This is quasi Part II for Goblin Town & The Effort Chad.
Three paragraphs can tell you more than three dates. A résumé is curated. A social media profile is managed. Dating is a performance where both parties slowly figure out who the other really is. But a thousand words on any subject, written without an editor? That’s an involuntary MRI.
Writing is an unwitting confession. A mask that fits so well you forget you’re wearing it. Details about our mind, circumstances, bodies: exposed.
Physiognomy reads faces. But did you know a voice can tell us what your face looks like? I’m not kidding (see research linked at the end of this essay). Everything is a biomarker. Even the way you deny that it is.
A sentence is just a voice in formal wear. If faces embed characteristics and voices betray faces, then prose betrays all. We tell on ourselves in ways we’re unaware of.
What follows is irresponsible and more accurate than you'd like it to be.
Outline:
I. Body Language: Surface Physiognomy
II. The Underfucked: Pleasure States
III. Borrowed & Earned Beliefs: Psychological Profiles
IV. The Latchkey Kid: Psychological Formation
V. Sad Clown: Life Hardships
VI. Sword or Shield: Psychological Profiles & Physical Capacity
VII. The Confident & Powerful: Social Status
VIII. Embodied Practitioners, Disembodied Theorists
IX. Concluding
I. Body Language: Surface Physiognomy
Sentences leave fingerprints. Paragraphs show gait. Your body has a BMI and so does your rhetorical style. I can tell many of you are attractive based on prose alone. Beautiful silly mids beget beautiful silly thoughts.
A pretty girl writes carelessly because she can. Lowercase, no punctuation, vibes-only explanations. She assembles letters whimsically and posts with abandon. Attention is heroin for the female mind, and she shoots it right into her veins. She doesn’t have to try in real life, and she doesn’t try on Substack either. Yet you read it anyway, because carelessness from someone beautiful feels like being let in on a secret.
Frivolous streams of consciousness that anyone below a 7 would be crucified for. Essays written on her phone with Netflix in the background. Says nothing, is adorable about it, pulls 60 likes as a floor. Pretty privilege leaks into prose. Her incoherence: charming. His incoherence: retard.
A cutie pie uses comma breaks like she’s tossing hair over her shoulder. Ellipses trail off like she’s bored with her own sentence… The hot rarely hedge. Defined guys produce defined arguments; you can sense a jawline in the cadence. Broad shoulders, declarative phrasing. A chinless man blends into the timeline the way he blends in on the subway.
A man with sound squat form doesn’t meander toward his point; he picks it up and delivers it. The doughy craft prose that plods along as they do. The plump and ponderous bury their thesis under labyrinthine layers of fatty language. Read it twice slowly and you'll kinda get it. Sometimes, when it's quiet enough, you can hear the author breathing heavily between paragraphs.
A man who works with his hands composes with mechanical directness: subject, verb, object, done. Paragraphs built like a shelf, functional before decorative. A man whose hands have never gripped anything heavier than a thesis faintly gestures in the direction of a point. Calloused palms produce actionable takeaways.
Youth writes like it’s sprinting from something. Zoomers intuited that caring makes you vulnerable, so best not care about anything. Their insights arrive pre-ironized, shrink-wrapped in detachment, with shitty grammar. The olds write like they're walking toward something they’ve either made peace with or will never make peace with.
Middle-aged, middle-class writing has a penchant for middle-ground stances. The perimenopausal phase of centrism. A defensive crouch with homeostatic desire. They have enough to want to protect it, but not enough runway to build new positions. Delivering takes that feel as if they were approved by an HOA board.
The short man overexplains. Stature that goes unnoticed overcompensates by puffing its chest out elsewhere. A textual insistence on being heard mirroring the manlet experience of being overlooked.
Disjointed reasoning is an anxious body in disguise. Clarity is confidence made visible. Obscurity is shallowness dressed as depth. Polysyllabic clutter words are fear with pretentious scaffolding.
Those with something to say know brevity is.
II. The Underfucked: Pleasure States
Sexual fulfillment radiates outward. Its absence radiates louder. Horny dislocations show up in syntax.
There’s soft desperation in the language of someone rarely wanted on arrival. Compositions auditioning for intimacy. The look-at-me shimmer of ornamental vocabulary from someone who struggles to find dates. Writing in hopes of connection, not expression. The prose equivalent of lingering too long at the end of a hug.
The underfucked man mistakes precision for persuasion.
The underfucked woman mistakes attention for affection.
The underfucked Reddit husband debases himself with performative anti-male self-flagellation. "We gotta do better, fellas": the mark of a man who asks his wife for consent before spanking her. He writes to win the approval of 40-something mommy bloggers who give him pity likes, share his post captioned "more men should be like this", and wouldn't fuck him at gunpoint.
“Come on guys, let’s step it up!”
The well-loved woman writes with pervading serenity. Unrushed, composed, a little playful. She doesn't need you to finish the essay. She wrote it for fun and describes the world as someone who's held often. Her posts feel like Sunday morning. Cozy girls have cozy pace.
The underfucked man intellectualizes his hunger.
The underfucked woman romanticizes her loneliness.
The underfucked woman posts call-for-help poetry at 2 AM with no title. She doesn’t want feedback nor cares of it’s good. She wants someone to recognize and caress the shape of her aches.
A deficit of intimacy echoes in diction. A face that attracts little notice writes like it’s begging to be seen. A girl spewing negative adjectives cries out for warmth she can’t name.
A girl who posts 17 times a day wants sex purely for the pillow talk afterwards.
The underfucked man has a resentful pitch. Five paragraphs where two would do, the textual equivalent of someone grabbing your arm at a party. A dearth of intimacy transmuted into strange hostility and needless complexity.
A man missing a woman’s touch is consumed by whether she “makes sense”. He retreats into logic puzzles when expectations diverge from reality. Concluding reality was wrong yet again. His models remain undefeated. His bed remains empty.
The overfucked are drowning in options. Obligations and options are a Biofoundationalist dyad; if you have many options, you have few obligations, and vice versa. Without obligations, one has no duty. Without duty, one has no commitments. Without commitments, one loses direction. The lothario gentleman slowly loses the ability to commit to anything… a person, a position, a sentence.
The fuckboy's prose is slick, oily, and takes you on a scenic route to nowhere. Optimized for engagement, because he views everything as competitive seduction. Sexual interactions are games to be won.
He comments on what’s trending. His opinions are whatever’s edgy enough to be risqué without too thoroughly scaring the hoes. A chameleon in shoes, modifying his presence to become a key for whatever lock he’s trying to pick.
The overfucked (or rather, oversexualized) woman is saturated with a male gaze she loves to hate while hating how much she’s nourished by it. Does a tree make noise if it falls with no one around? Does a woman exist when no one gives her attention? Questions that have vexed philosophers for millennia.
She writes with a kind of exhausted irony. Nothing surprises her, nothing impresses, the type who thinks living in the right Manhattan neighborhood automatically makes you cool. She uses 'try hard' as an insult because effort itself seems desperate. She communicates like she dates: showing up, being present, waiting for you to do the interesting part. Hollow thoughts demonstrating she expects men to fill her silences.
Endocrine profiles seep into sentiments. Hormones coauthor your verses. Estrogen-saturated exposition opts for conclusion-by-feeling: everything is either maudlin or histrionic. Panic or ennui. The rhetorical equivalent of crying at a commercial. You can tell she’s been alone for too long when her interiority has interiority. If she uses “yearn” with noticeable frequency, she could use a hug. And then some.
The testosterone-drenched paragraph mistakes force for function, treating every disagreement as territory to be seized. Surplus androgens abrasively relay points, turning the author into a hammer seeing nails everywhere. Fueled by confrontation, prone to impotent aggression, guided by extrospection.
The highly creative man is often an absurd one, oscillating between moments of profundity and “is he having a breakdown?” spectacle. He’s graced with astounding self-confidence that’s entirely unwarranted. But he believes in himself so sincerely that you start believing in him too: willing whatever weird shit he's working on into existence through sheer reflexive force.
Should she succumb to the womanly impulse to hurt herself in a fun way, the creative, colorful man will haunt her pussy forever. These guys fuck, she must stay far away. So naturally, she will not.
III. Borrowed & Earned Beliefs: Psychological Profiles
Bad posture shows up in thinking. A spine that won't straighten produces arguments that won't stand.
A man unsure what he believes needs a bibliography to justify himself. Those who lack identity lean on credentials; those with it stand on merit. When you’re unsure who you are, you cite others who do.
A man who arrived at his own conclusions describes his journey. A man who had conclusions handed to him name-drops who handed them over. He borrows altitude from better minds, mistaking the view for his own.
The woman who earned her perspective describes the struggle preceding it. The woman who read about it describes her sources. Absorbing extensive documentation of someone else's suffering, her empathy is extensively footnoted.
The insecure really, really need you to know where they went to school and what they do for work. It's the first thing in their bio, the second thing out of their mouth, and the load-bearing wall of their personality.
The educated man is augmented by others’ work. The overeducated man becomes an avatar for the consensus surrounding him. The well-read woman is enhanced by literature. The overread woman is diluted by it. Books are her escape from reality.
The distinction between reading to grow and reading to watch someone else grow. The former integrates; the latter vicariously lives through others. One uses books as weights for training, the other as trophies for display. Please do not brag about how many books you read this year.
IV. The Latchkey Kid: Psychological Formation
You can tell who was loved as a child by how they engage. The securely attached leave brief, generous comments. Reading charitably, they don’t need you to be wrong for them to be right. Wholesome upbringing produces wholesome margins.
The latchkey kid glares behind a screen, leaving remarks with needles hidden in the upholstery. A master of perturbing ambiguity, misrepresenting your position while remaining passably sincere. Technically on topic, substantively hostile. Sprinkling in exquisite tidbits of condescension to provoke a reaction he can then characterize as overreaction. Smart enough to phrase it so calling it out makes you look sensitive, and ignoring it slowly poisons your afternoon.
Physically unassuming and emotionally unfulfilled, he learned early that direct confrontation gets you hit. So he weaponized implication. Soft-dunking via quote-reply with the energy of a kid who knows exactly which words don't technically count as talking back.
Those ignored as children tend to find the same waiting in adulthood. Frequently caught up in insult matches: a dearth of attention means you’ll take it any way you can.
“Impotent screeching defines their existence. They are online tantrum children, only briefly heard as they lash out. Adults who were never spanked as kids, they used to throw fits at the toy store and now throw them in the comments.
The anxiously attached apologize preemptively. They don't care so much whether you agree, just that you don’t disagree. If you consistently like their posts and then don’t like one of them, they will think it sucks.
The avoidantly attached write with conspicuous emotional absence: technically competent, strangely hollow. Their arguments chase you down the street with a ‘facts and logic’ stick. You finish the essay with no idea who they are. Their rhetorical style concealing human presence.
V. Sad Clown: Life Hardships
Humor is damage that decided to be useful. Those gifted with laughter accidentally tell you they’ve been hurt in interesting ways. Tragedy reframed as absurdity. Laughter is scar tissue that chose not to despair. Sensitive boys tell the best jokes.
Self-deprecation signals someone who learned to beat others to the punch. Roasting himself so nobody else gets the chance. Absurdist comedy is a coping mechanism for those who saw too much too young. So upset by reality they refused the premise entirely. Cruel wit emanates from those sustaining wounds and choosing to wound back. It doesn't make you laugh, just grateful you're not the target.
The author joking about loneliness has been lonely. He who jokes about death has sat next to it. Those who find nothing off-limits have either lost what they cherished or never had much worth cherishing.
Writing that takes itself too seriously reveals an author who hasn’t suffered enough to find levity, or has suffered so much they've lost their light. The funniest people often have the worst personality defects. The saddest try hardest to make others happy. Comedians are terrible people.
VI. Sword or Shield: Psychological Profiles & Physical Capacity
The physically vulnerable worship consensus. The physically capable trust themselves.
Those unable to defend themselves have a penchant for hivemind’s moth-attracting glow. Recognized by passive voice and absent first person, “Experts agree” instead of “I believe”. Posting from behind a fortress of official sources, prose filled with someone else's authority. The thesis doesn’t advance a position but reports others.
The consensus-seeking don't have convictions so much as coordinates. Their stances are transient addresses on maps demarcated by Overton Windows. Being “right” means others agree. Their citations are their shield. Bandwagon fallacy is no fallacy at all.
Groupthink allegiance isn’t cowardice so much as centuries of selection pressure. The majority is a safe position, not necessarily a correct one. In ancestral environments, the physically weak who insisted on heterodoxy were at risk. Blending in was a survival tactic. The capacity to stand alone intellectually required the capacity to stand alone physically. This architecture persists.
Those who can defend themselves are freer to think for themselves. Self-directed expression. Beliefs intrinsically borne. Their reasoning is their sword. First person, active voice, conclusions stated, evidence provided. Even in modernity, potential for violent resistance subconsciously provides a sufficient but unnecessary condition for intellectual independence. An evolved trait lingering to this day. You’re an animal, you know.
Genuine dissent isn’t to be confused with the contrarian edgelord. This is rebellion in a dress code. Their heterodoxy has its own orthodoxy. Hivemind in negative: defining himself entirely by what he rejects, meaning he's still defined by what he claims to have transcended. The edgelord is just the conformist viewed from behind.
Sometimes, everyone else is wrong. Not all the time. But sometimes.
The anonymous writer is his own case study. Liberated from physical consequence, he either discovers what he actually thinks or unleashes the worst version of himself. Some find liberated introspection. Some find a hobgoblin. The frustrated anon not getting what he wants out of life deploys crude, caricatured attacks: anonymity is his sword.
The well-adjusted anon explores uncomfortable terrain and dissects forbidden fictions: anonymity is his shield.
VII. The Confident & Powerful: Social Status
Confident writing doesn’t announce itself. It arrives. Substance flows immediately, the first paragraph isn’t a throwaway. A long, winding introduction signals someone unsure if they belong.
Nervousness and self-doubt qualify everything — "in my opinion", "arguably", “I could be wrong” — the textual equivalent of not making eye contact. Every hedge is a flinch. Every caveat a small apology for taking up space. Discouraging confrontation by placing stances in flexible, amorphous buckets. You don’t have to agree, but please (please) don’t disagree.
The lawyer composes defensively and forcefully. The engineer crafts if-then statements and chains of reasoning. The academic writes to impress other academics. The natural salesman writes to manufacture desire and urgency (‘10 traits that will make you a Sigma, #6 will shock you’).
The wealthy write with conspicuous indifference. Unconcerned if their diction impresses because everything else they have does. They throw claims around the way they throw money around. Is it true? Does it make sense? These are not aristocratic questions. Does it advance my status? Does it signal alignment with my business interests? Yes, that’s more like it.
Those who aren’t elite but believe they should be overdecorate their meditations: upper-class references, turgid philosophical vocabulary sprinkled in like truffle oil on a gas-station sandwich. Writing that wears a three-piece suit to go to the mall. Output engineered to impress others, extrinsically motivated. The textual equivalent of a leased Lamborghini due back at 9 AM.
The powerful type like they bill by the word. Typos in every other sentence. Proofreading is a task for someone whose time is less valuable. An email from the C-suite is immediately identifiable: it doesn't argue, persuade, or finish its sentences… “ok”, “handle this”. Just two words redirecting massive sums of money and hours of everyone’s time. Power is spotted when it’s inarticulate, provides no rationale, and is dutifully obeyed.
The truly powerful often don’t write at all, they dictate.
Some write as they speak. Others compose as who they wish they were. A man who sounds nothing in person as he does on page is telling you who he wants to be. The gap between spoken and written voice sometimes exposes the gap between self-image and self-reality.
VIII. Embodied Practitioners, Disembodied Theorists
Status shapes what you say. But something deeper shapes how you think.
For the embodied writer, language compresses reality. Symbols point outward: at terrain, consequences, things that physically push back. Actionable philosophy is tested outside itself as that’s where life happens. The map that doesn’t correspond to territory is useless.
The embodied writer asks how it operates in practice. Not "is this elegant" but “does it work?”. If you seek application, you don't fear falsifiability.
For the disembodied writer, language constitutes reality. Symbols point inward, creating self-referential loops. Philosophy becomes identity rather than tool when it’s not measured against terrain, when it declares without testing. Getting lost in theory has no consequences because theory is the destination. Practice… meh.
Application implies the theory could fail, failure implies the theorist is wrong, and being wrong is an identity crisis when your identity lives in theoretical space. Taking refuge in abstractions, they surround themselves in unfalsifiable loops.
One uses words to navigate the world. The other uses words to furnish a house they never leave. You can tell a writer’s embodiment by how they respond to a simple question: “How does this move?”
If it moves, it’s subject to physics. Observable. Testable. Exists under constraint. If it doesn’t move, if it only exists in the mind or behind a screen, it’s indistinguishable from fantasy.
Orderly minds draw boundaries around arguments and definitions, keeping them moored to implementation. Words direct logistics. Symbols reference reality for validation. The purpose of thinking is correct motion.
Chaotic minds draw boundaries around those who draw boundaries, allowing abstractions to become unmoored from implementation. They think symbols can cite symbols to prove symbols. Rearranging definitions behind a screen or in their head. The purpose of thinking is correct thinking.
Someone who lives through their body writes with concern for external correspondence. Someone who lives in their mind writes with preoccupation for internal coherence.
“Traits of the disembodied: treating internal states as external facts. Identity is declared rather than demonstrated. Problems renamed rather than solved. Consensus substitutes for verification. Thinking is the goal of thinking. Feelings supersede evidence. Shuffling financial symbols instead of building wealth. Sentiments are their reality. Chaos looping without exit.
For the embodied, words point to things in the world. For the disembodied, words constitute the world.”
Philosophy as compass or terrarium? Does it describe symphonies or guide you to create your own? Does it hand you a framework that helps you move, or ask you to admire how beautifully it's been framed? Changing how you think without changing behavior is changing nothing while pretending otherwise. The catharsis of epiphany without the inconvenience of action. A gym membership for the soul that never requires showing up.
What makes a math equation “true”? It aligns with the way things move. Rockets land, machines function, engines run. If the equation says one thing and the airplane says another, it’s the equation that’s wrong. Math is rationalism with numbers if it has no application to motion. Even proofs are eventually subject to this.
Now we ask: what makes a philosophy statement “true”...?
*Eight redefinitions of ‘true’, four of ‘real’ and a six-paragraph exposition through dialectical phenomenology of epistemics of beinghood...*
Words and symbols are either compressions of reality or decorations on a void. If it can’t exist outside your head, it’s indistinguishable from delusion. It’s easy to tell if a thinker lives behind a screen or the real world: “Pardon me sir, how does this move?”
Embodied authors respond with specifics: “I’d stop doing X, start doing Y, measure the outcome by Z.”
Disembodied authors respond with squishy language games: “Well, that depends on how we define behavior, and whether we’re operating from a consequentialist or deontological framework, and whether the self is even continuous enough to... according to Hegel…”
One treats philosophy as GPS. The other treats it as a museum to wander forever.
Hands that solve problems produce sentences focused on results. Hands that have problems solved for them produce sentences focused on definitions. Those with legs built to move produce logic that moves in kind.
The software whispers the hardware. Your mind processes reality differently when you regularly operate within it.
How you write is not that far removed from how you move.
Note: A balanced author balances existence between the mind’s coherence and the body’s correspondence. Being writers means we already have a strong predilection for living in our heads. That’s what writing fundamentally is.
This is why I disproportionately tout embodiment: not because mental work isn’t important, but if you’re on Substack and got this far, odds are you live in your head plenty. The construction worker (all embodiment) could do with some literature; the terminally online girl (no embodiment) could do with some gardening and physical effort.
We must be diligent about not residing solely in symbol space.
IX. Concluding
You've spent twenty minutes reading a man diagnose strangers through sentences. Laughing, nodding, feeling sense of wonder and concern about which archetypes you are. What does his writing physiognomy betray? An appetite for taxonomy… does this suggest the author believes he defies categorization? How do we pin down a man who contains multitudes?
Tragically, he has unwittingly doxxed himself as a sex-haver and incredibly jacked. Dieseled, if you will. A practitioner of exceptionally heavy free weights since his late teens. Perhaps some of those humor remarks apply, but we needn’t get into that. Has worked both embodied and unembodied jobs. A former long-distance runner and team-sport player in his younger years. You are, of course, unsurprised.
Writing physiognomy is real because minds developed and evolved through embodiment.
How you move through physical space shapes how you move through conceptual space. This is not a metaphor or poetic license. Your brain's structure physically changes through mechanical engagement with the world. Knowledge is prediction error reduced through contact with reality. Truth really is found through motion. All intelligence is pattern matching. These are not metaphors, truly.
Prose is thought made visible. Thought is neural activity made sequential. Neural architecture emerges from bodily navigation of reality. This is a neuroscientific statement, not a metaphorical one.
A writer's voice changes as their body does. The hot girl who gains weight learns empathy. The ignored man who gets jacked develops a confident, assertive tone. The young author turned parent understands why patience is a virtue. The trauma victim who moves on discovers humor. Bodies change. Circumstances change. Communication follows.
The mask you wear with language isn’t a mask at all. Even your choice of mask communicates something about you. It’s still your face, because it reveals what you’re trying to hide: refracted through syntax, rhythm, and the direction of your gaze. Things you share when you didn't know you were sharing. Everything is a biomarker.
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New tag yourself format just dropped, everyone tag yourselves!
I was personally attacked maybe four times. Not bad, really.