Zenis
Fire
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2023
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It begins, as most tragedies do, with a moment of dangerous optimism. You have just caught your reflection in a shop window. The angle was forgiving. The lighting was divine. For one glittering instant, you thought: today is my day.
You walk into the room. You find your spot. You lean against something. You start to squint your eyes while thinking "i am that guy, who can mog me? i am HIM". The confidence is almost architectural in its ambition and then BOOM, the door opens, The new arrival does not acknowledge you. He does not need to. The simple fact of his presence has already done the work. Your squint wilts. Your lean subtly adjusts. Somewhere deep in your nervous system, an ancient recalibration begins, your confidence turns into doubt.
You have been mogged.
What is perhaps most brutal about the mog cycle is not the initial strike, but its recursive, fractal nature. The man who mogged you will, himself, be mogged. Perhaps not today. Perhaps not in this room. But the universe is patient, and it has an infinite supply of slightly better looking faces queued up for deployment. What makes the cascade particularly cruel, researchers note, is its perfect democracy. The man who just mogged you has himself been mogged, is currently being mogged, or will be mogged within the hour. There is no summit. There is no man at the top looking down with peace in his heart. There is only the door, and the next thing that comes through it.
The correct response to this, psychologists might suggest, is to decouple your sense of self-worth from comparative aesthetics and invest in the things that actually produce lasting fulfilment: relationships, purpose, craft, the occasional really good meal. This is, objectively, sound advice.
It does not help in the moment. Nothing helps in the moment. In the moment, there is only the jaw, the light, and the dawning understanding that your copes have been destroyed. The mog never stops. It only changes hands. And somewhere out there, in some room you haven't entered yet, stands a man with excellent bone structure who has absolutely no idea that his time is also coming.
You walk into the room. You find your spot. You lean against something. You start to squint your eyes while thinking "i am that guy, who can mog me? i am HIM". The confidence is almost architectural in its ambition and then BOOM, the door opens, The new arrival does not acknowledge you. He does not need to. The simple fact of his presence has already done the work. Your squint wilts. Your lean subtly adjusts. Somewhere deep in your nervous system, an ancient recalibration begins, your confidence turns into doubt.
You have been mogged.
What is perhaps most brutal about the mog cycle is not the initial strike, but its recursive, fractal nature. The man who mogged you will, himself, be mogged. Perhaps not today. Perhaps not in this room. But the universe is patient, and it has an infinite supply of slightly better looking faces queued up for deployment. What makes the cascade particularly cruel, researchers note, is its perfect democracy. The man who just mogged you has himself been mogged, is currently being mogged, or will be mogged within the hour. There is no summit. There is no man at the top looking down with peace in his heart. There is only the door, and the next thing that comes through it.
The correct response to this, psychologists might suggest, is to decouple your sense of self-worth from comparative aesthetics and invest in the things that actually produce lasting fulfilment: relationships, purpose, craft, the occasional really good meal. This is, objectively, sound advice.
It does not help in the moment. Nothing helps in the moment. In the moment, there is only the jaw, the light, and the dawning understanding that your copes have been destroyed. The mog never stops. It only changes hands. And somewhere out there, in some room you haven't entered yet, stands a man with excellent bone structure who has absolutely no idea that his time is also coming.
