better sex and authenticity

People talk about escaping a job, or the drudgery of working 9-5, or creating passive income so that they don't have to work.  I think they are all full of an idea that they are creating solely because they know it can't come to fruition.  They are imagining living a type of life that is an idea like porn, not a reality like having sex with your wife.  And the truth is, although we all know that having real sex is so much better, how many people do you know that work at having better sex with their spouse? Not just read magazines with 100 promises on the front, but do the actual work of having better sex?  The wild part is, if you ask most people, they would not be able to give one cemented example of something they could actually do to have better sex!  

And yet that is what society is thinking about all the time, but then collectively we just look at porn instead.  This is what the self help movement, betterment, multiple streams of income is for the vast majority of people.  It's porn for our imagination.  Then, just like porn, when we muster up the audacity to actually do something, it is so misguided and off target that we end up just hurting our chances of actual better.  Guys who see somebody doing something long enough and then want to do it to somebody they love and realize it only harms the relationship and possibility of having actual great sex.  

We see somebody hawking a proven system and how they earned a giant amount of money (I will leave the porn analogy up to you) and we take all of our money and try it and lose half of it and blame the market or the system instead of saying to ourselves "I did that to me".  

People in adult movies aren't having sex, they are acting.  

People selling investment systems are not investing, they are selling.  

People writing books about quitting their jobs are professional authors.  

Bloggers who focus on productivity are focused on readership.  

Magazines that show you how to get better abs are only watching the subscriptions sold matrix.  

What your paying for and what your buying is vastly different.

Whatever you are paying for is what is being tracked.

So is it all emptiness, is it all marketing and there is no way to get any real benefit or guidance in the world?

Seth Godin said when he post's a link to a book that somebody else wrote he gets 6x more clicks that when he posts about a book that he wrote.  That is because deep down we all know the difference.  When Seth post's about somebody else's book it's because it helped him, he is not selling, he is informing.  And becoming informed is what you want.  Finally we see both the person pushing and the person pulling desiring the same thing.

When we follow people who are only worried about themselves (and what I mean is not themselves making money but their own personal struggle for growth) there is an strange correlation to the purity of what they have to say.  David in the Bible wrote Psalms to himself, and they are some of the most beautiful poetry ever written about the pursuit of God.  Edgar Allen Poe wrote about the demons in his own mind, and in his writings we see a creativity that haunts our own minds from time to time.  The guys over at 37 Signals wrote programs that helped them do their jobs better, and they help us do our jobs better too.

It is a hard balance, because sometimes we are like the Counting Crows.  Their first successful album was about the pain and loneliness they were feeling when the album was birthed.  Their next album was much more upbeat because they had lots of money and friends from their previous album.  Critics dismissed the album and it took some time before they were able to come back to making music which was both authentic and touching.

37 Signals is now making applications to sell applications, it will be interesting to see what the next ten years looks like.  David stopped writing Psalms and indulged in his wealth and power, and it caused him great pain and irrevocable damage was done.

Authenticity is hard, but it is attainable.  Not only is it attainable, but there are so many of us that are desperate for your authenticity in our life long search for ourselves.  I heard a speaker recently say that we are in search of the person we already are in God.  When you are searching for that person you can help me find myself as well.