Humans are not a very bright species, and we express our profound misunderstandings of the universe by attempting to tabulate the scores of everything in perceived existence. The prevalence of autism has not helped matters, as autistic people tend to have an attraction to quantification as part of their disorder. To fan that fire, autistic people like myself often suffer from autistic literalism as a side effect of autistic narcissism, which means that we think following directions to the letter or “playing by the rules” will steer outcomes towards what they would be in our ideal world. If I had a dollar for every time my autistic literalism has blown up in my face, I would be a very rich woman.

We are all on the spectrum in some sense, and the worst afflicted are not necessarily bean counters. A bean counter is a human being who has fallen into the trap of gameifying every interaction in his or her life, hoping that there is a system beneath it all that they can exploit and reap the eternal benefits. Most religions are built by people who have gameified their particular god or gods, firstly presuming that their deity is superior to all others (or in the case of monotheism is the only deity that exists) and secondly presuming they are God’s chosen people. Monotheism is especially plagued with literalism, and that is why we have Christians who waste their lives living provisionally in anticipation of the Second Coming and Jews who believe avoiding pork will help them in the afterlife. Religion, being a creation of human idiots grasping at straws, is not good at grasping the subtle, and the spiritual is the subtle. Religion bulldozes the subtle and its metaphors with obtuse virtue signaling and grandiose carnivals of unearned wealth and fake charity. Churches and temples are great as social clubs in a civilization that has lost its ability to create social cohesion, but as far as getting humans any closer to the Divine is concerned, they suck at the one job they are supposed to perform.

Bean counting for 5 year olds

If we have good parents, we are taught as children to trade good behavior for approval. We are nurtured and not left to our own devices when it comes to learning to go potty, how to clean up after ourselves, how to share with others, and earning an allowance. The trouble comes when we are forced into school, or at least it came when I was forced into school with a bunch of strangers who immediately hated me and determined that I would be cast in the role of Outsider for the next 14 years of my life. A blissful youth spent at home was broken on the rocks of girls who forced me to sit by the bus driver because I had never met them or their friends at age 4. At age 9, I won spelling bees and had a handful of pals but was so generally hated by my so-called “best” friend that she admitted that her mother hated my guts and did not want me to hang out with her anymore. Popularity was a game and I was its biggest loser. I felt alone at the time, not understanding that my experience was being played out in every classroom across the nation and the world. School was not about learning — just about everything I ever learned during ages 4-17 was learned on my own or via my parents. Reading? My mother taught me that. Arithmetic? That was my dad, who showed me how to add and subtract. Typing? I taught myself on an old-fashioned ink and ribbon typewriter with the help of a book. School was about learning to comply with absurd rules to please unhappy and bitter “teachers” who lived lives of quiet desperation while trying to make it look like they knew what they were doing. School was about becoming a good little drone who knew what to say in order to keep the peace.

School sports

One of the ways to become popular in school besides being born to obscenely rich parents was to excel in athletics. It was not enough to be fit and healthy; no, you had to be the one who could hit a softball into the subdivisions beyond the creek and down someone’s chimney. You had to run fast enough to prequalify for the Olympics. If you were a cheerleader, you had to be able to do flips in the air and to be tossed around like a hackey sack without landing on the ground with two broken legs. If you were not that — heaven forbid you were fat, uncoordinated, or just plain not into sports! — you were shunned as weak and pathetic.

Those of us who sucked at sports were tasked to prove our worth elsewhere. The other school clubs and activities beckoned: Join the debate team to word-battle with other kids! Enter the sonatina festival! Qualify for National Honors Society so you’ll have better chances of getting into college! Join Yearbook so you can be of use to the school with all that free time you have after 4 hours a night of homework! It was never enough to just be.

You don’t have to imagine the surprise of all those who were repeatedly told they would get good jobs after graduating college to afford spouses, a home, and a yearly vacation somewhere because they are living that surprise. Zoomers, Millennials, and most of Gen X labored under the delusion that by following the script of get-good-grades-then-degree, they would be rewarded with a job that paid enough to cover the bills and a few small luxuries. They thought they would have enough to raise a family if they chose to do that. As it turns out, my decision to not have children was the best economic decision I have ever made for myself. Had I landed with a husband who wanted children (there was a guy I had a crush on in college who probably could have gotten me to bear his children if it my love had been requited) we would have been very challenged when it came to affording the basics for them. Both spouses have to work these days outside of an extremely privileged echelon of the upper middle class. Everybody has got to hustle, and even then, it is almost impossible to make ends meet.

Most of the women and men who went to college got rug-pulled. This has not stopped the current generation from flooding into colleges and universities as if the past 30 years never happened. They still believe in the dream of flowing into a luxe life after serving up 4 - 8 of their most productive years. Dreams are hard to kill, and bean-counting depends on a dream in order to prop it up.

Dieting

The bean-counting mentality becomes literal when it comes to psychoses over food, otherwise known as dieting a.k.a. disordered eating as a result of an attempt to create order in eating. Wallis Simpson, the train wreck socialite 2x-divorcee who married Prince Edward, quipped “You can never be too rich or too thin” She said this despite being a horsey looking mid who suffered throat cancer (probably from a combo of smoking and starving) and dementia. She could have benefited both health-wise and looks-wise from gaining a few extra pounds, just sayin’.

Anorexics turn calorie counting into a bona fide addiction. It's a talent in its own right.

At its core, anorexia is and always has been a disease of privilege. Anorexia, which rarely happens to men and mostly afflicts affluent young women, is a disease of ingratitude. When we are surrounded by easily attainable, beautiful, life-sustaining food, it is a truly vile and perverse act to starve ourselves to death.

Semaglutide drugs have thrown gasoline on an already roaring fire, and I would guess that most GLP-1 drugs are being used by people who have no business taking them such as Demi Moore. Anorexia is about counting calories as if they were lepers. The anorexic would like to expel all lepers from the kingdom (some claim to do just this by becoming supposed breathatarians) but some lepers must be admitted so the kingdom does not die off entirely. Why? You can never be too rich or too thin.

Liv is gonna die

Liv Schmidt, probably about age 18

Elliot Rodger

There is a creepy, possibly pedophilic, foul influencer named Liv Schmidt who is only known in certain circles of social media. Schmidt is known for being kicked off of TikTok and other social media platforms for her abusive pro-anorexia rhetoric and malevolent bullying. If there is any better example of how to profoundly fail at life than Liv Schmidt, I have yet to see one. She seems like an absolutely awful human being who should be pitied for her emptiness in every sense of the term.

Liv Schmidt wanted to be a haute couture model but was allegedly too “fat” to be considered for runway work. Yet as a younger woman, she was absolutely stunning. Had she been born a decade earlier, she might have been a Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie and Fitch model, with all its attendant Jeffrey Epstein and Mike Jeffries-related problems. Her look was all-American. Schmidt, however, apparently has severe body dysmorphia. She reported in 2024 that she had lost enough weight to walk a “real” fashion runway. Since at least half of her content is AI slop, it is unclear whether or not she ever achieved her dream to strut down a designer’s catwalk.

Schmidt’s entire life revolves around how little she can eat. She is 24 and thoroughly emaciated. Her social media presence consists of hurling abuse at women whose legs are thicker than the girth of a cheerleader’s baton. She often takes selfies where she is seen “eating” a small portion of food with puffy, overfilled duck lips. She hosts an online club cringily entitled the Skinni Société, a subscription club where the seriously anorexic can get lifestyle advice from a pro. To Schmidt’s credit, she has become an expert at making her own body disappear. She was never a big girl, but now she looks like the Grim Reaper if he stole and wore the head of Elliot Rodger, the incel who took his own life after killing 6 people and injuring 14 in 2014. Schmidt’s constant, whiny vitriol towards “fat” women is reminiscent of Rodger’s rants about sluts and Chads. I’m not saying she’s a massacre killer waiting to happen; only that she is entitled and autistic. She also has the dead Rodger boy’s glazed eyes, puffer fish lips, and perpetual frown. Rodger filmed countless hours and wrote a boring, novel-length manifesto about how he was owed beautiful women because he was a “supreme gentleman”. He literally thought that because he wore brand name clothes, drove an expensive car, and was reasonably good looking that women should have been falling over themselves to ride his dick. He was too proud to hire a prostitute, and when he took his own life, he was supposedly a virgin.

Somewhere along the line, Schmidt was told that the only way she could be worth more than the powder to blow herself to hell was via being emaciated. She reports that her mother was the original Skinni club member, which shows us that eating disorders run in families. Like Rodger, she seems to have been a child who was never told “No” unless it pertained to having a full slice of birthday cake.

Fake and gay

Schmidt has shaved her nose into a Michael Jackson fishbone. Because she is dysmorphic, she cannot stop getting work done despite her first nose job being quite terrible. She is now on her second or third. Her nose, however, is a masterpiece compared to her botched lips. Her pout looks like a female baboon’s ass if it was able to frown, and it is all the more disconcerting paired with the fake blonde hair, empty eyes, and horrific fashion choices on the bundle of sticks she has made out of her body.

Also, Schmidt is likely a closeted lesbian. There is photographic evidence that indicates that she has groomed and possibly molested a female 15 year old member of her Skinni Société. I will be talking about the gayness of anorexia in a future article.

Like Elliot Rodger, Schmidt’s entire existence is bean-counting and scorekeeping. Because she has enjoyed a great deal of privilege in her lifetime, she feels she is owed more and more as long as she lives up to the tortured image of privilege she has created in her brain. Every fat-shaming posts she makes makes claims that the “fat” who cannot lose weight are always, always eating too much. Lack of self control = fatter than Starvin’ Marvin Liv = you must be eating too much. Never mind that some people are genetically thinner than others or have diseases or medications that result in weight gain; nah, it all boils down to how much you’re willing to starve yourself like Liv.

Why we are all probably going to die alone

I recently stepped in it when I posted on TikTok about how I don’t nag my husband to do dishes. I explained that he does the dishes more frequently than he used to because instead of bitching or going on housework strikes, I thank him when he does do chores. The women of TikTok went into attack mode, saying that it was sad that I was gentle parenting my husband and that I obviously don’t know how to communicate with the man I have been married to for 26 years. One woman said that she was affirming her choice to be perpetually single via my video.

Whatever. They were triggered by my soft approach and my unwillingness to see myself as a commodity to be traded. When people divorce, they do so because of a long list of offenses committed by their spouse that amounts to physical, emotional, and spiritual debt in their minds. One divorcee I knew saw the writing on the wall when her husband started saying “That’s a divorceable offense!” in regards of some terrible thing she said in an argument or chore she was unwilling to do. He had been tabulating her unworthiness since the honeymoon or before it. The main excuse women use to divorce their husbands nowadays is that he is a man-child. He is not able to earn enough money and he does not help enough with the housework and child-rearing, so they kick him out and become single mothers, come what may. They try for alimony and usually get it, or at least they get what is known as a lump sum or all-at-once payment for their troubles. The main excuse men use to divorce their wives is that she has become unsexy or that she no longer puts out. Never mind that she has given him healthy children and put her own needs and wants on the shelf to care for those kids; she’s no longer hot, so it is time to trade in her moody ass for a girl who is about five years older than his children.

So of course a woman who has gone the Way of the Lone Harpy sees my nonconfrontational treatment of the other adult in my household as deficient because she would much rather see me join her Hate Club where all men are stupid doofuses who cannot do anything right. Tonight my supposedly-terrible husband insisted I open a new package of shredded lettuce for the tacos I made for dinner because as the woman, I should not be made to suffer the insult of eating old, slightly wilted lettuce. He ate the old lettuce on his tacos because “that’s what guys do” according to him. (I tried to get him to throw the old lettuce away, if you’re curious) This is the sort of sweet, chivalric interaction the Lone Harpy does not get to enjoy, and in my opinion, it is her loss. She will die as she lived — utterly alone.

I say this and I fully anticipate dying alone. My husband is 14 years my senior and as I mentioned earlier, I chose not to have children. People have children partially because they hold out hopes that those children will repay them by caring for them in old age. I certainly have put in my fair share of care for my aging parents. Nursing homes, however, are full of old people crying and moaning to go home. They are too far gone or senile to understand that home has been sold off by their children who almost never visit. Filial piety is not what it used to be, especially in America where most kids move far, far away from their parents the moment they are grown.

When people turn relationships into transactions, it all becomes hoe math. Hoe Math is a snarky guy with an eponymous channel on the internet (we never see his face) who draws flow charts of people ranked on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness. Women, who he calls females, used to date in their own range, for instance, a female 5 would date a 4-6 male. Nowadays, every woman from 1-10 only dates the hottest guys fro 8-10, leaving the 1-7s like poor old Elliot Rodger in the lurch. Hoe Math, though it claims not to be serious, is a perfect example of how the autistic brain attempts to reconcile human behaviors into rational units that can be stacked and organized. The Hoe Mathematician thinks he is dealing blows to the slutty femoids who choose Chad over him — never mind that Chad actually attempted to treat her like a human being and not an animated doll. When he finally pins down a femoid and makes her into his wife because she checked enough boxes, he is ironically blindsided when she dumps him for someone who is less enthralled by his own, tiny, narcissistic world.

I am not going to go into it here about how gratitude and generosity break the rules of negative bean-counting due to their sublimating effect. I have many other essays on that. Here are two of them:

The Glad Game

How to Attract the One: Advice from an Old, Married Woman

I will leave you with the observation that bean-counting should be saved for actual accounting, such as in the scrupulous avoidance of high interest credit cards. We humans are simply not intelligent enough (present company very much included) to see the ripples in the pond and how they intersect. Better to go with thankfulness and thoughtfulness than to be absorbed into the fray of retarded bean-counting.

Life is unfair and difficult for human brains to understand. Count on it.