Since my personal identity flipped this year from that of primarily humanitarian to that of primarily hedonist, my outlook & plan for personal relationships, including friendship & sexual, has strongly polarized as well.

I’d like to introduce the concepts of Organic vs. Engineered and Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic and Conscious vs. Unconscious into your relationship perspective.

These aren’t binary attributes, but rather spectrums made up of many degrees.

When I say “organic relationship” & “engineered relationship”, I’m talking about the basis for deciding to establish & deepen one’s relationship with another.

On the surface, an organic relationship probably sounds good to most people and an engineered relationship probably sounds cold, heartless, fake, or unfulfilling.

I used to largely agree, but am now seeing things differently, and there is much genuine happiness & pleasure to be had here. Which I totally dig.

Looking through the eyes of individual happiness… For most people, friendships come & go, and deep friendships aren’t too perpetual for most. Don’t even get me started on intimate relationships… Monogamous marriage is the dominant long-term objective of people’s lives here. Long-term monogamy is a huge unnatural battle for most individuals that is largely unsustainable and surely isn’t optimized for maximum happiness & pleasure. Fuck all of that shit. Remember the most amazing moments of personal connection with others throughout your life. That is the type of life I aspire to on an everyday basis…and I believe it can be predictably achieved.

However, I think it takes an alternative structure of personal relationships to do so.

Deep personal relationships are a power pillar of human happiness, so getting the structure right in one’s life will be a big determining factor of our actual happiness & quality of life.

The happiness & pleasure found here within personal relationships is largely why I want to live as a human being for as long as I can. I hate the thought of giving it up. I hate the thought of even giving the potential of it up.

However, based on my obsessive study of human nature & psychology, I know that it isn’t the “relationship” that really matters, but the connection & active experiences one shares with others that really produces the payoff. Fuck inherently perpetual relationships, unless you get off on the sheer notion of them, when we can day trade people based on our desires & motivations. Its not idealistic in a traditional sense, but it is reality, and virtually everyone already does it to a notable degree. Almost all are whores in commerce, many whores in friendship, and some whores in love. I’m now quite agnostic to it, so I cheer on this fundamental drive & strategic pursuit for personal happiness & pleasure! Go human peeps!!

Now, I’ve recently talked publicly a bit about my vision for a personal entourage as a pillar of my personal life. I do really want to live the bulk of my life with a personal entourage of tight, like-minded friends that meet my standards & make me happy to the point of spectators vomiting.

And I fully expect to pay cold hard cash for this entourage.

Yes, that’s right, pay for them…my friends. Call it buying friendship or love, if you want, but that is a simplistic view.

Going back to my distinctions…

Paying for best friends or girlfriends is, on the surface, a primarily engineered relationship basis. I’ll be designing a set of criteria and recruiting/paying people to fill the slots of my desired positions. Quite an engineered notion.

However, here is where I will introduce the concept of Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic. You see, the real idealized underwriter of a traditionally organic relationship is that of intrinsic motivation, where the people like & commit to each other based on their pure human traits & emotional chemistry (intrinsically motivated). This is why many marriage vows say things like “in sickness and in health”. But you go pull the plug on all of the extrinsic aspects involved in all personal relationships out there, like money, etc, and you would see most of these “organic relationships” crash and burn, which would expose the necessary extrinsic pillars of value/motivation propping the relationship up for one or more of the involved peeps.

Does this make these billions upon billions upon billions of human beings hedonistic whores who use each other for self-interest? Yup.

But this is largely a good thing. Because it is simply the mechanics of natural human nature in play. It is only our religious-biased collectivist laws and unnatural social conditioning that introduces the notion of extrinsic or engineered personal relationships being inherently bad.

Obviously, the bulk of personal relationships throughout the world stand upon extrinsic motivations. Yet, most all engaged here deceive themselves & others to believe that their relationship is primarily intrinsically motivated, which is what most people are trying to convey when they say they are in “love”. It exists, but simply isn’t the bulk of human reality. Therefore, with the bulk of personal relationships un/subconsciously resting upon extrinsic motivations, you can easily say that, within their continuing everyday reality, virtually all people are engaged in “engineered relationships”.

I know this position is getting a bit long winded & technical, but it really is quite simple & plain to see. People pursue their personal desires & motivations, whether they are aware of them or not, and these largely do not match the values of an intrinsic motivated relationship, so the true bulk of most relationships just happens to be extrinsic in nature. Also, these motivations are not static and fluctuate throughout time. Overall, big deal with this shit. It is the truth, yet most of our societies & cultures make it taboo or even sinful. Fuck that. Agnostic human nature rules the world, no matter how people try to spin the story or rules.

So I’m going with the biological flow and engineering my personal relationships for maximum personal happiness & pleasure.

The aspects of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation don’t really matter, since they are both almost always present to some degree. However, I think that extrinsic motivation, such as money, is overall a more predictable & stable enabler for a desired relationship. This is especially true for me, since I have very specific & unique standards and desires for what I’d like out of my personal relationships. So the chances of organic & intrinsically motivated success happening to the degree I desire, on a consistent basis for a long life, is just way too unlikely. So, yeah, I’ll largely pay for it.

However, I do desire organic & intrinsic value within my personal relationships. These are great things and that is largely why people are so damn blindly adamant about them. They feel uniquely special. Inside of them, there can even more often be a sense of magic. So it is all good & desired, except that the statistics & economics make for a bad premise of odds for success, as I already detailed. That means that I’m planning on always maintaining a foundational baseline of engineered & extrinsically motivated personal relationships. And when the organic magic shows up at times, I’ll fuck it for all its temporarily worth, but hopefully not be blinded to the point of trashing the masterpiece of hedonistic engineering that I will have created to consistently pump out the personal pleasure like an industrial age factory without unions.

In the end, I predict I will have been outrageously pleased & happy with my life experience. And that’s the overwhelming majority of what ultimately matters here.

Brian Watkins