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.