight Club.

I'll tell you what I'm looking for in a relationship, in one easy sentence. I'm looking for a man that didn't like Fight Club.

Really. That's it.

The rise of "man-children" is actually a horrific event for a single mama on the dating scene. Let me modify that. The rise of "man-children" is a horrific event. For everyone. Single, parent, employer, bartender, what-have-you. It's terrible for everyone. Some men claim this label proudly, others don't even bother to analyze their behavior enough to be able to claim it, but in either case, there's a stunning number of ridiculously immature, overgrown children out there.

I blame Fight Club. Palahniuk, this is ALL YOUR FAULT. And I'm totally glaring at you from my Rust Belt bastion with baleful eyes. Take note. Don't ever come to Milwaukee, or I will give you a piece of my mind.

Ok, so it's not really Palahniuk's fault, per se. He merely wrote about an already-existing cultural phenomenon. Alienation is a common theme in modern literature, and we all feel it. We all feel disconnected at some point, we all feel cheated by the world.

However, Fight Club glamorized both alienation and anger. Fight Club made it ok to be an immature, selfish, lazy "radical." Fight Club made it acceptable to blame the world at large for your unhappiness while doing nothing at all to alter the course of your life towards something better, because there is nothing better in the world of Tyler Durden. The only solution is to blow the whole thing up. Fight Club made it cool to spout off about everything and do absolutely nothing. Fight Club, and by extension Palahniuk, are the reason these man-children are so inexplicably proud of their debilitating inability to function in the world.

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate
so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No
purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great
depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one
day we'll be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're
slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

This is the iconic quote of Fight Club. This encapsulates the sense of alienation that many, many people feel in our comfortable, Western, modern era, and gives it a distinctly masculine twist. I can appreciate all those things. Palahniuk is actually a decent writer, and I do dearly love real masculine voice in fiction, because it's becoming somewhat rare.

And if the whole thing had remained a book, read by some few and appreciated as literature, perhaps I wouldn't be crafting this rant of my own.

But then someone went and made a movie out of it. And now there are legions of men in this country that hate their jobs, hate their lives, think they're meant for something more, and fucking whine about it. Constantly.

These are the man-children. They never grew up. They still look to others to get orders. They hate this about themselves. But they don't take initiative and start sculpting their own lives.

They simply get angry.

These are the man-children. They blame the clever advertisers for fooling them all these years, telling them they need this-that-and-the-other thing to be happy and fulfilled. They blame someone else for their inability to process information rationally. And they do this while they proclaim their own superior intelligence.

And then they get angry because obviously they're smarter, but they're slaving away at jobs they hate while these lucky men get to buy all these things with the money they don't really earn because they're NOT AS SMART AS ME.

Uh, contradiction much? How about a little side of hypocrisy.

Here's the truth, you man-children, you Fight Club-aficionados: You're not smarter than the world. And if you're incapable of being happy in your life, it's no one's fault but your own.

Don't want to work a desk job? THEN QUIT. Do something else. Start a farm. Get a construction job. Go build bamboo huts in Thailand. I don't care. But don't blame the world because you don't know what else to do, because you can't actually conceive of a life that doesn't involve a steady job of some sort. It's not the world's fault that you are uncreative, and that you have no dreams. That's no one's fault but your own.

And if you have bucked the desk job, don't whine about being broke all the time. Don't whine about the things you don't have. You chose this life, and if it's really making you so miserable not to have a car or a new computer or an iPod, go get a job that will let you have those things.

Want to be a rock star? Then do it. But don't whine if you fall on your face. And especially don't come crying to me when you have never even bothered to try. I know too many people that have tried, and failed, to feel any sympathy for you.

And absolutely, positively, I am through dating you man-children. I'm done trying to give my heart to men that are angry all the time. I'm done trying to be sympathetic to men that will never, ever be happy because they are simply too stupid to figure out how. I'm done dealing with men that are so far removed from any sense of self-awareness that they don't even know what will make them happy. They rely on the fantasy of some writer that they've never actually read, just saw the movie.

From this moment on, I'm holding out for a man that hates Fight Club. I'm holding out for a man that's actually happy in the life he's chosen for himself. Maybe he's always made such great decisions, or maybe he's figured it out through trial and error, but either way, he likes his life. He's happy. I'm holding out for a man that doesn't blame everything else when something goes wrong. I'm holding out for a man self-aware enough to know what he wants, what's going to make him happy.

I'm holding out for a man that hates Fight Club.

Evil Exists. But.

I was raised Catholic. In many ways, I still am Catholic. It's something that will never leave me. Over the years I've gravitated towards the mystic traditions of Christianity, towards the Teresa of Avila's and the Thomas Merton's. I've found myself drawn to the notion of personal, ecstatic experience of the divine and the exhortation to "Love thy neighbor as thyself." These are the tenets of my faith. These are the central pieces.

I spend more time than most of the people I know engaged in meditation, which often makes people think I'm all Zen and stuff. I'm into balance, calm, acceptance. But I'm still Catholic.

And the thing about Catholics: We believe in evil.

We believe absolutely that evil exists. It roams the earth. The Devil is merely an anthropomorphized personification of this evil. He's a boogeyman. The evil actually exists within us, within each of us, and it is the responsibility of each of us to find that evil within ourselves and accept it, absorb it, so that we don't commit evil.

Theologically, God is our help in this endeavor. Baptism, communion, prayer, regular Mass attendance and confession are all ways in which God (through his representatives on Earth) aid us in our quest to accomplish this. We will fuck up a lot. That's why forgiveness is God's greatest gift, and such a central piece of the Catholic cosmology.

I believe in evil. I believe absolutely that evil exists in the world. I believe absolutely that it is my duty, as an aspiring moral being, to combat this evil. Because of my propensity towards mysticism, I believe that I must start with the evil within me. It's not a matter of casting it out, since such a task is impossible, but rather of absorbing it. When you are aware of the negative impulses, you can control them, and thus refrain (knowingly and purposefully) from committing evil.

To me, the "knowingly and purposefully" caveat is quite important. We can accidentally stumble into good works all the time; it doesn't take much. It is akin to what philosopers refer to as "narcissistic altruism" in which we do good things for others because we are addicted to the rush of righteousness that comes along with it. We're really doing good things for ourselves, for our own selfish reasons.

I believe in evil. I believe in true good.

But the world is not a perfect dichotomy, and there exists a whole spectrum in between evil and good.

Narcissistic altruism, for example. It's not true good. You are not being selfless; your primary concern is your self and your own feelings. But it's also not evil. It's dangerous because once you get into a pattern of doing things for the way they make you feel rather than the way they make others feel, it's hard to get out, and this prevents you from growing as a person. This prevents you from reaching stages of awareness in which you could fully embrace and therefore neutralize the evil within you.

But it's not itself evil to do good things for the wrong reasons.

Evil is far, far worse than that.

I was recently chit-chatting idly with a friend when the conversation took a turn for the serious, and this friend honestly began to put forth evidence of their own evilness. I was slightly aghast. Evil is not a joking matter, for one. I am Catholic. But also I was deeply saddened that anyone could have lived and come to the conclusion that they were evil simply because they'd made mistakes. What kind of culture do we live in that anything as human as making mistakes, even mistakes that cause pain, make one categorically evil? Evil is something I take far too seriously to classify it on par with human weakness. If human weakness were evil, there would be no salvation or comfort for any of us, and we would all be incapable of doing good as soon as we were born.

Evil is not temptation succumbed. Evil provides the temptation, and we will and do succumb. But to be an evil person, you have to look at whatever the fallout from that mistake was and not be hurt yourself by it. Evil is the inability to feel in yourself the effects of what you do.

As long as you can still feel, as long as you retain empathy, you are not an evil person, and you can grow.