Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Stahlmann wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 09, 2018 2:37 pm

However, due to the commercial success of Fightclub and its meaning in ERE way - I will watch it finally someday.

Or you could read the book, if you're really opposed to mainstream Hollywood.

Such a great movie. Loved it. I never picked up the ERE aspects of it but can see that in retrospect.

I mainly took from it the stuff around support group meetings for problems you dont have and the fight club itself. The film is interesting on so many levels.

Just food for thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfFb95tXvaU

I'll tell something about my "views" after I come from morning walk.

I remember being confused by the fact that the most degrading dialogue in that movie was the most uplifting.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all part of the same compost heap."

That stuff made me feel energized. Later I made the connection to the first noble truth if Buddhism. All life is suffering. As opposed to my baseline belief that some people suffer and some don't. If you think that way, you could blow any little set back up into a tragedy. But If your baseline assumption is that everybody's life is garbage, than every success makes you a heroic underdog who beat the odds.

Also, I was thinking about the ending when I started listening to Jordan Peterson lately. (Movie ending was better than the book.) Jack's old life is Order and Tyler is Chaos. He's got too much order initially, but unrestrained Tyler is Chaos. That's why Tyler goes from being the Savior to being the Villain. He definitely rescued these men from their lives, but then they followed him into a cult.

That type of social ordering plays out amongst the chickens in the barn yard every day. I'd like to think that we are more sophisticated than that, but I was a young rooster once.

I just flat out liked to fight. It was another competition and young men are naturally competitive. But the raw basics of fight club is enlightening or reminding. The stripping down to essentials and gaining the new perspective of how much little things don't matter. Some concepts are better illustrated in story version.

Fight Club captures so many things well:
- the romantic desire of young human males to burn down a system they feel mistreated by
- the cultural suppression of masculinity, and the male desire to express their masculinity, on their own terms
- the ultimate futility of any ideology or belief system against human nature (re-establishing the social system they initially tried to escape)
- human males like to fight, it's almost a biological drive, not like food or sleep, but like sex, and it can be channeled

the movie is also brilliantly done. brute must've seen it 10-20 times at least, and every time it is as enjoyable as the first. this is kind of true for most Fincher movies brute has seen - they're just so incredibly well made, with such attention to detail, that they don't get old or boring.

Why I don't choose to teach 6th grade.

Wow. So this post came full circle. I must have really liked the movie to start this thread. Last week I was in the Salvation Army store and my SO walked up with Fight Club in her hand and said hey, “do you want to own this?” It was half price day.

I shrugged, “Why?”

I’ll have to check it out from the library to refresh my memory. I found the fighting part to be kind of a distracting platform for the minimalism theme.

Ah yes, just read the OP. The things you own own you.

Sclass wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 11, 2018 8:46 am

I found the fighting part to be kind of a distracting platform for the minimalism theme.

Well, physical aggression is a major part of male angst, which was a theme of the story.

The movie was very poorly marketed. Previews of a bunch of amateurs punching each other in a basement? No thx. It didn't reach cult status until after it left theaters, which matches my experience.
I first saw it on DVD at my friend's apartment. I remember the exact moment I knew it was a classic:

"To make soap, we must first render fat. And the best fat comes from humans."
"Wait, what is this place?"
"Its a liposuction clinic."

.

Timeless film.

In college, I wrote a paper about Fight Club en route to my degree in Film/Basket Weaving. I drew a parallel to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, with Norton’s character as representative of slave morality, Tyler Durden as master morality, and the encounter/struggle between the two as representative of individuals having mixed moralities. “My eyes are open” and the following self-inflicted gunshot wound as consummating the synthesis between the two. We were required to speak on our paper to indicate we ourselves had written the paper and not plagiarized. I remember the adjunct professor being intimidated enough by the paper that she brought in a philosophy professor from another school to hear my presentation. I honestly do not recall if the paper was absolutely brilliant, or pointless drivel. I was perpetually in a marijuana-induced stupor at the time. It was probably drivel.

I got an A.

I liked Fight Club but I don't think I would watch it again, because it wouldn't work again.

Why Fight Club might appeal to INTJs ... http://typeindepth.com/2011/12/fight-club-functions/

finished seeing it now; saw it around 2012/13 and never understood a thing. Now its making some sense.

"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. "\


Here we are, in the forum outlining how much we have saved for retirement lol.

Interesting things happen at the intersection. Flip one "not" above and you have FIRE.