Last month I made the decision to get off Adderall so I can be more effective, both in my personal life and as leader of The Tortuga Society.
This has been an enormous pain in the ass, and has greatly retarded my progress toward several of the goals I care about. But in and of itself it’s gone quite well, and has even provoked a fair few thoughts I’d like to share with you fellers today.
In this article I’m going to ramble on about amphetamines and anima possession; executive functioning and ethical leadership; sleep and suicide; and my plans as currently constituted for this year and beyond.
Just hold on to your dopamine receptors, because this one might get a bit messy.
I first became acquainted with my speedy little friend just over four years ago.
The pretext was straightforward—I was about to commence a brutal consulting gig at a Big Four (in the middle of audit season, no less) and I severely doubted my ability to perform at the required level given that I’d spent most of 2020 doing basically zero substantive work in my remote actuarial role at a sclerotic local insurance company.
Now in my defense the year hadn’t been a *total* waste. I’d started reading again for the first time in years, and for a short while became something of a Civil War buff (I’ve since forgotten virtually all of it, but can still make southrons like me in a pinch). I’d also begun a testosterone enanthate cycle and had run Starting Strength under the tutelage of a scrappy Puerto Rican MMA fighter who insisted he was natty but very clearly wasn’t, and as a result had become somewhat handsome for the first time in my life. This in conjunction with my recently-acquired six figure income had enabled me to rampage through the local prospects on SeekingArrangement at discount rates, and by the end of the year I didn’t really feel like an incel anymore.
What I *did* feel like was an absolutely useless faggot, as my already modest technical skills and actuarial knowledge had atrophied to such an extent that by the time I started interviewing for a new position I’d mostly lost track of what I was actually supposed to be doing all day. But it was also prohibitively difficult to rectify this issue, because if I’m being honest it felt sort of existentially insulting that anyone expected me to understand what was going on in all those lame spreadsheets. Needless to say this mindset led to me fucking up A LOT of opportunities across multiple insurers.
.…before absolutely fucking demolishing my interview for a vastly higher paying and far more prestigious role on the consulting side.
And ironically enough, it was probably the very fact that I’d gotten relatively far in the actuarial world without learning anything useful that convinced them I’d be a good fit, because it turns out the skillset it takes to pull that off overlaps fairly perfectly with what it takes to be a top shelf consultant. Or at least to look like one—it’s debatable if there’s any meaningful difference within the Byzantine halls of Big Four corporate politics, which is sort of like House of the Dragon if everyone were gay and Chinese.
But thankfully White privilege still persists in a few sectors of American life, and over the next six months I not only thrived in this new environment, but quickly secured a promotion to Manager. Initially I’d been told this would be impossible given my short tenure at the firm, but I beat the odds by deploying unconventional tactics to bolster my reputation with the partners, working angles the bean-counting mandarins around me never saw coming through their jaundiced epicanthic folds. I pledged fealty to a slave-driving yet unflinchingly loyal Pakistani Director who pulled me up the ladder with gusto; made a Faustian Bargain with a nice Jewish boy who sweet-talked the brass on my behalf; and regularly put in 90-120 hour weeks, often going several days in a row without sleeping a wink.
This last tactic was made possible by my abuse of prescription amphetamines.
Securing this prescription was trivial. I told my drug dealer—some Chinese lady in Cali who talked like Elle Woods and looked my age but was probably like 45—that I was having trouble concentrating, and had my script in under ten minutes.
Seeing how easy this was I briefly considered also milking her for xannies so I could arbitrage my way into even cheaper Seeking dates, but ultimately I demurred. I like to imagine that even amidst the blackest depths of my Fuckboy Era I had an impulse to maintain *some* standards. But it’s also quite possible I was just a pussy.
Anyway the first months of my Adderall abuse comprised the second of three distinct periods of my life where I recall being genuinely and uncomplicatedly happy. During this era the drug became my personality and I obsessively identified with this poem:
Believe it or not there’s a printout of this framed on the wall across from my bed so it’s the very first thing I see when I wake up every morning. Reading it again for the first time in years I was expecting it to feel cringe and Boomer… but I actually stand by every word. If all men lived by this credo the world would be a far happier place.
Because the truth is every decent man yearns to be The Man Who Delivers the Goods. Unlike the fairer sex we don’t have any intrinsic worth as a human bean, and actually need to produce something valuable for people not to vaguely feel like we deserve to be tortured to death. For men the truest satisfaction in life—that elusive serotonin—comes not from material wealth or positional status markers, but from doing something we’re good at that’s genuinely useful to our ingroup.
Obviously in the vast majority of cases the ability to do this is easily converted to status or resources, but divorced from some underlying act of service those things tend to bring only shallow and fleeting pleasure, and not sustained meaning.
Real meaning comes from being needed.
Several weeks ago I interviewed my mother on my podcast, and a number of people commented on my hostility to her characteristically Gen X suggestion that a healthy relationship consists of both parties not needing each other.
I’ve always found this notion utterly insipid—if you don’t need each other then what’s the point of making literally any meaningful sacrifices, or keeping things going once the Honeymoon Phase ends and you inevitably start to find bae boring and annoying? It seemed instructive that my mother expressed support for “five year marriages” over lifetime marriages—lots of Xers are drawn to that same sort of view, which is the only logical conclusion of their broader generational values. But I suspect the modal person my age would be just as repulsed by it as I am.
To my mind robust marriages are predicated on a deliberate interdependence; I maintain that elevating personal satisfaction / individual autonomy above need creates a rotten incentive structure that carelessly subjects your relationship to feminine caprice and masculine indiscretion. Anyone who thinks that’s wise is either sheltered, deluded by oxytocin, or a traumatized latchkey kid groomed into contentment with apocalypse.
I haven’t the faintest interest in being with a woman who doesn’t need me—such a relationship seems viscerally disgusting and morally contemptible. In my experience an absence of need obliterates sexual polarity and with it any real eroticism.
Now of course there are many different kinds of need. Physical protection and financial provisioning are simply the most visceral and obvious options available, as well as the most straightforward to activate (assuming you aren’t poor or a manlet). But these days the former only holds unironic value to relatively low status women residing in the ghetto / barrio / trailer park, while the latter is sufficiently fungible that higher status women will usually either take it for granted or disregard it entirely.
So in practice your best option is to target higher order and more sophisticated needs. For instance, when I was dating on SeekingArrangement I quickly realized there was no way I could ever compete with the Boomers on there dollar for dollar (at least not for the higher quality girls with genuine options), so I primarily stood out to women by leveraging more individuated assets for which lots of girls on the website displayed a deeply voracious need—things like humor, emotional intensity, and a certain faculty for theatrical hyperverbal dominance.
This approach was made possible by my abuse of prescription amphetamines.
A lot of your standard game advice will instruct guys to maintain a sort of stoic and Batmanlike deportment with women, and in fairness this is certainly the optimal route to take when pursuing a stolid square-jawed cishajnal bih from frostier climes. But it’s also deeply impractical for an enormous chunk of the male population—poor Wally B. for instance is far too much the faggoty theater kid for that approach to ever come off as anything but inauthentic, as the good women of Omaha can attest.
Thankfully stoicism is far from a universal female preference, and Men of the World quickly discover that the Irish/Italian broad, the Cubana, and particularly the elusive Jewess strongly prefer emotionally expressive men, as do girlies blessed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Such women simply require you to mediate your expressiveness through a quasi-adversarial framing to show you aren’t a huge pussy.
One really excellent way to do this is by being racist. Whenever you drop an n-bomb or three on a date the girl knows you aren’t scared of her or her dumb opinions, and in practice that gives you lots of runway to act like a faggot once you let your guard down a bit. The thing is girls like this appreciate dissonance and crave novelty, so if you can oscillate between saying the n-word and trauma dumping on her (which she’ll quickly reciprocate five times over) it’s a fantastic way to build intimacy at light speed.
But if saying the n-word feels too vulgar there are obviously plenty of more layered alternatives from which to choose. The crucial thing is to reshape your inchoate sentimentalism into something that feels firm and authoritative; something that pushes back instead of giving way; something that feels phallic instead of vaginal.
And to that end I’ve always found Adderall absurdly helpful.
…at least at first.
I’ve always really loathed sleeping.
Lots of people tell me it’s necessary to clear the shit out of your head and refresh your synapses or whatever, and no doubt that’s all splendidly true. The problem is my discomfort with sleep is more philosophical in nature.
Recall the famous Ship of Theseus—the way I see it consciousness is basically an illusion, so any break in contiguity of thought raises serious questions as to whether you’re actually the “same person” when you wake up.
If that sounds retarded just consider that we all feel like an utterly different person thinking of ourselves even five years after the fact, and there are tons of dissociative identity disorders that scale that time horizon down a lot. I’m sure most of you reading this have wondered at some point if you suffer from one of them.
That’s why on some level I’ll always feel like sleep is suicide.
I’m not sure if they impact other folx differently, but at least for me I’ve observed that amphetamines seem to sever the connection between my conscious and unconscious mind.
In other words I’ll be entirely fine at analytic writing and math and basically anything I’m very overtly focused on, but my background processing / reaction time / creativity will more or less evaporate. As will my capacity for cognitive empathy.
I’ll also stop remembering my dreams. But I suspect one part of this is that instead of staying up for 16 hours and sleeping 8 I’ll stay up for 48-72 hours and then sleep 12-16, by which point my brain might be too tired to dream normally (or recall dreams later).
In general I find it mostly impossible to disaggregate the impact of amphetamine use from the impact of sleep deprivation, but the overall process is clearly a feedback loop so I’m not sure if it would even make sense to attempt such a thing.
In the section that follows I’ll attempt to describe how I experience a 72-hour cycle using Addy (for a somewhat more artful representation check out Speedy Little Friend).
DAY 1
I wake up mentally refreshed, but typically a touch groggy. I take my Addy and in roughly 30 minutes begin to experience a mild euphoria. This is when I’m most productive and capable of executing mundane business functions.
I take a second pill later in the afternoon. Rinse and repeat. Later that night I typically feel a brief spell of mild exhaustion, but I’m never able to actually sleep when I try. Instead I’ll toss and turn or have that gross half-sleep where your mind invents an imaginary branch of geometry and tries to master all the fake rules etc.
So I’ll blast through the night and typically get a lot done—this is easily the best time in the cycle for creative output, because the decline in cognitive empathy creates a sweet spot wherein I’m *just* enough of an asshole to consistently produce that Walt Bismarck sizzle, but I also haven’t lost enough right brain functionality to no longer be witty or charming.
Day 2
At this point I often need to up my dosage to not feel tired (thankfully I have a former SB and former FWB each supplying me with an extra script), which means I tend to experience more pronounced sides from the Addy during this stage
But even when I don’t double it up I often notice an intense grandiosity surfacing roughly halfway through the second day. My ability to parse social cues falls off a cliff, which in practice has both positive and negative effects because I basically stop paying attention to others’ reactions and start to act almost entirely without mediation. This tends to make people who already find me annoying / abrasive double down on that position, while people who find me charming / inspirational will likewise have that impression amplified.
Overall I become a lot more intransigent and can’t find areas of common ground as easily. My left hemisphere functionalities remain mostly intact, but the right side starts to degrade quite noticeably. It’s around this time that I’ll start to hear melodies less distinctly when listening to music, lose the ability to “mask” as not a sperg in terms of mannerisms / vocal cadence, etc.
Despite this greater autism, the night of Day 2 is easily when I’m most effective with women, because my cognitive empathy is at this point low enough that I no longer overindex on what they say (still my Achilles Heel), while my body is *just* exhausted enough to produce a vaguely oppositional attitude without degrading my verbal acumen. I also lose basically all inhibition with female friends and become sort of hypersexual during this stage, flirting with everything that has a pulse and vagina. This has gotten me into a bit of hot water over the years but is entirely harmless, and a huge proportion of my best experiences with girls were incubated in these moments. I find that if I text girls on Day 1 I’m generally a bit too nice / gay for their taste, whereas Day 2 Walt has the perfect amount of bite. Day 3 definitely shouldn’t interact with anything female though.
Day 3
I typically will avoid hitting Day 3 unless something interesting happens on Day 2 that demands an all-nighter or logistics simply necessitate it. I’ll be tired on Day 3 even with Addy most of the time, and always quite grumpy.
Cognitive Empathy is now in the negative zone. My default mental state is a kind of Stalinesque paranoia punctuated by moments of childlike gullibility that make me highly susceptible to manipulation (particularly by women).
Right hemisphere functionalities nearly nonexistent, left severely compromised. Unless I double up my dosage I notice my verbal creativity starts to decay and I’ll occasionally lose my train of thought in the middle of a sentence. Lots of music no longer sounds like music without me concentrating very intently. At times I’ll experience squiggly hypnogogic imagery fading in and out of my field of view.
If I ever try to stretch into Day 4 I begin to experience mild hallucinations or psychosis. For instance, regular pictures on my phone or laptop will have a different “texture” and almost look AI generated. It’s hard to describe but a very uncanny phenomenon—before experiencing it I’d always assumed people with schizophrenia etc. were kind of making it up. But this changed things for me.
One observation I had last December is that basically everything bad that’s happened to me over the past few years has occurred on Day 3 of the aforementioned cycle.
I suspect this is at least partially attributable to anima possession—there seems to be a sort of Faustian Bargain at play wherein I brute force my anima into silence on Day 2 by castrating my right hemisphere through amphetamines and sleep deprivation, only for her to come roaring back on Day 3 to hoist me up by the petard of the day (without entirely realizing it I actually wrote a song about this last year—you might enjoy).
Usually when this occurs it isn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. In a lot of cases the cycle will terminate with me mishandling (or outright nuking) a promising connection—think being an intractable dick to a girlfriend or overly vindictive toward a rival—and then regretting it later. But when this happens it’s generally more of a personal conflict, and not really anyone else’s beeswax. Clearly it’s something to get a handle on to ensure I successfully matriculate to the next stage of life… but it also seems rather undignified to belabor the point, don’t you think?
Because it’s also lost me money. A lot of money, in that particular case—possibly millions long term. And I’m way too Mischling-coded to ever let that happen again.
It also compelled me to nuke the Walt Right Subscriber Chat last year for reasons that seem quite gay in retrospect. This of course had a silver lining insofar as it facilitated the birth of Tortuga, which has since grown into a very respectable startup. But I easily could have had my cake and eaten it too had I simply retained the emotional regulation not to make major decisions about my platform in a Day 3 Stalin mindset.
Now I’ll extend myself some grace for these bad decisions by reprising Marilyn and once again pointing out you can’t love the rose without also loving the thorns. That’s just a brutal fact of life and how personalities work. If you adored Kanye’s early oeuvre you aren’t allowed to freak out the moment the same traits that produced those works compel him to start praising Hitler. Or vice versa. It’s all the same guy.
But this grace also has to be sharply limited in scope, lest the whole thing collapse into an asinine truism and someone decide to write Walters Don’t Have Agency.
Now that I’m leading an organization in Tortuga that’s committed to improving the life outcomes of Our Guys, the stakes are simply a lot higher than they ever were before. The leader of something like this simply has no choice but to be a lot more agentic than the average person, because it isn’t only my ass on the line anymore.
I owe it to my men not to be a degenerate addict.
Hell, I owe that to a lot of people—like Rebecca, who at one point last year questioned how I could take responsibility for her sobriety when I wasn’t even sober myself. This objection seemed deeply retarded to me at the time, and I naturally insisted to her that Addy was nothing like alcohol. I wasn’t wrong about that insofar as my issues were nowhere near as bad as hers. But I wasn’t entirely right, either, because there were absolutely a few high stakes convos with her dad I sort of botched due to lacking the social finesse required to outfox a wealthy and narcissistic Jew with a 140+ IQ.
With a lot of the best things in life the margin for error is just astonishingly small. Such endeavors require subtlety and sophistication—not a meth brain optimized for constantly churning out podcasts and admittedly hilarious thinkpieces.
Circumstances demanded a pivot.
I won’t bore you with the details of my detox, other than to say I’ve been tapering off for a little over a month now and have worked my way down to relatively small doses. It will take a long time before my brain is totally normal, but I’ve done this once before and based on that estimate I’ll be back to 90% capacity in two or three weeks.
Experientially it sucks ass; chronic dopamine withdrawal is pretty much the definition of a bad time. But my life is also objectively pretty amazing—so much so that I can’t help feeling like a bit of a hothouse flower complaining about my hedonic treadmill having been overclocked by my own damn hand. Live by the sword, rose and thorns, if you can’t handle me at my worst, equal and opposite, poo poo pee pee.
Progress has slowed on Tortuga because of these developments, but we’ve kept chugging along thanks to the heroic efforts of my brilliant COO and equity partner
, who’s almost singlehandedly gotten our independent staffing firm up and running while I’ve sat around depressed arguing with Arcto about The Simpsons and writing songs about Jewish women.Theon—mein bruder—you are *truly* The Man Who Delivers The Goods. Tortuga never could have taken off without your consistency, loyalty, and cold hard white boy competence. The sizzle ain’t shit without the steak, and you’re bona fide Filet Mignon (no homo). I’ve never doubted for a second that I chose the perfect man for the job.
So what’s next for Tortuga and the Walt Right?
Theon and I will be releasing a podcast explaining our new independent staffing arm later this week. Stay tuned, even if you don’t give a shit about Tortuga, because this is a way even non-members can potentially make a pretty penny.
This weekend I’ll be debating my dear friend
on the merits of White Nationalism vs. White Globalism. Specific topics include the Jewish Question, Castizo Futurism, and Imperialism vs. Isolationism.One silver lining to my detox is I’ve channeled my low agency into art, and have written several original songs I plan to collate into a live action cabaret-style revue (perhaps at the first Tortuga meetup?). Check out the best ones below:
But that’s all for now.
As always, feel free to reach out to myself or Theon with any questions re: Tortuga.
And a sincere thank you to all of my frens on here. Thank you to my Walt Right Fam and Pirate Bros, my AR oldheads and DR chuds, my Nazis and Jews and Jewish Nazis, my feet pic art hoes, all the guys I blocked who still hateread my shit in incognito, Bentham’s Bulldog, the girl reading this, whoever ends up assassinating me…
I very genuinely love every single one of you.
(Yes, even you, Apoc)
<3
— Wally B.
Can you not just take one in the morning and not more than that, and then sleep a normal schedule every night? It's all or nothing for you? I understand if so, plenty of people have an easier time with extremes than with moderating, just wondering if you really have to quit entirely simply to not stay up for 3 days.
I just don't want you to gain 50 pounds and get depressed. For real. Because that would be just as bad, just in the opposite direction.
What a magnanimous guy you are, extending love even to those who would never do the same. Truly a benevolent leader.