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July 31, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:19
THE TRAGIC DEATH OF ESTER DINGLEY
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So, I'm a little bit of a true crime guy.
And I was reading something this morning I found really interesting.
This is from the Sunday Times.
It is, in fact, Saturday, though.
July 31st, 2021.
And this came out yesterday.
And it's about a woman named Esther Dingley.
Esther Dingley.
Family grieve after skull is confirmed as lost hikers.
Now... She was thirty-seven years old, an Oxford University graduate, a truly brilliant woman, and she had a smile that could light up a room, her family said, after her remains were found in the Pyrenees Pass.
The family of a British backpacker missing since November have confirmed that a skull found in the Pyrenees last week is hers.
Esther Dingley, thirty-seven, had been walking alone near the Spanish and French border, while Daniel Colgate, her partner of nineteen years, It was house-sitting at a French farm.
A Spanish hiker found the skull at an altitude of 2,200 meters, or 7,200 feet, in the Port de la Clare Pass.
Rhea Bryant, Dingley's mother, supplied a sample of her DNA for French police to check against the remains.
Bryant and Colgate said yesterday, that's her mom and her boyfriend, Said yesterday they were devastated beyond words to have received DNA confirmation that the bone belonged to her.
Captain Jean-Marc Bottonero, head of the police unit in Saint-Gaudin, said the most likely explanation was that Dingley had fallen while on her way back alone to France.
Her boyfriend had stayed at a farm in a village a hundred miles north of the Pyrenees.
Bordenaro said that officers had returned to the Mountain Pass this week to look for Dingley's belongings and other remains.
He declined to confirm the DNA match, saying prosecutors would issue a statement next week.
Colgate and Bryant said in a statement, We have all known for many months that the chance we would get to hug her beloved Esther again, to feel her warm hand in ours, to see her beautiful smile, And to watch the room light up again whenever she arrived was tiny, but with this confirmation that small hope has now faded, it is devastating beyond words.
At this stage, with just a single bone found and no sign of equipment or clothing in the immediate area, the details of what happened and where still remain unknown.
French police believe that her remains were hidden by rocks after her fall before animals moved the skull.
Right, so they didn't find any of her clothing, her backpack, her equipment.
She was very heavily laden going up this mountain.
Colgate and Dingley, this is the dead woman and her boyfriend, both Oxford University graduates had left their flat in Durham.
To travel around Europe in a camper van for six years.
Six years!
Oh, isn't that kind of tempting?
Oh, I'll get into all of that in a sec.
The last message Colgate posted on the couple's travel blog days before Dingly Skull was found recalled the final hike they took together a thousand-mile, 80-day journey across the Alps.
He wrote on July 17th.
Just as we were leaving, Esther went back to collect something she'd, quote, forgotten.
The next morning, which happened to be my birthday, I woke up to find banners hung inside of our tent.
I won't be marking my birthday this year.
That's not why I'm writing this.
I just wanted to share this to reiterate how wonderful Esther is, always doing her utmost to make others feel special.
Her boyfriend said that Dingley carried a heavier pack for the first month of the hike because she was ultimately stronger and in better shape than me.
Comments I've seen and received in recent weeks that suggest Esther was in some way less capable in the mountains on her solo hikes are fundamentally the opposite of what is true, he said.
It was Esther who looked after me.
Patrick Leglaire, a former member of the Gendarmerie's High Mountain Rescue Unit, said that he was familiar with the past...
If you are not careful, it is easy to lose your way and suddenly realize you have gone off the path," he said.
The only thing to do is to go back up the way you have come, but it is sometimes beyond the mental and physical strength of people.
That is when they get into trouble.
He said that most mountain disappearances were accidental.
We all make mistakes, every one of us.
He said we all have to stay humble in the face of the mountains.
He said it was possible that there would never be a complete explanation for Dingley's death.
We have the best mountain rescue teams in the world, he added, but however hard you look, there are things that you won't understand.
It's very hard for grieving families to accept that.
Now I get mathematically, geometrically, from a gravity well standpoint drawn into these I find them fascinating, and I just want to overturn and unturn and unpack what might have happened.
Maybe I'd be an investigator in a free society.
So you look at the woman.
She's, of course, slender, attractive, and obviously very intelligent.
And you look at the smile, and for me, and again I don't obviously know anything, it's all speculation, but for me, when you look at the smile, I don't look at the mouth, I don't look at the teeth, I look at the eyes.
Are the eyes smiling?
And to me, there's almost nothing more disconcerting than a smiling face with unsmiling eyes.
It's kind of what I get both from this woman, Esther, and from her boyfriend.
So, I find that really, really...
Interesting. So I thought I would dig in a little more because it does seem like, wow, isn't that a bit of a tempting life?
Isn't that a little bit of a tempting life?
To just backpack and roam around and all kinds of stuff and not have any responsibilities really and live in a van, live in a camper, see all these beautiful sights, hike, see the animals and just blog and vlog.
It's a very tempting life.
It's a very tempting life. I was always really envious, really envious.
Of the people who could just go and travel.
They could just go and travel and roam and explore.
And it was always a bit of a mystery, of course, prior to, I guess, you can get ads or sort of vlogging stuff.
But it was always a real mystery to me, like, how on earth did people pay for this?
Because having money to pay for things was sort of a foundational reality of my existence.
And I know it kind of grounded me in economics and limited resources, which richer people don't have.
But, oh, my God. I just would have loved to do some of this, just travel, Roman, no responsibilities, but youth, fertility and all ticks away, so she's 37 years old.
Obviously, highly, highly intelligent woman.
How did she end up with, you know, she got educated for a reason, for a purpose, I assume.
How on earth did she end up dying on this lonely mountain in the middle of nowhere?
Well, let's look at, this is from strangeoutdoors.com, let's do a little bit more here.
So this is from the point of view.
This was written July and it was updated at the end here.
So this is before the news. The disappearance of 37-year-old Esther Dingley in late November 2020 in the Pyrenees mountain range between France and Spain has baffled experienced search and rescue teams on both sides of the border.
She was from Durham in the UK and was an experienced mountain hiker and climber.
She vanished while hiking alone from blah-blah-blah to blah-blah-blah and was last seen climbing almost 9,000 feet high Peak de Civil Guard mountain.
Spanish mountain search and rescue teams used helicopters with loudspeakers.
They sent 16 people up the mountain.
Anyway, all this kind of stuff, right?
And Jorge Lopez Ramos, head of the Spanish mountain rescue team, told reporters that the failure to find him was very strange.
And he said, now snow will cover the mountain.
That means the search can't resume with the same intensity until the spring.
Esser had her cell phone off to conserve battery power.
Now, I don't know if anybody knows for sure it was to conserve battery power, and coverage was patchy in the area.
On the day she disappeared, the weather was fine and sunny, with only a light covering of snow.
This is interesting to me.
Marto Vigo del Arco, a Spanish Olympic skier, told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that around 3 p.m.
on November 22, 2020, he was hiking down a trail high in the mountains with his girlfriend when they met an English woman coming the other way.
Marty remembers thinking it was quite late in the day to be climbing the mountain, and here's the quote.
She was coming up.
We were on the descent. She was very heavily loaded with a big fresh backpack.
She asked us if we had a piece of fruit or something fresh, but we didn't have anything.
She carried on up. That's interesting.
So this could be the last people who saw her alive.
And she's heading up this mountain, heavily loaded.
And she asks, to me that's kind of odd.
Do you have a piece of fruit or something fresh?
I guess maybe she only had freeze-dried or stored food or something like that.
But it's pretty wild.
And why not stop and say, what are you doing?
It's kind of late. Where are you going?
This is a bad idea or whatever.
I don't know. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't.
The couple did not pass anyone else coming up the mountain and are believed to have been the last people to have seen Esther.
At about 4 p.m. after her meeting with this skier, she reached the 9,000 feet summit from where she sent a selfie to her boyfriend, her partner of, I guess when this was written, oh, was this last year?
No, he says 18 years.
Some other places say 19 years.
So 4 p.m., she's at the very top of the mountain.
Now that seems like some pretty bad planning.
And I say this as a guy who climbed with no harness, no ropes, a mountain in Africa.
Which actually had an overhang and, you know, could have easily slipped and fallen to my death.
I was not experienced. After she sent the selfies, she had had enough time before dark to reach the mountain refuge cabin in which she planned to spend the night, according to searches, but there was no sign she got there.
So in July, some human remains were discovered, and at the end of July, these remains were confirmed to be estrus.
So what happened, right?
None of her belongings had been located in the area where her body was found.
So, well, it's really, I think, just a skull that was found.
So, of course, animals could have moved the skull, or I guess weather could have moved the skull, but of course it would have to be detached from the body to begin with.
So, what's the story? Esther Dingley and Dan Colgate were fitness fanatics who met at Wharton College, Oxford University.
Esther was studying for a degree in economics and management, and Dan was studying chemistry.
So what did they probably get?
A million or two million dollars over the course of their youth poured into their education, for which, you know, I hate to sort of say there's kind of an obligation, but societies that are forced to pay for people's education and people who voluntarily choose that education You might want to think about paying things back to society as a whole, you know, like start a business, get a job, have kids, raise them in the values that your culture manifests.
You know, personally, I always felt a very strong obligation this way.
Society largely paid for my degrees in English and history and my graduate degree and philosophy, history of philosophy.
So I always felt, okay, well, you know, thanks for the money, but it probably would be a decent idea for me to pay it back in a way, right?
You take stuff, there's kind of an obligation, right?
So they have been touring Europe in a camper van since 2014.
Along the way, they hiked, cycled, and climbed during their six-year adventure.
Now, is it an adventure?
Really? We're just walking around places and looking at stuff and driving around?
Is that an adventure? Maybe.
Can an adventure really go on for six years?
I'm not too sure that it can.
Anyway, Dan was proud of his working class background in the northeast of England.
His father was a milkman while his mother worked in a call center.
So, Dan, of course, highly intelligent guy, and I don't know that you want to be proud of things you didn't earn, such as, you know, okay, your father was a milkman, the other mother worked in a call center, and what happened was some combination of their genetics produced Dan, who had, I assume, went through Oxford and all of that, a very high IQ. Not so sure about the emotional intelligence, which we'll get to.
But it's sort of like being proud of the fact that two short parents produced a tall son, which they can certainly do.
It's just an odd thing to be proud of.
And I've always really strongly resisted any kind of pride in anything I didn't earn.
Because it's like a drug, right?
It's a shortcut, as I talked about recently in a show.
You want to reserve your pride for the things that you've earned, because if you take pride in things you haven't earned, it diminishes your desire to go out and earn things.
Esther was born in Holland and grew up in the Buckinghamshire village of Stone in England.
She had been a boarder at the $45,000 a year Headington School in Oxfordshire, where she became a rowing fanatic, which eventually meant she represented Great Britain in the sport.
So yeah, fitness fanatics for sure.
And a boarder is a boarding school, right?
So very wealthy parents who put her in boarding school And my mother was not wealthy.
My father was not wealthy, really, but he put me in boarding school for a couple of years.
And it's a little tough to feel slightly less than hugely wanted if your parents want you to live away from them, live apart from them.
So, yeah, wealthy, incredibly wealthy family.
Think of 10 years of that schooling is half a million dollars, right?
Almost. So, very wealthy family, and I would imagine some kind of emotional distance.
You know, if she's got a smile that lights up a room and she's such a wonderful girl, why would you send her away to boarding school?
I don't know. Anyway. So, she wrote a book.
It was published in June 2020.
It reminisces that after graduating with first-class degrees from Oxford University, they settled into successful academic careers.
So, again, you know, if you're going to get educated by the society that you live in, just staying in the academic world is not really paying back the investment societies made into you.
Again, maybe this is just very waspy of me, but don't you have a sense of obligation for the society that educated you that you need to return that kind of value to society?
I mean, I felt, okay, I can get them to a business degree.
I did study some econ in university, but at least I can go and create a company, build it to, like, 30, 35 people, get a huge payroll going, and, you know, like, just contribute.
The pace is something back.
That's sort of an obligation, right?
But anyway, they went on to successful academic careers.
He worked for a year at Oxford's Chemistry Research Laboratory, while ESFA completed a degree.
He then insisted that they move to Durham, where he had the offer to study for a Ph.D. postgraduate qualification.
She found a place on a master's course.
Wow, are they ever doing the academic treadmill, right?
Four years later, they moved to Cambridge, where Dan became a post-doctoral research assistant in the Department of Engineering.
Boy, isn't that sad.
To me, anyway, right? Once he's in his 30s, I guess, maybe late 20s, and he's still a research assistant.
Esler attained a fellowship at Wolfson College and was offered a PhD scholarship.
The couple had won a business competition to set up a network for early career researchers which signed up 20,000 members from 80 countries.
They also bought three buy-to-let properties, which left them heavily in debt.
So I guess they tried to take their economics and management and business that she had trained for out of the theory and into the practice, and they got these properties, and then they lost a huge amount of money, I assume.
Dan said...
It was around this time that any last traces of romance slipped away from us.
We clung on to the belief that we still loved each other, but beneath all the animosity, it was hard.
Ouch, right? So, oh gosh, I don't really get a clear sense of the timeline, but I guess they had been together for about a decade at this point.
They'd been together 19 years.
They did a bunch of years of travel.
Six years, was it?
Sorry, let me just go back in and check that.
Six years, yeah. So they'd been together 19 years.
They'd traveled for six years. And so at this point, they'd probably been together for a decade.
They're not married. And, you know, of course romance is going to fade away.
See, I don't know.
I mean, I guess this is complicated for people because we've lost the simple stuff.
I'm sure it's not complicated for you guys, but, you know, it's pretty simple, right?
What is love and attachment and romance?
What is it all for? Well, it's to cement a family bond, to cement a pair bond so that you can raise children.
That's why we have sexual attraction.
That's why we have pair bonding.
That's why we have oxytocin.
That's why we fall in love.
It's entirely and completely for the...
Founding of families and the raising of children.
Now, of course, I totally get it.
I mean, people choose not to have kids.
Maybe they can't have kids.
And, of course, they can still get married, and they should enjoy the state of marriage.
But marriage is not built for that.
In the same way that roads are not built for bicycles, but bicyclists can use the road.
It's totally fine. So, of course, you know, if 10 years they're not settling down, they're not having kids, their genes are going to say, okay...
So this is not a fertile union, right?
Now, maybe they had fertility issues, whatever, but it doesn't sound to me particularly like it.
Again, we may never know for sure, but what's going to happen is, regardless of whether you have fertility issues or not, because maybe it's the combination of the two of them that have fertility issues, but if after a certain amount of time being with someone, generally it's around five years, Your genes are like, okay, are we having kids or not?
Because if we're not having kids, let's move on to someone else.
So your genes are going to detach you, they're going to withhold the bonding mechanism, and then you just feel tortured and stuck together.
And that's pretty horrible.
So, yeah, any last traces of romance slipped away from us?
So clearly romance had been diminishing for a long time.
But they were both good-looking people, both very athletic and so on, and both high status, so there was probably a certain amount of vanity in the union.
But the vanity was not able to produce kids, right?
So, in 2013, they moved back to the northeast of England where Colgate, this is the boyfriend, took an administration job at Newcastle University.
Now, an administration job, you know, things are not going well, right?
Because he's not, it doesn't sound like he's in the chemistry field, it sounds like he was in the bureaucracy, in the administration, an administration job.
Esther became a personal trainer, having been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.
That's pretty rough, man.
That's pretty rough. So, what's interesting is chronic fatigue syndrome, this is what my mom claimed to have, and it seems to be one of these, I'm just tired, I have no energy, I'm kind of depressed, I'm kind of down, and they can't find a medical cause.
They cannot find a medical cause.
Of course. And my mom's doctor at some point, according to her reports, my mom's doctor said, you've got to start looking at the possibility that this is psychological because we've run every test known to man and we can't find anything wrong with you.
And you still claim to be tired and stressed and upset and can't sleep and all of that.
So maybe something's going on.
And then she sued him.
So what's interesting is that if you have chronic fatigue syndrome, how are you going to become a personal trainer?
So their lives are going very badly, in my humble opinion, right?
They're overeducated, they've not spent a day really much in the free market, and they're not able to have kids, they're not able to get married, and their careers are decaying, right?
From chemistry to an admin job, from what she was working on a PhD or was offered a PhD to becoming a personal trainer.
Now, of course, the personal trainer stuff she doesn't need all that other education for, and again, how do you become a personal trainer if you have chronic fatigue?
Doesn't that mean you can't, right? At this time, the couple had both been diagnosed with clinical depression.
I guess they probably went on antidepressants and stuff like that too, right?
And there's a picture of the guy, Dan Colgate.
You know, my heart goes out of the guy.
I mean, he lost the woman he was bonded with for close to two decades.
It's pretty horrendous. But yeah, talk about a smile in the mouth but not the eyes.
On Christmas 2013, Dan needed an emergency operation on an abscess from a surgery wound which developed into necrotizing fasciitis, known as the flesh-eating disease.
And they decided to get married in February 2014.
And I remember when I was directing a play I'd written called Seduction.
And the woman, who was my stage manager, was going through a...
It was a brutal breakup, not because it was aggressive or violent, but because she'd invested five years into this guy.
And there was this general incomprehension.
I remember this really vividly, like...
We really care about each other, but we just can't make it work.
We really love each other, but it just doesn't seem to be working.
Like you're operating a complicated piece of alien machinery.
Be virtuous. Get married.
Have kids. That's what it's all for.
And you can try and hijack it for something else.
But it's not really what it's for, right?
I mean, I guess you can become a forklift truck, so to speak.
Like, you can say, I'm going to get my arms, I'm going to lift and move around like a forklift truck.
And you can do that to some degree, but it's not really what your body is for.
And it's probably going to give you weird injuries and problems and tendinitis and back problems and so on.
So you can have all this love and bonding and attachment without it aiming to marriage and kids.
But that's not what the bonding and attachment is for.
The bonding and attachment is not designed for your personal pleasure.
It's not designed for you to be happy.
It's not designed for you to find meaning or be blissfully in love.
It's designed to pair-bond you so that you can raise children.
That's what it's designed for. And again, you can hijack it, I guess, and try and turn it into something that serves just you.
And I don't know if that's what this couple did or not, but they certainly didn't get married after being together at this point for...
14 years? Let's see, 2014, they were together sick, she died last year.
Yeah, it's about a decade and a half or so, give or take, right?
Okay, so, they decided to get married in February 2014 despite Dan saying in his book that, oh, that's the first I've heard of Dan's book, I remember, oh, maybe they co-wrote it, no, I don't know.
This is a quote that's just horrendous, right?
They decided to get married in February 2014 despite Dan saying in his book that, quote, what was supposed to be a chance to rediscover our love of one another did at times seem to have transformed into a festering pit of mutual loathing.
Despite Dan saying in his book they were going to get married, that, quote, what was supposed to be a chance to rediscover our love of one another, did at times seem to have transformed into a festering pit of mutual loathing.
My God. My God.
Following Dan's serious illness, they decided to cancel their wedding and set off for a road trip around Europe.
So, look, if after a decade and a half or so together, you are inhabiting a festering pit of mutual loathing, then the idea that You're going to stay together?
Come on. A year and a half.
I mean, sorry, a decade and a half.
Imagine being a decade and a half into a career and find that you absolutely can't stand your career.
I mean, that would be a chance to change it, right?
Following Dan's serious illness, they decided to cancel their wedding, right?
Then the wedding might have led them to kids, which might have led them to maybe some sort of meeting.
And they set off for a road trip around Europe.
So they're in their 30s, right?
Early 30s? And they're just going to go be bums roaming around the countryside, right?
Esther and Dan said they felt like, quote, zombies sleepwalking through life, end quote, before they had put most of their possessions in a friend's attic.
And hit the road in 2014 to tour Europe in their campervan in the summer of 2019.
So we got, what, 2014 they head off on this frankly ridiculous thing, right?
Okay, maybe a month or two or whatever.
So then we jump forward like six years, right?
Five years. Yeah, from 2014 to summer 2019.
Dan returned to Britain for family reasons while Esther went hiking alone for a month in the Pyrenees.
He wrote, This was the longest time we'd spent apart for years, and finding herself alone in the wild was a significant step change.
In many ways, the emotional and mental journey we're on has grown more important than the physical one.
So, 2019, she died at 37, so she's 35, right?
She's 35, and she's just walking around the middle of nowhere, alone.
Oh, that's so sad. Oh, I mean, that's just heartbreaking to me.
It's heartbreaking to me.
And finding herself alone in the wild was a significant step change.
I mean, there are real challenges in life, you know, being virtuous, being honest, being courageous in the face of what seemed like overwhelming odds at times.
But there are just challenges that you make up for yourself in order to...
This is like the... This is the relationship to real challenges in life, I don't know, like pornography has to pair bonded sex.
I mean, she's just making up challenges here.
Oh, I'm going to go hike alone in the middle of nowhere.
It's like I've got challenges. I'm overcoming challenges.
But you're creating these challenges entirely for yourself.
And the overcoming of these challenges benefits no one except possibly you.
And I would actually argue that it harms this person, right?
So... It bothers me.
I mean, so I overcame challenges and became a good parent after being raised very badly.
So there's the overcoming of a challenge that benefits my daughter, benefits my wife.
I learned how to maintain a marriage despite growing up all around divorce and so on.
So, and I think, at least I hope, that the philosophy that I put out, I know that it has, has done great good in the world to overcome my ignorance, overcome any fears of speaking the truth.
So when you overcome challenges, it should really be for the good of society as a whole, I think.
Or at least that's where you're going to get your greatest, most sustainable happiness.
But the idea you're just going to go hike alone for a month in mountains, you're just making up challenges for yourself.
And the overcoming of those challenges leads to what?
Leads to what?
No. Attraction leads to love.
Love leads to marriage. Marriage leads to kids.
Kids leads to family.
Family leads to partaking of immortality and bringing a new brain into the world and the joys of family life and continuity and all of that.
Hiking alone for a month in the mountains leads to what?
Leads to what? And this kind of almost like self-obsessive, well, we've really grown by spending time apart and this constant tinkering with a relationship that at this point has been going on for 17 years and still needs constant tinkering.
My God! I remember thinking about this when I had relationships that required a lot of work when I was young.
And at some point, I just sort of thought, you know, I'm spending my whole time tinkering, I'm spending more time tinkering with the damn car than driving anywhere.
That's not good. The car is designed to get you somewhere, and yeah, you know, every once in a while you're going to need to take the car in for some maintenance and, you know, get the winter tires put on, get the oil changed.
I get all of that, but you're not supposed to be spending all your time tinkering and this, like, obsessive, like, we grabbed this butterfly of happiness, but then it got away, and we chased it across the Pyrenees, and then we found that the butterfly of happiness landed on us for five minutes when we spent time apart, and it's just like, oh my god!
That's just horrendous, right?
To me, anyway. Esther wanted to spend winters in the sun, but last year, instead of visiting Spain and Portugal, Dan arranged for them to stay in a remote farmhouse in the village of Aru in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
Okay, why? Why?
Why are you in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in the foothills of the mountains?
What are you, like, stepping into a windows background?
Anyway, when COVID-19 hit in the spring of 2020, the couple returned to the farmhouse.
And again, my question is, okay, what are they living on?
Always my absolutely, deep down, fascinating, would love to know, what are they living on?
I mean, they didn't make a huge amount of money in academia.
They lost money when they invested in houses.
What the hell are they living on?
Oh, well, you know, but they're living pretty cheaply and all of that.
Other parents are paying for this.
We know she comes from money because she was in a $45,000 a year school, right?
So, then they realized that during the coronavirus pandemic they had not been apart from each other for a year.
So the couple decided to each do their own thing for a while in the autumn of 2020.
Esther said, this whole thing has been really good for us individually and our relationship.
We're genuinely happy now. Again, that's this sort of navel-gazing self-obsession of trying to be happy, trying to grab happiness, roaming around, trying different things, being apart, being together, being in the Pyrenees, being in some other place, being in a camper van.
Can I just chase this elusive bluebird of happiness?
Sigh. And now they're saying that we've been together.
And look, the whole point of love and pair bonding, not to beat the dead horse here, you've got to enjoy being together because you're there raising children, right?
I mean, I've spent...
Now, I mean, my wife and I have barely spent a day apart in 20 years.
I have never spent any significant time apart from my daughter, just here and there when I would go and do a documentary or two, but that would be for like five days.
And the idea that what's really great for us is to spend time apart, you can't do that when you have kids, but again, they're all just trying to figure out how to stay happy while taking a biological system called love, connection, and happiness and trying to use it for their own ends rather than for what it's evolved for.
Esther's last hike. Esther had been well prepared for what was meant to be her last hike, after a month of hiking by herself.
Their last conversation had been about how excited we were to see each other, as this was her last trip before driving back.
To see each other for what?
Now, in the past, of course, before social media, you couldn't document and get feedback and a pretend sense of community and everyone saying how envious they are and everyone, oh, these views are beautiful and, oh, you guys are so fit and you look so happy and, like, all of this crazy positive feedback that your brain thinks is coming from an immediate community, like friends, family, kids or whatever, but it's coming digitally over the internet and internet.
So, that is a very artificial situation.
It's the same thing that, you know, women on Tinder or other places, they think that they're getting male attention, but they're not.
I mean, they are, but they're, sorry, let me rephrase that.
Their body thinks that they're getting male attention in the immediate vicinity, and because they, you know, if a woman walks into a room and, you know, ten guys turn and stare at her and want to approach her, she feels fantastic because she's like apex predator of testosterone, right? She's going to, That's what women want to aim for because it means that they're like the Elizabeth Bennet, Dorsey, alpha female who's going to bag the rich guy or the powerful guy or the guy with great potential.
And so if a woman walks into a room and gets attention from 10 men, that is signaling to her that she's doing something right and then she's going to have to choose at some point relatively soon before the bloom goes off the rose, choose these men.
But what happens now is if a woman logs on to her computer or her phone and there are 10 messages from men, she feels that same thrill.
But it's not particularly real because if you're getting attention from 10 men in a room, it means that you're top of the heap and that's positive feedback from your bio system.
But if it's just 10 guys randomly on the internet and your body thinks it's 10 guys in the same room, it's not the same thing at all.
So... Let's see here.
At the end of October 2020, Esther set off alone for a hike in the Pyrenees crossing the border into Spain to avoid the strict French lockdown conditions.
On November 15th, she parked their camper van in the village of Benask, which has become the focus of the search.
She was seen at the 7,000-foot Angel Oris refuge on November 17th, where she seemed in very good spirits.
In an Instagram post that day, she wrote, I love carrying everything I need with me on my back.
It gives me confidence and freedom, because I know I have everything I need to survive with me.
You have this odd kind of independence thing.
It's isolated, right?
It means there are massive trust issues, right?
Because she doesn't trust people to take care of her.
She was not willing to merge with somebody else for the better mode of both and so on.
And this confidence and freedom is a complete illusion.
I love carrying everything I need with me on my back.
No. Did you make the backpack? No.
Did you make all of the powdered food or the tin food or the canned food or the pouch food or whatever it is that you're eating?
No. Did you go and get the water yourself and put it in the...
And no, you didn't, right?
I mean, somebody else had to dig the well water up or get the well water.
Did you make the car?
Did you make the gas? No. So this idea that you're somehow independent because you bought a bunch of stuff that other people made, look at me, I can survive on my own.
No. I mean, okay, maybe if you go out into the woods and you find a way to survive on your own, then that's something, right?
But this, it's just, I don't know, it just seems kind of odd.
Snow forced her to abort that trip in a Facebook post from November 19th, said she had hiked down the mountain with a man who gave her a lift back to her camper van.
CCTV from later that day shows her looking sad and thoughtful in the supermarket in Vinesque, and she was seen doing yoga next to her camper van.
Yeah, so, I mean, I guess still fitness-obsessed after close to 20 years, right?
And here's the other thing, too, right?
So she's, oh, she's in very good spirits.
I love caring.
I'm so happy.
Confidence and freedom. And that's when she's in society or on the Internet, right?
But CCTV, she's just looking sad and thoughtful in the supermarket.
She's seen doing yoga next to her campervan.
Dan reported Esther missing three days later on November 25th, when she failed to appear at the planned rendezvous in Gascony, France.
He was house-sitting a vineyard property.
That's... May that so say it.
I remember house-sitting when I was 20, but the idea that you're house-sitting when you're pushing 40, I don't know.
Anyway, he later joined in the search, saying he was broken and shattered that my beloved Esther, the person who taught me how to feel, is missing.
I need her back. I can't face the alternative.
Now, look, I'll do sympathy for the guy, but that's neediness beyond words, I guess, right?
Okay, so they're investigating all possibilities, including foul plays.
They've been trying to locate the fellow hiker who had given Esker the lift down.
They examined the camper van called Homer that she was using.
So December 4th, they gave up on...
Rescue efforts, heavy snowfall, covered any tracks she might have left.
And then the mystery of what may have happened to this experienced hiker and trail runner has prompted many theories, but search dogs, helicopters, and drones over the past two weeks have turned up no clues.
Some searchers have questioned whether she was on the mountain at all, perhaps left after her Facebook posts were published.
They would have expected to find her given the intensity of search efforts and the fact that most of the trails were straightforward across open ground.
And yeah, so you can look at this mountain.
I'll put a link to this in the show.
But yeah, there's no trees, right?
There's no canyons, there's no crevasses.
It's just straight, flat mountain.
It's like hiking up a pyramid.
So the idea that she would be unable to be found?
Crazy. Crazy.
Okay, so, let's see.
Misadventure. So, this is some theories, right?
It was getting dark when she posted on social media back in November 2020, but searches are baffled why they haven't found Esther or her body.
She had dark clothes and a grey rucksack, which could easily blend into the surrounding rocks and vegetation.
At the time of her disappearance, snow was light in the area, A hotelier in Banasque said, Walking from here is very dangerous.
There is snow on the mountains and ice.
It seems an atrocious idea at this time of year.
Perhaps she left the mountain, but where has she gone?
It would seem surprising with all the publicity that she hasn't been seen.
Was she abducted or murdered on the mountain?
Did she intend to start a new life by faking her disappearance?
This was an update on December 12th.
Police are now concentrating on the theory that she has deliberately gone missing because she feared her nomadic lifestyle was about to end.
French and Spanish officers are focusing their investigations on a voluntary disappearance as heavy snowfall means they have to cancel searches of mountains where she was last seen three weeks ago.
They have discovered that Esther was concerned that her partner, Daniel Colgate, was considering settling down following their six-year road trip around Europe in a camper van.
He was interviewed, but not a suspect.
A spokeswoman for the Spanish Civil Guard search team in Huesca province She said that the search for Esther had been difficult as she had not told anyone her exact route for her final hike.
There's lots of vegetation in this area, she said.
People can fall in places that are almost impossible for us to see.
The last few days have been very windy, a metre and a half of snow.
So, yeah, for sure when the snow falls, so I guess there are little crevices.
In the map that I looked at, or the photo that I looked at.
I couldn't see any, but maybe it was too far away.
Even officers get lost from time to time, she added.
One officer recently took shelter in a refuge during bad weather where there was no mobile telephone signal and was deemed missing for several days.
In mid-January 2021, Dan Colgate issued a statement through the Lucy Blackman Trust, which supports families of missing people.
He said, He added that Esther is a very experienced haiku who had ample supplies with her, but no trace of her has been found.
Voluntary disappearance. The dossier said this is totally out of character in every way.
Also, Esther has no motive or means to do so.
She hasn't accessed any funds.
There were no large cash withdrawals in the weeks leading up to her trip.
Finally, she was already doing her own thing as part of her usual relationship with Dan.
She didn't need to vanish to get time to herself.
At the time of Esther's disappearance, France was under national lockdown and exercise was meant to be taken within one kilometer of someone's home.
The document said, however, that doesn't mean that nobody could have been up there and that somebody who was breaking the rules didn't see an opportunity when encountering a lone female hiker with the additional knowledge that nobody else should be nearby and so close to a road, an individual with a weapon could feasibly force somebody back into their vehicle.
Well, I mean, that's not the case now, because we've found the skull, right?
At the time of Esther's disappearance, it was supposed to be hunting season.
Quote,"...in such a mountainous region, there is no practical way to police anybody choosing to ignore the COVID restrictions.
This is not to say Esther was harmed by a hunter, just that the possibility of Esther encountering an individual with a weapon remains, given that the intensive search found no trace of her.
This is why the criminal investigation is absolutely necessary." Okay, Friday, January 23rd, 2021, two Spanish hikers found a skull with long hair lying among the boulders on the French approach to Port de la Gleire.
Police searched the site but could not find anything belonging to Esther, including her clothes, her bright yellow tent, and her grey and red rucksack.
Oh, so I thought that the rucksack was grey and she was easy to blend in.
That's very confusing. Anyway, French police chief Jean-Marc Bartonero said, We cannot say anything at the moment because the discovery of the bones is too recent.
They must be properly analyzed.
Let's see here. Spanish police are reported to believe that a heavy snow shower in the area where Ms.
Dingley vanished may have covered her body if she had slipped and fallen.
Snowfall forced police on both sides of the border to suspend their search.
Yeah, I mean, if she had slipped and fallen, she could have booted up her cell phone and tried to get a signal, of course, right?
And you're not supposed to hike alone, right?
Obviously, right? And you're also not supposed to hike without telling people exactly where you're going, if you do end up going alone.
So they did confirm the remains of whether the skull was Esther Dingley.
And let's see here.
At this stage, with just a single bone found and no sign of equipment or clothing in the immediate area, which has been closely searched again over several days, the details of what happened and where remain unknown.
They're going to continue their search on foot and with drones, particularly trying to find some sign of Esther's equipment to understand how this tragedy occurred.
And so some guy said, this is the tragic end we have all feared.
This is devastating news for Esther's loved ones.
Never before have I seen such incredible determination as that showed by Daniel in his relentless physical search of the mountains.
Well, of course, there could be a codependence.
And again, not to completely dismiss his obvious sorrow and so on, but you can only love the woman by being apart from her sometimes.
It just seems a bit strange.
So... It's very tragic.
It's very sad. I mean, this is a very intelligent woman.
She died at the age of 37.
I mean, we assume that she died.
I assume after the snowfall, if she was still out there, right?
She wasn't abducted. She didn't flee the mountains.
She didn't fake her own death. Like, all this Elvis and Jim Morrison stuff was not the case at all.
And yeah, this festering pit of mutual loathing.
Again, that's like, we're not going to have kids, let's get away from each other.
You can only will so much in happiness.
You have to roll with the biological.
You have to roll with what things are designed for.
In the same way that you need to buy a forklift, not become a forklift.
You need to use your mind, your heart, your soul, your emotions, your neurotransmitters.
You need to use them. In the manner that they evolved to support.
You can only go against nature for so long.
So this mutual loathing, and this chronic fatigue, this depression, I mean, that's your body, I think.
I don't know, obviously, but I'm thinking that's your body as a whole, saying this path is disastrous.
And she willed herself to stay on this path.
And he willed himself to stay on this path.
And if he wanted to settle down and she couldn't handle going back to any kind of regular life, That's bad, too.
After six years of no responsibilities, no mortgages, they probably weren't paying much, if anything, in taxes, no car payments, no kids, no taking care of elderly relatives, and isolation from parents to child, too.
She was sent to boarding school.
I don't know for how long, but I imagine a long time.
She was sent to boarding school and, you know, gosh, if my daughter at some point wanted to just vanish into nowhere year after year after year, I mean, I'd find her, track her down, find out what the problem was, figure out how to make her happier, figure out what I could do to intervene to bring her joy back and tell her to stop running and turn around and face what I was chasing her.
And I wonder, you know, this is one of the great privileges that I have in having these incredible conversations with people about deep and meaningful things, which for a lot of people is the first time they've ever had that.
The first time they've ever had that deep and meaningful stuff.
But I always wonder how many lives can be saved by one deep and meaningful conversation.
One deep and meaningful conversation.
Why are you unhappy? Why don't you want kids?
And you know, I know I hop on the kids thing, but that's why we're all here, and that's what we're designed to do.
We're designed to have and rear children.
That's what so much of our psychology and biology and happiness neurotransmitters and dopamine and oxytocin and all of that is designed to pair a bond to allow us to have children.
And again, you can try and wrestle nature away from 3 billion years of evolution, and maybe you'll succeed, but the odds are very, very slim.
And it's really, really tragic.
Now, there's another fact, too, which I wanted to sort of mention here as well.
So, Dingley and Colgate completed an 80-day unbroken hiking trek through the Alps, took up temporary residence in a borrowed gite in Gascony, I guess that's the farm, the vineyard.
Six days later, Dingley decided at short notice to set off on a solo trip in the camper van.
She spent the first night an hour from Colgate in a lay-by, Then later, according to Colgate, continuously extended her trip.
During this time, Dinkley told a fellow walker that she was taking a break from her relationship and did not know if she would resume it.
Colgate says this was not true.
So, again, some basic facts and basic curiosity, basic interest about this kind of stuff.
She spent the first night an hour from her boyfriend.
Now, if you decide you want to go someplace because you want to go on a solo trip, okay, but then you would leave the next morning.
She was only an hour away from her boyfriend, so that's, to me, that's storming out, that's being unhappy, that's just getting out.
And she says, oh, I'm just going on a short trip, and then she just keeps saying, I'm going longer, I'm going, I'm going longer, right?
And when she says to a fellow walker she's taking a break from her relationship, did not show if she would resume it.
That's unbelievable agony.
I mean, please, please understand.
Again, biology, biology, biology.
The baby rabies would be strong in this, right?
The baby rabies may have hit, like the desire to have children may have hit her earlier, which is why she had chronic fatigue, which is why they were both depressed, which is why, you know, all of this kind of stuff, right?
And if a woman is 37, she's been in a relationship for 19 years, and she's thinking of, I mean, she wants to get out, or she's not sure if she's going to resume the relationship.
They're on a break, friend style, right?
They're on a break, right? So the relationship is over, and she's not knowing if she's going to go back, right?
Now, when Colgate says this was not true, oh, he's not saying what she told the fellow walker.
He's saying that this wasn't the case.
Okay, well. I don't know.
You'll probably get a lot more positive attention from being somebody's long love than ex-boyfriend.
Anyway, taking a break from her relationship, I did not know if she would resume it.
She's 37. She's 37.
Now, her figure, of course, she was very healthy, very fit.
Her figure was good. Her face, of course, and this is the thing, right?
When you get into your 30s, and particularly into your 40s, you can have a good figure, or you can have a good face, but you can't have both.
When you're younger, you can have both.
But when you get into your 30s, late 30s in particular, mid to late 30s for women, you can have a good figure or you can have a good face.
If you have a good figure, it means you have low body fat, which means your face looks paper thin and wrinkled.
If your face is fuller and looks younger, that's because you have extra subcutaneous fat, which means your figure isn't good.
And she had a good figure, and you can see from the face that the age is caving in, right?
Again, it's no insult, no disrespect whatsoever.
It's just a basic...
I mean, I can see this in myself.
I've got a little bit of wattle under my chin.
Well, it'll be 55 next month, right?
A month or two, right? No, it'll be 55 in a month and a half, right?
So yeah, I'm going to have a bit of wattle.
I'm going to have a bit of face sagging.
I can't do everything that I used to do physically.
That's just the nature of the beast.
So I'm not saying anything to anybody else that I'm not also saying and noticing with myself.
You know, my beard is largely gray.
My hair is largely gray. It's just the way it is.
What are you going to do? I'm loved for who I am, not how I look.
And that's what you've got to do.
You've got to be transitioned into being loved for who you are rather than how you look.
And look, this is all probably nonsense.
But in my experience, personal trainers do a lot of body flaunting.
And this may all be complete nonsense, but I'm sort of struck by the fact that she was doing yoga in public view.
And there's no reason why she probably couldn't do yoga in a camper van or anything like that.
But she's seen doing yoga.
And again, my experience has been that women with really good figures in the yoga pants doing yoga in a public place, there is a certain amount of figure display that's going on.
No hate, no problem. It's just something I've...
Kind of noticed. And if she took a certain amount of vanity in her physique, and she's aging out of it, and certainly in her face, you know, 37 years old, breaking up from the relationship.
She's invested 19 years of her life.
You know, I mean, if they'd had kids when they first got together, that kid would be able to drink in Ontario, right?
But a year past voting age.
And there is, you know, there is this sense that happens in life.
What is it all for?
Now when you're young and you're worried about what people think of you and you're worried about how attractive you are and you're trying to find a date or a partner and you're trying to figure out what you want to do in your life, you're so busy trying to carve your way into adulthood and trying to shape what kind of future you're going to have.
And you're kind of on a train track, right?
Because You know, when you're in school, you're on a train track, they just tell you basically what to do.
You go to university, it's kind of the same thing.
You go to have a job in the summers or Christmases or whatever, and because you don't have many skills, you're told what to do all the time.
Of course, right? You're told what to do.
I mean, when I was a waiter, I was told what to do.
I was a waiter at Pizza Hut, and you had to get the drinks out and the food.
Within five minutes at lunch, there was a timer on the table, or you had to give them free pizza.
So you're just reacting, reacting, reacting.
And of course, I'm sure this is true for women.
It's a little bit more true for men, I think, that these hormones are just driving you to pursue women and get dates and kiss women and have sex and pair a bond if you can and try and find someone.
So you're on the train track, really, of the hormones, right?
Now, this does begin to diminish.
It hopefully should diminish. Because your early to mid-twenties is trying to find out what you want to do, trying to find out who you are, who you're going to be with.
And I tell you, I love being in my fifties because all those questions are answered.
All those questions have been answered for me.
Who am I going to be with? I'm going to be with my wife.
What am I going to do? I'm going to be a philosopher.
What's the meaning of my life?
Having kids. Having a kid, right?
So... Those questions, going back to when I was younger, it's kind of like I wish I had known how well it was going to turn out.
I wouldn't have striven for quite as much.
But... I left theater school.
I left acting. I left directing.
I left playwriting. I left novel writing.
I left poetry writing. I left the business world until I found the thing that was the best for me and the best for the world and I wouldn't trade any of it for anything.
So when you're young the meaning is striving.
When you're young the meaning is Got to figure out what my life's going to be about.
I've got to figure out who I'm going to be with, what I'm going to stand for, what are my morals going to be, what's my profession going to be, right?
Now, by the time you're in your 30s, particularly your late 30s, like this woman, all these questions are supposed to be completely and totally answered.
All these questions are supposed to be completely and totally answered.
And for me, in my 30s, okay, I was in the business world, and I met my wife, and so I knew I was going to be working in a professional context.
I thought it would be software for, you know, the foreseeable future, but I was, of course, still trying to get novels published and all that.
I knew the answers. I didn't know the final answer, because I was still working in software, but I would have preferred to be a novelist.
And I got such a fantastic review for The God of Atheists, my novel The God of Atheists, got such an amazing review for me, that it was the great Canadian novel, that every time the phone rang in my big office as a director of marketing, I picked it up thinking it was A publishing house saying, my God, we have to publish this book.
Of course, I didn't realize that they're generally run by communists, and the book was pronatalist, and they just weren't never going to publish it.
So, I think this woman, 37, you know, battling depression, end of the relationship, And then what?
Right? Is there a future that you can envision?
My future, yeah, I can envision my future.
I can envision how things are going to play out.
I mean, there'll be changes and adaptations of this, that.
I mean, I get all of that. But, you know, I'm going to be married, I'm going to remain a dad, I'm going to remain a philosopher, where I do it and how I do it.
It could be a bunch of different ways.
But I think of this woman with, you know, great, great sympathy.
Great sympathy. Highly educated with very little idea how to live.
And she's invested 19 years of her life.
Never got married. Never had kids.
37 years old.
And now what? Let's say that the guy did want to settle down and she's like, I can't settle down.
I cannot settle down.
Well, maybe she didn't want to have kids because she was put in boarding school.
And... There was a lot of unprocessed abandonment issues, isolation, trauma, lack of trust, neglect, whatever.
I don't know. Maybe she didn't want to have kids.
Okay, so you don't want to have kids. Okay.
Again, there's things you can do in your life if you don't have kids that are going to give meaning.
But it has to be something to do with serving virtue and inspiring better things in your community in whatever way you can.
So she'd just been traveling like a tumbleweed for no purpose.
Really, navel-gazing into the elusive butterfly of happiness, chasing it all through the mountains.
She's 37 years old, and she can't stand her boyfriend, it sounds like.
She's, like, taking a break from the relationship.
And you, like, my God, I can't emphasize this enough.
19 years with this guy, and she needs to get away from him.
That is about as bad a situation for a 37-year-old woman as I can imagine.
Because she's looking forward. She can't go back to academia.
She's got no job experience.
She's got no job history.
Maybe she's getting some social media attention because, I mean, she's obviously very intelligent, good-looking, and has a life that some people are going to envy, right?
Yeah, some people are going to envy that life.
I do. I mean, there are times where it'd be like, yeah, it'd be fantastic to be hiking in the mountains in the middle of nowhere.
People are very nice. They have no responsibilities and not a care in the world and so on.
But this is often where it leads to this kind of, now what?
What you got to look forward to?
Her relationship's over. She's in the middle of nowhere.
She hasn't had a job for six years.
She's aging out of her attractiveness.
Fertility is massively down, what she's down like ninety-five percent of her eggs.
Who's she going to meet? So let's say she breaks up into the sky.
Who the hell is she going to meet out there in the middle of nowhere?
She's going to meet younger people traveling.
Or older people who are burned out.
So she's not going to have kids.
This end of this relationship is like no kids.
Now he may have been saying, I want to settle down and have kids.
And maybe she was ambivalent about it or whatever.
But the relationship's over.
She's 37. She's aging out.
She's hit the wall. And she's got no prospects.
What's she gonna do? Is she gonna go hike alone for the rest of her life and post selfies on social media?
That's her life? See, with social media, you need to at least have the pretense of happiness, some plausible pretense of happiness.
And I'm getting struck by the CCTV footage that shows her, you know, forlorn and sad and all of that outside of the social media stuff.
So if you say, let's say you're a woman, you know, she's, you know, in a couple of years, she'll be 40, some 40-year-old woman, hiking alone, taking selfies in the sun, you know, wrinkled and, you know, long in the tooth and all of that.
It's going to be really tough to say, I'm living my best life.
Now, I'm traveling across, I'm looking great, I'm taking cool selfies, I'm pretty, I'm athletic, and I'm in a camper van with the love of my life, roaming around Europe.
Okay, that's like a marketing thing you can sell.
You can sell that. I'm not saying it's good, but you can sell it.
But I'm 40, I'm alone at the top of a mountain, and I'm going to sleep in a tiny tent all by myself tonight.
You can't sell that. That's someone you feel sorry for, so all of this is stone of validation if she's not in the relationship.
And either way, either way, When you're in your 40s and all of this stuff, it's pretty bad.
So the social media validation was probably going to fall off pretty soon.
She's got no future. What's she going to do?
Where's she going to go? Where's she going to live?
How's she going to live? What's she going to do?
I said this as one of the biggest tweets I ever had on Twitter, where I said, You know, ladies, sexual market value diminishes at 40.
Your fertility ends at 40.
You're going to live to be 90.
What are you going to do with those 50 long years?
And a giant phase of her life was ending, which is sexual market value, fertility, youth, all going, all gone.
She's looking forward to 50 years of what?
You ever have that where you wake up in the morning and You have nothing planned, nothing to do.
It's been a long time for me since that's been the case with your new kids and your family life and so on, right?
Now for me, when that happened, I was like, oh how lovely, I just pick up a book and sit on the couch and Have a coffee and a snack and read for a couple of hours.
Just wonderful, right? Now, I can sit down.
I find something interesting about this article.
I can just sit down here and do a show or whatever, right?
But how much would have to be taken away before you'd wake up and say, I have no idea how to fill the next 16 hours?
You sleep for 8 hours, right?
You wake up at 8 o'clock in the morning.
You're going to go to bed at midnight, right?
8 to 12, 6.
12 more you got, right?
16 hours. 8 to 12, 4, sorry.
8 to 12, 4 plus 12.
16 hours, right? What are you going to do?
Oh, I'll play some video games.
I'll maybe go for a walk.
I'll get some groceries. You know, but all of that is diminishing.
You've got to have something that is going to get you out of bed.
And have you go back to bed having done something productive and virtuous and positive with your day.
You know, I go out for brunch with my daughter.
We have a great chat and laugh and all that.
Fantastic. I do a show where I can not just help an individual, but help the world through these conversations.
I did four shows yesterday.
One woman was called a Nazi by her family because she's conservative and we talked about that.
I helped a fellow with his drug addiction.
I did a show in the morning, pro-vax versus vaccine skeptic, how to solve the problem, and then I did a call-in show at night where I argued German history and contempt for humanity and how to avoid it with a listener and a bunch of other things.
I went to bed, and I didn't look back and say, what was that for?
And I didn't wake up this morning and say, I've got 16 hours, what's it for?
I can take my thoughts, I can share them with the world for all time, for all eternity, with you, with others.
And there's never a question, what's it for?
What's it for is, through the wisdom that I have accumulated, I can both teach and learn from people, and we can make the world a better place.
Can't ask for more than that, can you?
That Jude has made at least one person's life better.
She had spent a long time not making people's lives better.
A lot of the social media stuff, the vanity stuff, where, you know, you see these...
They're called influencers, right?
Because nobody knows what the hell to call them.
I mean, attention whore seems a little crass.
But the people who, you know, they'll rent a pretend airplane and sit in a cabin like they're in a private jet and look...
They're provoking envy.
And it's generally not that aspirational, because the people are, you know, especially the women, right?
They're born naturally beautiful, and they have good figures, which, you know, I mean, part of that's genetic, right?
And all of that.
And they work for it as well, but they work for it in part because they're beautiful and can do all of this stuff, right?
Like, you know, you look at Chris Pratt and his abs.
Well, he gets paid, however, millions of dollars a movie, and, you know, if I got paid millions of dollars, I'd get some abs, too.
So it's not particularly aspirational.
You do all the social media posting where people are like, oh, you look so fantastic, you look so fabulous.
It reminds me of the Asian woman who tried to take a selfie by a waterfall, fell 16 feet and died.
She's a gorgeous figure. I'm sure she was smart.
And she would post and just, oh, my God, you look fabulous.
Oh, what an exotic location.
Oh, my God, you're so beautiful, blah, blah, blah, right?
So a lot of that is simping, a lot of that is envy, a lot of that is reaching for the stars and so on.
Is she making the world a better place?
Showing her butt to strangers.
Is she making the world a better place?
No. No, she's not.
And certainly the women who flaunt their looks on social media, they're not really making the world a better place.
And it's not like, look, it's not like every pretty woman is doing this, but, you know, the women who are mostly known for their looks, are they making the world a better place?
No. What they're doing is harming people's capacity to pair bond, because if you try oxytocin-like to pair bond with some social media figure, you're doomed.
So you're never going to meet her. So they're interfering with people's ability to pair bond.
They're getting resources, gathering resources, because men are programmed to give attractive women resources if there's any hope that they'll pay them attention.
And so you see the thirsty comments and you see the donations and all of that.
And no, they're not making the world a better, they're making the world a worse place.
Because they're harming people's ability to pair bonds, they're putting people in a holding pattern, they're putting men in a situation where they compare every woman they meet to the 1 in 10,000 genetic freaks of significant physical and facial beauty.
They're making men dissatisfied and they're giving men the sense that they're advancing in a relationship because they send 20 bucks to a Twitch streamer.
Like, that's just not making the world a better place.
It's pillaging Biological vulnerabilities for the sake of gathering resources.
That's not good.
And again, I don't know much about this woman's history or this man's history about what they did on social media, but...
And to be fair, they were honestly writing about their mutual pit of self-loathing and all of that.
But it's interesting to me that the woman who spent a lot of time on social media and was around internet places, right?
That place is where you get the internet for the couple of days before she died.
She didn't post that she was feeling lost or sad or lonely.
She didn't post that she's ended her relationship and she's not sure if she's going to resume it.
She didn't post that she'd stormed out if that's what she did, and it sounds like if she spent the first night only an hour away from her boyfriend.
My wife had to go somewhere and said, I'm going to leave at 8 o'clock at night.
I'd be like, what now? I mean, that wouldn't make any sense.
We'd spend the night together, and then she could leave in the morning, right?
So, she wasn't posting the vulnerability, she wasn't posting the hurt.
And it is such a hollow thing to base your sense of worth on the comments of strangers and the envy of the unknown ghost masses of the internet.
So, relationship's over.
Sounds like. It's aging out of her attractiveness.
It's going to be tough to sell the glorious story of the enviable life of the solo woman.
Aging out of the mountains.
Her education went nowhere.
Her career went nowhere.
And it must go back to something early in her history.
Which... we'll never know.
We'll never know. It's a very sad mystery.
And that's, you know, I would love to peel back the layers of time and view people's histories to find out what happened that influenced them, perhaps, to end up where they ended up.
I'd like to talk with the skull, Yorick style, Hamlet style.
What happened? Maybe this is all nonsense.
Maybe it was a total, complete accident.
Maybe she had a big life plan.
But I don't think so. I don't think so.
There's so much to be learned from this stuff.
A little life of Easy Live and Quiet Die is that little song that Lucy Honeychurch sings in Room with a View.
Easy Live and Quiet Die.
I was at a restaurant once in Guelph called The Round Table.
I went there with my daughter, because they have games there.
And there was a table in the back with a bunch of people, looked like they were in their thirties, and they were playing Dungeons and Dragons, I think it was, or something like that.
And, you know, a lot of them were overweight, and there weren't any kids around, and they were, of course, living this life of hyperextended adolescence that's gone on 20 years past its due date.
But I tell you, man, I looked at that, and I felt this welling up of just, God, that would be nice.
Eat what you want.
Work some nothing job.
Go play Dungeons and Dragons.
Eat some more. Make your jokes.
Have your friends. A tiny life that never arouses the enmity of anyone in power.
A lost, nothing, self-indulgent life of silly pleasures and possibly scant regrets.
Recognizing the shape of society, you might as well grab your Flashes of goofy happiness while you can.
why not take your heroine if the titanic's going down and all the lifeboats have left it is a consummation devoutly to be wished And the idea that there can...
I mean... Six years of traveling around Europe, doesn't that sound kind of glorious in a way?
No responsibilities, no cares, no struggles, no challenges, no deplatforming, no hostility, no one's angry at you, nobody calls you a cult leader or a white supremacist or a Nazi or nobody.
Oh, pretty nice.
It is a ghostly, satanic, seductive finger cock.
Come here. Let go of all this silly virtue stuff.
You're just fighting for no reason.
The world's going to go the way it's going to go.
Your ideals mean nothing. Listen to the callers.
Oh, I've listened to you for so long and they still live such irrational lives, some of them.
Come on. Just come and have some goofy fun.
Go play in the corner of a restaurant.
You're in a small town.
Have your little friends, your little jokes.
Easy live and quiet die.
Bad guys are gonna win.
Enjoy your time before they do.
Fighting only shortens your survival metrics.
One day it won't just be threats.
Let it go. Be small.
Be insignificant. Be inconsequential.
Survive. The mammals don't fight the dinosaurs.
They simply burrow and hide until the comet wipes them out.
And that's the temptation of living in a camper and hiking around and being cool, which would be depressing enough in the past.
And I spent a short amount of time.
I traveled with a friend of mine through Belize, Guatemala, Mexico.
And yeah, similar kind of person, right?
I think she ended up Having a, um, ended up setting up an adventure tour company or something like that.
Almost certain she never had any kids.
And then there is this, okay, well, that's the problem, alright?
So the problem with the playing Dungeons& Dragons in the back of a small restaurant in Guelph is that it's a long life.
It's a long life. And it's a long time where you're not playing that, Dungeons& Dragons, in your 30s.
It's a long time.
It's a long time. A lot of hours to fill.
A lot of days, weeks, months, years to fill.
Decades. And I'm sure you even age out of that.
I didn't see anyone there in their 50s or 70s.
Still alive. What are you doing?
You run away from life.
It's a huge relief.
But it drives you slowly mad.
And my other concern...
I think the Asian woman who died falling in the waterfall was in her 30s.
I guess my other concern as well is that if you're not going to have kids, if you're not going to be a productive member of society, I think that your genes, I talked about this in the death impulse thing, I think your genes are like, okay, let's just wipe it out.
Let's just wipe it out. She's not contributing, not having kids, just consuming.
We call them useless eaters in the sort of harsh phrase of...
Marxism, and the tribe as a whole benefits if you're not consuming resources without hunting or fishing or having kids, if you're just living self-indulgence, but taking the resources of the tribe, then the tribe benefits if you're not there.
And I'm just wondering if sometimes there is this carelessness, there is this death wish and so on that floats around for the benefit of the tribe, because if the tribe was full of people who were consuming without producing, the tribe would fail.
And, you know, I mean, the old story of the Inuit, right?
They would take their old people and put them on an ice floe and push them off because they couldn't afford to feed them and they weren't able to produce anything.
I don't know. Is there a death wish that undercuts the people who aren't productive, who don't have kids, who don't contribute, who consume without producing?
Is there an underlying death wish?
I think there could be. And it would be biological, not really psychological.
And it may have nothing to do with this woman whatsoever.
It's just that these are the thoughts that were sparked by casually reading the article about a woman who went missing.
I hope they're of interest to you.
Please let me know. As always, I'm fascinated by what you think, if this makes any sense to you, if these kinds of shows are of interest.
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